On Friday, a trailer dropped for the newest Prigozhin movie, and the sequel to Tourist: “GRANITE,” an action movie about Russian “specialists” Mozambique
Mozambique is an odd choice for setting their sequel to a movie about the Central African Republic because by all accounts, Wagner had a terrible time there
A lot of the same faces in this movie as in Tourist, and it looks like fundamentally the same set up. Seems considerably more racist in its portrayal of Africans.
We’ve got our heroes, mostly featured firing into the jungle or climbing off of aircraft (note the Novorossiya flag patch)
And a villainous European who is paying off a local warlord to defeat the Russians. Exactly the plot of Tourist. Not a lot of new ideas being kicked around the Aurum LLC offices
Like FACA in Tourist, looks like the FADM are portrayed as being kind of bumbling until the Russians arrive to whip them into shape
Some references to Soviet involvement in Mozambique. A Portuguese/French/something (?) guy says “Russians never change - I already met them here in the 70s” referring to FRELIMO presumably
A Mozambican guy tells a young boy that the Soviets were “like gods to them.”
If they are going to keep making these and I’m going to continue being obligated to watch them, they could at least make them more fun.
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TASS reports that EU members have approved the introduction of sanctions against Wagner Group entities. The EU Council will then have to approve this decision on the 13th.
Killer investigation from @ZackKopplin into the Barzanis US property holdings dropped today. Some key insights into how corporate secrecy and property ownership works in the US, benefiting kleptocrats and the super wealthy
The Barzanis have been lucky in most large leaks - they haven’t appeared in the Panama Papers and the Pandora Papers. They do appear in @C4ADS Sandcastles database of Dubai properties, and as Zack shows, hidden deep in US records as well.
For more on the Barzani family in the UAE, check out Zack’s thread:
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Amazing new Conflict Armament Research @conflictarm report on Russian weapons in the Donbas makes use of @C4ADS' Seamless Horizons data environment to find out how European components ended up in Russian UAVs in the Donbas
It's been 10 years since South Sudan won its independence. Corruption by the ruling elite and transnational illicit flows have denied the country both peace and prosperity.
THREAD on @C4ADS' work to illuminate the networks behind violence & corruption in South Sudan.
Last year, we launched conflict.id, a project to catalog imagery of weapons and vehicles used by warring parties in South Sudan prior to the UN embargo. It provides a window into the origins of weapons sustaining the conflict, and a baseline for conflict researchers.
This includes everything from analysis of weapons like NORINCO CQ rifles contributed by @CalibreObscura to MRAPs and other armored vehicles used by the SSPDF and non-state armed groups.