Russia is easing orders that require most workers to stay at home even as the country’s coronavirus cases continue to grow rapidly.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the move on Monday and said that the “nonworking period” would be lifted the following day.
“Starting from tomorrow, May 12, the national period of nonworking days will be over for all sectors of the economy,” he said during a meeting with officials, according to Agence France-Presse.
Putin said that individual regions of the country would still be able to maintain restrictions to combat the pandemic. The mayor of Moscow extended a lockdown of Russia’s capital through the rest of May. (Read more from “Putin to Loosen Lockdown Despite Russia’s Emergence as Coronavirus Hot Spot” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/Vladimir_Putin_and_Emmanuel_Macron_2017-07-08_03-1.jpg11601880Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2020-05-11 20:06:522020-05-11 20:05:06Putin to Loosen Lockdown Despite Russia’s Emergence as Coronavirus Hot Spot
Russia is testing whether the U.S. military has developed any weaknesses during the novel coronavirus crisis, a top general said, noting three run-ins with that country’s planes over a two-month period.
“We just want to make it very clear to them … there are no vulnerabilities as a result of COVID-19,” Air Force Gen. Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy, head of U.S. Northern Command, told reporters Tuesday. “We are postured and maintain that ability to respond at a moment’s notice.” . . .
Air Force F-22 Raptor fighter jets intercepted two Russian maritime patrol planes earlier this month approximately 50 miles from Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. About a month earlier, a pair of Russian reconnaissance aircraft were intercepted by U.S. and Canadian jets 50 miles from the state’s coast over the Beaufort Sea.
That was the second time in days Russian aircraft were spotted in the region. A Russian plane also flew within 25 feet of a Navy P-8A Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft last week. The aircraft was flying inverted at high speed, putting the Navy crew at risk, officials said.
O’Shaughnessy said Russia is likely to continue testing the U.S. — including near the homeland. (Read more from “Top General: Russia Is Testing U.S. Military for Weaknesses Amid Pandemic” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/sukhoi-35-1880484_1280.jpg7201280Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2020-04-23 21:16:272020-04-23 21:17:37Top General: Russia Is Testing U.S. Military for Weaknesses Amid Pandemic
Did Russia interfere in the 2016 election in order to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton? Contrary to the left’s favorite narrative, the reverse was true — and known to be true among the U.S. Intelligence Community, according to Fred Fleitz, former chief of staff to Trump’s National Security Council. Fleitz claimed that then-CIA Director John Brennan suppressed the truth and put forward lower quality intelligence to claim the Russians backed Trump.
Fleitz, a former CIA analyst who also worked on the House Intelligence Committee, took to Fox News to disagree with a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report released Tuesday. That report claims that the 2017 intelligence community assessment showing that Russia backed Trump over Clinton followed proper procedures, contradicting a House committee report from March 2018 showing that it did not.
Newly declassified intelligence further undermines the 2017 assessment, and Fleitz focused on a few basic procedures that were violated in the production of that assessment.
“For example, although the protocols require intelligence community assessments to be ‘community products’ and vetted with all intelligence agencies and analysts with equities in a given subject, only three intelligence agencies were asked to draft this assessment: the CIA, National Security Agency and FBI,” he wrote. “With the 14 other intelligence agencies left out, the three participating agencies included only two dozen ‘handpicked’ analysts.”
Worse, Fleitz said his sources inside the House Intelligence Committee told him “the actual drafting of the intelligence community assessment was done by three close associates of former CIA Director Brennan, who has proven to be the most politicized intelligence chief in American history. Contrary to common practice for controversial intelligence community assessments, Brennan’s team allowed no dissenting views or even an annex with reviews by outside experts.” (Read more from “U.S. Intelligence Knew Russia Preferred Hillary to Trump, But John Brennan Hid the Truth” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/Hillary_Clinton_25055755464.jpg6831024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2020-04-23 20:55:512020-04-23 20:53:00U.S. Intelligence Knew Russia Preferred Hillary to Trump, But John Brennan Hid the Truth
A lawyer whose firm hired Fusion GPS to produce opposition research on Donald Trump leading to the phony “Russia dossier” has written to the State of Nevada pressuring it to bow to Democrat demands to allow “ballot harvesting.”
Mark Elias, a Perkins Coie lawyer who once represented Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, wrote on behalf of the Nevada Democratic Party to Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske on April 10 demanding that the state refrain from prosecuting violations of current state law, which only allows “a member of the voter’s family” to return an absentee ballot on their behalf. It is a felony for someone other than a family member to submit a ballot on someone else’s behalf.
Across the state line, in California, Democrats allow “ballot harvesting,” in which party operatives may collect and submit as many ballots as they want. (The practice is almost exclusive to Democrats; Republicans do not easily part with their ballots.) . . .
The practice is illegal in Nevada and most other states — as well as most other countries, where the practice is associated with fraud and corruption. Democrats, however, want to make “ballot harvesting” the law nationwide — and wanted to do so long before the coronavirus pandemic.
As Fox News noted Tuesday, Democrats now claim that “ballot harvesting” is necessary to overcome obstacles resulting from coronavirus — though they are also arguing for more in-person voting sites in Nevada, according to Elias’s letter. (Read more from “Democrat Lawyer Behind ‘Russia Dossier’ Pressures State to Allow ‘Ballot Harvesting’” HERE)
By The Hill. “Travesty” is not a nice word. It usually is applied to gross perversions of justice, and that apparently is the context Attorney General William Barr desired when he dropped it into an interview answer the other day in the breezy courtyard of the Department of Justice (DOJ).
His composed, understated delivery almost disguised the weighty magnitude of that disturbing word and the loaded adjective that preceded it. “I think what happened to him,” he said, referring to the president and the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into his campaign, “was one of the greatest travesties in American history.”
Okay, it’s important to pause for a moment and absorb what the AG said. He just called an FBI investigation not just a travesty but one of the “greatest” travesties in the nation’s history. It was an unprecedented statement by an attorney general about his own department’s premier agency. . .
Is the AG’s assessment fair? The answer is entwined in his next statement: “Without any basis [the FBI] started this investigation into [Donald Trump’s] campaign … .”
Oops, stop again right there. Mr. Barr is making a definitive statement about that which many of us have speculated all along, namely that the weirdly unprecedented investigative team put together by former FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe did not have adequate legal reasons to open a case into the Trump campaign in the first place. The attorney general just confirmed that. (Read more from “AG Barr Just Signaled That Things Are About to Get Ugly for the Russia Collusion Team” HERE)
Devin Nunes Says There May Be More Criminal Referrals Following Declassified Footnotes
By PJ Media. After Friday’s revelation that the FBI used Russian government disinformation to get secret warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, Congressman Devin Nunes says you can expect more criminal referrals against those who plotted to take down Trump.
The information that many thought likely is now confirmed in black and white in the declassified footnotes of the Inspector General’s report on the FISA court abuses.
#FISA READ footnote 350 FBI effort to verify Steele Dossier “The (redacted) stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and ASSESSED that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate US foreign relations” pic.twitter.com/7aVvNkx3BV
On Fox and Friends on Saturday morning, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee said the revelations reported on Friday before the holiday weekend mean that he’ll be calling for more criminal referrals.
“People should go and look at the footnotes that are now public, ok? Because likely we’re going to have more criminals referrals based on these.
We know the Democrats were spreading disinformation, Russian disinformation, which we were saying the whole time. It never made sense he would have a political operative – the Clinton campaign working with Fusion GPS, hiring a former foreign spy – that they know is supposedly getting information from a Russian intel folks.
(Read more from “Devin Nunes Says There May Be More Criminal Referrals Following Declassified Footnotes” HERE)
It Looks Like Putin Conned the FBI Into the ‘Russiagate’ Probe
By New York Post. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Russia investigation launched and conducted by James Comey’s Federal Bureau of Investigation deserves to rank as one of the agency’s great blunders — at best.
President Trump famously calls the probe a hoax, a label he uses liberally, but in this instance, it may literally be true.
We’ve spent years obsessing about Russian meddling in our politics, and now it turns out that the original FBI investigation into the Trump campaign that morphed into the Mueller probe may have been instigated, in part, by Russian disinformation.
In other words, the Kremlin may have succeeded in getting us to turn even more viciously against ourselves and conduct our politics in an atmosphere characterized by screaming headlines, dark insinuations and endless investigations — all by feeding a few lies to a private eye hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Trump. (Read more from “It Looks Like Putin Conned the FBI Into the ‘Russiagate’ Probe” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/39836313374_aaa4045722_b.jpg6831024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2020-04-13 22:49:012020-04-18 20:29:33AG Barr Just Signaled That Things Are About to Get Ugly for the Russia Collusion Team; Nunes Says There May Be More Criminal Referrals; It Looks Like Putin Conned the FBI Into the ‘Russiagate’ Probe
Saudi Arabia and Russia ended their price war and are poised to deliver the oil production cut President Trump has been demanding in order to raise historically low prices that have damaged the U.S. shale industry.
Saudi-led OPEC and its allies agreed in principle to a deal during an unprecedented emergency remote video meeting Thursday to cut production by 10 million barrels per day beginning in May.
The agreement for that level of cuts would last for two months, with reductions subsequently leveling off through April 2022 depending on progress in containing the coronavirus outbreak. Trump spoke Thursday night with Russian President Vladimir Putin and King Salman of Saudi Arabia to discuss finalizing the oil production cut deal.
After the call, Trump said at his daily press conference that “they are getting close to a deal.” . . .
Trump has been pushing Saudi Arabia and Russia to cut output in the hopes that less crude on the market will raise oil prices, which have fallen by two-thirds since the start of the year and reached a 18-year low last month. (Read more from “Saudi Arabia and Russia Reach Deal to End Oil Price War” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/Vladimir_Putin-6-2.jpg14282048Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2020-04-10 20:21:532020-04-10 20:19:08Saudi Arabia and Russia Reach Deal to End Oil Price War
For decades, submarines came in two discrete flavors: traditional diesel-electric submarines that need to surface every day or two to recharge their noisy, air-breathing diesel engines, and nuclear-powered submarines that could quietly hum along under the sea at relatively high speeds for months at a time thanks to their nuclear reactors.
The downside to the nuclear-powered variety, of course, is that they cost many times the price of a comparable diesel submarines and require nuclear propulsion technology, which may not be worth the trouble for a country only interested in defending its coastal waters. A diesel submarine may also run more quietly than a nuclear submarine by turning off its engines and running on batteries—but only for a very short amount of time. Still, there remains a performance gap in stealth and endurance that many countries would like to bridge at an affordable price.
One such country was Sweden, which happens to be in a busy neighborhood opposite to Russian naval bases on the Baltic Sea. Though Sweden is not a member of NATO, Moscow has made clear it might take measures to ‘eliminate the threat,’ as Putin put it, if Stockholm decides to join or support the alliance. After a Soviet Whiskey-class submarine ran aground just six miles away from a Swedish naval base in 1981, Swedish ships opened fire on suspected Soviet submarines on several occasions throughout the rest of the 1980s. More recently, Russia has run an exercise simulating a nuclear attack on Sweden and likely infiltrated Swedish territorial waters with least one submarine in 2014. . .
The Swedish firm has unveiled concept art depicting a submarine with a ‘chinned’ sail, X-shaped tail fins for greater maneuverability in rocky Baltic waters, and four 533-millimeter torpedo tubes can fire both heavyweight torpedoes, back up by two 400-millimeter tubes, all of which would use wire-guided torpedoes. The vessel’s four Stirling engines apparently allow allowing for higher sustainable underwater cruising speed of 6 to 10 knots. . .
Sweden’s two A26s should be completed between 2022 and 2024, at which point it will be possible to gauge whether they can meet their ambitious performance parameters. In general, advancements to AIP submarines are allowing countries across the globe to acquire capable short and medium-range submarines at an affordable price. (Read more from “Why Russia Fears Sweden’s Deadly Submarines” HERE)
For the second time in less than a week, the U.S. has intercepted Russian maritime surveillance aircraft in what’s known as the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone, military officials announced Saturday.
Two pairs of Tu-142 maritime reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare aircraft were tracked and intercepted Saturday by Air Force F-22 Raptors, supported by KC-132 Stratotanker refueling aircraft and E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System planes.
“The Russian aircraft entered the ADIZ from the West and North of Alaska respectively,” officials with the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, said in a release. “The western pair of Tu-142s remained within the ADIZ for approximately 4 hours and loitered in the vicinity of the U.S. Navy’s ICEX where they are conducting submarine exercises. The Tu-142s were escorted by F-22s the entire time.” . . .
A pair of Tu-142s to the north spent only about 15 minutes in the zone, and also received an F-22 escort, officials said.
ICEX, which began March 5, is an Arctic preparedness exercise involving two U.S. Navy submarines, forces from five different countries and more than 100 participants. The exercise requires troops to set up a temporary camp on an ice floe and use the camp as a command center for submarine operations taking place below the ice, at temperatures averaging negative 27 degrees Fahrenheit. (Read more from “U.S. Fighters Catch Russian Spy Planes Near Alaska for 2nd Time in Days” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/800px-Tupolev_Tu-214R_inflight.jpg533800Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2020-03-15 18:36:302020-03-15 18:34:23U.S. Fighters Catch Russian Spy Planes Near Alaska for 2nd Time in Days
By Bloomberg. “The Kremlin has decided to sacrifice OPEC+ to stop U.S. shale producers and punish the U.S. for messing with Nord Stream 2,” said Alexander Dynkin, president of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow, a state-run think tank. “Of course, to upset Saudi Arabia could be a risky thing, but this is Russia’s strategy at the moment – flexible geometry of interests” . . .
When the coronavirus started devastating Chinese economic activity in early February – cutting oil demand in Saudi Arabia’s biggest customer by 20% — Prince Abdulaziz tried to convince [Russian Energy Minister Alexander] Novak that they should call an early OPEC+ meeting in response to cutback supply. Novak said no. The Saudi king and Putin spoke by phone – it didn’t help. . .
In the short run, Russia is in a good position to withstand an oil price slump. The budget breaks even at a price of $42 a barrel and the finance ministry has squirreled away billions in a rainy-day fund. Nonetheless, the coronavirus’s impact on the global economy is still unclear and with millions more barrels poised to flood the market, Wall Street analysts are warning oil could test recent lows of $26 a barrel. (Read more from “Putin Declares War on American Oil Production” HERE)
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Opening the Floodgates of Oil Production Forcing Prices Down
By Brian Sullivan. Vladimir Putin just sparked what could end up being one of the ugliest oil price wars in modern history, and American oil and gas companies may be the victims.
This weekend Saudi Arabia dropped the oil bomb. It not only cut its forward crude price to Chinese customers by as much as $6 or $7 per barrel, but is also reportedly looking to raise its daily crude output by as many as 2 million barrels per day into an already oversupplied global market. Look out below.
The move by the Saudis is both a market share grab and a loud signal to Moscow that it’s done playing games. The dramatic action is in response to a contentious, and ultimately failed, OPEC meeting in Austria on Friday. OPEC members laid out a proposal to further cut oil output quotas by as much as 1.5 million barrels per day. [And it] couldn’t occur at a worse time. Coronavirus is already slamming global oil demand and crude prices have fallen 30% this year . . .
It′s not media hyperbole to call what happened this weekend in the oil markets “historic.” When the Russians walked out of OPEC’s Austria headquarters, it suddenly became every country – and every U.S company – for itself. A race to the top in production and a race to the bottom in prices. (Read more about the oil production crisis HERE)
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US Oil Production May Prove Resilient
By Jason Lemon. Under Trump, the U.S. has surpassed Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s biggest oil producing nation, largely spurred by the expansion of fracking. Saudi Arabia had tried unsuccessfully to flood the oil market and reduce prices drastically to maintain its dominance back in 2014. But U.S. production proved more resilient than the Saudis anticipated.
Some analysts are suggesting that Russia may similarly be underestimating or misunderstanding how the U.S. oil industry will respond.
“While the crash in oil prices that began in late 2014 [due to Saudi Arabia flooding the market] did ultimately result in hundreds of shale producers declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the net result of that process is that most of those companies reorganize themselves and come back with far less debt load,” David Blackmon, an independent energy analyst and consultant, wrote for Forbes.
“The strategy also fails to recognize that most producers have already put hedges in place for most of their equity production through the remainder of 2020 and beyond,” he noted. (Read more about how US oil production may respond HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/unnamed-3.jpg316512Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2020-03-09 00:01:162020-03-14 19:28:11“Couldn’t Come at a Worse Time”: Putin Declares War on American Oil Production
Dossier author Christopher Steele will not cooperate with U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, telling an audience at Oxford University that he believes U.S. investigators have acted in “bad faith.”
Steele, a former British spy, said at the Oxford event on Friday that he and his firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, had already “done our duty” by cooperating with a Justice Department inspector general’s (IG) investigation of the FBI’s surveillance of Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
According to The Daily Beast, which attended the Oxford event, Steele also criticized the IG, saying that he cooperated with the probe for “four or five months,” and observed “very bad qualities” on the part of government officials. He said some acted in “bad faith.”
Reuters reported on Friday that Durham’s team has recently approached Steele seeking an interview. The former MI6 officer rejected the request because he believes that he would not be treated fairly, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Numerous questions remain unanswered about how Steele collected information for his dossier, and how many of his allegations about Trump associates turned out to be inaccurate. (Read more from “Christopher Steele Refuses to Cooperate With U.S. Prosecutor Looking Into Origins of Trump-Russia Probe” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/unnamed-2.jpg316512Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2020-03-08 21:18:202020-03-08 21:17:00Christopher Steele Refuses to Cooperate With U.S. Prosecutor Looking Into Origins of Trump-Russia Probe
