Feb 19: The Sunday Stories
Day 360: CrimesAgainstHumanity MSC2023 UA-NATO Syria Timchenko Qatar - A&Ps- Kuleba Blinken Lautman Berlinski Soldatov-Borogan Detta Acyn Chase
Catching up…
EA Worldview’s Ukraine Up-date- hop over to Scott’s amazing hourly Ukraine up-date page. I’ll fill in with some bits and bobs.
Top stories…
The conference in Munich also heard this morning from the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, who said in a speech that she was in “no doubt” that Russia had committed war crimes in Ukraine.
Russian forces have pursued a widespread and systemic attack against a civilian population – gruesome acts of murder, torture, rape and deportation.
Russian authorities have forcibly deported hundreds of thousands of people from Ukraine to Russia, including children. They have cruelly separated children from their families.
Harris said that, as a former prosecutor and former head of California’s Department of Justice, she knew “the importance of gathering facts and holding them up against the law”.
In the case of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, we have examined the evidence, we know the legal standards, and there is no doubt. These are crimes against humanity.
The EU at the Munich Security Conference- The Guardian
The EU is urgently exploring ways for its member countries to team up to buy ammunition to help Ukraine, following warnings from Kyiv that its forces need more supplies quickly, diplomats and officials said.
EU foreign ministers are expected to discuss the idea of joint procurement of 155mm artillery shells at a meeting in Brussels on Monday.
“It is now the time, really, to speed up the production, and to scale up the production of standardised products that Ukraine needs desperately,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen told the annual Munich Security Conference on Saturday.
Olga Lautman, Russia's Planned Coup in Moldova Reminds Us Why Ukraine Must Win This War- The Moscow Times
As Moldova was plunged into a political crisis following Prime Minister Natalia Gavrilita's resignation and the collapse of her government, Moldovan President Maia Sandu revealed further details of the alleged plot, which she said entailed using foreign actors "with military background, camouflaged in civilian clothes, to undertake violent actions, attacks on state institutions and taking hostages."
Russia’s plot to violently overthrow the Moldovan leadership echoes its illegal annexation of Crimea and occupation of eastern Ukraine in 2014, when the so-called "little green men" — a mixture of Russian special forces, intel operatives, and mercenaries — violently seized Ukrainian government buildings in an operation all too familiar to Russia.
While the Kremlin has of course denied Moldova’s allegations, the planned coup is a case of Moscow making good on threats made publicly by its own officials last spring. In late 2021, as Russia was making final preparations for its invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin set its sights on Moldova, issuing continuous threats and unleashing a torrent of disinformation and propaganda.
The planned Russian coup in Moldova reveals that despite being made a global pariah and subjected to harsh international sanctions for the past year, Russia still feels no need to rein in its behavior. Some experts continue to claim that any harsher response to Russia's actions would serve only to escalate the situation, but this latest attempt to subvert democracy shows that despite walking a fine line, Russia’s egregious behavior continues and is itself escalatory.
Claire Berlinski on Turkey’s Unnatural Disaster- Symposium podcast
Rob Tracinski interviewed Claire Berlinski for his Symposium podcast. They spoke about the earthquake in Turkey.
Before we spoke, knowing that Rob wanted to discuss the political circumstances that permitted this to happen, I sent him an article I wrote in 2008 about Turkish corruption. I think it’s one of the most useful and comprehensive pieces I published during the years I lived there. You can no longer read it on the web because the magazine for which I wrote it went under.¹
I think this article will give you a better sense of exactly how this happened than anything I could write now, so I’ve republished it below and updated it, where necessary, in the footnotes.
While this is about Turkey, specifically, as Rob points out in our discussion, the lessons are much broader.
Corruption kills. ...
Soldatov & Borogan, How Russia's FSB Embraced Religion in the Face of a Baffling War- The Moscow Times
The mood among Russia’s special forces and the FSB began to change dramatically in the fall, when Russian troops abandoned Kherson, suffering the latest of many humiliations for the Russian army.
Suddenly, the social media channels we use to communicate with our contacts began to change, as images of religious icons flooded in, along with prayers for the victory of the Russian army and calls to pray for soldiers on the battlefield.
We’ve known most of our contacts in Russia’s special forces and the FSB for years, and none was particularly religious before the war. Now a wave of mysticism has descended on them; the apparent trigger being a growing understanding that the war is not going to end anytime soon.
The higher-ups in the siloviki, the security forces, have long recognized the use of the Russian Orthodox Church as an unofficial arm of the state. In 2002, the Cathedral of St. Sophia of Divine Wisdom was reopened inside the Lubyanka, as the departmental church of the FSB — Patriarch Alexy II himself blessed its opening in a ceremony attended by then FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev.
Eddy Wax & Ana Fota, How Qatar used a secret deal to bind itself to the EU Parliament- Politico
POLITICO has obtained a cooperation pact between a Parliament subcommittee and a Qatari organization. Officially, however, the deal doesn’t exist.
In February 2020, Eva Kaili, the European Parliament’s high-flying vice president, was on stage at the five-star Ritz Carlton hotel in Qatar’s capital Doha, moderating a discussion about social media giants and democracy.
“We see always efforts of political interference among member states, even in Europe,” she said, turning to her co-panelist. Kaili looked down at her notes. “How do you feel in this country and [its] role in the stability of the whole region?” she asked.
“The country that is hosting us today has made a great progress during the last years,” came the laudatory reply as former EU commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos answered.
This snippet of conversation from a two-day conference would have passed unnoticed at the time. But heard today, the praise is laden with irony. Kaili is in jail, swept up in a high-octane corruption scandal gripping the EU establishment in Brussels, in which Qatar — and also Morocco — are accused of paying off EU lawmakers in order to influence Parliament’s work.
Taneesha Datta, How to get recruited by MI6- Varsity
On the summer of 1984, as Easter term drew to a drowsy close, Richard Tomlinson heard an unfamiliar voice calling his name across Gonville court. Christopher Pilchard, a tutor in law, was peering out of his ground-floor window. “You’re Tomlinson, aren’t you?” he asked. Upon hearing of Tomlinson’s plans to join the navy, he said: “If you ever change your mind, but would like to try your hand at another form of government service, let me know.”
That same month, Ben Macintyre approached his tutor at a graduation party and made some “clumpingly obvious remarks” about his interest in foreign affairs. He and his tutor exchanged significant glances - perhaps a hitched eyebrow or two - and, soon after, a brown envelope arrived with an invitation to meet a Major Halliday in Whitehall.
The classic tap on the shoulder: a glass of sherry with a wheezing tutor, a handshake in an ivy-clad court. The University has produced a long line of spies, not least the infamous Cambridge Five. At least until the 90s, every Cambridge college reportedly had a ‘talent spotter’ like Pilchard. “The chaplains were often how it was done,” Andrew Lownie tells me over the telephone. He read history at Magdalene from 1981 to 1984, during which time he was President of the Cambridge Union. “Any don with a close connection to the intelligence services was asked to keep an eye out for possible recruits. Maybe they had written about it or served in it, or maybe they were just good chaps.”
Randall Chase, Off camera, Fox hosts doubted 2020 election fraud claims- AP
Private exchanges between Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, and other network bigwigs — including the chairman of Fox Corporation, Rupert Murdoch — show a wide chasm between what the network promoted in primetime and the doubts that its stars held behind the camera, according to new court filings in a defamation lawsuit being waged by a company whose voting systems were regularly maligned on air.
“Sidney Powell is lying” about having evidence for election fraud, Carlson said via text on Nov. 16, 2020 to a Fox News producer, referring to one of Trump’s lawyers.
Ingraham texted Carlson that Powell is “a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy,” referring to the former New York mayor and Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani.
In a deposition, host Sean Hannity said “that whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second,” according to Dominion’s filing.
Murdoch, meanwhile, in a Nov. 19 email, described what he saw in a press conference that day featuring Giuliani and Powell as “Really crazy stuff. And damaging.”