EUROPEAN POLICY FAILURE: Why does Russia (and its proxies such as Belarus) keep doing major hostile operations such as using a terrorist-style tactics to kidnap a journalist from a civilian airlines?
Since 2014,Russia has been conducting openly hostile na often murderous operations against European democracies:
from violent coup attempt in Montenegro
assassination operations in UK, Germany or Bulgaria,
to blowing up arms depot on NATO soil in Czech Republic or Bulgaria
It is known that Russia effectively controls the intelligence service (KGB) and armed forces of Belarus.
So the RyanAir kidnapping operation could not happen without Russian state approval or support.
The bottom line: Russia thinks it is worth conducting such hostile operations like the RyanAir operation against a journalist.
They clearly believe that it pays off. Russia thinks: EuU punitive response will be largely symbolic = it will not really hurt Belarus or Russia.
The fact that Russia believes that European punishment will be very soft is the core of our European problem.
Our enemy knows we will not punish his aggression so it is worth doing it again.
What should Europe do?
If we really WANT these Russian state hostilities to stop, we must make it really damaging for the Kremlin interests so that we change their pragmatic calculus.
Symbolic sanctions on (1) irrelevant individuals or (2) known Russian intelligence personnel are worthless since those people don’t care, so it does not hurt the Kremlin leaders.
As @IZaslavskiy proposes, we need to go after the Kremlin oligarchs who keep Putin in power. They must be the target of our sanctions to make it really hurt for the Kremlin dictatorship.
Anything else will be read in Moscow as Europe saying:
"Keep doing it, we don’t really care, we are just pretending that we are responding but we (Europeans) love your dirty money via Nord Stream 2 and other elite capture projects."
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Foreign Policy Committee of the Czech Senate asks the Czech government to "decrease number of employees of Russian diplomacy in the Czech Republic to one".
In other words: to expel the whole Russian diplomatic presence and keep just the Russian Ambassador.
I LOVE THIS VIEW:
18 Russian intelligence officers (SVR and GRU) are leaving Czech territory right now.
Czech Prime Minister @AndrejBabis & VicePM/Interim For.Minister @jhamacek announced that GRU unit 29155 was "involved" in a 2014 explosion of Czech ammo depot (Vrbětice) which killed two Czech citizen.
DETAILS OF GRU OPERATION, AS EXPLAINED BY CZECH POLICE INVESTIGATION, @okundra reports:
On 13 October 2014, two GRU Unit 29155 officers flew by Aeroflot from Moscow to Prague. They left on 16 October 2014 to Austria and then flew back to Moscow.
Let us have a look to what led to the complete failure of @JosepBorrellF who was completely humiliated in Moscow. It is a strategic problem, not just ad hoc screw-up.
Usually, large EU countries select weak High Representatives for Foreign and Security Policy (HiRep) so that HIReps serve as their tools, not as strong players.
So they chose @JosepBorrellF with no real Europe-wide executive track record.
October 2019: With dozens of European security experts, we voiced our fears that @JosepBorrellF will be a weak EU foreign policy chief:
HOW A JOINT COUNTER-INTELLIGENCE OPERATION CAUGHT GRU RED-HANDED:
New details of Russian military intelligence (GRU) operation in the Czech Republic are out thanks to @okundra & @spurny2 (Czech weekly magazine @RESPEKT_CZ):
- (Russian) Assistant Military Attache to Prague Dmitrij Bondarenko cultivated a Czech arms leader. Since 2018, Bondarenko developed a clandestine arms deal with him.
- In January 2019, Bondarenko was replaced by another GRU officer Jevgrenij Sergejevic Borisenko in Prague.
- Borisenko kept meeting the Czech arms dealer on monthly basis, discussing “the order (or specific weapons and ammo)”.
- Czech police tracked and arrested a gang of Czech weapons dealers in late May 2020, including this Czech arms dealer - the contact of GRU.
(Thread) EU leaders are making a strategic mistake for the whole Europe by trying to finalise the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) now.
Let me explain why this mistake will have deep geopolitical implications. It is greed over geopolitical wisdom:
ANGLE #1: TRUST
Just in 2020, China has broken multiple international treaties it has signed up for. It became a rough actor which cannot be trusted.
Just in 2020, we have seen China blackmailing individual EU member states (Germany, Czech Republic, Sweden, others).
Moreover: China openly strategically blackmails Australia, our fellow democracy.
Therefore, we cannot trust what China promises, we need to have hard tools to force it to obey the rules it signed up for. Without this, it is a strategic defeat for the EU.
(Thread) WHY WE CANNOT TRUST ZOOM FOR PRIVATE CALLS
Many people use Zoom for public events, which is fine.
The problem is that often Zoom, is used for private calls. Many security professionals do not trust it for following reasons:
The main problem is that Zoom has much of its business in mainland China, so under effective control of the largest and most technologically sophisticated totalitarian regime of today.
1) In the past, data of Western Zoom users were transferred via Zoom servers in China. Zoom claims it will not happen again. But: Zoom in China is under direct control of Chinese laws which force it to cooperate with Chinese intelligence agencies and be silent about it.