Daily: 04/06/2022

Байден: санкції зведуть нанівець досягнення Росії за 15 років

6 квітня був опублікований новий список санкцій, до якого увійшли високопоставлені російські чиновники, а також «Сбєрбанк», «Альфа-Банк» і повʼязані з ними компанії

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US Parents Plead for Information on Son Held by Russia

The parents of a former U.S. Marine held captive in Russia pleaded for information about him on Wednesday, expressing fears about his “rapidly declining health” and that “something terrible” had happened to him.

Joe and Paula Reed, who met last week with President Joe Biden about the plight of their son, Trevor, 30, said in a statement that it has been five days since he was last heard from, in a Friday phone call with his girlfriend.

“With each passing hour, we are more and more worried that something terrible has happened,” the parents said in their statement. “We believe there is a rapidly closing window for the Biden administration to bring our son home.”

Russian news agencies reported Monday that Reed ended a hunger strike to protest his solitary confinement and was being treated in a prison medical center.

The younger Reed is serving a nine-year term after being convicted of endangering the lives of two police officers while drunk on a visit to Moscow in 2019. Reed denied the charges. The United States called his trial a “theater of the absurd.” 

After his parents met with Biden, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the president reiterated his commitment to continue to work to secure Reed’s release and other Americans “wrongfully held in Russia and elsewhere.” 

U.S.-Russia relations, however, are severely strained after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and U.S. imposition of economic sanctions, including new ones on Wednesday. 

Some information in this report came from Reuters.

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«Я не займався цим питанням» – Монастирський про обставини виїзду братів Суркісів з України

Міністр внутрішніх справ Денис Монастирський в етері програми «Свобода Live» прокоментував виїзд з України Григорія та Ігоря Суркісів.

«Я не займався цим питанням. Я також із засобів масової інформації чув. Спілкувався потім з представниками спецслужб, які обговорювали цей кейс. Тому я не можу зараз прокоментувати. Я не глибше, ніж ЗМІ володію цим питання», – сказав міністр, відповідаючи на запитання, за яких обставин братам Суркісам з родичами-чоловіками призовного віку вдалось покинути територію України після початку повномасштабного вторгнення Росії.

Монастирський додав, що випадки хабарництва серед прикордонників за «сприяння» у виїзді чоловікам призовного віку розслідує Державне бюро розслідувань.

«Сьогодні залучені до перевірки цієї інформації представники державного бюро розслідування. Дійсно у соцмережах, ЗМІ час від часу виникає така інформація, вона перевіряється сьогодні вже не внутрішньою безпекою прикордонників, а слідчими і оперативними співробітниками ДБР. Бюро має зробити чіткий висновок, тому що у більшості випадків, які ми перевіряли, інформація не підтверджувалась», – додав Монастирський.

 

23 березня ДБР порушило кримінальне провадження щодо інспекторів митного посту «Вилок» Закарпатської митниці, які пропустили через кордон машини братів Суркісів без перевірки.

За інформацією відомства, 26 лютого 2022 у зону митного контролю прибули дві автівки, за кермом яких перебували Григорій та Ігор Суркіси з чотирма пасажирами в кожній машині. Інспектори не оглянули багаж та особисті речі, не виконали інші дії передбачені законодавством під час воєнного стану.

ДБР порушило провадження після того, як раніше видання «Українська правда» з посиланням на джерела в правоохоронних органах повідомило, що Григорій та Ігор Суркіси виїхали з України на початку збройного вторгнення Росії, вивізши на своїх машинах, серед іншого, своїх родичів-чоловіків віком від 18 до 60 років – попри указ президента про загальну мобілізацію.

Як свідчить документ прикордонників, який опинився в розпорядженні журналістів, Суркіси виїхали до Угорщини окремо на двох автівках 26 лютого між 22:40 і 23:00. Співрозмовники в Держприкордонслужбі сказали, що Суркіси виїхали без декларування готівки на митниці, хоча на угорському митному пункті оформили готівку на суму 17,6 мільйона доларів.

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Орбан пропонує переговори з Путіним про мир. У Зеленського назвали ідею «медійним хайпом»

За словами угорського премʼєра, Путін відреагував «позитивно», але висунув кілька умов

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EU Adopts New Sanctions Against Russia 

The European Union is expected to join the United States in imposing new sanctions against Russia as horrific reports of possible war crimes in Ukraine continue to surface. But critics, including some EU members, are calling the measures insufficient.

The new EU sanctions — the fifth round by the bloc since Russia invaded Ukraine — are expected to target Russian coal, shipping and banking sectors, including Russia’s largest lender Sverbank, which says the move will be insignificant on its operations.

In a video address to the Irish parliament, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the EU indecisive for not adopting stronger measures to bar Russian energy imports.

Calls for tougher energy bans also are growing within the EU, including from Baltic states — which ended Russian natural gas imports as of April 1 — and the bloc’s executive arm. That includes European Council President Charles Michel, who addressed the European Parliament on Wednesday.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I think that measures on oil and even gas will also be needed sooner or later.”

The same message was sent from EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who said the EU had paid Russia’s President Vladimir Putin more than $35 billion for energy imports since the war began, compared with only about $1 billion worth of arms and weapons the EU sent to Ukraine.

The 27-member bloc has pledged to cut by two-thirds its Russian gas imports by year’s end, and completely end energy imports from Moscow this decade. But countries like Germany, which is highly dependent on Russian oil and gas, are worried about the economic hit of an immediate and total energy ban.

Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, who won another term in office Sunday and who has nurtured close ties with Russia, is also pushing back against tougher sanctions.

Still, horrific reports of possible Russian war crimes in Ukraine are hardening European mindsets. This week, more EU countries expelled dozens of Russian officials from their soil. Some member states also are sending their diplomats back to Ukraine, who left after Russia’s invasion six weeks ago.

On Tuesday, French prosecutors opened three probes into alleged war crimes for activities they said likely had been committed in Ukraine against French nationals.

Interviewed by French radio, President Emmanuel Macron of France, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency, said there are clear indications that war crimes were committed in Ukraine, likely perpetrated by Russia’s army. He said international justice must be served and perpetrators held responsible.  

 

Still, Macron has maintained an open dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin to try to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict. That has been criticized by EU member state Poland, which compares Putin to Hitler.

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У ЄС готуються до реагування на хімічні і ядерні загрози

«Наша мета – надати можливість швидкого реагування нашим громадянам, якщо така надзвичайна ситуація коли-небудь відбудеться», – кажуть в ЄС

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Велика Британія запровадила санкції проти «Сбербанку» і восьми російських олігархів

«Разом з нашими союзниками ми показуємо російській еліті, що вона не може вимити руки від звірств, скоєних за наказом Путіна», – заявила глава МЗС Британії

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Зеленський доручив уряду формально припинити товарообіг із Росією

«Фактично імпортні та експортні операції з державою-агресором повністю зупинилися з початком війни»

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Війна в Україні може тривати «місяці або навіть роки» – Столтенберґ

«Ми також повинні бути підготовленими до довгого протистояння. Це стосується як підтримки України, так і збереження санкцій»

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Russian Media Campaign Falsely Claims Bucha Deaths Are Fakes

As gruesome videos and photos of bodies emerge from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Kremlin-backed media are denouncing them as an elaborate hoax — a narrative that journalists in Ukraine have shown to be false.

Denouncing news as fake or spreading false reports to sow confusion and undermine its adversaries are tactics that Moscow has used for years and refined with the advent of social media in places like Syria.

In detailed broadcasts to millions of viewers, correspondents and hosts of Russian state TV channels said Tuesday that some photo and video evidence of the killings were fake while others showed that Ukrainians were responsible for the bloodshed.

“Among the first to appear were these Ukrainian shots, which show how a soulless body suddenly moves its hand,” a report Monday on Russia-1’s evening news broadcast declared.

“And in the rearview mirror it is noticeable that the dead seem to be starting to rise even.”

But satellite images from early March show the dead were left out on the streets of Bucha for weeks. On April 2, a video taken from a moving car was posted online by a Ukrainian lawyer showing those same bodies scattered along Yablonska Street in Bucha. High-resolution satellite images of Bucha from commercial provider Maxar Technology reviewed by The Associated Press independently matched the location of the bodies with separate videos from the scene.

Other Western media had similar reports.

Over the weekend, AP journalists saw the bodies of dozens of people in Bucha, many of them shot at close range, and some with their hands tied behind them. At least 13 bodies were located in and around a building that residents said was used as a base for Russian troops before they retreated last week.

Yet Russian officials and state-media have continued to promote their own narrative, parroting it in newspapers and on radio and television. A top story on the website of a popular pro-Kremlin newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, pinned the mass killings on Ukraine, with a story that claimed “one more irrefutable proof that ‘the genocide in Bucha’ was carried out by Ukrainian forces.”

An opinion column published Tuesday by the state-run news agency RIA Novosti surmised that the Bucha slayings were a ploy for the West to impose tougher sanctions on Russia.

Analysts note it isn’t the first time in its six-week-old invasion of Ukraine that the Kremlin has employed such an information warfare strategy to deny any wrongdoing and spread disinformation in a coordinated campaign around the globe.

“This is simply what Russia does every time it recognizes that it has suffered a PR setback through committing atrocities,” said Keir Giles, senior consulting fellow with the Russia and Eurasia program at the Chatham House think tank. “So the system works almost on autopilot.”

Before the war, Russia denied U.S. intelligence reports that detailed its plans to attack Ukraine. Last month, Russian officials tried to discredit AP photos and reporting of the aftermath of the bombing of a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, which left a pregnant woman and her unborn child dead.

The photos and video from Bucha have set off a new wave of global condemnation and revulsion.

After his video appearance Tuesday at the U.N. Security Council, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy enumerated the killings in Bucha by Russian troops and showed graphic video of charred and decomposing bodies there and in other towns. Russian U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia dismissed them as staged.

Across social media, a chorus of more than a dozen official Russian Twitter and Telegram accounts, as well as state-backed media Facebook pages, repeated the Kremlin line that images and video of the dead were staged or a hoax. The claims were made in English, Spanish and Arabic in accounts run by Russian officials or from Russian-backed news outlets Sputnik and RT.

The Spanish-language RT en Español has sent more than a dozen posts to its 18 million followers.

“Russia rejects allegations over the murder of civilians in Bucha, near Kiev,” an RT en Español post said Sunday.

Several of the same accounts sought to discredit claims that Russian troops carried out the killings by pointing to a video of Bucha Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk, taken March 31, in which he talked about the suburb being freed from Russian occupation.

“He confirms that Russian troops have left Bucha. No mentioning of dead bodies in the streets,” top Russian official Mikhail Ulyanov tweeted Monday.

But Fedoruk had publicly commented on the violence before the Russian troops left in an interview with Italian news agency Adnkronos on March 28, where he accused them of killings and rapes in Bucha.

In an AP interview March 7, Fedoruk talked about dead bodies piling up in Bucha: “We can’t even gather up the bodies because the shelling from heavy weapons doesn’t stop day or night. Dogs are pulling apart the bodies on the city streets. It’s a nightmare.”

Satellite images by Maxar Technologies while Russian troops occupied Bucha on March 18 and 19 back up Fedoruk’s account of bodies in the streets, showing at least five bodies on one road.

Some social media platforms have tried to limit propaganda and disinformation from the Kremlin. Google blocked RT’s accounts, while in Europe, RT and Sputnik were banned by tech company Meta, which also stopped promoting or amplifying Russian-state media pages on its platforms, which include Facebook and Instagram.

Russia has found ways to evade the crackdown with posts in different languages through dozens of official Russian social media accounts.

“It’s a pretty massive messaging apparatus that Russia controls — whether it’s official embassy accounts, bot or toll accounts or anti-Western influencers — they have many ways to circumvent platform bans,” said Bret Schafer, who heads the information manipulation team at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

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WHO: After March Surge, Global COVID-19 Cases Continue To Drop

The World Health Organization ((WHO)) says, following a surge of new cases in early March, the number of new worldwide COVID-19 cases and deaths has fallen for a second consecutive week.

In its weekly update released late Tuesday, the WHO reports the number of new cases overall fell by 16 percent during the week ending April 3, compared to the previous week.

As of 3 April 2022, just over 489 million cases and over 6 million deaths had been reported globally.

The agency said global deaths from COVID-19 fell sharply – by 43 percent – in the past week. The WHO attributed a sharp rise in death numbers the previous week to a change in the way deaths were counted and the addition of death numbers not previously reported in the Americas.

At the country level, the highest number of new weekly cases was reported in

South Korea, with more than 2,058,000 new cases, Germany, with more than 1, 371,000 and France, with nearly one million new cases.

South Korea’s cases declined 16% and Germany’s declined 13 percent. In France, case numbers were up 13 percent.

Across the six WHO regions, over nine million new cases and over 26,000 new deaths were reported. All the regions show decreasing trends both in the number of new weekly cases and new weekly deaths.

The WHO continues to caution, however, several countries are progressively changing their COVID-19 testing strategies, resulting in lower overall numbers of tests performed and consequently lower numbers of cases being detected.

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Греція висилає 12 російських дипломатів

Відомство сповістило по рішення посла Росії

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Шарль Мішель пропонує обговорити надання притулку солдатам РФ, які відмовляються воювати проти України

Шарль Мішель назвав ймовірність надання притулку російським дезертирам «цінною ідеєю, яку слід розвивати»

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Майже 180 підприємств змінили виробничі локації через війну – Мінекономіки

465 підприємств вже знайшли обладнані площі для своїх потужностей

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Влада повідомила про 11 гуманітарних коридорів на 6 квітня

Попередньої доби вдалося евакуювати 3 900 людей

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Посольство Туреччини заявляє про повернення до Києва

Посольство Туреччини повідомило про перенесення роботи до Чернівців 11 березня

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У Білорусі заблокували сайт правозахисної організації Human Rights Watch

Практика внесення ЗМІ до переліку «екстремістських» чи позначення їх «іноагентами» широко застосовується і в Росії

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Twitter to Start Testing Long-Awaited Edit Feature Soon

Twitter said on Tuesday it will begin testing a new edit feature in the coming months, surprising its users on the same day it said Tesla boss Elon Musk would join the social media company’s board. 

Jay Sullivan, Twitter’s head of consumer products, said in a tweet the company had been working since last year on building an edit option, “the most requested Twitter feature for many years.” 

The news, first teased by Twitter on April Fools’ Day, comes as the company faces a broader change in direction with Musk becoming its largest shareholder and joining the board after questioning the social media platform’s commitment to free speech.  

Musk began polling Twitter users about an edit button after disclosing his 9.2% stake in the company on Monday. As of 6:30 p.m. EST, the poll had more than 4.2 million votes, with 73.5% supporting the feature. 

Twitter Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal asked users to “vote carefully” on Monday, though the company on Tuesday tweeted that it did not get the idea for the edit button from the poll. 

Sullivan tweeted the feature will take time to fine tune as “without things like time limits, controls, and transparency about what has been edited, Edit could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation.” 

The company will actively seek “input and adversarial thinking in advance of launching Edit,” he added. 

Twitter will start testing the feature within its Twitter Blue Labs premium subscription service in the coming months to “learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible,” it said. 

Twitter Blue members get exclusive access to premium features and app customizations for a monthly subscription. 

 

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Російських військових інструкторів у Малі підозрюють у причетності до масових вбивств – HRW

За даними правозахисників, урядові війська за підтримки іноземців, яких кілька джерел назвали росіянами, стратили без суду не менше 300 людей

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США анонсують нові санкції проти Росії, в тому числі заборону нових інвестицій – Псакі

Білий дім планує «посилення санкцій проти фінансових інституцій, російських державних компаній, санкції проти російських посадовців і їхніх родин»

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Естонія надала Україні протитанкову та іншу зброю – посольство

Крім того, естонські підприємці передали українським військовим військове спорядження

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Elon Musk Named to Twitter Board After Acquiring Massive Stock Share

A day after it was revealed he owned the largest stake in Twitter, slightly more than 9% of shares, Elon Musk has joined the company’s board of directors.

The Tesla and SpaceX founder will be on the board until at least 2024, according to a regulatory filing.

As a stipulation of his board membership, Musk won’t be allowed to own more than 14.9% of Twitter shares while on the board and for three months following a departure from the board.

After the announcement, Musk tweeted, “Looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!”

“I’m excited to share that we’re appointing @elonmusk to our board!” tweeted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. “Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board.”

“He’s both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service, which is exactly what we need on @Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term. Welcome Elon!”

In recent weeks, Musk, who is an active Twitter user with upwards of 80 million followers, has questioned the platform’s commitment to free speech and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  

He recently ran a poll on Twitter asking users if they felt the same. More than 2 million responded, with over 70% saying Twitter does not adhere to free speech.  

 

Twitter stock has surged since Musk’s acquisition of about $3 billion worth of the company’s stock. 

Some information in this report comes from The Associated Press. 

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Wimbledon Organizers Holding Talks with UK Govt on Russian, Belarusian Players

The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) is holding talks with the British government on the participation of players from Russia and Belarus at this year’s Wimbledon, saying on Tuesday that it hopes to announce a decision in mid-May.

Russian and Belarusian players have been allowed to compete on the regular ATP and WTA Tours but not under the name or flag of their countries following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Belarus was a key staging area for the invasion, which Russia says is a “special military operation.”

Russia was also banned from defending its Davis Cup and Billie Jean King Cup team titles.

“We have noted the UK Government’s guidance regarding the attendance of Russian and Belarusian individuals in a neutral capacity at sporting events in the UK,” the AELTC, organizers of the grasscourt Grand Slam, said in a statement.

“This remains a complex and challenging issue, and we are continuing to engage in discussion with the UK Government, the Lawn Tennis Association, and the international governing bodies of tennis.

“We plan to announce a decision in relation to Wimbledon ahead of our entry deadline in mid-May.”

British Sports Minister Nigel Huddleston had said last month that he would not be comfortable with a “Russian athlete flying the Russian flag” and winning Wimbledon in London.

He added that U.S. Open champion Daniil Medvedev may have to provide assurances that he does not support Russian president Vladimir Putin if he is to compete.

Wimbledon will be held from June 27-July 10.

 

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