NBC reports that, shockingly, during his latest Moscow pilgrimage Witkoff met with Putin and his two negotiators alone and without his own interpreter, relying - in breach of protocol - on a locally present one. . However, this seems half the problem (1/n)nbcnews.com/world/russia/r…
Here's the video released by the Kremlin. It clearly shows Witkoff pointing at the young woman and asking "Interpreter?", to which Putin & Co say "yes". Following that, cryptically Witkoff asks "from Embassy?", to which he again gets a confirmation.
So what embassy is the interpreter from? Obviously there's no Russian embassy in Moscow (unless Witkoff thinks so), so a logical conclusion is that he was assured she was, hm, sent by or approved by the US embassy? Anyway, let's look at who she is.
Unfortunately, the video only shows a glimpse of her side profile. Fortunately, today's AI face search tools are happy with that breadcrumb of visual information.
She apparently is the government appointed interpreter for key Russian political figures, such as Putin, Lavrov and Medvedev.
More worryingly, she's also apparently the interpreter for the head of Russia's foreign intelligence agency, Naryshkin.
Her name is Natalia Koshkina, born 1991. Currently she works as second secretary of the Russian MFA's linguistics department..but a few years ago she worked as third secretary of the Russian mission to NATO in Brussels.. almost certainly not am interpreter job.
Leaked social insurance records show that in addition to being employed by the MFA, she is also working for the holding company of RT, the Kremlin's propaganda mouthpiece.
So the question is: did Witkoff really think she was sent by the US embassy? Or did, maybe worse, the UA embassy in Moscow endorse her as a "neutral" interpreter for a negotiation where lives of hundreds of thousands of people - plus the security of half the world - were at stake?
Or as @FideliusSchmid posited, unfortunately sarcastically: Wow, of she's a US asset, the Americans are going places...
(obviously I meant the US embassy, not the UA embassy, typo)
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Pavel Durov, Telegram's founder, claims he was poisoned in 2018 (symptoms he describes are indeed are consistent with nerve agents/organoposphates). He chose "not to tell my colleagues so I wouldn't scare them"
I believe him this happened. Sadly, he didn't volunteer information on where this happened (I wish he had, so we could triangulate the usual suspects - in 2018 he was a MAJOR thorn in the side of Russian authorities). But thanks to leaked databases we can have some guesses.
Based on leaked travel data, he spent most of the time in 2018 in Dubai, interspersed with stays in Switzerland, France and the UK. Interestingly (likely coincidentally), he left the UK for Dubai a day after the Skripal poisoners left London for Moscow.
In our new investigation into Russia's use of children for their military drone program, crucial evidence came from @tashurkevich's undercover phone calls. Here are some of the most striking confessions she extracted.
What are the tasks assigned to the kids? Well they sound like things from Ender's Game (link to full investigation here: )
Here Tatsiana calls "Maksim" who explains the kids' "oath of silence" in mentioning the war.
If anyone had any doubts about the subvertive nature of Chinese AI freebies, here's a good example.
I decided to ask @deepseek_ai to do a mundane job: edit the text of a recent @the_ins_ru article to make it more vocal-delivery friendly, so we can record it as a podcast. SFSG.
Here's the beginning of the original article that DeepSeek totally promised would not alter, but for style edits
And here's the offered text that I almost choked while reading out to my daughter.
Serbian opposition activists post photo of what is alleged to be a police Jeep with a mounted long range acoustic device. Visual and audio evidence already seen from open sources is compatible with the use of such devices. If this photo is verified then there's no doubt anymore.
This is especially ridiculous given that Russia's man in Belgrade, Deputy PM Aleksandar Vulin, publicly thanked Russian intelligence for "helping quash color revolution attempts" in Serbia. I.e. any use of sonic weapon would've been coordinated with/done by RU intel to begin with
And a reminder that Unit 29155 of GRU, whose members are very frequent visitors to Belgrade, spent years researching "potential capabilities of non-lethal acoustic weapon in urban warfare"
BREAKING: the House sub-committee on intelligence says "now convinced that foreign adversary behind AHI (Havana syndrome) incidents", "Intelligence community has hindered the subcommittee's efforts" to get to the truth.
The Subcommittee is aware that the IC continues to withhold valuable information from the Subcommittee. For this reason, a final unclassified report cannot be issued at this time. In addition, the Subcommittee plans to issue a classified report that explains why the Subcommittee finds the conclusions reached in the ICA dubious at best, and misleading at worst. It is not possible, in an unclassified format, to detail the full scale and scope of the Subcommittee’s investigation, as well as the findings that have resulted from this investigation. Nevertheless, it is the hope of the Subcommittee that this interim unclassified report will shed light on the need to better understand AHIs and the toll they have taken on the IC workforce.
The Subcommittee found that the process resulting in the ICA, titled “Updated Assessment on Anomalous Health Incidents,” which is often used to portray a consensus discounting foreign adversary involvement in AHIs, lacked analytic integrity and was highly irregular in its formulation. The Subcommittee’s investigation has uncovered information illustrative of problems with the ICA’s creation, review, and release. Some of these problems may include a rush to convey a consensus amongst elements of the IC in an effort to control the narrative with the American public, policymakers, foreign partners and adversaries, and IC employees.
This must be the funniest Russian Intel failure I have seen. It's 'Allo 'allo level. The FBI read the Whatsapp (!) chats between FSB's Col. Popov and his asset Ionov, and indicted them. And the two continued to discuss the indictment...on Whatsapp!!!