Day: March 20, 2023

The United States is providing $350 million in U.S. equipment and ammunition in its latest aid package for Ukraine, as European Union foreign and defense ministers finalized a plan to supply Ukraine with ammunition while replenishing their own ammunition stocks.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Monday the 34th presidential drawdown of U.S. military weapons stocks for Ukraine. Three military officials tell VOA the package includes more surface-to-surface Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System rockets to use in Ukraine’s High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), more 155-millimeter ammunition for Howitzers and additional 25-millimeter rounds.

Long-range rockets for HIMARS are not included in this package, according to officials.

Blinken said the package also includes more ammunition for Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles, HARM missiles, anti-tank weapons and riverine boats.

“Russia alone could end its war today. Until Russia does, we will stand united with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” Blinken said.

A military official told VOA the U.S. ammunition package was being made in tandem with the efforts that EU partners were making to address Ukraine’s need for more ammunition on the battlefield as it fights the full-scale Russian invasion that began more than a year ago.

The EU’s $2 billion plan includes sending Ukraine 1 million 155-millimeter artillery shells within 12 months.

After EU foreign and defense ministers endorsed the plan during a meeting in Brussels Monday, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called the agreement a “historic decision.”

“We are taking a key step towards delivering on our promises to provide Ukraine with more artillery ammunition,” he said on Twitter.

The EU plan also calls for fast-tracking new orders of ammunition for Ukraine and encourages countries to work together on purchases through the European Defense Agency or in groups of at least three nations.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba cheered the EU move in a tweet, calling it a “game-changing decision.”

“Exactly what is needed: urgent delivery + sustainable joint procurement,” he wrote.

Putin in Ukraine

The Kremlin says Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the Russian-occupied Ukrainian port city of Mariupol late Saturday after a stopover in the Crimean Peninsula to mark the ninth anniversary of Moscow’s annexation of the territory.

Video showed Putin chatting with residents after earlier visiting an art school and a children’s center in Crimea.

The visits came after the International Criminal Court Friday issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest on war crimes charges for Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian children during its 13-month invasion. Putin has not commented on the charges, and the Kremlin has called the allegations “legally null and void.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has demanded Russia’s withdrawal from Crimea and all areas it has occupied in the eastern regions of Ukraine, but the ground war in Ukraine’s eastern regions has to a large degree stalemated, with neither side gaining much territory.

Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address Sunday that the warrant represented a turning point in the conflict, and that Russia would be held responsible “for every strike on Ukraine, for every destroyed life, for every deported Ukrainian child … And, of course, for every manifestation of destabilization of the world caused by Russian aggression.”

Putin’s visit to war-torn Ukraine was his first since the February 2022 invasion. Numerous Western leaders supporting Ukraine, including U.S. President Joe Biden, have visited Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital that Putin tried — and failed — to capture in the earliest weeks of the war.

Mariupol was one of the centers of fighting in the first months of the war, although when Russia took full control last May, only about 100,000 residents remained, out of the city’s prewar population of 450,000.

Source: Voice of America

Chinese auto makers have embarked on a major expansion in the Russian market and are expected to reach a 60% share of total sales this year, the newspaper Izvestia reported on Monday, citing car-dealer chain Autodom.

According to the report, in the first half of 2022 the share of Chinese car brands in the Russian market stood at 3.7%, a figure that rose to almost 33% in the second half. Overall car sales in Russia last year decreased by 58.8% to 687,000 units, the Association of European Businesses (AEB) calculated.

Chery, Haval and Geely were named the most popular Chinese car brands in Russia. Their share in the country’s market will continue to grow in 2023, according to the CEO of Autodom Andrey Olkhovsky.

Meanwhile, the Association of Russian Automobile Dealers told Izvestia that it expects around 785,000 new car sales in Russia this year, of which at least 250,000 (32%) will be Chinese made.

According to market expert Viktor Kondrashin, the lack of competition leads to an increase in prices for models such as Geely and Haval. He told the newspaper that “new models of Chinese crossovers currently cost the same as Volvo or Skoda two years ago.”

Kondrashin believes that domestic car prices could moderate when deliveries of automobiles from Iran start to arrive.

The popularity of Chinese automobiles in Russia has been rising amid the exodus of European, American, and Japanese brands. Many automakers found it difficult to continue operations in the country due to logistical disruptions resulting from Western sanctions, particularly after deliveries of cars and spare parts to Russia were stopped.

Source: Russia Today

America’s Big Tech bloodletting has reached a new round of victims, with online retailing behemoth Amazon revealing that it will cut an additional 9,000 jobs just two months after announcing that 18,000 slots would be eliminated.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy disclosed the latest job cuts in a message to employees on Monday. Most of the affected positions are in the company’s AWS cloud services, its PXT Solutions business, its advertising operations and its Twitch online gaming platform.

“Given the uncertain economy in which we reside and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount,” Jassy said. “The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole.”

The move came less than a week after Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced an additional 10,000 job cuts on top of the 11,000 positions it eliminated last November. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned of the possibility that “this new economic reality will continue for many years.”

Companies such as Google, Microsoft, Twitter and eBay also have cut thousands of jobs in recent months. US technology firms have been hit hard by rising interest rates and a slowdown in online advertising amid increasing economic uncertainty. Bank of America has predicted that the US economy will slide into recession later this year, while some economists have warned that even a global economic downturn won’t curb high inflation rates.

Nearly 140,000 US technology industry jobs have been cut so far this year, following more than 161,000 such eliminations in 2022, according to a tally by Layoffs.fyi.

Source: Russia Today

The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) principal prosecutor and the judges who issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin have become the targets of a criminal case, Russia’s Investigative Committee announced on Monday.

In a Telegram post, the committee said that it had opened cases against ICC prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan, as well as judges Tomoko Akane, Rosario Salvatore Aitala and Sergio Gerardo Ugalde Godinez.

Khan sent a petition on February 22 to the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber to obtain warrants for the arrest of Putin and Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, whom he accused of being responsible for the “illegal deportation of children from Ukraine.” His petition was approved by the aforementioned judges.

Russia’s investigative committee has described the ICC prosecutions as “obviously illegal, since there are no grounds for criminal liability.” It also pointed to the 1973 UN Protection of Diplomats Convention which grants heads of state absolute immunity from the jurisdiction of foreign countries.

The committee considers Khan’s actions a crime under Russian law for “knowingly bringing an innocent person to criminal liability, combined with unlawfully accusing a person of committing a grave or especially grave crime.” He is also charged with preparing an attack on a representative of a foreign state “with the intention of complicating international relations.”

The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) principal prosecutor and the judges who issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin have become the targets of a criminal case, Russia’s Investigative Committee announced on Monday.

In a Telegram post, the committee said that it had opened cases against ICC prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan, as well as judges Tomoko Akane, Rosario Salvatore Aitala and Sergio Gerardo Ugalde Godinez.

Khan sent a petition on February 22 to the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber to obtain warrants for the arrest of Putin and Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, whom he accused of being responsible for the “illegal deportation of children from Ukraine.” His petition was approved by the aforementioned judges.

Russia’s investigative committee has described the ICC prosecutions as “obviously illegal, since there are no grounds for criminal liability.” It also pointed to the 1973 UN Protection of Diplomats Convention which grants heads of state absolute immunity from the jurisdiction of foreign countries.

The committee considers Khan’s actions a crime under Russian law for “knowingly bringing an innocent person to criminal liability, combined with unlawfully accusing a person of committing a grave or especially grave crime.” He is also charged with preparing an attack on a representative of a foreign state “with the intention of complicating international relations.”

Source: Russia Today

Chinese President Xi Jinping flies to Russia on his first official visit since re-election and says the two countries strategic relationship is vital, and based on historical ties of the neighboring states. Russian President Vladimir Putin says in case the Black Sea grain deal is not extended, Russia is ready to supply the African countries most in need for free. India increases Rice exports to Africa, as the continent suffers from food scarcity amid devastating droughts. South Africa braces for a nationwide labor strike amid calls from the political opposition for President Ramaphosa to resign.

Source: Russia Today

The US is still working with Islamic State and other terrorist groups to carry out attacks against government forces in Syria, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergey Naryshkin, has claimed.

According to an SVR report released on Monday, the US military’s Al-Tanf base in southern Syria is coordinating subversive activities, with the actions of terrorist groups being planned by representatives of the Central Command of the US Armed Forces as well as US intelligence officers.

The SVR stated that a special role has been assigned to the so-called Free Syrian Army, which consists of Kurdish and Arab detachments operating in the central and northeast parts of Syria. “Through them, the Americans and their British allies are working with the underground formations of Islamic State [IS, formerly ISIS] that still remain in remote areas of the country,” it was alleged.

“ISIS was instructed to incite hostilities in the Syrian south-west (the provinces of Suwayda and Deraa), in the central part of the country (Homs) and east of the Euphrates River (Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor). For this, it is planned to form several detachments of radicals with a total number of about 300 people. After special training, they will be involved in attacks on military facilities in Syria and Iran,” the statement added.

The SVR claims that the US also intends to use terrorists in the region around the capital, Damascus, to conduct tasks such as kidnapping Russian and Iranian servicemen.

In addition to coordinating the actions of Islamist groups, Washington is providing terrorists with weapons, according to the SVR. Several dozen four-wheel-drive pickup trucks with heavy machine guns, as well as a number of rocket systems such as NLAW ATGMs, TOWs, and Igla MANPADS are set to be handed over to fighters in the near future, the report alleged.

Washington’s actions put it “on the same level” as Islamic terrorists and IS militants, and are a manifestation of state terrorism, the SVR argued.

In February, the SVR reported that the US was using Islamist extremists to plan terrorist attacks in Russia and former Soviet republics. Washington has been training as many as 60 terrorists at the Al-Tanf base to make improvised explosive devices and use them to target diplomats, public officials, law enforcement officers, and military personnel, the intelligence service claimed.

Source: Russia Today

The Bank of Russia has forbidden Russian financial institutions to use the SWIFT messaging system for transactions inside the country, the regulator announced on Monday.

Starting from October, Russian banks will be obliged to only use domestic services for transferring messages on financial transactions. The use of SWIFT will be allowed only for international payments.

“This will ensure reliability, continuity and security of data exchange when conducting intra-Russian transactions,” the regulator said in a statement.

Information on such transactions will now need to be transmitted through the Bank of Russia’s own banking systems, services of third-party Russian companies, or through the Bank of Russia’s own financial messaging system, SPFS.

The SPFS was created by the regulator in 2018 as a substitute for SWIFT on the domestic market. While its coverage is still much smaller than that of SWIFT – which boasts 11,000 financial organizations globally – the spread of SPFS has been gaining momentum in recent months. In February, the Russian Central Bank announced that SPFS now has 469 participants, including 115 foreign entities from 14 nations.

Russia was forced to start seeking alternatives to SWIFT in dealing with foreign partners last year, after some of the country’s largest banks were disconnected from the system as part of Western sanctions.

At present, ten Russian banks are disconnected from SWIFT, including Sberbank, VTB, Otkrytie, Rosselkhozbank, Novikombank, Promsvyazbank, Rossiya, Sovcombank, VEB.RF, and MKB. Banks which have not been disconnected but are under blocking sanctions from Western countries may also face difficulties using the system.

Source: Russia Today

Members of the Russian presidential administration whose jobs focus on domestic policy have been instructed to discard their iPhones by the end of March, the business daily Kommersant reported on Monday. The decision was made due to the risk of Western espionage, the outlet said.

Russian officials will have to “throw away or give to their kids” their devices running the iOS operating system, according to how one source summarized a discussion during a seminar in early March.

Kommersant sources say the final say on the matter and the deadline came directly from Deputy Chief of Staff Sergey Kirienko, who supervises several departments in the presidential office in charge of various aspects of domestic policy. The ban will also affect officials who liaise with regional governments on behalf of the administration, the newspaper reported.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to either confirm or deny the report, but stressed that officials are not allowed to use smartphones “for work purposes” anyway. Any such device, regardless of its operating system, is too exposed to handle classified information, he said.

Apple prides itself on the increased security achieved due to the strict limitations on what users can do with its products and what programs can run on them. However, the brand’s popularity has also made the devices the target of extensive research into how to hack them.

Some advanced cyberwarfare tools, such as the infamous Israeli Pegasus software, allegedly allow Apple gadgets to be breached without the need for users to be tricked, unlike less sophisticated malware. The Russian ban is reportedly motivated by exactly that consideration, according to Kommersant.

The administration’s employees were told to switch to phones running the Android operating system, Chinese software, or the Russian Aurora system, a source told the newspaper. The domestic system has been in development since 2016 and derives from the Linux-based Sailfish operating system.

Cybersecurity expert Natalya Kaspersky remarked that smartphones “are designed as spy devices” that collect and store information that can be transferred elsewhere. But using electronics less familiar to potential attackers would improve users’ safety, she added.

“The more Russian components a device has, the smaller the risk that information would be leaked to hostile states. In that regard, a domestic OS would be advantageous to a foreign one,” Kaspersky said.

Western states are currently conducting a crackdown on TikTok, a popular video-sharing service owned by a Chinese company. Over the past several weeks, government agencies in several US-allied nations have banned the app from being installed on employees’ devices over alleged cybersecurity risks.

Source: Russia Today

In his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Harold Pinter spent a good deal of his time detailing the crimes of the US in the world, but especially in Latin America. He spoke about how most people have been lulled into forgetting about these crimes, if they ever knew about them at all, thanks to Washington’s sophisticated propaganda machine:

“The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

Of course, the people who suffered from the relentless US attacks have not forgotten them. And as might be expected, these attacks have not stopped, or even slowed down, with the US supporting right-wing coups in Latin America and the Caribbean in recent years – for example, in Honduras in 2009; Bolivia in 2019; and most recently the ongoing unrest in Peru. The US also helped instigate a very violent coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018, though it ultimately failed. Moreover, in addition to forcibly kidnapping Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and flying him to the Central African Republic in 2004, it appears that the US had some role in the recent murder of Haitian President Jovenel Moise.

Meanwhile, Washington is leading NATO’s expansion of its forward-operating capacity in Latin America and the Caribbean. According to Popular Resistance, at the end of 2022, the US had “12 military bases in Panama, 12 in Puerto Rico, 9 in Colombia, 8 in Peru, 3 in Honduras, 2 in Paraguay, as well as installations of this type in Aruba, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Cuba (Guantanamo), and Peru among other countries.” Washington is seeking to control the entire “land and maritime surface of the region”, including a network of NATO bases on islands in Argentina’s territorial waters “usurped by the United Kingdom.”

In light of all this activity and history, the people of Latin America and the Caribbean can be forgiven for doubting the claims that the US is helping to spread democracy, peace and truth in the region. The people of this region are simply tired of being bullied by the US, and they are equally tired of being blatantly lied to by the US government and its corporate media mouthpieces. As such, it should come as little surprise to anyone paying attention that the people of this region are increasingly looking to non-US sources like Russia’s RT to get their information, much to the chagrin of the US.

As CNN laments, “Russian propaganda has long exploited simmering resentments against the West’s imperialistic past and recent foreign policy interventions, now promoting the view that Ukraine is a puppet of the West. The narrative is particularly powerful in Latin America, where Kremlin-controlled media outlets such as RT have big audiences.” Similarly, POLITICO complains, “When it comes to Russian state media, the Kremlin’s Spanish-language services – most notably RT en Español – are a juggernaut, particularly in Latin America. Its glitzy television studios, anti-gringo editorial line and ability to tap into locals’ desire for outside news sources have made the outlet by far the largest proponent of Moscow’s talking points.”

There is much to unpack in these alarmist statements. First of all, in its very assertion about “Russian propaganda,” CNN itself engages in its own, quite typical pro-US propaganda, attempting to claim that the West’s imperialism is in the “past” and reducing its recent, anti-constitutional coups in Latin America to mere “foreign policy interventions.” For its part, POLITICO acknowledges that the appeal of RT to Latin American viewers is its “anti-gringoeditorial line” without explaining why Latin Americans would be attracted to that – that is, without acknowledging it is the cruel US actions which have driven Latin Americans away from American sources and towards those like RT.

Of course, the problem is that the US government and its compliant propaganda outlets like CNN and POLITICO have gotten high on their own supply. They believe their own line about the nature of US imperialism in the region and cannot seem to fathom that they themselves are some of the biggest purveyors of false news in the world, including about Washington’s role in the world.

Again, the people of Latin America and the Caribbean, forced to endure the brutality of the US in their daily lives, are not so fooled, and they are quite understandably looking elsewhere for their news, and even for help. Thus, people protesting US intervention in such countries as Haiti and Peru are even waving Russian flags and asking for Russian help against this intervention.

There is an easy solution to this. If the US wants the people of the region to look to it and its media outlets for news and information, it might be honest about its interventionist past and present conduct in this hemisphere, and it can start treating the people of this hemisphere and their countries with respect and as equals. As long as the US continues to treat Latin America and the Caribbean as its “backyard” in which it is free to meddle for its own gain, it will only continue to alienate the people and to push them towards Russia and other points eastward. This should be an obvious point, but it seems to be lost on those policymakers in the US who seem incapable of seeing past their own self-interest, all the while believing that they are somehow the good guys.

Source: Russia Today