Author: disinfo1

98% of Russian companies in the light industry have failed to demonstrate that they have actual production at the declared addresses, announced Revas Iusupov, deputy director of the Center for the Development of Prospective Technologies (ЦРПТ), the operator of the national labeling system “honest brand”. According to Iusupov, a year and a half experiment, conducted in collaboration with Rospotrebnadzor, aimed at identifying fictitious clothing manufacturers. Out of the 107 companies checked, only two managed to confirm that they are actually engaged in production. In the other cases, residences, hotels or vacant lands were found at the declared addresses, not workshops,…

The US has refused to grant the international oil trading company Gunvor permission to purchase the foreign assets of Russia’s largest private oil and gas company – Lukoil. “President [Donald] Trump has made it clear that the war [in Ukraine] must end immediately. As long as [Russian President Vladimir] Putin continues his absurd crimes, the Kremlin’s puppet, Gunvor, will never receive a license to operate and profit,” stated the US Treasury Department. About an hour later, Gunvor announced that it was withdrawing its offer to acquire the international assets of Lukoil. Gunvor representatives described the US Treasury’s statement as “completely…

Poland will begin a new military training program this month as part of a broader plan that involves training about 500,000 people by 2026, announced the Ministry of Defense in Warsaw on Thursday, according to Reuters and AFP. Driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Poland is currently spending more of its GDP on defense than any other NATO state, writes Agerpres, citing the two foreign agencies. With 216,000 soldiers, Poland has become the third largest army in NATO and intends to increase its forces by almost a third in the next decade. The program titled “Always Ready” will be voluntary…

The type of pro-Kremlin figures who are rewarded by the regime for their loyalty are now finding themselves targeted by the very repressive machinery they supported, reports The Guardian. The British publication presents the case of three fervent followers of Vladimir Putin who have become overnight enemies of the state. Recently, an analyst who praised Putin in glowing terms in the foreign press, a fervent pro-war blogger, and a volunteer and commentator for the RT network, were declared “foreign agents,” a term reserved for dissidents and exiled opponents. Political analyst Serghei Markov hailed Vladimir Putin as one of the great…

The head of Russian diplomacy, Sergey Lavrov, seems to have fallen out of favor with Vladimir Putin, following a failed exchange of remarks with the new American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio — an episode that led, according to the Russian press, to the cancellation of the much-anticipated summit between the Kremlin leader and Donald Trump. The 76-year-old diplomat, who has been leading the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for over two decades, was noticeably absent from the meeting of the Security Council of the Russian Federation on November 5 — a significant meeting, usually attended by the hard core of…

The scams of marriages with Russian soldiers have escalated in Russia. Russian women who marry to receive the benefits paid by the Russian state to the relatives of those fallen in battle are known as “black widows,” reports WSJ. The American publication consulted judicial documents concerning crimes with fake marriages. Some of these involve criminal groups. Elena Sokolova was fined 3,000 rubles, equivalent to 37 dollars, by a judge, after she married a soldier, Serghei Handojko, immediately after he signed a contract with the Russian army. As a widow, the woman would have been entitled to 200,000 dollars, a sum…

The great debate about the use of frozen Russian assets to finance Ukraine’s defense effort has led to the emergence of a burning question – where are all these immobilized assets – writes Euronews. When the Prime Minister of the Belgian government, Bart De Wever, blocked the bold plan of the European Union to obtain a loan of 140 billion euros for Ukraine with the help of the immobilized assets of the Russian Central Bank, the reason he gave was that Belgium is the only country that is transparent when it comes to these assets. This is also because the…

The Czech Republic, until now one of Ukraine’s most devoted allies, is considering reducing the much-needed flow of weapons and ammunition to Ukrainian forces, announced the politician who is expected to become the new foreign minister of the country, in the new Babis cabinet, reports Politico. Filip Turek, the president of the Bikers Party, a populist formation that will form the government together with Babis’s party, announced that the Czech Republic “will prioritize diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine and to mitigate the risks of conflict in Europe, moving from military aid funded from the national budget to…

Poland and Romania are set to deploy a new weapon system to defend against Russian drones, following a series of incursions into NATO’s airspace in recent months, which have exposed the Alliance’s vulnerabilities and increased tensions in Europe, reports The Associated Press. The American system Merops, compact enough to be transported in the bed of a medium-sized truck, can detect and intercept drones using artificial intelligence, even when satellite communications or electronic signals are jammed. According to NATO military officials quoted by AP, Merops will be used not only in Poland and Romania, but also in Denmark, as part of…

A civil war could break out in Russia due to accumulated social, economic, and political conflicts, warned Alexander Kharichev, the head of the Presidential Executive Office for Monitoring and Analysis of Social Processes, according to The Moscow Times. According to Kharichev, the civil war is one of the five challenges that Russia is facing. In addition, the country is dealing with the loss of political, territorial, and cultural sovereignty, depopulation, loss of public trust in the government, and the collapse of the political system, as well as the “dehumanization” and transformation of Russians into “consumer subjects”. The Kremlin’s chief sociologist…