Some Lingering Russo-Ukrainian Questions For Which I Don't Have Answers
Thinking through the Moscow theater shooting and the propaganda
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Many years ago my late grandfather (Dickinson College, class of 1950, majored in Russian language) told me that things are never quite as they seem when it comes to Russia. I, a target of the Israeli-conducted Russian probe, have tried to take his admonition to heart. The Russians delight in confusing people and if the national sport is chess then conspiracy is a close second.
As an investor it’s impossible to avoid dealing with the Russians who often use proxies like the United Arab Emirates to conceal their influence in the United States.
In the early days of the Russo-Ukraine War of 2022, an Indian friend of mine in Silicon Valley (whose family happen to be military intelligence) told me about how a Russian “investor” friend of his had offer to turn over his entire portfolio to my Indian friend “for a time.”
If you pay attention you learn rather quickly that Republican donors like Andy Beal or Rebekah Mercer are fronts for the Russian or Ukrainian world. If you pay especial attention you learn that there are quite a number of ties between the Russian world and say, Texas, and that there are many different factions within the Russian Federation itself, some of whose internal conflict play out in our own society.
A very well known investor I have dealt with on occasion is a front for the Russian mob and that’s before we get into all the Russian ties around Elon and SpaceX which are quite considerable. This is, I think, the flip side of being the world’s reserve currency.
Navigating this sort of thing is confusing! I use several heuristics which have helped me avoid getting too confused.
Here’s the first heuristic: What if what the Russians are saying is actually true?
Is it possible that Evan Gershkovich might actually be a spy? And if it is true that he’s a spy what does that suggest about the papers he worked for?
"The guy's obviously not a spy, he's a kid," Carlson said of Gershkovich in his interview with Putin. "And maybe he was breaking your law in some way, but he's not a super spy and everybody knows that. And he's being held hostage in exchange, which is true. With respect, it's true. And everyone knows it's true."
Well, I don’t know it’s that’s true, Tucker. I’m not so quick to miss the possibility, as, say, Tucker Carlson. After all, Gershkovich’s parents Ella and Mikhail Gershkovich are Refusenik Jews — a group from which the Israeli government often recruited spies. No less a figure than Moshe Sharett, Israel’s second prime minister, founded Nativ, a clandestine organization designed to help Jews in Eastern Europe immigrate to Israel. Are we really not going to address his father Mikhail’s work on artificial intelligence at a dubious Princeton, New Jersey startup?
What if Russia is trying to lose the Ukraine War? After all, he could be fighting it much more aggressively and yet that doesn’t seem to be happening. What does seem to be happening is that the marginal people of the former Soviet states are being ground up in Ukraine — convicts, Kyrgyz, etc. A front can be an especially great way of getting rid of troublesome peoples.
A recent discussion between the Robert Wright and the pro-“special military operation” Russians Without Attitude podcast seems to confirm that the effects of the Russian conflict were not felt by the larger population.
I suspect we will see a Turkic strike in the not too distant future, led perhaps by Alisher Usmanov, the Silicon Valley-backing Turkic tech billionaire who is reportedly moving out of Putin’s orbit.
Didn’t it seem as if Vladimir Putin fired Tucker Carlson as his preferred talk show host? Putin was altogether disrespectful toward Carlson. Why is that? Might Putin have been signaling to the Russian money behind Tucker to look for other constructs?
And speaking of constructs it’s hard not to see the entire thing breaking down.
Is it wrong to see Candace Owens, married into a Russian-connected British family, as the Russian world turning on Likud? We’ve discussed at length the Chinese-Israeli ties of Ben Shapiro and I noted my own experience watching Ben Shapiro and Joel Pollak getting tasking from the Israeli Defense Forces.
We haven’t really gone there with the Russians in part because I’ve been afraid that anything I say about them might be used by corrupt federal agents to come after me. It’s not an idle fear.
It’s dangerous for me to talk about my Russophilia — though, I, like all good thinking people, want the Ukrainians to win the war.
What if Alexei Navalny worked for the Wagner Group? There was a curious detail that Yevgeny Prigozhin was recruiting convicts from Navalny’s jail to come fight in Ukraine. What if Navalny was a recruiter for them instead?
Why does Navalny’s wife seem so happy now that he’s dead? And how do we know “Putin killed” him narrative is true?
Journalist Matthew Puddister punctures the Nalvany myth.
In reality, Navalny was a far nastier piece of work: an ultra-right racist and Russian nationalist, who railed against immigration and compared Muslims to “flies and cockroaches”. It’s ironic that Western liberals who view Donald Trump as a puppet of Russia/Putin and the very incarnation of evil are mourning a figure whose politics in all essentials are very similar to Trump’s. Consider Trump’s infamous attack on illegal immigrants launching his 2016 U.S. presidential campaign — “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists” — to Navalny’s remarks in a 2012 interview stating, “Immigrants from Central Asia bring in drugs [to Russia].”
Like Trump, Navalny encouraged and welcomed support from the most extreme fringes of the far right. In 2007, Yabloko, Russia’s oldest liberal party, kicked out Navalny for his “nationalist views” and participation in the Russian March, an annual rally that brings together thousands of far-right Russian nationalists, monarchists, and white supremacists under the slogan “Russia for ethnic Russians”. Shortly thereafter, Navalny released a video in which he presents himself as a “certified nationalist” who wants to exterminate “flies and cockroaches”, his rant intercut with shots of bearded Muslim men. In the video, Navalny then takes out a gun and shoots an actor wearing a keffiyeh, who is portrayed as trying to attack him.
I remember learning that Navalny mentioned a $1.4 billion villa purportedly and corruptly owned by Putin — only to have various mobsters say that, in fact, that that villa was theirs. Is it possible Navalny’s “anti-corruption” campaign was about something more sinister?
Might a lot of the Russian influencers — like the influencers in America, Europe or China — be actual fronts for foreign governments or organized crime figures?
Could Navalny’s well documented hesitancy to denounce Russian nationalists or other extremists be because it was part of a larger mob hustle?
And how real is the Putin as mob boss narrative we see so often displayed?
There’s this common view that Putin is on the take with all of these different (largely Jewish) oligarchs and that he has forced the oligarchs who helped Yeltsin win and who have been protect him win.
Why does Putin need all the money if he’s going to hold the job until he does?
I think — more likely — that Putin was re-taxing the oligarchs who had been involved in his predecessor’s rise to power. Putin seemingly cast many of them out of Russia and we’re now in a game where the West is trying to turn Russian oligarchs to their ends with mixed results.
One of the problems of interpreting modern Russia is how many of the lenses around Russia are seemingly developed by other countries or their spies.
Noted Putin critic Bill Browder worked for notorious Israeli-connected spies Edmond Safra and Robert Maxwell, something that the Jewish Forward was all too keen to mention.
I had become friends with Andrei Nekrasov and we WhatsApp often.
Nekrasov and I met in London and I watched his 2016 film, The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes when I was researching Bill Browder — a man who had been introduced to me in 2011 by Thor Halvorssen, who later tried to rape me.
Nekrasov and I met again in Berlin in a very Russian area in December 2018.
What made Nekrasov interesting to me is that he was a critic of Putin — a liberal and a former assistant to one of Russia’s great filmmakers Andrei Tarkovsky.
Nekrasov, like me, had wanted to believe Browder’s lies because they could presumably have been used against the Putin government which neither he nor I favor.
After the attempted coup by Prigozhin against Putin in 2023 I reached out to Nekrasov:
“A civil war, but, as I have been warning, it’s not the liberals that would be the winner. Putin’s problem has bee that he is, in fact, too liberal (or neoliberal), in a peculiar Russian way, but still…”
If Putin hated Browder so much why hasn’t he killed Browder? And indeed if you look back on the history you’ll discover that Browder was actually a friend to Putin.
Might Browder simply be useful at causing trouble for the West against Putin?
The more you sanction Russia, the more you empower the organized crime world — and maybe that’s the point.
Maybe the black market world — the world of the oligarchs — is how many Western “Russian exports” secure their bag. Edward Snowden — who has lived in Russia since 2013 — recently noted that a “national government” — presumably Russia — would be revealed to have been purchasing bitcoin.
Seizing those Russian assets could presumably lead to more of a black market in the Russian system.
This reminds me a bit of what happened with Cyprus when Bitcoin rallied sharply as the Cyprus banking crisis unfolded in March 2013. The cryptocurrency surged 178% to $93 that month and hit a record high of $265 in May 2013.
Could something similar happen with the Russian economy? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Bitcoin is on a tear right around the same time as the Russian state is being sanctioned everywhere. Whether you’ll be able to get your money out of bitcoin is another thing entirely.
Nor does it strike me as altogether odd that the Ukraine — with its long history of black market connections — might be deliberately targeting Russian oil infrastructure to drive up the price of that black market oil and that that oil money could be used for all manner of strange operations in much the same way that the Safari Club used illicit oil in Africa and the Middle East.
In the recent shooting in Moscow there’s this curious subplot of Robert De Niro, who is a partner with Azeri billionaire, Aras Agalerov, in the Nobu restaurants.
Times have been tough for Agalerov. Reportedly Agalerov had tried to secure loans on the Moscow theatre he helped build only a few weeks before there was this recent mass shooting. Agalerov was also a partner of Donald Trump in bringing the Miss Universe pageant to Crocus concert hall — the very place that was the scene of the grisly mass shooting.
De Niro who welcomed his seventh child into the world at age 80. His baby mama is allegedly Tiffany Chen, who has a fascinating and altogether disturbing connections in Hong Kong.
In other words Hong Kong mobsters. A baby is a great way to move assets and certainly something De Niro would know all too well. Might this explain the recent increase in surrogacy? Right Elon Musk?
One of the things we never really talk about is how many of the people who play mobsters might actually be mobsters.
There’s an especially disturbing bit of history here where Israeli mobster and nuclear spy (and Netanyahu bribe peddler) Arnon Milchan filmed Robert De Niro repeatedly “raping” Milchan’s lover actress Elizabeth McGovern for a scene in Once Upon A Time in America (1984).
Maybe we shouldn’t have been so obsessed with Russia but more focused on the Likud criminal associates who middle man between us and
Had America dealt honestly with nuclear espionage — and not had an Israel exception — we might have solved a lot of these issues.
Watch Robert De Niro be interviewed next to Arnon Milchan.
Despite being an admitted spy Milchan was allowed to stay in the United States after he paid a series of bribes to Netanyahu and Netanyahu prevailed upon both Secretary of State John Kerry and his advisors to let Milchan have his visa renewed.
The Trump Administration refused repeated Israeli requests to have then-Secretary of State John Kerry questioned by Israeli authorities who were finally bringing Netanyahu and Milchan to justice.
Should we have held Netanyahu to account earlier it’s likely there would be far fewer dead Gazans. Something to think on…
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The surrogacy point is very interesting. Never thought of that before.