Russo-Ukrainian War Thread - Page 306

A senior politician from the Dutch political party CDA was monitored by the civilian intelligence service, AIVD, because of questionable contacts the politician had with a Russian spy and others with close ties to President Vladimir Putin, the Volkskrant reported on Sunday. René van der Linden sat in the Tweede Kamer for nearly 20 years, served as the State Secretary of Foreign Affairs, and was a senator for 16 years, including from 2009-2011 when he was the Senate chair.

The CDA politician was also the president of the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly from 2005-2008 while he was a senator, and began keeping contact with Valeri Levitski, an accused Russian spy who was expelled from France in April 2018 for ties to the Russian security service GRU. Levitski also opened communication between Van der Linden and two Russian politicians, Leonid Slutsky, the head of Russian nationalist party LDPR, and Konstantin Kosachev, a senator from Putin’s United Russia party who now chairs the Federation Council’s Foreign Affairs Committee.

Even after Levitski was forced out of France, Van der Linden maintained contact with him for another 15 months. During the decade that they maintained dialogue, Van der Linden raised red flags with the AIVD and Dutch politicians alike. In documents previously released in September, Levitski asserted to Moscow that he was able to hold sway over Van der Linden and SP politician Tiny Kox, the latter being the current President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Kox vehemently denied the accusation.

What is clear is that Van der Linden received Kosachev at his home, and spent time with Slutsky as part of a delegation that visited Moscow, the Volkskrant said. He frequently traveled to Moscow to participate in conferences, with transportation and hotels paid for by Russia.

Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014, after years of faltering relations between the Netherlands and Russia, the West imposed a series of strict sanctions against Russian leaders. He again traveled to Moscow that June as a guest, and was pictured with Sergei Naryshkin, who now leads Russia’s foreign intelligence service. Van der Linden often spoke out against those sanctions, saying they stood in the way of rebuilding relations with the country.

“I was against that, and the committee supported me,” said Frank van Kaapen to the Volkskrant. Van Kaapen is a VVD politician who chaired the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. “I was surprised at Van der Linden’s pro-Russian attitude. I didn’t expect that from a CDA member. I didn’t expect that from any politician. It was beyond naivety.”

A month later, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down above eastern Ukraine hours after it departed Amsterdam for Kuala Lumpur. The international investigation into the incident placed blame on Russia, saying that a Russian-made Buk missile system sent to support Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine was used to shoot the plane out of the sky.

Even that was not enough to deter Van der Linden from his stance, despite Dutch-Russian relations having been eviscerated. “The most important thing is that we get rid of those sanctions as soon as possible and get a partnership with Russia again. We need them,” he reportedly said during a political debate in 2016.

Despite leaving the Senate in 2015, Van der Linden continued to attend meetings and conferences in Moscow for years. These were often clearly pushed by Russian intelligence services, said Rob de Wijk, who attended the conferences as a professor of international relations at Leiden University and the founder of The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies. “Van der Linden must have known that too. You just can't be so naive not to know that,” he told the Volkskrant.

Van der Linden stopped attending conferences in Moscow after a final visit in 2019, when he was taken aback by the overwhelming presence of far-right European political figures. Around that time, it became clear that he was being monitored by the AIVD. “I find it extremely questionable that I was tapped,” Van der Linden told the Volkskrant. He said he was irritated that the intelligence service immediately treated him as a possible suspect, instead of discussing the situation directly.

He ultimately learned of Levitski’s ties to Russian intelligence, possibly from Dick Schoof, the head of the AIVD, or Jan Swillens, the head of military intelligence outfit MIVD, the newspaper speculated.

“When I heard about it, I immediately cut off all contact, did not respond to anything, and erased the phone numbers. Of course I was shocked that he had a double role, but I was never asked for information,” the former senator continued.

But a source who spoke to the Volkskrant said otherwise. The newspaper reported that the AIVD believed Van der Linden was pressed for information in issues regarding Dutch defense. Van der Linden admitted that in the past he was in contact with Slutsky and Kosachov “at most once or twice a year” in discussions that were organized by Levitski. “How was I to know he was a secret agent?” Van der Linden said.

On November 15 2022 02:48 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
If true then Ukraine is already across the Dnipro river and has a foothold.

https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1592187594267557888

https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1591900962699894784

On November 15 2022 03:45 Nezgar wrote:
According to reports they have crossed the Dnipro estuary and landed at the Kinburn peninsula. This is unlikely to be anything serious and probably mostly aimed at tying up Russian forces and shattering their sense of security on the left bank of the river. They won't really be able to ferry over heavy equipment and the terrain there isn't suited for mechanized warfare either. Some say that this is little more than a raid but I suppose we'll see just how much they commit to it.

As Russia pivots towards regime change, the Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin is more and more often heard flattering Russia’s frustrated nationalists. In recent weeks, Prigozhin has repeatedly encouraged the people he calls “regular plowmen” in resenting the super-privileged “elites” in Russia’s high offices. Meduza’s special correspondent Andrey Pertsev spoke with Kremlin insiders and political experts about Prigozhin’s recent public attacks on key Russian political figures — and the large-scale political ambitious that might lurk behind Prigozhin’s words.

It would have been difficult not to notice Evgeny Prigozhin’s recent rise to public prominence. Prigozhin’s now frequent appearances in the media are often connected with his public criticisms of Russian politicians and officials. In late October, for example, the Wagner Group founder accused the Russian “elites” of evading mobilization:

No mobilization of the elites has taken place. The oligarchs, and other representatives of the elite, have always lived in boundless comfort, and continue to do so. Until their children go to war, the country will not be fully mobilized.

On November 11, Prigozhin returned to this theme, now contrasting the “elites” with the convicts who join the Wagner Group, Prigozhin’s “private military company”:

The inmates have the highest level of consciousness — much higher than the Russian elites’. This is because the incarcerated are regular plowmen, who had some bad luck in life — and this is why they volunteer on such a massive scale.

This particular remark was an answer to a local journalist’s question about the Wagner Group’s recruitment of inmates in Tyumen. Its jibe at the “elites” might seem less of an accident if put side-by-side with Prigozhin’s comment on the brutal extra-judicial execution of one of his conscripts:

There are traitors who drop their machine guns and go to the enemy side, betraying their own people and their Motherland — but they’re not the only ones. Some of the traitors are sitting tight in their offices, giving no thought to their own people.

Two Kremlin insiders who are personally familiar with Prigozhin think that this pattern of “anti-elite” statements is not coincidental. They believe that Prigozhin is considering the start of a conservative movement that might turn into a full-fledged political party in the future.

If it comes into being, Prigozhin’s potential new movement will be likely to focus around “patriotism and statism.” Its tactics will involve continuous criticism of state bureaucrats and the business sector. Sources who know Prigozhin personally suggest that his inspiration comes from Alexey Navalny and his team’s anti-corruption investigations, which expose corrupt members of the Russian ruling class on a regular basis. A source close to the St. Petersburg administration agrees with this impression of Navalny’s (perhaps unlikely) influence on Prigozhin.

“Prigozhin learns quickly, he grasps things very rapidly,” says one of our sources. “He can very well present himself as a populist demanding equality.”

Sources familiar with Prigozhin suggest that, apart from attacking the elites, he is likely to speculate on cravings for revenge:

He will cultivate a thirst for vengeance, for the military defeats — since, in the end, we’ll win all the same. Who is to blame if we didn’t make it to Kyiv, if we surrendered Kherson? Once again, the elites.

The Kremlin insiders who spoke with Meduza suggest that Evgeny Prigozhin’s efforts are aligned with the aims of two other figures close to Vladimir Putin himself — namely, the Kovalchuk brothers, Mikhail and Yury Kovalchuk. Together with Prigozhin, the Kovalchuk family are now wrestling against the St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov. Their relations used to be better, but conflicts over large government contracts around the city allied the Kovalchuks with Prigozhin. Recently, Prigozhin himself filed two official complaints against Beglov, accusing him of organized crime and demanding that Beglov also be investigated for possible treason.

One of the sources close to the Kremlin suggests that Prigozhin is instrumental to the Kovalchuks in their desire to show Putin that they are capable of becoming “key operators in national politics.” Specifically, Prigozhin is useful “in the patriotic segment,” and in demoralizing the elites “so they don’t even think of jumping back from the president.”

In the 2021 State Duma elections, the Kovalchuk brothers sponsored the New People political party, which ultimately made it into the parliament. Around the same time, Prigozhin had similar political projects of his own: he wanted to take control of the nationalist Rodina party, but his plan was foiled when the president’s administration decided not to invest any more resources into Rodina.

Kremlin insiders highlight Prigozhin’s constant contact with Putin since the beginning of the war. Prigozhin is believed to have access to Putin, and to be able to “reach” him. Although it’s unclear whether Prigozhin talks to Putin about his political ambitions, in theory, if he did have such ambitions, they might well be endorsed by the Kremlin.

A source close to the administration thinks that Prigozhin’s politics is “a niche project, calibrated for the ultra-patriotic majority who, at the same time, do not fully support the regime, and are critical of the elites, the bureaucracy, and the business sector.” Prigozhin’s growing influence, the same source adds, may very well trouble some of the the higher-ups in the state security and law enforcement organs.

The Russian political scientist Ivan Preobrazhensky tells Meduza that “under certain circumstances” Prigozhin could appeal to Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s former audience,

the Russia of depressed towns and cities, with people educated in trade schools and a huge social segment of people who have a highly specific prison mentality. The majority of these people, from criminal subculture adepts to the actual incarcerated people and their prison guards, have the same mentality as the numerous Russian law-enforcement class.

Another political scientist, Konstantin Kalachev, thinks that Prigozhin’s rhetoric already resembles Zhirinovsky’s: “Nationalist populism in a frustrated society begins as a farce — but now, things can grow serious — they can be amped up.”

Ivan Preobrazhensky is skeptical about Prigozhin’s chances of great electoral success — but he also thinks that none might be needed. “The situation in the country is moving in the direction of power being seized by force.”

On November 16 2022 01:42 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
Seems like russia fired another huge wave of missile strikes on civilian infrastructure today. Dutch foreign minister was visiting Kyiv and had to go to bomb shelters.

On November 16 2022 03:38 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Two Russia missiles strayed off course and have hit a Polish town on the border with Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/Joyce_Karam/status/1592585156384415744

On November 16 2022 03:46 hitthat wrote:


Too little to retaliate, too much to ignore.