88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
kinda bizarre and hard to fact check I'd imagine... Chinese military/"Russian media".
RUSSIA 🇷🇺 Thread: Wikileaks=FSB front, UKRAINE?, SNOWED LIED; NATO Aggression; Trump = Putins B!tch
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
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kinda bizarre and hard to fact check I'd imagine... Chinese military/"Russian media".
A New Weapon in Russia’s Arsenal, and It’s Inflatable
By ANDREW E. KRAMEROCT. 12, 2016
In a field outside Moscow, workers armed with little more than green fabric and air compressors are creating an imposing weapon.
James Hill for The New York Times
A sleek, slate-gray MIG-31 fighter jet suddenly appears, its muscular, stubby wings spreading to reveal their trademark red star insignia.
James Hill for The New York Times
It is a decoy, lifelike in appearance from as close as 300 yards.
James Hill for The New York Times
This trick is another entry in Russia’s repertoire of deceit and disguise, known as maskirovka, a psychological warfare doctrine that’s becoming an increasingly critical element in the country’s geopolitical ambitions.
“If you study the major battles of history, you see that trickery wins every time,” Aleksei A. Komarov, the military engineer in charge of this sleight of hand, said with a sly smile. “Nobody ever wins honestly.”
Mr. Komarov oversees army sales at Rusbal, or Russian Ball, a hot-air balloon company that also provides the Ministry of Defense with a growing arsenal of inflatable tanks, jets and missile launchers.
As Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin has muscled its way back onto the geopolitical stage, the Kremlin has employed a range of stealthy tactics: silencing critics abroad, hitching the Orthodox Church to its conservative counterrevolution, spreading false information to audiences in Europe and even, according to the Obama administration, meddling in American presidential politics by hacking the Democratic Party’s computers.
One of the newer entries to that list is maskirovka.
Russia’s most recent military deployments began with operations involving this doctrine: with literally masked and mystery soldiers in Crimea in 2014, soldiers said to be “vacationing” or “volunteering” in eastern Ukraine and a “humanitarian airlift” to Syria in 2015.
As the Russian incursion in Ukraine unfolded, Moscow sent a “humanitarian” convoy of whitewashed military vehicles to the rebellious eastern provinces. The trucks were later found to be mostly empty, prompting speculation that they had been sent there to deter a Ukrainian counteroffensive against rebels.
The idea behind maskirovka is to keep the enemy guessing, never admitting your true intentions, always denying your activities and using all means, both political and military, to maintain an edge of surprise for your soldiers. The doctrine, military analysts say, is in this sense “multilevel.” It draws no distinction between disguising a soldier as a bush or a tree with green and patterned clothing, a lie of a sort, and high-level political disinformation and cunning evasions.
Thus at a news conference immediately after the invasion of Crimea, Mr. Putin flatly denied that the “green men” appearing on television screens were Russians, saying anyone could buy a military uniform and put it on. It was only five weeks later, after his annexation of the peninsula, that he admitted that the troops were Russian.
And last month, the Ministry of Defense denied Washington’s assertion that Russian warplanes had attacked a humanitarian convoy in Syria. It said first that the trucks could have been hit by a rebel mortar, then that an American Predator drone was responsible and finally that the cargo had simply caught fire.
Maskirovka goes well beyond the simple camouflage used by all armies and encompasses a range of ideas about misdirection and misinformation, as useful today as it has been for decades. Soviet maps, for example, often included inaccuracies that frustrated drivers but served a national security purpose: If taken by a spy, they would confuse an invading army as apparently useful roads, for example, led into swamps.
In fact, nearly every Russian and Soviet deployment over the past half century, from the Prague Spring to Afghanistan, Chechnya and Ukraine, opened with a simple but effective trick: soldiers appearing first in mufti or unmarked uniforms. In 1968, for example, an Aeroflot flight arrived in Prague carrying a disproportionate number of healthy young men, who subsequently seized the airport.
Soldiers disguised as tourists sailed to Syria in 1983 in what became known as the “comrade tourist” ruse. The appearance of mysterious, camouflaged soldiers in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Grozny, Chechnya, presaged wider deployments in 1979 and 1994.
Experts fear that the next theater for such tactics may be the Baltic region, home to significant minorities of ethnic Russians as well as a major Russian military base at Kaliningrad.
The array of possibilities for Russia in the Baltics is vast. Analysts have speculated, for example, that an aging Russian military ship might feign a mechanical breakdown and beach on a Baltic sandbar. Soon, marines would deploy to “protect” it.
That incursion might not be enough to elicit a full-scale response from NATO, but if left to stand, it could undermine the alliance’s credibility, analysts say.
“The fun part about the Baltics, from the Russian perspective, is that NATO’s credibility rests on every useless piece of land, so you don’t have to take more than a tiny slice,” said Michael Kofman, a military analyst at the Kennan Institute in Washington.
Rusbal employees inflating a mock S-300 missile system next to an inflated mock MIG-31. James Hill for The New York Times
Col. David M. Glantz, a leading expert on Russian disguise operations, said Russia viewed war “in many, many facets.”
To be sure, other militaries use decoys. The Russian doctrine of maskirovka, though, differs from deception operations by other major militaries in its blending of strategic and tactical deception, and in its use in both war and peace.
In one storied example, the Soviets decided to call their space launchpad Baikonur, after a small Kazakh settlement of that name a few hundred miles away, hoping that in an attack, enemy bombers might hit the insignificant village by mistake.
“They look at war as chess, and we look at it as checkers,” said Colonel Glantz, a former professor at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
A well-constructed Russian maskirovka ruse, like a good Russian play, typically builds an underlying narrative before introducing the plot twist.
Maskirovka is “designed to manipulate the adversary’s picture of reality, misinform it and eventually interfere with the decision-making process of individuals, organizations, governments and societies,” Dima Adamsky, an authority on Russian psychological warfare, wrote in a paper published last year. The opening moves, if played well, will “appear benign to the target.”
In Georgia, the game had already begun days before Gocha Kojayev, an Interior Ministry officer, and some fellow officers fell victim in the aftermath of the 2008 war with Russia.
Part of a team clearing a battlefield of unexploded matériel near South Ossetia, Mr. Kojayev was sent to collect a small, yellow-painted surveillance drone that had fluttered to earth in an apple orchard — a seemingly harmless object. Indeed, so many drones had crashed in the area that the Georgians had taken to snickering at their shoddy construction.
Sensing danger at the last moment, however, Mr. Kojayev stepped back as a colleague picked up the drone, which was sprung with explosives. Two men were killed, and eight others, including Mr. Kojayev, were wounded.
The earlier crashes had desensitized the soldiers to danger. “This was a trick,” he said. “We thought they were of poor quality, but they were crashing them intentionally.”
Rusbal’s director for military sales, Aleksei A. Komarov, with some of the inflated decoys. The company also makes bouncy castles. James Hill for The New York Times
Unfurled in the sunny field outside Moscow, a cloth decoy of an S-300 missile system — in the metal version, one of Russia’s most feared weapons ‚ looks like a large, unmade bed of camouflage-colored blankets.
“Pull it a bit this way,” one worker suggested. “Straighten it out here,” another said. With the flip of a switch on an electric air compressor, it bulged, lurched and took its form, like a gigantic marshmallow waiting for a roasting in World War III.
A hot-air balloon enthusiast founded Rusbal in 1993 and later diversified into the inflatable children’s attractions that are springy play areas known as bouncy castles.
In fact, bouncy castle construction inspired the company — and the Russian military — to re-examine a decade-old Russian practice of using bulky rubber balloons for inflatables, leading to a technological advance in decoys around the turn of the millennium.
Although it forms a tight seal that does not require constant inflation, rubber is far heavier than fabric. In a bouncy castle, a continuously running air compressor creates overpressure in a fabric structure that is not airtight. The rubber tanks deflated, or even popped, if hit by a single bullet. But the fabric holds its form even if perforated by a spray of shrapnel.
“There was a lot of skepticism at first,” Maria A. Oparina, the director of Rusbal and daughter of the founder, said in an interview in a cafe in Moscow. Demonstrations, though, impressed the generals.
The company would not disclose how many inflatable tanks it made, because the numbers are classified, but Ms. Oparina said output had shot up over the past year. The contract forms one small part of Russia’s 10-year, $660 billion rearmament program that began in 2010. The factory now employs 80 people full time, most on the military side sewing inflatable weapons.
The company also works for export. It made about $3 million worth of inflatable decoys of the S-300 antiaircraft missile system to sell to Iran, but was left holding the goods when the Russian government suspended the sale of the actual missile system because of United Nations sanctions. The sale was completed this year, but Iran said it had no interest in the decoys.
The tanks and missile launchers are not just blowup, but made to be blown up, with their most obvious use as decoys for drawing expensive, precision fire such as cruise missiles or laser-guided bombs away from real weapons systems.
More subtly, their purpose is to clutter the enemy’s decision making, forcing commanders to waste precious time verifying whether a newly discovered target is real or just hot air. They are intended for quick inflation and deflation: If they are left out for long periods, their airy nature becomes obvious to satellites, Ms. Oparina said, as they tend to blow around in the wind and swell and shrink in size.
The inflatable T-80 tank, one of the company’s standard products, weighs 154 pounds, costs about $16,000, totes in two duffel bags, inflates in about five minutes and vanishes just as quickly. Sold separately: a device for stamping fake tank tracks in the ground.
“There are no gentlemen’s agreements in war,” Ms. Oparina said. “There’s no chivalry anymore. Nobody wears a red uniform. Nobody stands up to get shot at. It’s either you or me, and whoever has the best trick wins.”
Putin ally tells Americans: vote Trump or face nuclear war
Putin says U.S. hacking scandal not in Russia's interests
00:55
By Andrew Osborn | MOSCOW
Americans should vote for Donald Trump as president next month or risk being dragged into a nuclear war, according to a Russian ultra-nationalist ally of President Vladimir Putin who likes to compare himself to the U.S. Republican candidate.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a flamboyant veteran lawmaker known for his fiery rhetoric, told Reuters in an interview that Trump was the only person able to de-escalate dangerous tensions between Moscow and Washington.
By contrast, Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton could spark World War Three, said Zhirinovsky, who received a top state award from Putin after his pro-Kremlin Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) came third in Russia's parliamentary election last month.
Many Russians regard Zhirinovsky as a clownish figure who makes outspoken statements to grab attention but he is also widely viewed as a faithful servant of Kremlin policy, sometimes used to float radical opinions to test public reaction.
"Relations between Russia and the United States can't get any worse. The only way they can get worse is if a war starts," said Zhirinovsky, speaking in his huge office on the 10th floor of Russia's State Duma, or lower house of parliament.
"Americans voting for a president on Nov. 8 must realize that they are voting for peace on Planet Earth if they vote for Trump. But if they vote for Hillary it's war. It will be a short movie. There will be Hiroshimas and Nagasakis everywhere."
Zhirinovsky's comments coincide with deep disagreements between Washington and Moscow over Syria and Ukraine and after the White House last week accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations.
Even as WikiLeaks released another trove of internal documents from Clinton’s campaign on Wednesday, Putin insisted his country was not involved in an effort to influence the U.S. presidential election.
more here
Putin ally tells Americans: vote Trump or face nuclear war
Putin says U.S. hacking scandal not in Russia's interests
00:55
By Andrew Osborn | MOSCOW
Americans should vote for Donald Trump as president next month or risk being dragged into a nuclear war, according to a Russian ultra-nationalist ally of President Vladimir Putin who likes to compare himself to the U.S. Republican candidate.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a flamboyant veteran lawmaker known for his fiery rhetoric, told Reuters in an interview that Trump was the only person able to de-escalate dangerous tensions between Moscow and Washington.
By contrast, Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton could spark World War Three, said Zhirinovsky, who received a top state award from Putin after his pro-Kremlin Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) came third in Russia's parliamentary election last month.
Many Russians regard Zhirinovsky as a clownish figure who makes outspoken statements to grab attention but he is also widely viewed as a faithful servant of Kremlin policy, sometimes used to float radical opinions to test public reaction.
"Relations between Russia and the United States can't get any worse. The only way they can get worse is if a war starts," said Zhirinovsky, speaking in his huge office on the 10th floor of Russia's State Duma, or lower house of parliament.
"Americans voting for a president on Nov. 8 must realize that they are voting for peace on Planet Earth if they vote for Trump. But if they vote for Hillary it's war. It will be a short movie. There will be Hiroshimas and Nagasakis everywhere."
Zhirinovsky's comments coincide with deep disagreements between Washington and Moscow over Syria and Ukraine and after the White House last week accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations.
Even as WikiLeaks released another trove of internal documents from Clinton’s campaign on Wednesday, Putin insisted his country was not involved in an effort to influence the U.S. presidential election.
more here
Putin ally tells Americans: vote Trump or face nuclear war
Top Russian Officials Shift Away From Denying Involvement in DNC Hack
President Vladimir Putin says the emails’ content matters, not their source
By
Devlin Barrett and
Damian Paletta
Updated Oct. 12, 2016 4:35 p.m. ET
Russia's President Vladimir Putin said it was the information contained in the hacked emails, not the source of the hacking, that mattered, during a forum in Moscow on Wednesday. Photo: Metzel Mikhail/Zuma Press
WASHINGTON—The Federal Bureau of Investigation suspects Russian intelligence agencies are behind the recent hacking of the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and of a contractor handling Florida voter data, according to people briefed on the investigations.
Top Russian officials on Wednesday, meanwhile, shifted away from denying a role in a separate hack of the Democratic National Committee. President Vladimir Putinsaid it is irrelevant who stole the computer records, and the foreign minister said that the U.S. hasn’t proven anything so far.
The comments, made in separate public appearances, reflect an ambivalence among top Russian officials about accusations made Friday by U.S. intelligence agencies that Moscow directed a hack-and-leak campaign aimed at interfering in the U.S. election.
“Everyone is saying, ‘Who did it?’” Mr. Putin said at an investor forum in Moscow. “But does it matter that much? It’s what’s inside the information that matters.”
Mr. Putin was referring to thousands of emails and other documents that have been leaked to the public since April, much of it stolen from the DNC or its affiliates. U.S. officials have accused Russia of stealing the emails and then using at least three entities, including WikiLeaks, to publish them on close to 50 separate occasions.
The FBI has been probing a number of computer breaches directed at various political and election entities, and the new details suggest a growing list of political targets for hackers, just weeks before a presidential election.
Last week, U.S. intelligence agencies said they are confident senior Russian officials had directed such activities, and that the stolen data was then leaked publicly through Wikileaks, an online persona called Guccifer 2.0, and a website called DCLeaks.com.
On Wednesday, Wikileaks posted another batch of emails from John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman. Investigators believe Russian intelligence is also behind the hack of Mr. Podesta’s emails, something he asserted Tuesday to reporters.
“I’ve been involved in politics for nearly five decades and this definitely is the first campaign that I’ve been involved with in which I’ve had a tangle with Russian intelligence agencies,” Mr. Podesta said.
Democrats say Mr. Putin is trying to meddle with the election to hurt Mrs. Clinton’s chances and benefit her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. Mr. Trump has said he isn’t convinced there was any hacking, let alone evidence it was done by Russia.
Officials have previously said hackers penetrated voter data information in Illinois, and made a small inroad into a local voting system in Arizona. ABC News reported last week that hackers successfully targeted a contractor handling Florida election data. Florida officials have said their systems are secure.
Amid the growing concern about possible Russian interference in the U.S. election, the Department of Homeland Security is helping states scan their systems and advising them on better security. FBI Director James Comey has cautioned people not to be too alarmed by that, because the U.S. system of tallying votes is so decentralized and “clunky’’ that it would be very difficult to alter the outcome of an election.
“Hysteria started over the [allegation] that this is in the interests of Russia,” Mr. Putin said, according to a transcript posted by the Interfax news agency. “But nothing in it is in the interests of Russia, while the hysteria is merely caused by the fact that somebody needs to divert the attention of the American people from the essence of what was exposed by the hackers.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, responding to allegations about the hacking campaign in August, said Russia would “never interfere in the internal affairs of other countries,” but on Wednesday, in an interview on CNN, he didn’t deny involvement in the recent hacking operation.
“We did not deny this,” he said, but added, “They did not prove it.”
White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Russia is orchestrating the hackings “to try to destabilize our democracy, and that’s something that obviously the president takes quite seriously.”
He dismissed Mr. Lavrov’s comments, saying, “I think a reasonable person would conclude that there is no piece of evidence the United States government could produce that would prompt Sergei Lavrov to admit Russian complicity in these efforts.”
On Tuesday, the White House said it would carry out a “proportional” response to Russia at some point in the future in response to the hacking operation. Mr. Lavrov didn’t seem worried.
“If they decide to do something, let them do it,” he said on CNN.
The Russian Embassy in Washington issued a statement over Twitter saying that “unbiased investigation of #DNChack would be a proportional (and logical) response to it. Threats or attacks against other countries are not.”
Write to Devlin Barrett at devlin.barrett@wsj.com and Damian Paletta at damian.paletta@wsj.com
Russia is desperate and losing Syria will tear their income to pieces. Putin about to go all out he has nothing to lose especially if that Syria pipeline gets build and they are pushed out.
Putin and them boys are gonna body this Flabby and sick country 
The retribution come January will be amazing.
I can't wait for this dude to get his shyt pushed in.
Them Langley boys trained to go
I can't wait for this dude to get his shyt pushed in.
Them Langley boys trained to go
Pull Up the Roots
I have a good time when I go out of my mind..
This is such a weird sentiment.Putin and them boys are gonna body this Flabby and sick country