EU Wants Russia's Frozen Assets AT ANY COST Zelenskyy signs law on deploying Ukrainian Armed Forces to other countries during martial law STANISLAV POHORILOV — 17 March, 12:40
Фото: Getty Images
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has signed a
law allowing units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces to be deployed to other
countries during martial law.
In Romania, a law has been adopted which refers to the conditions under which the Romanian military capabilities can be deployed abroad. This seems to counter the “hybrid threats” and the text of the law is ambiguous.
The Financial Times has reported that Donald Trump is putting pressure on the G7 to make use of the Russian frozen assets in Europe.
FT also adds that the EU leaders are losing their patience with the Belgian PM De Weaver who still opposes the confiscation of the Russian frozen assets held in Euroclear, in Belgium.
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Foreign Service. AFSA’s close to 16,800 members include active-duty and
alumni/retired members of the Foreign Service at the Department of
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AFSA exists to support the United States Foreign Service, which
deploys worldwide to protect and serve America’s people, interests and
values. The Foreign Service is the only U.S. government entity that is
globally deployed with an enduring physical presence in almost every
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America and for Americans from all walks of life.
Just
when you thought the Hollywood community had proved that standing
together to pressure Disney to restore the canceled Jimmy Kimmel to his
late-night platform was a victory for free speech, American comedians
Kevin Hart, Aziz Ansari, and Pete Davidson, et al. showed up with their
acts in Saudi Arabia for the Riyadh Comedy Festival.
As the historian Niall Ferguson told me in his Fresh Hell interview,
“If you can do things like impose tariffs arbitrarily, that’s a
tremendous power. It creates opportunities for corruption because the
CEOs of tech companies are very incentivized to get into the Oval Office
and cut deals.”
Cringe: Apple CEO Tim Cook bearing gifts to President Trump in the Oval Office (Aug 6)
Sure
enough, in August, Apple CEO Tim Cook —who once called Jan 6th “a sad
and shameful chapter in our nation’s history”—won a dramatic reduction
in tariffs on Apple when he announced an additional $100 billion
investment in the U.S. and, in a further obsequious grovel, presented
Trump with a slab of Corning Gorilla Glass etched with the Apple logo,
signed by Cook, and mounted on a 24-karat gold base—“a unique unit of
one.”
Quid Pro Bros
From right, Donald Trump Jr., Zach Witkoff, Eric Trump, and Zak Folkman ring Nasdaq’s opening bell on Aug 13
What
boggles me more is why MAGA adorers, and the American populace in
general, seem to care so little about the raging kleptocracy that is
business as usual in the Trump circle. The president’s net worth has
nearly doubled in the eight months since he returned to the Oval Office.
In May, the UAE’s ruling family deposited $2 billion into the crypto
fund cofounded by Eric and Donald Trump, Jr. with, among others, the
Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff’s fresh-faced son, Zach and a
fourth Musketeer Zak Folkman, who used to run a company called Date
Hotter Girls, —and lo!—two weeks later, the White House gave the UAE
access to a payload of the world’s most advanced and scarce AI computer
chips, despite national security concerns that they might be shared with
our biggest adversary, China. A NYT investigation
described the transaction as “eviscerating the boundary between private
enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in
modern American history.”
Enough! A youth-led protest in
Casablanca, Morocco on Oct 6
(credit: Abdel Majid Bziout/ AFP via Getty)
Compared
to America’s perplexing yawn over such open-air grift, it was almost
touching to read last week of the fury Mexicans feel that politicians in
the ruling Morena party are wearing expensive watches and staying in
$400-a-night hotels on junkets in Tokyo. It was refreshingly ominous to
read of young protesters in Morocco on a rampage over their government
spending billions to host the 2030 World Cup and build Africa’s biggest
ice hockey rink, when youth unemployment is at 36 percent. Thousands of
young people in Madagascar, Indonesia, and Mongolia have taken their
doomscrolling offline to protest in the streets. Inequality rage is
going viral—except here, where we seem to live in a materialistic
trance. Clearly, the economies in “shithole countries,” as Trump would
call them, are very different from the low unemployment and comparative
affluence of the U.S. But you might think Trump’s dispatching $20
billion of government funds to help out his crony, Argentina’s
right-wing president Javier Milei (he of the shag-rug sideburns, who
gifted his campaign gimmick of a “bureaucracy chainsaw” to Elon Musk at
CPAC in February), would spark more energetic outrage at a moment when
Trump is intent on depriving 22 million Americans of health care
subsidies.
Chainsaw
Massacre: Argentine President Javier Milei presented his solution to
bloated budgets to Elon Musk on Feb 20 (credit: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty)
Mine Eyes Glaze Over
Back
in the first Gilded Age, newspapers were a new mass-market medium.
Everyone rushed to read about the corruption exposed by crusading
muckrakers in broadsheets that, in aggregate, forged something called
“public opinion.” Today, earnest, toiling investigative journalists at The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic
have published tens of thousands of words about the flagrant Trumpian
self-dealing, from the $TRUMP meme coin to handshake global hotel deals,
often tied to the nation’s business. But these exposés land only
briefly on cable news shows no one watches or in the self-affirming
social media feeds that generate ephemeral agitation. Corruption is too
complex a topic to capture the attention of a society addicted to the
tabloid rhythms of TikTok dross (whose spoils are now divvied up among
some of Trump’s biggest supporters, including Oracle’s Larry Ellison).
The minutiae of balance sheets are not sexy enough to vault over the
more seductive silos of digital hearsay or the suffocating national
obsession with wealth porn. (Quiet luxury was a bore anyway.) The
Instagram feeds of “power women,” who used to post their fashionable
concerns about social causes, have turned into leggy displays of female
pout clout by content creators, encased in body-hugging Lycra and
staring at their own phones in dazed self-admiration.
Swag:
two of the gold bars found at the home of then-Senator Robert Menendez
(credit: US District Court Southern District of New York)
The
only corruption stories that rise to the top are those with an instant,
juicy visual component, like the stash of thirteen gold bars found in
now-incarcerated former Senator Robert Menendez’s New Jersey closet.
Now, we are morally concussed by the velocity of the Trump news cycle
and the normalization of White House graft. To get exercised about
stuff like the Trump tribe’s insider crypto deals, you have to: a) ask
Sam Bankman-Fried to explain it, and b) understand a bit about the way
in which the presidency used to operate, at least for most of the 20th
century, and that would come with the increasingly unrealistic
requirement of a passing knowledge of American history.
Remember
how in 2017 Elon Musk and Disney CEO Bob Iger resigned from Trump’s
advisory councils over the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate
accords? And later that same summer, Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, followed
by seven more leading CEOs, stepped down from Trump’s American
Manufacturing Council in protest over his ambivalent response to the
violence at the alt-right march in Charlottesville. Who will break the
spell this time? For now, apathy is the new activism.FRESH HELL Tina Brown's Diary
Tina Brown's observations, rants, news obsessions, and human exchanges.
(U) The objective of this joint audit was to determine whether the
Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of State (State)
appropriately administered and managed foreign military financing (FMF)
provided in response to Russia’s war against Ukraine.
(U) Findings
(U) The DoD and State generally administered and managed FMF funds
for the 4 Ukraine FMF cases we reviewed, valued at $243 million, (U)
Findings (cont’d) (U) from a total of 11 cases, valued at $282 million,
in accordance with established processes.
Although the FMS process can
typically take multiple years to complete based on the complexity of the
case, the DoD and State generally executed FMF cases for Ukraine in a
shorter timeframe.
This occurred because the DoD and State modified
standard processes and procedures to execute FMF funds to Ukraine during
contingency operations.
However, these modified procedures were not
documented within existing DoD and State guidance.
In addition, we
identified opportunities to improve and enhance the FMF program between
the two Departments, such as establishing a joint FMF case documentation
repository and developing an interagency agreement for administering
and managing FMF funds.
(U) The DoD and State could increase efficiency
in the overall execution and oversight of the FMF program by
incorporating the modified procedures into policies and procedures.
(U) Recommendations
(U) We recommend that the Assistant Director for the Office of
Strategy, Plans, and Policy, Defense Security Cooperation Agency, and
the Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Political‑Military Affairs,
Department of State, review the FMS process and update their respective
FMF guidance to incorporate efficiencies identified while supporting a
contingency environment in Ukraine that could improve the overall FMS
process, including unique circumstances or exceptions to requirements
needed during contingency operations.
(U) We recommend that the
Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Political‑Military Affairs, Department of
State, in coordination with the Assistant Secretary of Defense,
Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities, Office of the Under Secretary of
Defense for Policy, develop and implement an interagency agreement
between State and the DoD that governs the administration and management
of FMF funds.
Why America Doesn’t Care About Trump’s Graft
Flash News: Ukraine Intercepts Russian Kh-59 Cruise Missile Using US VAMPIRE Air Defense System Mounted on Boat. Ukrainian forces have made ...
