As Ukraine Mourns a Pilot’s Death, Jet’s Crash Is Still a Mystery
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As hundreds of Russian missiles and drones streaked across Ukraine on Monday, the Ukrainian fighter pilot known as Moonfish was exactly where he had said he always wanted to be: in the cockpit of an F-16 giving chase.
“The F-16 is a Swiss Army knife,” the pilot, Lt. Col. Oleksiy Mes, told reporters while training on the warplane last fall. “It’s a very good weapon that can carry out any mission.”
Colonel Mes helped lead Ukraine’s intense lobbying effort to secure the F-16 fighter jets, a half-dozen of which joined the fight against Russia earlier this month. And he was among the dozen or so pilots trained to fly the sophisticated warplane in combat.
After shooting down three Russian cruise missiles and one attack drone in Monday’s assault, he was racing to intercept yet another target when ground control lost communication with his aircraft, Ukrainian Air Force officials said.
“The plane crashed, the pilot died,” the Ukrainian military said in a statement.
The death of a widely celebrated pilot and the loss of one of the long-coveted fighter jets so soon after their deployment cast a pall over the battlefield just as the giddy first days of the incursion into Russia’s Kursk region were fading away and concerns mounted over an advancing Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine.
As the nation mourned the death of the pilot, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine dismissed the head of the country’s Air Force and promised a thorough investigation of the incident, including the possibility raised by a Western official on Friday that it was the result of friendly fire from a Patriot missile battery.
But on Saturday, two senior U.S. military officials said that friendly fire was probably not the cause of the F-16 downing, and that American and Ukrainian investigators were looking at a variety of possibilities.
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“The loss of a pilot is incredibly painful to bear, especially as he was among those who fought for Ukraine’s right to have F-16 aircraft,” said Anatolii Khrapchynskyi, a pilot and former Ukrainian Air Force officer.
“Regarding the aircraft, it’s important to understand that this is war, and unfortunately, losses are inevitable,” he said. “We are fighting a state that can launch over 200 weapons at Ukraine in a single strike, including cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and combat drones.”
Ukraine has swathed its F-16 program in secrecy, as both the airplanes and the pilots are prized targets for the Russians. In early August, in an effort to lift the nation’s morale, the new warplanes flew over television cameras and were shown maneuvering on the apron of an airfield.
Lt. Gen. Anatoliy Kryvonozhka, who was named the acting commander of the Air Force after the dismissal of Lt. Gen. Mykola Oleshchuk, said in an interview earlier this month that battle-hardened pilots like Colonel Mes were given priority to train on the advanced Western jets.
“They were shot at, they came through fights,” he said. “People who have gone through these episodes, they respond correctly” to emergencies, he said. “This combat experience will apply to new types of planes.”
When friends and family gathered to bury Colonel Mes on Thursday, one of his teachers said he knew what he wanted to do from a young age.
“I asked him, ‘What do you want to be?’” the teacher, Nadiia Mushtyn, said. “‘Actually, I dream of being a pilot,’” she said he replied, adding: “His dream came true.”
A former Republican House member, Adam Kinzinger, recalled meeting Colonel Mes when he came to Washington to lobby for the F-16s with another pilot, Major Andriy Pilshchykov, who died in a crash a year ago.
“They knew the risks, understood the stakes, and yet, they never hesitated,” he wrote in a tribute published on Substack. “They were young, full of life, and yet carried a maturity beyond their years — a maturity forged in the fires of war.”
Ukrainian military analysts said it was far too soon to speculate about what caused the crash. But they emphasized that Western air defense systems and F-16 fighter jets have never worked together in conditions as complex as the circumstances in Ukraine on Monday.
At the same time that Colonel Mes was chasing Russian missiles, teams manning three different defensive systems, including the Patriot missiles, as well as mobile groups with Stinger missiles and British Starstreak missiles, were all working to intercept the 127 missiles and 109 one-way attack drones, the Ukrainian Air Force said.
“Many things could have led to the loss of the F-16, including the technical condition of the plane, pilot error, external factors,” said Mr. Khrapchynskyi, the former Ukraine Air Force official.
For instance, he said, it was possible that fragments of a destroyed missile could have hit a vital part of the plane. “At this moment of the investigation, all versions are being considered, including friendly fire,” he said.
Mr. Zelensky did not offer a reason for his dismissal of the Air Force commander beyond saying his administration was taking every step it could to protect the lives of soldiers and civilians.
But one pilot, who asked not to be identified because he was on active duty and was not permitted to speak about operational matters, said “the structure of aviation management in Ukraine is outdated.” Yet it would be wrong to place all the blame on the former commander, he said, who had a background in air defense and performed his job capably.
The problems run deeper than that, he said, and relate to a command structure steeped in bureaucracy that too often rewards those who do not question authority and whose thinking may be outdated.
“Pilots have a variety of tasks, even on the ground, and bureaucracy is the cancer of aviation,” he said. “Today, I’ve been writing and typing all morning, following Soviet-era manuals.”
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Kamala Harris Is Breaking Barriers. She Just Isn’t Talking About It.
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When Kamala Harris took the stage in Chicago last week, she spoke of her “trailblazer” mother and her encouraging father — “Don’t let anything stop you.” She told of how the sexual abuse of her best friend led her to become a prosecutor. She encouraged people to imagine abortion rights being restored in a Harris presidency. What she did not do, as she described her “unlikely journey,” was state the obvious — and that silence spoke volumes.
As the first Black woman and first South Asian to receive a major party nomination, she was all but expected to talk about her candidacy as a historic first. She could have easily tipped her hat to the galvanizing power of “representation” or referred to the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” that Hillary Clinton had tried so hard to shatter. Some enthusiastic delegates had dressed in suffragist white, but she was not among them. She wore a dark navy suit. That color, too, spoke volumes.
We’re only beginning to grapple with the audacity of what Kamala Harris is doing: She’s trying to take identity politics out of presidential politics. Don’t get me wrong, Ms. Harris is savvy enough to know how important identity is in America today. But if identity is in, gender and racial politics are out. As she put it on CNN on Thursday night, when asked during her first interview as the Democratic nominee to respond to Donald Trump’s attacks on her identity: “Same old tired playbook — next question.”
She aspires to be the first post-gender POTUS. So many American voters loathe being asked to assess their candidates through the lens of gender and race, and they cringe at the performative nature of identity politics — including, yes, Mrs. Clinton and that ever-present glass ceiling, as well as the argument that her supporters were “voting with their vaginas” if they dared to feel inspired by it.
The metaphor may have yielded feel-good empowerment for a while — and lots of clever merch — but we all know the outcome. And how many times can you declare “The future is female,” tattered sign in hand, before it starts to get awkward?
Ms. Harris is a woman, and a Black woman, and a woman of Jamaican and South Asian descent, and the first woman to be vice president. But we know all that. Other people can talk about history; she’ll be too busy making it.
Gender and race are plenty present in this election, of course — and not just in the form of Mr. Trump’s fixation with it. Pollsters predict this will, in fact, be the most gendered election in American history, with young women and men increasingly polarized.
But that doesn’t mean Ms. Harris is about to let herself be sucked into all of that, and she’s wise not to. As Nancy Pelosi put it recently, speaking at an event with former Obama adviser David Axelrod at the University of Chicago: Ms. Harris becoming the first female president “brings tears to my eyes, but not votes to the ballot box.”
“It’s icing on the cake. It ain’t the cake,” she added.
There was a funny moment that crystallized things for me on the first night of the convention: As Mrs. Clinton wrapped up her speech and left the stage, a familiar chorus began to play over the loudspeakers: Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song.”
This was the ubiquitous anthem of Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign — a cringingly earnest, one-hit-wonder that seemed to embody an over-the-top “you go, girl” sentiment of the moment, almost to the point of parody. “Nooooo,” my seatmate groaned, as the dashed hope of Mrs. Clinton washed over us again. It was like instant PTSD.
The truth is, there is a hangover of sorts for those of us who lived through the hope, and then the letdown, of the last eight years.
I, like many women, was energized by Mrs. Clinton in 2016, writing about the message she would send to little girls, donning my “Pussy Grabs Back” T-shirt, delighting in the unabashed solidarity of groups like Pantsuit Nation.
By 2020, there were six women running for the Democratic nomination, and the language of gender solidarity had grown more muted — and, perhaps, more nuanced — but it was still there: in the Democrats calling attention to double standards, talking about “intersectionality” or working to normalize seeing a woman onstage. (Elizabeth Warren often noted how, when she encountered girls on the campaign trail, she would say: “Hi, my name is Elizabeth, and I’m running for president because that’s what girls do.”)
It’s as if Mrs. Clinton, and the women who came after, boxed themselves into identity politics, in effect if not intent. Even those who didn’t play up their womanhood didn’t quite know how to get out of the box.
We know by now, thanks to social science and polling, that women are just as likely to win elections, even as their “electability” seems to be an ever-present question. And yet there is a very real worry that the more attention is paid to a candidate’s gender — whether by the candidate herself, or the public asking questions like, “Is America ready for a woman?” or “Can a Black woman win?” — the more it sows doubt about her ability to win. “It has the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophesy,” the sociologist Marianne Cooper told me.
Ms. Harris’s ability to avoid all that may be as much about her own political instincts as it is about any cultural shift; after all, she has always been a first, in virtually every job she’s held — did she really need to keep talking about it?
“I am who I am. I’m good with it,” she told The Washington Post in 2019. “You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it.”
To Vogue, later that year, she explained how, “If someone says, ‘Talk to us about women’s issues,’ I look at them and smile and say, ‘I am so glad you want to talk about the economy’” — a stinging emphasis on “so.”
And this week, when asked about the symbolism of her candidacy — and a viral photo of her great-niece staring up at her as she accepted the nomination — she deftly steered again: “Listen, I am running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender,” she said.
Still, she has found subtle ways to signal who she is. She has used her mother, a “5-foot-tall brown woman with an accent,” to nod to her heritage. She has relied on political surrogates — Michelle Obama, Mrs. Clinton, Oprah — to hammer home the more identity-driven aspects of her biography, like attending a historically Black university. Her supporters can self-segregate in any way they want, and have — “White Dudes for Harris,” “Cat Ladies for Kamala,” “Moms for Momala” — but she is not the person leading these efforts.
And, anyway, it’s not exactly a secret who she is: From her style of speech, to her family, to the fact that she chose a Beyoncé song as her official campaign anthem (just not the one about girls running the world), she is showing us.
“Quite frankly, I think she’s doing something very clever,” said Carol Moseley Braun, who ran in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary and was the first Black woman to serve in the Senate. “Nobody wants to hear ‘I’m the first, I’m the first, I’m the first.’ What they want to hear is what you’re going to do for them.”
A recent polling experiment seems to suggest that her approach is working.
In a survey of 800 registered voters, Dan Cassino, a political scientist at Fairleigh Dickinson University, found that when voters were prompted to think about gender and race — specifically, they were asked whether these things were important to them in a generic candidate — their support for Ms. Harris grew substantially.
And yet the opposite was true during the 2008 primaries, when he conducted a similar study looking at Mrs. Clinton. That signifies some progress — and is perhaps a testament to Mrs. Clinton’s perseverance. But it also implies that Ms. Harris has skillfully cracked the code.
“I would argue that telling people to vote for a candidate on the basis of identity is too explicit,” Mr. Cassino said. “Voters want to think they’re voting for a candidate on the issues, and making identity appeals explicit is going to work against that, and potentially trigger a backlash.”
With that in mind, Mr. Cassino told me, other people drawing attention to Ms. Harris’s identity, as they have been, may in fact be the most effective way of replicating those survey results in real life. But even better, he added, would be to have the opposing candidate do it — because it makes it salient, without overdoing it.
In which case, Ms. Harris has one very strong (albeit reluctant) man working for her. His name is Donald Trump.
Boy, four, who broke bronze age jar returns to museum in Israel
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Smashing a rare museum artefact dating back thousands of years would probably earn you a lifetime ban at the very least.
But a four-year-old who accidentally toppled a jar from the bronze age, leaving it broken into pieces, was welcomed back to the Hecht Museum in Haifa, Israel, a week after the unfortunate incident.
“It was just a distraction of a second,” said Anna Geller, a mother-of-three from the northern Israeli town of Nahariya. “And the next thing I know, it’s a very big boom boom behind me.”
Her son, Ariel, was perusing the museum’s ancient artefacts when Anna looked away for just a moment. Then a crash sounded, a rare 3,500-year-old jar was broken on the ground, and her son stood over it, aghast.
The bronze age jar that Ariel broke last week has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered. It was probably used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500BC.
On Friday, the family returned to the museum. Ariel gifted the museum a clay vase of his own and was met with forgiving staff and curators.
Alex said Ariel, the youngest of his three children, was exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash last Friday, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
“I’m embarrassed,” said Anna, who said she tried desperately to calm her son down after the vase shattered. “He told me he just wanted to see what was inside.”
The jar was one of many artefacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbar Rivlin, the director of the museum.
She said she wanted to use the restoration as an educational opportunity and to make sure the Gellers, who curtailed their initial museum visit soon after Ariel broke the jar last week, felt welcome to return.
There were a lot of children at the museum that day and Alex said he was “in complete shock” after learning that it was his son who caused the damage.
Alex went over to the security guards to let them know what had happened in the hope that it was a model and not a real artefact. The father even offered to pay for the damage.
“But they called and said it was insured and after they checked the cameras and saw it wasn’t vandalism they invited us back for a make-up visit,” Alex said.
Experts are using 3D technology and high-resolution videos to restore the jar, which could be back on display as soon as next week.
“That’s what’s actually interesting for my older kids, this process of how they’re restoring it, and all the technology they’re using there,” Alex said.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Shafir added that the artefacts should remain accessible to the public, even if accidents happen because touching an artefact can inspire a deeper interest in history and archaeology.
“I like that people touch. Don’t break, but to touch things, it’s important,” he said.
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С сожалением и понятными пожеланиями, Dimitriy.
Источник RT: удар по учебно-тренировочному центру войск связи ВСУ в Полтаве нанесён двумя ракетами «Искандер-М».
По характеру разрушений видно, что одна ракета ударила между третьим и четвёртым этажами, взрывом были обрушены перекрытия четвёртого и пятого этажей, при этом крыша здания не обрушилась. Вторая ракета ударила в крышу здания сверху, обрушив крышу и перекрытия пятого, четвёртого и третьего этажей, уточнил собеседник.
С отраслевой точки зрения полезно сравнить новостные рекламные материалы двух разных подходов: военный объект и объект мирный.
‘They Have Stolen Our Business’: When You Leave Russia, Putin Sets the Terms
Western companies that exited Russia immediately after the invasion of Ukraine suffered big losses. Two years later, it’s clear that was as good as it got. An excerpt from the new book Punishing Putin.
In early March 2022, top executives of McDonald’s Corp. gathered for their annual meeting in Cascais, a chic coastal resort town in Portugal. Just days earlier, Vladimir Putin’s troops had invaded Ukraine, sparking a global public outcry. Horrified by the images of attacks on civilians across Ukraine, consumers quickly took to social media, threatening to boycott companies that remained in Russia. In a flurry of video calls and C-suite huddles, executives had to weigh the reputational risk of staying, and being seen to indirectly help fund the war, against the financial pain of relinquishing billions of dollars of investment. In the first week, a parade of global brands announced plans to withdraw, suspend operations or temporarily close stores in Russia, including oil major BP and consumer giants Ikea and Nike.
McDonald’s, perhaps the biggest symbol of American capitalism, initially carried on with business as usual. It had blazed the trail for countless other Western companies in Russia since opening its first restaurant in Moscow in 1990 in what was a powerful sign of the easing of Cold War tensions. In the days after the invasion, McDonald’s Chief Executive Officer Chris Kempczinski temporarily shut the company’s restaurants in Ukraine because of security concerns but kept its Russian operations going.
After arriving in Cascais, an anxious Oleg Paroev, the recently appointed CEO of McDonald’s Russia, asked Kempczinski and then-Chief Financial Officer Kevin Ozan if the company was considering leaving Russia or suspending operations. “They both looked at me and said, ‘Are you insane? Do you think we would ever exit Russia? Of course not,’” Paroev told me. The stakes were enormous. The company directly owned almost all its 850 restaurants in Russia—only about 15% were franchised. It employed 62,000 people in the country, and an additional 100,000 worked for McDonald’s local supply chain companies. Russia accounted for around 7% of the burger chain’s global revenue, or roughly $1.6 billion. The company had a vast network of physical assets there.
After the war began, McDonald’s announced financial support for Ukraine, but its silence on operations in Russia led #BoycottMcDonalds to start trending on social media. The outcry was impossible to ignore. McDonald’s executives were soon conferring with another potent symbol of American capitalism: Coca-Cola Co. The two companies have been aligned globally for decades, including in Russia, where McDonald’s sold Coke products. #BoycottCocaCola was also trending. Senior US officials were telling both McDonald’s and Coca-Cola that they should leave Russia.
Public pressure was building. On March 7, 2022, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management professor, appeared on CNBC, criticizing McDonald’s for remaining in Russia while shutting down in Ukraine. The next day, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola each announced that they’d suspend their Russian businesses. Kempczinski emailed McDonald’s employees and franchisees announcing it would temporarily close all the restaurants in the country while continuing to pay employees and keeping current on its leases on restaurant sites.
In Moscow, Paroev was shocked. “We had no idea what was going to happen to the business, whether it would stay suspended or whether it would be completely shut down,” he told me. The move left more than 100,000 jobs in limbo. Whether the restaurants reopened or not, there would be a massive price to pay.
“The investment restrictions were about methodically ejecting Russia from the international economic order”
Putin’s invasion forced many companies into uncharted territory, in which political decisions were at least as significant as financial ones. There was a naive belief in some circles that the war would be over quickly, so it might be best to wait it out. Other companies took their time to find the right buyer to try to extract more value, a calculation that in some cases proved more costly than a quick exit—for their brands, their executives and their bottom lines.
News of McDonald’s decision to shutter restaurants created havoc. Long lines formed at outlets across the country. Some Russians started hoarding burgers. When Paroev ordered all McDonald’s restaurants in Russia to close, some franchisees refused to comply.
McDonald’s was hemorrhaging money. Ozan, the CFO, said at an investor conference in March that staying closed would cost $50 million a month, but he indicated he thought business could resume. “We expect this to be temporary,” Ozan said. “We think it’s the right thing to do, both for the global business and for our people locally.” But as the weeks passed and the war intensified, it became clear that Western sanctions would make it difficult to keep operating in Russia. The US government put full blocking sanctions on state-controlled Sberbank, which barred US citizens from dealing directly or indirectly with Russia’s largest bank. Payroll suddenly became questionable. Paroev told me most McDonald’s employees in Russia had personal accounts at Sberbank, which was the only option in some rural areas.
Then, in early April, just days after a Russian massacre of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha came to light, the Biden administration banned new investment in Russia and prohibited the supply of services “by a US person, wherever located.” It was a purposefully ambiguous move designed to cause companies to exit Russia.
Global executives with businesses in Russia panicked. “The investment restrictions were about methodically ejecting Russia from the international economic order, which included multinational companies,” Daleep Singh, Biden’s deputy national security adviser for international economics, told me. Not long after the April investment ban, Kempczinski and the McDonald’s board concluded it was game over. They decided to take the radical step of selling the Russian operations outright.
McDonald’s had the contours of an exit path mapped out. Even before the war, the company had decided it wanted to sell its directly owned restaurants in Russia and expand the number of franchises to bring it more in line with how McDonald’s operates in other countries. The company had already drawn up a short list of prospective buyers of the outlets. In early May, executives flew to Dubai to meet with a handful of Russian bidders. The Persian Gulf financial center was one of the few cities where Russians could travel with ease, making it a natural venue to hammer out a deal.
Among the interested buyers was a thickset, gray-haired former coal miner and entrepreneur named Alexander Govor, one of McDonald’s rebellious franchisees. Govor had operated 25 restaurants in Siberia and remained defiantly open during the closures. The talks with Govor lasted hours. On May 9, McDonald’s executives in Chicago held a video call with Govor in Siberia, telling him he’d won—they’d decided to “entrust” him with the business. “For the first time in our history, we are ‘de-Arching’ a major market and selling our portfolio of McDonald’s restaurants,” Kempczinski wrote in an email to employees and suppliers worldwide announcing the sale. “The Golden Arches will shine no more in Russia.”
Govor told local media he’d paid a “token fee” for the business in a deal that required him to retain all 62,000 staff for two years. The contract gave McDonald’s the right to buy back the business within 15 years on market terms. It prevented Govor from using the McDonald’s name, logo, colors and menu, but the rest of the terms remained undisclosed. McDonald’s took a charge of $1.3 billion to exit Russia, a sign it was unlikely to have taken much if any money from the deal.
The fire sale had made one wealthy Russian businessman even richer overnight. In late May, at a branch outside Moscow, a large crane helped lower the giant “M” onto the parking lot. This was repeated at more than 800 restaurants across the country. “Everything that could remind anybody of McDonald’s had to be destroyed,” Paroev told me.
At the suggestion of the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade, Govor scheduled the reopening of the still-unnamed flagship restaurant on Pushkin Square and more than a dozen others on June 12—Russia Day, a national holiday marking the anniversary of the country’s declaration of autonomy from the Soviet Union. The timing of the relaunch was designed to display Russia’s ability to not just withstand but thrive in the face of international sanctions and the exodus of Western companies. On the eve of the reopening, the new name was still a mystery. Some were hoping it would be called McDuck, the nickname Russians use for McDonald’s. Govor dismissed a suggestion to rebrand as McGovor as “immodest.” In reality, he and his management team couldn’t use “Mc”-anything. They had to run the proposed names and new packaging by McDonald’s to make sure it didn’t compromise their agreement.
McDonald’s rejected around 20 suggested names, according to Paroev, who’d stayed on as CEO of the new burger chain. At the last minute, Govor finally decided to rebrand as Vkusno i tochka, which means “Tasty and that’s it.” The Golden Arches were replaced with a new logo—two lines and a circle meant to symbolize fries and a burger. Some Russians hated the new name, but the opening was a major event. Now, Vkusno says it has more than 900 restaurants, serving 2 million customers daily, and sales are bigger than they ever were under McDonald’s.
McDonald’s exit from Russia was a microcosm of the moral and business dilemmas created by Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Staying would have meant paying taxes to the Russian government, indirectly supporting the war. The company would have had to cooperate with Russian authorities if any of its employees were called up to serve on the front line. Doing business in Russia as it waged indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilians in Ukraine would have damaged the standing of its brand in the eyes of millions of customers. And running a business in a heavily sanctioned economy would have been risky. Yet the company lost not just financially but also strategically. A Russian copycat brand easily took over the McDonald’s concept, assets and systems, which had been built up over decades.
More global symbols of Western capitalism announced they were leaving Russia, not just because of sanctions but because of the global public outcry. The economic war had effectively gone private. More than 1,700 companies, big and small, exited or curtailed their operations in one way or another, according to the Kyiv School of Economics.
But more than 2,000 Western companies continued operations, profiting in Russia as global attention slowly shifted away from Ukraine. Notably, several Western banks stayed, including Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank International AG and Italy’s UniCredit SpA, despite pressure from the European Central Bank. (Both banks have announced plans to reduce their exposure to Russia, but progress has been slow.) Other Western companies remained under the cover of Russian brands. In August 2022, Coca-Cola HBC AG, Coke’s European bottler (in which Coke has a 21% stake), said it was renaming its Russian business Multon Partners, ring-fencing it from the rest of the company to focus on producing existing local brands at its bottling plants. While the original branded Coke was still being trafficked in from neighboring countries such as Kazakhstan and Poland, and sold online, Multon Partners began pushing its replacement, Dobry Cola, or Good Cola, a knockoff with a similar red label sold across Russia, including at Vkusno i tochka.
In hindsight, McDonald’s decision to cut and run relatively early looks smart, because it allowed the company to choose who took over the business and on what terms, even if those terms may ultimately be unenforceable in Putin’s Russia. Other Western companies that sold businesses to Russians weren’t so lucky, as their trademarks were hijacked or compromised. During Soviet times, Levi’s jeans were traded on the black market and came to symbolize Russia’s hunger for American-style consumerism. In March 2022, Levi Strauss & Co. temporarily stopped operations in Russia; two months later it decided to exit, selling its inventory to its local franchise partner, which rebranded several stores as JNS with a similar red logo. Levi’s said it hasn’t shipped jeans to Russia since the beginning of the war, but JNS is still selling Levi’s online. After Pizza Hut owner Yum! Brands Inc. announced it was pausing operations in March 2022, it transferred the Russian business in July to a local buyer, who renamed the outlets Pizza H, or Pizza N (“N” in Cyrillic reads like the letter “H”), just lopping off the last two letters. Russia had become a surreal theme park of local companies producing copycats of Western brands.
One of the most glaring examples was Starbucks Corp., which suspended operations at its 130 cafes in early March 2022. Two months later, it announced it would leave after 15 years in the country. The following July, a pro-Putin Russian rap artist named Timati teamed up with entrepreneur Anton Pinskiy to buy the business for $6 million. Timati is known for his 2015 song Vladimir Putin Is My Best Friend and a 2019 music video that praised the Kremlin-backed Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and touted Moscow as “the city that doesn’t hold gay parades.” (He later deleted the video after getting more than 1 million dislikes on YouTube.) The two owners began reopening the cafes in the summer of 2022 under the new brand Stars Coffee. The Stars circular logo features a woman with long hair, not unlike the Starbucks mermaid, but they gave her a kokoshnik, a traditional Russian headdress, with a star for a communist retro flair.
Since the invasion, Andrii Onopriienko has spent his days and nights at the Kyiv School of Economics tracking Western companies in Russia, using a small army of researchers and volunteers and posting in-depth research on the website leave-russia.org. As an ex-financier who’s worked at Western banks and consulting firms in Ukraine, he’s been asked by foreign executives what they should do. “They say, ‘If we leave we’ll lose everything, and if we wait we won’t be giving away our know-how and technologies,’” Onopriienko told me, referring to concerns among Western executives about leaving behind factories kitted out with proprietary equipment to produce goods. “I tell them they are already hostages, and they are not in control of their assets or technologies in Russia. Just accept that fact.”
Under pressure from governments and consumers to exit Russia, many European and US executives agreed to deals with politically connected oligarchs. In April 2022, Russia’s richest man, Vladimir Potanin, scooped up the French bank Société Générale SA’s Rosbank unit through his holding company. At the time, Potanin, who used to play ice hockey with Putin, wasn’t under sanctions in the European Union or the US, enabling the agreement to go ahead. (Washington later imposed sanctions on him, but Brussels never did.) The French bank wrote off €3 billion ($3.3 billion) from its exit, which meant Potanin suddenly added billions to his fortune.
Within a year, it became almost impossible for Western companies to sell, even to Kremlin cronies at knockdown prices, proving Onopriienko’s point. Instead, foreign companies that tried to agree to orderly sales had their assets seized. In April 2023, Putin signed a decree that allowed the state to take “temporary” control of assets of companies or individuals from “unfriendly” countries. Some saw it as a tit-for-tat response to the sanctions that froze the assets of Russian companies and billionaires. Putin used the decree to legitimize the Russian government’s takeover of the subsidiaries of German energy giant Uniper SE and Finland’s state-owned utilities company Fortum. Both companies took multibillion-dollar hits after losing control of their Russia operations. The Kremlin had threatened to seize the assets of foreign companies in 2022, but many executives believed Putin wouldn’t go ahead. Now the threat of arbitrary confiscation was real.
Some Western companies in advanced talks with buyers weren’t worried by the decree, but they should have been. The Danish beer manufacturer Carlsberg A/S had spent the year following the invasion preparing for a sale by walling off its Russian unit. It had whittled down a long list of interested bidders. The business was worth around $3 billion before the war; it accounted for almost 10% of Carlsberg’s global revenue and employed more than 8,000 people at eight breweries in Russia. In June 2023, Carlsberg said it had found a buyer for the business, subject to regulatory approval. The Russian Finance Ministry had given the company an informal nod to sell it to Arnest Group, a Russian producer of metal cans that Western sanctions hadn’t touched. A month later, Carlsberg executives were shocked to find out from Russian news reports that Putin had signed a decree to seize control of the business by transferring their shares to the government for “temporary management.”
“I tell them they are already hostages, and they are not in control of their assets or technologies in Russia. Just accept that fact”
To lead Carlsberg’s Baltika Breweries subsidiary, the government picked 71-year-old Taimuraz Bolloyev, an old friend of Putin’s from St. Petersburg. Bolloyev is chairman of the St. Petersburg judo club board where Putin is the honorary president and also owns a clothing company that won lucrative contracts to supply uniforms to the Russian army. Russian authorities didn’t consult or inform Carlsberg about the change of management. “There’s no way around the fact that they have stolen our business in Russia,” Carlsberg CEO Jacob Aarup-Andersen told journalists on a call discussing the company’s financial results last October. “We are not going to help them make that look legitimate.” The Kremlin turned up the pressure on Carlsberg in November 2023 when Russian authorities arrested two of its top local executives on charges of fraud, a move the Danish company branded “appalling.” (In January, one was transferred to house arrest; the status of both men is currently unclear.) The company wrote off $2.5 billion.
A similar fate appeared to await the French yogurt maker Danone SA. Like Carlsberg, Danone had found a buyer for its Russia business pending regulatory approval before the Kremlin swooped in to take control. The Russian government named the 32-year-old nephew of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a close Putin ally who’d deployed forces in Ukraine, as the general director of Danone, the producer of Activia yogurt and Evian water. Danone had more than a dozen production facilities and employed around 8,000 people in Russia. It booked a loss of €1.2 billion from its Russia subsidiary, which its Kremlin handlers rebranded as H&N, for Health & Nutrition. In March 2024, Putin halted the government seizure of Danone, which cleared the way for the company to sell the operation to Vamin Tatarstan OAO, a Russian dairy company owned by a businessman close to Kadyrov, at a heavily discounted price.
Staying put had gone from a game of Russian roulette to an almost certain corporate death. The biggest mistake of Western companies was clinging to their assets and waiting, thinking the political situation might improve. The opposite has happened: Putin has progressively narrowed the exit doors. Any sale of a company must now be at a steep discount of at least 50% of the market value, and 10% of the proceeds must go to the federal budget. Companies that want to leave are effectively forced to pay ransom to Putin’s regime.
Plenty of major Western companies have reduced their footprint or stopped investing but retain some business in Russia. Despite the fact that boycotts and other pressure campaigns are most often directed at consumer-goods companies, that sector accounts for most of the remainers. Procter & Gamble Co. and Nestlé SA continue to sell key brands. Alan Jope, the outgoing CEO of Anglo-Dutch conglomerate Unilever Plc, which sells Dove soap and Cornetto ice cream in Russia, told ITV News in January 2023 he didn’t want the company’s Russian production sites to fall into the hands of the government or pro-Kremlin tycoons. The company has pledged not to take any profits from Russia, but it almost doubled its earnings in the country in 2022. (The company’s Russia revenue fell in 2023.) Philip Morris International, the seller of Marlboro cigarettes, said soon after the war began that it was working on options to exit Russia, but by February 2023 its CEO, Jacek Olczak, told the Financial Times he’d rather keep the business than sell it on the Kremlin’s terms.
Some executives continue to justify their decision to stay by saying they’re selling items such as food or diapers far removed from the war effort. But they’re still paying taxes to the government. And they still could be taken over by the Kremlin any day.
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How Astronauts Cope With a Surprise Months-Long Stay in Space
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Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams were supposed to spend only eight days in space. Instead, the NASA astronauts will end up being on the International Space Station for about eight months. That means missed birthdays, wedding anniversaries, kids’ performances and even the US presidential election.
So far, they’re taking the news in stride. “We are having a great time here on ISS,” Williams said during an in-space press conference in July. “You know, Butch and I have been up here before, and it feels like coming back home. It feels good to float around.”
Their families say they’re managing to cope, too — despite their loved ones missing out on major milestones. Wilmore, for example, will be up in space for his 30th wedding anniversary. “You just sort of have to roll with it and expect the unexpected,” the astronaut’s wife, Deanna, told WVLT. To make up for it, the astronaut has been FaceTiming his family.
Unexpected extensions on space voyages aren’t unprecedented. NASA keeps the International Space Station well stocked with food, supplies and equipment to make sure astronauts are safe, comfortable and well informed about life back on Earth. In fact, NASA even has protocol for allowing astronauts to vote from space — thanks to a bill passed by the Texas Legislature in 1997.
It’s not too different from requesting an absentee ballot on Earth, except astronauts have to list their current address on the application as “International Space Station, Low Earth Orbit.” From there, they receive an encrypted PDF of a ballot on their personal laptop through a secure email process, according to NASA.
Once they’ve selected their candidates, the data for the completed vote is then transmitted via satellite to a ground antenna. NASA transfers that encrypted data to Mission Control in Houston and then on to the county clerk’s office.
Still, long and unexpected trips take a toll.
“When you’re in space for almost a year, you’re in space for just about everything — every birthday, every Christmas, every holiday,” said Scott Kelly, a former NASA astronaut who spent nearly a year on the International Space Station from 2015 to 2016. “I think the only holiday I’ve never been in space for was St. Patrick’s Day.”
While astronauts go into orbit knowing they might not come down as soon as planned, they’re not always fully prepared for such long stays.
“I knew what I was getting into, and I prepared mentally for it. I looked at it as every day I was up there was a kind of a badge of honor the longer I stayed,” said Kelly. “When you’re not expecting it, there is a little bit of a different mindset.”
When Frank Rubio found out his six-month mission would be extended to a year due to a coolant leak in his spacecraft, he had mixed feelings.
“It was probably the one that we least wanted — to be extended for a full 12 months — as a family. That was mostly because of the things that I knew I’d be missing from a family perspective,” said Rubio, who now holds the record for longest continuous spaceflight for an American astronaut. “But then there’s a part of you that says, ‘Hey, you know, this is going to be pretty great as far as experiencing space, right?’”
Adjusting to an extended stay in orbit is no different than preparing for living abroad for a year. Astronauts have to find people to look after their homes and pay their bills, which may not be an issue for Wilmore and Williams, but can be for others.
“Both of them, as far as I understand, are married, and I’m sure their spouse can take care of that. But what if you’re not? How do you take care of your house?” Kelly said. “Single astronauts tell the stories of going into space for six months and coming back and their house was not in the same condition that they left it.”
The space station’s inhabitants aren’t totally cut off from life on Earth. There is decent internet on board and a network of satellites allows for phone calls, albeit short ones, to Earth.
“Most phone calls can last anywhere from five to 20 minutes,” Rubio said. “Right as as you switch from one satellite to the next, the phone call will drop. So generally, you try to kind of fit the phone call in there.”
For Rubio, the biggest disappointment for him was missing the entirety of his son’s senior year while in orbit.
“That was especially poignant to us because I had missed his birth when I was deployed to Iraq,” Rubio said. “So, you know, as a father, I just felt a little bit more guilty about that. But the great thing is, he was actually pretty proud of it, and actually probably more resilient than I was, and that really helped me out, to stay positive about it.”
One other thing for the astronauts to prepare for, said Kelly: Coming home.
“Everything seems new,” Kelly said of being back on the planet after a year way. “I remember the first time I saw a dog after being in space for nearly a year. It was like meeting this alien being that I had never met before. It was kind of cool.”
World order under threat ‘not seen since Cold War’, say heads of MI6 and CIA
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The international world order is under threat in a way not seen since the Cold War, the heads of MI6 and the CIA have warned.
In the first joint op-ed penned by the leaders of the British and American intelligence services in their shared 77-year history, the MI6 chief Sir Richard Moore and CIA director William Burns warned that both countries now “face an unprecedented array of threats”.
Writing in the Financial Times, the intelligence leaders reflected on their decades of cooperation over the course of two world wars and in their fight against terrorism, warning: “The challenges of the past are being accelerated in the present, and compounded by technological change.”
“There is no question that the international world order – the balanced system that has led to relative peace and stability and delivered rising living standards, opportunities and prosperity – is under threat in a way we haven’t seen since the cold war,” they wrote.
For both agencies, “the rise of China is the principal intelligence and geopolitical challenge of the 21st century, and we have reorganised our services to reflect that priority”, they said.
And they warned that staying the course in resisting Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine “is more vital than ever”, saying that Russia “will not succeed in extinguishing Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence”.
The spymasters criticised the “reckless campaign of sabotage across Europe being waged by Russian intelligence, and its cynical use of technology to spread lies and disinformation designed to drive wedges between us”.
“In the 21st century, crises don’t come sequentially,” they wrote. “While significant attention and resources are being deployed against Russia, we are acting together in other places and spaces to counter the risk of global instability.”
Speaking on Saturday in London at an unprecedented joint appearance alongside Sir Richard, Mr Burns warned of the growing and “troubling” defence relationship between Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
Following reports by CNN and the Wall Street Journal that Tehran had defied G7 threats of further sanctions by supplying Moscow with hundreds of short-range ballistic missiles, Mr Burns warned that such a move would mark a “dramatic escalation” of the relationship between Iran and Russia.
North Korea has sent ammunition and missiles to Russia to use against Ukraine, while Iran supplies Moscow with attack drones. Mr Burns said the CIA had yet to see evidence of China sending weapons to Russia, “but we see a lot of things short of that”.
With Ukraine currently urging Western allies to allow Kyiv to use their weapons to strike targets within Russia, Mr Burns said the West should be “mindful” of the escalation risk but not be “unnecessarily intimidated” by Russian sabre-rattling.
Disclosing that he had been sent by the US president Joe Biden to meet one of his Russian counterparts earlier in the conflict in order to warn him of the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons, he said: “There was a moment in the fall of 2022 when I think there was a genuine risk of the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons.
“We’ve continued to be very direct about that. So I don’t think we can afford to be intimidated by that sabre-rattling or bullying.”
Sir Richard added: “I think Russian intelligence services has gone a bit feral, frankly, in some of their behaviour. The fact that they are using criminal elements shows you that they’re becoming a bit desperate ... it’s become a bit more amateurish.”
He added: “Amateurish can actually be more reckless and more dangerous as well.”
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CIA boss says west should not be intimidated by Russia’s nuclear threats
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“Putin’s a bully. He’s going to continue to sabre rattle from time to time,” Burns said. “We cannot afford to be intimidated by that sabre rattling … we got to be mindful of it. The US has provided enormous support for Ukraine, and I’m sure the president will consider other ways in which we can support them.”
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Drone debris found next to Ukraine's parliament building after overnight attack
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KYIV, Sept 7 (Reuters) - Debris from a downed drone was found next to Ukraine's parliament building after an overnight Russian air attack, the country's parliament said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app on Saturday.
Ukraine's air force said earlier Russia launched 67 drones in a nationwide overnight attack. Reuters correspondents in Kyiv heard a series of explosions shortly after 3 a.m. (0000GMT).
Ручку с исчезающими чернилами изъяли на избирательном участке в Петербурге.
В городском Избиркоме подтвердили информацию и пообещали, что канцелярию тут же изъяли.
Подброс ручки назвали провокацией. Теперь ручки во всех УИКах перепроверят. Особенно те, что лежат в кабинках, где избиратели голосуют за кандидатов.
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Число отравившихся на избирательных участках Петербурга за ночь увеличилось до 30 человек.
Деятельность производителя еды, которую привозили на участки, временно приостановлена, — передает ГСУ СК по Петербургу.
После осмотра кухни было зафиксировано несоответствие условий санитарным нормам.
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Уголовное дело возбудили после случаев отравления на избирательных участках в Петербурге.
Отравление сотрудников избирательных участков в Адмиралтейском и Кировском районах Петербурга и полицейских стало уголовным делом об оказании небезопасных услуг. По предварительным данным, пострадало более 10 человек, некоторые из них сейчас находятся в реанимации.
Сейчас следователи осматривают места происшествия, проводят обыски на предприятиях, которые готовили еду для избирательных участков, а также другие мероприятия, которые помогут установить обстоятельства случившегося, а также причастных к этому лиц.
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Члены избирательных комиссий в Адмиралтейском районе Петербурга отравились готовой едой.
Сейчас в обстоятельствах случившегося разбираются надзорные органы. По словам члена Горизбиркома с правом решающего голоса Юрия Кузьмина, случаи пищевых отравлений единичные, работать избирательные участки и комиссии из-за этого не перестали.
Ukraine’s Kursk incursion already has its own museum exhibit in Kyiv
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KYIV — What’s left of a concrete copy of Vladimir Lenin’s nose — which, until recently, was part of a statue of the Soviet leader in Sudzha, Russia — is now on display in the capital of Ukraine.
The broken nose, collected by the director of Ukraine’s war museum on a cross-border trip after Ukrainian troops seized Sudzha last month, was unveiled Friday in a new exhibit in Kyiv that documents Ukraine’s surprise Aug. 6 military incursion into Russia’s western Kursk region.
“There is a phrase among film and television artists that ‘the picture can disappear,’” museum director Yuriy Savchuk, 59, said in an interview as museum staff rushed about preparing the space for the new exhibit. “We may lose this first picture of the war. And so, we needed to see it, to feel these emotions, to witness it with our own eyes in order to reproduce it in the public space.”
“Thanks to our defense forces,” he added, “we managed to make this short, urgent tour.”
Savchuk crossed into Ukrainian-controlled Russia four times last month, returning with a diverse haul of items: local newspapers, movie posters, a handwritten sign from a civilian bomb shelter, a hammer-and-sickle flag from a fire station and, perhaps most symbolically, a blue, bullet-ridden sign showing where the roads to Ukraine and Russia diverge.
The museum’s display of some of those items, along with archival Ukrainian maps of Russia’s border regions and recent photos from Kursk, chronicles how Kyiv turned the tables on Moscow last month, seizing some 500 square miles of Russian territory and hundreds of Russian prisoners of war. The exhibit and the haste with which it was opened reflect how Kyiv sees its seizure of Russian territory in the first such assault on Russian soil since World War II.
The fork in the road sign, Savchuk said, “very symbolically and figuratively demonstrates not just that we have gone in different directions … [but] how far we have already moved away.”
Some of the territory seized inside Russia was long ago considered part of Ukraine, and Savchuk said he hopes the archival display, which describes the region’s history, drives home that “even if territorial claims existed in the past, it does not justify resorting to war in the present day.”
Ukraine has insisted that it brought the war to Kursk to create a buffer zone, push Russian forces from the border and demoralize Russian troops — and has not claimed it plans to try to permanently expand Ukraine’s own modern borders, set in 1991, which Russia has tried to redraw.
When asked how he would respond to any criticism that he had looted the items he brought over the border, Savchuk said he would profoundly disagree. “This is property that has been smashed, destroyed,” he said. The Lenin monument, for example, was damaged in a suspected Russian drone attack, he said — not intentionally destroyed as an act of revenge.
“I absolutely believe that we cannot even use the term ‘artifacts’ or ‘cultural property’ to refer to these objects when they are in Russia,” he said. They only become “mementos and testimonies of this war in our collection, in our museum, where we will keep them for life.”
Russia, he added, is meanwhile “deliberately destroying cultural objects” in Ukraine.
For its part, Russia exhibits items taken from Ukraine during the war, including in a display this summer at Moscow’s State Historical Museum, just off Red Square. Visitors were shown bullet-riddled street signs from the now-occupied eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, Azov Brigade T-shirts and paraphernalia — and a cello that curators claimed had been taken from the destroyed Mariupol Drama Theatre. One wall of the exhibition described Russia’s justifications for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, describing how the war was “forced upon” Russia.
Yuriy Horpynych, an exhibition manager at Kyiv’s state-funded war museum, said his boss did not tell the staff that he was embarking on a trip to Sudzha until after he had gone. The collected items are “not for our own use. It’s a museum collection. … It’s not like an exhibition of trophies,” he said. “We don’t take it from people who need it.”
In Ukraine, he added, “Russians looted everything they can find.”
Pat Griffiths, International Committee of the Red Cross spokesperson in Ukraine, said that he could not speak to the legality of any specific case because his organization maintains neutrality. “What I can say is that in any armed conflict — anywhere, at any time — private, public and cultural property is protected,” he said, referring to the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war.
Savchuk took his job at Ukraine’s World War II museum in late 2021. Within months, his role changed as he shifted his focus from historical research on a century-old war to documenting the new war as it took place in his own home.
In April 2022, days after Russian troops retreated from the Kyiv region, Savchuk requested permission from the Ukrainian military to travel through just-liberated territories to collect evidence to display in the museum.
Much like in Sudzha, his task was urgent. To make his collection historically accurate, he had to arrive first, before others had sifted through the destruction. Over 12 days that month, he collected abandoned Russian soldiers’ boots, ID cards and rations, now on display in the museum previously dedicated to the Soviet-Afghan War.
His team then installed a re-creation of a civilian bomb shelter it visited in the Kyiv suburb of Hostomel. In the museum basement, visitors feel their way through an immersive exhibit and experience the dark, cramped, degrading experience of wartime life. Across Ukraine, some civilians still live full time in similar shelters. Many others still take cover in them during regular Russian airstrikes.
When Ukraine liberated other territory later in 2022, Savchuk again rushed to visit the areas — still mined and vulnerable to Russian assault — to add to his collection.
But the visit to Sudzha was more complicated, he said. The week he visited, the city remained extremely dangerous, with regular Russian drone, missile and glide bomb attacks. Some Russian soldiers were still hiding in the surrounding forests or inside civilian homes.
For his first trip, he crossed with the Ukrainian military, wearing a flak jacket and helmet, he recounted. But the next three days, he and a young photographer working for the museum traveled around Sudzha in their civilian van with Kyiv plates.
When crossing through a checkpoint in the last Ukrainian village near the border, troops raised their eyebrows when he said he worked for a museum. But then one soldier recognized the car. By chance, he was the same soldier who had accompanied Savchuk’s team on its first excursions outside of Kyiv in 2022.
Once inside the Kursk region, they rushed through the town searching for items that would help explain the significance of the incursion. At one point, they watched Ukrainian soldiers shoot a flagpole to help take down a Russian flag.
“You don’t know if you’ll be back on this street later. You don’t know your route. You don’t know how long you will be there,” he said. “And it is extremely difficult. You need to instantly navigate, instantly think about what things you need.”
Racing from street to street, Savchuk said he and the photographer were so excited imagining the future exhibit that they were “high on adrenaline and happiness hormones.” Savchuk even tried to take a cat he found at the border crossing, he said, promising her that she could live in his museum — but she jumped out of his car window and ran back to Russia.
In the civilian shelter in the basement of a former school in central Sudzha, he saw elderly people huddled on mattresses in a basement, using a bucket for a bathroom. The basement, he said, looked exactly like the one from Hostomel that he re-created in Kyiv.
“It’s absolutely the same,” he said. “It’s amazing.” He asked the civilians if he could take the handwritten poster written outside that warned that only civilians — not soldiers — were inside. It looked identical, he said, to signs Ukrainians had installed outside their own homes or shelters.
“It is a great tragedy, a great disaster, a great misfortune for civilians,” he said. “And everyone finds themselves in similar situations.”
Once they had what they needed — and after narrowly avoiding a Russian drone attack — they decided to leave. The museum was waiting for its new collection. And if they were going to install it in time for the one-month anniversary of the incursion, he said, “we had to save our lives.”
Marine Corps requires immediate reporting of extremism, gang activity
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When U.S. Marine commanders hear about instances of extremism or gang activity in their ranks, they’re now required to call Marine Corps headquarters to report the allegations within 30 minutes of learning about them.
The new rule is part of a step-by-step guide for reporting extremism and gang activity released by the Marine Corps at the end of August. The guidance streamlines the reporting process, which has been inconsistent across the services.
The lack of uniformity for reporting and tracking allegations complicated efforts by the Defense Department Office of Inspector General to gauge the military’s response to extremism, the IG reported in 2023. The watchdog determined the DOD investigated 183 allegations of extremist activity among service members in 2023, but the IG doesn’t know how many allegations were made that weren’t investigated.
“The report highlights ongoing challenges in compiling and validating data, emphasizing the need for consistent implementation of data collection,” the IG said.
The National Defense Authorization Act approved by Congress in 2021 mandated the IG to report every year how effectively the Defense Department prevents and responds to extremist activities in the ranks. That same year, the Pentagon expanded its definition of extremist activities to include online interactions that promote terrorism, as well as rallies, fundraising and organizing in support of extremist ideologies.
The changes were made in reaction to the presence of veterans and service members at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. As of May, 222 individuals with military backgrounds had been charged or convicted in connection with the attack, and 24 were active-duty troops, National Guard members or reservists, according to data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.
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The new Marine Corps reporting guidelines follow similar rules imposed by the Army in June. The Army’s rules require commanders to train troops about off-limits extremist activities, take action when they spot extremism in their units and report any incidents to the Inspector General.
During an initial call about an allegation, the Marine Corps Operation Center will talk through reporting requirements with commanders and help determine whether the incident is a threat to mission success. If it is a threat, the allegation would trigger a faster reporting timeline, the guidelines say.
If an instance of extremism or gang activity isn’t mission-critical, commands have three days to send a serious incident report detailing the allegation to Marine headquarters. For senior service members, commands must send the report within one day.
Marine headquarters will share those reports with the Judge Advocate Division, which will share redacted reports to the Inspector General of the Marine Corps, the new guidelines stipulate.
In addition to calling the Marine Corps Operation Center and filing a serious incident report, Marine commands must notify several other groups about the allegations. Those include the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the Marine Counterintelligence Element, the Marine Corps Insider Threat Program and the staff judge advocate in the chain of command.
If a service member who’s facing an allegation has a security clearance, the command’s security manager must also be informed. The security manager will then determine whether to suspend the Marine’s access to classified material, the rules state.
Lt. Gen. James Bierman, the deputy commandant for plans, policies and operations, sent the message outlining the new rules. His message orders commanders to share the guidelines with their units and to spend time instructing all personnel about the requirements.
Two NATO members say Russian drones violated their airspace
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KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Two NATO members said Sunday that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day.
A drone entered Romanian territory early Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, Romania’s Ministry of National Defense reported. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions.
It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.
Later on Sunday, Latvia’s Defense Minister Andris Sprūds said a Russian drone fell the day before near the town of Rezekne, and had likely strayed into Latvia from neighboring Belarus.
Rezekne, home to over 25,000 people, lies some 55 kilometers (34 miles) west of Russia and around 75 kilometers (47 miles) from Belarus, the Kremlin’s close and dependent ally.
While the incursion into Latvian airspace appeared to be a rare incident, Romania has confirmed drone fragments on its territory on several occasions since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, as recently as July this year.
Mircea Geoană, NATO’s outgoing deputy secretary-general and Romania’s former top diplomat, said Sunday morning that the military alliance condemned Russia’s violation of Romanian airspace. “While we have no information indicating an intentional attack by Russia against Allies, these acts are irresponsible and potentially dangerous,” he wrote on the social media platform X.
Latvia’s military on Sunday similarly said there were no indications that Moscow or Minsk purposely sent a drone into the country. In a public statement, the military said it had identified the crash site, and that a probe was ongoing.
Sprūds, the Latvian defense minister, sought to downplay the significance of the drone incursion.
“I can confirm that there are no victims here and also no property is infringed in any way,” Defense Minister Andris Sprūds told the Latvian Radio on Sunday, adding that any risks in the event were immediately eliminated: “Of course, it is a serious incident, as it is once again a reminder of what kind of neighboring countries we live next to.”
Ukraine Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called the incursions “a reminder (that) the aggressive actions of the Russian Federation go beyond Ukraine’s borders.”
“The collective response of the Allies should be maximum support for Ukraine now, to put an end to (Russian aggression), protect lives and preserve peace in Europe,” Sybiha said in a post on X.
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NATO members Romania, Latvia report Russian drones breach
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Latvia and Romania each reported incidents involving Russian drones during another UAV barrage fired at Ukraine over the weekend, a sign of increasing aerial threats posed to countries in the region.
A Russian military drone crashed in eastern Latvia on Saturday, the country’s President Edgars Rinkevics said Sunday in a statement on X.
The drone crossed into Latvian airspace from neighboring Belarus before crashing in the Rezekne municipality, the Latvian defense ministry said on its website. Rezekne is about 55 kilometers (34 miles) west of the Russian border and about 700 km north of Ukraine.
Latvia’s foreign ministry has summoned Russia’s charge d’affaires to discuss the incident, and said it plans to increase protection of its land borders, airspace and territorial waters.
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Earlier on Sunday, Romania’s foreign ministry issued a statement urging Russia to abide by international law after a drone violated its air space the previous night.
Romania issued an alert message to citizens in the counties of Tulcea and Constanta near the border, and scrambled two F-16 fighter jets as a precaution. Its government also informed NATO allies and remains in close contact with them, it said.
Russia unleashed a barrage of 23 explosive-laden Shahed drones against Ukraine overnight in addition to four cruise missiles. Ukraine was able to down one missile and 15 drones, the country’s Air Force said on Telegram.
As winter draws closer in Ukraine, Moscow’s forces have stepped up aerial attacks on energy infrastructure there, regularly sending dozens of drones to attack its territory. Those UAVs circle above Ukraine and have sometimes crossed into the airspace of neighboring countries, including Romania and Poland.
Such incidents have sparked debate within Poland on whether to start shooting down Russian military objects that enter into its airspace. So far, Poland, also a NATO member, has been reluctant to do that due to concern of the potential damage from falling debris.
Belarus, Russia’s close ally which also neighbors Ukraine, reported downing foreign drones for the first time last week, yet avoided naming the country which sent them.
Saturday’s incident is the first known to have involved Latvia.
“The number of such incidents is increasing along the eastern flank of NATO and we must address them collectively,” Rinkevics said on X. Diplomats from NATO countries are expected to discuss the incidents in the coming days.
Цитата:
NATO members Romania, Latvia report Russian drones breach airspace
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BUCHAREST, Sept 8 (Reuters) - Romania and Latvia, both NATO members and supporters of Ukraine in its 2 1/2-year-old war with Russia, on Sunday were investigating instances of Russian drones that crashed after breaching their airspace, authorities in both countries said.
The incidents prompted officials to call for measures to act jointly to counter Russia air incursions.
NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoana denounced the incidents as "irresponsible and potentially dangerous", while saying there was no indication of a deliberate attack on Alliance member-states.
The Romanian defence ministry said the "radar supervision system identified and tracked the path of a drone which entered national airspace and then exited towards Ukraine".
Romania scrambled two F-16 fighter jets to monitor the incursion. Residents of the southeastern Romanian counties of Tulcea and Constanta were warned to take cover.
"From existing data, the possibility of an impact zone on national territory was identified, in an uninhabited area near the village of Periprava," the ministry added.
Ministry personnel were searching the area of impact.
In Latvia, which borders both Russia and its close ally Belarus, President Edgars Rinkevics posted on social media platform X that his government sought a common NATO response.
"The number of such incidents is increasing along the Eastern flank of NATO and we must address them collectively," Rinkevics wrote.
The LETA news agency quoted the defence ministry as saying initial investigation showed that the drone had entered Latvian airspace from Belarus and crashed near the city of Rezekne.
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Polish FM: “We may intercept Russian missiles to protect Ukrainian nuclear plants”.
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“Imagine if a Russian drone or missile veers off course and hits one of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants instead of flying towards Poland or Romania, as has happened before,” Sikorski said. “I believe we should help Ukraine protect its nuclear plants from such stray Russian missiles.”
When asked about the possibility of Polish equipment intercepting munitions over Ukraine, Sikorski replied, “This is my personal view that we would legally have the right to self-defense. But no decisions have been made about this.”
In a separate Financial Times interview, Sikorski had previously asserted that Poland and other countries bordering Ukraine are “obliged” to intercept approaching Russian missiles before they enter their airspace, despite NATO’s opposition.
Sikorski emphasized that NATO membership does not negate each country’s responsibility to defend its own airspace, which is a constitutional duty.
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Ranting Putin ally predicts US will collapse in 'imminent new civil war' amid election chaos
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A close ally of Vladimir Putin has predicted America will collapse in an 'imminent new civil war' amid the presidential election chaos in his latest social media rant.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council and former prime minister of Russia, believes that US will keep its sanctions against the Kremlin in place 'forever' or until a civil war brings the country to ruins.
Medvedev, in a Telegram message Saturday, offered his thoughts on the US presidential election, branding Democrat nominee Kamala Harris as 'inexperienced' and 'just plain stupid', and Republican rival Donald Trump an 'eccentric narcissist' and 'pragmatist'.
He argued that although Trump 'understands that sanctions harm the dollar's dominance in the world' and has 'threatened to lift' them, he will not actually do so because it is an 'insufficient reason to stage a revolution' in an anti-Russia America.
He further alleged that Harris, who Putin has endorsed, will continue to deliver 'beautiful, meaningless speeches' during which she will 'read off a teleprompter while laughing contagiously'.
Russian leaders, apparently angered by the sanctions that were imposed on the nation after its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, have routinely touted the narrative of another civil war. Medvedev even previously alleged parallels between the current political climate and that of Abraham Lincoln's presidency.
The US has gradually increased its sanctions on Russia. President Joe Biden issued an executive order in December that would allow the US to directly sanction foreign banks that facilitate transactions for Russia.
But Biden dropped out of the White House race in July and endorsed his vice president for the job. Putin last week also threw his support behind Harris.
Medvedev, who has made headlines throughout the Ukraine war for his outlandish social media rants, has now weighed in on the upcoming election and the impact he believes it could have on Russian sanctions.
'Out of spite for the current administration, Donald Trump has threatened to lift sanctions against Russia. But will he really do it if elected? No, of course not,' he wrote in a Telegram post Saturday.
'For all his apparent bravado as an 'outsider', Trump is ultimately an establishment insider. Yes, he is an eccentric narcissist, but he is also a pragmatist.'
Medvedev claimed that as a 'businessman' Trump is aware of the financial impacts that the sanctions have on the US dollar, but argues he still will not go against DC.
'Trump understands that sanctions harm the dollar's dominance in the world. However, that's insufficient reason to stage a revolution in the United States and go against the anti-Russian line of the notorious Deep State, which is much stronger than any Trump,' he said, before taking aim at Harris.
'But what about Harris? You shouldn't expect any surprises from her. She is inexperienced and, according to her enemies, just plain stupid. Beautiful meaningless speeches and boring 'correct' answers to questions will be prepared for her, which she will read off a teleprompter while laughing contagiously.'
Medvedev, then suggesting yet again that America was on the brink of destruction, concluded: 'There were sanctions against the USSR throughout the 20th century, and they've returned on an unprecedented scale in the 21st.
'So, it's sanctions forever. Or rather, until the US collapses during an imminent new civil war. After all, Hollywood makes films about this for a reason.'
Karoline Leavitt, National Press Secretary for the Trump campaign, responded to Medvedev's comments Monday in a statement issued to DailyMail.com: 'Vladimir Putin recently endorsed Kamala Harris for President because he knows Harris is weak and can easily be bullied, as evidenced by his invasion of Ukraine days after Kamala warned him not to do it.
'When President Trump was in the Oval Office, Russia and all of America's adversaries were deterred, because they feared how the United States would respond. Only President Trump can end the war in Ukraine and restore peace through strength.'
DailyMail.com has approached the White House for comment.
Medvedev warned of a 'premonition of civil war' on July 4 this year, alleging there were parallels between the American Civil War and modern day America.
He also compared the civil war to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
Medvedev's predictions are seemingly baseless, with the Putin ally having predicted in 2022 that an internal war would erupt in America in 2023.
The US State Department has also previously dismissed Medvedev's statements, with a spokesperson telling Newsweek: 'We know by now not to take Medvedev seriously. This is standard Kremlin nonsense.'
Цитата:
Дональд Трамп обиделся на
нынешнюю администрацию и угрожает снять санкции с России. Снимет, если изберут?
Нет, конечно. При всей своей кажущейся «несистемности» Трамп в конечном счёте – системный персонаж. Да, он экстравагантный самовлюблённый тип, но при этом он прагматик. Трамп, как бизнесмен, понимает, что санкции вредят господству доллара в мире. Однако не настолько, чтобы устроить в США революцию и пойти против антироссийской линии пресловутого deep state, которое гораздо сильнее любого Трампа.
А что Харрис? От неё тем более не стоит ждать никаких сюрпризов. Она неопытна и, как утверждают её недруги, просто глупа. Ей будут готовить красивые бессмысленные речи и скучные правильные ответы на вопросы, которые она, заразительно смеясь, будет зачитывать с телесуфлёра.
Санкции против СССР были весь XX век. Они вернулись в ХХI в беспрецедентном масштабе. Поэтому для всех нас – sanctions forever. Вернее – до распада США в ходе неминуемой новой гражданской войны. Ведь Голливуд недаром снимает о ней фильмы😂.
U.S. Prepares to Challenge Google’s Online Ad Dominance
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For years, Google has faced complaints about how it dominates the online advertising market.
Many of the concerns stem from the internet giant’s suite of software known as Google Ad Manager, which websites around the world use to sell ads on their sites. The technology conducts split-second auctions to place ads each time a user loads a page.
The dominance of that technology has landed Google in federal court. On Monday, Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia will preside over the start of a trial in which the Department of Justice accuses the company of abusing control of its ad technology and violating antitrust law.
It would be Google’s second antitrust trial in less than a year. In August, a federal judge ruled in a separate case that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in online search, a major victory for the Justice Department.
The new trial is the latest salvo by federal antitrust regulators against Big Tech, testing a century-old competition law against companies that have reshaped the way people shop, communicate and consume information. Federal regulators have also filed antitrust lawsuits against Apple, Amazon and Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, saying those companies have also abused their power.
The Justice Department declined to comment on its latest courtroom fight with Google.
Google’s vice president for regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, said in a blog post on Sunday that the Justice Department was “picking winners and losers in a highly competitive industry.”
“With the cost of ads going down and the number of ads sold going up, the market is working,” she said. “The DOJ’s case risks inefficiencies and higher prices — the last thing that America’s economy or our small businesses need right now.”
Google’s other antitrust case is also moving forward. On Friday, Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia set a timeline for deciding remedies by next August. The Justice Department has considered asking for a breakup of the company.
The financial impact of the Google trial that starts on Monday would not be as significant as the suit targeting the company’s core search business, which accounts for about 57 percent of Google’s revenue.
But the new suit could still reshape the internet giant and change the way many online ad businesses operate. The government is pre-emptively calling for a breakup of Google’s ad tech business. That includes divesting advertising software developed by DoubleClick, a company that Google acquired for $3.1 billion in 2008.
Google wrapped DoubleClick’s technology into a suite of products that are used for ad transactions around the web. Today, Google’s ad-selling tools for publishers control 87 percent of the U.S. market, the government says. The Justice Department says that overall, Google’s technology for selling ads across the web brought in about $31.7 billion in 2021. That portion of its business contributes only a small fraction of the company’s profits.
The Justice Department is expected to argue that Google’s dominance over placing ads online results in higher prices for advertisers and publishers. Google’s tool has also hurt specific industries, like news publishers, the government says. Google takes a portion of the price each time those publishers sell their ad space, making it harder for them to stay in business, the government argues.
“Ad tech issues raise the most important antitrust issues involving Google,” in part because they evoke the prospect of a breakup of the company, said Doug Melamed, a former acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s antitrust division.
A government win could require the sale of DoubleClick and other ad tech acquisitions, forcing Google to change its behavior when selling ads online.
Cleaving the DoubleClick technology away from Google could have broad implications for the online advertising industry because it is so widely used by publishers, even if it is no longer the centerpiece of Google’s ad business.
William Kovacic, a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, said doing so would be “very directly changing an industry structure that’s made them enormously powerful” because web advertising is the foundation of the entire modern, free internet.
“Everything that’s not behind a paywall is free to the reader,” said Roger Alford, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, “but it costs the publishers of the websites, and the advertisers of those websites, significant amounts of money in order to present their product for free.” Mr. Alford is a consultant on a similar lawsuit filed against Google and led by the attorney general in Texas.
Google plans to argue that it has been successful simply because it has the best advertising system in the face of substantial competition. The company said in a court filing in August that it had an “extraordinarily sophisticated” system of technology updating constantly to respond to a shifting advertising world.
“Millions of small, medium and large businesses choose Google’s ad tech ecosystem because it works,” the company said in the filing.
Google also said the Justice Department’s case was too narrowly focused on web page ads, an older segment of the market that has since expanded to social media, apps and other types of digital media that offer a wide variety of ways to advertise often outside Google’s control.
As the case plays out over the next few weeks, testimony is expected from representatives of news publishers, including News Corp, Vox Media and The New York Times Company, in the form of recorded depositions.
Daniel Francis, an assistant professor at New York University’s law school who previously served at the F.T.C., said the trial was a “huge bellwether” because it concerned practices across the tech industry.
Antitrust experts said the case could help the Justice Department test legal arguments that it planned to use in future antitrust cases, including against Apple, which it has accused of making it difficult for customers to leave its tightly woven world of devices. The claims that Google built its dominance through acquisitions echo the case the F.T.C. brought against Meta, Facebook’s parent company, which the government says bought nascent rivals to snuff out competition.
Цитата:
U.S. Argues Google Created Ad Tech Monopoly
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The Justice Department told a federal judge on Monday that Google had built a monopoly in lucrative technology that delivers online ads, kicking off a second federal antitrust trial against the tech giant amid mounting scrutiny of the industry.
Google used its acquisition in 2008 of the advertising software company DoubleClick to build its dominance in technology that auctions off ads on web pages as users visit, Julia Tarver Wood, the government’s lead trial lawyer, said in opening statements. Google now has an 87 percent market share in that ad-selling technology, allowing it to charge higher prices and take a bigger portion of each sale, she said, harming news publishers and other website owners.
Google used its size and influence to lock out competitors and rigged the rules to pad its bottom line, Ms. Wood said in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
“Google is not here because they are big,” Ms. Wood said. “They are here because they used that size to crush competition.”
The trial stems from a case — U.S. et al v. Google — that the Justice Department filed against Google last year. In its suit, the agency accused the internet giant of abusing control of its ad technology and violating antitrust law. It is the second federal antitrust trial that the Silicon Valley company has faced in a year, with a federal judge ruling in August in the other case that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly over online search. He is now considering how to resolve those concerns, which could include ordering Google to sell off parts of its business.
The cases against Google are part of a growing push by regulators to rein in Big Tech’s power, which shapes commerce, information and communication online. The Justice Department has also sued Apple, arguing it made it difficult for consumers to leave its tightly-knit universe of devices and software. The Federal Trade Commission has sued Amazon, for squeezing small businesses, and Meta, for killing rivals when it bought Instagram and WhatsApp.
Google has denied the ad-tech allegations, saying the government was trying to disrupt a system that has benefited small businesses that run ads and people who create content.
The trial that began on Monday focuses on advertising technology that largely operates out-of-sight of consumers. Over time, Google built a suite of products to run auctions that sell slots for ads on web pages. After buying DoubleClick, Google wove the company’s technology into its offerings.
While this system has become less central to Google’s revenues in recent years, the government contends that business segment earned more than $31 billion in 2021.
Google controls every link in a chain of software that sells ad space online, Ms. Wood told Judge Leonie Brinkema on Monday.
Google drove customers to use its products, even when websites could have made more money selling their ads through its rivals’ technology, she said. That hurt the websites, like news publishers, that rely on ad sales for revenue, she said. She argued that without that revenue, websites might be forced to charge for content or shut down.
Google’s lead lawyer, Karen Dunn, countered that customers had plenty of options for placing ads online. But they chose Google’s products on the merits, she said. Google will show the judge, Ms. Dunn continued, that the company is “one big company among many others” that competes in the ad tech business.
Ms. Dunn also argued that the scope of the case is incorrect. It focuses on web page ads in an era when online ads are sold across a wide range of platforms, including social media sites and mobile apps.
The government’s case flies in the face of longstanding legal precedents set by the Supreme Court, Ms. Dunn argued. (The lawyer, who has been preparing Vice President Kamala Harris for Tuesday’s presidential debate, left the courtroom after her opening statement. She declined to say where she was going.)
The trial is expected to play out for at least the next four weeks. The judge may hear testimony from Google employees, including YouTube’s chief executive, Neal Mohan, and representatives of media companies, including The New York Times Company.
Ukrainę czeka ważna zmiana. To da ogromne możliwości polskim firmom
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Od początku agresji na Ukrainę Rosja wzięła na cel swoich ataków infrastrukturę energetyczną tego kraju. Z szacunków Forum Energii wynika, że w porównaniu z zasobami sprzed inwazji, Ukraina ma dziś do dyspozycji zaledwie jedną czwartą dawnej mocy wytwórczej w energetyce.
Dlatego już teraz, nawet gdy wciąż trwa bezprecedensowy i zmasowany atak militarny, jednym z najważniejszych tematów jest odbudowa sektora energetycznego, dla którego zniszczenia wojenne - paradoksalnie - mogą stać się szansą na przyspieszoną modernizację.
Ukraina już myśli o odbudowie i modernizacji swojego systemu energetycznego
Obecny system energetyczny Ukrainy to miks energii jądrowej z tradycyjnymi źródłami, takimi jak gaz ziemny i węgiel. Odnawialne źródła energii przed wojną zdobywały także swój udział w rynku, ale po 24 lutego Ukraina straciła 80 proc. OZE. Wszystko wskazuje, że kraj ten wkrótce straci też znaczną część produkcji energii z węgla, dlatego już pora pomyśleć, jak zastąpić te źródła.
- Z pewnością, rola energetyki jądrowej pozostanie duża. Szacuje się, że jej udział może wynieść ponad 50 proc. Ale musimy zastąpić tradycyjne źródła energii, takie jak węgiel, a w przyszłości także gaz ziemny za pomocą zwiększenia udziału odnawialnych źródeł energii. Dlatego musimy myśleć o inwestycjach w dystrybucję i o rozwoju niezależnych i rozproszonych źródeł energii w różnych regionach Ukrainy - mówił WNP.PL podczas Europejskiego Kongresu Gospodarczego Artem Svyryd, dyrektor ds. inwestycji ukraińskiej grupy inwestycyjnej Smart Holding, działającej szeroko na rynku energetycznym.
Do odbudowy Ukraina będzie potrzebowała pomocy i partnerstw. To szansa dla polskich firm
Jak podkreśla, w tym celu Ukraina będzie potrzebować różnego rodzaju pomocy, począwszy od zapewnienia najlepszych standardów ram europejskiej polityki, regulacji i – powiedzmy – wsparcia technicznego. Ale na pewno będzie potrzebować pomocy finansowej. Tu Ukraina liczy także na biznes.
- Mamy nadzieję, że nie tylko rządy i instytucje międzynarodowe będą prowadzić tę pomoc, ale także prywatne firmy, które wniosą znaczący wkład w ten proces - dodaje nasz rozmówca.
Jak wskazuje, polskie firmy w tej chwili mają doświadczenie w niektórych segmentach i sektorach, których Ukraina będzie potrzebowała. Przede wszystkim chodzi o sektor odnawialnych źródeł energii.
- Macie dostawców sprzętu, deweloperów, instalatorów. To jest rodzaj doświadczenia, którego nam w tej chwili brakuje na Ukrainie. Potencjalne partnerstwa z polskimi firmami prywatnymi byłyby docenione z naszej strony, ze strony Ukrainy i inwestorów - wylicza, podkreślając, że już teraz trzeba być przygotowanym do podejmowania współpracy, która będzie zapewne możliwa dopiero po zakończeniu działań militarnych na terenach objętych wojną.
- To zdecydowanie dobry czas, aby znaleźć odpowiednich partnerów, przeprowadzić badania, prace projektowe, znaleźć odpowiednie działki i przygotować się do dalszego rozwoju projektów. Tak więc jest to dobry czas, by stawiać pierwsze kroki na miejscu inwestycji, być może znaleźć odpowiednie połączenia i partnerów po ukraińskiej stronie, aby być w stanie zwiększyć skalę swojej działalności - tłumaczy Artem Svyryd.
A możliwości dla polskich firm są ogromne. Jak wylicza nasz rozmówca potencjał ukraińskiej generacji energii z biomasy na Ukrainie to 30 mld metrów sześciennych rocznie, co przekracza obecną produkcję gazu ziemnego na Ukrainie i większość z tego może być eksportowana do Unii Europejskiej i pomóc Unii w przejściu zielonej transformacji i zabezpieczeniu dostaw energii do całej Wspólnoty. Ukraina mogłaby podjąć się tej roli.
- Dzięki biomasie, ogromnemu potencjałowi energii słonecznej i wiatrowej moglibyśmy w teorii zwiększyć naszą produkcję z OZE trzy lub pięć razy w porównaniu do tego, co było przed 2022 rokiem. Wszystko to może zostać skonsumowane albo przez ukraińskie firmy, albo – mam nadzieję – poprzez współpracę w formule joint venture i partnerstw z europejskimi i polskimi firmami - podsumowuje dyrektor ds. inwestycji grupy Smart Holdings.
Цитата:
Rachel Reeves tells struggling pensioners losing £300 winter fuel cash to blame the Tories ahead of showdown vote tomorrow - as Chancellor warns Labour MPs there are 'more difficult decisions to come'
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Pensioners furious at losing their winter fuel payments should focus their anger on the Tories rather than Labour, Rachel Reeves was tonight.
The Chancellor defended the decision to make the £300 payments means-tested ahead of a vote in the Commons tomorrow expected to see a major Labour rebellion.
The government has come under attack from the left and right, from unions to the Tories, over the cut, which has sparked warnings that pensioners may die from cold rather than turn on their heating this winter.
But addressing a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) tonight Ms Reeves said pensioners were already £900 better off thanks to a state pension rise this year.
And she warned there were more 'more difficult decisions to come', adding: 'When [party] members are looking at where to apportion blame, when pensioners are looking where to apportion blame, I tell you where the blame lies.
'It lies with the Conservatives and the reckless decisions that they made.'
However, leftwing MP Richard Burgon told LBC: 'These cuts will result in the deaths of pensioners who won't be able to turn the heating on.'
He and other MPs suspended by Labour for rebelling against a refusal to increase child benefits say they will vote against the winter fuel measure.
Sir Keir is scrambling to minimise a damaging rebellion after being forced to call a Commons vote on the measure tomorrow.
The government had originally tried to dodge a confrontation by using a so-called 'negative resolution'. But up to 50 MPs are now thought to be considering whether to break ranks.
Labour's own research has suggested thousands of pensioners could die if winter fuel payments are cut.
A shocking analysis was published in 2017 – when Sir Keir Starmer sat in the Shadow Cabinet.
It warned that Conservative plans to axe the allowance for 10 million elderly voters would increase excess deaths by 3,850 that winter.
And it called Theresa May's proposal, which was later abandoned, the 'single biggest attack on pensioners in a generation in our country'.
The revelation has sparked accusations of 'blatant hypocrisy' from ¬Labour's own MPs as the party now forces through the deeply unpopular means-¬testing of the energy bill subsidy.
Unions have joined condemnation of stripping the winter fuel allowance from millions of pensioners as Keir Starmer faces a revolt from dozens of MPs.
Demands for a U-turn have been growing as union chiefs - many of whom fund Labour - gather for their annual conference in Brighton.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham accused the government of 'picking the pocket of pensioners' while leaving the wealthiest 'untouched'. She told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the plan was 'wrong' and had to be dropped.
'We need to make sure that he is making the right choices and leadership is about choices. He needs to be big enough and brave enough to do a U-turn on this choice. It's completely wrong,' she said.
'People do not understand how a Labour government has decided to pick the pocket of pensioners and, at the same time, leave the richest in our society totally untouched. That is wrong and he needs to change course.'
TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said: 'I've got real concerns about the cuts to winter fuel allowance because I don't want any pensioner going into this winter worried about putting the heating on.
'That's why I hope in the Budget the Chancellor will set out the support that she'll make available to those pensioners who … aren't well off by any means. To make sure that they're not frightened to use the heating this winter.
'But I think it's fair to say the Chancellor's got a huge range of challenges. She's been bequeathed a toxic economic legacy by the previous government. There's lots of things that she needs to fix. The state of our public services, the fact that we've got a universal credit system that's not fit for purpose.'
There was fresh confusion this morning after policing minister Diana Johnson suggested Chancellor Rachel Reeves is looking at ways of softening the impact of the cut on pensioners. But Treasury sources told MailOnline that was not the case.
Sir Keir hailed a rise in applications for pensioner benefits today as he struggled to defend axing winter fuel payments.
Downing Street said 38,500 had signed up for pension credit over the past five weeks - compared to 17,900 in the same period before that.
The government have been trying to boost historically poor take-up after dramatically scaling back winter fuel allowance worth up to £300, so that only those on pension credit are eligible.
However, the bump in claims by those on incomes of under £11,400 compares to around 10million who are losing the seasonal sum to help with heating.
The PM's spokesman insisted the Cabinet is united behind the policy today despite a mounting backlash.
The New York Times опубликовал рецепт "польского розового супа"
Литовцы возмутились рецептом из кулинарной рубрики портала американской газеты: пользователям предложили приготовить холодный польский розовый суп, который называется "hłodnik litewski".
Литовский специалист по связям с общественностью Каролис Жукаускас даже обратился в редакцию американской газеты с просьбой исправить ошибку. Однако на этом он не остановился: нашел автора колонки в соцсетях и написал письмо "с конкретной угрозой и требованиями".
"Литовцы, вооружайтесь плакатами, возможно, придется идти, чтобы отстоять холодный борщ!", – написал Жукаускас.
Цитата:
Chłodnik Litewski (Chilled Beet Soup)
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An ideal dish for peak summer, when hot meals seem unthinkable yet fresh produce is bountiful, chłodnik litewski is perhaps the best-known of the Polish chłodniki (chilled soups). Chłodnik litewski translates to Lithuanian cold soup, and reflects a time when Poland and Lithuania were under the rule of the same dynasty starting in the late 14th century, a period in which Polish cooking was influenced by Lithuanian cuisine and vice versa. It’s certainly the most eye-catching, with a lovely magenta hue that emerges when the roasted beets meet the kefir and sour cream to form the soup’s tangy base.
It combines both cooked and raw ingredients — you’ll need to roast some beets and boil some potatoes and eggs — and is best prepared in advance, ready for easy assembly. (For the most vibrant pink color, be sure to refrigerate the soup overnight, as the color deepens with time.) Beets and their greens lend an earthy note, and fresh cucumbers and radishes provide a satisfying crunch. A tangle of fresh herbs and vegetables and a soft-boiled egg on top complete the dish.
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С сожалением и понятными пожеланиями, Dimitriy.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim they shot down another US MQ-9 drone
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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed early Sunday they shot down another American-made MQ-9 drone flying over the country, marking potentially the latest downing of the multimillion-dollar surveillance aircraft. The U.S. launched airstrikes over Houthi-controlled territory afterward, the rebels said.
The U.S. military told The Associated Press it was aware of the claim but has “received no reports” of American military drones being downed over Yemen.
The rebels offered no pictures or video to support the claim as they have in the past, though such material can appear in propaganda footage days later.
However, the Houthis have repeatedly downed General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper drones in the years since they seized Yemen's capital, Sanaa, in 2014. Those attacks have exponentially increased since the start of the Israel-Hamas war and the Houthis launched their campaign targeting shipping in the Red Sea corridor.
Houthi military spokesperson Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree made the claim in a prerecorded video message. He said the Houthis shot down the drone over Yemen’s Marib province, a long-contested area home to key oil and gas fields that’s been held by allies of a Saudi-led coalition battling the rebels since 2015.
Saree offered no details on how the rebels down the aircraft. However, Iran has armed the rebels with a surface-to-air missile known as the 358 for years. Iran denies arming the rebels, though Tehran-manufactured weaponry has been found on the battlefield and in seaborne shipments heading to Yemen despite a United Nations arms embargo.
The Houthis “continue to perform their jihadist duties in victory for the oppressed Palestinian people and in defense of dear Yemen,” Saree said.
Reapers, which cost around $30 million apiece, can fly at altitudes up to 50,000 feet and have an endurance of up to 24 hours before needing to land. The aircraft have been flown by both the U.S. military and the CIA over Yemen for years.
After the claim, the Houthis' al-Masirah satellite news channel reported multiple U.S.-led airstrikes near the city of Ibb. Late Sunday, the U.S. military's Central Command said it had “destroyed three Iranian-backed Houthi uncrewed aerial vehicles and two missile systems in a Houthi-controlled area of Yemen,” without elaborating.
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Ukraine to press top US and UK officials on striking deeper inside Russia
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Ukrainian officials will have a fresh chance to lobby Washington and London to let them use long-range missiles to target sites inside Russia when Secretary of State Antony Blinken and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy visit Ukraine together on Wednesday.
Kyiv has been urging its allies to remove restrictions on using long-range weapons to strike targets within Russia, a ban imposed by nations such as the U.S. and U.K. due to a range of concerns. But the Biden administration argues that beyond the risk of escalating the war there’s a limited number of the missiles needed and that Russia has relocated its air assets out of range.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Mike McCaul (R-Texas) said in an interview he believes, based on a recent conversation with Blinken, that the top diplomat will use the visit to deliver the news that Kyiv can use U.S.-supplied Army Tactical Missile Systems across Russia’s border.
McCaul, a critic of President Joe Biden’s national security approach, has been spearheading a pressure campaign and led a letter sent Monday pressing President Joe Biden to remove limits on Ukraine’s use of the missiles.
“[Blinken’s] as supportive as I am, and he just said, ‘I have some good news. I’m going to Ukraine with my counterpart from the U.K. to talk about ATACMS. And what I’ve seen and what I’ve been briefed on, it looks like that’s the message they’re going to give them, that they can use them cross-border,’” McCaul said. “It sounded promising to me.”
A senior Biden administration official, however, suggested the Biden team still hasn’t made up its mind on the issue.
Blinken will listen to the Ukrainian arguments this week and will relay the messages to Biden and the rest of the U.S. national security team, said the senior administration official, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations. A decision on whether to permit such inside-Russia strikes could follow.
The trip to Kyiv with Lammy is notable as the two allies have been first with a host of weapons for Ukraine, including tanks and British Storm Shadow and American Army Tactical Missile Systems, both of which are long-range than anything the Ukrianians could field at the start of the war.
Both countries have placed limitations on where Ukraine can use them inside Russia however, restrictions that the Ukrainians have argued for months should be lifted to allow them to hit Russian logistics and airfields that are part of Moscow’s war effort.
If permission is granted, it would follow a pattern in which Biden initially resists but eventually allows Kyiv to have more latitude or greater capabilities.
In May, Biden permitted limited U.S. weapons strikes in Russia for cross-border defense operations, but Kyiv and its advocates have sought broader permissions to build on battlefield gains. The Army missiles have a range of up to 190 miles, allowing Ukraine to strike targets deep inside Russia, which would mark a significant escalation if approved.
On a visit to Washington last month, Ukraine’s defense minister, Rustem Umerov, and Andriy Yermak, senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, pressed the case, pointing out that many targets, including critical infrastructure and Russian logistics nodes, were still well within range of the missiles.
Beyond the risk of intensifying the war, the Biden administration has recently emphasized that easing restrictions would pose limited tactical benefit, as Russia has moved many of its air assets out of the missiles’ range. Officials also believe Ukraine doesn’t have enough ATACMS to strike key targets within Russia, and the U.S. has a constrained stockpile available for Ukraine.
McCaul maintains that the devastation from recent Russian attacks has changed the Biden administration’s calculus — and he speculated that the White House wants to start brokering a peace deal before U.S. elections next month.
“I think when [Russia] came back with that massive glide bomb attack,” McCaul said. “I think personally that [administration officials] want to try to negotiate something before the election. They’re not in any position without any leverage to do so, unless [Ukrainian forces] have some victories.”
The news comes as the Biden administration’s updated Ukraine strategy has arrived on Capitol Hill, a person familiar with the report said. The news was first reported by Reuters.
The classified report, which was mandated in April when Congress passed the $95 billion supplemental bill that funds U.S. military and economic support for Kyiv, was expected in June. The person said that the administration has long had a military and economic strategy for its Ukraine support, and the report reflects the long-term thinking in the White House.
Some of Ukraine’s Democratic allies in Congress are also calling for the Biden administration to uncuff Ukraine. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) said he planned to press White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan for the greenlight at a meeting on Wednesday.
“You’ve got to constantly reevaluate where we are and what more we could do,” Kelly said in an interview. “We can’t let Russia win. So I’m going up, having conversations with the administration.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), another senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he’s watched the expansion of bipartisan support for loosening the restrictions.
“I believe it’s actively under consideration by the administration,” Blumenthal said. “I have seen some of my colleagues who feared escalation that Ukrainians really need the authority to strike the sources of slaughter against them. It’s been gradual but I think more and more of my colleagues now feel that giving Ukraine to strike deeper is necessary.”
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Ukraine strikes Moscow in biggest drone attack to date
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Ukraine struck the Moscow region on Tuesday in its biggest drone attack so far on the Russian capital, killing at least one woman, wrecking dozens of homes and forcing around 50 flights to be diverted from airports around Moscow.
Russia, the world’s biggest nuclear power, said it destroyed at least 20 Ukrainian attack drones as they swarmed over the Moscow region, which has a population of more than 21 million, and 124 more over eight other regions.
At least one person was killed near Moscow, Russian authorities said. Three of Moscow’s four airports were closed for more than six hours and almost 50 flights were diverted.
Kyiv said Russia, which sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022, had attacked it overnight with 46 drones, of which 38 were destroyed.
The drone attacks on Russia damaged at high-rise apartment buildings in the Ramenskoye district of the Moscow region, setting flats on fire, residents told Reuters.
A 46-year-old woman was killed and three people were wounded in Ramenskoye, Moscow regional governor Andrei Vorobyov said.
Residents said they awoke to blasts and fire.
“I looked at the window and saw a ball of fire,” Alexander Li, a resident of the district told Reuters. “The window got blown out by the shockwave.”
Georgy, a resident who declined to give his surname, said he heard a drone buzzing outside his building in the early hours.
“I drew back the curtain and it hit the building right before my eyes, I saw it all,” he said. “I took my family and we ran outside.”
The Ramenskoye district, some 50 km (31 miles) southeast of the Kremlin, has a population of around quarter a million of people, according to official data.
More than 70 drones were also downed over Russia’s Bryansk region and tens more over other regions, Russia’s defense ministry said. There was no damage or casualties reported there.
Drone war
As Russia advances in eastern Ukraine, Kyiv has taken the war to Russia with a cross-border attack in Russia’s western Kursk region that began on Aug. 6 and by carrying out increasingly large drone attacks deep into Russian territory.
The war has largely been a grinding artillery and drone war along the 1,000 km (620 mile) heavily fortified front line in southern and eastern Ukraine involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
Moscow and Kyiv have both sought to buy and develop new drones, deploy them in innovative ways, and seek new ways to destroy them - from shotguns to advanced electronic jamming systems.
Both sides have turned cheap commercial drones into deadly weapons while ramping up their own production and assembly to attack targets including tanks, energy infrastructure such as refineries and airfields.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has sought to insulate Moscow from the grinding rigors of the war, says the Ukrainian drone attacks are “terrorism” as they target civilian infrastructure - and has vowed a response.
Moscow and other big Russian cities have largely been insulated from the war.
Russia has hit Ukraine with thousands of missiles and drones in the last two-and-a-half years, killing thousands of civilians, wrecking much of the country’s energy system and damaging commercial and residential properties across the country.
Ukraine says it has a right to strike back deep into Russia, though Kyiv’s Western backers have said they do not want a direct confrontation between Russia and the U.S.-led NATO military alliance.
There was no immediate comment from Ukraine about Tuesday’s attacks. Both sides deny targeting civilians.
Tuesday’s attack follow drone attacks Ukraine launched in early September targeting chiefly Russia’s energy and power facilities.
Authorities of the Tula region, which neighbors the Moscow region to its north, said drone wreckage fell onto a fuel and energy facility but the “technological process” of the facility was not affected.
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Drohnenangriff auf Moskau!
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Wieder hat der blutige Angriffskrieg, den Wladimir Putin (71) losgetreten hat, das Herz Russlands erreicht!
Übereinstimmenden Medienberichten zufolge wurde ein Hochhaus in Ramenskoje (Oblast Moskau) von einer ukrainischen Drohne getroffen. Die 100 000-Einwohner-Stadt liegt etwa 45 Kilometer südöstlich von Moskau.
Ukraine-Drohne schlug im 11. und 12. Stock ein.
Bilder bei X/Twitter zeigen den Wohnblock. In Höhe des 11. und 12. Geschosses war die Drohne nachts eingeschlagen, Flammen lodern aus dem klaffenden Loch. Eine 46 Jahre alte Zivilistin soll bei dem Angriff getötet worden sein. Russische Staatsmedien berichten von drei Verletzten.
Zunächst hatte es geheißen, dass auch ein neun Jahre altes Kind gestorben sein soll. Diesbezüglich korrigierte sich Regionalgouverneur Andrej Worobjow jedoch und sagte, der von ihm vermeldete Tod sei noch nicht bestätigt.
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Der Treffer war Teil einer ganzen Angriffswelle, welche die Ukraine in der Nacht zu Dienstag auf den Aggressor geflogen hatte. Russland will insgesamt 144 der unbemannten Flugobjekte abgefangen haben, heißt es in russischen Propagandakanälen.
Moskaus Bürgermeister Sergej Sobjanin behauptete bei Telegram, dass 20 Drohnen zerstört worden sein sollen. In der an die Ukraine angrenzenden Region Briansk will der Regionalgouverneur Alexander Bogomas „einen massiven terroristischen Angriff des Feindes“ abgewehrt haben. Dabei seien 72 Drohnen zerstört worden. Unabhängig bestätigen lassen sich die Angabe nicht.
Insgesamt vier russische Flughäfen betroffen
Klar ist: Der Einschlag in das Wohnhaus ist nicht der einzige Treffer, der der Ukraine gelungen war. Bilder und Videos zeigen, dass auch die drei Flughäfen Moskau-Domodedovo, Moskau-Wnukowo und Moskau-Schukowski beschossen wurden. Mitarbeiter mussten Drohnenteile vom Schukowski-Gelände entfernen.
Die russische Nachrichtenagentur RIA meldete, dass die Airports 30 Verbindungen streichen mussten. Schließlich wurden alle Drehkreuze der Millionenmetropole mehrere Stunden lang für den Luftverkehr geschlossen.
Auch in der russischen Teilrepublik Tatarstan mussten Starts und Landungen verschoben werden – mal wieder. Ausgerechnet in der Hauptstadt Kasan will Kreml-Despot Putin das größte russlandpolitische Ereignis in diesem Jahr austragen: Im Oktober soll dort der Brics-Gipfel aufstrebender Industrieländer steigen (die Abkürzung steht für die Gründungsmitglieder Brasilien, Russland, Indien, China und Südafrika). Unklar, ob der Flughafen aufgrund des ukrainischen Drohnen-Drucks überhaupt angesteuert werden kann.
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A woman is killed near Moscow after more than 140 Ukrainian drones target Russia, officials say
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Over 140 Ukrainian drones targeted multiple Russian regions overnight, including Moscow and surrounding areas, killing at least one person and injuring eight, officials said Tuesday, in one of the biggest drone attacks on Russian soil in the 2 1/2-year war.
A woman died in the town of Ramenskoye, just outside Moscow, where drones hit two multistory residential buildings and started fires, Moscow region Gov. Andrei Vorobyov said. Five residential buildings were evacuated due to falling drone debris, Vorobyov said.
The attack also prompted the authorities to shut three airports just outside Moscow — Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky — forcing 48 flights to be diverted to other airports, according to Russia’s civil aviation authority, Rosaviatsia.
The first two airports, which are Russia’s second- and third-busiest, reopened in the morning but Zhukovsky was still closed in the afternoon because law enforcement officers were dealing with drone debris there, an airport spokesperson told the Interfax news agency.
It was the second massive Ukrainian drone attack on Russia this month. On Sept. 1, the Russian military said it intercepted 158 Ukrainian drones over more than a dozen Russian regions in what Russian media described as the biggest Ukrainian drone barrage since the start of the war. Russia’s Investigative Committee announced a criminal investigation into what it described as a terror attack.
Russia has pummeled Ukraine with missiles, glide bombs and its own drones, killing over 10,000 civilians since the war began in 2022, according to the United Nations.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian air force said Russia launched 46 Shahed drones and two missiles at Ukraine overnight. The air force said it downed 36 of the drones.
Ukraine has invested a lot of effort in developing domestic drone production, extending drones’ range, payload and uses. It has increasingly utilized drone blitzes to slow Russia’s war machine, disrupt Russian society and provoke the Kremlin.
Ukrainian officials have complained that weapons pledged by the country’s Western partners fall short of what their military needs and commonly arrive long after promised. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged defense companies to increase their output.
On the battlefield’s 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line, Ukrainian troops are up against Russia’s larger and better-equipped army. The two sides are especially contesting parts of eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, fighting over towns and villages that are bombed-out wrecks, while Ukraine last month launched a bold incursion into Russia’s Kursk border region.
In Moscow on Monday night, drone debris fell on a private house on the outskirts of the city, but no one was hurt, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. He counted over a dozen drones heading toward Moscow that were shot down by air defenses as they were approaching the city.
Overall, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it “intercepted and destroyed” 144 Ukrainian drones over nine Russian regions, including those on the border with Ukraine and those deeper inside Russia.
Ukrainian officials declined to comment on the attack.
As the war drags on, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been expanding his alliances:
The Russian military on Tuesday began massive naval and air drills, involving over 90,000 troops and over 400 warships, that China will also take part in, the Defense Ministry said.
Putin is also beefing up his military arsenal with Iranian ballistic missiles, the United States and Britain said Tuesday.
Moscow and the surrounding region have often come under attack throughout the war.
In May 2023, Russian officials said Ukraine tried to attack the Kremlin with drones which lightly damaged the roof of the palace that includes one of Putin’s official residences.
In August 2023, a drone attack on Moscow’s prestigious business district blew out part of a section of windows on a high-rise building and sent glass cascading to the streets, unsettling Muscovites. The attacks exposed gaps in the city and region’s air defenses.
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Ukraine-Russia war latest: Huge drone attack hits Moscow region as Kremlin claims control of Ukrainian towns
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Ukraine has launched what is likely to be its largest drone attack of the war so far, with Russian air defences saying it downed 144 of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) across nine different Russian regions.
At least 20 of the drones were downed over Moscow, Russian officials said, where dozens of flights were cancelled and several major airports suspended operations. Two floors of a multistorey apartment block in the southeast Moscow region of Ramenskoye were pictured destroyed.
Moscow’s mayor Sergei Sobyanin said emergency crews were dispatched to several sites across the capital region including the Zhukovo airport and to the Domodedovo district - home to one of Moscow’s largest airports. At least one child was killed and a large fire broke out in a high-rise residential building outside the capital.
It comes as Russia’s security council chief Sergei Shoigu claimed that Russia was pushing on in its offensive in eastern Ukraine. The ministry of defence, formerly run by Shoigu, claimed Russian forces had taken several towns in the Donetsk region.
They offered no evidence to substantiate these claims.
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Ukraine Fires Deadly Drone Barrage at Russia, Taking War Closer to Moscow
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Ukraine struck Russia with one of its largest drone attacks of the war on Tuesday, killing a woman in the Moscow area, setting off fires in high-rise buildings and forcing the closure of major airports near the capital, Kremlin officials said.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said it had shot down 144 Ukrainian drones in multiple regions ranging from the border area near the war zone in southwestern Russia to suburban towns around Moscow, highlighting Ukraine’s growing capability to strike back at Russia with a fleet of domestically made, long-range weapons.
About 20 of the drones were intercepted over the Moscow region, the ministry said. Ukraine typically remains ambiguous about strikes into Russia, and had no immediate comment on Tuesday.
Taking the war to Russia has become a focus of Ukraine’s strategy over the summer, most prominently in a surprise ground incursion into the Kursk region of Russia, capturing more than 500 square miles of territory. At the same time, it has stepped up long-range strikes, even as Russia has repeatedly bombarded Ukraine with missiles and pressed ahead with an offensive in the country’s east.
Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russia have hit oil refineries, power plants, airfields and military factories. Ukrainian commentators have said that they are intended to disrupt logistics and provide leverage in possible settlement talks to halt Russian strikes on Ukraine.
The drones on Tuesday flew at least 270 miles from Ukraine to reach the outskirts of Moscow. The capital has largely been insulated from the war, with most troops recruited from far-flung provinces, while Ukraine’s ground incursion last month came far to the south of the city.
Authorities said a 46-year-old woman in the suburb of Ramenskoye was killed in the strike; it appears to be the first time Russia has publicly announced a death in the Moscow region resulting from a Ukrainian strike.
Witnesses posted scenes of burning buildings and smoke plumes.
Fragments from one intercepted drone fell in the area of Zhukovsky International Airport, which serves Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, the city’s mayor, said on social media. That airport and two others in the region, Vnukovo and Domodedovo, restricted operations early Tuesday, according to Artem Korenyako, a representative of Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Zhukovsky airport remained shut while the other two were reopened. Russian news agencies reported long lines at check-in counters at the Vnukovo airport.
Though Ukraine has stepped up attacks inside Russia, it is on the defensive elsewhere along the front lines, as Moscow’s forces, with superior numbers, advance in the region around the eastern city of Pokrovsk, a key transit hub.
The strike damaged two apartment buildings in Ramenskoye, a town in the Moscow region, according to Andrey Vorobyov, the regional governor. Three people were hospitalized, and at least 43 residents were evacuated from burning buildings to temporary shelters, he said.
One drone struck midway up a high-rise, igniting a fire and damaging more than 50 apartments, he added.
Situated around 26 miles southeast of the Kremlin, Ramenskoye has a population of nearly 114,000 people. A former center of the Russian textile industry, it is now one of many towns scattered outside Moscow’s city limits from where people commute daily to work in the Russian capital.
Moscow is protected by a multilayered air defense system. Since the start of the war, air defense systems have appeared in the vicinity of high-value targets in the city, including on top of one of the main buildings of the Defense Ministry. GPS signals, which are used by drones, have also been jammed near the Kremlin, disrupting taxi and other services.
Speaking about the Ukrainian attack on Tuesday, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov said that the Russian military “has already gained considerable experience in the fight against drones.”
In the overnight drone attack, the Russian Ministry of Defense reported that it had shot down 20 drones in the Moscow region, an administrative district that surrounds but does not include the capital. The ministry reported that it had shot down most of the drones in southern Russia, near Ukraine’s border.
Tuesday’s volley was among the largest reported by Russia. On Sept. 1, the Defense Ministry reported that it had shot down 158 Ukrainian exploding drones.
In that attack, videos showed fixed-wing drones — which appear like small, low-flying airplanes — buzzing into areas around Moscow. One exploded at a power plant. Last year, Russia accused Ukraine of firing drones that targeted the Kremlin and a skyscraper in Moscow’s financial district that housed government ministries.
Though the Ukrainian military’s abilities to strike deep into Russian territory are growing, Russia’s missile and drone arsenal vastly outguns Ukraine’s, and casualties are far higher inside Ukraine. The United Nations has reported that Russia’s invasion, which began in 2022, has killed more than 11,000 civilians, and that figure is considered far lower than the actual total.
Drone attacks going both directions have become a frequent feature of the war.
Russia launched 46 Iranian-designed Shahed exploding drones and two missiles at Ukraine overnight Monday to Tuesday, Ukraine’s military reported. Attacks by at least several dozen drones have become a near nightly ordeal for Ukrainians. The Ukrainian Air Force said that it had shot down both missiles and 38 drones.
The strikes damaged houses and wounded three people, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Energy and local officials. One person was wounded when a drone hit a mine in eastern Ukraine, and two others were hurt from falling debris in the central Cherkasy region. The attack targeted electrical infrastructure in eight regions and caused brief electrical blackouts in some areas, the ministry said in a statement.
Russia launches massive naval drills with China
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The Russian military on Tuesday launched massive naval and air drills spanning across both hemispheres and including China in joint maneuvers.
The “Ocean-24” exercise spans the Pacific and Arctic Oceans, the Mediterranean, Caspian and Baltic Seas and involves over 400 warships, submarines and support vessels, more than 120 planes and helicopters and over 90,000 troops, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement. The maneuvers will continue through Sept. 16, the ministry said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said in comments to military officials that the war games are the largest of their kind in three decades, and that China’s warships and planes were taking part. China confirmed that on Monday, saying the two countries’ navies would cruise together in Pacific, but gave no details.
A total of 15 countries have been invited to observe the drills, Putin said, without naming them.
“We pay special attention to strengthening military cooperation with friendly states. Today, in the context of growing geopolitical tensions in the world, this is especially important,” Putin said.
The Russian leader accused the United States of “trying to maintain its global military and political dominance at any cost," seeking “to inflict a strategic defeat” on Russia in its war with Ukraine and to “break the established security architecture and balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region.”
“Under the pretext of countering the allegedly existing Russian threat and containing the People’s Republic of China, the United States and its satellites are increasing their military presence near Russia’s western borders, in the Arctic and in the Asia-Pacific region,” Putin said, stressing that “Russia must be prepared for any development of the situation.”
Russia and China, along with other U.S. critics such as Iran, have aligned their foreign policies to challenge and potentially overturn the Western-led liberal democratic order.
With joint exercises, Russia has sought Chinese help in achieving its long-cherished aim of becoming a Pacific power, while Moscow has backed China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea and elsewhere.
Russia’s Defense Minister Andrei Belousov said the drills are aimed to train “repelling large-scale aggression of a potential enemy from ocean directions, combating unmanned boats, unmanned aerial vehicles, defending naval bases, conducting amphibious operations and escorting transports.”
Дебаты между Трампом и Харрис завершились. В этот раз соперники не стали пожимать друг другу руки.
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Трамп на дебатах с Харрис допустил, что Путин был искренен в своих словах о поддержке Харрис и правда желает ей победы на выборах в США.
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Трамп на дебатах с Харрис заявил, что по-прежнему не признает свое поражение на предыдущих президентских выборах в США, когда победил Байден.
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Харрис заявила, что поделилась с Зеленским «разведданными о том, как он может защитить себя» перед началом СВО
Ранее сообщалось, что вице-президент США отказала украинскому лидеру во введении превентивных санкций против России и испортила с ним отношения. .
Harris and Trump have never met. Here's when they could have
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Former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have both been in national politics for the better part of the last decade. Their first face-to-face meeting will be at Tuesday's presidential debate.
Why it matters:
The debate will give U.S. voters the first opportunity to see the two candidates interact, answer questions and likely trade insults in real time.
• Harris was a U.S. senator from California during Trump's first time in office between 2017 and 2021 — so their paths primarily crossed on Capitol Hill during key moments of the Trump presidency.
• Even though they've never met, they've spoken amply about each other during their respective campaign rallies, in interviews and in countless statements or social media missives.
• Harris confirmed she never met Trump during a June interview with late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel before President Biden exited the race. CNN's Dana Bash in August repeated this same fact during Harris' first sit-down interview as presidential nominee.
• For their own parts, Trump (raised in New York and living in Florida) and Harris (raised across the U.S., with roots in California) aren't members of American political dynasties that might have ordinarily intersected. Below are a few occasions where they nearly met.
Biden's inauguration
• Trump skipped Biden's inauguration in 2021, during a presidential transition marked by turmoil of a pandemic, dozens of failed post-election lawsuits filed by Trump and an insurrection.
• It is tradition for outgoing presidents to attend the ceremony. Former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, as well as their spouses, attended Biden's. Obama and Biden both attended Trump's 2017 inauguration.
• The inauguration took place on the same steps where Jan. 6 rioters began their attack on the Capitol weeks before.
Between the lines:
Trump didn't meet with Biden in 2020, which was a departure from the norm, according to the Center for Presidential Transition.
• Vice President Mike Pence and former first lady Karen Pence conducted the "ceremonial duties" of greeting Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff to the vice president's residency, according to the center.
Trump's State of the Union addresses
• Harris attended at least two of three Trump State of the Union addresses.
• In 2019, she brought a furloughed government worker as her guest to the speech to show the impact of the government shutdown, which was caused by a stalemate between Congress and Trump over funding for Trump's border wall. The shutdown left 800,000 workers temporarily without pay for about five weeks.
• She also delivered a "pre-buttal" via Facebook Live to Trump's address that year, when she was also in the running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Her speech offered fact checking to policy he was expected to focus on.
Trump's impeachment hearings
• Harris sat in the Senate chamber in early 2020 during Trump's first impeachment trial over abuse of power and obstruction of justice. During the nearly three-week trial she posed a written statement to House impeachment managers, per the Washington Post.
• Her statement, read by Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., ended with the question: "If the Senate fails to hold the president accountable for misconduct, how would that undermine the integrity of our system of justice?" She had previously called on Congress to impeach Trump.
• Trump's second impeachment over incitement of an insurrection occurred a week before he left office in 2021, and the trial bled into the Biden-Harris administration. The same month, Harris left the Senate after she was elected vice president.
• Trump was acquitted by the Senate in both trials. Republicans made up the Senate majority in 2020, and Democrats did in 2021.
Funerals and memorials
Elijah Cummings:
Trump didn't attend the former U.S. representative's 2019 funeral in Baltimore.
• Cummings chaired the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, which carried out Trump's impeachment inquiry.
• Former presidents and Harris attended.
John Lewis:
Trump did not attend memorial services in 2020 for the civil rights icon and former U.S. House member in Atlanta.
• In addition to Harris, three former presidents attended, Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg:
The Supreme Court justice's shocking death in 2020 set off a race for Republicans to appoint and confirm a new justice with less than 50 days before the election.
• Harris and Trump each attended her services in Washington, DC and Arlington, Virginia, but on separate days.
• Trump, who appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the seat, was booed as he visited the casket of the former Supreme Court justice in 2020.
• Harris attended a private service the following day.
Rosalynn Carter:
Trump, along with former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, did not attend the service for the late wife of former President Jimmy Carter in 2023 in Plains, Georgia.
• Biden and Harris both attended.
• Melania Trump was at the service along with fellow former first ladies, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush and Michelle Obama. All except Melania Trump joined the Bidens' motorcade.
«Вы знаете, давайте все же к Telegram-каналам соответственно относиться, да, насчет Норвегии. Эта информация, скорее, ей владеют наши военные, специальные службы. Здесь я вам точно ничего не могу сказать, только хочу вас предостеречь от восприятия как первоисточников сообщений разных электронных средств массовой информации или около средств массовой информации», — заявил он.
Цитата:
Ruotsi otti yhteyttä Natoon ja hälytti puolustusvoimat Arlandaan
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Ruotsissa Arlandan lentokentällä on annettu droonihälytyksiä jo kolmena peräkkäisenä päivänä, ruotsalaislehti Expressen kertoo.
Tiistai-illan droonihälytys vaikutti lentoliikenteeseen Arlandan läheisyydessä, mutta Expressenin mukaan se ei aiheuttanut viivästyksiä. Poliisi tutkii tapauksia.
Droonien vuoksi Ruotsin viranomaiset ovat hälyttäneet jo maan puolustusvoimatkin hätiin.
– Puolustusvoimilla on enemmän signaalitiedusteluvälineitä kuin poliisilla, Ruotsin maanpuolustuskorkeakoulun professori Hans Liwång selittää Expressenille.
Ruotsalaislehden mukaan signaalitiedustelua voi hyödyntää droonien välisten tai droonin ja sen käyttäjän välisten signaalien paikantamiseen. Sen avulla voi selvitä tarkemmin myös, millä tavalla drooneja ohjataan ja mitä informaatiota drooneilla on lähetetty.
– Se olisi tärkeää tutkinnan kannalta, Liwång lisää.
Toistaiseksi Ruotsilla ei ole tietoa, minkälaisista drooneista on ollut kyse tai kuka tapausten takana oikein on.
Ruotsin yleisradioyhtiö Sveriges Radion mukaan Ruotsi on ollut asian vuoksi yhteydessä myös Natoon ja lähettänyt tapahtuneesta raportin puolustusliitolle.
Цитата:
Lennokit häirinneet Ruotsin Arlandan lentoliikennettä jo kolmatta päivää
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Tukholmassa lennokit häiritsevät lentoliikennettä Arlandan lentokentällä jo kolmatta päivää, kertoo Aftonbladet-lehti. Ruotsin ilmailuviranomaiset ovat vahvistaneet asian uutistoimisto TT:lle.
Siviili-ilmailulaitoksen päivystävä viranomainen Eric Casselberg kertoo, että lentokentän lähellä tänään havaitun lennokin takia joitakin nousuja ja laskuja ollut pakko muuttaa. Hänen mukaansa liikenne on kuitenkin nyt palannut normaaliksi.
Lentoaseman ilmatilaan on lentänyt lennokkeja kahtena edellisenäkin päivänä.
Motiivi epäselvä
Myöhään maanantai-iltana havaittu lennokki johti pieniin viivästyksiin joillakin lennoilla, minkä jälkeen liikenne palautui.
Maanantain vastaisena yönä lentoliikenne Arlandassa sen sijaan pysähtyi lähes kahdeksi tunniksi, kun neljä lennokkia lensi lentokentän ilmatilaan. Lennot joko ohjattiin uudelleen muille lentoasemille tai ne viivästyivät.
Ruotsin poliisi epäilee tekoja tahallisiksi, ja tapauksista on aloitettu tutkinta. AFP:n mukaan poliisin tiedottaja Daniel Wikdahl ei kuitenkaan maanantaina halunnut arvioida, mikä teon motiivi voisi olla.
Цитата:
В Мурманской области сбиты три беспилотника — губернатор
Все три беспилотника, прилетевшие в Мурманскую область в среду, сбиты, заявил губернатор региона Андрей Чибис в телеграм-канале.
Ранее он сообщал, что область подверглась атаке беспилотников.
Росавиация на время закрывала аэропорты Мурманска и Апатитов.
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Москва ответит на возможное разрешение Украине наносить удары вглубь территории России, заявили в Кремле
Пресс-секретарь президента Путина Дмитрий Песков заявил, что Москва не оставит без ответа возможное снятие Вашингтоном ограничений на использование ВСУ предоставленных ей американских дальнобойных ракет для ударов по целям в России.
СМИ писали о возможности такого решения в преддверии сегодняшнего совместного визита в Киев госсекретаря США Энтони Блинкена и министра иностранных дел Великобритании Дэвида Лэмми.
«Он будет соответствующим», — сказал Песков об ответе Москвы, добавив при этом, что «на все эти действия специальная военная операция и является ответом».
Минобороны России сообщило о срыве «попытки ВСУ захватить в акватории Черного моря российскую буровую установку «Крым-2».
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Украинские военные сообщения об атаке на российскую буровую вышку не комментировали.
Цитата:
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Очередная приуроченная к приезду 11 сентября т.г. на Украину высоких представителей США и европейских стран «медийная операция» киевского режима в акватории Черного моря захлебнулась в крови и унесла жизни многих десятков украинских военнослужащих.
Цитата:
Силы Черноморского флота сорвали операцию по захвату Военно-морскими силами (ВМС) Украины российской буровой вышки в Черном море, сообщили в Минобороны РФ.
"Для захвата российской буровой вышки главным управлением разведки Минобороны Украины был направлен морской десант из 14 американских катеров Willard Sea Force с военнослужащими сил специальных операций ВМС Украины. В ходе боя силами Черноморского флота и российскими военнослужащими, выполняющими задачи охраны и обороны буровой вышки, были потоплены 8 морских катеров и уничтожено до 18 украинских военнослужащих сил специальных операций. Еще шесть украинских катеров ретировались, даже не сделав попыток забрать остававшихся в воде раненых украинских военнослужащих", сообщили в российском военном ведомстве.
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Duże wzmocnienie polskiego wojska. Te pociski dolecą do Rosji
Amerykański Departament Obrony ujawnił, że Polska kupiła 400 pocisków manewrujących dalekiego zasięgu JASSM. Nie jest to największy zakup, jakiego dokonaliśmy, ale bardzo ważny, który wzmocni nasze lotnictwo wojskowe.
Siły Powietrzne RP (i armia jako taka) potrzebują broni dalekiego zasięgu. To wniosek płynący nie tylko z doktryn i planów NATO-wskich, ale także z działań zbrojnych, toczących się od dwóch lat na Ukrainie. Dlatego też nasz kraj postawił na kolejne zakupy. Tym razem - kilkuset pocisków samosterujących JASSM.
Amerykanie ujawnili, ile pocisków JASSM kupi Polska
W jednym z odtajnionych dokumentów amerykańskiego Departamentu Obrony (DO) możemy znaleźć ciekawą informację. Polski Skarb Państwa i DO podpisały pod koniec maja porozumienie o zakupie nowej - dużej - partii pocisków JASSM (Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile).
Według ujawnionego przez Amerykanów porozumienia, zdecydowaliśmy się na zakup 400 pocisków z możliwością dokupienia 400 kolejnych. Wartość kontraktu jest niebagatelna. Jak wyliczył portal Dziennik Zbrojny, wynosi ona 735 mln dolarów, czyli około 3,5 mld zł. To bardzo ważny i potrzebny zakup, który może w znacznym stopniu podnieść zdolności obronne RP.
JASSM-ER - pociski samosterującej o obniżonej wykrywalności
Czym są JASSM-y? To produkowane przez koncern Lockheed Martin pociski samosterujące o obniżonej wykrywalności. Służą do punktowego, precyzyjnego niszczenia celów dużej wartości, poza zasięgiem obrony przeciwlotniczej przeciwnika. Innymi słowy, pocisk JASSM może posłużyć np. do zniszczenia dużego centrum logistyki, łączności albo innego, mniejszego celu szczególnej wartości.
Polska dysponuje już pewną liczbą zapasów pocisków JASSM. Ich liczba nie jest podawana publicznie, stanowić ma bowiem tajemnicę wojskową państwa. W przypadku tego zakupu liczbę pocisków ujawnili sami sprzedający nam uzbrojenie Amerykanie.
W Polsce są one przenoszone przez nasze samoloty wielozadaniowe F-16. W przyszłości będą przenoszone także przez F-35. Warto przy tym zaznaczyć, że Polska zdecydowała o zakupie pocisk JASSM w wersji ER, czyli o przedłużonym zasięgu, sięgającym nawet 1000 km. Jest to zatem pocisk mogący zaatakować cele w głębi Białorusi czy Rosji.
JASSM - garść szczegółów technicznych, czyli jak (i gdzie) to działa?
Długie na niemal 4,3 m, ważące ponad tonę pociski JASSM to nowoczesny system walki. Służy do zwalczania celów naziemnych, raczej stacjonarnych. Masa głowicy wynosi nieco ponad 450 kg. Wyposażone są w silniki odrzutowe, nadające im prędkość poddźwiękową.
Pociski zostały opracowane w połowie lat 90. Produkowane są od pierwszych lat XXI w., obecnie są użytkowane przez cztery kraje świata: USA, Australię, Finlandię i Polskę. W przyszłości mają ich używać także Niemcy, Japonia i Holandia.
Polska rozpoczęła starania o zakup pocisków JASSM w 2012 r. Początkowo kupiliśmy je w podstawowej wersji, z czasem rozszerzając zakupy do wersji ER. Teraz jasnym jest, że pocisków ER zakupiliśmy 400 z możliwością zwiększenia zamówienia do 821 sztuk.
Цитата:
Harris’ suggestion that Poland could be next if Ukraine loses the war resonates with Poles
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Wanda Kwiatkowska eagerly read reports on Wednesday morning about the U.S. presidential debate — and they convinced her that a second Trump presidency would be a grave threat to her home of Poland and the larger region.
Former President Donald Trump twice refused to directly answer a question during the debate about whether he wanted U.S. ally Ukraine to win the war. Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris praised U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion so far — and called for it to continue.
“Otherwise, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe. Starting with Poland,” she said.
That’s an argument that many in Poland make themselves, and it resonated Wednesday in the nation of 38 million people whose geography makes it particularly sensitive to the debate. The NATO member is wedged between partners in the European Union in the west and, to the east, the Russian region of Kaliningrad, Russian ally Belarus and Ukraine.
As a result, the war is always present in Poland, whether from occasional accidental incursions into Polish airspace or the large numbers of refugees who have settled there.
Fears that Putin could prevail in Ukraine and then turn his sights on areas of central Europe once under Moscow’s control — including the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — have been present since Russia first illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. They have grown more acute following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, particularly at times when Russia has had the momentum on the battlefield.
If Ukraine loses, Putin “will take further steps,” said Kwiatkowska, a 75-year-old resident of Warsaw whose Ukrainian mother and Polish father met after World War II.
She was particularly dismissive of Trump’s claim in Tuesday night’s debate that he could easily end the war. “I will get it settled before I even become president,” Trump said.
“Just empty words,” she scoffed, pulling a grocery cart as she did her morning shopping in Warsaw, a capital that, like cities in Ukraine today, was bombed to near destruction during World War II.
Sławomir Dębski, a professor of strategy and international affairs at the College of Europe in Natolin, also found it “far-fetched” for Trump to claim he could force Putin and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the negotiating table before he even entered the White House.
“There’s little reason to believe Putin would agree to such a meeting unless Ukraine were prepared to capitulate, which would be unlikely,” Dębski said. In fact, Putin earlier this year insisted Ukraine must give up vast amounts of territory and avoid joining NATO simply as a condition to start negotiations.
Dębski contended that it was a “clear mistake” on Trump’s part not to say outright that he wants Ukraine to win the war. But he also argued that the Biden administration has made a mistake because it “committed itself to help Ukraine as long as it takes, but refused to state that it should mean Ukraine’s victory.”
When Trump first won the presidency, there was strong enthusiasm for him in Poland, from the government and public. The conservative authorities in power at the time shared many of his positions, particularly in their opposition to migration. Poland, one of the largest spenders of defense among NATO allies, also welcomed his push that other allies pay more on defense themselves.
Today’s government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk has made its critical views of Trump known. And with the brutal war in Ukraine, many Poles have soured on Trump, who has a history of admiring comments about Putin.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov dismissed the back-and-forth in the debate, saying “the name Putin is used, let’s say, as one of the tools in the domestic political struggle of the United States.”
Dębski noted that Trump’s praise for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, arguably Putin’s closest ally in the European Union and NATO, is also unlikely to sit well with many Poles.
Trump called Orbán “a tough person, smart.”
Andrzej Nowak, a 67-year-old resident of Warsaw, said he views Putin as a danger to the region, and says that if Russia wins in Ukraine, Poland could one day face Russian troops on its border.
“It’s important for Poland that Ukraine wins,” Nowak said. “Because there is no telling what this madman will come up with.”
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Suomesta löytyy kaksi harvinaista ”Hitlerin tammea” – olympiavoittajat saivat palkinnoksi Berliinin olympialaisista 1936
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Etelä-Pohjanmaalla Lapuan kaupungintalon pihassa seisoo 88-vuotias tammi. Se on vielä ikäisekseen hyvässä kunnossa ja hyvin säilynyt.
Sen alkuperää on pidetty kyseenalaisena, sillä sitä kutsutaan Hitlerin tammeksi.
Adolf Hitlerin
valtakaudella järjestetyissä Berliinin olympialaisissa vuonna 1936 olympiavoittajat saivat kunniapalkinnoksi tammen taimet.
– Se oli saviruukussa 20–30 -senttinen tammi. Niitä tuli Suomeen kahdeksan, sanoo Lapuan kaupungin viheralueiden työnjohtaja
Heikki Oikarinen
.
Lapualainen painija
Lauri Koskela
voitti kreikkalais-roomalaisen painin kultaa ja sai tammen mukaansa.
Ensimmäiset vuodet tammi sai vahvistua Helsingissä, ja Lapualle se siirrettiin 1939.
– Suurin osa niistä kuoli 40-luvulla, kun oli kovia pakkastalvia. Tämä säilyi ehkä siksi, kun tässä on lehmuksia ympärillä, jotka ovat suojanneet, pohtii Oikarinen.
Oikarinen arvelee, ettei tammeen tänä päivänä liity negatiivista tai ideologista ajattelua. Berliinin olympialaisia on pidetty natsihallinnon vallan sementoimisen välikappaleena.
Tutkimusten mukaan Berliinin olympialaisissa nähtiin massiivinen propagandanäytös, jonka tarkoitus oli sekä vahvistaa natsihallinnon sisäistä yhtenäisyyttä ja Hitlerin suosiota, mutta myös kiillottaa ulkoista kuvaa myönteisemmäksi.
Viipurista Joutsenoon
Toinen Hitlerin tammi kasvaa Joutsenossa, Etelä-Karjalassa. Sen tarina on monimutkaisempi.
Nyrkkeilijä
Sten Suvio
ja voimistelija
Ale Saarvala
olivat viipurilaisia. Heidän voittotammensa istutettiin ensin Viipurin keskuskentän portille. Kun Neuvostoliitto miehitti kaupungin 1944, toinen tammista kaivettiin mukaan ja kuljetettiin Joutsenoon.
Ilmeisesti tammi oli Suvion. Toisen tammen kohtalosta ei ole tietoa.
Joutsenon kotiseutuyhdistyksen mukaan taimi istutettiin ensin Joutsenoon Saimaantien varrelle, koska esikunta majoittui silloisessa Keskuskoulussa. Tammi siirrettiin nykyiselle paikalleen koulun pihaan 1970-luvulla.
Siellä se kasvaa vielä tänäkin päivänä. Joutsenon kotiseutuyhdistyksen varapuheenjohtaja
Matti Hätönen
kertoo, että puu ja sen alla oleva muistopaasi ovat entisen keskuskoulun, Martikanpellon koulun, pihamaalla.
– Koulu on lakkautettu jo vuosia sitten. Pihamaa viime aikoina ollut VR:n käytössä ja aidattuna, kertoo Hätönen.
Kahdeksan tarinaa
Kaikkiaan kahdeksan suomalaista olympiavoittajaa sai erikoispalkinnoksi tammen taimen Berliinin kisoista. Vain kaksi tammea on enää hengissä.
Urheiluarkiston tietojen mukaan painija
Kustaa Pihlajamäen
tammi istutettiin Helsinkiin Talin alueelle, mutta se kuoli 1940-luvulla. Juoksija
Gunnar Höckertin
tammi puolestaan istutettiin Helsinkiin olympiastadionin lähelle, mutta sekin kuoli. Estejuoksija
Volmari Iso-Hollon
tammi istutettiin keravalaisen omakotitalon pihalle, mutta sekään ei selvinnyt montaa vuotta.
Juoksija
Ilmari Salmisen
palkintotammi ei selvinnyt edes Suomeen asti. Tarina ei kerro, mitä tapahtui. Sen sijaan uusi tammi istutettiin myöhemmin hänen pihansa eteen.
Kahdeksannen tammen saanut oli Urho Karhumäki, joka voitti olympiakultaa taideolympialaisissa. 1900-luvun alkupuoliskolla järjestettiin kisojen yhteydessä myös taideolympialaiset, joissa kisattiin arkkitehtuurissa, musiikissa, kirjallisuudessa, maalaustaiteessa ja kuvanveistossa. Karhumäen palkinto tuli kirjallisuudesta.
Urheiluarkiston mukaan hänen tammensa istutettiin Vihtiin. Karhumäen haudan vierellä on jäljellä tammen kanto.
...
_________________
С сожалением и понятными пожеланиями, Dimitriy.
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Как не ошибиться с выбором формата обучения и предстать перед будущим работодателем успешным специалистом. Директор по маркетингу ведущего IT-холдинга Fplus Ирина Васильева рассказала, на что теперь смотрят работодатели при приеме на работу, как нестандартно можно развиваться в профессии и стоит ли действующим маркетологам обучаться на онлайн-курсах.
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За пару недель создать ажиотаж вокруг фильма, чтобы все писали о смелом промо, а зрители сметали билеты на премьеру? Маркетинг впечатлений — это искусство, которым Голливуд владеет в совершенстве. Как использовать его принципы в рекламе, рассказывает генеральный директор Mera (by Okkam) Мария Силкина.
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