Audio/Video, Blog, Books/Film, Films, Russia
I visited Russia twice, before and after the collapse of Communism and even attempted to learn Russian, not getting much beyond waiter and taxi talk, though I can pick up film and political speakers with the help of subtitles. So as an investigative reporter, not a film critic, to understand this film about a Russian editor who won a Nobel Prize, I sent a screening of this film to world-class Russia expert, Richard Sakwa. He is Emeritus Professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent (England). He was also the head of the University’s Politics and International Relations department, has lived and taught in Russia and has published sixteen books on Soviet, Russian and post-communist affairs.
Blog, Russia
Sept 23, 2023 – My question to NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg at the Council on Foreign Relations meeting Thurs Sept 22 elicited his lies about NATO’s “not one inch East” agreement and the US-sponsored 2014 coup against elected head of Ukraine. I was stopped before talking about Ukraine shelling of Donbass from 2014 and Ukraine forces massed on Donbass border that provoked Russian to move troops in. Stoltenberg’s response is a defense of U.S. hegemony.
Audio/Video, Featured, Films, Russia
Feb 22, 2023 – How do you make a good propaganda film? How do you expose it before it wins a truth-telling award and embarrasses the prizegivers — before they discover it’s a propaganda pseudo-documentary that has been nominated for an “Oscar” – before the white envelopes are opened before millions of people on Oscar night, March 12th?
Blog, Books/Film, Russia
Feb 21, 2022 – John Helmer, a journalist in Moscow since 1989, has published a brilliant comic graphic-text primer about Russia, its outside enemies and corrupt insiders. In just over 100 pages of comment and vivid cartoons you will learn the stories of the major deep state inventions of most of the last decade or so: faked stories about Navalny, the Skripals, the downing of the MH17 in Ukraine, media propagandists, esp Russophobes Anne Applebaum and Canadian deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland. Also Russian inside-dealing including Putin’s gifts to some bigtime oligarchs. No surprise that Helmer got a death threat after that one.
Featured, Russia
July 6, 2020 – The U.S. and UK, are taking new actions to intensify their collaborative Cold War against Russia. In Washington, calls for sanctions are based on the fake bountygate, the UK has sanctioned selected Russians based on William Browder’s Magnitsky hoax.
Blog, Russia
April 13, 2020 – I saw this post on a tweet, Thomas Merton on how good propaganda makes people think they made up their own minds. A Columbia Law prof, claiming the Russian government is targeting American voters with fake news and disinformation, turns out to be a victim of the propaganda he describes.
Blog, Books/Film, Russia
March 23, 2020 – Knockout details about how Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky used transfer-pricing in sales of Yukos oil to cheat the Russian government and minority shareholders of massive amounts of money are found in this seemingly staid business-academic book by Mikhail Glazunov.
Audio/Video, Russia, The Browder Hoax
July 19, 2019 – Jamison Firestone was a featured speaker at a panel in Miami called Bill Browder: Hero or Villain? I took the villain side in the debate. Firestone, who collaborated with Browder on his tax frauds, opted for hero. The event at a Miami Beach conference in April was sponsored by Offshore Alert, a Miami-based newsletter that writes about offshore fraud.
Audio/Video, Russia, The Browder Hoax
July 13, 2019 – On Wednesday July 10th, I was interviewed by John Batchelor for his radio program. Here are the key points. There are a few corrections and edits. And here is the link to the audio.
Russia
Consortium News, July 3, 2019 – A “key event” described in the Mueller Report
is the Trump Tower meeting where a Russian lawyer met with the
president‘s son Donald Trump Jr, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his
campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Russiagaters have been obsessed with the meeting, saying it was the smoking gun to prove collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign to steal the 2016
election. Months after Mueller concluded that there was no collusion at all, the obsession has switched to “obstruction of justice,” which is like someone being apprehended for resisting arrest without committing any other crime.
Russia, The Browder Hoax
May 15, 2018 – Michael McFaul, President Obama’s senior director of Russian affairs at the National Security Council and then ambassador to Russia, gave a neocon tour d‘horizon at the Council on Foreign Relations May 11. [Republicans/Democrats, they are all neocons now.] He was there to promote a new book. I asked him about the Magnitsky hoax. I got expected evasions at the Council, but later found revelations in the book. Here’s the Q & A.
