I don't get it... / General Political Bitching Thread....lol

U.S. Believes Ukrainians Were Behind an Assassination in Russia
Julian E. Barnes
Wed, October 5, 2022 at 2:45 PM

WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence agencies believe parts of the Ukrainian government authorized the car bomb attack near Moscow in August that killed Daria Dugina, daughter of a prominent Russian nationalist, an element of a covert campaign that U.S. officials fear could widen the conflict.

The United States took no part in the attack, either by providing intelligence or other assistance, officials said. U.S. officials also said they were not aware of the operation ahead of time and would have opposed the killing had they been consulted. Afterward, U.S. officials admonished Ukrainian officials over the assassination, they said.

The closely held assessment of Ukrainian complicity, which has not been previously reported, was shared within the U.S. government last week. Ukraine denied involvement in the killing immediately after the attack, and senior officials repeated those denials when asked about the U.S. intelligence assessment.

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While Russia has not retaliated in a specific way for the assassination, the United States is concerned that such attacks — while high in symbolic value — have little direct effect on the battlefield and could provoke Moscow to carry out its own strikes against senior Ukrainian officials. U.S. officials have been frustrated with Ukraine’s lack of transparency about its military and covert plans, especially on Russian soil.

Since the beginning of the war, Ukraine’s security services have demonstrated their ability to reach into Russia to conduct sabotage operations. The killing of Dugina, however, would be one of the boldest operations to date — showing Ukraine can get very close to prominent Russians.

Some U.S. officials suspect Dugina’s father, Alexander Dugin, a Russian ultranationalist, was the actual target of the operation and that the operatives who carried it out believed he would be in the vehicle with his daughter.

Dugin, one of Russia’s most prominent voices urging Moscow to intensify its war on Ukraine, has been a leading proponent of an aggressive, imperialist Russia.

The U.S. officials who spoke about the intelligence did not disclose which elements of the Ukrainian government were believed to have authorized the mission, who carried out the attack or whether President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had signed off on the mission. U.S. officials briefed on the Ukrainian action and the American response spoke on the condition of anonymity, in order to discuss secret information and matters of sensitive diplomacy.

U.S. officials would not say who in the American government delivered the admonishments or whom in the Ukrainian government they were delivered to. It was not known what Ukraine’s response was.

While the Pentagon and spy agencies have shared sensitive battlefield intelligence with the Ukrainians, helping them zero in on Russian command posts, supply lines and other key targets, the Ukrainians have not always told U.S. officials what they plan to do.

The United States has pressed Ukraine to share more about its war plans, with mixed success. Earlier in the war, U.S. officials acknowledged that they often knew more about Russian war plans — thanks to their intense collection efforts — than they did about Kyiv’s intentions.

Cooperation has since increased. During the summer, Ukraine shared its plans for its September military counteroffensive with the United States and Britain.

U.S. officials also lack a complete picture of the competing power centers within the Ukrainian government, including the military, the security services and Zelenskyy’s office, a fact that may explain why some parts of the Ukrainian government may not have been aware of the plot.

When asked about the U.S. intelligence assessment, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, reiterated the Ukrainian government’s denials of involvement in Dugina’s killing.

“Again, I’ll underline that any murder during wartime in some country or another must carry with it some kind of practical significance,” Podolyak told The New York Times in an interview Tuesday. “It should fulfill some specific purpose, tactical or strategic. Someone like Dugina is not a tactical or a strategic target for Ukraine.

“We have other targets on the territory of Ukraine,” he said. “I mean collaborationists and representatives of the Russian command, who might have value for members of our special services working in this program, but certainly not Dugina.”

Though details surrounding acts of sabotage in Russian-controlled territory have been shrouded in mystery, the Ukrainian government has quietly acknowledged killing Russian officials in Ukraine and sabotaging Russian arms factories and weapons depots.

A senior Ukrainian military official who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the topic said that Ukrainian forces, with the help of local fighters, had carried out assassinations and attacks on accused Ukrainian collaborators and Russian officials in occupied Ukrainian territories. These include the Kremlin-installed head of the Kherson region, who was poisoned in August and had to be evacuated to Moscow for emergency treatment.

Countries traditionally do not discuss other nations’ covert actions, for fear of having their own operations revealed, but some U.S. officials believe it is crucial to curb what they see as dangerous adventurism, particularly political assassinations.

Still, U.S. officials in recent days have taken pains to insist that relations between the two governments remain strong. U.S. concerns about Ukraine’s aggressive covert operations inside Russia have not prompted any known changes in the provision of intelligence, military and diplomatic support to Zelenskyy’s government or to Ukraine’s security services.

In a phone call Saturday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, that the Biden administration “will continue to support Ukraine’s efforts to regain control of its territory by strengthening its hand militarily and diplomatically,” according to Ned Price, the State Department’s spokesperson.

Officials from the State Department, National Security Council, Defense Department and CIA declined to comment on the intelligence assessment.

The war in Ukraine is at an especially dangerous moment. The United States has tried carefully to avoid unnecessary escalation with Moscow throughout the conflict — in part by telling Kyiv not to use American equipment or intelligence to conduct attacks inside of Russia. But now, the recent battlefield successes by Ukraine have prompted Russia to respond with a series of escalatory steps, like conducting a partial mobilization and moving to annex swaths of eastern Ukraine.

Concern is growing in Washington that Russia may be considering further steps to intensify the war, including by renewing efforts to assassinate prominent Ukrainian leaders. Zelenskyy would be the top target of Russian assassination teams, as he was during the Russian assault on Kyiv earlier in the war.

But now, U.S. officials said Russia could target a wide variety of Ukrainian leaders, many of whom have less protection than Zelenskyy.

The United States and Europe had imposed sanctions on Dugina. She shared her father’s worldview and was accused by the West of spreading Russian propaganda about Ukraine.

Russia opened a murder investigation after Dugina’s assassination, calling the explosion that killed her a terrorist act. Dugina was killed instantly in the explosion, which occurred in the Odintsovo district, an affluent area in Moscow’s suburbs.

After the bombing, speculation centered on whether Ukraine was responsible or if it was a false flag operation meant to pin blame on Ukrainians. The bombing took place after a series of Ukrainian strikes in Crimea, a part of Ukraine that Russia seized in 2014. Those strikes had led ultranationalists in Dugin’s circle to urge Putin to intensify the war in Ukraine.

Russia’s domestic intelligence service, the FSB, blamed Dugina’s murder on Ukraine’s intelligence services. In an announcement made a day after the attack, the FSB said that Ukrainian operatives had contracted a Ukrainian woman, who entered Russia in July and rented an apartment where Dugina lived. The woman then fled Russia after the bombing, according to the FSB.

Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of the Russian parliament who voted against the annexation of Crimea, has claimed that a group made up of pro-Ukrainian and anti-Putin fighters operating in Russia known as the National Republican Army was responsible for the killing.

In an interview with The New York Times, Ponomarev claimed to be in contact with the National Republican Army and was aware of the operation against Dugina several hours before it occurred. Many officials in Washington have been skeptical of Ponomarev’s claims on behalf of the group.

© 2022 The New York Times Company

Been a Russian history and geopolitics enthusiast for about ten years now. I have a lot of feelings about this kind of thing. Here are the broad strokes.

The first one is that for all intents and purposes, the US, UK, EU, were happily taking Russian oligarch money - the same oligarchs who secured monopolies from the Soviet Union collapsing, looting its corpse as it were. Everybody - everybody giving the sanctions before February knew they only targeted regular Russians. The oligarchs literally just imported what they wanted through Belarus. The Tory party in the UK even had Ben Eliot, whose entire bloody job revolved around attracting Russian billionaires to launder their money here under the guise of a “lifestyle brand”. Gazprom was a sponsor of UEFA and FIFA. The idea that Putin’s Russia is anti-capitalist is a bizarre one. Every tank and soldier that goes into Ukraine was possible because of the West’s love of Russian money.

As for anti imperialist… Personally something I also perceive in pro-Russia leftists is that they seem to have no comprehension of the Soviet Union as a successor state to Imperial Russia. Imperial Russia was a colonial power that did all the atrocities its contemporaries did and inherited similar attitudes and justifications. The only difference was they did it to land next to them and spread out vastly, that’s why the country even is the size it is. I feel both the right, centre and left ought to know - features of the Soviet Union like gulags, deportations, ethnic cleansing and secret police, were all features of the Russian Empire. The Soviet Union did economic reforms and industrialisation, but it still picked up the political tools and the ethnocentrism of its predecessor. It’s not unique in that regard. The same way France offing their monarchy and transforming into a republic didn’t magically mean they were suddenly not colonialist, despite any liberté égalité pamphlets.

Also the matter of racism and colonialism, I see people completely miss it in Russia because they don’t understand what it looks like, what its history is or who it targets. What currently stands out in my mind is that Stalin and Beria’s justification for the genocide of the Chechens, the Ingush and the Tatars - all groups not considered white - was that they all as races were inherently guilty of being Nazis and Nazi collaborators. That was literally the justification written on the orders. So it was alarming when Russia began talking about Nazis in Ukraine - for one, if fascists in your country justify an invasion we’re all candidates because where hasn’t it reared its ugly head - but it’s historically not a concern the Kremlin have in good faith when they tie it to an entire ethnic group’s existence. It’s effectively a dogwhistle and it went over a LOT of heads. Ironically, that all is because of Western-centrism that we don’t know what to look for.

Further on this matter, people don’t seem to get that like other places, Russia’s ethnic minorities are the ones disproportionately having to join the military. They are the ones having their lives chucked away by Putin en masse with shitty equipment, shitty rations, no logistics plans for waste management, etc, all for a war they were told would take 1 fucking week! They were told the Ukrainians would welcome them as saviours, they brought their dress uniforms! That’s what you’re told by a command that doesn’t give a shit if you live or die, because if they did they would have at least given their soldiers a realistic assessment of the battlefield and resistance. I see a LOT of criticism of Zelensky for “throwing lives away”, but not much of Putin. Even before the war, the areas soldiers are from were largely rural and impoverished areas lacking jobs and infrastructure, except of course a convenient military recruitment station. Partial mobilisation is a misnomer for Russia’s ethnic minority republics - it’s full mobilisation for places like Buryat and Dagestan. Minorities are also the disproportionate targets of dedovshchina which is a… whole thing in its own right that is why Russia was never going to win this, but trying to keep this short as possible. The idea some people have that Russia is anti-imperialist or anti-racist simply because it targets ethnic minorities they’ve personally not heard of? It would be fucking laughable if it weren’t so fucking sad.

I find this consistent theme among conservatives and Leninists of the Soviet Union being sort of a representative symbol of something to revere or avoid at all cost, especially human cost. But it was a massive country and a world superpower lasting 70 years that span the 20th century, so it has all the complexities one should approach literally any country out there with to understand it. The Soviet Union had things detrimental to human well-being like secret police and censorship, and it had beneficial things like guaranteed shelter and childcare. It was a living breathing state, not a political theory or experiment. I see this often happening with China too. Not to centrist it; Leninist-Maoists and conservatives are guilty of not the exact same thing, but they are guilty of the same sentiment - “countries in the ‘east’ exist to be condensed into aesthetics and narratives that I can invoke to make points about the ‘west’.” When these countries are discussed, it’s always to say something about their own country or political stance and how they feel, what they want.

Obviously, none of the dynamics I’ve described - illegal wars, human rights violations, genocide - none of them are things that ‘Western’ countries haven’t done or still do. But that’s precisely why we should reject it. It’s late and there’s probably more I wanted to say that I forgot but passing out now, goodnight.