Napetost v Ukrajini - Krimu

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"The Russians could leave tomorrow if they wanted to — but they want a mess," Oliker says. "They want to show what happens when you have a Maidan movement: disaster follows."

In other words, a more traditional, short, all-out war differs from the Russian approach in Ukraine the way that an execution by lethal injection differs from a crucifixion: Both are intended to kill the prisoner, but one is intended to make a very public demonstration of a long and agonizing death in order to send a message to others. In this punitive scenario, cruel and unusual punishment is a feature, not a bug.

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An interesting riff off this idea is described more fully by Felgenhauer. His contention is that this whole thing is analogous to World War I's Verdun campaign. Sparing all of the historical details, the nut of it is the theory that if things can be made to go badly enough, it will cause political support for the government in Kiev to crumble.

So, in a way, it's not about what Russia needs to do to seize the territory, but rather what it can do to make the Ukrainian government collapse and, in so doing, surrender the contested regions.

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Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych has offered the post of prime minister to opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

He also offered former boxer Vitali Klitschko the position of deputy PM.

In response, the opposition leaders did not explicitly say whether they accepted the offer, but repeated their demands for new presidential elections.

The offer came after talks on Saturday with the opposition in a new effort to end the deadly unrest that has spread across the country.

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Nuland: OK. He's now gotten both Serry and [UN Secretary General] Ban Ki-moon to agree that Serry could come in Monday or Tuesday. So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and to have the UN help glue it and, you know, f.uck the EU.

Pyatt: No, exactly. And I think we've got to do something to make it stick together because you can be pretty sure that if it does start to gain altitude, that the Russians will be working behind the scenes to try to torpedo it. And again the fact that this is out there right now, I'm still trying to figure out in my mind why Yanukovych (garbled) that. In the meantime there's a Party of Regions faction meeting going on right now and I'm sure there's a lively argument going on in that group at this point. But anyway we could land jelly side up on this one if we move fast. So let me work on Klitschko and if you can just keep... we want to try to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing. The other issue is some kind of outreach to Yanukovych but we probably regroup on that tomorrow as we see how things start to fall into place.

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Highly destructive malware that infected at least three regional power authorities in Ukraine led to a power failure that left hundreds of thousands of homes without electricity last week, researchers said.

The outage left about half of the homes in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine without electricity, Ukrainian news service TSN reported in an article posted a day after the December 23 failure. The report went on to say that the outage was the result of malware that disconnected electrical substations.

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"It's a milestone because we've definitely seen targeted destructive events against energy before—oil firms, for instance—but never the event which causes the blackout," John Hultquist, head of iSIGHT's cyber espionage intelligence practice, told Ars. "It's the major scenario we've all been concerned about for so long."

Researchers from antivirus provider ESET have confirmed that multiple Ukrainian power authorities were infected by "BlackEnergy," a package discovered in 2007 that was updated two years ago to include a host of new functions, including the ability to render infected computers unbootable. More recently, ESET found, the malware was updated again to add a component dubbed KillDisk, which destroys critical parts of a computer hard drive and also appears to have functions that sabotage industrial control systems. The latest BlackEnergy also includes a backdoored secure shell (SSH) utility that gives attackers permanent access to infected computers.

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In 2014, the group behind BlackEnergy, which iSIGHT has dubbed the Sandworm gang, targeted the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Ukrainian and Polish government agencies, and a variety of sensitive European industries. iSIGHT researchers say the Sandworm gang has ties to Russia, although readers are cautioned on attributing hacking attacks to specific groups or governments.

According to ESET, the Ukrainian power authorities were infected using booby-trapped macro functions embedded in Microsoft Office documents. If true, it's distressing that industrial control systems used to supply power to millions of people could be infected using such a simple social-engineering ploy. It's also concerning that malware is now being used to create power failures that can have life-and-death consequences for large numbers of people.

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Latest figures, for the third quarter of 2015, show the Ukrainian economy contracting at an annual rate of more than 7%, and IMF support has been vital in preventing a bigger collapse in output and in brokering a debt relief deal with investors.

But interest rates on Ukrainian bonds have risen sharply and the currency, the hryvnia, was trading close to a one-year low against the US dollar.

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Today we publish the video, obtained by SMERSH counterintelligence service OSpN Troy surgically.
In this video OL'KHON (name in the public domain are not disclosed) brutally torturing and promises to hammer to death (which he subsequently did) a resident of the village Kommunar, who later went missing and the investigating authorities DNI carry it wanted on the application his relatives of the missing missing.
All materials related to the illegal, criminal activities of the above-mentioned "freedom fighters Donbass" will be transferred with the accompanying materials Russian military prosecutor's office (since he is a citizen of the Russian Federation) for a decision on the fact of a war crime.

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Segodnya v 13-00 na VDNKH budet kontsert gruppy SCOOTER i ne tol'ko ikh. I razve my s Grishaney Filipovichem mozhem propustit' takoye meropriyatiye?! Konechno zhe net, tak chto kto kuda, a my idem v narod!)))

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VVP (padalci) corrects errors Geyropy!))))))))))

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Mi Moskali!!!

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Moy luchshiy drug, ty byl smelym, otvazhnym i ty vsegda mog prikryt' , tsenoyu svoyey zhizn'yu , spiny druzey i tovarishchey. Segodnya ty pokinul nas navsegda na etom svete , no ya vsegda budu pomnit' o tebe , poka sam zhiv... Zemlya tebe pukhom "Gusar" i vechnaya pamyat'....

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http://thetim.es/1kBA3yU (AFP/Getty)

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Yesterday on Feb 16 2016 early in morning at 8:18 am Russian troops used “TOR” SAM aka SA-15 “Gauntlet” in Lugansk city which is controlled by militants of so-called Lugansk People’s Republic. The sound of heavy explosion was heard in the city center, West and South of Lugansk. The rocket exploded about 40 seconds later (some locals report from 1 to 2 min after first sound of explosion) in the air above dense residential area, the head of the rocket was found in the South part of Lugansk also in dense residential area. Luckily nobody got wounded and no damages reported. ... Ukraine doesn’t have “TOR” missile systems since 2001. 1st time “TOR” was spotted as part of Russian military convoy moving through the territory of Lugansk Region in Krasnodon town, it was going in the direction of Russian border on September 3 2014.

Head of 9M331 missile used by “TOR” SAM found in Lugansk

Part of 9M331 missile after military exercises in Russia

Head of 9M331 missile used by “TOR” SAM found in Lugansk

Militants immediately arrived to that location and they were collecting even smallest debris, like 5 cm in size. That process took them several hours and they left the area only after 2 pm (local Lugansk time).

More likely “TOR” SAM system was delivered from Russia and it was operated by Russian soldiers. That’s why authorities of so-called Lugansk People’s Republic are trying to hide the incident. Observers from OSCE Special Monitoring Mission already visited location where the head of the rocket found, but there is no report from them about that yet.

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ATO spox: For the first time in a couple of last months, the enemy applied MLRS “Grad”

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Today, the National Security and Defence Committee has declassified and published the minutes of the most important high-level meeting of Ukrainian leadership after the Maidan. Much of this information has been already discussed by analysts and the media; but some details are still curious to point out to understand the ensuing political debate in Ukraine and beyond.

On 28 February 2014, as Russia was occupying the Crimea with its troops, officials of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine (NSDC) had met in one of the rooms of Verkhovna Rada. As Oleksandr Turchynov, then a parliament speaker and acting president of post-Maidan Ukraine, himself pointed out, the discussion was held in unprotected premises, so the participants would probably be unlikely to cite too sensitive details.

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PM Yatseniuk mulled a political settlement with the self-proclaimed authorities in Crimea (fiscal decentralization, language concessions), but admitted Russia would not allow such a settlement.

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Prosecutor General Makhnitsky, nominated by the right-wing-populist Svoboda party, claimed that the most his Office could charge Aksenov and Konstantinov with (Russian puppets in Crimea) was “illegal power grab”, not separatism. That nonchalant designation provoked Turchynov’s indignant outburst that they were “terrorists” and “separatists”.

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Some participants seemed more concerned with the internal threats to the authorities in mainland Ukraine rather than the Russian aggression in Crimea. For example, deputy PM Yarema (responsible for law enforcement) insisted on immediate arrest of a notorious Right Sector member as a way to show consolidation of power post-Maidan.

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Apparently, Yatseniuk was a dove in that discussion with tacit support from his colleagues Yarema and Tenyukh. Tymoshenko also claimed that “we should become the most peaceful nation on Earth and behave like doves of peace”; her only proposal was “holding peace conferences” and writing addresses to Western countries.

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PM Yatseniuk appeared quite pessimistic about Ukraine’s chances to get military assistance from any of the Western countries.

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SSU chief Nalyvaichenko claimed that “Americans and Germans” asked Ukraine to refrain from any active steps, because their intelligence signaled Russia’s readiness to start ground operations against Ukraine in the east. Similarly, the then Foreign Minister Deshchytsia implied Visegrad-4 countries (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic) cautioned him against drastic moves.

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Yet the first time when Tymoshenko actually entered the discussion was when Turchynov suggested that Ukraine could request joining the NATO. That’s when Tymoshenko declared that talking of “urgent NATO membership would provoke even bigger Russian aggression”.

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Right in the middle of the discussion, the Head of Russian Duma Naryshkin called Turchynov on the phone to “pass threats from Putin”, as Turchynov himself put it. Allegedly, Naryshkin warned that if a single Russian soldier in Crimea was killed, Russia would declare the Ukrainian leadership “war criminals”.

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In response to those threats, Turchynov suggested a massive mobilization and transfer of Ukrainian troops from the West and Centre to the Eastern borders. Tymoshenko interrupted Turchynov to claim that a massive panic would ensue as Ukrainians will see “tanks roll across their cities”

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Declassified Ukrainian NatSec grams from Feb '14: "USA and Germany ask us not to engage with RU in Crimea, to prevent all-out war"

SBU chief, Feb 28 '14: "We have not more than 1,200 loyal soldiers in Crimea as of now. Russia has at least 20 k. It's futile"

All members of NatSec Council (except Turchinov) voted against sending army to Crimea, as "futile", and not in line with Western wishes.

Timoshenko at NatSec meeting (why there?): "If we had 1% chance of winning, I'd be the first to vote for military response. We have 0%"

SBU chief, Feb 14: Throughout the country, we have maybe 5,000 fully-qualified active soldiers. The army is a disaster. And Russia knows it"

Feb 2014. @Yatsenyuk_AP: "RU army is poised to invade mainland if we give them a pretext. Today we don't have capacity to defend Kiev"

Feb 28 '14: Turchinov phoned with Naryshkin, who threatened "dramatic military measures if Ukraine doesn't relent on RU speakers' rights".

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Paranoia and Purges: The Dark and Dirty Battle for Power in Rebel-Held Ukraine

The rebel commander had been married for less than 24 hours before the car bomb exploded. Pavel Dryomov, one of the most prominent, pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, was celebrating his wedding in the rebel-held town of Stakhanov with his new wife and a colorful array of guests, including men drawn from the ranks of his own Cossack militia.

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The assassination was the latest in a string of bloody murders of maverick rebel commanders in Ukraine's restive east, fuelling fears among senior separatist ranks of further purges. Rival factions are jostling for power as two opposing camps in the rebels' self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic (LNR) struggle to consolidate their rule. In exclusive interviews with VICE News, against a disturbing backdrop of Soviet-style paranoia, illegal detentions, torture and extrajudicial killings, rebel military chiefs and well-placed sources in the regime have spoken of their profound sense of unease — and their fears about who could be next.

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