Category Archives: Russia

UN relief official calls crisis in Aleppo the ‘apex of horror’

The New York Times reports: The top aid official at the United Nations gave a gloomy assessment of the Syria relief effort on Monday, saying no convoy deliveries had been made to besieged areas this month and that the suffering in Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial epicenter, was the “apex of horror.”

In a briefing to the Security Council, the official, Stephen O’Brien, the under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, said that while he welcomed Russia’s support last week for a 48-hour cease-fire in Aleppo — as he had proposed earlier in the month — there had been no assurances from other combatants.

“This cannot be a one-sided offer,” Mr. O’Brien said. “Plans are in place, but we need the agreement of all parties to let us do our job.”

United Nations officials have said that the fighting in Aleppo — pitting Syrian government forces and their Russian backers against an array of insurgents, including Islamist militants — has left 275,000 people in rebel-held eastern Aleppo completely cut off from food, water and medicine, and has severely limited aid deliveries to 1.5 million people in government-held western Aleppo. [Continue reading…]

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Iran rebukes Russia for showing ‘ungentlemanly’ attitude by publicizing use of air base for bombing Syria

The Associated Press reports: Russia has stopped using an Iranian air base for launching airstrikes on Syria for the time being, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said Monday, just hours after the Iranian defense minister criticized Moscow for having “kind of show-off and ungentlemanly” attitude by publicizing their actions.

There was no immediate response from Moscow, which had used the Shahid Nojeh Air Base to refuel its bombers striking Syria at least three times last week.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi told reporters in Tehran that the Russian airstrikes on militants in Syria were “temporary, based on a Russian request.”

“It is finished, for now,” Ghasemi said, without elaborating. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian government and Russia are accused of using napalm-like incendiary bombs

The New York Times reports: Syrian government aircraft hit the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Daraya with incendiary bombs for the third straight day on Wednesday, according to local council members, who said the weapons were packed with substances akin to napalm.

Incendiary bombs emit bright light that resembles fireworks and ignite persistent fires, heating to temperatures up to 10 times the boiling point of water.

Usually armed with thermite or phosphorus, which can cause horrific burns like those inflicted by napalm in American bombardments during the Vietnam War, the weapons are increasingly being used in attacks on rebel-held areas, especially in the contested northern city of Aleppo, according to Syrian opposition activists and human rights groups that are calling for an end to the practice.

And the Syrian government’s most powerful ally, Russia, may also be using the weapons in its own airstrikes, Human Rights Watch contends, citing footage from Russian state-run television that showed the bombs clearly labeled on an attack aircraft in Syria, and similar casings found at attack sites.

Incendiary weapons have been used at least 18 times in the past nine weeks, Human Rights Watch said in a report issued this week, mostly in and around Aleppo, as well as in Idlib Province. The group said that activists and residents had reported at least 40 other cases, but that it had confirmed only 18 through video footage and other evidence. [Continue reading…]

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Once again political murders are playing a prominent role in the Kremlin’s foreign policy

The New York Times reports: From a certain perspective, certainly the Kremlin’s, Vladimir Kara-Murza’s behavior in Washington could be seen as treasonous, a brazen betrayal of his homeland.

In a series of public meetings on Capitol Hill, Mr. Kara-Murza, a leader in the Russian opposition, urged American lawmakers to expand economic sanctions against the Russian government under a law known as the Magnitsky Act. That would hasten political change in Russia, he argued.

Back in Moscow a month later, in May 2015, the changes Mr. Kara-Murza detected were going on in his own body. Midway through a meeting with fellow dissidents, beads of sweat inexplicably dotted his forehead. His stomach churned.

“It all went so fast,” he recalled. “In the space of about 20 minutes, I went from feeling completely normal to having a rapid heart rate, really high blood pressure, to sweating and vomiting all over the place, and then I lost consciousness.” He had ingested a poison, doctors told him after he emerged from a weeklong coma, though they could find no identifiable trace of it.

While Mr. Kara-Murza survived, few others in his position have proved as lucky. He said he was certain he had been the target of a security service poisoning. Used extensively in the Soviet era, political murders are again playing a prominent role in the Kremlin’s foreign policy, the most brutal instrument in an expanding repertoire of intimidation tactics intended to silence or otherwise intimidate critics at home and abroad. [Continue reading…]

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Continued inaction in the face of an abomination shaped by Assad, Iran, and Russia is exacting too high a price

Fred Hof writes: No one in the history of the Syrian conflict has counseled Mr. Obama to invade and occupy Syria, fighting Iranian forces in the process. Fifty-one conscience-stricken State Department officers recently pressed upon him a variation of what others, in and out of government, have urged him for years to do: use limited military means to exact a price for mass homicide in an effort to deter it. For years the president has said no. The consequences for Syrians, their neighbors, and European allies have been staggering, as a country that began the war with 23 million people gradually empties itself. And ISIS — the author of heinous atrocities abroad — is in large measure a consequence of Assad regime mass homicide unchecked by the civilized world.

Yet whenever presented with modest proposals for measured pushback, Mr. Obama and his communications mavens deploy an army of straw men to counterattack. They have exploited the understandable, if misguided reluctance of Americans to do anything at all of a military nature in the Middle East after the experience of Iraq.

ISIS — partly the result of Assad-induced state failure in Syria — is the exception. But Assad himself — a protégé and employee of Iran — has been spared entirely, even though a straight line runs from his practice of mass homicide in Syria to the ‘Brexit’ vote in the United Kingdom and the rise of Vladimir Putin lookalikes in the politics of the West. Iran is the key to understanding why the Obama administration immolated its own reputation in the 2013 ‘red line’ fiasco, and why it continues to look the other way while Assad and his enablers enjoy an unrestrained crime spree. [Continue reading…]

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Fighting rages in Aleppo despite global anger at image of injured child

The Guardian reports: Fighting raged across the embattled city of Aleppo on Friday, a day after the harrowing image of a child rescued from the rubble of his house in an opposition-held district sparked global condemnation and outrage over the plight of civilians there.

The renewed violence continued despite assurances from Russia, the primary ally of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, that it was ready to observe 48-hour humanitarian pauses in the fighting to allow aid to trickle into the besieged city.

Moscow said it could begin testing the pauses as early as next week as a “pilot project”.

“More precise date and time will be determined after receiving information about the readiness of the convoys from the UN representatives and receiving confirmation of the security guarantees of their safe travel from our American partners,” a Russian defence ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by the Tass news agency.

The UN special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, proposed the idea of humanitarian pauses last week in an effort to allow aid into Aleppo, which is divided into two halves – an eastern portion controlled by the rebels and a western side held by the Assad government. [Continue reading…]

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Outcome of U.S. election seen as ‘question of national security for Russia’ says Kremlin watcher

NPR reports: Investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov says the [Democratic National Committee] hack wasn’t necessarily the work of Russian intelligence services.

“It’s much more complicated than that,” says Soldatov, co-author of The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries. “We have non-government actors, and they’re really adventurous, really fast and they’re really, really good.”

He says mercenary hackers give the government a way to deny involvement.

Once the material had been stolen, though, [Mark] Galeotti thinks the Kremlin took over.

“The actual leak — the point where they did something with the information they gathered — now there’s no question that that would be regarded as a strategic move, and would need to have had Kremlin sanction,” he says.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, repeated this week that Russia doesn’t interfere in the affairs of other countries. Recently he said, “We have witnessed a volley of Russophobic hysteria.”

He called the accusations “ploys to support one candidate and smear another.”

DNC staffers charged that the publication of the emails was a Russian ploy to support the candidacy of Donald Trump. But “I think it’s not about Trump,” says Soldatov. “It’s all about Hillary Clinton.”

What might Russia hope to gain from influencing the American vote?

Soldatov says President Vladimir Putin believes Clinton is a Russia-hater who was behind anti-government demonstrations that took place in Russia in 2011 and 2012.

And Soldatov says this U.S. election is important for Moscow because America’s next leader could determine whether economic sanctions against Russia will be lifted. “And everybody in the Kremlin believes that if Hillary Clinton in the White House, it will be absolutely impossible to get the sanctions against Russia lifted. So in a way, it’s a question of national security for Russia.”

Galeotti thinks the key purpose with the DNC leaks is to divide Clinton’s political base by showing that top party officials worked to freeze out her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders.

The Kremlin’s idea, he says, is to create the impression that politics in the U.S. is manipulated just as much as in Russia. [Continue reading…]

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Putin’s ‘war on terror’ — first he went after Muslims, now he targets Ukrainians

Anna Nemtsova reports: Tatars knew Remzi Memetov as a jovial cook who made the best traditional plov, a dish of rice and lamb, in the little Crimean town of Bakhchysarai. Memetov’s cooking was especially popular among Muslims coming to the local mosque to participate in religious festivals.

Nobody in the town’s sizeable Tatar community would have imagined that their favorite chef would be accused of terrorism.

At 6 a.m. the morning of May 12, the Memetov family heard a knock at the door of their house on Lazurnaya Avenue. The voice outside said: ”Open up, this is the Federal Security Service.”

The visitors were two FSB investigators, two official witnesses, who the FSB invited to be present while they searched the house, a camerawoman, and several people who did not identify themselves.

After a few questions, they looked through all the rooms in the house, confiscating a few religious books and a few CDs. As the investigators were taking Remzi Memetov away, his neighbors gathered around the FSB officers to ask why they were arresting a friendly cook everybody loved. An official said Memetov would just be away a few minutes, just enough to sign a few papers.

“Shame, Shame!” people chanted. And soon their worst expectations came: Memetovs wife and two adult sons learned he was accused of participating in terrorist activities as a part the Islamic movement Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is banned in Russia. He was accused together with three more neighbors, who were arrested the same day. One of them, Enver Mammoth, had seven little children.

Soon after Moscow annexed what had been Ukrainian Crimea in 2014, Russian security agencies began to crack down on Muslims there, and after many arrests they knew only too well what happened when the FSB detained one of them. [Continue reading…]

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Ten times worse than hell: A Syrian doctor on the humanitarian catastrophe in Aleppo

 

Middle East Eye reports: Thousands of people have shared the image of a bloodied and dazed boy who was pulled from a building in Syria’s Aleppo following a bombing raid on the besieged city.

Five-year-old Omran Daqneesh was reported by the Telegraph as being one of five children injured in an air strike on a building late on Wednesday in Syria’s second city.

Graphic footage published by the Aleppo Media Centre shows the small child being lifted from rubble and being put on a seat inside an ambulance.

Once inside the ambulance the boy sits motionless on the seat, looking dazed and confused, covered head-to-toe in dust, before raising his left arm to wipe away blood that covered one side of his head. [Continue reading…]

 

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Why the United States must change its failed policy in Syria

Hassan Hassan writes: Aleppo is a microcosm of the Syrian conflict. It is also a microcosm of the failures of American policy in this war-torn country.

The country’s second largest city has come to define everything that is wrong with the Syrian war: Indiscriminate violence, a siege, starvation, rising extremism, and crippling regional and international rivalries. In the midst of this mess, Washington is a bystander — even a contributor — to the worsening situation.

On Thursday, Aleppo’s last remaining doctors wrote an open letter to President Barack Obama highlighting a similar message: “We have seen no effort on behalf of the United States to lift the siege or even use its influence to push the parties to protect civilians,” the doctors, 15 in total, wrote.

The humanitarian crisis in Aleppo continues to make headlines as regime and Russian airstrikes often target the city’s infrastructure and provision of basic services. Each time, the lives of an estimated 300,000 civilians get worse in what CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward described as an “apocalyptic wasteland.”

But instead of responding to the worst disaster of our times, US policy is vindicating one of the most critical mantras of extremists: That the international community is not a friend to the Syrian people. [Continue reading…]

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Possible NSA hacking could signal warning shot from Russia

The New York Times reports: The release on websites this week of what appears to be top-secret computer code that the National Security Agency has used to break into the networks of foreign governments and other espionage targets has caused deep concern inside American intelligence agencies, raising the question of whether America’s own elite operatives have been hacked and their methods revealed.

Most outside experts who examined the posts, by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, said they contained what appeared to be genuine samples of the code — though somewhat outdated — used in the production of the N.S.A.’s custom-built malware.

Most of the code was designed to break through network firewalls and get inside the computer systems of competitors like Russia, China and Iran. That, in turn, allows the N.S.A. to place “implants” in the system, which can lurk unseen for years and be used to monitor network traffic or enable a debilitating computer attack.

According to these experts, the coding resembled a series of “products” developed inside the N.S.A.’s highly classified Tailored Access Operations unit, some of which were described in general terms in documents stolen three years ago by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor now living in Russia.

But the code does not appear to have come from Mr. Snowden’s archive, which was mostly composed of PowerPoint files and other documents that described N.S.A. programs. The documents released by Mr. Snowden and his associates contained no actual source code used to break into the networks of foreign powers.

Whoever obtained the source code apparently broke into either the top-secret, highly compartmentalized computer servers of the N.S.A. or other servers around the world that the agency would have used to store the files. The code that was published on Monday dates to mid-2013, when, after Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, the agency shuttered many of its existing servers and moved code to new ones as a security measure.

By midday Tuesday Mr. Snowden himself, in a Twitter message from his exile in Moscow, declared that “circumstantial evidence and conventional wisdom indicates Russian responsibility” for publication, which he interpreted as a warning shot to the American government in case it was thinking of imposing sanctions against Russia in the cybertheft of documents from the Democratic National Committee. [Continue reading…]

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Vacuum bombs in Syria: The latest chapter in a long history of atrocity from the skies

By Peter Lee, University of Portsmouth

Imagine taking a deep breath then submerging yourself in water. Then imagine having all of the oxygen forced instantaneously from your body. Try to inhale again. But instead of cold water filling your lungs, toxic, flammable particles start killing you from the inside out.

Such suffering and death is distressing and inhumane. That is what is inflicted by a thermobaric bomb, sometimes called a “vacuum bomb”. They first appeared in modern form in the 1960s and have been refined ever since. Russia, the US, China, India and many others have them.

Thermobaric bombs use different combinations of heat and pressure to produce different high explosive effects. An initial explosion produces a pressure wave powerful enough to flatten buildings or penetrate into cave or other structures. At the same time, the explosion will disperse highly flammable fuel particles around its vicinity.

These, often aluminium-based, particles ignite a fraction of a second later and burn at very high temperatures. The two blasts combine for maximum effect. They use up all the oxygen in the surrounding air, creating a vacuum – hence “vacuum bomb”. The resulting vacuum can be powerful enough to rupture the lungs and eardrums of anyone nearby.

The Syrian and Russian governments have both been accused of using thermobaric bombs against rebel forces. Compelling evidence supports the claims of devastating consequences for nearby civilians.

It is brutally clear why Vladimir Putin and his ally Bashar al Assad might use these weapons. Thermobaric bombs are highly destructive with fearsome, direct physical effects. In opposition-held areas, civilians are just as likely to be affected as combatants. The indirect effects are also desirable from Syrian and Russian government perspectives. Local communities are terrorised into submission or displaced, joining the millions of refugees seeking sanctuary elsewhere.

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Strikes from Iranian air base show Russia’s expanding footprint in the Middle East

The Washington Post reports: Russian bombers flying from an Iranian air base struck rebel targets across Syria on Tuesday, Russian and Iranian officials said, dramatically underscoring the two countries’ growing military ties and highlighting Russia’s ambitions for greater influence in a turbulent Middle East.

The long-range Tu-22 bombers took off from a base near Hamadan in western Iran and launched raids in the Syrian provinces of Aleppo, Deir al-Zour and Idlib, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement. The ministry said the bombers were accompanied by Russian fighter jets based in Syria.

Both countries are staunch allies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but the flights marked the first time Russia has launched strikes from Iranian territory.

Iran has long banned foreign militaries from establishing bases on its soil. But the raids appeared to signal a budding alliance that would expand Russia’s military footprint in the region. [Continue reading…]

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Aid worker in Aleppo says joint U.S.-Russian airstrikes would be ‘diabolical’

The Intercept reports: A British aid worker based in rebel-held East Aleppo says that reported plans by the United States and Russia to conduct joint airstrikes against the city are “ludicrous and diabolical,” and, if carried out, would have a disastrous impact on civilians living there.

Tauqir Sharif, 29, speaking to The Intercept from a hospital in Aleppo, says that Russian and Syrian government airstrikes on the city are creating nightmarish conditions for ordinary people. The addition of American forces to the mix would compound the misery of civilians, while giving the impression that the United States was openly siding with the Assad government.

Last week an alliance of Syrian rebels and Islamist groups broke the longstanding government siege on the eastern half of the city. Sharif says that since then, the frequency and intensity of airstrikes has increased. “There has been an almost constant bombardment from strikes because the regime is very, very angry that a corridor has been opened into the city from the south,” Sharif says. “The siege in some ways is still in place because it is very difficult to bring aid in due to constant airstrikes on vehicles driving the routes to the city.” [Continue reading…]

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Russia uses Iran as base to bomb Syrian militants for first time

Reuters reports: Russia used Iran as a base from which to launch air strikes against Syrian militants for the first time on Tuesday, widening its air campaign in Syria and deepening its involvement in the Middle East.

In a move underscoring Moscow’s increasingly close ties with Tehran, long-range Russian Tupolev-22M3 bombers and Sukhoi-34 fighter bombers used Iran’s Hamadan air base to strike a range of targets in Syria.

It was the first time Russia has used the territory of another nation, apart from Syria itself, to launch such strikes since the Kremlin launched a bombing campaign to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in September last year.

It was also thought to be the first time that Iran has allowed a foreign power to use its territory for military operations since the 1979 Islamic revolution. [Continue reading…]

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Alleged Ukrainian terror plot gives Putin excuse to pull out of upcoming meeting with Normandy group of Western nations

Owen Matthews writes: I was recently invited to appear as a guest on Channel One’s “Special Correspondent,” a news-related chat show, where I sat through two hours of increasingly wild theories linking the Olympic doping ban to a Western conspiracy to punish Russia for its “independent” stance in international affairs.

“Tell us, Owen, do you agree that the Olympic ban is payback for our having taken Crimea?” barked the quick-talking presenter Evgeny Popov. “Russia defied Washington’s hegemony and now its time for us to be punished?”

Then, on Friday, Sergei Ivanov, a former KGB officer and long-time Putin ally, was removed from his post as head of the Presidential Administration and replaced by his deputy, Andrei Vaino, a minor apparatchik who made his way up in the Kremlin protocol service.

Ivanov’s sacking is part of a pattern. Russian President Vladimir Putin has consolidated his personal rule, purging long-time political allies in favor of young, faceless, but utterly loyal bureaucrats.

Earlier this year, Putin appointed two former bodyguards as the governors of the Tula and Kalinigrad regions, and he placed his former personal bodyguard, Viktor Zolotov, in charge of the powerful National Guard, a newly-formed law enforcement organ composed of 250,000 armed men and directly answerable to the Kremlin.

“Putin is purging old friends and replacing them with servants,” Kremlin-connected analyst Stanislav Belkovsky told fontanka.ru. “These people reminded [Putin] of a time before he was a boss, let alone President … Now he needs executors, not advisers.” In other words, Putin is removing anybody capable of standing up to him. [Continue reading…]

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Putin’s latest Crimean gambit

Adrian Karatnycky writes: Curiously, it took Russia four full days after an alleged attack by Ukrainian special forces in Crimea to make a public statement about the event.

On August 10, Russian President Vladimir Putin took to the airwaves to denounce “tactics of terrorism.” He stated the alleged killings of a soldier and an FSB security agency operative “will not pass idly by,” intimating a Russian military response, and he called on the United States and the European Union to rein in Kiev.

Russian news sources report that a unit of 20 Ukrainian soldiers engaged in the attack on August 6 after their plot to sabotage a Crimean highway was foiled; seven “saboteurs” are reported to have been apprehended. But the delay in reporting the event raises the question of why authorities did not make an effort to inform Crimeans of the potential danger or urge them to be on the lookout for a large number of armed men on the run.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has called the accusations a “fantasy that serves as a pretext for the latest round of military threats against Ukraine.” Logic suggests that he is being truthful.

To begin with, it would be foolish for Ukraine to launch a violent attack, given the vast superiority of Russian military power. It would be even more foolish to provoke Russia at a time when its forces are mobilizing for massive military maneuvers along Ukraine’s eastern border and in Crimea.

Indeed, Ukraine is already on edge over signs of increased Russian military deployments near its eastern border and increased attacks on Ukrainian positions by fighters from the breakaway enclaves of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. Last week, Ukraine placed its armed forces on a state of heightened readiness. On Thursday, President Poroshenko ordered these forces to be on “combat alert.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. considers sanctions against Russia in response to hacks of Democratic groups

The Wall Street Journal reports: U.S. officials are discussing whether to respond to computer breaches of Democratic Party organizations with economic sanctions against Russia, but they haven’t reached a decision about how to proceed, according to several people familiar with the matter.

Levying sanctions would require the White House to publicly accuse Russia, or Russian-backed hackers, of committing the breach and then leaking embarrassing information. The U.S. has frequently opted not to publicly release attribution for cyber-assaults, though Washington did openly accuse North Korea of carrying out an embarrassing breach of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. in 2014.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. intelligence agencies have been studying the Democratic hacks, and several officials have signaled it was almost certainly carried out by Russian-affiliated hackers. Russia has denied any involvement, but several cybersecurity companies have also released reports tying the breach to Russian hackers.

On Thursday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) told reporters, regarding a breach of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which spearheads the Democratic House campaigns: “I know for sure it is the Russians” and “we are assessing the damage.”

She added, “This is an electronic Watergate…The Russians broke in. Who did they give the information to? I don’t know. Who dumped it? I don’t know.” [Continue reading…]

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