Defense Secretary suggested European allies replenish the $771 million meant to shore up Europe’s defensive posture against Russia to President Donald Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border barrier.
The announcement is sure to jar European allies, where NATO members have nervously watched the president’s on-again, off-again commitment to the alliance. And it could deal a blow to the narrative among allies that Trump’s boisterous rhetoric should be taken with a grain of salt, given that money has kept flowing from Washington despite trans-Atlantic disagreements.
Half of the $3.6 billion for the border wall would come from dozens of U.S. military construction projects, and the other half would come from projects in Europe and the Pacific. In Europe, there were roughly 40 projects, including training facilities for special forces in Estonia and aviation infrastructure in Germany, Hungary and Slovakia.
Julian Röpke is a journalist for the German tabloid BILD, and a big fighter against Russian disinformation. He blocked my current twitter account…
What Julian is referring to is the exchange of prisoners between Russia and Ukraine. One of these prisoners was Oleg Sentsov, an activist of the Automaidan in 2013, who was arrested by FSB because he allegedly planned to blow up Soviet monuments in Crimea, so that the “Moskals experience terror!” The EU awarded him a Sakharov Freedom of Thought prize. Western media referred to him as a film director. It is true, Sentsov has one amateurish film that he made, which none of his fans have watched. I bet Julian didn’t watch it either.
We have to thank the new President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky for making this exchange of prisoners possible. It was something that he worked on over Summer, he personally phoned Vladimir Putin. Oleg Sentsov and the others were a source of cheap propaganda for the previous president, Petro Poroshenko and the dupes at EU have only aided him in this.
I wish all the luck to Oleg Sentsov, and I hope his career as a film director will only flourish from now on…
Something ridiculous is happening in Prague 6 (one of the self-governing parts of Prague)…
In August, somebody painted over the monument to Ivan Konev, the Soviet general that led the liberation of Prague. The municipality of Prague 6 decided not to clean the statue because, as they say, the statue gets vandalised every year. The anonymous vandals blame Konev for suppressing pro-democracy revolt in Hungary 1956, building the Berlin Wall, and lending support to Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. However, the monument itself commemorates liberation from the Nazis. The statue has been the target of vandalism for the last four years, it has survived for most of the post-Communist era without eliciting any passions. The municipality seeks ways to remove the statue built in 1980. They have asked the Russian Embassy to take it, which I understand the embassy refuses.
No to the bloody Marshal, we will not forget!
Activists, some say pro-Russian activists, have therefore decided to clean the statue themselves, which they did within three days. According to their words, the paint was easy to remove without application of chemicals. The cleaning attracted a number of weirdos, a guy with a Soviet flag, a guy with a far right Czech party symbolica, and yet another guy with a ROA t-shits, and even mainstream politicians. Then the municipality put up scaffolding over the stature, and covered it with a screen. The screen was immediately torn down by activists. Mind you, this is a municipality that does not take care of other monuments very well.
A “smart bench” that cost a quarter million CZK, that is $10,000 USD, a bench with a garden. The garden dried up because there was nobody to water the plants.
^Expectations…
^Reality
A monument to a Czech war hero, a pilot in the RAF, Frantisek Fajtl, which featured a grass silhouette of an airplane, overgrew because nobody was mowing the lawn.
^Expectations
^Reality
Somehow the municipality finds money to pay for scaffolding, and the works to cover the statue of Konev. The municipality also found money, some 50,000 CZK (more than $2000) to pay to the Playboy Magazine for a feature story about the mayor, Petr Kolář. This is him…
Update 2020: Another example of utterly unexplainable spending at the municipality of Prague 6 is the construction of public toilets for 3.6 million CZK, which is the price of a flat in some parts of Prague.
This apparently costs almost 4 million CZK
In the Czech Republic, one finds it difficult to locate a public toilet when in need. I hope Prague 6 has improved the situation.
The issue of Konev’s statue has already reached Russia. The Russian Culture Minister, Medinsky rather disingenuously called Kolář a Nazi. However, the campaign against the statue has all the hallmarks of Russophobic campaigns elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Prague for instance features the statue of Winston Churchill, who has starved out the Indians, and sold Czechoslovakia off to Stalin. And nothing happens to it. There is an attempt on the part of the East European countries to diminish and tarnish the contribution of the Red Army to victory over Naziism. The motivations might vary; nation building, or building support for NATO. The bottom line is that support for anonymous vandalism by the Prague municipality is an unfriendly act…
The last census of the population was conducted under the president Kuchma in 2001…
…in contrast to the Russian Federation, which conducts censuses every decade, and where the next one is planned for 2020.
I was watching one of my favourite YouTube channels (if you can follow content in Russian and Ukrainian, please give it a sub) and around the 3:33 mark, a video is played, featuring a newly elected representative, David Arakhamiya, who says this:
Census is, of course, needed but a census is a statistical action, and it would cost 90 million Euros, which is the preliminary estimate. We don’t have the money to conduct this every 5 years or something… We will conduct a census simultaneously with the distribution of new electronic ID cards…
Interesting, I wonder whether this would stop the guessing as to how many people are left in Ukraine. 25 million? 33.5 million?
The White House is reviewing whether $250 million in military assistance should be sent to Ukraine in keeping with President Donald Trump’s view that U.S. foreign aid must be justified, two senior administration officials said on Thursday.
The money is intended for use by Ukraine in its struggle with pro-Russian separatists backed by Moscow.
“The president has made no secret when it comes to foreign assistance that U.S. interests abroad should be prioritized and other foreign countries should also be paying their fair share,” said one of the officials, who shared details of the plan on condition of anonymity.
The officials said chances are the money will be allocated as usual but that the determination will not be made until a policy review is completed and Trump makes a final decision. The federal fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.
“Agencies are under no restrictions from preparing to obligate those funds, and agencies still have adequate time to obligate those funds prior to the end of the fiscal year,” the official said.
The internet is abuzz that John Bolton is heading to Ukraine to explain to the American puppets… I mean “strategic allies” how to do business so that American hegemony isn’t threatened…
I quote:
U.S. national-security adviser John Bolton is seeking to scuttle the pending Chinese acquisition of a Ukrainian aerospace company on grounds that it will give Beijing vital defense technology, according to senior U.S. administration officials familiar with the matter.
Mr. Bolton’s personal interest and involvement in the deal, acknowledged by the senior administration officials, underscores the growing importance of this case to the U.S. national-security establishment.
The company, Motor Sich, is one of the world’s foremost manufacturers of helicopter and airplane engines, and for years has supplied engines for the bulk of the Russian military-helicopter fleet. A sale to a group of companies, including Beijing Skyrizon Aviation, controlled by Chinese businessman Wang Jing, is pending.
Staffers at the National Security Council and the U.S. Embassy in Kiev are working to schedule a meeting between Mr. Bolton and the aerospace firm’s chief executive next week in Kiev, where Mr. Bolton plans to attend a security conference, a senior administration official said.
“We are going to have a conversation with the Ukrainians about China’s ambitions and what our view is of what China’s up to,” said another senior administration official. “This is all part of the national-security strategy and the national-defense strategy. It’s a strategic competition with China.”
Ukraine is a strategic U.S. ally in the region, and was the recipient of $250 million in U.S. military aid this year. Donald Winter, a former secretary of the Navy, was appointed this year as the Pentagon’s senior defense-industry adviser on Ukraine.
In 2014, the US supported coup d’etat deprived Ukraine’s industry of Russian markets, now the Americans want Ukrainians to stop trading with China. But since the Americans have technology comparable to the one produced in Motor Sich, they are not going to compensate for the losses incurred and will definitely not compensate for the ruined reputation the Ukrainian company will suffer.
But this is not the first time something like this happened. I quote from Wikipedia:
Ukraine’s Turboatom was to supply a turbine, but cancelled the deal after the US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright‘s visit to Kiev on 6 March 1998.
