Russian troops have poured into Ukraine by land, air and sea. Ukraine said 57 of its citizens have been killed so far and more than 160 wounded as explosions wrack the country s major cities.
The Russian elites targeted by Thursday s sanctions round are either from prominent families close to Putin himself, or powerful leaders in the country s financial sector, the administration said.
NSA condemns state terrorism against people under occupation - Newspaper dawn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dawn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Inside Putin’s underpants op
I don’t recall reading anything like Paul Roderick Gregory’s Hill column “The Kremlin, FSB, and the ‘Berlin patient’s’ underpants” and related news stories. The Coen Brothers could turn it to good use in a film like
Burn After Reading. Gregory tells how Vladimir Putin’s would-be assassination victim Aleksei Navalny extracted an account of the operation from the failed FSB assassin Konstantin Kudryavtsev himself. In a four-hour December 17 press conference, Putin referred to Navalny only as the “Berlin patient.” Gregory’s account draws on this reference to Kudryavtsev:
[T]he “Berlin patient” waked purported assassination-team member Konstantin Kudryavtsev (“Konstantin”) with a 7 a.m. telephone call using a fake FSB caller-ID. Navalny, playing a harried assistant, informed Konstantin ominously that the director of the National Security Council that manages the FSB, Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev, was demanding a report
The Spy Who Took Out the Dirty Laundry
A prank call reveals the ugly new face of international espionage. Navalny LIVE / Youtube
It is truly a shame that in addition to the apocalypse flick that 2020 has become, we’ve also lost John Le Carré, the chronicler of the kind of spy we want to believe in: intelligent, competent, brooding.
Just think of those wan faces, and terse, unrevealing words. The gray, romantic backdrops of Budapest or Prague and the unbearable weightiness of knowing too much. The awareness of danger and moral compromise lurking just around the corner.
Because now that Le Carré isn’t around anymore to provide us with a more aesthetically pleasing kind more spy, we have the real one. Konstantin Borisovich Kudryavtsev.