Us to send ukraine $18 million in food, health, shelter aid

[Gugudoll]

Russian Spetsnaz POW interrogated by Ukrainians (en subs)

Published on May 18, 2015

This is a video taken by Ukrainians interrogating a POW who confessed to be an active Russian Special Forces member. His testimony provides unique insight on Russian Spetsnaz recon operations on the frontline.

Video of Russian POW Sgt. Alexander Alexandrov, 3rd Spetsnaz GRU (Tolyatti/Togliatti, Samara).

More information here.

[gipsy]

Tolyatti,city where this guy from is several thousand kilometers from Ukraine ,pretty far for to lose during military exercises...

Kiev says alleged Russian military inteligence officers will be tried for terrorism

source

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/ukraine-says-captured-russian-soldiers-expose-kremlin-lies-1.2217292

[Gugudoll]

Russian Defense Ministry hopes Ukraine will release two former Russian servicemen

Russia May 18, 21:32 UTC+3

A ministry spokesman said the Russian nationals captured by the Ukrainian Security Service in the Luhansk region on May 17 were not servicemen of the Russian Armed Forces at the moment of detention

MOSCOW, May 18. /TASS/. Russia’s Defense Ministry hopes Ukraine will be judicious enough to release former servicemen detained by the Ukrainian Security Servive, the ministry's spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on Monday.

"We have been informed about the joint show staged today by Ukraine’s General Staff and the Security Service dedicated to the alleged detention of two Russian soldiers in the Luhansk region," he said. "The two Russian nationals, Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev, who were captured by the Ukrainian Security Service in the Luhansk region on May 17, were not servicemen of the Russian Armed Forces at the moment of detention."

First deputy commander of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic's militia Sergey Kozlov was earlier reported saying the republic insists on Kiev’s immediately releasing Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev.

"In line with provision six of the Minsk agreements that were signed by the Ukrainian president and with an aim of avoiding further escalation of the situation in the region, we demand immediate release of our militias, Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev," he said. "Mistreatment of our will not be left without consequences."

He stressed that LPR’s militias "have always been humane towards all captives." "I would like to stress that I am speaking not only about servicemen of the Ukrainian army but about soldiers of Ukrainian punitive battalions, including foreigners. We offered emergency assistance to all of them and let them return home," he said.

Source

In a parallel universe/reality Russia is so "embarrassed" by capture of GRU spetsnaz by Ukraine that it admits they are Russian "former" servicemen. Funny thing is their puppets in Lugansk said they were former police officers. We all know Russia invaded east Ukraine and local forces are composed by local thugs + russian mercenaries and russian regular army. We can see how Orwellian this all is!

Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev

were NOT Russian servicemen "at the moment of detention"

according to Kremlin!

[gipsy]

Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev

were NOT Russian servicemen "at the moment of detention"

according to Kremlin!

hvn't any doubt about it. they r just a tractor drivers on vacation who bought silent rifles in internet.

[Gugudoll]

Russian soldiers confess to taking part in fighting in East Ukraine (video)

Source

[Gugudoll]

The Stream - Garry Kasparov talks chess, politics and Putin

[Gugudoll]

Ukraine army presented Russian intelligence drone, which was shot down recently

Battalion Dnepr-1 shoots down one Russia "Форпост" drone near Avdeevka, Ukraine, today, 7,500km from its home base of Elizovo, Russia Federation...

No doubt this is the RF army's "Forpost 923".

Here are more photos of the 923 drone being manufactured at a Russian state owned factory.

Ukrainian Army shot down Russian UAV FORPOST that costs 6 million USD.

[sternog]

In your great democratic Ukraine hungry people are currently raving mad in Kiev. The police started arresting some of them. The so called government is only capable of begging for more money from the EU and the USA etc. They are unable to fix country`s economy, destroyed industry, increased pay rates for

electricity etc. Non-existing Russian invasion cannot explain why people are unable to pay for their expenses, bread on their table. Stop believing all the bs propaganda and use your own brain to think at last. Also, do rebels really have to shell and kill themselves, destroy their homes and rebuild them again, for me it`s unthinkable. Poroshenko only needed Minsk agreements in order to gather strengh for his defeated troops, recently he showed his true colors by announcing his intention to take back Donetsk airport. Even the USA were displeased with his words.

[Gugudoll]

21 May 2015 - 19H14

Fighters captured in Ukraine admit to serving in Russia's army: OSCE

© AFP/File | A man, whom the SBU Ukrainian security service alleged to be one of two captured Russian soldiers, covers his face as

he lies on a bed at the Kiev Millitary hospital on May 19, 2015

KIEV (AFP) -

Two Russians captured by Ukrainian forces during a firefight in the ex-Soviet state's separatist east have admitted to serving in the Kremlin's armed forces, the OSCE said on Thursday.

"Both individuals claimed that they were members of a unit of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. They claimed that they were on a reconnaissance mission. They were armed but had no orders to attack," the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe reported after conducting interviews with the two wounded men in a Kiev hospital.

"One of them said he had received orders from his military unit to go to Ukraine; he was to 'rotate' after three months. Both of them said they had been to Ukraine 'on missions' before," the report added.

Ukraine has charged Captain Yevgeny Yerofeyev and Sergeant Aleksander Aleksandrov with involvement in "terrorist activity" and promised to release them should they fully confess during a "public" trial.

Kiev is trying to use the men's detention to prove its longstanding belief that the Kremlin was covertly supporting the rebels with high-tech weapons and troops in order to unsettle Ukraine's pro-Western government.

Russia's defence ministry says the two men were once members of the armed forces but had been demobilised by the time they crossed into the Ukrainian war zone nearly two months ago.

Moscow acknowledges the presence of Russian "volunteers" and off-duty servicemen in Ukraine while rejecting charges that they were there under orders from President Vladimir Putin's generals.

The two fighters were captured during a battle in the renegade Lugansk province on Saturday.

The Russian army on Monday demanded their immediate release and promised to open direct talks over the men's fate with the Ukrainian security service.

It is not clear whether such talks are currently being held.

Source

[Gugudoll]

Cisco's sanction-breaking & deals with the KGB in Russia

The intent was to dodge sanctions and provide equipment to Vladimir Putin’s military and security services, a source says. Cisco strongly denies it violated sanctions or attempted to do so. A BuzzFeed News investigation.

After Western sanctions began shutting down sales of high-tech internet equipment to Russia’s military and security forces, employees at technology giant Cisco Systems Inc. altered sales records and booked deals under a false customer name, according to internal company documents. The intent, according to a confidential source with deep knowledge of Cisco’s Moscow operations, was to dodge the sanctions by masking the true customers behind more innocuous-sounding straw buyers.

In at least one case, the source said, Cisco employees succeeded in actually providing equipment — including sophisticated internet switches — to the feared FSB, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB.

Top officials at Cisco, one of America’s most prestigious and innovative companies, valued at more than $151 billion, vehemently denied the allegations. Cisco did not violate sanctions or attempt to do so, they said.

Cisco officials didn’t dispute the authenticity of the internal emails and spreadsheets obtained by BuzzFeed News. Instead, speaking on condition of anonymity in lengthy phone briefings, the Cisco officials acknowledged that the buyer name on some accounts was incorrect but said those were innocent and harmless errors. When records were changed, they said, the intent was only to be more accurate, not to conceal the real buyer.

In the case of the alleged FSB deal, officials said the equipment had not gone to the security service but to a civilian ministry. Cisco is “in complete compliance with the US and EU sanctions on Russia,” spokesperson Nigel Glennie said in a brief written statement.

...

Source

Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63 · May 20

Instead of capitalists selling Russia the rope with which to hang them, it's Cisco selling routers to the KGB & RU Defense Ministry.

UPDATE

Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63 · 17h 17 hours ago

Update on the Cisco-Russia story with statements from me & @SenJohnMcCain. Dig more, corruption is never skin deep!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/talalansari/mccain-says-ciscos-russia-deals-deserves-further-investigati#.rn3v7DgGk

[Gugudoll]

Interviewed by Novaya Gazeta, captured GRU officer weeps when told even his wife participates in the denial charade...

Source

(in Russian, use QTranslate)

UPDATE:

Novaya Gazeta interview with Russian soldiers captured in Ukraine: English translation

[Gugudoll]

Russia’s Armed Aggression against Ukraine. Further evidence

Source: Security Service of Ukraine

[Gugudoll]

High price for probing Russian soldiers’ deaths in Ukraine

25.05.15 | Halya Coynash

A 74-year-old Russian rights activist is on trial on fraud charges carrying a sentence of up to six years imprisonment. One of two alleged ‘victims’ has admitted that it was the police who suggested he lodge his allegations which emerged less than 2 months after Ludmila Bogatenkova, the head of a Soldiers’ Mothers Committee in Buddyonovsk ("Матери Прикумья") probed the deaths of nine Russian soldiers who were almost certainly killed in Ukraine.

She is now charged with two cases of fraud. In the first Vladimir Dubrovin claims that he paid Bogatenkova 800 thousand roubles to get criminal charges against either his brother or son reclassified in order to avoid criminal prosecution. Presumably it is the media, not Dubrovin, who can’t decide whether it was his son or brother, however Bogatenkova’s lawyer Andrei Sabinin reports that at the last hearing on May 19, the relatives of the alleged victim got mixed up about the amounts supposedly paid to Bogatenkova, dates, etc. At the previous hearing on April 23, Dubrovin admitted that police officers had come to him and suggested that he lodge the complaint. Bogatenkova is also alleged to have borrowed 100 thousand roubles from Svetlana Kharebina, and then denied even receiving them.

Bogatenkova denies all charges. It is a telling detail that a member of the President’s Human Rights Council, Sergei Krivenko appeared at the hearing on May 19 as a witness for the defence.

On Aug 28, 2014 Bogatenkova’s Committee drew up a list of around one hundred Russian soldiers whom they had reason to believe had been killed in eastern Ukraine as well as another three hundred injured. Bogatenkova herself also sent the Human Rights Council information about the deaths of 9 contract soldiers.

Instead of answers to her questions, the elderly activist received a visitation from the police. On Oct 17 a search was first carried out of the Soldiers’ Mothers offices, and then police turned up at her home and arrested her on suspicion of ‘fraud on a particularly large scale’.

A court on Saturday, Oct 18 ordered that she be remanded in custody and she was taken 140 kilometres away, to the SIZO [remand prison] in Piatygorsk. There, however, the SIZO staff noticed what the court had chosen to ignore, namely that the 73-year-old was in poor health, suffers from a number of serious illnesses, and is in need of daily medication. They were clearly concerned that she would die in the SIZO and refused to admit her. Despite this, she was still held for two nights in a police holding facility in Buddyonovsk.

Bogatenkova had refused to accept the lawyer whom the investigators provided and insisted on her own choice, Andrei Sabinin, who was only able to represent her from Monday. The investigator that day withdrew his own application for her detention and agreed to a signed undertaking that the elderly lady who has trouble even moving without assistance would not ‘abscond’. After the experiences of that weekend, the following day Bogatenkova was admitted to the cardiology unit of the local hospital.

Sabinin at the time pointed to the investigator’s about-turn between Saturday and Monday, and said that the publicity which her case had received was doubtless a factor.

A month later, the prosecutor of the Stavropol region informed the Human Rights Council that they had found no evidence of fraud by the rights activist. The Council had approached the prosecutor, Yury Turygin on Oct 20 asking that he take the case under his personal control and inform of his findings.

It appears, however, that those assurances were meaningless or else that somebody put pressure on Turygin to ‘change his mind’, and the prosecution is still continuing. It is indicative of the case that both the investigator and the courts have rejected reasonable applications, including the wish to have a face-to-face formal meeting with the alleged victims.

It should also be noted that while one of the alleged victims wrote his complaint at the prompting of the police, the other, who claims to have not been repaid 100 thousand roubles, first lodged her complaint in August. The police then decided not to initiate criminal proceedings. That decision was overturned by the prosecutor, yet a check still found no elements of a crime.

Human rights activists were adamant back in October 2014 that the charges against Bogatenkova were politically motivated. Each court hearing only confirms this, and publicity is again urgently needed.

Source

[Gugudoll]

Garry Kasparov - Гарри Каспаров - Banks Not Tanks (2014)

Published on Nov 20, 2014

Garry Kasparov's speech at the 2014 Oslo Freedom Forum. See more talks like this at www.oslofreedomforum.com and follow @OsloFF for updates.

Source

[Gugudoll]

Russia Is Using Mobile Crematoriums to Hide Ukraine's Dead

May 26, 2015 6:00 AM EDT

By Josh Rogin

Russia is so desperate to hide its military involvement in Ukraine that it has brought in mobile crematoriums to destroy the bodies of its war dead, say U.S. lawmakers who traveled to the war-torn country this spring.

The U.S. and NATO have long maintained that thousands of Russian troops are fighting alongside separatists inside eastern Ukraine, and that the Russian government is obscuring not only the presence but also the deaths of its soldiers there. In March, NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow told a conference, "Russian leaders are less and less able to conceal the fact that Russian soldiers are fighting -- and dying -- in large numbers in eastern Ukraine."

Hence the extreme measures to get rid of the evidence. “The Russians are trying to hide their casualties by taking mobile crematoriums with them,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry told me. “They are trying to hide not only from the world but from the Russian people their involvement.”

Thornberry said he had seen evidence of the crematoriums from both U.S. and Ukrainian sources. He said he could not disclose details of classified information, but insisted that he believed the reports. “What we have heard from the Ukrainians, they are largely supported by U.S. intelligence and others,” he said.

Representative Seth Moulton, a former Marine Corps officer and a Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, was with Thornberry on the Ukraine trip in late March. He tweeted about the mobile crematoriums at the time, but didn’t reveal his sources. He told me this week the information didn’t come just from Ukrainian officials, whose record of providing war intelligence to U.S. lawmakers isn’t stellar.

“We heard this from a variety of sources over there, enough that I was confident in the veracity of the information,” Moulton said, also being careful not to disclose classified U.S. intelligence.

Both Thornberry and Moulton agreed with Vershbow's assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin was struggling to keep up the ruse that he has no soldiers fighting inside Ukraine. Moulton said the mounting evidence of dead Russian soldiers is causing a domestic backlash for Putin. Russian and Ukrainian bloggers and activists have been compiling lists of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine, including details of their service and circumstances of their deaths. New organizations in Russia representing soldiers’ families have sprung up to publicly challenge Putin's narrative.

“Russia is clearly having a problem with their home front and the casualties they are taking from the war,” Moulton said. “The fact that they would resort to burning the bodies of their own soldiers is horrific and shameful.”

There had been unconfirmed reports of Russia using mobile crematoriums in Ukraine for months, including leaked videos purporting to show them. But never before have U.S. lawmakers confirmed that American officials also believe the claims.

The head of Ukraine’s security service, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, said in January that seven truck-mounted crematoriums crossed into his country over a four-day period. "Each of these crematoriums burns 8-10 bodies per day," he said.

The next month, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko held up the passports of several Russian soldiers and intelligence officers he said were captured or killed in Ukraine, rejecting the Russian assertions that these troops had accidentally wandered over the border.

For many in Washington, the Russian casualties represent a rare vulnerability for Putin -- one that should be exploited through providing weapons to the Ukrainian military. This is a position held by the top U.S. military commander in Europe, General Philip Breedlove, Secretary of State John Kerryand many top lawmakers in both parties.

Yet, in the face of European resistance, President Barack Obama said in March that he was still pondering providing defensive arms to Ukraine. More than two months later, he has yet to make a decision. The result has been a de facto policy of limiting U.S. assistance to Kiev to non-military items. Even that assistance has been delivered late, or in many cases not at all.

Thornberry said arming the Ukrainians would raise the price Putin pays for his aggression. As long as Putin feels the cost of his Ukraine policy is manageable, Russian fueled instability will continue, he said.

The recently passed House version of next year’s national defense authorization act contains explicit authorization for appropriations to support Ukraine’s military and provide it with defensive lethal weapons. This goes further than the action Congress took last year in passing the Ukrainian Freedom Support Act, which Obama signed but still has not acted on with regard to lethal support for Ukraine. The new legislation would set aside money specifically for the arms, and provide for increased production of items the Ukrainians want including Javelin anti-tank missiles.

“We’re doing anything we can possibly think of to get at legislatively forcing it to happen. How do we force the president to provide weapons to a country if he doesn’t want to?" Thornberry said. "I can’t find anyone who is against this except for President Obama.”

Moulton said that the West has a moral obligation to help the Ukrainians, and under current conditions, the Ukrainian military simply can’t face down the heavy weapons Russia continues to pour into Ukraine. He also said that if Putin isn’t confronted now, he will only become more aggressive later. “When a bear comes out of hibernation, he doesn’t have a few blueberries and go back to sleep. He is hungry for more,” said Moulton.

The Obama administration is understandably concerned that giving the Ukrainians arms will fuel the fire and risk a retaliatory Russian escalation. But if that’s the decision, Obama should let the Ukrainians and the American public know it. He then must come up with an alternative to the current, failing approach to stopping Putin’s murderous mischief.

Source

Russia deploys new Mobile Crematories into Ukraine (video)

[Gugudoll]

Putin Imposes Blackout on Russian Special Operations Losses

by Andrey BiryukovDaryna Krasnolutska

12:22 PM BST
May 28, 2015

President Vladimir Putin banned disclosing details of deaths among troops involved in special military operations after repeatedly denying allegations that Russian soldiers are fighting in Ukraine.

A presidential decree published on the Kremlin website on Thursday extended the list of state secrets to include information on losses incurred “in peacetime during special operations” as well as when the country is at war.

Russia denies U.S. and European Union accusations that it is sending troops and weapons to eastern Ukraine to support separatists in a more than yearlong conflict that has claimed more than 6,100 lives. At least 220 Russian soldiers have been killed in the fighting and as many as 10,000 may be in Ukraine, according to a report published on May 12 by opposition activists in Moscow.

Two Russian men held in Ukraine after being wounded and captured during fighting this month said in video interviews with investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta last week that they remain active-duty soldiers, contradicting statements from the Defense Ministry in Moscow that they had resigned from the military.

Putin is trying to “hide the direct involvement of Russian military personnel and their losses” in eastern Ukraine, Oleksandr Turchynov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Defense and Security Council, told reporters in Kiev. The order showed “disrespect and contempt” for soldiers “who were first forced to fight against the Ukrainians and then secretly buried in unmarked graves” as well as toward their families, he said.

Source

Putin declaring soldier deaths in peacetime a state secret is probably a preemptive measure for what is yet to come!