The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

[Armenian]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

Russia sells Iran sophisticated missile systems capable of repelling US or Israeli air or missile assaults.

The first of 29 Tor-M1 systems in the $700m deal have been delivered to Iran by Moscow despite US opposition to their sale of a weapon widely regarded as the most advanced of its kind in the world. Some Iranian and Russian air defense experts say its full deployment at Iran’s nuclear installations will make them virtually invulnerable to American or Israeli attack in the foreseeable future. Therefore, no more than six months remain, until the Russian Tor-M1 systems are in place, for any attempt to knock out Iran’s nuclear weapons industry.

DEBKAfile’s military sources disclose that Iran’s military and Revolutionary Guards units are on top war alert for the second month. Their fighters and bombers are parked on the runways ready for takeoff, their surface missiles including Shehab are a button’s push away from firing and their war ships and submarines cruise out at sea in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. Tehran is determined not to be caught napping by any surprise attacks. The fact that officials in Moscow, albeit unidentified, announced the Tor-M1 missile’s delivery to Iran indicates the Russian president Vladimir Putin has decided to shrug off US objections, including a request put to him in person by President George W. Bush when they talked in Moscow and Hanoi earlier this month.

DEBKAfile adds some information about this super-missile: The first batteries to be delivered come ready with Iranian crews trained at Russian air defense corps facilities. The advantages of the Tor-M1 system are principally its ability to simultaneously destroy two targets traveling at up to 700km/h in any weather by day or night; its powerful, jamming-resistant radar with electronic beam control, and its vertically-launched missiles’ ability to maintain high speed and maneuverability throughout their operation. According to military experts, the 3D pulse Doppler electronically beam-steered E/F-band surveillance radar feeds to a digital fire control computer range, azimuth, elevation and automatic threat evaluation data on up to 48 targets.

The 10 most dangerous targets are automatically tracked and prioritized for engagement. The maximum radar range is billed as 25 kilometers but may be more. On the lower right side of the tracking radar, which is located at the front of the turret, is an automatic TV tracking system with a range of 20 km that enables the system to work in a heavy ECM environment. Last spring, the United States called on all countries to stop all arms exports to Iran. Link: http://www.debka.com/

[TomServo]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

I read it years back when I was a young Pro-Russian finatic who hated America and wanted to restore the soviet union.

What changed your mind? Did you realize that the Soviets were just as imperialistic as their Czarist predecessors?

[ace]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

What changed your mind? Did you realize that the Soviets were just as imperialistic as their Czarist predecessors?

The Soviets were more imperialistic.

[Artsakh]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

What changed your mind? Did you realize that the Soviets were just as imperialistic as their Czarist predecessors?

No, I just came to realize that the Russians are guided soley by their own national interests. While at times this may concide with Armenia's interests, there is always the danger that it may not. Therefore, we must put all our hopes on our own shoulders.

Nonetheless, I do have a love for the Russian people, and have respect for the russians because armenia truly underwent a cultural renaissance under soviet rule. from the 1918 republic, where people were starving,less than a million population, to the flowering under soviet rule- writers, poets, language, culture all blossoming.

[TomServo]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

No, I just came to realize that the Russians are guided soley by their own national interests. While at times this may concide with Armenia's interests, there is always the danger that it may not. Therefore, we must put all our hopes on our own shoulders.

Nonetheless, I do have a love for the Russian people, and have respect for the russians because armenia truly underwent a cultural renaissance under soviet rule. from the 1918 republic, where people were starving,less than a million population, to the flowering under soviet rule- writers, poets, language, culture all blossoming.

All very true. But let's not forget the Stalinists and the transmigration programs (this is what I meant by "imperialism") and the execution/torture of Armenian writers like Yeghishe Charents, Gurgen Mahari (though Armenians contributed to his misery), Barouyr Sevag (just conjecture) and Zabel Yessayan.

I enjoy Russian art and culture as well. I think Ivan the Terrible (both parts) is one of the greatest films ever made.

[Armenian]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

They could easily have planted a bomb in Litvinenko's vehicle, or just shot him to death in a dark alley somewhere. However, they chose to give us all a 'show,' a morbid spectacle, as we watched an enemy of the Russian State slowly wither away into nothingness. And interestingly, many of the names on Moscow's hit list are, not surprisingly, Jooz. This act has yet again shown us all just how brazen Moscow has become. For better or for worst, watch the rise of Russia during the next ten to twenty years.

Russian Ex-Spy Lived and Died in World of Violence and Betrayal

By ALAN COWELL

LONDON, Dec. 2 — The tangled tale of Alexander V. Litvinenko, the maverick Russian K.G.B. agent turned dissident who died of radiation poisoning last week, has seized the headlines recently, but its roots can be traced to a late spring evening in Moscow in 1994. At just after 5 p.m. on June 7, Boris A. Berezovsky, one of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs, was leaving the offices of his car dealership in a chauffeured Mercedes 600. According to Russian news accounts at the time, he and his bodyguard were sitting in the rear seat behind the driver. As the car drove by a parked vehicle, a remote-controlled bomb detonated, decapitating the driver but somehow leaving Mr. Berezovsky unscathed.

As a high-ranking officer in the organized crime unit of the F.S.B., the successor to the K.G.B., Mr. Litvinenko “was the investigating officer of the assassination attempt,” said Alex Goldfarb, a Berezovsky associate and a spokesman for the Litvinenko family, in an interview conducted, fittingly, in the rear seat of a parked Mercedes in central London with a heavyset driver at the wheel. “They became friends.” It was a friendship that was to shape Mr. Litvinenko’s career, which began in the roller-coaster politics and self-enrichment of post-Soviet Russia, spanned his desperate flight from Russia through Turkey and then on to Britain to seek asylum. It ended spectacularly and mysteriously, with the British police saying the only thing they knew for sure was that he was dead, poisoned after ingesting an obscure radioactive isotope called polonium 210.

[...]

Although the precise circumstances of his death remain hidden, Mr. Litvinenko lived the last years of his life as a public critic of President Vladimir V. Putin and the Russian government. Assigned to investigate the assassination attempt on Mr. Berezovsky, he ended up accusing the F.S.B. of involvement in a later conspiracy, a charge that severed his ties with the agency. Once in exile in London, his contacts with Mr. Berezovsky and a circle of other Russian émigrés and former agents flourished, even as his criticism of Mr. Putin grew more vigorous. In the weeks before his death, he had begun looking into the shooting death in Moscow of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of Mr. Putin and his policies in Chechnya.

Mr. Litvinenko began his lingering decline on Nov. 1, when he met an Italian academic, Mario Scaramella, in a sushi bar and linked up with former K.G.B. colleagues in a five-star hotel. Then he fell ill, wasting away over 22 excruciating days from a muscular, almost boyish figure to a gaunt shadow. Investigators followed a radioactive trail around London and, through British Airways planes found to have traces of radiation, to Moscow. British Airways said 221 flights, carrying 33,000 people, might have been affected. In a bizarre sideshow, a former Russian prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, a quiet critic of the Kremlin, fell ill with symptoms of poisoning.

The episode left Britain’s relations with Russia strained: no matter how much Mr. Putin denied it, British officials faced a barrage of newspaper speculation that a supposedly friendly power, or its disaffected agents, had reached onto the streets of London for nefarious purposes. From his deathbed, Mr. Litvinenko accused Mr. Putin of responsibility for his plight, but that conclusion was far from certain. One thing, though, was abundantly clear: Mr. Litvinenko’s death matched his life in a world of conspiracy and betrayal as a former spy.

[...]

“I brought him to the U.S. Embassy at the end of October in Ankara,” said Mr. Goldfarb, by his own account an American citizen who fled the Soviet Union 31 years ago and spent many years in exile working for, among others, the financier George Soros. “We just walked in and said here’s the F.S.B. colonel, and they are not interested.”

Finally, Mr. Litvinenko left Turkey using a ticket allowing him to transit, but not stay, in London. In November 2000, he arrived at Heathrow airport, surrendered to the British police and claimed asylum, according to accounts by Mr. Litvinenko and in the British press. But he was still not treated as a high-level defector. Mr. Suvorov, an agent from Russian military intelligence, G.R.U., who defected in 1978, said: “I raised the question, ‘Look, there’s a man who has lots of information about organized crime’ — no one else had so much information — but no one questioned him about it, British, French, Americans. He had incredible knowledge.” Neither Turkish nor American officials confirmed this account. But, to judge from what happened later, Mr. Litvinenko was determined to put his knowledge of Russia’s intelligence networks to use.

Émigrés in London

From the minute he landed in Britain, Mr. Litvinenko resumed his association with Mr. Berezovsky, who had arrived some months earlier also seeking asylum. From a modest row house in white-collar Muswell Hill in north London, he appears to have moved easily in security and former espionage circles, frequently visiting Mr. Berezovsky’s offices in Mayfair — one of London’s most upscale districts. He was part, too, of a population of an estimated 300,000 Russians in London, including political émigrés, old-time defectors and wealthy tycoons who spend their time in nightclubs and boutiques and buying up real estate and soccer clubs. He was granted British citizenship earlier this year.

[...]

But he also maintained contact with his former F.S.B. colleagues, like Mikhail Trepashkin, who was jailed in October 2003 for betraying state secrets while investigating apartment bombings in Moscow and elsewhere in 1999 that killed scores of people. Those bombings formed the basis of a book published in English the same year by Mr. Litvinenko accusing Russia’s security services of staging the bombings as a pretext for the second Chechen war. In a letter released Friday and dated Nov. 23, Mr. Trepashkin said in a reference to the F.S.B., “Back in 2002, I warned Alexander Litvinenko that they set up a special team to kill him.” But Mr. Litvinenko also registered increasing concerns about his safety. “A secret service is designed to fight another secret service,” he told The New York Times in a telephone interview in 2004 during the inquiry into the poisoning of Viktor A. Yushchenko, then a Ukrainian presidential candidate. “When a secret service goes after an individual, they have no chance.”

[...]

Mr. Litvinenko said his supporters arranged for him to address British legislators, whom he told that members of the Russian secret services were “getting more aggressive, threatening my relatives.” He said he knew of 32 Russian spies working in England. “They follow us and prepare provocations and our liquidation,” he said. In September 2004, two weeks after his appeal to Parliament, Mr. Litvinenko said in the interview, bottles containing burning liquid were thrown at his apartment at 1 a.m. Some of his associates bridled at the idea that he was Mr. Berezovsky’s personal agent or go-between. “He was not just someone who came from Russia and said to Berezovsky: give me some money,” said Mr. Suvorov, the former G.R.U. agent.

But Mr. Litvinenko nonetheless displayed a knack for confidential business. According to a report in The Times of London in November, he traveled to Israel weeks before he died to hand over a dossier on the Yukos oil affair — in which the company’s former chairman, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, has been imprisoned for tax evasion — to Leonid Nevzlin, an exiled oil tycoon. Mr. Nevzlin was quoted as confirming the article. On the fateful day when he first took ill, the radiation trail of his movement led to the offices of Erinys, an international security company in Mayfair.

[...]

Source: http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/f...gh/nyt671.html

[Illuminator]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

http://www.vor.ru/index_eng.phtml?view=news4_eng&id=782

The Daily Telegraph quotes sources in Scotland Yard as reporting the discovery of the radioactive poison that killed Alexander Litvinenko in the car of the senior Chechen separatist Akhmed Zakayev, who resides in London after securing asylum in 2003.

They were neighbours, living in houses bought for them by the fugitive Russian tycoon Boris Berezovski. His office, too, is contaminated with traces of radiation.

The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has reiterated the Russian offer of help in investigating the Litvinenko case.



The Daily Telegraph has been told that Mr Litvinenko had converted to Islam.

Akhmed Zakayev, the leading Chechen dissident who lived next door to Mr Litvinenko, said: "He was read to from the Koran the day before he died and had told his wife and family that he wanted to be buried in accordance with Muslim tradition."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mai...2/npoison02.xml

[Illuminator]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

"He told me of his plans to blackmail the oligarchs" - Julia Svetlichnaja

Strange stroll around Hyde Park that went nowhere


Julia Svetlichnaja recalls Litvinenko's eccentric behaviour

Sunday December 3, 2006
The Observer


We first met beside the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. Wearing dark glasses and leather jacket, Alexander Litvinenko appeared unexpectedly behind my back, saying: 'I was watching you from around the corner. You are not a spy, are you?' I suggested coffee in the nearby Caffe Nero, the first of our often chaotic, erratic conversations we would share from last April until his death.

I asked various questions about the Chechen people in Moscow during the Eighties and Nineties. Litvinenko, though, leapt from one exotic story to another - secret operations in Afghanistan, a plot against Boris Yeltsin, the assassination of former Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev; all these memories still seemed dear to his heart. In the end I made my excuses and left.

'Try him, but filter what he says; the man rambles too much,' the exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky had earlier warned me. Litvinenko was the contact who, I had hoped, would introduce me to Akhmed Zakayev, a member of the officially unrecognised Chechen government in exile.

Ultimately, however, I almost regretted giving my email to Litvinenko. From our first meeting he started to feed me information with such gusto that in the weeks before his death I had started deleting most of his messages without opening them.

The next time we met, in the summer, we ended up walking around Hyde Park for hours. I started to wonder whether meeting Litvinenko was a waste of time. He told me shamelessly of his blackmailing plans aimed at Russian oligarchs. 'They have got enough, why not to share? I will do it officially,' he said. After two hours of traipsing around the park, I suggested we sit down somewhere. 'Professionals never sit and talk, they walk and walk around so nobody can overhear their conversation,' he muttered darkly.

So we carried on walking, Litvinenko regaling me with more stories about his war against the Kremlin. 'Every time I publish something on the Chechen press website, I piss them off. One day they will understand who I am!' he said.

Some of his emails were confidential documents from the FSB, the successor to the KGB; others were his own writings for the Chechen press. Many of his 'political' texts were too obviously rants to take seriously: one of his wildest claims was that Putin was a paedophile.

The photographs he sent were equally contradictory - one showed him with Zakayev and Anna Politkovskaya. Next he sent me a striking picture of himself in front of a large Union flag, holding a Chechen sword and wearing FSB gauntlets - Litvinenko said this proclaimed his pride in his new British citizenship.

The next meeting, in May, was arranged to take place at Litvinenko's home in Muswell Hill, north London, where we were supposed to be joined by Zakayev, but he did not turn up.

Litvinenko proudly told me how well his son was adapting to England and its language while he could barely string a few sentences together. Marina, his wife, served us dinner and tea with traditional Russian sweets. Afterwards, we moved to the garden and eventually to Litvinenko's study, where he showed me his stash of secret files and photographs. It was very late when he drove me to the station. He stopped at the traffic lights and, indicating right, suddenly turned left into a dark alley. We drove round and round the crescent before stopping.

'Demonstration. I was famous for getting rid of the "tail". All you have to do is to indicate and then turn the other way,' he explained.

We sat in his car for another hour talking about life in the FSB. I felt sorry for him. People around him seemed either deranged or were using him for their advantage.

Despite his whistleblower past, Litvinenko was confident he was safe. Unlike Zakayev, he willingly gave out his mobile phone number and home address. He did not have any security. Although, in October 2004, a Molotov xxxxtail was thrown into Zakayev and Litvinenko's neighbouring homes in Muswell Hill, he never contemplated moving house.

May was the last time I saw him. Later I heard he had been poisoned and I am ashamed to say I thought it might have been another trick to get attention. After that I watched and read the details of his slow death drip into the media as the polonium 210 rotted him from within.

Would Litvinenko be pleased with the paradox that since his death he has been taken very seriously?

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/sto...1962762,00.html

[Illuminator]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

http://antiwar.com/pat/

November 28, 2006

Is Putin Being Set Up?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

PARIS – Whoever poisoned Alexander Litvinenko had two goals: a long and lingering death for the KGB defector and pointing a finger of accusation for his killing right in the face of Vladimir Putin.

Which leads me to believe Putin had nothing to do with it.

In an assassination, one must ask: Cui bono? To whose benefit? Who would gain from the poisoning of Litvinenko?

Certainly not Putin. Litvinenko's death puts him, the Kremlin and the KGB, now the FSB, under suspicion of having reverted to the terror tactics of Stalin, who commissioned killers to liquidate enemies like Leon Trotsky, murdered in Mexico in 1940.

What benefit could Putin conceivably realize from the London killing of an enemy of his regime, who had just become a British citizen? Why would the Russian president, at the peak of his popularity, with his regime awash in oil revenue and himself playing a strong hand in world politics, risk a breach with every Western nation by ordering the public murder of a man who was more of a nuisance than a threat to his regime?

Litvinenko, after all, made his sensational charges against the Kremlin – that the KGB blew up the Moscow apartment buildings, not Chechen terrorists, as a casus belli for a war on Chechnya and that he had refused a KGB order to assassinate oligarch Boris Berezovsky – in the late 1990s. Of late, Litvinenko has been regarded as a less and less credible figure, with his charges of KGB involvement in 9/11 and complicity in the Danish cartoons mocking Muhammad that ignited the Muslim firestorm.

Yet, listening to some Western pundits on the BBC and Fox News, one would think Putin himself poisoned Litvinenko. Who else, they ask, could have acquired polonium-210, the rare radioactive substance used to kill Litvinenko? Who else had the motive to eliminate the ex-agent who had dedicated his life to exposing the crimes of the Kremlin?

Indeed, no sooner had Litvinenko expired than his collaborator in anti-Putin politics, Alex Goldfarb, was in front of the television cameras reading Litvinenko's deathbed statement charging Putin with murder:

"You may succeed in silencing one man, but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. … You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed."

Litvinenko's statement is awfully coherent and eloquent for a man writhing in a death agony. But if he did not write it, who did? All of which leads me to conclude Putin is being set up, framed for a crime he did not commit. But then, if Putin did not order the killing, who did?

Who else could have acquired the polonium-210? Who else would kill Litvinenko to make Putin a pariah? These are the questions Scotland Yard, which also seems skeptical that Putin had a hand in this bizarre business, has begun to ask.

As the predictable effect of Litvinenko's death has been to put a cloud of suspicion over Putin and a chill over Russian relations with the West, one must ask: To whose benefit is the discrediting of Putin? Who would seek a renewal of the Cold War?

Certainly, the oligarchs and robber barons like Berezovsky – many of them now dispossessed of the wealth they amassed in a collapsing Soviet Union, and all of whom have been run out of the country or imprisoned – have the most powerful of motives. They hate Putin and seek to bring him down. And Goldfarb and Litvinenko both enjoyed the patronage of the billionaire Berezovsky.

Surely, rogue or retired KGB agents, passed over by Putin and bitter at Litvinenko, would have a motive: to send a message, written in polonium-210, that this is what happens to those who betray us and Mother Russia.

Scotland Yard has yet to declare this a murder case and is looking into the possibility of a "martyrdom operation" – suicide dressed up like murder – in which Litvinenko may have colluded. The Putin-dominated Russian press is pushing this line, as well as the idea of an oligarchs' plot to discredit Putin and destroy Russia's relations with the West.

Yet Litvinenko was still in his early 40s, with a wife and two children. While his agonizing public death would make him a celebrity even more famous than Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian anti-communist murdered in London in 1979 with a poison-tipped umbrella, Litvinenko would not be around to enjoy his fame.

America has a vital interest in this Scotland Yard investigation. What it discovers may tell us more about the character of the man into whose eyes George Bush claimed to have stared, and seen his soul, or it may tell us who the real enemies of this country are, who are out to restart the Cold War, and perhaps another hot one.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

[skhara]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

Litvinenko, after all, made his sensational charges against the Kremlin – that the KGB blew up the Moscow apartment buildings, not Chechen terrorists

Those charges aren't so "sensational" at all. I'd bet on it.