[Jpost] Canada, the US, France, the UK and other Western countries have helped train far-right extremists in Ukraine, a report by the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at George Washington University revealed last month.
The report found that members of Centuria, a far-right organization intent on reshaping Ukraine's military to align with its ideology, received training from Western countries while at the Hetman Petro Sahaidachny National Army Academy (NAA).
Centuria describes itself as a military order of "European traditionalist" military officers who aim to "defend" the "cultural and ethnic identity" of European peoples against "Brussels’ politicos and bureaucrats," according to the report. The group is led by people with ties to Ukraine's far-right Azov movement. Members have been photographed giving Nazi salutes and have made extremist statements online.
One of the leaders of Centuria wrote on VK in 2016 that Jews were "the destruction of humanity" and shared a post saying that Jews had tried to "exclude Ukraine from world history and the map of the world.” Ukraine's current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish.
The group has claimed that its members have taken part in joint military exercises with France, the UK, Canada, the US, Germany, and Poland. One apparent member of the group, then NAA cadet Kyrylo Dubrovskyi, took part in an 11-month officer training course at the UK's Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 2020.
The NAA receives and has access to funding and training from a number of Western countries.
Canadian Defence Attaché in Ukraine, Colonel Robert Foster, told IERES that Canada trusted Ukraine to screen recipients of Canadian training and that Canada would not entertain training extremists.
“I think we are at a point where, in the event that we did find a Ukrainian that was expressing or showing signs of that type of attitude, then they would be ejected from any training that the Canadians would provide,” said Foster.
One NAA cadet was apparently involved as a firearms instructor with an Azov-linked far-right group that the United Jewish Community of Ukraine accused of spreading antisemitic propoganda in 2021. Cadets at the academy have also been photographed giving the Nazi salute, despite NAA's insistence that it has no tolerance for extremism.
The NNA denied to the IERES that Centuria was operating within the academy and said a probe into the group's alleged activities had turned up no evidence of such activities. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry told IERES that it does not screen military recruits or cadets for extremist views and ties, while several Western governments training and arming Ukrainian troops said Ukraine was responsible for vetting the soldiers.
About 20 people are involved with Centuria, according to the report. Videos and photos collected by IERES show NAA cadets posing with Centuria banners and wearing Centuria patches and members of the organization at political events.
A Centuria member told the KP.ua Ukrainian media outlet in 2020 that NAA and the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were both "aware of the Order’s existence and have not voiced any opposition to efforts to form an elite core of officers." The member added that Centuria worked with a number of other military education institutions and armed forces units.
Centuria members have also apparently held events on the premises of the Academy, including a lecture in 2018 which featured the recitation of a nationalistic text from before WWII.
Centuria has called for its members to transfer to specific units where the group's members serve and attracts new members through its Telegram channel, which has over 1,200 followers. The organization has become more secretive since IERES began tracking its online presence in early 2019, switching through multiple Telegram channels and deactivating Facebook, Instagram and VK accounts.
The US Congress has banned the use of US funding to "provide arms, training, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion," meaning that Centuria, which has apparent ties to the Azov Movement, likely should not have received the training it claims it has received from the US.
#Azerbaijan accuses rival #Armenia at the #UN’s top court of laying landmines as part of a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” despite the end of last year’s war.https://t.co/DZYDpKTogU
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[KavkazUzel] A Moscow court left in custody for six months a resident of Dagestan, Magomed Nurov, accused of involvement in organizing terrorist attacks in 2010.
As the "Caucasian Knot" wrote, the investigators believe that Gusen Magomedov was the organizer of the terrorist attacks in the Moscow metro on March 29, 2019, who according to the National Anti-Terrorist Committee, was killed in 2013.
According to the investigation, resident of Dagestan Magomed Nurov helped Magomedov escape after the terrorist attack. In September, the Prosecutor General's Office charged Nurov with involvement in a criminal community and a stable armed group, committing terrorist acts and illegal manufacture of explosive devices. The case has been referred to court.
According to the investigators, acting as a liaison for the gang, he drove its members to meetings where terrorist attacks were planned in the Moscow metro, and also hid a participant in terrorist acts from law enforcement agencies. Nurov fully admitted his guilt.
On March 29, 2010, two explosions took place at the Lubyanka and Park Kultury metro stations. A total of 40 people were killed and over 100 were injured.
The leader of the North Caucasian militants, Doku Umarov, claimed responsibility for these terrorist acts, claiming that he was taking revenge on the military for actions in Chechnya, according to the "Caucasian Knot," "... [for] terrorist acts committed by suicide bombers on the territory of the Russian Federation."
The arrest of Magomed Nurov, accused of involvement in terrorist attacks at the Lubyanka and Park Kultury stations of the Moscow metro in 2010, has been extended for six months.
"The court ruled the petition of the investigation to satisfy and extend the term of Nurov's detention until March 27, 2022," Kommersant quoted the judge as saying.
Nurov and his lawyers objected to the extension of his arrest. The defense noted that the accused is not going to hide from the court, and before the arrest he had a permanent job: he worked as a watchman at a children's sports school in the Moscow region, TASS reported today.
The Second Western District Military Court will begin hearing the case on October 25, the agency said.
The "Caucasian Knot" also wrote that on November 22, 2020, the head of the police department of the Kizlyar district of Dagestan, Gazi Isaev, was detained. He was charged under articles on participation in a criminal community with the use of official position, on banditry and a terrorist act.
According to the investigation, Isaev joined the terrorist organization Imarat Kavkaz, banned in Russia by the court, and using his official position, provided the militants with information about the security forces.
In 2010, he helped the suicide bomber get to Moscow and set up an explosion in the metro there. A Moscow court arrested Isaev, then on October 14 the court extended Isaev's arrest for three months.
A rally demanding the release of Isaev was held in November 2020 by employees of the Kizlyar ROVD, Internet users and retired officers who questioned the court's sincerity.
In April, several deputies of the Kizlyar District Assembly asked the Russian president to take control of the Isayev case, calling him an honest and decent officer. Chairman of the District Assembly Nurudin Kakhirovcalled the appeal a private initiative of the deputies.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[KavkazUzel] A cook and a dietician of the Tamisk sanatorium in the Alagir region of North Ossetia have been charged with providing services that do not comply with safety rules. The cook cooked the meat seven hours before dinner, and the nurse, who did not come to work that day, did not monitor compliance with the standards.
As a result, 12 children were hospitalized with food poisoning, the investigation said today.
As "Caucasian Knot" wrote, 12 children with signs of food poisoning were admitted to the infectious diseases department of the Republican Children's Clinical Hospital in Vladikavkaz from the Tamisk sanatorium from August 14 to August 16 . The next day, the Ministry of Health of North Ossetia reported that the children were in a state of moderate severity. The sanatorium is closed and checks are being carried out there. All the children were taken by their parents, Rospotrebnadzor reported.
The investigation has brought charges against the cook and the dietician of the sanatorium in the Alagirsky district of North Ossetia for providing services that do not meet the health safety requirements of consumers, the North Ossetian ICR Department reported today.
According to the investigation, on August 13, at about 1200 hrs Moscow time, the cook prepared chicken meat and, in violation of the rules, instructed the employees of the sanatorium to serve the dish for dinner.
On the same day, at about 1900 hrs Moscow time, the workers of the sanatorium's catering unit, in the absence of control from the dietician, who did not come to work that day, served chicken meat for dinner, which had already been spoiled, according to a message on the department's website.
From 14 to 15 August, 12 children aged eight to 14, who were vacationing in a sanatorium, were hospitalized with an acute intestinal infection. After the provision of medical assistance, they were all discharged, Interfax writes today.
Part 1 of Article 238 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (provision of services that do not meet the health safety requirements of consumers) provides for up to two years in prison.
[KavkazUzel] A total of 23 residents of the Khunzakh village consulted doctors with symptoms of intestinal infection, including 11 children. Thirteen patients continue their treatment at the hospital, the Dagestan Ministry of Health said today.
As "Caucasian Knot" wrote on October 14, the Ministry of Health of Dagestan reported that eight people -- seven children of preschool and school age and one adult -- were hospitalized in the Khunzakh district hospital with symptoms of intestinal infection.
On October 15 three more victims were admitted to the hospital , two people were discharged. The condition of all patients is mild to moderate, the doctors said. Poisoning could have occurred due to dirty water in the water supply system, investigators, who began checking the incident, suggested.
All mass poisonings in Dagestan in 2021 were associated with water quality , while there is no water supply scheme in the republic and there is not enough treatment facilities, said the acting head of Dagestan Sergey Melikov on April 28 during an interview.
Since October 13, in the village of Khunzakh, 23 people, including 11 children, have consulted doctors with symptoms of an intestinal infection. In the Khunzakh central district hospital, 13 patients with symptoms of acute intestinal infection are being treated, six of them are children, seven more patients are being treated on an outpatient basis, including three children, the Ministry of Health of Dagestan informs today.
After the poisoning, the doctors began to make house-to-house visits to the residents of Khunzakh, said Raisa Shakhsinova, Deputy Minister of Health of Dagestan.
Doctors have already visited "more than 3,000 residents, nine of them had signs of illness and started treatment," she said on the department's Instagram page.
The Ministry of Health of Dagestan has organized preventive phage phaging of the population of the village of Khunzakh for the prevention of acute intestinal infections, TASS writes today.
The "Caucasian Knot" reported that at least five mass poisonings have occurred in Dagestan since the beginning of 2021.
In January, 359 patients turned to doctors with signs of poisoning in Buinaksk, 251 of them were children.
In early February, mass poisoning occurred in the village of Arani, Khunzakh district, where the number of local residents who applied to doctors reached 95. From February 22 to February 24, 29 patients came to the Kaspiysk city hospital with symptoms of intestinal infection, including 26 children, mostly of preschool age.
From 9 to 10 March, 41 people were hospitalized with symptoms of food poisoning in Makhachkala, including 32 children. In the Gergebil district at the end of March, 23 people including 15 children, were poisoned. At the same time, in most cases, dirty drinking water was named as the cause of the poisoning.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[REGNUM] A snow cyclone hit Chukotka, suspending the operation of the airport in the city of Anadyr. This was reported on October 18 by the press service of the regional administration.
The Ministry of Emergency Situations in the region warned of an approaching snow cyclone with a hurricane wind. On the coast of the Chukchi Sea, the speed of individual wind gusts is up to 18 m/s, in the continental part of the Anadyr region, wind gusts are 18-23 m/s, on the coast of the Bering Sea and in Anadyr, a blizzard is observed, wind gusts are 28-33 m/s.
Anadyr airport temporarily suspended its work due to unfavorable weather conditions. Flights to the Gulf of the Cross, to Vaegi and Markovo, Provideniya, Lavrentiya, Kanchalan were delayed indefinitely. Flights to other regions were not planned on October 19. Additional information on flights will be given no earlier than the morning of October 20.
Classes in schools have been canceled in the region, public transport is operating normally.
Earlier IA REGNUM reported about the delay and cancellation of about 30 flights from Moscow airports.
Using the traditional Russian spelling in the spelling of Gorlovka (instead of Horlivka) because references to the town in passed posts in rantburg.com also use the Russian spelling.
[REGNUM] The Severodonetsk city court of the Luhansk region, occupied by the Ukrainian security forces, arrested the representative of the Luhansk People's Republic in the Joint Center for Control and Coordination of the Ceasefire Regime (JCCC) Andrei Kosyak, who had previously been abducted while performing his duties as an observer.
The verdict on October 18 was announced by the press service of the prosecutor's office of the "Luhansk region".
"During the pre-trial investigation, it was established that since July 2021, the suspect has been serving as an overseer officer of the representative office of the Special Center for Control and Coordination of the Ceasefire", which is part of the so-called "People's Militia of the LPR."
The detention was carried out by the SBU counterintelligence together with units of the armed forces of Ukraine," the Ukrainian prosecutor's office reports.
As reported by IA REGNUM , on October 13, in the area of the village of Zolote, during the work agreed with Kiev at the withdrawal area in Donbass, Ukrainian militants seized the representative of Luhansk in the JCCC Andrei Kosyak.
Joint Center for Control and Coordination of the Ceasefire Regime (JCCC) is a formal organization of Russian, Ukrainian and now Lugansk officers charged with detecting ceasefire violations in place since the February, 2015 truce.
[Korrespondent] OSCE mission blocked in Donetsk
In the occupied Donetsk and Gorlovka, they do not let the staff of the OSCE Monitoring Mission out of the hotels and demand the release of the militant who was detained by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
The OSCE monitoring mission stopped its work in the occupied areas of Donetsk region. All due to the fact that the mission staff were actually blocked in the hotel by representatives of the so-called “DPR”. They are seeking the release of the militant detained by the Ukrainian military. But so far Donbass remains without observers.
How did it start?
On October 13, 2021, the Ukrainian delegation to the Minsk Trilateral Contact Group announced the arrest of a fighter of the so-called “LPR”, a citizen of the Russian Federation Andrei Kosyak, in the Donbas.
The operational group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine detained him in the area of the Zolote checkpoint (Luhansk region) for "gross provocation." Contrary to the agreements, Kosyak conducted reconnaissance, posing as a representative of the JCCC, the Joint Center for Control and Coordination of Ceasefire Issues and Stabilization of the Line of Delimitation of the Parties.
"At about 10:45 am, a group of armed men with armbands from the JCCC, under the guise of carrying out demining work, was conducting reconnaissance of the positions left by the Armed Forces of Ukraine," the Ukrainian delegation told the TKG.
They added that on October 13, the Ukrainian side really provided security guarantees to the participants in the equipment of the site for the opening of the Zolote checkpoint from the side of the temporarily occupied territories. However, such work -- in particular on demining -- had to be carried out "with a clear indication of the routes of movement and determination of the maximum point of advancement towards the positions of the Armed Forces."
Instead, the Ukrainian military noticed an unknown person at the site, where, according to the agreed conditions, no one should have been, so a decision was made to detain him.
Who was detained?
The detainee turned out to be a citizen of the Russian Federation Andrey Valentinovich Kosyak, born in 1978. They confiscated a Makarov pistol with two magazines, as well as documents issued by the "LPR" and an ID of the JCCC.
Ukrainian law enforcement agencies suspect him of committing a grave crime in 2010 (premeditated murder, article 115 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine).
According to Novosti Donbass, he was born in Alchevsk, was a citizen of Ukraine, but subsequently received a Russian passport.
In the "LPR" and in Russia, Kosyak's detention was used as a pretext to accuse Ukraine of violating the Minsk agreements.
The SBU established that Kosyak fired at the positions of the Ukrainian military in Popasna and Zolote from a mortar, he was informed of suspicion of committing a crime under Part 2 of Art. 260 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (creation of paramilitary or armed formations not provided for by law).
The actions of the militants
On October 15, several dozen young people held a protest action in the center of occupied Donetsk near the Park Inn hotel, where representatives of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission live. Young people came to the hotel with posters, the inscriptions on which contained calls for the release of Kosyak.
In fact, the OSCE representatives were blocked in the hotel The participants of the meeting set up 22 tents (with heat and power supply), as well as dry closets in front of the hotel where the members of the mission live. The mission acknowledged that the blockade prevented any movement of patrols into and out of the premises on 15 and 16 October.
On October 17, similar actions were resorted to in Gorlovka. On Sunday evening, the SMM observed that the vehicle gates of the mission's forward patrol base in Gorlovka had been locked with a chain and padlock. South of the gate, a car with blue "DPR" signs blocked the exit. The SMM also saw several members of the armed formations standing next to the vehicle.
Reaction
The OSCE has already called for the removal of any obstacles to the freedom of movement of the mission's observers.
Serhiy Garmash, a representative of the Ukrainian delegation to the Trilateral Contact Group, said that the militants actually took the observers hostage.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Oleg Nikolenko called the actions of the Russian Federation inadmissible regarding obstruction of the OSCE mission in ORDLO.
"Blocking and pressure on observers of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Donetsk is an element of the ongoing efforts of the Russian Federation to destroy the Minsk agreements and stir up the armed conflict," Nikolenko stressed.
He also recalled that in September the Russian Federation closed the OSCE observer mission at the Russian checkpoints across the state border of Gukovo and Donetsk, "to make it impossible to observe and hide from the international community illegal supplies of weapons, ammunition and mercenaries from Russia to Ukraine."
[Korrespondent] The tent camp with the "protesters" near the hotel, where the members of the OSCE mission are accommodated, has been dismantled.
The work of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in occupied Gorlovka has been unblocked. The tents with "picketers" outside the hotel where the mission is located have been dismantled. Local mass media write about it .
The tent city near the Rodina hotel was set up a few days earlier.
"Patriotic residents of Gorlovka", as the mayor of the city Ivan Prikhodko called them, blocked the exits from the building. Patriotic because Prikhodko prolly paid them.
The "picketers" demanded the release by the Ukrainian side of the detained Russian citizen Andrey Kosyak.
Later it became known that the representatives of the "protest action" discussed with the members of the OSCE monitoring mission the stop of the picket, since the mission must "ensure the safety of the workers of the filtering station and record the shelling."
Gorlovka is a city in Donetsk People's Republic which has been under near constant artillery fire since 2015.
[NewsFrontInfo] The representative office of the Republic in the Joint Center for Control and Coordination of the Ceasefire Regime (JCCC) reports that the Kiev security forces fired mortars at the village of Sokolniki in the Slavyanoserbsky region. Slavyanoserbsky region is seven kilometers due west of Schastye, on the Severdonetskiy River.
"At 20:30 from the area of the settlement of the Crimean VFU, the settlement of Sokolniki was fired upon with the use of 82 mm mortars," the message says.
#2
I am interested in all relations between Fascist Italy and Soviet Union. I know there was some aeronautic cooperation about 1930 and then it seems to have been only naval one in this case one sided with Italians supplying technology and some ships.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
