Rusia

This might have been done upon Ukraine’s demand as part of their newly clinched security pact’s requirement for standardizing historical narratives.

The Warsaw District Court recently ordered the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) to reopen its investigation into “Operation Vistula”, which was the forcible post-war resettlement of ethnic Ukrainians and other Polish citizens from the southeastern part of the country. The initial one that was launched in response to a request by the president of the Union of Ukrainians in Poland, the head of the Lemko Union, and one Ukrainian who was subject to resettlement concluded that it wasn’t a communist crime.

Belgian authorities are expected to make a decision soon regarding Tajik refugee Sitoramo Ibrokhimova. She will most likely be extradited to the Rahmon regime, as was her sister, 27-year-old Nigora Saidova, who was sent to Tajikistan along with her seven-month-old daughter on charges of aiding terrorism, which, according to The Insider, were fabricated. In her homeland, Saidova was sentenced to eight years in the worst women’s prison, where prisoners face rape and torture. Poland has been denying refugee status to Tajiks year after year — they are among the top three in terms of refusals, after Russians and Iraqi citizens. Emomali Rahmon uses the fear of ISIS to persecute entire families of emigrants – these can be both relatives of terrorists and relatives of oppositionists, but, as The Insider and the Polish weekly Polityka found out, European authorities do not really understand the case materials and often extradite citizens to Rahmon against whom the charges are obviously falsified. According to human rights activists, sometimes those forcibly returned are extradited to Russians: they are interrogated on the territory of the 201st military base near Dushanbe – tortured and forced to confess about ties to Ukraine.

For over a week now, Ukrainian troops have been holding part of the Kursk region and, what’s more, expanding the combat zone. During this time, they have managed to occupy, according to various estimates, from 500 to 1,100 square kilometers and capture hundreds of prisoners. The Ukrainian Armed Forces’ offensive crosses the red line on the use of Western military equipment on internationally recognized Russian territory and clearly demonstrates that the presence of nuclear weapons does not guarantee protection from ground operations on the territory of the possessing state. But what are the ultimate goals of the Kursk operation? The Insider examines the main scenarios for the development of events.

La patience du président Poutine a-t-elle atteint ses limites ?

par Peter Koenig

Toutes les lignes rouges ont été franchies – à plusieurs reprises


Une invasion de la Russie nucléaire par l’OTAN est actuellement en cours, et le monde ignore que nous vivons la Troisième Guerre mondiale, comme l’a rapporté Megatron (14 août 2024).

For around two and a half years since the start of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, many analysts have predicted an inevitable economic crisis that sooner or later would hit Russia. However, by early 2024, these forecasts had proved wrong. The war with the neighboring country elevated the government military spending; the wave of emigration resulted in labor shortages and therefore pushed wages higher; the capital controls locked money inside the country and thus increased domestic demand. In addition to all this, Russian exports have not collapsed even despite the European and American energy embargo and the oil price cap,[1] remaining more or less at their 2021 levels after an extraordinary surge in 2022. In 2023, the Russian economy grew by 3.6 percent,[2] the ruble-to-dollar exchange rate was just 15 percent lower than before the attack on Ukraine (which is, I would say, much less than the accumulated inflation for both 2022 and 2023),[3] and the real wages shot up by 8.5 percent while the inflation was accelerating, but still “remained under control” at 7.42 percent.[4]

FSB Lieutenant General Vladislav Menshchikov heads the FSB’s First Service (counterintelligence), which cannot boast of a large number of spies caught, but has recently found itself at the center of scandals due to the fact that it arrests foreign journalists under the guise of spies to replenish the exchange fund (it is the First Service that is behind the criminal prosecution of The Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich). As The Insider has found out, the high-ranking security officer is involved in corruption schemes around a Russian defense company, and registers expensive property and business in the names of his relatives.

Russia has conducted a prisoner exchange with the United States and Germany. According to The Insider, political prisoners Ilya Yashin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Alsu Kurmasheva, Andrei Pivovarov, Oleg Orlov, Alexandra Skochilenko, Liliya Chanysheva, Ksenia Fadeeva, Evan Gershkovich, Rico Krieger, Kevin Leake, Demuri Voronin, Vadim Ostanin, Patrick Schoebel, Paul Whelan and Herman Moyzhes have been released. In exchange, Russia received FSB killer Vadim Krasikov, spies and swindlers.