German police have arrested a British man who worked at the British embassy in Berlin on suspicion of spying for Russian intelligence in exchange for cash, according to prosecutors.
Germany’s highest public prosecutor said the man, identified only as David S, was arrested at his Potsdam apartment at 2.20pm on Tuesday, and his home and embassy workplace were searched.
A new BBC investigation has revealed the scale of operations by a shadowy Russian mercenary group in Libya’s civil war, which includes links to war crimes and the Russian military.
A Samsung tablet left by a fighter for the Wagner group exposes its key role – as well as traceable fighter codenames.
And the BBC has a “shopping list” for state-of-the-art military equipment which expert witnesses say could only have come from Russian army supplies.
Russia denies any links to Wagner.
The Biden administration has reached an agreement with German Chancellor Angela Merkel that allows for the completion of a controversial natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany.
The July 21 deal to complete the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would double shipments of Russian natural gas to Germany by transporting the gas under the Baltic Sea, has angered the leaders of many countries in Eastern and Western Europe; they argue that it will effectively give Moscow a stranglehold over European gas supplies and open the continent to Russian blackmail.
The Guardian is pushing a story claiming documents showing the Kremlin met to agree to push “mentally unstable” Donald Trump during the 2016 election and that they had some undefined “kompromat” on Trump. Now there’s no detail as to what this alleged kompromat is, much less any evidence to support the claim.
After the 20th century’s first great war, France, Britain, Italy, Japan, and other major powers founded the League of Nations. Its primary mission: To keep the peace. It failed, of course, and the result was World War II. After the Second World War, the major powers created a new and, what they hoped, was an improved model: the United Nations.
Keeping the peace was, again, the principal mission, but the U.N.’s contribution to preventing the Cold War from heating up was marginal at best. And wars between lesser powers continued.
Russia and China are coordinating military exercises to threaten not only Taiwan but also Hawaii, according to a senior Japanese defense official who warned the United States to beware of a Pearl Harbor-style surprise attack.
“We have to show the deterrence towards China, and not just China but also the Russians, because, as I told you, that they are doing their exercises together,” Japanese deputy Yasuhide Nakayama told the Hudson Institute this week.
Joe is OK with this so long as he gets his 10%.
h/t HJ
OTTAWA — Canada’s digital spy agency responded to more than 2,000 attacks on the federal government and its critical infrastructure partners last year, according to a new report, amid heightened concerns over the use of cyber warfare tactics by foreign actors.
Schoolchildren in a number of Western countries are taught that Jesus was bisexual, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed on Monday, accusing the West of an attack on “the genetic code of the planet’s key civilizations.”
Writing in Moscow daily Kommersant, Lavrov expressed his opinion that the so-called “rules-based world order” is a “neo-colonial” policy that imposes Western values on countries around the world, including when it comes to moral and religious ideas.
Hostile military and intelligence forces are targeting Canada in a new “sophisticated, multifaceted” type of warfare using a range of tools from criminal gangs to cyber-hackers to high-tech companies such as Huawei and China Telecom, the author of a newly released national security report alleges.
Imagine yourself sitting at a poker table with one opponent who fingers his dwindling stack of chips while glowering at you and daring you to bump the pot. Meanwhile, your other opponent with more chips sits quietly behind his cards while his paid spies behind your chair signal him the contents of your hand.
A national poll this spring showed a sharp divide between Democrats and Republicans over whether Russia or China is America’s greatest international adversary. Democrats, perhaps still seething from Russia’s clumsy efforts to sway the 2016 election to Donald Trump, see Vladimir Putin as a Bond movie villain and master manipulator. Republicans focused on commerce, cyber-security, and Asian ascension, look at emerging China as their greatest threat.
By holding a tete-a-tete with Vladimir Putin just after the G7 summit in Cornwall, US President Joe Biden may signal a move towards a G7 and a half arrangement in which Russia, once a full member of the club, secures a side chair in its ante-chamber. The arrangement suits Putin just fine. For his strategy has always aimed at taking the Western democracies one by one and not as a bloc such as NATO, the European Union or the G7.
But what does Putin want?
The Russian foreign ministry has banned a number of Canadian officials — including Justice Minister David Lametti — from travelling to that country, citing what it claims are “anti-Russian” activities.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the ministry said Lametti, RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc and a number of government officials — including the top bureaucrat at the Department of National Defence, Jody Thomas — will be barred from travelling to Russia because they have shown “inappropriate and counterproductive activity in support of the ultra-nationalist regime” in Ukraine and other “Russophobic forces” in the Baltic states.
The Russian foreign ministry has banned a number of Canadian officials — including Justice Minister David Lametti — from travelling to that country, citing what it claims are “anti-Russian” activities.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the ministry said Lametti, RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc and a number of government officials — including the top bureaucrat at the Department of National Defence, Jodi Thomas — will be barred from travelling to Russia because they have shown “inappropriate and counterproductive activity in support of the ultra-nationalist regime” in Ukraine and other “Russophobic forces” in the Baltic states.
Marc Polymeropoulos was a senior CIA case officer on a routine visit to Moscow in 2017 when he awoke in his hotel room with a severe case of vertigo.
His first inclination was that he had food poisoning and that the symptoms would soon wear off. Instead, it was the beginning of a brain-rattling affliction that would last for years and eventually force him out of the CIA.
The comments came a day after U.S. President Joe Biden said he would press Russian President Vladimir Putin to respect human rights when the two leaders meet in Geneva on June 16. Relations between the two powers are at post-Cold War lows.
