If you can understand their concern, then I suspect you support stopping funding to UNWRA, and clawing back funds contributed in the the last year (leading up to the sneak attack (breaking the cease fire) on Oct 7, right?
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Absolutely. Since there is ample evidence that some of its members in Palestine took part in organizing and participated in the HAMAS raid. Simply removing the identified members involved was not enough. Funding of it should be stopped at least until it can be shown that the program is still justified in its mission and funds are not grossly misused like they were before. Failing confidence that it can be managed responsibly, that program should just be scraped in its current form.
Beyond that, lessons should also be learned from this as far as transparency/reporting for the use and effectiveness of UN funds allocated to all similar UN missions.
P.S.: I’m not hopeful for accurate and transparent determination of the effectiveness of these programs since it’s the UN who’s in charge of assessing its own programs. Kinda like the fox guarding the hen house IMO. Short of independent auditing, I think the conclusions are already guaranteed: “it was only very very few bad apples impossible to completely root out… etc”
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Russia expanding territory gains as Ukraine efforts languish
Pessimism about Ukraine’s battlefield chances has increased in recent months as Russian forces have regained the initiative on the battlefield, largely because Ukrainians are short on troops and ammunition.
Zelensky has said Ukraine will accept nothing less than the return of all its territory, including land that Russia has controlled since 2014. But with the battle lines changing little in the last year, militarily retaking the swaths of east and south Ukraine that Russia now occupies — about 20 percent of the country — appears increasingly unlikely.
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4 more years!
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Experts say subscribing to Ukraine+ is absolutely essential in order to “save democracy or whatever.” Studies also confirmed that if anyone disapproves of the new subscription, they are probably a Russian agent and love Putin.
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- Chinese banks are imposing restrictions on Russian wire payments, affecting transactions and imports.
- Russian imports from all sources, including China, have declined amid US threats of secondary sanctions.
- Chinese expert expresses doubt about Russia’s ability to sustain its war effort in Ukraine due to various internal and external factors.
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One of the sanctioned Russian companies offers to buy back stranded foreigners’ shares at $0.30 on the ruble.
US proposes stealing billions from the Russian central bank
Meanwhile Russia retaliates by seizing some of the US banks’ assets in Russia, half a billion or so from JPM and Goldman.
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That must mean 30% since the current exchange rate is about one cent per ruble
Just what we need to add to the out-of-control government spending in the US and western Europe.
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I meant the company was offering to foreigners about 30% of the market value of the securities that currently trade on the Moscow exchange.
Meanwhile, polls show Americans desire to send more money and weapons to Ukraine is about evenly divided, so if the Wrong Party got elected by those Deplorable voters, the aid might be cut off in the future. Of course Biden and whoever else benefits from corruption in Ukraine don’t want that, so they’re trying to circumvent the will of the people, or at least half the people, by signing some 10 year subscription plan for Ukraine+ at only $60B/year or something.
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War drums. Remember the Iraqi chemical weapons? Or the Syrian chemical weapons? Both were fabrications to facilitate our entry into a foreign war. Now we accuse Russia of using them in Ukraine.
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some Democrats in the House join France’s Macron in calling for sending troops in Ukraine
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Is this is linked to Ukraine? Another article said that Fico was “pro Russian” whatever that means.
I wonder what his credit score is?
See also this
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Looks like the US isn’t the only country that takes a border defense budget of millions and fails to do anything. And it’s our tax dollars doing nothing for both!
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Whether you’re talking about productivity or corruption, volume conquers all
When you only do one thing, you get good at it.
Tit for tat continues. Yellen goes to Europe to tell them to seize Russian assets to give to the war effort. Russia seizes a billion in western corporate assets.
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The seizure marks one of the biggest moves against western lenders since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine prompted most international lenders to withdraw or wind down their businesses in Russia. It comes after the European Central Bank told Eurozone lenders with operations in the country to speed up their exit plans.
The moves follow a claim from Ruskhimalliance, a subsidiary of Gazprom, the Russian oil and gas giant that holds a monopoly on pipeline gas exports. The court seized €463mn-worth of assets belonging to Italy’s UniCredit, equivalent to about 4.5 per cent of its assets in the country, according to the latest financial statement from the bank’s main Russian subsidiary. Frozen assets include shares in subsidiaries of UniCredit in Russia as well as stocks and funds it owned, according to the court decision that was dated May 16 and was published in the Russian registrar on Friday. According to another decision on the same date, the court seized €238.6mn-worth of Deutsche Bank’s assets, including property and holdings in its accounts in Russia. The court also ruled that the bank cannot sell its business in Russia; it would already require the approval of Vladimir Putin to do so. The court agreed with Rukhimallians that the measures were necessary because the bank was “taking measures aimed at alienating its property in Russia”.
On Friday, the court decided to seize Commerzbank assets, but the details of the decision have not yet been made public so the value of the seizure is not known. Ruskhimalliance asked the court to freeze up to €94.9mn-worth of the lender’s assets. The dispute with the western banks began in August 2023 when Ruskhimalliance went to an arbitration court in St Petersburg demanding they pay bank guarantees under a contract with the German engineering company Linde.
Yellen heads to the EU to drum up theft of additional Russian assets to give to the war effort.
Lots of western businesses decide to stay in Russia, due to a combination of punitive laws if they were to sell their business and leave, and indifference on their customers/owners about their continued operations there.
Overall, more than 2,100 multinationals have stayed in the Russia since 2022, the Kyiv School of Economics has found, compared with about 1,600 international companies that have either quit the market or scaled back operations.
Moscow has gradually raised the cost of corporate departure, imposing a mandatory 50 per cent discount on assets from “unfriendly” countries sold to Russian buyers and a minimum 15 per cent “exit tax”. It has also been increasingly hard to find local buyers acceptable both to the seller and to Moscow and whose involvement does not fall foul of western sanctions.
Multinationals have been mindful of the travails of western companies such as Carlsberg and Danone, which had their assets seized after announcing plans to leave. While Danone was eventually able to work out a deal to sell the assets at a steep discount, Carlsberg remains locked in a protracted legal battle with Moscow and one of the brewer’s former top executives is in a Russian prison.
bump
Maybe I was supposed to post this in the WW3 thread instead?
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/30/biden-ukraine-weapons-strike-russia-00160731
- BIDEN SECRETLY GAVE UKRAINE PERMISSION TO STRIKE INSIDE RUSSIA WITH US WEAPONS
Not very good secrecy there, if that was the intention (rather than to deliberately provoke Russia).
Russia offering peace with the status quo, clearly unacceptable to our war mongers.
- RUSSIAN PRESIDENT PUTIN: RUSSIA WOULD CEASE FIRE AND START TALKS IF UKRAINIAN FORCES WITHDRAW FROM FOUR REGIONS CLAIMED BY MOSCOW AND KYIV DROPS ITS NATO AMBITIONS
In other war time propaganda, check this out. Biden is accusing Russia of having taking Ukrainian children and then put them up for adoption in Russia. “Credible reports”, just like all that laptop disinformation that got his kid convicted.
Won’t someone think of the Ukrainian Children? More guns and money to Ukraine!
Seriously though, even if it were true, what exactly do you think Russian troops should do if they found some orphaned or separated kids in the middle of a war? Sending them to Russia to find willing foster parents (as they’re accused) seems pretty high up there in terms of doing the right thing under the circumstances. Instead of say killing them, or leaving them to starve in a war zone or something, which would clearly be worse for the kids. But Russia Bad, even so.