RT News - January 20th 2023

Accidentally murdered? Kiev's presidential office admits that a Ukrainian participant in peace talks with Moscow last year was murdered by mistake, after a report said he was killed by the Ukrainian national security service for being a Russian spy.
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On the ground: Heavy fighting continues on the front lines as Russian troops are close to taking the city of Artyomovsk (which Kiev renamed "Bakhmut"). High ground will give advantage. Comments from Sargon Hadaya, right there on the front line.
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Africa: Pushing US interests over China's strong ties with Africa - that's how the continent's media is describing the US Treasury Secretary's Janet Yellen's 11-day visit to Africa. (QS: the only thing "strong" I can see about it is the phoney-ness. U.S. only wants significance in Africa when it sees other countries helping with development and growth, which China and Russia have been doing for years. I rarely see anything in the U.S./allies press about Africa, except to moan or talk about sanctions and "green agenda requirements" etc., they impose on Africa.) Karabo Letlhatlha reports.
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Over a million people take to the streets throughout France to protest against Macron's plan to raise the national retirement age by two years to 64. Emmanuel Macron was conveniently out of the country. Report on strikes and protests from Rachel Marsden.
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Peru: 46 people have been killed and more injured in clashes with police during protests about the new president, who they want to resign. (catch up on previous posts for background) President Castillo was ousted after he tried to dissolve congress saying they are corrupt. Elena Mejia reports from Lima.
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Russia/Pakistan pipeline project, Pakistan Stream (Pak-stream): Musadik Malik(Pakistan's petroleum minister) talks with RT.
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Crypto: Binance is apparently implicated by dealings with Bitzlato (see last night's post for full details)
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Below Via RT website 1) --- Ukrainian secret police shot the man who ‘saved’ Kiev – Zelensky aide
F) --- ‘Russiagate’ is dead, but the control of social media that the US government gained from it is here to stay FEATURE
A) --- Russia blasts US asset expropriation scheme
2) --- CIA head briefs Zelensky on ‘Russia’s next steps’ – media
3) --- Ankara slams US ‘colonial governor’ for election meddling
4) --- Türkiye outlines ‘complications’ in potential Ukraine-Russia talks
5) --- Top economists warn of global recession
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19 Jan, 2023 19:05

1) --- Ukrainian secret police shot the man who ‘saved’ Kiev – Zelensky aide

After putting a bullet in the back of Denis Kireev’s head, the Ukrainian government now says he rescued capital

The extrajudicial execution of Denis Kireev in March 2022 was due to a lack of coordination between security services, a top aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said on Thursday. Mikhail Podoliak was responding to a Wall Street Journal feature describing the 45-year-old banker as an asset of Ukrainian military intelligence, who supposedly helped save Kiev from Russian attack.

Kireev was killed on March 2 last year. His body was dumped on a Kiev sidewalk “with a bullet hole in the back of the skull,” according to the WSJ. Ukrainian media reported at the time that the country’s security service, the SBU, had “clear” evidence Kireev had committed high treason. The military intelligence, however, said he “died protecting Ukraine.”

The 45-year-old banker’s violent end was brought into the spotlight again by the WSJ, which interviewed Kireev’s relatives and associates, as well as the man he died working for – General Kirill Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence (GUR).

The banker was loyal to Kiev, raising funds for Ukrainian “volunteer brigades” fighting in Donbass after 2014, and “enjoyed playing the 007 role,” according to his friends and associates. Budanov said he had recruited Kireev in 2021 because of his business contacts with Russia, and received useful information from him for months before the conflict escalated.

“If it were not for Mr. Kireev, most likely Kiev would have been taken,” Budanov told the WSJ.

Kireev came to Budanov on February 23 and said Russia would “invade” the following day, with the primary objective to seize the Antonov Airport in Gostomel, near Kiev. The tip “gave Ukraine a precious few hours to shift troops to counter the Russian assault” and ultimately disabled the airport, saving the capital, according to the general.

Budanov said he had asked Kireev to attend ceasefire talks in Belarus, because he personally knew two members of the Russian delegation. He was photographed at the talks, and the SBU got suspicious. The night before the second round of talks, Kireev received a call from the SBU’s top counterintelligence officer, Alexander Poklad. Poklad had asked for a meeting, Kireev’s security detail told the WSJ.

Kireev had told his bodyguards he might be arrested and instructed them to not intervene. They dutifully disarmed when the SBU surrounded them outside St. Sophia Cathedral. Kireev was bundled off into a SBU minivan. His corpse was found about 90 minutes later.

The GUR arranged for a hero’s burial and Zelensky posthumously gave Kireev a medal for “exceptional duty.” The WSJ also noted that the SBU leadership was purged in July 2022. During an interview with an Estonian outlet on Thursday, Podoliak commented on the WSJ story by blaming Kireev’s death on miscommunication.

“Those were the first days of the war. His killing is due to the fact that there was no unified coordination between security structures. There were certain claims against him, they did not have time to settle these claims in a dialogue format,” Zelensky’s aide said.

“ISIS are little children compared to the Kiev regime,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, commenting on Podoliak’s explanation and referring to Islamic State terrorists.
https://www.rt.com/russia/570155-ukraine-kireev-traitor-hero/
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19 Jan, 2023 22:06

F) --- ‘Russiagate’ is dead, but the control of social media that the US government gained from it is here to stay

An academic study has confirmed there was no Russian conspiracy to elect Trump

Donald Trump’s time as president was dominated by years of mainstream news headlines declaring that his unexpected victory was attributable to Saint Petersburg’s Internet Research Agency (aka 'The Russian IRA').

The company reportedly corralled online networks of bots and trolls that perpetuated pro-Trump propaganda in a bid to get the outsider elected at the Kremlin’s request. This narrative quickly became widely accepted among US liberals, and remains entrenched today – but a new study decisively shows it to be false.

Debunking a lie

The paper, published in the respected academic journal Nature, investigates the exposure of Twitter users to alleged activity on the social media platform by the IRA during the 2016 US election, “and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9

The study’s findings speak for themselves. For example, 70% of purported IRA-connected posts during that campaign were seen by just 1% of the network’s users, “who strongly identified as Republicans.”

Coverage of these posts was moreover “eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians.” The academics also found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship” between exposure to these tweets, and “changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”

Alleged IRA posts seen on Twitter by users were “overshadowed – by an order of magnitude – by posts from national news media and politicians.” For every four IRA tweets published in the last month of the 2016 election campaign, 106 per day from national news media and 35 per day from US politicians were seen on average. In other words, 25 times and nine times more posts respectively.

The academics also probed whether there was any connection between exposure to alleged IRA posts and “changes in respondents’ positions on salient election issues” and political polarization, surveying them on “eight major policy issues salient during the election, and respondents’ self-reported political ideology.” They bluntly concluded that there were not “statistically significant relationships between exposure on any of the issue-based and polarization outcomes.”

Extensive data-based analyses were also conducted to “examine the relationship between exposure to Russian foreign influence accounts and vote choice.” Again, the conclusion couldn’t be more damning – “the relationship between the number of posts from Russian foreign influence accounts that users are exposed to and voting for Donald Trump is near zero (and not statistically significant).”

“This is the case whether the outcome is measured as vote choice in the election itself; the ranking of Clinton and Trump on equivalent survey questions across survey waves; and with the broader measure capturing whether voting behavior more generally favored Trump or Clinton through voting abstentions, changes in vote choice, or voting for a third party.”

Social media are part of the problem

These findings may not be news to some. The headline claims of news coverage and reports produced by supposed “disinformation” experts, attesting to the existence of a Russian social media conspiracy to elect Trump, often sounded seismic – the alleged connivance was repeatedly compared to a new Pearl Harbor. But no evidence to support this charge ever emerged. https://www.politico.eu/article/putins-pearl-harbor-attack-on-the-us-is-our/

Take, for instance, an official Facebook investigation into adverts paid for by the IRA. It estimated that 10 million US citizens saw them, although 56% were published after the election. Roughly a quarter were never seen by anyone, and in 50% of cases, less than $3 was spent on a particular campaign.

While 10 million views may sound significant, the new academic study calls for calm:

“One should be skeptical about its potential effects on attitudes and voting behavior. The large body of political science research that examines the effects of traditional election campaigns on voting behavior finds little evidence of anything but minimal effects, even when messages are well-targeted and conducted in politically conducive environments.”

Recent #TwitterFiles exposures, wholly ignored by the mainstream media but fully dissected by RT, underline the utility of claims of Russian meddling in Western democratic processes to the US national security state. They showed how Twitter was pressured by American intelligence services, lawmakers, pundits and journalists into extensively investigating alleged Russian disinformation on its platform, following the 2016 election.

After several exhaustive official probes turned up no evidence to substantiate the existence of any Kremlin-backed bot or troll networks, Twitter executives were then successfully threatened with the prospect of restrictions on political advertising – which could’ve damaged the company’s business model – into granting American spying agencies an effective backdoor into their operations. Staffers were reduced to effective middlemen for the US government, censoring content and deplatforming users at the direct request of Washington’s power elite.

Despite Twitter’s recent takeover by Elon Musk, and the reappearance of many long-banned dissident voices on the platform, how the company operates may not have significantly changed.

For one thing, the swamp of former military and intelligence officials at the company’s highest levels, deciding which users can gain traction and which can’t, and what users can and can’t see, has stopped being drained. The threat of a mass advertiser exodus, which would result in likely bankruptcy in short order, may well have given its new owner cold feet about making further radical changes to the social network, and who runs it.

Twitter might have been launched with the best intentions, but its efficacy for information warfare was clearly recognized early on by Western spy agencies, and it has served for much of its existence as a highly effective tool in this area. As the academic paper testifies though, it has never been exploited by Russia, or Russians, but rather by the very same powerful figures and entities telling Americans it was all Moscow's doing.

By Felix Livshitz

https://www.rt.com/news/569819-whole-russiagate-was-a-lie/
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20 Jan, 2023 05:59

A) --- Russia blasts US asset expropriation scheme

The illegal transfer of Russian assets to Ukraine would be a “breach of fundamental American values,” Moscow says

Russia has denounced plans by the US government to give Ukraine assets confiscated from Russian citizens, warning the move will undermine confidence in the global financial system and erode the protection of private property.

In a statement issued on Thursday night, the Russian Embassy in the US accused Washington of an “obvious disregard of generally accepted legal norms” after the Department of Justice announced that it would transfer “forfeited” Russian assets to Kiev.

“Such dangerous precedents only serve to discredit the United States as a ‘bastion’ of free enterprise. Washington, with its own hands, is undermining confidence in both the American and international financial system, as well as the security of the dollar jurisdiction,” it said, calling the decision “a breach of fundamental American values which erroneously seemed unshakable.”

US President Joe Biden first proposed the asset transfer scheme in April, suggesting that any seized property thought to be “linked to Russian kleptocracy” should be used to “support Ukraine.” To make the plan work, Congress was required to amend several laws, and the DOJ confirmed on Thursday that those changes were included in a massive $1.7 trillion spending package passed late last year.

Washington and its allies have also frozen assets belonging to Russia’s central bank, totaling around $300 billion, but have so far found no legal justification to seize that property outright.

Last week, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova slammed the confiscation of assets as “a completely illegitimate measure, violating commonly acceptable standards of commercial and international law.” She warned that any attempt to take Russian-owned funds and redirect them to Ukraine would violate property rights and said Moscow would respond with “appropriate” countermeasures.

More than 1,000 Russian entities and 1,300 individuals are currently under American sanctions, according to data from the Atlantic Council, a Washington, DC-based think tank with close ties to the NATO alliance. The total value of Russian assets held by the US government has not been made public, however.
https://www.rt.com/news/570172-russia-assets-transfer-ukraine/
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20 Jan, 2023 04:39

2) --- CIA head briefs Zelensky on ‘Russia’s next steps’ – media

The US intel chief reportedly made yet another trip to Kiev last week

CIA Director William Burns quietly visited the Ukrainian capital for a classified meeting with President Vladimir Zelensky and his intelligence apparatus, multiple outlets reported on Thursday. Besides sharing Washington's intelligence analysis, the official also allegedly warned that US military aid could wane in the coming months amid opposition from Republicans, who recently took control of Congress.

Burns arrived in Kiev sometime late last week and discussed “his expectations for what Russia is planning militarily in the coming weeks and months,” emphasizing “the urgency of the moment on the battlefield” for Ukrainian forces, according to the Washington Post.

“Director Burns traveled to Kiev where he met with Ukrainian intelligence counterparts as well as President Zelensky and reinforced our continued support for Ukraine in its defense against Russian aggression,” an unnamed US official confirmed in a statement to Reuters.

During the talks, Ukrainian officials reportedly raised concerns about US support and asked how long they could expect the aid to continue. Burns allegedly acknowledged that “at some point assistance would be harder to come by” with Republicans again holding a majority in the House, as a number of conservative lawmakers have grown increasingly critical of the American largesse.

Since taking office, President Joe Biden has authorized more than $27 billion in direct military assistance to Kiev, with the latest $2.5 billion aid package approved on Thursday.

Last week’s trip was not Burns’ only visit to Ukraine over the last year, having met with Zelensky in January 2022 – weeks before Russia sent troops into the neighboring state – and again in November. He is said to be a “respected figure” among officials in Kiev due to his intelligence briefings, which have included warnings about plots to assassinate the Ukrainian leader and information about Russia’s military plans

According to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Burns also met with the head of Moscow’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergey Naryshkin, in Turkey last November, around the same time he visited Kiev. While Lavrov said “no revelations” were made during the talks, he noted that the sit-down came at Biden’s request. Naryshkin, meanwhile, said he is ready for another round of talks with Burns earlier this week, provided the two sides can agree on the details.

A career-long diplomat before becoming CIA director, Burns previously served as the US envoy to the Russian Federation under President Barack Obama. As ambassador, he issued warnings behind the scenes about NATO’s continued expansion toward Russia’s borders, penning a 2008 memo obtained by WikiLeaks which discusses the subject in detail. Nonetheless, Burns remains vocally critical of Moscow in public comments, telling PBS last month that Russia is not “serious” about “real negotiation” to end the conflict with Ukraine.
https://www.rt.com/news/570171-cia-burns-zelensky-kiev/
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19 Jan, 2023 23:46

3) --- Ankara slams US ‘colonial governor’ for election meddling

President Erdogan’s spokesman reacted strongly to John Bolton’s op-ed about the upcoming Turkish vote

Reacting to the proposal by a former US national security adviser to threaten Türkiye with expulsion from NATO, presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin denounced John Bolton as a would-be “colonial governor” whose attempts to interfere in Turkish democracy are doomed to fail.

“Bolton, who previously admitted that he supported coups, called on NATO to intervene in the elections in Türkiye. It is a futile effort to try to take the democratic will of the Turkish nation under tutelage,” Kalin tweeted. “Gone are the days when you played colonial governor,” he added.

The Turkish-language tweet also linked to Bolton’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, published on Tuesday, in which the hawkish Republican advised NATO to “put Ankara’s membership on the chopping block” as a way to influence the Turkish elections.

Bolton accused Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of being “divisive and dangerous,” subverting the constitution, wrecking the economy, and pursuing “belligerent regional policies.” Türkiye is a member of NATO, “but it isn’t acting like an ally,” Bolton argued.

A member since 1952, Türkiye commands the second-largest army within NATO and hosts the Allied Land Command headquarters in Izmir. Relations between Ankara and Washington have been fraught in recent years, however, after the US sanctioned Türkiye over its incursions into Syria and the decision to buy S-400 air defense systems from Russia in 2019.

While Bolton currently holds no public office in the US, he previously represented Washington in the UN and served as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser until he was fired in 2019. The champion of regime change in Venezuela, Iran, and Russia recently said he might run for the White House in 2024 if Republicans do not disavow Trump.

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has run Türkiye for almost 20 years. He has been president since 2014, and was prime minister before that. AKP currently has 286 seats in the 600-seat Grand National Assembly, while the largest opposition party, CHP, has 134.

By law, Ankara must call a general election by mid-June. On Wednesday, Erdogan proposed moving the vote up to May 14, the anniversary of the first Turkish multi-party elections in 1950.

Several opposition parties are reportedly working together to challenge the president, but have yet to agree on a joint candidate. One widely rumored choice, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, was convicted last month of insulting public officials and disqualified from running for public office.
https://www.rt.com/news/570168-bolton-turkiye-election-meddling/
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19 Jan, 2023 11:22

4) --- Türkiye outlines ‘complications’ in potential Ukraine-Russia talks

Moscow and Kiev now have even more issues to resolve, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has said

The diplomatic process to settle the Ukraine conflict has become more complicated despite Moscow and Kiev having initially made headway, Türkiye’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Thursday.

Speaking during his visit to Washington, DC, where he met with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Cavusoglu stated that while Ankara had been doing its best to put an end to hostilities, “it is not entirely in our hands to stop the war.”

The minister noted that, though Russia and Ukraine had covered “quite a distance in the beginning, and the parties came closer to at least a ceasefire,” later the situation “had evolved, unfortunately.”

Cavusoglu stated that the conditions of the Ukraine conflict “have changed.” “It has become more complex and has different dimensions. Unfortunately, many more different areas to negotiate have emerged,” he added.

The diplomat reiterated that Ankara continues its mediation efforts as part of the UN- and Türkiye-brokered grain deal, which aims to unlock agricultural exports via the Black Sea from Russia and Ukraine. He added that the same applies to prisoner swaps between Moscow and Kiev, as well as mitigating risks at the nuclear power plant in Russia’s Zaporozhye Region.

The US and Russia are also maintaining contacts in order to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, Cavusoglu noted. This was an apparent reference to talks between the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergey Naryshkin and CIA Director William Burns, which took place in Ankara in mid-November and revolved around issues of nuclear security.

Türkiye has consistently tried to act as a mediator between Moscow and Kiev to settle the stand-off diplomatically. In March, the nation hosted talks between the two. While Moscow had initially voiced optimism about the peace process, the Ukrainian government quickly backtracked on all the promises it had made in Istanbul, with the sudden change of mood occurring shortly after then-UK prime minister Boris Johnson visited Kiev.

Since then, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky signed a decree officially rejecting peace talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. Later, he floated a ten-point “peace formula,” which requires Russia to withdraw all its troops from the territory Kiev claims as its own. Moscow has rejected Zelensky’s proposal, saying that it refuses to take reality into account and illustrates Kiev’s unwillingness to find a solution to the crisis.

Moscow has repeatedly said that it is open to talks with Kiev but only if Ukraine “recognizes the reality on the ground,” including the new status of the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye as parts of Russia.
https://www.rt.com/russia/570129-turkiye-complications-russia-ukraine-talks/
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20 Jan, 2023 05:24

5) --- Top economists warn of global recession

A World Economic Forum survey suggests major economies are facing a slowdown due to inflation

More than half of the leading economists polled by the World Economic Forum (WEF) say they expect a global recession in 2023. The results were published on the WEF website on Monday as business and government leaders gathered for the annual meeting in Switzerland.

A survey conducted by the WEF was based on 22 responses from a group of chief economists drawn from international agencies including the International Monetary Fund, investment banks and multinational companies.

Almost two-thirds of respondents believe a global recession is likely in 2023, of which 18% consider it “extremely likely” – twice as many as in a previous poll carried out in September 2022. Only one-third of experts surveyed said a recession was unlikely.

Senior economists forecast “significant regional variations” in the inflation outlook for 2023 with 57% of respondents sharing high inflation expectations for Europe, while just 5% of experts foresee the same for China. The report showed that, year-on-year, the proportion of respondents who expect high inflation in Europe increased from 47% to 57% since September 2022.

“The current high inflation, low growth, high debt and high fragmentation environment reduces incentives for the investments needed to get back to growth and raise living standards for the world’s most vulnerable,” WEF Managing Director Saadia Zahidi said in a statement commenting on the survey results.

The survey comes shortly after the World Bank’s latest report, in which it slashed 2023 global growth forecasts to levels approaching a recession as many countries struggle with energy, inflation, food and security crises.
https://www.rt.com/business/569962-top-economists-forecast-global-recession/
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