Happy Holidays, Vlad

January 18, 2020

January 6 was Christmas Eve in Russia, the day that America’s iconic Capitol Building was sacked, plunging the United States into political chaos. January 13 was New Year’s Eve in Russia, the day Donald Trump was impeached following his four-year flirtation with Vladimir Putin, Russian oligarchs, and homegrown white supremacists.

America’s catastrophic week did not escape the attention of Russians and their cynical social media. Some wrote that the political mess was a present to Putin and a meme circulated immediately superimposing Putin’s happy face onto a vandal’s body stealing a lectern from the Capitol building.

Clearly, the Russians understand what Americans do not. Their leader is up to his bullet-proof vest in causing America’s woes. But you wouldn’t know it, given that last week the FBI announced it was probing whether foreign governments were involved in the Washington attack. Of course they were, led by the Kremlin which has invested heavily for years in fomenting, recruiting, and training white supremacist, terrorist, divisive, racist, and anti-democratic groups here and globally.

In fact, Putin is the global poster boy for white supremacists worldwide and the nature of the mayhem in the United States is right out of his playbook.

For skeptics, consider Exhibit A below, a tweet sent out on January 9 by an astute Kremlin watcher, Michael MacKay, and posted on a smallish news site in Washington called hillreporter.com.

It reads:

“A tie-in between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the insurrection in the United States. Serhiy Dobynyn is an info-warrior for Inter TV, nominally owned by fugitive oligarch [Dymytry] Firtash but beneficially owned by Putin pal [Viktor] Medvedchuk.”

Let me connect the dots. The guy on the left in both shots is a Ukrainian “info-warrior”, or propagandist, who works for a pro-Russian newspaper in Ukraine. He poses with a soldier in front of a Ukrainian airport that was destroyed during the seizure and occupation by Russian operatives of part of Eastern Ukraine in 2014. The photo on the right shows info warrior boy in the Capitol building with the face-painted and bare-chested rioter who calls himself the “QAnon Shaman”.

Intel TV’s nominal owner is Firtash who is fighting extradition to the United States for a bribery scheme involving mining in India and was involved in Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to dig up dirt on Biden in Ukraine that led to Trump’s first impeachment. Medvedchuk is a Putin pal.

The “QAnon Shaman” is Jacob Anthony Chansley donning his headdress made of coyote skin and buffalo horns at the riot. This week, federal prosecutors charged him and alleged that they had “strong evidence, including Chansley’s own words and actions at the Capitol, supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States government.”

Obviously, one pro-Russian guy posing with QAnon’s Shaman does not a Russian-led insurrection make. Besides, the photo may even be a fake, but that’s beside the point. The thugs who mugged Ukraine are coming to a neighborhood near you in America, armed to the teeth with their American brethren.

The FBI’s confusion about foreign involvement is all the more curious given the fact that last April the first “domestic” white supremacist group designated by American authorities as a terrorist organization in the United States was The Russian Imperial Movement. Headquartered in St. Petersburg, it is an ultra-nationalist, far-right paramilitary organization that helped Putin recruit fighters to seize and occupy roughly seven percent of Ukraine territory -- Donbas (where the bombed out airport is) and Crimea.

Russian operatives organized mobs to seize public buildings, launched mass disinformation campaigns, infiltrated local governments, then sent in hoodlums and spec ops to threaten police, journalists, politicians, and the populace. The accused Lansing terrorists had similar plans. After they kidnapped and killed the Governor, some 200 of them could storm seize Michigan’s State House and overthrow the government.

There’s another interesting commonaity. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine took place when the country was embroiled in political chaos as its population rose to remove a Russian puppet as its President whose chief advisor was former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort. Here in America, the uprising flopped because American institutions are stronger and because Trump was not a Russian puppet, just a Putin fanboy.

He wasn’t alone. Russia’s prestige among white power and neo-nazi advocates is well-established. They believe that Russia has replaced Germany as the sole white power in the world. American Klu Klux Klan guru David Duke was quoted as saying that Russia holds the “key to white survival” worldwide.

Clearly, a major course correction concerning the Kremlin is required. Trumpian equivocation over Russia’s acts of war against the Republic must be replaced with retaliation, sanctions, and diplomatic isolation. Putin has exported havoc for years, and last month launched an unprecedented cyberattack against the American government and corporations. This New Year’s resolution should be to insure that next year Vladimir Putin has absolutely nothing to celebrate.

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