RussiaGate #Digest

The head of Russia's Federal Investigative Committee has ordered the committee's Chechen branch head to investigate the attack in Grozny on Elena Milashina & Alexander Nemov and report back. What a joke.https://t.me/sledcom_press/7473Chechen officials have already indicated that they plan to treat this attack as a false flag designed to sully their republic's "good name." 🤡 via Kevin Rothrock https://ift.tt/tUbLOHY

NI: Between 2008 and 2014, 1,993 Russian nationals received the United Kingdom’s “golden visas,” which offered residency to people investing £2 million or more in the country. The United States, Portugal, and Austria were among the top issuers of investor visas for wealthy Russians. These opportunities began fizzling away following the imposition of Crimea-related sanctions on a number of Russian oligarchs linked to the Kremlin. Despite the financial losses that the Russian tycoons incurred, the list of Russian billionaires grew by a third—from 77 in 2016 to 106 in 2018—and their net worth rose to a collective $485 billion in the two years following the 2014 tranche of sanctions.

The head of the Wagner PMC Eugene Prigozhin: The military operation was done for the sake of denazification ... And we made Ukraine a nation that is known throughout the world. Legitimized Ukraine ... Now about the demilitarization. If at the beginning of the special operation they had conditionally 500 tanks, now they have five thousand. If at that time they were able to fight with 20 thousand fighters - now they have 400 thousand. How did we demilitarize it? Now we on the contrary - how the hell we militarized Ukraine.

Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin plays the role of Vladimir Putin's "technical successor" and has been embedded in all the processes implemented by the supreme power - from import substitution and the sovereignization of production processes to providing logistical support for the military operation in Ukraine. The prime minister only did not yet visit the war zone or the "new regions" like almost all of his direct subordinates - the deputy prime ministers. Instead, Mishustin's foreign policy functions have been greatly increased, especially in the post-Soviet space.

Russia was forced to resort to the practice of using private military companies in the military operation zone in Ukraine because the forces of paratroopers and marines were practically exhausted, retired military intelligence colonel Vladimir Kvachkov has said. According to him, the participation of Wagner PMC fighters in combat operations in Ukraine is a forced measure, which the Russian authorities had to take.

Anatoly Chubais has no plans to comment publicly on Russian political life and the military operation in Ukraine, sources in his entourage have said. Insiders report that several major Western media outlets tried to contact Chubais to persuade him to give a detailed interview about his attitude toward the military operation in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin, but the former head of Rusnano flatly refused such offers. "It is possible that this complete public silence was the condition Chubais had to accept in exchange for his unimpeded departure from the country last year," specify the interlocutors familiar with the situation.

In the last section of the essay, immediately after praising Russians’ “resilience and solidarity,” Medvedev launches into a condemnation of internal enemies, expressing relief that the “alien toxic foam” that formed on Russian society is “gradually disappearing.” Any Russians who wish defeat on their own country and army are outright “traitors,” he says, though he leaves open a gray area for expats aboard “philosophers' ships” (an allusion to intellectuals expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922). “God will judge them,” concludes Medvedev, before finishing with more praise for the Russian economy and the state’s handling of weapons manufacturing.

ISM: The Russian information space has significantly deviated from the narratives preferred by the Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) that things are generally under control.

⚡️Putin calls meeting with Russian Security Council members on Monday.

A Ukrainian government official told The Washington Post on Saturday that Ukrainian special services were behind the bridge attack.