Category Archives: News & Views

X’s / Twitter’s Russian backers are Petr Aven and Vadim Moshkovich

https://x.com/DenisDanilovL/status/1827282706574537013

Elon Musk has complied after all and provided a list of X Holding Corp shareholders who helped the billionaire buy Twitter. And who do you think turned out to be the investors of the X platform? That’s right, Petr Aven and Vadim Moshkovich. Now it is absolutely obvious where Musk got such love for Russia and where the roots of “filters” due to anti-Russian publications grow from. Let me remind you who Aven and Moshkovich are.

Petr Aven is a Russian billionaire, founder of Alfa Group, which is one of the main wallets for Putin. This man is controlled by the Kremlin as much as possible, for example, in 2018 he traveled to Washington with his colleague Fridman to lobby on behalf of the Russian government to lift international sanctions on Russia. Aven is one of Putin’s oldest friends. In general, without Peter’s interference, Putin would be in jail rather than becoming president. After all, Aven covered for Vladimir Putin in 1992, when he organized the illegal trade in export licenses. Aven promptly approved him as an authorized representative of the Ministry of Foreign Economic Affairs with the right of foreign economic activity, thus saving the future dictator from prison. Aven also attended a meeting with Putin on February 24, 2022 to mark the start of the invasion of Ukraine. He did not express any protest, started the special military operation and silently supported Putin. By the way, he along with Friedman is trying to get sanctions lifted, just yesterday he received another rejection in this matter.
Twitter is represented in the purchase by 8VC Opportunities Fund II, L.P., a company in which his son Denis works.

Vadim Moshkovich is a sub-sanctioned Russian agrarian billionaire who was a member of the “Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation”. In other words, he was officially part of Putin’s closest circle. Moshkovich owns Russia’s largest agricultural holding Rusagro. Naturally, he also attended the meeting with Putin on February 24, 2022 and, like Aven, did not express any protest against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Twitter is represented in the purchase by 8VC Opportunities Fund II, L.P., a company in which his son Jack (Eugene) works.

Also an interesting personality is Al-Waleed bin Talal Al Saud, who both personally and through his Kingdom Holding Company is represented in the list of investors as many as three times. This man continues his investment business in Russia and does not publicly support Hamas in the war against Israel. He regularly works with Rosneft, Lukoil and Gazprom on investments in Russia.

Knowing all of this, how can there even be a discussion about Elon Musk’s bias? Everyone was thinking how is it possible that Twitter (X)’s stock is plummeting, advertisers are breaking contracts, and no one is doing anything about it. I mean, that’s a direct loss to investors. But what everyone overlooked was the fact that investors didn’t care about profits, they needed a platform to promote their narratives, such as: supporting Putin and Russia; lobbying to freeze the war in Ukraine; taking the Ukrainian agenda out of the top news; the righteousness of Hamas, etc.

It is now obvious that all the changes to Twitter that are ruining this beautiful platform are a consequence of Elon Musk’s collaboration with people like Moshkovich and Aven.

“Russia must invade as many countries as possible.”

In a candid moment, Russian propaganda chief points out that in this golden era in which the US absolutely refuses to stand up for allies, Russia must invade as many countries as possible.

I don’t care about Russia, I’ve got a tsar!

https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1732830357928448428

This clip of Russian opposition politician Vladimir Ryzhkov on TV in 2004 has recently resurfaced thanks to @CurrentTimeTv

His warnings for the country’s future are frighteningly prophetic

You might also recognise the presenter…

Russian media mocks MAGA Trump supporters as “not very smart,” “rednecks,” and “primitive people” who you have to talk to with “cliches and dumb slogans.”

Russian media mocks Trump supporters as “not very smart,” “rednecks,” and “primitive people” who you have to talk to with “cliches and dumb slogans.”
https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1758678672716779955

Circassian Genocide

From 1818 until the great deportation of 1864-67 over 1 200 000+ Circassian have been killed by russia, with the number of Circassians who died during deportation via Black Sea being unknown.

95%+ have been either killed or expelled.

Russia is likely involved on both sides of the Mexican border crisis

In 2021, experts in cybersecurity and migration drew attention to the role of unchecked social media platforms in fueling the migration crisis on the US-Mexico border. These platforms, including Facebook, not only encouraged illegal migration to the United States but also promote hatred towards migrants through misinformation and disinformation, experts said. To me, this echoes…

This comes as US Air Force General Glen VanHerck said last year that Russia’s GRU had more agents in Mexico than any other country Could they be involved in this sort of messaging?

https://coldwardaily.com/2023/05/13/source-of-misinformation-fuelling-us-mexico-border-crisis/

Russia’s anti-Ukraine propaganda targeting the West is pervasive and mendacious

Recently, Donald Trump Jr. responded to a question by Timcast IRL co-host Luke Rudkowski about Ukraine.

Trump Jr. said, “We’re creating a class of billionaire oligarchs in Ukraine” by way of the country’s corruption.

Previously, he mocked Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky for seeming ungrateful for the aid received. Earlier, Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis described Russia’s full scale invasion as a “border dispute,” then backtracked.

It’s disturbing to hear so many ridiculous talking points from channels that I’ve otherwise thought to be pretty good. It’s reminiscent of when Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014. Most of the libertarian communities I was part of immediately went off the deep end, inspiring me to write this trilogy of essays.

Today, Russian propaganda is as prominent, brazen, and aggressive as it was in 2014, and as I imagine that it was it was during the 1930s Holodomor when Russia last tried to exterminate Ukrainians.

Then, the New York Times denied that the Holodomor — the great famine — was happening, and the Welsh journalist who exposed it, Gareth Jones, was assassinated.

For a point of reference, and maybe a clue as to why Ukrainians are fighting so hard, my late friend and once-co-author, Russian-American economist, Dr. Yuri Maltsev estimated that the Soviet Union slaughtered 60 million people, and this barbarism neither started nor ended with the Soviet Union. Besides the Holodomor, there are a handful of genocides which I doubt most of the readers here ever heard of: the Circassian Genocide, the Genocide of the Don Cossacks (see The Cossacks by Shane O’Rourke), the 75% reduction of Kamchatka’s native population, the repeated 16th century massacres of Novgorod because of … get this … Western influence (read: “NATO Expansion”).

For much of Europe, and certainly Ukraine, this is the context in which this war is happening.

Add to this historic observations of Russia’s relentless expansionism, their annexation of 20% of Georgia territory in 2009, and their brutality in Chechnya in the 1990s, possibly killing a tenth of their population, and their persistent calls for genocide of Ukrainians.

Here’s a playlist

Idiotic conservatives who attempt position American decadence against Russian traditionalism (something which isn’t remotely true, if you scratch the surface) might as well be the communists of a couple generations ago, aghast that people are risking their lives to flee the workers’ paradise into West Berlin.

More subtle agents, witting or unwitting, simply magnify every Ukrainian failure, ignore every Ukrainian success (liberating Kharkiv and Kherson, and clearing the Russian Navy from the western Black Sea), ignore the historic contexts such as the Holodomor and the Budapest Memorandum, and ignore every Russian atrocity in Ukraine and at home, like the suspicious deaths of at least fifty of prominent Russian business people and officials since the full scale invasion began.

Since even before the days of Potemkin villages, Russia has prioritized perceptions in ways that West does not.

In Russian military doctrine, propaganda is woven into everything, including their Principles of War, while in NATO militaries, principles are strictly tactical.

In 2014, I assembled this collection of incidents, which includes explicit calls to carry out massacres to blame on Ukraine.

One of the compromises we make to live in a relatively free society is that it’s hard to quash propaganda from well-organized foreign actors.

Let’s at least talk about it and identify what we know.

Twitter’s recent release of 9 million tweets from a Russian troll farm demonstrates that they disproportionately target conservatives, though not exclusively.

Russia has also promoted Black Lives Matter and the green movement in its propaganda operations targeting the West.

Communist groups stage creepy pro-Russian rallies, such as this one here. They hold influence over both white nationalists, where they can be found and black nationalists.

Upon Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, the 2004 Communist Party U.S.A. candidate for president, John Parker, visited occupied Luhansk in eastern Ukraine to demonstrate support for Russia. The CPUSA, in the past, has been known to take funding subsidies from the U.S.S.R. Ties apparently have never been broken.

In 2016, separate Russian-linked social media groups promoted both anti-Islam and pro-Islam protests in Texas, encouraging both sides to “battle in the streets.”

If conservatives have ever heard of Yuri Bezmenov, it’s probably in the context of relating his interview about “ideological subversion” to the cultural tensions in the West.

There are more important lessons to learn from his interview and lectures.

According to Bezmenov, 85% of Russian spy resources went into messaging, not espionage. The Russians were interested in extremely small influencers, including, fifty years ago at least, talkative barbers and taxi drivers. I strongly suspect that they found a way to pay me (yes, me!) $35 per month in 2008 for a tiny little Ron Paul blog I ran that echoed voices that took the Russian perspective in their invasion and annexation of a fifth of Georgia (more on that here).

Bezmenov also discussed how, in the countries they targeted, they nurtured the careers of influencers they considered helpful, and attempted to destroy the careers or the people who opposed them.

Thoughtful criticism of Ukraine should acknowledge the historic context including the Budapest Memoradum by which Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees, and the realities of Russian war crimes and rhetoric. And while we must tolerate foreign influence as part of living in a relatively free society, let’s do the work of understanding and describing it.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/01/russias_antiukraine_propaganda_targeting_the_west_is_pervasive_and_mendacious.html