ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

As reported yesterday , in a surprise announcement late in the day, and shortly before the S&P downgraded Russia to junk (perhaps as part of the fine-print of its $1.5 settlement with the DOJ for daring to downgrade the US in 2011), the US Department of Justice announced it had busted a Russian spy ring in New York City , where at least one of the three people was said to be involved with finance and potentially, capital markets. Specifically, the DOJ announced " charges against Evgeny Buryakov, aka “Zhenya,” Igor Sporyshev and Victor Podobnyy in connection with Buryakov’s service as a covert intelligence agent on behalf of the Russian Federation (Russia) in New York City, without notifying the U.S. Attorney General of Buryakov’s status as an agent of Russia, as required by federal law. Buryakov was placed under arrest earlier today in Bronx, New York, and is scheduled to appear before U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn in federal court in Manhattan later today. Sporyshev a...

By Dmitry Orlov The following article appeared briefly at this URL on censor.net.ua and was quickly pulled down. Ironic? It would seem so. My translation. I bring it to you because it succinctly lays out the situation as I've been able to piece it together from multiple Russian- and Ukrainian-language sources, and because you are unlikely to come across anything this truthful from cough Western media cough. International observers report of growing panic in Kiev in connection with the successful counteroffensive of the separatists near Donbass. Over a week of fighting the partisans have delivered a heavy blow to the Ukrainian forces. The group of Ukrainian fighters in Donbas suffered huge losses, the soldiers are demoralized, the officers are confused and unable to control the situation. Ukrainian military leadership is seriously concerned of a new encirclement near Debaltsevo, as well as in other areas. The situation is made worse by the fact that army and national guard reserv...

By Tyler Durden - Amid the devastation of yesterday's Mariupol artillery strikes which killed or wounded dozens, which was promptly blamed by both sides on the "adversary" - and has been proclaimed by both 'sides' (more on that later) as more violent than before the truce - an 'odd' clip has emerged that appears to provide all the 'proof' a US intelligence officer would need to surmise that US military boots are on the ground in Ukraine. As the following clip shows, a Ukrainian journalist approaches what she thinks is a Ukrainian soldier (since he is wearing a Ukrainian military uniform and is carrying an AK) and asked him as they run through the battlezone, "tell me, what happened here?" His response, which requires no translation, speaks for itself. With daily reportage of the 'invasion' of Russian military forces into Ukraine territory (admittedly unconfirmed by NATO), this clip raises many questions about American involveme...

In the 1980s and early 1990s the mantra was holy warriors in Afghanistan against the evil Soviet Union. Of course, not much was holy about these Takfiri Islamist sectarian warriors because soon they would slaughter the Shia, enslave women, support killing homosexuals, threaten to kill all apostates, whip women if not fully covered up and a host of other evils. The logical conclusion was an international jihadist network that was brought together with the help of the CIA, MI6, ISI and other interested parties in the Gulf region. Of course, once this barbaric year zero Takfiri Islamist reality came into being in Afghanistan then the end result was opium,, backwardness, terrorism, enforcement of women into the shadows of society and so many other brutal realities. Yet, the usual Western and Gulf powers – supported by Turkey and Pakistan in several conflicts depending on geopolitics, would continue to destabilize in Iraq, Libya and Syria. In other words, the madness created by the usual pl...

Jax Jacobsen For all the crackdowns on civil society throughout the post-Soviet sphere and Middle East, we’ve heard surprisingly little about Azerbaijan, ruled by Ilham Aliyev since he inherited the position from his father Heydar in 2003. His latest move to silence opposition from international groups is to have police raid the office of US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on Dec. 26, detaining journalists for hours. Former journalists of the station have also been questioned by police. According to Jeffery Gedmin, former president of RFE/RL and currently at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, at least 10 RFE/RL journalists in Baku were compelled to the prosecutor’s office for additional questioning. The station had also been shut down in 2009, along with the BBC and Voice of America, but listeners were able to access broadcasts via internet and satellite. U.S. Representative Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Committee for Foreign Affairs, called on “leaders in Ba...

Felix Imonti It is Greece against the Troika of the IMF, the EU, and the European Central Bank. The election on January 25th is only the beginning of Greece’s problems; voters are not prepared to grant to any one party the power to implement policies that will satisfy the people at home and creditors abroad. Prime Minister Antonis Samaras gambled and lost. Nominating a new candidate for the figurehead presidency of Greece should have been a simple matter that would have passed with little conflict, except that it was seized on by the opposition as a chance for a vote of no confidence. By failing to confirm the new candidate, it forced the prime minister to call a national election in the midst of widespread discontent. Now, as Antonis Samaras and Alexis Tsipras seek to sway Greek voters, the real subject of political skirmishing is Chancellor Angela Merkel. Whoever wins the approval of the electorate will have to win the approval of the Iron Lady in Berlin. Neither candidate is showing...

 In a famous speech to the US Congress in March 1991, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the US Gulf War victory over Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a triumphant US President George H.W. Bush proclaimed the dawn of a “New World Order.”1 The term, with its ominous freemasonic connotations, raised many an eyebrow and Bush never again publicly used the term. However, what he meant became starkly clear to the world in the two decades following the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Now that very US globalisation strategy is in a shambles and the outlines of possible alternative orders are slowly emerging. The US financial crisis that exploded on the world with a vengeance in March 2007 was the beginning of the end of the Old New World Order as Bush had envisioned in 1991, even though US elites were in denial of that reality. The sole superpower after the end of the Cold War had embarked on a quest of global empire disguised under the rubric of “globalisation.” The Clinton presidency fr...

In many ways, America has become the anti-empirical empire, a superpower where many political leaders divorce themselves from facts. Few examples are more glaring or dangerous than the continued denial of global warming despite the latest evidence of impending catastrophe, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains. By Paul R. Pillar The graphic that was on the front page of the New York Times on Saturday is striking. It accompanied a story about how 2014 was Earth’s hottest year on record. There is a bar chart showing how average global temperatures have been rising over the past century and markedly so since the 1970s, and how the ten warmest years have all occurred since 1997. But just as eye-catching is a world map that uses color to depict how temperatures in different areas of the globe in 2014 differed from the average for each area: red for hotter and blue for colder, with the intensity of the color indicating how much of a divergence there was from the average. As would be exp...

The last three decades have witnessed a remarkable rise in xenophobic, deeply conservative, and even extreme right-wing parties across much of Europe.[1] Whereas thirty years ago most xenophobic parties failed to even pass the 5% minimum voter threshold that is typically required to enter government, it can be argued that they now constitute as much as ~28% of the parliament in countries like Austria, and arguably have reached the ~70% level in Hungary.[2] By 1999, the Austrians—who traditionally tout themselves as the “first victims” of the Third Reich—had elected the prominent nationalist and accused Holocaust denier[3] Jörg Haider as the governor of Carinthia and given his Freedom Party more than 26% of the vote in the national elections. Haider proceeded to personally help dismantle multilingual street signs that were erected for the local Slovene minority.[4] The Golden Dawn party, which now has more than ~7% of the national vote in Greece, often marches in the streets of Athens w...

The head of Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau of Japan's Foreign Ministry and the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister are going to hold their first meeting on a wide range of issues, concerning North Korea. © AFP 2015/ JUNG YEON-JE Head of Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau of Japan's Foreign Ministry Junichi Ihara is to discuss a whole range of problems, regarding North Korea with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov, a source in Japan's Foreign Ministry told RIA Novosti Thursday. "The whole range of problems, regarding North Korea, will be discussed. It will really be a talk about everything, about all existing problems. As far as I know, it is the first meeting of Morgulov and Ihara, and they will exchange opinions on all matters," the source told RIA Novosti. © AP Photo/ Shizuo Kambayashi According to a statement issued by Japan's Foreign Ministry earlier Thursday, Ihara will visit Moscow on January 22-23 to discuss the "North Korea issue"...

An Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares rocket at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, January 5, 2014.(Reuters / Bill Ingalls) 51179 Russia’s design bureau NPO Energomash is to deliver 60 RD 181 engines for the Antares rocket first stage to American space technology manufacturer Orbital Sciences Corporation. The total cost of the deal is about $1 billion. “We are committed to deliver 60 engines. Three options have been signed, each for 20 engines,” Vladimir Solntsev, executive director of Energomash, told the Izvestia newspaper. “There is a firm contract for 20 engines, which we have started fulfilling, as we are due to supply the first two engines next June.” According to Solntsev, Russia’s government has already issued all the permits required for the deal. The contract envisages restrictions for the use of RD-181 engines in military programs as those rockets cannot be used for military goals. Following an engine failure and subsequent explosion during the Antares launch in October, ...

January 15, 2015 - So many things are happening around the world and time is running out for people to ready themselves for what’s ahead. Financial analysis’s are asking if 2015 will be the year the economy finally crashes or if it will hold out for another few years. We are on the brink of some pretty major events and we need to ready ourselves spiritually, mentally, and physically. In 2013 the US government revealed their plans of mass surveillance, in 2014 the US government revealed their plans of martial law, and in 2015 they very well may be revealing their plans for economic collapse or some other major let down to the American people. In the video below economic forecaster Harry Dent, met with Alex Jones on Infowars to elaborate on the oil crisis and how OPEC has purposefully kept production low in order to destroy Russia’s economy… In attempt to ‘save the sinking ship’ Russia has now pulled out of the Petrodollar which could have devastating effects on us here in the United St...

Prominent Ukrainian MP denounces Obama's weakness, calls him a 'shot-down pilot' By Mikhail Klikushin There were times in Ukraine’s recent history when even the country’s military brass were kneeling before the U.S. Literally. In June 2013, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Tefft received the saber of the Ukrainian Cossack in the city of Kherson from a kneeling Ukrainian high-rank military official. Mr. Tefft nowadays is serving the country as an Ambassador to Russia where no such honors are even imaginable. But that was then—a previous regime. On the surface, today’s Ukraine is much more favorably disposed toward everything Western and everything American because of the exciting wind of transformations that swept through the Ukrainian political landscape last year. Its political culture looks modern, attractive, refined and European. For example, at the end of last year a new law was passed that allowed former citizens of other countries to participate in Ukrainian poli...

Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East.  Firefighters carry an injured man on a stretcher in front of the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris on January 7, 2015, after armed gunmen stormed the offices leaving at least one dead according to a police source and "six seriously injured" police officers according to City Hall. (AFP Photo/Philippe Dupeyrat) 4238 The recent violent outrage in Paris that saw cartoonists and other innocents killed is but the latest example of the way in which Muslim extremists nowadays manage to occupy the airwaves and dominate the news broadcasts. But rather than proving that Islam is just a religion that cannot coexist with modern life and values, a closer look at the origins of Islamic extremism and terrorism betrays its indebtedness to geo-political machinations and the legacy of the Cold War...