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Anders Åslund Profile picture
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12 Dec, 4 tweets, 1 min read
What is @ZelenskyyUa up to?
1. He appears to maintain his partnership with Ihor Kolomoisky pursued in the US, UK & Israel, but not in Ukraine.
2. Yanukovych's top lawyer Andriy Portnov returned with Z but was now sanctioned by the US.
3. In September 2019, he appointed a friend of his, Oleksandr Gogliashvili, deputy minister of Interior, but he was just revealed to be a Russian citizen.
4. He has protected his deputy chief of staff Tatarov from prosecution for corruption.
5. The Pandora Papers show that Z & three colleagues received $41 million in their offshore company from Kolomoisky. Z has refused to answer any question about this unreported & untaxed transaction.
6. Somebody in Z's presidential office blew the sophisticated & daring military intelligence operation to arrest 33 Russian Wagner mercenaries ("Wagnergate"). No credible explanation has been offered.
This looks like political suicide to me. Wake up, Z!

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More from @anders_aslund

Anders Åslund Profile picture
11 Dec
After a seemingly successful video call Biden-Putin, many things have gone wrong. Biden allows the conversation to focus on Putin's aggressive demands. It is Biden, Ukraine & the West that should make demands to Putin.
1. Withdraw offensive forces from Ukraine's border, Crimea & Donbas! Return to prior transparency & preannouncement of military exercises of size! Why has the West let up on those standards?
2. Russia is the main source of destabilization in the former Soviet Union. Demand that Russian troops withdraw from Donbas, Transnistria, Abkhazia & South Ossetia! Russia has repeatedly made international agreements that it will not violate national borders. Hammer that in!
Read 9 tweets
Anders Åslund Profile picture
10 Dec
Outstanding 20-minute lecture by Dmitri Muratov.
"The practice of torture in prisons and during investigation is also alive and well in today’s Russia."
End: "I want journalists to die old."
nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2…
"Criminal cases in our country are often based on false accusations and political motives. Opposition politician Alexei Navalny is being held in jail based on a false accusation from the CEO of the Russian branch of a big French cosmetics company....
...The accuser was somehow not summoned to the court or neither pleaded to be an aggrieved party. But Navalny is behind bars. The cosmetics company chose to step aside hoping that the odour from this case will not harm the scent of the company’s products."
Read 5 tweets
Anders Åslund Profile picture
7 Dec
After almost three hours after the end of the video call, Putin came out with a statement, so far only in Russian. It states that the call was mainly devoted to the "internal Ukrainian crisis and the absence of progress in fulfillment of the Minsk..."
kremlin.ru/events/preside…
Untypically, the Kremlin mentions that Biden "underlined the allegedly 'threatening' character of the movement of Russian troops close to the Ukrainian partners and mentioned sanctions that the US and its allies would be ready to undertake in the case of further escalation."
"Vladimir Putin responded that the responsibility must not be transferred to the shoulders of Russia, since it is NATO that is carrying out dangerous attempts to seize the Ukrainian territory..."
Read 8 tweets
Anders Åslund Profile picture
6 Dec
It is great that the White House has issued its first ever US Strategy on Countering Corruption. It shows how important corruption has become for national security & how the Biden administration understands it. The more I dig in it, the better it looks.
whitehouse.gov/wp-content/upl…
Initially, it appears focused on international corruption, and it does not state that the US is the biggest offshore haven in the world and it offers no assessment of how large the US volume of dark money is, but it gets better and better.
The great US shortcoming is the millions of anonymous companies. The strategy states clearly:
"Beneficial ownership transparency: The United States will publish regulations and build a beneficial ownership database to implement the Corporate Transparency Act."
Great!
Read 10 tweets
Anders Åslund Profile picture
6 Dec
What @POTUS should tell #Putin tomorrow:
1. Ukraine is a sovereign nation and has the right to decide whom and what it receives on its territory, including arms and foreign military. It has the right to join NATO (repeatedly stated in public).
2. The US has coordinated with its Western allies & will impose crippling financial and personal sanctions, which Biden will detail (guess: sanctioning more Russian bonds, secondary trade in sovereigns & corporate state bonds, VEB, oligarchs with families, etc.)
3. The US will not give Putin any benefit from his illicit military threat & it will not make any concessions on behalf of Ukraine, which is a sovereign nation.
Read 4 tweets
Anders Åslund Profile picture
5 Dec
Watching responses on Twitter today, I see these recommendations what to do if Russia attacks Ukraine & they should be declared before:
1. Germany and the US should close Nord Stream 2 for good in line with their July 21 statement.
2. Russia should be expelled from the SWIFT payment system, as Iran was.
3. Russia should be excluded from most of the global financial system.
4. Western intelligence should publicize & freeze all Putin's & his cronies' international financial assets.
5. All Putin's cronies should be sanctioned.
6. Gennady Timchenko & Boris Rotenberg should be deprived of their Finnish citizenships.
7. The US should sanction Gerhard Schröder and Matthias Warnig.
8. The US, UK and Canada should move their troops in Ukraine to the Russian border
Read 6 tweets

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