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  • Decent article on the farce of Ukrainian 'judicial reform': http://euromaidanpress.com/2017/08/0...grity-council/

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    • Regarding the Siemens turbines now in Crimea - contrary to EU sanctions - Siemens in an apparent fit of redemption announced last month that a. it is suing it's client in Muscovy (Technopromexport which is a subsiduary of 'state' owned Rostec of which Siemens is a shareholder - suing themselves presumably), then announced that it was cancelling further contracts. See for example;
      https://www.ft.com/content/3bd84344-...6-93fb352ba1fe on the supposed legal case
      http://uk.reuters.com/article/us-ukr...-idUKKBN1A60I4 on the supposed halting of deliveries.

      This of course begs the question of why Siemens would continue any of these deliveries? Some question whether the Muscovites could get these generators to work but access to Crimea - though legally you need a Ukrainian permit - is relatively easy if you go via Moscow or by boat from say Turkey.

      So a little history is needed here. Toward the end of Soviet Union - when Putin was in Dresden - the KGB ran 'monitoring' operations in the occupied countries. In the GDR (East Germany) this was called 'Operation Luch' - don't worry this is public information. Putin's cover name in the GDR 'Adamov'. Operation Luch also involved the KGB recruiting their own people within the GDR - which the Krauts were not happy about naturally (we know this from the 'Mitrokhin archive' and post GDR archives). One example was former Stasi informer Matthias Warnig ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Warnig . There are pictures of them together in the 'good ol' days' still - like lining up for the anniversary of the foundation of Checka in 1989. After German reunification the BND was concerned that Siemens had been infiltrated via it's GDR 'partner' Robotron (who made computers) and riddled with GDR agents attempting to steal technology. A 'Mr Adamov' who was head of a 'Leipzig - Soviet frienship organisation' was much later found to have been payed a 'consultancy fee' by Siemens in 1989. Later when Putin returned to St Petersburg and became Chairman of the 'Committee for Foreign Liason' of the Mayoral Office - a committee that could 'legitimise' all exports from the area 'in theory' for various basics (which never arrived) the first contract sanctioned was with Siemens for medical equipment. Then there is a guy called Nikolai Shamalov and his son Kirril. Nikolai had the good fortune of being the Siemens representative in St Petersburg - he was one of the founders, along with Putin, of the Ozero 'cooperative' and it's now FSB guarded closed estate in St Petersburg. His son, Kirril is married to Putin's daughter Katerina and (obviously) a multi billionaire in his own right.

      So the question is how deep did 'Operation Luch' reach?

      Video on the Siemens business:

      Last edited by snapper; 12 Aug 17,, 17:56.

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      • This makes me confident of our future: Polish Armed Forces Day outside Lublin.

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        • In Ukraine, a Malware Expert Who Could Blow the Whistle on Russian Hacking


          By ANDREW E. KRAMER and ANDREW HIGGINS AUG. 16, 2017
          Ukraine has been used for years by Russia as a testing ground for politicized cyberoperations that later cropped up in other countries. Credit Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

          KIEV, Ukraine — The hacker, known only by his online alias “Profexer,” kept a low profile. He wrote computer code alone in an apartment and quietly sold his handiwork on the anonymous portion of the internet known as the dark web. Last winter, he suddenly went dark entirely.

          Profexer’s posts, already accessible only to a small band of fellow hackers and cybercriminals looking for software tips, blinked out in January — just days after American intelligence agencies publicly identified a program he had written as one tool used in Russian hacking in the United States. American intelligence agencies have determined Russian hackers were behind the electronic break-in of the Democratic National Committee.

          But while Profexer’s online persona vanished, a flesh-and-blood person has emerged: a fearful man who the Ukrainian police said turned himself in early this year, and has now become a witness for the F.B.I.

          “I don’t know what will happen,” he wrote in one of his last messages posted on a restricted-access website before going to the police. “It won’t be pleasant. But I’m still alive.”

          It is the first known instance of a living witness emerging from the arid mass of technical detail that has so far shaped the investigation into the election hacking and the heated debate it has stirred. The Ukrainian police declined to divulge the man’s name or other details, other than that he is living in Ukraine and has not been arrested.


          There is no evidence that Profexer worked, at least knowingly, for Russia’s intelligence services, but his malware apparently did.

          That a hacking operation that Washington is convinced was orchestrated by Moscow would obtain malware from a source in Ukraine — perhaps the Kremlin’s most bitter enemy — sheds considerable light on the Russian security services’ modus operandi in what Western intelligence agencies say is their clandestine cyberwar against the United States and Europe.

          It does not suggest a compact team of government employees who write all their own code and carry out attacks during office hours in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but rather a far looser enterprise that draws on talent and hacking tools wherever they can be found.

          Also emerging from Ukraine is a sharper picture of what the United States believes is a Russian government hacking group known as Advanced Persistent Threat 28 or Fancy Bear. It is this group, which American intelligence agencies believe is operated by Russian military intelligence, that has been blamed, along with a second Russian outfit known as Cozy Bear, for the D.N.C. intrusion.

          Rather than training, arming and deploying hackers to carry out a specific mission like just another military unit, Fancy Bear and its twin Cozy Bear have operated more as centers for organization and financing; much of the hard work like coding is outsourced to private and often crime-tainted vendors.


          In more than a decade of tracking suspected Russian-directed cyberattacks against a host of targets in the West and in former Soviet territories — NATO, electrical grids, research groups, journalists critical of Russia and political parties, to name a few — security services around the world have identified only a handful of people who are directly involved in either carrying out such attacks or providing the cyberweapons that were used.

          This absence of reliable witnesses has left ample room for President Trump and others to raise doubts about whether Russia really was involved in the D.N.C. hack.

          “There is not now and never has been a single piece of technical evidence produced that connects the malware used in the D.N.C. attack to the G.R.U., F.S.B. or any agency of the Russian government,” said Jeffrey Carr, the author of a book on cyberwarfare. The G.R.U. is Russia’s military intelligence agency, and the F.S.B. its federal security service.

          United States intelligence agencies, however, have been unequivocal in pointing a finger at Russia.

          Seeking a path out of this fog, cybersecurity researchers and Western law enforcement officers have turned to Ukraine, a country that Russia has used for years as a laboratory for a range of politicized operations that later cropped up elsewhere, including electoral hacking in the United States.

          In several instances, certain types of computer intrusions, like the use of malware to knock out crucial infrastructure or to pilfer email messages later released to tilt public opinion, occurred in Ukraine first. Only later were the same techniques used in Western Europe and the United States.

          So, not surprisingly, those studying cyberwar in Ukraine are now turning up clues in the investigation of the D.N.C. break-in and related hacking, including the discovery of a rare witness.

          Security experts were initially left scratching their heads when the Department of Homeland Security on Dec. 29 released technical evidence of Russian hacking that seemed to point not to Russia, but rather to Ukraine.

          In this initial report, the department released only one sample of malware said to be an indicator of Russian state-sponsored hacking, though outside experts said a variety of malicious programs were used in Russian electoral hacking.

          The sample pointed to a malware program, called the P.A.S. web shell, a hacking tool advertised on Russian-language dark web forums and used by cybercriminals throughout the former Soviet Union. The author, Profexer, is a well-regarded technical expert among hackers, spoken about with awe and respect in Kiev.

          He had made it available to download, free, from a website that asked only for donations, ranging from $3 to $250. The real money was made by selling customized versions and by guiding his hacker clients in its effective use. It remains unclear how extensively he interacted with the Russian hacking team.

          After the Department of Homeland Security identified his creation, he quickly shut down his website and posted on a closed forum for hackers, called Exploit, that “I’m not interested in excessive attention to me personally.”

          Soon, a hint of panic appeared, and he posted a note saying that, six days on, he was still alive.

          Another hacker, with the nickname Zloi Santa, or Bad Santa, suggested the Americans would certainly find him, and place him under arrest, perhaps during a layover at an airport.

          “It could be, or it could not be, it depends only on politics,” Profexer responded. “If U.S. law enforcement wants to take me down, they will not wait for me in some country’s airport. Relations between our countries are so tight I would be arrested in my kitchen, at the first request.”

          In fact, Serhiy Demediuk, chief of the Ukrainian Cyber Police, said in an interview that Profexer went to the authorities himself. As the cooperation began, Profexer went dark on hacker forums. He last posted online on Jan. 9. Mr. Demediuk said he had made the witness available to the F.B.I., which has posted a full-time cybersecurity expert in Kiev as one of four bureau agents stationed at the United States Embassy there. The F.B.I. declined to comment.

          Profexer was not arrested because his activities fell in a legal gray zone, as an author but not a user of malware, the Ukrainian police say. But he did know the users, at least by their online handles. “He told us he didn’t create it to be used in the way it was,”

          A member of Ukraine’s Parliament with close ties to the security services, Anton Gerashchenko, said that the interaction was online or by phone and that the Ukrainian programmer had been paid to write customized malware without knowing its purpose, only later learning it was used in Russian hacking.

          Mr. Gerashchenko described the author only in broad strokes, to protect his safety, as a young man from a provincial Ukrainian city. He confirmed that the author turned himself in to the police and was cooperating as a witness in the D.N.C. investigation. “He was a freelancer and now he is a valuable witness,” Mr. Gerashchenko said.

          It is not clear whether the specific malware the programmer created was used to hack the D.N.C. servers, but it was identified in other Russian hacking efforts in the United States.


          While it is not known what Profexer has told Ukrainian investigators and the F.B.I. about Russia’s hacking efforts, evidence emanating from Ukraine has again provided some of the clearest pictures yet about Fancy Bear, or Advanced Persistent Threat 28, which is run by the G.R.U.

          Fancy Bear has been identified mostly by what it does, not by who does it. One of its recurring features has been the theft of emails and its close collaboration with the Russian state news media.

          Tracking the bear to its lair, however, has so far proved impossible, not least because many experts believe that no such single place exists.

          Even for a sophisticated tech company like Microsoft, singling out individuals in the digital miasma has proved just about impossible. To curtail the damage to clients’ operating systems, the company filed a complaint against Fancy Bear last year with the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia but found itself boxing with shadows.

          As Microsoft lawyers reported to the court, “because defendants used fake contact information, anonymous Bitcoin and prepaid credit cards and false identities, and sophisticated technical means to conceal their identities, when setting up and using the relevant internet domains, defendants’ true identities remain unknown.”

          Nevertheless, Ukrainian officials, though wary of upsetting the Trump administration, have been quietly cooperating with American investigators to try to figure out who stands behind all the disguises.

          Included in this sharing of information were copies of the server hard drives of Ukraine’s Central Election Commission, which were targeted during a presidential election in May 2014. That the F.B.I. had obtained evidence of this earlier, Russian-linked electoral hack has not been previously reported.

          Traces of the same malicious code, this time a program called Sofacy, were seen in the 2014 attack in Ukraine and later in the D.N.C. intrusion in the United States.

          Intriguingly, in the cyberattack during the Ukrainian election, what appears to have been a bungle by Channel 1, a Russian state television station, inadvertently implicated the government authorities in Moscow.

          Hackers had loaded onto a Ukrainian election commission server a graphic mimicking the page for displaying results. This phony page showed a shocker of an outcome: an election win for a fiercely anti-Russian, ultraright candidate, Dmytro Yarosh. Mr. Yarosh in reality received less than 1 percent of the vote.

          The false result would have played into a Russian propaganda narrative that Ukraine today is ruled by hard-right, even fascist, figures.

          The fake image was programmed to display when polls closed, at 8 p.m., but a Ukrainian cybersecurity company, InfoSafe, discovered it just minutes earlier and unplugged the server.

          State television in Russia nevertheless reported that Mr. Yarosh had won and broadcast the fake graphic, citing the election commission’s website, even though the image had never appeared there. The hacker had clearly provided Channel 1 with the same image in advance, but the reporters had failed to check that the hack actually worked.

          “For me, this is an obvious link between the hackers and Russian officials,” said Victor Zhora, director of InfoSafe, the cybersecurity company that first found the fake graphic.

          A Ukrainian government researcher who studied the hack, Nikolai Koval, published his findings in a 2015 book, “Cyberwar in Perspective,” and identified the Sofacy malware on the server.

          The mirror of the hard drive went to the F.B.I., which had this forensic sample when the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike identified the same malware two years later, on the D.N.C. servers.

          “It was the first strike,” Mr. Zhora said of the earlier hack of Ukraine’s electoral computers. Ukraine’s Cyber Police have also provided the F.B.I. with copies of server hard drives showing the possible origins of some phishing emails targeting the Democratic Party during the election.

          In 2016, two years after the election hack in Ukraine, hackers using some of the same techniques plundered the email system of the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, which had accused Russian athletes of systematic drug use.
          Photo

          That raid, too, seems to have been closely coordinated with Russian state television, which began airing well-prepared reports about WADA’s hacked emails just minutes after they were made public. The emails appeared on a website that announced that WADA had been hacked by a group calling itself the “Fancy Bears’ Hack Team.”

          It was the first time Fancy Bear had broken cover.

          Fancy Bear remains extraordinarily elusive, however. To throw investigators off its scent, the group has undergone various makeovers, restocking its arsenal of malware and sometimes hiding under different guises. One of its alter egos, cyberexperts believe, is Cyber Berkut, an outfit supposedly set up in Ukraine by supporters of the country’s pro-Russian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, who was ousted in 2014.

          After lying dormant for many months, Cyber Berkut jumped back into action this summer just as multiple investigations in Washington into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow shifted into high gear. Cyber Berkut released stolen emails that it and Russian state news media said had exposed the real story: Hillary Clinton had colluded with Ukraine.
          https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/w...=top-news&_r=0
          To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato

          Comment


          • Today is the anniversary of the Warsaw Pact's armed 'humanitarian aid' intervention in Czechoslovakia. And they wonder why these so many of their former satellites wanted to join NATO asap?

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            • That was a crazy year-1968.

              Pueblo Incident. Tet Offensive. There'd been big student demonstrations in Paris that May. April MLK was shot and riots in Washington D.C. RFK shot a month later in May. Democratic Nat'l convention in Chicago that July and then, yeah, the end to Prague's springtime that August.
              "This aggression will not stand, man!" Jeff Lebowski
              "The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool." Lester Bangs

              Comment


              • Originally posted by S2 View Post
                That was a crazy year-1968.

                Pueblo Incident. Tet Offensive. There'd been big student demonstrations in Paris that May. April MLK was shot and riots in Washington D.C. RFK shot a month later in May. Democratic Nat'l convention in Chicago that July and then, yeah, the end to Prague's springtime that August.

                June 5th in Los Angeles. I remember that day very clearly as I woke up that morning, in the San Fernando Valley, to the news. Walked to high school down a dirt road through an old orange grove and never reached school. Spent the day sitting in the grove reliving JFK and now RFK.

                Comment


                • Yes. Correct. Not May. I was finishing my 7th Grade year the next day and didn't hear about it until that day was almost finished. No "all the news, all the time" world then. Living in Wisconsin put us two hours behind the west coast and the Cal Primary winner hadn't been announced yet. Went to bed and then Sirhan Sirhan did his thing at the victory party.
                  "This aggression will not stand, man!" Jeff Lebowski
                  "The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool." Lester Bangs

                  Comment




                  • Grand old Duke of York silliness in Kyiv today (Independence Day Parade). I saw Canadians, Latvians, Georgians, Moldovans, Romanians, Poles, Lithuanians, Brits and Yanks parading. The Anglo Intermarium alliance shaping it has been suggested to me.
                    Last edited by snapper; 25 Aug 17,, 00:49.

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                    • They started calling up reservists in Kaliningrad (Koenigsburg) yesterday ahead of Zapad 17 'exercises' in which apparently only 5000 Muscovite troops will be involved. The Belarusians say they will fight if their 'fraternal neighbours' decide to stay. The trains ordered are estimated for this 'exercise' are estimated to be sufficient for a force of 80 - 100,000 troops by NATO. Belarus has invited observers, Moscow due the limited troop levels it says will be involved in total (13,000) says it does not need to by the Vienna deals. There are already pictures of Muscovite troops in Belarus preparing for the 'exercise'. Georgia or Crimea ring a bell?

                      Comment


                      • Muzhenko's comments on the Ilovaisk debarcle:


                        Part 1. Combat situation in Sector D, July and August 2014



                        In order to clearly understand the whole scenery in the area of Ilovaisk in late August 2014, one should take a look at what happened before these events. One has to imagine the impact line the way it was in early July 2014. Back then, it stretched from Stanytsia Luhanska to the north, to Krasnyi Lyman, Yampil, Zakotne. We hadn’t retaken Sloviansk yet, so the impact line lay to the north of it, and much to the west of Donetsk. We hadn’t reclaimed Avdiivka yet, and, what’s especially important, we didn’t have any control over the area of Dokuchaivsk, which back then posed the end of the impact line in the southern art of Donetsk region.

                        That is, the impact line lay to the south of Donetsk, near Volnovakha, towards Amvrosiivka. Back then, we already took certain steps to restore control over a section of the state border – the one from Amvrosiivka to Izvaryno. We managed to retake 267 kilometers in length. After that, all that remained to be re-claimed was the 60-kilometers-long strip of land from Izvaryno to Parkhomenko, to the east of Luhansk. 90 percent of that area is a forbidding terrain.

                        The only two ways Russians could supply arms and vehicles for the illegal armed units were via Izvaryno and Krasnodon checkpoints, or via Parkhomenko village, with a small road leading to Luhansk. As we retake control over this section of the border, it gave us an opportunity to completely block the supplies for the militants, which came in from Russia. It is exactly when we conduction operations to release Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, Dzerzhynsk. In July 2014, we also re-took important positions to the west of Donetsk – in Avdiivka, Pisky, and to the south of Donetsk – in Dokuchaivsk, Starobeshevo, Komsomolsk, and approached Ilovaisk.

                        This posed a huge threat to the illegal armed gangs and Russian mercenaries; they badly lacked firepower and vital supplies, including nutrition – they really were short of everything necessary to continue fighting. They were cut off the supplies almost completely, which seriously threatened the whole Novorossiya project. Under these circumstances, the Russian military decided to strike on our positions in this particular section – between Ivaryno and Amvrosiivka. The first massive artillery strike took place near Zelenopillya; the shells hit emplacements if the 2nd Battalion of the 24th Detached Mechanized Brigade. We took severe casualties. 24 men were killed, 19 of them were army servicemen and the rest were the workers of the State Border Guard. Another 76 were wounded, and 56 more received psychological traumas. In general, over one and a half days, we evacuated 156 people from the endangered area.

                        Another front, the front of information war, was opened in peaceful Ukraine. Certain media spread hysteria; Russian special services also interfered in the country’s political and social life, orchestrating rallies were people demanded to withdraw the troops from the border zone.

                        In the mid-July, Ukrainian Armed Forces held 260 kilometers of the border zone. The enemy tried to completely isolate our troops in that area; intense fights took place in the areas of Dmytrivka, Dyakovo, Kozhevnya and Mariinka.

                        Mariinka is the border transition area to the east of Amvrosiivka, or to the south of Stepanivka. We sent supplies for our troops in this sector; it was difficult because the Russian artillery regularly fired on our convoys and roadways that we used to deliver the supplies. We also suffered casualties when trying to drop the supplies by aircraft. The Russians shot down the plane piloted by Hero of Ukraine Dmytro Maiboroda. This was also the first time when Russians used Buk anti-aircraft missile launcher; it fired from the territory of the Russian federation.

                        This is why we decided to withdraw the units from the border zone. In late July and early August, we successfully conducted a raid, with the 95th Detached Airborne Brigade leading the way. They enjoyed the support of the 25th Detached Airborne Brigade and a tactical group, shaped mostly from the fighters of the 1st Mechanized Battalion of the 30th Detached Mechanized Brigade.

                        The raid was successful, and under the dead of night, from August 6 on August 7, we managed to withdraw over 2,100 army servicemen and 500 border guards – over 2,500 fighters in total; we also saved 300 vehicles. We suffered no casualties in the operation. During the raid, the overall operative situation improved: we took the Hill 277, widely known as Savur-Mohyla hill. The army also claimed Stepanivka, an important inhabited locality, which lay on the crossroads of all communications, in the cross-section of roads that Russians used to deliver the manpower and supplies for the illegal armed gangs.

                        However, we could not take Dmytrivka, because we lacked man- and firepower in the units that already fight in this area for some time; and there was no way we could send in the reinforcements. Besides, the enemy heavily fortified this area. So, the impact line lay to the south of Dmytrivka, to the south of Dyakovo, and further on to the east – towards Biryukovo, Krasnopartyzansk and Izvaryno. After the raid and the withdrawal of our forces from Mariinka to Izvaryno, there was not a single Ukrainian unit left in that area and along that particular border’s section. But we planned to isolate this area, taking into account the location of our troops, which conducted the raid (they were stationed on the line Amvrosiivka-Blahodatne-Saur-Mohyla-Stepanivka, to the south Antracyt, on the approach to Roven’ky). Units of the 24th Brigade were supposed to move to the south to Roven’ky. In order to take this town, we had to involve the forces that we held on the state border – that is, roughly 2,500 men.

                        So, we planned to move the conditional border line 40-60 kilometers to the west or 50-60 kilometers to the north from the actual state border line; I mean, thus we would create the blockade line. However, the moral and psychological conditions of our group, which already faced enormous fatigue during the attacks near the border line, did lot let us do so. People simply were not ready to complete such mission. Many servicemen could not withstand the psychological pressure and gave up, crossing the state border with Russia.

                        In the second half of August, we had to move the blockade line much more to the west. We called in the units, which performed the aforementioned raid, except for the 95th briagede, which we moved to the area of Debaltsevo. Units of mechanized and airborne brigades took up defense on the line between Stepanivka and Miusynsk, reaching the area of Krasnyi Luch, Mykolaivka, Chervona Polyana and Lutugyno. By then, the troops already created a corridor near Luhansk airport, and they managed to extend the area under their control there. Besides, our forces took Novosvitlivka and Khryashchuvate, which let us completely block the transportation of supplies to Luhansk.

                        Had we brought all these ideas to life, we would fully cut off Donetsk, Makiivka, Horlivka, Yenakievo and Luhansk. We would also hold the line from Lutugyno and on to the south, to Stepanivka, reaching Amvrosiivka. Thus, we planned to encircle the illegal armed gangs, and we could have held their activity under control – as long as they didn’t have any supplies. And this is one of the particular reasons why Russian military leadership made such a step – a desperate one, I reckon, – and brought units of the regular Russian army to Ukraine. They did it without any notions, any messages or ultimatums.

                        As Russian troops were deployed in Ukraine, we gradually lost control over the considerable part of the state border – over 300 kilometers in length. This created an opportunity for the enemy to freely supply the illegal armed gangs with manpower, weaponry, ammunition and combat vehicles. The so-called ‘humanitarian convoys’ fully provided them with everything they needed. It also had certain impact on the very nature of combat activity in this area; the fights became more intense, causing more serious casualties. This is why, even before the Ilovaisk battle took place, we did a lot to strengthen the combat group, which fought there at the time – or, like I said, to move the isolation line. We gathered forces and performed that raid, which I mentioned previously. That was a perky adventure, indeed. and when it was over, odds were we can make it.

                        Of course, we considered worsening moral and psychological conditions of our servicemen; some of them even refused to obey orders – I mean, the particular order to control Roven’ky. We also experienced certain problems with moving of our 24th Mechanized Brigade; as it was on its way from Lutugyno to Rovenk’y, the troops were forced to stop for some time near Makedonivka, suffering from Russian artillery strikes. The enemy also used multiple missile launchers. This is when we decided to move the engagement line to the west.

                        There never was a plan on some special, particular operation to regain the town of Ilovaisk. According to the generally approved idea, in August 2014, our forces were supposed to complete several combat missions. Taking this town under control was one of such tactical missions. It is a large railway hub, which was of major importance in terms of blocking the enemy’s supply routes. But, sadly, the first attempts to regain Ilovaisk failed. Then, our troops took Kuteynikovo, a bit to the south from Ilovaisk, which made retaking this town less important – at least, in terms of tactical necessity.

                        We cut off the supply route near Kuteynikovo. Then, we planned to close the blockade circle between Donetsk and Makiivka, holding control over Kuteynikovo, Stepano-Krynka, Zuivka, Zhdanivka and approaching Verkhnya Krynka. Units of our 93rd Mechanized Brigade also moved forward, from Panteleymonivka to Verkhnya Krynka.



                        Thus, we fully secured control over Horlivka-Yenakievo circle, and another circle between Donetsk and Makiivka. On the other hand, we failed to move on and hold the area between Stepano-Krynka and Zuivka. We could have resumed the offensive operation, but things went otherwise, eventually. On about August 20th, 2014, the Defense Ministry once again ordered to take Ilovaisk; in turn, the Interior Ministry sent a large combat group, shaped mostly of the special task force units. They are now widely known as ‘the volunteer battalions’ – Azov, Myrotvorets, Kherson, Ivano-Frankivsk, et cetera. Donbas, the battalion of the National Guard of Ukraine joined the party, too.
                        Parts 2 and 3 are here http://112.international/opinion/vik...t-3-20102.html

                        Comment


                        • I transferred this comment from the US thread as it seemed not relevant to the current US political scene in particular but I wanted to answer it.

                          Originally posted by GVChamp View Post
                          Ukraine getting its own nuclear deterrent will result in Ukraine getting ostracized, North Korea style, and then you'll be invaded by Russia. You'll be invaded long before your nuclear deterrent actually translates into operational weapons. Not to mention if you nuke Russia, they'll just nuke you back and you'll have the distinct accomplishment of being the first nation utterly eradicated in nuclear war.
                          I was not speaking of Ukrainian alone nuclear deterrent. If you read what I wrote I said "we" have to start our own nuclear program. I speak of the Międzymorze (in Polish)/ABC (Adriatic, Baltic and Black Sea - 'black' in Polish being 'czarny')/intermarium (in the Latinised form) alliance that is already under way - in some ways mistakenly in my view. There is already a "Three Seas" inniative; Trump turned in Warsawa and gave a speech there specifically because of a meeting of those involved (http://time.com/4846780/read-donald-...nd-transcript/). It is a Polish - Croatian idea about new transport, energy sharing, infrastructure between primarily north and south but involves in all twelve countries; Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria. Critics (of which I am one) of this course say that there can be no intermarium without Ukraine and longer term Belarus. I accept that the north south linkage is important but the development path should go west to east too as you are missing the countries which are the front line already. So you understand I was not speaking of a sole Ukrainian nuclear deterrent but a regional one - including the Serbian cousins and perhaps even Finland. We actually had talks on how to do this with other in Warsawa soon after LITPOLUKRBRIG was sorted out but this idiot Polish Government offers meek excuses and says it is still "fully committed" etc...

                          Nor would this be new; when Ukraine became independent and before we signed the apparently meaningless Budapest Memorandum the first President of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, went to Warsawa and asked Lech Walesa if he would like to share the Ukrainian nuclear arsenal, in return for paying some of the costs of maintenance etc... Walesa of course was looking for NATO membership and Poland was broke so from his point of view at the time it was not a viable option.

                          Comment


                          • All the countries you listed are signatories to the NPT and the technologies needed belong to NSG countries extremely jealous of anyone else getting nukes. Ukrainian nuclear weapons expertise are working in Russia. You fired the lot when you can't pay them.

                            Plus, are you serious that any of those other countries, especially Poland, would trust a Ukrainian finger on a Polish nuclear button?
                            Chimo

                            Comment


                            • Originally posted by snapper View Post
                              It is a Polish - Croatian idea about new transport, energy sharing, infrastructure between primarily north and south but involves in all twelve countries; Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria.
                              Gee, why is there not a single country in that list that isn't part of the EU?

                              Comment


                              • Originally posted by WABs_OOE View Post
                                All the countries you listed are signatories to the NPT and the technologies needed belong to NSG countries extremely jealous of anyone else getting nukes. Ukrainian nuclear weapons expertise are working in Russia. You fired the lot when you can't pay them.

                                Plus, are you serious that any of those other countries, especially Poland, would trust a Ukrainian finger on a Polish nuclear button?
                                Welcome back Colonel, I hope you are well. Regarding the points you make there is quite suffiecient technological know how within our nations to design a device. Regardless of NPT signatories disapproval of such a project Israel, South Africa, Libya, India, Pakistan and now unfortunately North Korea have at times or continue to obtain the materials. Nor was a single finger on the trigger - be it Polish, Ukrainian or Romanian the point. The idea was a shared nuclear deterrent.

                                Originally posted by kato View Post
                                Gee, why is there not a single country in that list that isn't part of the EU?
                                Because the Polish Government are chickens and self concerned more than anything else, just like their Western neighbours.

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