1. Stanford documents on the Azov battalion in Ukraine
SUMMARY
Formed:March 20141Disbanded:ActiveFirst Attack:April 20142Last Attack:2022OVERVIEWThe Azov Battalion is an extreme-right nationalist paramilitary organization based in Ukraine.Founded in 2014, the group promotes Ukrainian nationalism and neo-Nazism through its National Militia paramilitary organization and National Corps political wing. It is notable for its recruitment of far-right foreign fighters from the U.S. and Europe as well as its extensive transnational ties with other far-right organizations. In 2022, the group came to prominence again for fighting against Russian forces in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Mariupol.NARRATIVE SUMMARY
TheAzov Battalion formed in March 2014 as a volunteer brigade to fight Russian-backed separatist in Donetsk and Luhansk.34The battalion’s origins lie in the extreme-right “Patriot of Ukraine” militant organization. In 2005, Andriy Biletsky created the Kharkiv-based Patriot of Ukraine (PU) to champion white nationalist, anti-immigrant extreme-right ideas in Ukraine. In November 2008, Biletsky created the umbrella Social Nationalist Assembly (SNA) movement.5The movement was a derivative of
the earlier political party Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU), which later became known as Svoboda. The SNA contained members from a collection of nationalist and extreme-right groups in Ukraine which promoted a neo-Nazi ideology.6The PU became the de facto armed wing of the SNA.
Click the link at the top for the whole PDF.
2. Zelensky’s appeal to Israel (Which didn’t go over as well as it did everywhere else apparently)
3. (Item 3 removed as it was essentially a repeat of Russian propaganda)
Vídeo with 3 Mariupol residents. Same accounts. Azov put artillery in residential areas, used civilians as human shields. Ukraine troops stopped people from leaving and the DNR and Russian troops rescue them. Azov used civilian buildings to fire on Russian troops. pic.twitter.com/hOXRjgKzpT
— Juan Sinmiedo (@Youblacksoul) March 20, 2022
MUCH more at the link above.
No link for this yet, but looking:
Zelensky just banned 11 opposition political parties, and consolidated all private media outlets under a single state broadcaster.
4. This reminds me a lot of something in the Middle East:
Please check back over the course of the day. This post will be updated frequently.
IT HAS BEGUN: NUCLEAR WEAPONS BEING MOVED – CHINA FUNDING THE RUSSIANS – FOOD PRICES JUMPED 30%
video – 20:49
Nuclear weapons trackers have marked an unmarked military convoy, carrying up to six nuclear warheads, as it shows nuclear munitions being moved in Scotland. In what military intelligence positions say is a nuclear weapons movement in preparation for a possible nuclear exchange with Russia and/or the East. According to the report the movement was tracked by nuclear campaigners as it made its way up the M74 and on to the M8, just a mile or so south of Glasgow.
europravda -Zelensky: “No euros for the occupiers”
Zelensky demands that Europe cease all trade with Russia in an effort to halt its invasion.
Zelensky Announces Ban on 11 Political Parties
Ukrainian president claims opposition parties have ties to Russia
https://www.theepochtimes.com/zelensky-announces-ban-on-11-political-parties_4349682.html
CBC – Ukraine rejects Russia’s demand for Mariupol surrender
Ukrainian officials have defiantly rejected a Russian demand that their forces in Mariupol lay down arms and raise white flags in exchange for safe passage out of the besieged city.
global news – Odessa turns to network of tunnels to shelter from looming attack
A check on the translation would be good: On Ukrainian TV, orders to castrate Russian captives.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1505699618377457667
FOX News – Fmr. State Dept. official has a message for Ukraine: Do not surrender Mariupol
Two video clips of Ukrainians being whipped while tied to a pole with their pants down. They are then wrapped up around the pole for an indefinite time. It would seem it’s a standard punishment for theft.
Personally, I would never have believed it had I not seen it.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1505478436491612161
https://twitter.com/i/status/1505582674370609155
MARCH 21 2022 – Mariupol
Mariupol
MARCH 20 2022 – Mariupol
MARCH 21 2022 – Kiev
Russia’s destruction of a shopping mall Retrovile in Ukraine
the conservative tree house – About That Russia Attacking a Shopping Center Story
[…]Why was it targeted? Take a look at the pictures below:
Yes, when a war is taking place and you use a shopping center as an area to conceal heavy armor and armored vehicles, you turn that shopping center into an authentic target for attack. If a military hides amid a civilian population, they are putting the civilian population at risk.
This is not to say Vladimir Putin was justified in his decision to invade Ukraine. However, it is also not okay for western media to claim a moral high-horse and then conceal how the facility was being used by the Ukraine military.
more:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/03/21/about-that-russia-attacking-a-shopping-center-story/#more-230373
reuters – U.S. suggested Turkey transfer Russian-made missile system to Ukraine
WASHINGTON, March 19 (Reuters) – The United States has informally raised with Turkey the unlikely possibility of sending its Russian-made S-400 missile defense systems to Ukraine to help it fight invading Russian forces, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
U.S. officials have floated the suggestion over the past month with their Turkish counterparts but no specific or formal request was made, the sources told Reuters. They said it also came up briefly during Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman’s visit to Turkey earlier this month.
The Biden administration has been asking allies who have been using Russian made equipment and systems including S-300s and S-400s to consider transferring them to Ukraine as it tries to fend off a Russian invasion that began on Feb. 24.
The idea, which analysts said was sure to be shot down by Turkey, was part of a wider discussion between Sherman and Turkish officials about how the United States and its allies can do more to support Ukraine and on how to improve bilateral ties.
The Turkish authorities have not commented on any U.S. suggestion or proposal relating to the transfer to Ukraine of Ankara’s S-400 systems, which have been a point of long-standing contention between the two NATO allies.
Turkish foreign ministry officials were not immediately available for comment.
Turkish sources and analysts said any such suggestion would be a non-starter for Turkey, citing issues ranging from technical hurdles related to installing and operating the S-400s in Ukraine, to political concerns such as the blowback Ankara would likely face from Moscow.
Washington has repeatedly asked Ankara to get rid of the Russian-built surface-to-air missile batteries since the first delivery arrived in July 2019. The United States has imposed sanctions on a Turkey’s defence industry and removed NATO member Turkey from the F-35 fighter jet programme as a result.
Ankara has said it was forced to opt for the S-400s because allies did not provide weapons on satisfactory terms.
U.S. officials are keen to seize this moment to draw Turkey back into Washington’s orbit. Efforts to find “creative” ways to improve the strained relationship have accelerated in recent weeks, even though no specific proposal has so far gained traction, U.S. and Turkish sources have said.
“I think everyone knows that the S-400 has been a long standing issue and perhaps this is a moment when we can figure out a new way to solve this problem,” Sherman told Turkish broadcaster Haberturk in an interview on March 5.
It was not clear what exactly she meant and the State Department has not answered questions about her comments. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the suggestion made during her visit to Turkey.
The effort is also part of a wider bid by the Biden administration to respond to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s plea to help protect Ukraine’s skies. Russian or Soviet-made air defense systems such as S-300s that other NATO allies have and S-400s are sought after.
One source familiar with U.S. thinking said Washington’s floating of the possibility came as a result of the renewed effort to improve ties at a time when Ankara has been spooked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Turkish President Erdogan had not received a specific heads up from Russian President Vladimir Putin on his plans of a full-scale attack on Ukraine, another source familiar with the discussions said.
Turkey shares a maritime border with Ukraine and Russia in the Black Sea and has good ties with both. It has said the invasion is unacceptable and voiced support for Ukraine, but has also opposed sanctions on Moscow while offering to mediate.
Ankara has carefully formulated its rhetoric not to offend Moscow, analysts say, with which it has close energy, defence and tourism ties. But Ankara has also sold military drones to Kyiv and signed a deal to co-produce more, angering the Kremlin. Turkey also opposes Russian policies in Syria and Libya, as well as its 2014 annexation of Crimea.
“Turkey has managed to walk on the razor’s edge and a transfer of a Russian S-400 would certainly lead to severe Russian ire,” said Aaron Stein, director of research at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute. “And for Erdogan, the S-400 has become a symbol of Turkish sovereignty, so trading it away wouldn’t be all roses and flowers.”
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-suggested-turkey-transfer-russian-made-missile-system-ukraine-sources-2022-03-19/
Same position as Israel. The Bear is essentially on the borders of both countries.
U.S. SoS Blinken planned a begging trip to Saudi and the UAE. Canceled: Nobody could fit him into their schedules. Not even time to take a phone call.
You say the kinds of things *Brandon* has said about the Crown Prince of the Petrodollar, he might not be home when you call for a favor. Name-calling is like throwing a shoe in an honor/shame culture.
Unleash the rabid Houthis to target civilian infrastructure and oil production facilities, don’t be surprised when nobody hustles to boost global supply when you fall short.
MbZ of the UAE is super-smart, a born leader and diplomat. If he turns a cold shoulder to Brandon’s regime, that’s _yuge_.
MARCH 21 2022 – Mariupol – Chechens
MARCH 21 2022 – Zelensky – Eng subs
from ======> the 8:00 mark ==== > to the end
paul j watson A Strange Form of Democracy
europravda – Brussels agrees on more military aid for Ukraine, but no new sanctions
The bloc’s foreign affairs ministers also agreed to formally approve the EU’s so-called Strategic Compass for defence.
Zelensky plays air raid siren during speech
“Stop escalating the war”: Heckler interrupts Canada’s foreign affairs minister
Police removed a man who was heckling Foreign Affairs Minister Joly during an event in Montreal on Canada’s contributions to Ukraine.
WSJ – MARCH 21 2022 – Pentagon’s Work With Ukraine’s Biological Facilities Becomes Flashpoint in Russia’s Information War
Moscow falsely accuses U.S. of funding biowarfare in Ukraine despite Kremlin once benefiting from Pentagon program
On his first official visit abroad, the new senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, was taken to a facility in Ukraine where the U.S. helped scientists working with dangerous biological materials. But rather than produce biological weapons, U.S. officials in that ramshackle building were trying to prevent lethal pathogens from falling into the hands of terrorists.
“I removed a tray of glass vials containing Bacillus anthracis, which is the bacterium that causes the anthrax,” recalls Andrew Weber, the Pentagon official who was in charge of the U.S.-funded program that worked with the Ukrainian government. Mr. Weber said he showed the tray “to a very concerned-looking young senator.”
Mr. Obama himself recalled seeing in his 2005 trip to Ukraine “test tubes filled with anthrax and the plague lying virtually unlocked and unguarded.”
A decades-old Pentagon program that was used to secure biological weapons across the former Soviet Union—and to build trust between Washington and Moscow after the Cold War—has instead become a new flashpoint in an information war between the two countries in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Moscow has accused the Pentagon of funding weapons work in Ukraine’s biological laboratories. “These were not peaceful experiments,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier this month.
China, whose leader Xi Jinping has cultivated a close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has echoed those allegations. “Russia has found during its military operations that the U.S. uses these facilities to conduct bio-military plans,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman told reporters.
U.S. officials have flatly denied those claims and warned that Moscow could use its allegations to justify its own use of weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine.
“We believe that Moscow may be setting the stage to use a chemical weapon and then falsely blame Ukraine to justify escalating its attacks on the Ukrainian people,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week. “Manufacturing events and creating false narratives of genocide to justify greater use of military force is a tactic that Russia has used before.”
The allegations have shocked those who are most familiar with the Pentagon’s post-Cold War initiative, called the Cooperative Threat Reduction program. That is because not only has Russia been aware of the Pentagon’s work securing chemical, biological and nuclear facilities across the former Soviet Union, but it had also been its beneficiary for many years.
“They’re outrageous claims,” said Robert Pope, the head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, or DTRA, the arm of the Pentagon in charge of running the program. “We were created 30 years ago to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, and Russia knows well we eliminate weapons of mass destruction.”
The program, which dates back to 1991 and continues today, stretches across the former Soviet Union. Since the program started, the Pentagon has spent approximately $12 billion on securing material used in weapons of mass destruction in post-Soviet republics, according to a DTRA spokeswoman. Of those funds, about $200 million has been spent on the biological work in Ukraine since 2005. The funds have supported dozens of labs, health facilities and diagnostic sites around the country, the DTRA spokeswoman said.
Mr. Weber, who was in charge of negotiating the initial agreement with Kiev to work on securing the country’s biological materials and facilities, said that work expanded to Ukraine after the 9/11 attacks, when al Qaeda terrorists hijacked aircraft and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. U.S. policy makers grew worried about the potential for terrorists to steal biological materials—fears that were heightened after letters containing anthrax were sent in the U.S. mail to congressional offices and media outlets. The FBI eventually concluded that an American scientist employed at a military lab sent the letters.
The president of Ukraine at the time, Leonid Kuchma, concerned about the threat of terrorism in his own country, asked the U.S. for help. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade earlier, Ukraine had been starved of the funds needed to secure its biological facilities.
Mr. Weber put together a team that visited Ukraine’s biological and chemical facilities, which ranged from large laboratories to small veterinary research centers. “We found that a number of them had dangerous pathogen collections left over from Soviet days,” he said. “They were in pretty bad shape.”
Ukraine’s laboratories—unlike some in other former Soviet republics—weren’t directly involved in the Cold War biological-weapons program, but they did have pathogens that fed into offensive work, according to Mr. Weber.
Those pathogens, like anthrax, could pose a threat if released, whether accidentally or on purpose. The focus of U.S. work in Ukraine was to consolidate that biological material, much of it related to agriculture, into secure facilities, which the U.S. would pay to build or upgrade.
Paul McNelly, who from 1995 to 2003 directed the Defense Department’s chemical and biological elimination programs in Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, said he was stunned with what he saw inside the former Soviet facilities.
“You would walk into these places and the refrigerators that stored these dangerous pathogens, they had no locks on them at all,” Mr. McNelly said. “There would be vials that were labeled tularemia, plague, different things like that. And these people, most of them, weren’t masked. Their gowns were antiquated.” He added: “It was horrible.”
As part of the program, the Pentagon spent $1 billion to build the Russians a facility in Shchuchye, Siberia, to demilitarize some two million chemical weapons. By the time it was done in 2009, ties with Moscow were growing tense. The price of oil was going up, giving Russia more revenue to wean itself off foreign assistance. At the same time, Mr. Putin was consolidating power.
As a result, the Russian government became a less-willing partner to the Pentagon’s drive to secure the deadly materials, according to James Tegnelia, who served as the head of DTRA from 2005 to 2009. “They wanted our money, but they didn’t want to admit that we built the facility,” Mr. Tegnelia said. “You could see that they were getting ready to pull back.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry had in the past praised the program. But by 2012, Moscow declined to renew cooperation, saying it could pay for the work on its own.
In 2014, the year Moscow illegally annexed Crimea and began backing separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region, the program in Russia drew to a close.
A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., didn’t respond to a request for comment on the Pentagon program.
Yet even with that chapter of its cooperation over, the Russian claims about the Pentagon conducting secret weapons work in Ukraine came as a surprise not only to those who have worked on the program but also to other Western officials. The Kremlin has in the past used such charges as cover for its own actions, they say.
“We are concerned that Moscow could stage a false-flag operation, possibly including chemical weapons,” North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said last week.
U.S. officials have declined to discuss what specific intelligence, if any, they have to indicate Russia might be preparing to deploy chemical or other unconventional weapons to Ukraine. But they say Russia has a history of using chemical weapons, including against Mr. Putin’s domestic political opponents, and it has encouraged their use in Syria by President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
The Russian government shot back against the U.S. allegations, denying plans to use chemical weapons. In a post last week on its official Telegram channel, the Russian Defense Ministry said the units fighting in Ukraine “do not have chemical munitions.”
Mr. Tegnelia, the former DTRA director, views Russia’s allegations as a path to an even more dangerous escalation. “If you see them using chemical weapons in Ukraine, watch out,” he said, “because they’re only one step away from nuclear weapons.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagons-work-with-ukraines-biological-facilities-becomes-flashpoint-in-russias-information-war-11647768601
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CBC – Chemical, biological weapons more likely to be used in Ukraine than nuclear, expert says
Putin is more likely to order the use of chemical or biological weapons in the invasion of Ukraine, nuclear weapons are still possible, said Andrew Weber, former U.S. assistant secretary of defence for nuclear, chemical & biological defence programs.
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PIC – 2005 – Andrew Weber + Obama + anthrax samples in Ukraine
https://images.wsj.net/im-508044?width=700&height=547
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The Foreign Fighters in Ukraine to Battle Russia