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Newsflash. Vladimir Putin is the world’s international bad guy. He is the Boris Bad-enough in the Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Vladimir is a former KGB Director, who just doesn’t know where the borders of bad behavior begin, and the borders of International Waters end.
Here are just a few of recent egregious examples of Putin-directed “projects” that demonstrate the lengths of his ambitions (and vengeance):
Russian spy poisoning: Nerve agent inspectors back UK — BBC News, 4/12/18
The international chemical weapons watchdog has confirmed the UK's analysis of the type of nerve agent used in the Russian ex-spy poisoning.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons did not name the nerve agent as Novichok, but said it agreed with the UK's findings on its identity.
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Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said: "There can be no doubt what was used."
He added: "There remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible - only Russia has the means, motive and record."
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MH17 downed by Russian military missile system, say investigators — The Guardian, 5/24/18
A Russian military missile was responsible for shooting down flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, an international team of investigators said on Thursday, for the first time pointing the finger directly at Moscow.
The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 was travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down over the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014. All 298 people onboard were killed.
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They said they had “legal and convincing evidence which will stand up in a courtroom” that the BUK system involved came from the 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade based in Kursk, in western Russia.
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Russia and Turkey Send Troops to Syria, Build New Gas Pipeline at Home — Newsweek, 6/23/17
Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw Friday's joining of a major pipeline that's set to provide Turkey with over 556 billion cubic feet of gas each year, an event that came shortly after the two countries reached a deal to allow foreign troops into areas previously designated as safe zones in Syria.
Russia and Turkey, which support opposing factions in Syria's more than six-year civil war, have had a tumultuous relationship in recent years. Turkey's geographic and political position as a bridge between East and West has given it strategic leverage with both the Western military alliance NATO, of which it is a member, and Russia, an important economic partner. [...]
Turkey and Russia also have come together on other fronts. They first announced plans for the Turkish Stream pipeline, or TurkStream, at the end of 2014. The project was interrupted after Turkey shot down the Russian jet in Syria, but resumed in 2016 after Erdogan apologized. Russia began laying the line last month, and on Friday Putin himself watched as Russia's Pioneering Spirit began laying the shallow and deepwater segments of the pipe, according to the state-run TASS Russian News Agency. TurkStream has a projected capacity of 1.11 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, about half of which will ultimately reach Europe. The planned pathway conveniently allows Moscow to bypass Ukraine, where Russia supports rebel movements in the east, and replaces previous plans for a South Stream pipeline that was opposed by the EU due to fears it would give Russia too much power over Europe's resources.
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Cyberattack on Critical Infrastructure: Russia and the Ukrainian Power Grid Attacks — jsis.washington.edu, 10/11/17
On December 23, 2015, the control centers of three Ukrainian electricity distribution companies were remotely accessed. Taking control of the facilities’ SCADA systems, malicious actors opened breakers at some 30 distribution substations in the capital city Kiev and western Ivano-Frankivsk region, causing more than 200,000 consumers to lose power.[1] Nearly a year later, on December 17, 2016, a single transmission substation in northern Kiev lost power. These instances of sabotage took place on the tail of a political revolution in Kiev, the annexation of Crimea, and amid military clashes in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Governments and cybersecurity companies have attributed the hacks to Russian groups with suspected, although unclear, associations with the Russian government.[2] Russian hackers have a long history of participating in political and military conflicts in Eastern Europe and consistently carry out espionage operations around the world in support of Russian interests.[3]
These attacks represent a growing category of hacks intended to sabotage critical infrastructure. [...]
'The United States is under attack': DNI Coats warns of cyberthreats — CNBC.com, 2/13/18
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats framed global cybersecurity threats in stark terms on Tuesday, saying: "Frankly, the United States is under attack."
Coats sounded the alarm in opening remarks at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats — annual testimony by intelligence chiefs about the greatest dangers to U.S. security.
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Russia is likely to continue to pursue cyberactions against the U.S. "using elections as opportunities to undermine democracy, sow discord and undermine our values," he said.
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Jailed Russian: Here’s How I Hacked The U.S. Election — fastcompany.com, 3/5/18
MOSCOW – Konstantin Kozlovsky is ready to talk. The 29-year-old blonde-haired Russian hacker at the center of the intrigue surrounding the Kremlin’s cyberattacks on the 2016 U.S. presidential election currently sits in a high-security prison with the forbidding name of Matrosskaya Tishina (Sailor’s Silence) in northeastern Moscow. Kozlovsky is officially charged with stealing millions from Russian banks, but he’d prefer to brag about how he built the software used to hack the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and other U.S. targets.
At a small hearing in a Moscow court earlier this month, with only a handful of media outlets present, Kozlovsky said he was ready to present detailed evidence that the Kremlin was directly involved in a series of high-profile attacks, including compromising the DNC’s computer systems in 2016, as well as those of the U.S. government, military, social media companies, and leading U.S. publishers.
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Back in December, Kozlovsky first claimed his role in hacking the DNC amid the heated U.S. primary season in 2016, saying he was acting on the orders of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the country’s counterintelligence agency that has retained the ethos and global ambitions of the Soviet era.
Outside of court hearings every few months, Kozlovsky has relied on his Facebook page to fill in the blanks. [...]
Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections — DNI.gov, 1/6/17
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, United States of America
ICA — Intelligence Community Assessment
Key Judgments
Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.
We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.
Despite all these Putin-directed attacks, Donald the-pawn Trump is still insisting Russia is ‘just like us’ — and that they belong back in the Western Alliance of democratic and free countries …
Donald Trump is just wrong.
If he’s looking for the “Deep State” and its nefarious activities, the current US White House resident need look no further, than Putin’s not-so-invisible wrecking crew — and its ongoing trail of influence, chaos, and destruction — that they are leaving around the world.
Of course, long as he remains the “beneficiary” of Putin’s “Influence efforts” — Why would he?
Long as the Republican Party, lets him — you know, get away with it: Trump’s ongoing Putin-promotion campaign will continue too ...
PS. This is not a drill. Putin is still winning ...
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