Putinova Rusija

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Uporabnik Pac_Man pravi:

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Uporabnik Pac_Man pravi:
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2...-in-small-homes

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Russia’s deputy prime minister thinks it’s funny that people live in small homes

While on an official visit to the city of Kazan last week, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov was taken on a tour of new economy-class apartments now under construction. In particular, he was shown a 20-square-meter (215-square-foot) apartment. He later told journalists that he was amused to learn people actually buy such homes. Shuvalov said, “It seems ridiculous, but people buy such housing, and it's actually very popular. There's a niche for such housing.” Given that people usually opt for such small homes out of economic necessity and not because of an affinity for cramped spaces—and remembering that Shuvalov rents a 1,500-square-meter (16,145-square-foot) house in Austria and a luxury apartment in Great Britain—the deputy prime minister's comments raised some eyebrows in Russia.

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Ruska verzija "let them eat cake." V Franciji se ni dobro končalo.

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Spet Igor & nepremičnine:

https://twitter.com/Mortis_Banned/status/749971580751601664

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Ru vice-PM building "one flat to rule them all", buying via proxy a whole floor of this Stalin-era tower

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A report by Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation accused First Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov of using an undeclared $62-million private business jet.

Using tracking websites that monitor flights of almost any aircraft — provided that their board number is known — Navalny found that over the past two years, the luxurious Bombardier Global Express plane traveled to the same destination as Shuvalov in 13 cases.

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According to Navalny's report, this year the private jet carried out 18 flights to Saltzburg, Austria — where Shuvalova's foreign company owns a lavish mansion on the city's outskirts. Property confirmed by Shuvalov in an interview to the New Times magazine.

Even if Shuvalov doesn't own but rents the jet to fly to the Austrian "dacha," the combined cost of the trips would come to about 100 million rubles ($1.5 million), according to the report.

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Earlier this month, Navalny accused Shuvalov of spending about 600 million rubles ($9.4 million) on 10 apartments in one of Moscow's Stalinist skyscrapers in order to combine them in single “tsar-apartment.”

Shuvalov's real estate in London and Switzerland, as well as his Rolls-Royce car also attracted Navalny's direct attention and resulted in several condemning reports from the Anti-Corruption Foundation over the past few years.

“It is a screaming fortune,” Navalny wrote on his official website.

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What the IP investigation adds to the bigger picture is how the WADA accredited laboratory was controlled by the state and acted as the failsafe mechanism to cover up doping. If all other steps were unsuccessful in covering up or manipulating the doping control system then the laboratory’s role was to make an initial finding of a positive result disappear. With the additional evidence available to the IP, this Report provides facts and proof beyond that of the IC and describes a larger picture of Russian doping activity and the sports involved beyond merely Athletics.

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The Disappearing Positive Methodology was used as a State directed method following the very abysmal medal count by the Russian Olympic athletes participating in the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver.

Deputy Minister Nagornykh was critical to the smooth running of the Disappearing Positive Methodology. Representing the State, he was advised of every positive analytical finding arising in the Moscow Laboratory from 2011 onwards. Nagornykh, as the Deputy Minister of Sport, decided who would benefit from a cover up and who would not be protected. In total violation of the WADA International Standard for Laboratories (“ISL&#8221 all analytical positives appearing on the first sample screen at the Moscow laboratory were reported up to the Deputy Minister after the athlete’s name had been added to the information to be supplied. The order would come back from the Deputy Minister “SAVE” or “QUARANTINE”. If the order was a SAVE the laboratory personnel were required to report the sample negative in WADA’s Anti-Doping Management System (“ADAMS&#8221. Then the laboratory personnel would falsify the screen result in the Laboratory Information Management System (“LIMS&#8221 to show a negative laboratory result. The athlete benefited from the cover up determined and directed by the Deputy Minister of Sport and could continue to compete dirty.

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Through the efforts of the FSB, a method for surreptitiously removing the caps of tamper evident sample bottles containing the urine samples of doped Russian athletes had been developed for use at Sochi.

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The IP investigation, assisted by forensic experts, has conducted its own experiments and can confirm, without any doubt whatsoever, that the caps of urine sample bottles can be removed without any evidence visible to the untrained eye. Indeed, this was demonstrated in front of Professor Richard McLaren. As will be noted later in this report, evidence of tampering could be detected on bottle caps from Sochi and the December 2014 sample seizure by WADA with the use of microscopic technology.

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Athletes, on instruction, would collect what were thought to be clean urine samples outside of the wash out periods for any PEDs they were using. Rodionova would receive these samples from athletes and arrange for their freezer storage at the CSP. Dr. Rodchenkov would test some of these clean urine samples to ensure they were in fact not positive.

Once the clean urine bank was fully populated by the chosen athletes, the samples were then secretly transported by the FSB from Moscow to the FSB storage freezer in the FSB building located next to the Sochi Laboratory. The bank of clean urine sat in storage awaiting the swapping program at Sochi when required.

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Dr. Rodchenkov’s role in the sample swapping scheme included ensuring that the substituted sample was manipulated to match as closely as possible the Specific Gravity (SG) indicated on the original Doping Control Form (“DCF&#8221 taken at the Sochi venue. This adjustment was accomplished by adding table salt to raise the clean urine SG or distilled water to dilute the clean urine sample so as to closely match the SG number on the DCF.

The veracity of Dr. Rodchenkov’s statements to The New York Times article is supported by the forensic analysis of the IP which included laboratory analysis of the salt content of samples selected by the investigative team. The London WADA accredited Laboratory, at the request of the IP, advised that of the forensically representative samples tested, 6 had salt contents higher than what should be found in urine of a healthy human. The forensic examination for marks and scratches within the bottle caps confirmed that they had been tampered with. Both findings support the evidence of Dr. Rodchenkov.

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The first ARD documentary aired in early December of 2014.(...)Dr. Olivier Rabin from WADA asked the Moscow laboratory to prepare for a visit during which the samples stored in the laboratory would be packed up and shipped out of the country for storage and further analysis.

The anxiety level of personnel in the laboratory rose because of the pending WADA visit. The Disappearing Positive Methodology was used during the summer of 2014. As a consequence, Dr. Rodchenkov knew that he would have dirty B samples from that period. A number of dirty samples had been collected and reported as negative, and were stored in the laboratory. The solution to the problem in part was to destroy thousands of samples obtained and stored prior to 10 September 2014, being the minimal 90-day period of storage as prescribed under the ISL. However, the massive destruction of samples only got rid of part of the problem. Still to be dealt with were the samples between 10 September 2014 and 10 December 2014.

Dr Rodchenkov prepared a schedule of 37 athletes whose samples were potentially a problem if another accredited laboratory were to analyze them. A meeting was held with Deputy Minister Nagornykh in which the jeopardy of the laboratory was discussed were something not done to deal with the selected samples. The upshot of that meeting was that Deputy Minister Nagornykh resolved to call in the “magicians”. That night the FSB visited the laboratory and the next day sample bottles were in the laboratory without their caps. The IP found that these samples all had negative findings recorded on ADAMS. The IP forensic examination of these bottles found evidence of scratches and marks confirmed tampering. A urine examination of 3 of the samples showed that the DNA was not that of the athlete involved.

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A Potemkin Village For The Turkmen President

Dancers, children, and happy fruit merchants greeted Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov as he officially opened a newly constructed village in early July. Then the president left and the village returned to its previous state: an uninhabited shell in the middle of nowhere.

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Russia now officially blames Ukraine for the attempt on LNR' chieftain Plotnitsky.

FSB names "second Ukrainian terrorist" - Andrey Zahtay. Because terrorists take their family on missions to Crimea
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cplug0XWEAAmMcJ.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cplug3KWcAAUPZv.jpg

If "second Ukr terrorist" is a gov't agent, he must have a hell of a deep cover/. His VK timeline has always been critical of Ukr gov't

When Russian armed military engage in war in Donbass, they are volunteers. When (if) 2 Ukrainians do it in Crimea, they are "Ukraine agents"

Kremlin: "@Poroshenko has turned Ukraine into an aggressor-country" #truestory

"Russia is considering terminating diplomatic relations with Ukraine", Izvestia cites high-ranking official. http://izvestia.ru/news/626718

The land of unlimited plausibilities: RU says "Internet blackout in area of terrorist act n Crimea is due to telecoms expanding bandwidth".

Russia says it will not grant access to OSCE to visit Crimea and investigate Russian claims of cross-border attacks. "OSCE is for Ukraine"

#LandOfInfinitePlausibility: Kremlin: "Sergey Ivanov himself asked Pres Putin to be transferred from Chief of Staff to an environmental job"

@christogrozev reminds me when yagoda asked stalin to be transferred from head of nkvd to ministry of water trasportation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrikh_Yagoda

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Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda (Russian: Ге́нрих Григо́рьевич Яго́да; 7 November 1891–15 March 1938), born Yenokh Gershevich Iyeguda (Russian: Енох Гершевич Иегуд&#1072 was a Soviet-Russian secret police official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936. Appointed by Joseph Stalin, Yagoda supervised the arrest, show trial, and execution of the Old Bolsheviks Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, events that initiated the Great Purge. Yagoda also supervised the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal with Naftaly Frenkel, using slave labor from the GULAG system, during which many laborers died.

Like many Soviet secret policemen of the 1930s, Yagoda himself was ultimately a victim of the Purge. He was demoted from the directorship of the NKVD in favor of Nikolai Yezhov in 1936 and arrested in 1937. Charged with the crimes of wrecking, espionage, Trotskyism and conspiracy, Yagoda was a defendant at the Trial of the Twenty-One, the last of the major Soviet show trials of the 1930s. Following his confession at the trial, Yagoda was found guilty and shot.

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Grandfather of new Kremlin chief of staff, was chief of Estonian Communist Party who requested Moscow to send tanks to Tallinn in '88.


Karlo Vaino, grandfather of Putin's chief of staff, 1981.



1988, Estonian SSR makes Estonian national language Russian organization calls law "incitement to hatred"

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On 12 August, the five Western firms which had planned to build the Nord Stream II gas pipeline from Russia to Germany pulled out of a joint venture with Russia’s Gazprom putting the project in doubt.

The shock decision came after the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) raised concerns over the initiative.

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The Western firms were meant to cover a third of the project’s financing through equity and raise the remainder on international financial markets.

With the partners gone, Gazprom will have to increase its stake and try to attract market capital on its own.

That will be no easy feat as Russia reels under financial sanctions, both EU and US, designed specifically to curb access to borrowing.
EU elephant

But the biggest elephant in the room remains compliance with EU competition law as enshrined in the so-called Third Energy Package (TEP).

Gazprom was trying to circumvent the EU rules by not taking a majority share in the consortium.

Nice try, but the rules are pretty straightforward.

Under TEP, pipeline owners must be independent of gas suppliers and must ensure equal access to any supplier that wishes to use their infrastructure.

Given that the project was 50 percent owned by Gazprom, and is now 100 percent Gazprom, this problem just got bigger.

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So what will happen now?

Most likely, Gazprom will soldier on with Nord Stream II, try to find a legal way around the defunct joint venture and simultaneously proceed with Turkish Stream.

Despite the issues plaguing Nord Stream II, Putin has good political reasons not to abandon the project at this stage.

At a time when Moscow is lobbying EU capitals to relax the sanctions regime, the mere prospect of a lucrative energy project, even if it might never be built, helps Russia to gain traction with business lobbies in Germany and beyond.

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It started with a report and erupted into a controversy involving a mufti, a Russian Orthodox priest and a rabbi.

On Aug. 15, the Russian Justice Initiative issued a report called "Production of Genital Mutilation of Girls in the Republic of Dagestan."(...) The report said that the mutilations were being performed in remote mountain villages in predominantly Muslim regions of Dagestan on girls as young as 3 and as old as 11.

Although FGM has been condemned by the U.N. and the World Health Organization, the report says it's not banned by Russian law.

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Asked to comment, Mufti Ismail Berdiev — a Muslim religious leader from the area — told a Moscow radio station, "Moscow Says," that female circumcision is a "healthy custom" practiced in one of the republics of Russia's North Caucasus region. Berdiev even said that all women should be circumcised "to end depravity on Earth and reduce sexuality."

The Russian news agency, Interfax, promptly contacted the mufti to ask if what he said was an endorsement of FGM. Berdiev expanded on the theme, saying female circumcision is "necessary to reduce women's sexuality.... God created women to give birth to children and to raise children. And [circumcision] doesn't have anything to do with that. Women can still give birth, and there's less depravity."

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He soon got qualified support from another religious conservative, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, a former spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church. In a post on Facebook, Chaplin wrote, "Ay-ay-ay. Now we're seeing some real feminist howling because of what Mufti Ismail Berdiev has said." The archpriest said he respects female circumcision as a "time-honored practice recognized by the majority of women living in this [Muslim] tradition. "We probably don't need to circumcise all women," he added. "There's no need with Orthodox Christian women, for example; they don't fornicate as it is." As a parting shot, Chaplin said "Without a doubt, Feminism is the lie of the 20th century."

A prominent rabbi also weighed in. Boruch Gorin, the head of public relations of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, didn't address the propriety of FGM but didn't condemn it either. He did concur that "debauchery" and "licentiousness" are serious problems in the community. "A faithful man is surrounded by a huge number of temptations," Gorin said, though he added that female circumcision does not solve the "problem of corruption."

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In its report, the Russian Justice Initiative called for a ban on FGM in Russia. A Russian lawmaker has now drafted legislation to outlaw the practice.

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According to opinion polls, Chaplin was the most recognizable person in the Russian Orthodox Church, after the Patriarch Kirill (data from 2013 year) and has a mass media reputation of an ultra-conservative cleric.
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Vsevolod Chaplin is one of the closest and loyal people of Kirill for many years, said the former Patriarch Alexy II, congratulating him with the birthday in 2008 year. They both were the main developers of The Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church (ru). The Australian Broadcasting Corporation calls Chaplin: "Patriarch Kirill's right-hand man" (2014 year).

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On 24 December 2015, by the decision of the Holy Synod he was released from this position of head of the Department for the Cooperation of Church and Society, the latter being merged with the Information Department headed by Vladimir Legoyda (ru). Chaplin was also removed from the Interconfessional Council of Russia (other languages).

Shortly after his dismissal, he gave a series of interviews which were sharply critical of Patriarch Kirill who he said would "not last much longer".

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Reading an eye-opening book on Russia by 19th century Bulgarian historian. I am thinking of translating it into English.



Intro to the chapter on Russian Diplomacy (1898). Don't tell me you don't want to read this book

On Russian diplomacy & cash, 1898:



On RU diplomacy in US and France (1898)





"Russia's best interest is confusion and disturbances abroad..." (Dr. Rakovski, 1898)





About Russia's "stretchable rights" (1895)



Interesting advice from 1881



Sounds so much like today. 1898. though.



Another quote from "Russia in the East" (1898) which sounds eerily contemporary...at least to Ukrainians' ears.

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Russia is the most unequal major economy in the world, with almost two-thirds of its wealth controlled by millionaires, a wealth research company has said.

Sixty-two percent of Russia's wealth is held by U.S. dollar-millionaires and 26 percent of its wealth is held by billionaires, New World Wealth said in a report on Wednesday.

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"If millionaires control over 50 percent of a country's wealth then there is very little space for a meaningful middle class," New World Wealth said.

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The U.S. was "surprisingly equal," with around one-third of total wealth held by millionaires.

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Proportion of wealth held by millionaires:

Russia: 62%
India: 54%
UK: 35%
US: 32%
Australia: 28%
Japan: 22%

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