Tag: Russia

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Foreign Policies News Russia

Russia Firing Warning Shots at Ukraine Soldiers

Although the rest of the world is denouncing the recent occupation of Russian forces in Ukraine, things took a turn for worse as bullets from Russian troops fly over the heads of Ukrainian soldiers.

Escalation.

Russian troops in control of the Belbek air base in Crimea fired warning shots into the air as around 300 Ukrainian soldiers, who previously manned the airfield, demanded their jobs back.

About a dozen Russian soldiers at the base warned the Ukrainians, who were marching unarmed, not to approach.

They fired several warning shots into the air and said they would shoot the Ukrainians if they continued to advance.

The Ukrainian forces are believed to be led by Colonel Yuli Mamchor, commander of the Ukrainian military garrison at Belbek, who was seen speaking to gun-wielding Russian troops at the air base.

The stand-off comes as Vladimir Putin ordered thousands of Russian troops participating in military exercises near Ukraine’s border to return to their base.

But the Russian president showed no signs of loosening the stranglehold on the Crimean peninsula, openly defying the threat of diplomatic and economic sanctions from world leaders.

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Foreign Policies military invasion Russia

Russia Could Lose Membership in G8 Soon

WASHINGTON — After Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine, the G8 might become the G7 again.

Russia is set to host the next summit of the Group of Eight — the (mostly) western economic powers of the U.S., UK, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Japan and Russia — in Sochi in June, and the U.S. has broken off its participation in planning meetings in protest of Russian forces’ presence in Crimea, where they have reportedly surrounded military bases.

About 6,000 Russian forces have “operational control” of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, a senior U.S. official told reporters.

After a U.S.-led push, all members but Russia have announced they will boycott planning meetings for the Sochi summit.

In a joint statement disseminated by the White House on Sunday, the leaders of the U.S., UK, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Japan all pledged “to suspend our participation in activities associated with the preparation of the scheduled G-8 Summit in Sochi in June, until the environment comes back where the G8 is able to have meaningful discussion.” They also “condemn[ed] the Russian Federation’s clear violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”

U.S. officials offered not-so-veiled threats that the G8 could kick Russia out altogether.

The incursion “puts at question Russia’s capacity to be within the G8,” Secretary of State John Kerry told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” Sunday morning.

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Foreign Policies Politics Russia

President Obama Warns Putin – Stay Out of Ukraine

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama warned Russia on Friday that military intervention in Ukraine would lead to “costs,” as tension with old foe President Vladimir Putin rose in a Cold War-style crisis.

“We are now deeply concerned by reports of military movements taken by the Russian Federation inside of Ukraine,” he told reporters.

Obama and European leaders would consider skipping a G8 summit this summer in the Russian city of Sochi if Moscow intervenes militarily in Ukraine, a senior U.S. official said.

“The United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine,” Obama said in the White House briefing room.

Facing yet another confrontation with Putin after butting heads with him over Syria, Obama said any violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity would be “deeply destabilizing.”

Obama did not spell out what he meant by Russian military intervention.

Russia has a huge naval base in Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula and says it has the right to move troops in Ukraine under an agreement between the two former Soviet neighbors.

U.S. officials said they saw indications of Russian troop movements into Crimea but that their numbers and intentions were unclear.

The crisis has presented Obama with a difficult challenge days after pro-Western protesters prompted Ukraine’s pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovich to flee to Russia.

Armed men took control of two airports in the Crimea region in what the new Ukrainian leadership described as an invasion by Moscow’s forces, and Yanukovich surfaced in Russia a week after he fled Kiev.

Ukraine fell into political crisis last year when Yanukovich spurned a broad trade deal with the European Union and accepted a $15 billion Russian bailout that is now in question.

A U.S. response to any Russian intervention in Ukraine could include avoiding deeper trade and commerce ties that Moscow is seeking, the senior U.S. official said.

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Politics

Anti-Gay Activist Wants Russian-style Anti-Gay Laws in U.S

Strident anti-LGBT activist Peter LaBarbera said on Wednesday that the U.S. should adopt its own Russian-style “gay propaganda” law that would outlaw any positive representation of non-heterosexual relationships.

According to Right Wing Watch, LaBarbera was incensed at the inclusion of a family headed by a lesbian couple in the Disney Channel comedy series “Good Luck Charlie.”

“Look at the Disney show, they are promoting lesbianism to kids who don’t even know what sex is yet,” LaBarbera complained in a radio interview with the American Family Association’s Sandy Rios. “How are kids going to process that information of two moms?”

LaBarbera — dubbed “Porno Pete” by some LGBT activists because of his purportedly massive trove of gay pornography, which the Americans for the Truth About Homosexuality director says he keeps for “research” — said that the U.S. needs to copy Russia’s laws against positive portrayals of same-sex relationships.

These laws, he said, will keep Americans from “promoting homosexualism” and therefore are “acceptable and a good idea.”

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Celebrities News

Shaun White Pulled Out of the Olympic Slopestyle Contest

Shaun White pulled out of the Olympic slopestyle contest Wednesday, about 24 hours after being banged up on a course that riders are criticizing as unduly harsh.

White issued a statement, saying that after much deliberation, he has decided to forgo the new snowboarding event and concentrate on halfpipe, where he will try for his third straight gold medal next week.

“With the practice runs I have taken, even after course modifications and watching fellow athletes get hurt, the potential risk of injury is a bit too much for me to gamble my other Olympics goals on,” White said.

Considered among the favorites of the new events on the Sochi Olympics schedule, White jammed his left wrist during practice Tuesday, and when he came off the slopestyle course, he called it “a little intimidating.”

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Videos

Criticize Putin, Get a 200 Lbs ‘Cock’ on Your Car – PIC

And when I say “cock”, I’m not talking about a rooster.

She and her co-author spent most of that day trying to get police to take the incident seriously, but they — and some onlookers — were too busy laughing and taking pictures. They ended up lugging it into their apartment and are currently deciding what to do with it. (I can think of a few things. HEY-OOOO!)

Who’s the culprit, you ask? Probably some state-backed, pro-Putin youngsters, the magazine reports:

This is the kind of cockamamie (sorry) prank that reeks (sorry) of Nashi, the pro-Kremlin youth group founded after Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2005. It was the Kremlin’s way to engage the youth in politics by paying and brainwashing them to be their blunt instrument of revenge. These kids, often from poor families, have strange imaginations that center almost always on the scatalogical and the sexual. (They once used one prostitute named “Mumu” to lure various male opposition figures into bed in the same bugged apartment.) They manage to pull off these kinds of pranks by having the resources of the state at their disposal.

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Featured Russia

Russia Killing Stray Dogs Before Olympics Begin – Calls Them “Biological Trash”

The city of Sochi has hired a private company to kill as many stray dogs as possible before the Winter Olympics, it has been claimed.

Describing the animals as ‘biological trash’, the owner of the company has reportedly admitted being tasked with using poison and traps to rid the city of stray dogs before thousands of tourists and competitors arrive for the Games’ opening ceremony next Friday.

The news will anger animal rights campaigners who thought Sochi officials had abandoned plans to exterminate the stray dogs following widespread protests last year.

Speaking to ABC News, the owner of Basia Services extermination company Alexei Sorokin claimed the animals were a realistic threat to the Games.

‘Imagine if during an Olympic Games a ski jumper landed at 130KPH (80 MPH) and a dog runs into him when he lands. It would be deadly for both the jumper and the stray dog,’ he said.

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News Technology

Russian Teen May Have Helped Steal Your Credit Card Info From Target

 

Via Yelp

Turns out the mastermind behind the software leading to a massive Target breach that swiped credit card information from 110 million customers last November may have been none other than a (brilliant) teenager,according to investigators.

Authorities suspect that an unnamed 17-year-old with “ties to St. Petersburg” may have developed the “malware” software used to skim credit card numbers in the enormous data breach, which involved the theft of everything from confidential credit and debit card data to personal information like addresses and phone numbers. That same software may have also been used to hit up several other retailers, and a federal report this week suggested the software breach was an organized, likely Russian-instigated cyber attack on the U.S.

California cyber-security firm IntelCrawler says they’ve identified the “malware”‘s architect, tracking the software back to a 17-year-old with the username “ree4.” And though the firm does not believe the teenager orchestrated the cyber-attack, they note this isn’t the first malicious software he has designed, as per CEO Andrew Komarov: “Previously he has created several tools used in hacking community for brute force attacks, such as ‘Ree4 mail brute’, and also earned some first money with social networks accounts hacking and DDoS attacks trainings, as well as software development including malicious code.”

Several online chats were embedded in the report; the chats were conducted in Russian, and the translation alleges Ree4 sold one download of the software for $2000; investigators have still not managed to pinpoint the hackers directly responsible for the attack.

h/t – gothamist
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Politics

Second Suicide Bombing in Russia, 14 More People Killed

Two suicide bombings on consecutive days killed at least 31 people in southern Russia city, highlighting the terror threat Russia faces as it prepares to host the Winter Games in six weeks.

A suicide bomber on a bus early Monday in Volgograd killed at least 14 people and left nearly 30 wounded, Russian officials said, a day after another suicide bombing killed at least 17 at a railway station in the city.

Vladimir Markin, the spokesman for Russia’s main investigative agency, said Monday’s blast involved a bomb similar to the one used in Sunday’s bombing at the city’s train station.

“That confirms the investigators’ version that the two terror attacks were linked,” Markin said in a statement. “They could have been prepared in one place.”

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, but they came several months after Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov called for attacks against civilian targets in Russia. Umarov, leader of a terrorist group that calls itself the Caucasus Emirate, has called on Muslims to disrupt the Olympics, which will be held in Sochi in February.

“If you are a terrorist group in the Caucasus, the Sochi Olympics are going to be a very inviting target,” said Steven Pifer of the Brookings Institution’s Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative.

Some Muslim terrorists view the Olympics as a provocation, says Jeffrey Mankoff of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Russia and Eurasia Program. Sochi was conquered in the 19th century. “They view it as a provocation on territory they consider stolen from Muslims,” he said.

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Featured

Russian TV Star Wants to Burn All Gay People in Ovens

Russian actor/ex-Orthodox priest Ivan Okhlobystin, who’s famous for playing an ill-mannered recovering alcoholic on the medical sitcom Interny (a show sometimes described as “the Russian Scrubs”), has an interesting take on gay rights. He isn’t for them. In fact, he’d rather be done with the whole concept of gay people all together.

“I would put all the gays alive into an oven,” Okhlobystin told cheering fans in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. “This is Sodom and Gomorrah! As a religious person, I cannot be indifferent about it because it is a real threat to my children!”

He also compared homosexuality to fascism (“queer fascism!” that is), which is strange, since shoving human bodies into ovens is something closely associated with fascist death camps and the Holocaust.

The 47-year-old actor and filmmaker attempted to form his own political party in 2012, but failed to get state registration. He also once tried to run for president of Russia, and has pledged to donate the proceeds from an upcoming book to purchase more weapons for the mass-murdering Assad regime in Syria.

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chemical weapons Syria Syria

Amazing Deal Reached On Syria’s Weapons – Republicans However, Not Amused

This is a big deal! Russia and Syria has not only agreed that Syria has chemical weapons, a huge deal was reached on Saturday calling for these chemical weapons to be accounted for and destroyed by the middle of 2014!

The joint announcement, on the third day of intensive talks in Geneva, also set the stage for one of the most challenging undertakings in the history of arms control.

“This situation has no precedent,” said Amy E. Smithson, an expert on chemical weapons at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “They are cramming what would probably be five or six years’ worth of work into a period of several months, and they are undertaking this in an extremely difficult security environment due to the ongoing civil war.”

Although the agreement explicitly includes the United Nations Security Council for the first time in determining possible international action in Syria, Russia has maintained its opposition to any military action.

But George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, emphasized that the possibility of unilateral American military force was still on the table. “We haven’t made any changes to our force posture to this point,” Mr. Little said. “The credible threat of military force has been key to driving diplomatic progress, and it’s important that the Assad regime lives up to its obligations under the framework agreement.”

Republicans however, are not having it. Moment after the news broke that an agreement was reached, Senator John McCain and Lindsey Graham issued a statement saying, the deal allows Syrian leader Bashar Assad”to delay and deceive” while the country’s civil war continued.

The statement said: “It requires a willful suspension of disbelief to see this agreement as anything other than the start of a diplomatic blind alley, and the Obama administration is being led into it by Bashar Assad and [Russian president] Vladimir Putin.”

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chemical weapons Politics Syria

President’s Weekly Address – Possible Diplomacy in Syria

President Obama continued his call for action in Syria whether it be military or diplomatic, and he called on the leaders of Russia and Syria to continue talks with Sec. Kerry on securing and destroying Syria’s chemical weapons. “We’re making it clear that this can’t be a stalling tactic,” the president said. “We need to see concrete actions to demonstrate that Assad is serious about giving up his chemical weapons.”

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