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45РОССИЯ—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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PoorAndDangerous
Superstar
Did I seriously get reported for saying the Republicans should be executed for treason? Smh
:moscowmjpls::moscowmjpls::moscowmjpls:
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The Tragedy of the Age-Old Kremlin-Vor Alliance (Op-ed)
From Stalin to Putin, the Kremlin's mutually beneficial ties to Russian gangsters go way back.
Vladimir Putin
Marina Lystseva / TASS
The current geopolitical tussle between Russia and the West has impoverished our debate. Too often, it replaces nuanced understanding with snappy and snarky sound bites.
One example is the description of Russia as a “mafia state.” As if that can encapsulate the complex, sometimes hostile or cooperative relationship between Russia’s rulers, spooks, population and gangsters. Nonetheless, since 2014, the ties between mafia and state have certainly become closer.
For generations, there has been an unusually close connection between the underworld and "upperworld" powers. Stalin carried out bank robberies and piracy with mobsters such as the infamous Simon Ter-Petrossian — or “Kamo,” as he went by in criminal and revolutionary circles — in part to raise funds for the Bolshevik revolution.
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The Cheka political police recruited bandits, and later Stalin would coopt vory — “thieves,” members of the professional criminal subculture — to be the enforcers, foremen and even guards of the Gulag slave-labour camps.
In the twilight years of the Soviet Union, organized crime was part of the connective tissue holding corrupt Party officials and the barons of the black market together. And in the anarchy of the 1990s, the distinctions between mobsters, entrepreneurs and officials were often more theoretical than real.
Of course, when the little-known Vladimir Putin was campaigning for the presidency in 1999-2000, he promised law and order, and many believed him. I spoke to one vor who took to keeping a packed suitcase under his bed in case he had suddenly to head to the airport ahead of an arrest warrant.
But he never had to.
In hindsight, given Putin’s crucial role in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office as its ambassador to the city’s underworld, and the powerful Tambovskaya crime group in particular, we should not have expected him necessarily to take on the gangsters.
Instead, he domesticated them. The word went out, routinely communicated through earnest conversations between criminals and the police officers meant to arrest them, that there was a new social contract.
Criminals could continue to be criminals; the police would continue to police them. But if at any point the vory looked as if they were posing any challenge to the state, then they would be treated as enemies, and life would get very hard. The criminals adjusted very quickly to this new world, one in which the state had reaffirmed its status as the biggest gang in town.
During the Second Chechen War, the Chechen gangs across Russia largely abandoned Chechnya to its fate. And more generally, the indiscriminate car bombings and drive-by shootings, such a feature of the wild 90s, and symbols of a state unable to control its streets, ended.
Occasionally, individuals were deemed to have become too big for their boots or embarrassingly prominent, such as Tambovskaya kingpin Vladimir Barsukov (Kumarin) or Said Amirov (Said the Undying) the notorious mayor of Makhachkala. Then the state would swoop in with deliberate overkill, commandos leaping from helicopters to a chorus of sirens, in a piece of law-enforcement theater to remind everyone of the power of the state. The state did not seem to consider organized crime a priority, so long as it knew its place.
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Over years of talking to Russian police officers and investigators, I have been heartened and impressed by the number who clearly wanted to do their jobs. They may take a small bribe for a small service here, turn a blind eye to a minor infraction there. Ultimately, though, many wanted to tackle the gangsters.
But the corruption still to endemic in the state, and the tight links between criminal, business and political elites, especially at the local level, mean that the major criminals are, unless they arouse the ire of someone higher up the pecking order, pretty much untouchable.
As a result, many of the law enforcers confine themselves to targeting middle-ranking criminals, whom they at least have a chance of convicting, rather than major players who are safe beneath their krysha, their protective roof of corrupt favors and mutual assistance.
Until 2014, the relationship between the Kremlin and the kleptocratic Russian elite on one hand, and the gangsters on the other, seemed to be getting more tenuous. Putin might still occasionally use some underworld slang to demonstrate his tough-guy credentials, but the days when senior figures of the business and political elite would openly hobnob with gangsters had largely passed. Furthermore, the vory had lost their old, gulag-chic identifiers of tattoos and leather. They were becoming a new breed of white-collar gangster-businessman.
The new age of geopolitical tension may be reversing that trend and bringing Kremlin and crooks closer together again. In his bid to make an impoverished Russia punch like a great power, Putin has created what I call a mobilization state.
This is not totalitarianism. There is still independent business, free journalism and civil society. But аt any time they may be asked — and in Godfather style, this is a request that cannot be refused — for favors in the name of the state. This also applies to the gangsters.
We have seen hackers pressed into service as footsoldiers of cyberwar and espionage. Gangsters charged with assassinating Chechen fundraisers in Turkey. Smugglers “taxed” to provide secret funds for political operations in Europe. The list goes on, as once again the Kremlin turns to criminals as instruments of its rule.
This is not a “mafia state” with its implication that either the gangsters run the government, or that the government controls the underworld.
Instead, it is simply the latest example of the corrosive way that successive regimes have tried to use organized crime as a tool of statecraft, not realizing — or perhaps not caringm — how much the vory have gained from this pernicious alliance.
Prof. Mark Galeotti is a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague and the author of the new book “The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia.” The views and opinions expressed in opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the position of The Moscow Times.
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Former Trump Tower in Azerbaijan, Dogged by Controversy, Is Engulfed by Fire
Former Trump Tower in Azerbaijan, Dogged by Controversy, Is Engulfed by Fire
By ANDREW E. KRAMERAPRIL 28, 2018
The 33-floor building in Baku, Azerbaijan, once a Trump-branded tower, is the second property linked to President Trump to catch fire this month, after a blaze in New York killed an art collector.Michael Steele/Getty Images for BEGOC
MOSCOW — A fire broke out on Saturday in a high-rise that until recently had been called Trump Tower in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, engulfing much of the building in flames by early evening.
Footage on social media showed flames shooting out of the windows and smoke billowing from the 33-floor building, which is still under construction and had been labeled “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal” by The New Yorker magazine.
The blaze, which broke out on the top floor of the building, burned down through about 20 stories before firefighters extinguished the flames by midafternoon, the news agency Interfax reported.
The fire rekindled in the evening, burning through much of the building, a video posted by the Russian news portal Lenta.ru showed.
The cause of the fire was not immediately clear. Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Emergency Situations did not release further information.
The building was the second property linked to President Trump to catch fire this month, after a blaze broke out on the 50th floor of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York, killing an art collector. That building was built in the 1980s, before sprinklers were required in new residential towers in New York City.
The Trump Organization withdrew its licensing agreement for the Baku skyscraper shortly after the 2016 election, as it promised to wind down international projects that could pose conflicts of interest to the president.
Mr. Trump had partnered in the development with the son of a former minister of transportation in the oil-rich former Soviet state.
The Trump-branded hotel never opened, but it was dogged by controversy. Mr. Trump cut the deal despite allegations by United States diplomats that the minister had dealings with front companies for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and was corrupt.
After the New Yorker article was published in 2017, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, was among lawmakers who wrote to Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin; Attorney General Jeff Sessions; and James B. Comey, then director of the F.B.I., seeking an investigation into the issues raised in the article.
The planned hotel had been under construction since 2008 and was nearing completion when Mr. Trump announced the licensing agreement six months before joining the presidential race in 2015.
His partner was Anar Mammadov, the billionaire son of the country’s former minister of transportation, Ziya Mammadov. In a diplomatic cable leaked in 2009, American diplomats described the father as “notoriously corrupt, even for Azerbaijan.”
The cable also accused the former minister of awarding highway construction projects to a onetime senior Iranian military official in the Revolutionary Guards.
“We assume Mammadov is a silent partner in these contracts,” the diplomatic cable said.
A lawyer for the Trump Organization told The Associated Press for an article published in June 2016 that the organization had been unaware of the corruption accusations and the Iranian links of the Mammadov family, but that it postponed the project that year for economic reasons.
The Trump Organization pulled out of the deal that December and dropped a host of other overseas projects after the election.
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staticshock
Veteran
Trump can never be a man of the people like this
PoorAndDangerous
Superstar
Trump can never be a man of the people like this
arguably one of the GOAT presidents, he would've accomplished SO MUCH more if the republicans didn't just try to block every thing he tried to do. They were so afraid of an intelligent powerful black man that they committed treason to elect a white supremacist in office w/the help of Russia after blocking everything Obama tried to do for 8 years. We would have universal healthcare right now but Obama had to compromise just to get Obamacare passed. this is what a President talks and behaves like people. I wish Michelle Obama would run for office, I'd vote for her in a heartbeat. black excellence
Trump on special olympics....
"And the kids were .....good....they were good folks, of course I would dominate on the court, a lot of these kids are strong, very strong, some say the strongest and smartest, and some I assume, are actually.....retarded.....but many, many are not....I've hit three point shots from half court at Madison....You know, NBA players have told me, I was as good as anyone they ever saw in the league, believe me."
"And the kids were .....good....they were good folks, of course I would dominate on the court, a lot of these kids are strong, very strong, some say the strongest and smartest, and some I assume, are actually.....retarded.....but many, many are not....I've hit three point shots from half court at Madison....You know, NBA players have told me, I was as good as anyone they ever saw in the league, believe me."
staticshock
Veteran
arguably one of the GOAT presidents, he would've accomplished SO MUCH more if the republicans didn't just try to block every thing he tried to do. They were so afraid of an intelligent powerful black man that they committed treason to elect a white supremacist in office w/the help of Russia after blocking everything Obama tried to do for 8 years. We would have universal healthcare right now but Obama had to compromise just to get Obamacare passed. this is what a President talks and behaves like people. I wish Michelle Obama would run for office, I'd vote for her in a heartbeat. black excellence
yet we have idiots in TLR who always say "what did Obama do for black folks?" when his name is brought up in that section. i fear for our future generations if the people on this site will become parents.
staticshock
Veteran
didnt he use to be super liberal, or am I tripping?
I could have sworn when I was younger he used to shyt on republicans all the time. Maybe I have him confused with someone else.
he actually shyts on Roseanne here...but yeah...