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Welcome back to Political Misfits on Radio Sputnik, where we bring you news, politics and culture - without the red and blue treatment. I am John Kiriakou here with Michelle Witte.
Mark Sleboda is an international affairs and security analyst.
Russia to station nuclear arms in Belarus, says Putin
German Christian Democrats rewrite Merkel’s China playbook – POLITICO
I’m going to be a grownup and save the fun story for just a little bit later, after we get through some of the more serious news. Talk to us about this announcement by Vladimir Putin that Russia already has deployed fighter jets capable of carrying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus and that he intends to position nuclear armed hypersonic missiles in the country as well. Why has Russia said it’s doing this, and what other reasons might they not be expressing?
OK, let’s get into the fun stuff. The New York Times ran a story this weekend about how, what do you know, foreign dudes in Ukraine who love posting self-aggrandizing videos and revealing their exact locations MIGHT not be the kind of seasoned operators and good faith actors we’re told have been swelling the ranks of Ukraine’s foreign legion! And some of our most beloved and high profile dudes might be among them!
So the Times tell us that among all the noble volunteers in Ukraine are men who have lied about their past service, lied about the conditions of their service in Ukraine, lied about fundraising efforts and are at least tangentially involved in things like arms and human trafficking! Hoo boy. One of the major figures in the story is this guy called James Vazquez, who got a hero’s sendoff from his hometown paper upon leaving for Ukraine and has been preening online ever since. He’s been revealed to have lied about his own military background and to have fudged the circumstances of his service in Ukraine. That hasn’t stopped him from talking about the easy access he has to plenty of brand new American weapons of unknown provenance. And while it’s fun to see some of these clowns get exposed here, this is probably the truly worrisome aspect of the story - Vazquez in particular is confirmation of what people have been warning about - that weapons, including weapons from the US, are not being sent just to members of the Ukrainian army, but to anyone who can talk a good story. These might include people like Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban, who another person profiled has talked about trying to traffick from Pakistan and Iran - illegally! - to fight in Ukraine.
Now, I’m not going to be Pollyanna and act like I’m surprised that war creates great conditions for fraud. But are there circumstances in this conflict that make these kinds of scams particularly dangerous?
We also have to talk about Malcolm Nance, MSNBC talking head and a man who has spent his entire life exaggerating his credentials, turning two decades in the Navy and work as a cryptologist into “counterterrorism” credentials and expertise on American enemies from ISIS to Russia. Now Nance is fighting bitterly with other members of the Ukraine Foreign Legion and fundraising from outside the country with another man who is misrepresenting his credentials - a dude who completely made up a history as a US marine to get into the legion for a time. Honestly, this Legion service for a lot of people just seems like an opportunity to fundraise and skim off the top. And I wonder if we’re going to see lawsuits for fraud against some of these people like we have against Steve Bannon and his Build the Wall crew?
Still, Mr. Vasquez had easy access to weapons, including American rifles. Where did they come from? “I’m not exactly sure,” Mr. Vasquez said in a text message. The rifles, he added, were “brand-new, out of the box and we have plenty.” He also tweeted that he should not have to worry about international rules of war while in Ukraine.
Last spring, a volunteer group called Ripley’s Heroes said it had spent approximately $63,000 on night-vision and thermal optics. Some of the equipment was subject to American export restrictions because, in the wrong hands, it could give enemies a battlefield advantage.
Frontline volunteers said Ripley’s delivered the equipment to Ukraine without required documentation listing the actual buyers and recipients. Recently, the federal authorities began investigating the shipments, U.S. officials said.
The International Legion, hastily formed by the Ukrainian government, spent 10 minutes or less checking each volunteer’s background early in the war, one Legion official said. So a Polish fugitive who had been jailed in Ukraine for weapon violations got a position leading troops. Soldiers told The Kyiv Independent that he had misappropriated supplies, harassed women and threatened his soldiers.
https://fcw.com/comment/2023/02/building-accountability-coming-spyware-ban/382769/
I want to talk about spyware also. The Biden administration has been working for some time on a ban of foreign commercial spyware - like the NSO group’s Pegasus spyware - and is expected to announce the details of that ban very soon. It’s not a ban on the government using spyware - it’s foreign spyware, because increasingly, anything on the internet that is foreign is probably dangerous, whereas anything American made is fine. Can you talk about what this spyware ban might look like and what impact it could have?
There was this initial view of the internet in some quarters that it would be this great tool to unite people, and so it’s interesting and sad to find that the internet is increasingly blocked off by national borders. It also provides another look at how the US views the world - it’s all ours and we should get to patrol it and bomb it and harness it, etc, but incursions by anyone else into any arena are threats. Can you talk a little bit about the nationalization of the internet and whether it’s following or breaking from offline trends?
I also wanted to get your thoughts on this new internal document by Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, the party of former chancellor Angela Merkel, that would push the party into an about-face on China, shifting from the practical and economically interdependent relationship Merkel built to one of increasing hostility. The paper echoes what we hear from US administrations - that Beijing is a threat to the “rules based international order” and that China is behaving “aggressively.” This would be a pretty big shift and I have two questions about it - one, what does it portend for Germany politics, and two, how should it add to our understanding of Merkel herself?
Finally - what’s the latest in France? What do you make of coverage of these protests and how long do you expect them to continue?
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