Цена вопроса

[tijd]

Оставляя в стороне экзистенциальное напряжение американских выборов, обратим внимание на дополнительные штрихи к истории, которые всплыли в последние месяцы.



Прояснились в частности некоторые детали разговоров Трампа с Путиным в Гамбурге в июле 2017. Бывшему госсекретарю Тиллерсону (автору выражения "fucking moron"), пришлось разгребать последствия обработки клиента по вопросу Украины.

On July 7, 2017, after President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia shook hands in Hamburg, Germany, to conclude their first face-to-face meeting, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson walked out of the sterile conference room, removed notes from his pocket and gave anxious White House aides a summary.
"We've got work to do to change the president's mind on Ukraine," Mr. Tillerson said.
The secretary of state had just watched Mr. Putin, the former K.G.B. spymaster, put on a master class in seeking to shape the thinking of the new American president.
The Russian leader disparaged Ukraine, a former Soviet republic with aspirations of joining the European Union and NATO. Ukraine, he told Mr. Trump, was a corrupt, fabricated country. Russia, which had seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine three years earlier and backed pro-Russia separatists in a border region, had every right to exert its influence over the country, he insisted.
Mr. Trump told Mr. Putin that his administration was considering giving weapons to Ukraine. "What do you think?" Mr. Trump asked, to which Mr. Putin said it would be "a mistake." <...>
Mr. McMaster and Mr. Bossert prepared Mr. Trump for the Hamburg meeting with Mr. Putin. The tough stance they supported toward Moscow was evident in a speech Mr. Trump gave the day before the summit. On July 6, 2017, Mr. Trump stood before a jubilant crowd assembled at Krasinski Square in Warsaw, Poland, and sent a stern message to Mr. Putin: Stay out of Ukraine.
Russia, Mr. Trump said in a line included in the speech at Mr. McMaster's insistence, should "cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine" and join "responsible nations in our fight against common enemies."
But the next day in Hamburg, sitting across from Mr. Putin, the American president listened as Mr. Putin delivered a monologue. Mr. McMaster wrote in his book that Mr. Putin "used his time with Trump to launch a sophisticated and sustained campaign to manipulate him."
Beyond his usual points about Ukrainian corruption, Mr. Putin made an argument that he had a duty to protect Russian speakers in the eastern part of the country, along the border with Russia, from "ethnic cleansing."
Mr. Putin even brought up an episode from American history to defend Russian military operations. Just as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, advanced by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, justified American intervention in the internal affairs of Latin American countries, he said, so was Russia justified in operating inside Ukraine to protect Russian-speaking citizens there.
Fiona Hill, a senior member of Mr. Trump’s National Security Council staff who was in Hamburg for the summit, said she believed that Mr. Putin most likely referred to Roosevelt in the meeting “because he did his homework” and knew that Mr. Trump had a fixation on the former “strongman” president.
When Mr. Tillerson huddled after the meeting with several of Mr. Trump’s advisers, including Mr. McMaster and Ms. Hill, Mr. Tillerson said that the Russian president had done his “K.G.B. shtick” on Mr. Trump, Ms. Hill recounted. Mr. Tillerson, she said, stressed that they all had work to do to counter Mr. Putin’s anti-Ukraine rhetoric.
“Putin was basically telling him that you can’t trust Ukraine, and don’t give them anything,” Ms. Hill recalled about Mr. Tillerson’s briefing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/05/us/politics/trump-putin-ukraine.html

Click to view

Общение друзей не прекратилось после выхода одного из них в отставку. Как сообщается в новой книжке легендарного Боба Вудворда, известного тщательной проверкой фактов, после 2021 Трамп тайно разговаривал с Путиным не меньше семи раз. Выяснилось также, что на посту президента он распорядился послать в кремлевский бункер высокоточные американские тесты на Ковид.

As the coronavirus tore through the world in 2020, and the United States and other countries confronted a shortage of tests designed to detect the illness, President Donald Trump secretly sent coveted tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use.
Putin, petrified of the virus, accepted the supplies but took pains to prevent political fallout - not for him, but for his American counterpart. He cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had dispatched the scarce medical equipment to Moscow, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward.
Putin, according to the book, told Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.”
Four years later, the personal relationship between the two men appears to have persisted, Woodward reports, as Trump campaigns to return to the White House and Putin orchestrates his bloody assault on Ukraine. In early 2024, the former president ordered an aide away from his office at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, so he could conduct a private phone call with the Russian leader, according to Woodward’s account.
The book does not describe what the two men purportedly discussed, and it quotes a Trump campaign official casting doubt on the supposed contact. But the unnamed Trump aide cited in the book indicated that the GOP standard-bearer may have spoken to Putin as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/08/bob-woodward-new-book-war-trump-putin-biden/



Не обойден вниманием кремлевского старца и Илон Маск, главный спонсор и пропагандист избирательной компании старой марионетки. Подозрения о регулярных контактах подтверждаются новыми репортажами. Помимо самого Путина Маск на проводе с Сергеем Кириенко, руководителем администрации президента РФ.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a linchpin of U.S. space efforts, has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022.
The discussions, confirmed by several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials, touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.
At one point, Putin asked the billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, said two people briefed on the request.
Musk has emerged this year as a crucial supporter of Donald Trump’s election campaign, and could find a role in a Trump administration should he win. While the U.S. and its allies have isolated Putin in recent years, Musk’s dialogue could signal re-engagement with the Russian leader, and reinforce Trump’s expressed desire to cut a deal over major fault lines such as the war in Ukraine. <...>
In October 2022, Musk said publicly that he had spoken only once to Putin. He said on X that the conversation was about space, and that it occurred around April 2021.
But more conversations have followed, including dialogues with other high-ranking Russian officials past 2022 and into this year. One of the officials was Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s first deputy chief of staff, two of the officials said. What the two talked about isn’t clear.
Last month, the U.S. Justice Department said in an affidavit that Kiriyenko had created some 30 internet domains to spread Russian disinformation, including on Musk’s X, where it was meant to erode support for Ukraine and manipulate American voters ahead of the presidential election.
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/musk-putin-secret-conversations-37e1c187



Красноречивая статья Wonkette с многочисленными ссылками:

"Elon is one of the loudest voices in the room for fucking Ukraine and leaving it to die, stomping his feet and sneering with his beady little apartheid eyes when Congress is trying to pass aid for our war-torn ally.
Meanwhile, Elon and his Twitter are some of the foremost purveyors of Russian disinformation on the globe, particularly as it pertains to the US election. Here is a good report from NBC News’s Brandy Zadrozny on the current Russian lie factory-to-American mainstream superhighways. Plus, here’s a story on the former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who’s working with Russian intelligence to seed America with deepfakes and hurt Kamala Harris’s campaign. Guess where some of his work has ended up?
Elon constantly falls for Russian propaganda and shares it incessantly. His Twitter is the biggest disinformation/bullshit factory on the planet, the happiest host to Russian lies.
Trump supports Putin. Putin supports Elon. Elon supports Trump. Putin supports Trump. These guys are all from the same exact strain of medication-resistant butt herpes."
https://www.wonkette.com/p/maybe-elon-musk-is-the-2024-russian



Путинская новая атака на американские выборы пользуется незамысловатыми приемами вроде вброса фейковых видео.

Американская разведка:

"This Russian activity is part of Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election and stoke divisions among Americans, as detailed in prior ODNI election updates. In the lead up to election day and in the weeks and months after, the IC expects Russia to create and release additional media content that seeks to undermine trust in the integrity of the election and divide Americans."
https://www.odni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/press-releases-2024/4011-odni-pr-24-24

Отдел кибербезопасности Майкрософт:

"Initially, Russian influence operations struggled to evolve their efforts following President Biden’s departure from the 2024 US presidential race. However, in late August and September, we observed two Russian actors MTAC tracks closely - previously reported as Storm-1516 and Storm-1679 - using videos designed to discredit Harris and stoke controversy around her campaign."
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2024/09/17/russian-election-interference-efforts-focus-on-the-harris-walz-campaign/



Более утонченная работа - использование вместо собственных троллей подкупа раскрученных правых инфлюенсеров.

Prosecutors alleged two employees of the Russia-backed media network RT funneled almost $10 million to six commentators through a company that appears to be Tenet.
Though the media company and the commentators went unnamed, their details match those of Tenet and Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern, Tayler Hansen and Christiansen.
An NBC News review of Tenet’s many videos combined with details from the government’s two indictments illustrate how the company amplified conservatives who had already embraced many talking points favored by former President Donald Trump and Russia, in line with the country’s broader propaganda goals. The alleged tactics would represent an evolution in Russia’s previous attempts to meddle with American voters’ perceptions of an upcoming election, marked in 2016 by crude but effective text posts on Twitter and Facebook. With Tenet, Russia appears to have updated a decades-old strategy of laundering propaganda through seemingly independent actors by targeting some of the most popular creators of the polarized U.S. political system.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/internets-popular-trump-pundits-ended-paid-messengers-russian-propagan-rcna169803

Схема была разоблачена ФБР с заочным предъявлением обвинений вовремя скрывшимся чекистам Косте Калашникову и Лене Афанасьевой.

An indictment charging Russian nationals Kostiantyn Kalashnikov, 31, also known as Kostya, and Elena Afanasyeva, 27, also known as Lena, with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and conspiracy to commit money laundering was unsealed today in the Southern District of New York. Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva are at large.
“The Justice Department has charged two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, in a $10 million scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to covertly further its own propaganda efforts, and our investigation into this matter remains ongoing.”
“Our approach to combating foreign malign influence is actor-driven, exposing the hidden hand of adversaries pulling strings of influence from behind the curtain," said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. “As alleged in today’s indictment, Russian state broadcaster RT and its employees, including the charged defendants, co-opted online commentators by funneling them nearly $10 million to pump pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation across social media to U.S. audiences. The Department will not tolerate foreign efforts to illegally manipulate American public opinion by sowing discord and division.”
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-rt-employees-indicted-covertly-funding-and-directing-us-company-published-thousands



На выборах, до которых осталось меньше недели, многое стоит на кону и для Америки, и для всего мира. Но, как и восемь лет назад, победа над Трампом и победа над Путиным оказываются связаны крепкой нитью.