On Sat, Germany distanced itself from comments made by its navy chief after video footage emerged in which the vice-admiral said Russian President Vladimir Putin deserved respect and that Kyiv would never win back annexed Crimea from Moscow.
German Navy Chief Kay-Achim Schoenbach apologized for his "rash" comments, published on YouTube and widely circulated on German media, and called them a mistake.
In a Twitter post, Schoenbach said his remarks at a thinktank discussion in India expressed a personal opinion and not the official position of the defence ministry.
In the video, Schoenbach, speaking in English, says Putin seeks to be treated at eye level by the West.
"What he (Putin) really wants is respect," Schoenbach says.
"And my God, giving someone respect is low cost, even no cost... It is easy to give him the respect he really demands - and probably also deserves," Schoenbach said, calling Russia an old and important country.
Schoenbach concedes Russia's actions in Ukraine needed to be addressed, but adds that "the Crimea peninsula is gone, it will never come back, this is a fact", thereby contradicting the joint Western position
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry called on Germany to publicly reject the navy chief's comments.
Schoenbach's comments that Crimea would never return to Ukraine and that Russia's president deserved respect could impair Western efforts to de-escalate the situation, it said
The bank has been on regulators’ radar ever since a joint inspection by the Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) and FIAU last year found extremely weak structures in place to prevent its clients from using it to launder potential proceeds of criminal activity.
This led regulators to come down hard on the bank, freezing all its funds and appointing EY to administer its assets. Police and financial regulators have since been inspecting transactions w/ potential links to fuel smuggling, drug trafficking and trade with sanctioned countries
Just when it seemed as though Calgary-based oil producer Hurricane Hydrocarbons was finally getting its business back on track, things once again took a turn for the bizarre last week.
The former chairman of the board at the company's Kazakhstan oil refinery, Nurlan Bizakov - who resigned in August after Hurricane took over the refinery - showed up with an armed guard and tried to seize control of the entire operation.
According to a BBC report, Mr. Bizakov apparently commandeered a militia group attached to the Kazakhstan Interior Ministry and tried to take over the refinery.
15 Oct 2020, a federal grand jury in the Western District PA returned an indictment against six Russian military intel officers for their roles in targeting and compromising computer systems worldwide,
including:
those relating to critical infrastructure in Ukraine
a political campaign in France, and the country of Georgia
international victims of the “NotPetya” malware attacks (including critical infrastructure providers)
international victims associated with the 2018 Winter Olympic Games and investigations of nerve agent attacks that have been publicly attributed to the Russian government.
A Russian national today admitted his role in hacking that targeted major corporate networks, compromised 160M+ credit card numbers & resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses – the largest such scheme ever prosecuted in the US
On 30 Dec 2016, the day after Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for interfering in the 2016 US election, Tillmann Werner was sitting down to breakfast in Bonn, Germany.
A grand jury in California (Northern D) has indicted four defendants, including two officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), for computer hacking, economic espionage and other criminal offenses in connection with a conspiracy