🧵2/Meduza special correspondent Lilia Yapparova spoke with Ukrainians who have been released from the facilities, as well as with their relatives and lawyers, to find out how this clandestine prison system works.
🧵3/International law prohibits participants in armed conflicts from taking civilians captive. Nonetheless, abducting civilians and holding them prisoner has become one of the hallmarks of Russia’s war against Ukraine, according to human rights workers.
🧵4/The prisoners’ Russian captors did not allow them to sleep. Olha was fed expired food once a day, and only had 30–40 seconds to eat it. The brought her rust-colored water from the bathroom.
🧵5/Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) has been recruiting former Islamic State (or ISIS) fighters and trying to embed them in pro-Ukrainian Chechen units and Crimean Tatar battalions.
🧵1/The Republican-led House Oversight Committee has spent most of the past five months trying to link “the Biden family” (but not Biden himself) to millions of dollars proffered by foreign business interests before Biden became president.
🧵2/It is, therefore, safe to assume that the committee’s interest would be piqued if it learned that the Democratic front-runner for his party’s nomination was actively receiving unspecified amounts of money from a foreign business — one linked closely to a foreign leader.
🧵3/The Oversight Committee would no doubt launch hearings if it heard that the Democratic front-runner was actively promoting that foreign business, much less a shared business venture between the candidate and the foreign entity.
🧵A Russian oil executive, Ravil Maganov, Chairman of Russia’s second-largest oil producer Lukoil, a company that criticized President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, died Thursday after reportedly falling out of his hospital window in Moscow.
The company issued a statement Thursday confirming the death of Maganov, 67, "after a severe illness," but did not specify the cause. “Ravil Maganov immensely contributed to the development of not only the Company but of the entire Russian oil and gas sector,” the statement read.
It was a rare Russian business to come out against Putin’s Ukraine invasion, which the Kremlin calls its “special military operation.” The company’s board of directors called for an end to the war in early March.
🧵DOJ has delivered a shocking view of how classified information was treated by Trump, including that highly classified documents were likely concealed and removed for the purposes of obstruction. DOJ has also released a timeline of events going back to January 2021.
🧵In responding to Trump's judge, DOJ included an image showing how the FBI found clearly marked, highly classified documents of the most sensitive kind, sitting in plain sight, spread across the floor. Other documents were recovered from the drawers of Trump’s desk.
🧵From the moment Trump reluctantly left the White House in January 2021, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was working to retrieve materials that Trump improperly transported to Mar-a-Lago.
🧵DOJ has not only explained the events timeline more clearly, but has also delivered a shocking view of how classified information has been treated by Trump, including that highly classified documents were likely concealed and removed for the purposes of obstruction.
🧵Included in the filing is information that resets the narrative on several events. For one, in response to the subpoena months before the raid, Trump’s attorneys signed a false statement saying that their own “diligent search” found no other classified materials.
🧵The factual background includes the statement that from the moment Trump reluctantly left the White House in January 2021, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has worked to retrieve materials that had been improperly taken to Mar-a-Lago.
🧵Over the last three decades, radical conservative billionaire Leonard Leo has created an interconnected series of institutions designed, behind the curtain, to quietly reshape the American judiciary and in turn America itself into an extremist right-wing hell.
🧵Leo's new infusion of 1.6 billion dollars is going to solidify this radical reactionary effort in a way that will be hard for anyone to counter, in part thanks to new election law rules created by the judiciary he has helped shape.
🧵While much of the reporting has focused on the means by which the transaction was fixed to avoid paying at least $400 million in taxes, the results for American democracy are truly dire: America is becoming the personal property of billionaire fascists to rule.
🧵🧐 We seem be witnessing a Trump family member walk away with billions after selling out Yemen, Khashoggi, armaments deals, and the US to KSA -- with virtually NO questions from Congress or the mainstream media.
🧵That MBS who the Wall Street Journal reports is now moving his country closer to Russia and China in order to harm our democracy and Democratic administration.