DIRTY DOZEN

From jail cell to frontline: Russia turns to convicts to help flailing war effort

New bill would allow those convicted of crimes to serve in the military in exchange for early release or a reduction in their sentence.

Those convicted of certain types of crimes would technically be 

permitted by the measure to serve in the military

| Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images

BY ZOYA SHEFTALOVICH
OCTOBER 13, 2022 

Russian criminals could be freed from prison and have their convictions quashed in exchange for serving in Moscow’s flailing war effort in Ukraine, under a new bill drafted by senators.

The bill would formally allow those convicted of certain categories of crimes to perform military duty in exchange for early release, the scratching of their convictions or reduced penalties, Olga Kovitidi, a senator representing illegally annexed Crimea, said in a post on Telegram on Thursday. Kovitidi, along with her colleagues on the Federation Council Committee on Constitutional Legislation and State Building, was responsible for drafting the bill.

Kovitidi said the law would apply to those who had committed crimes of “small and medium gravity.” Those who have been convicted of calling for or participating in anti-government rallies, discrediting the Russian armed forces or calling for sanctions against Moscow would not be eligible, the senator said.

Russia has struggled to turn the tide of the war, with Kyiv launching a successful counteroffensive last month and taking back thousands of kilometers of Ukrainian territory held by Moscow’s troops. In response, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced what he called a “partial mobilization” of reservists, which led to a significant public outcry (by Russian standards).

Videos and reports have circulated of the Wagner Group, a network of mercenaries and Putin’s de facto private army, attempting to convince prisoners to fight in the war, but the new legislation paves the way for more open recruitment.

According to Russian news daily Vedomosti, there are reports of “thousands of prisoners with unserved terms for various, including serious” crimes being sent to the front lines.

 

Ukraine bats away Lukashenko’s border threats

Despite saber-rattling from Minsk, Kyiv’s forces are playing down the risks of another invasion from Belarus.

Belarus' President Alexander Lukashenko has so far avoided sending his own forces into the conflict in Ukraine | Alexander Nemenov / AFP via Getty Images

BY SERGEI KUZNETSOV
OCTOBER 12, 2022 


KYIV — Ukraine is giving short shrift to increased posturing from Belarus’ authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, who this week pledged to conduct joint deployments with Russian forces and triggered fears that Minsk could be seeking to engineer a false flag operation on the border.

Belarus’ chief strategic significance in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine is that its territory — and importantly its airfields — are a springboard for attacks against northern Ukraine, most significantly Kyiv. Indeed, Putin used Belarus in exactly this way in the opening phases of the war.

Crucially, however, Lukashenko has avoided sending his own forces into the conflict, sensing it would be a political disaster.

Just two years ago, Lukashenko survived massive street protests against his rule by using brutal force, and the heavy casualties that the Belarusian army would probably sustain in the war against Ukraine could reignite popular anger against his rule. His direct involvement in the war would also mean more Western sanctions against a nation that has already been seriously hit by restrictions over the rigged 2020 presidential election.

Law enforcement officers respond to a protest against President Lukashenko’s rule in 2020 |

 AFP via Getty Images

Attention swung back to Lukashenko’s motives this week when he said on Monday that he had agreed with Putin to deploy a joint regional military group. He added that this order had been given two days before, apparently after the explosion of the Russia-Crimea bridge, which Moscow blamed on Ukraine. Lukashenko said that the Belarusian army would form the base of this group.

Lukashenko also made fake claims about a potential Ukrainian attack against Belarus. He issued a warning to the Ukrainian leadership in the light of supposed information on “strikes on Belarus from the territory of Ukraine.” Think tankers and independent Belarusian journalists considered this to be Minsk laying the ground for a possible false-flag operation.

“This information was immediately brought to my attention. My answer was simple: Tell the president of Ukraine and other insane people … that the Crimea bridge will be just the thin end of the wedge to them, if only they touch a single meter of our territory with their dirty hands.”

He made his statement as Russia was hitting Ukraine with barrages of missiles on Monday, and Lukashenko’s reference to the Crimea bridge was most likely a hint at Moscow’s retaliation.

Despite this escalation in rhetoric, Ukraine’s military is remaining cool-headed about potential risks from Belarus.

“The units of the Defence Forces are monitoring the situation, there are no signs of the formation of offensive groups on the territory of Belarus,” the general staff said in a statement on Tuesday.

The Ukrainian political leadership also played down Lukashenko’s provocative talk of the past days.

“Lukashenko continues to sell [Belarus’] sovereignty to Russia. The request to deploy Russian contingent in Belarus under false pretenses is the formalization of occupation,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office, tweeted on Monday.

Ukraine assesses risks and is ready for any threat from the Belarusian territory, he added. “The situation is under control, currently there is no sign of repeated invasion from Belarus.”

Ukrainian forces have also added context about how much help they think Belarus is really offering Putin.

Belarus is “involved in the repair” of Russian military equipment damaged during the war in the Ukrainian territory, the general staff of the Ukrainian armed forces said on Wednesday.

Perhaps more significantly, the general staff added the first batch of 20 T-72 tanks was removed from storage in Belarus and sent to Russia’s Belgorod region, apparently with the aim of beefing up the army’s depleted reserves in eastern Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the leader of the Belarusian opposition Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who ran against Lukashenko in 2020’s fraudulent presidential election and now lives in exile in Lithuania, urged Kyiv on Tuesday to build a joint “alliance against Russian aggression.”

So far, the relationship between the Ukrainian authorities and Tikhanovskaya’s team has been limited. Unlike many Western leaders, Zelenskyy, as well as other senior Ukrainian officials, has never officially met Tikhanovskaya, much less recognized her as the legitimate leader of Belarus.

Kyiv has always tried to distance itself from expressing direct sympathy for Tikhanovskaya, one of Lukashenko’s main political rivals, seeking not to provoke the authoritarian leader, who might then refrain from holding back and join Russia’s ground war in Ukraine.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's history of spreading bizarre conspiracy theories, from space lasers to Frazzledrip


Rachel E. Greenspan INSIDER
Fri., February 5, 2021

In this Jan. 6, 2021, file photo, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., sits in the House Chamber after they reconvened for arguments over the objection of certifying Arizona's Electoral College votes in November's election, at the Capitol in Washington 

Erin Schaff/The New York Times via AP, Pool, File


The House voted to remove Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, from committees.


Greene has espoused beliefs tied to the QAnon conspiracy theory.


Here's her history of supporting conspiracy theories online.


Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's election to Congress came after she spread conspiracy theories on social media for years.

The Georgia Republican, elected in November, has supported the QAnon conspiracy theory and associated falsehoods, claimed that mass shootings were "false flag" events, and made other outlandish allegations. In addition to espousing beliefs in these conspiracy theories, Greene showed support in 2018 and 2019 for the execution of Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, CNN reported. She has also said that Black people "are held slaves to the Democratic Party."

But former president Donald Trump sang Greene's praises ahead of her election while he was still in office, writing in an August tweet that she was a "future Republican Star" and "strong on everything."

The House voted to strip Greene of her committee assignments on Thursday evening.

When asked for comment regarding all of Greene's claims that are referenced in this article, a spokesperson told Insider, "Aren't you in the 'news' business? None of this is new."

Here's a list of false claims Greene has spread online.

The QAnon conspiracy theory

The QAnon conspiracy theorists hold signs during the protest at the State Capitol in Salem, Oregon, United States on May 2, 2020. John Rudoff/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Greene's apparent belief in QAnon, a baseless far-right conspiracy theory alleging Trump was fighting a "deep state" cabal of pedophiles, was widely reported ahead of her election to Congress. QAnon has been linked to several crimes and the movement played a huge role in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.

In a 2017 YouTube video, Greene called "Q," the anonymous figure whose cryptic messages on 8kun (formerly 8chan) lead the QAnon movement, a "patriot."

Greene said "Q" is "someone that very much loves his country, and he's on the same page as us, and he is very pro-Trump." The last message from "Q" came on December 8, and many people have suspected that Jim Watkins, the owner of 8kun, is "Q" himself, or at least associated with the figure.

Read More: The QAnon conspiracy theory and a stew of misinformation fueled the insurrection at the Capitol

"There's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it," Greene said in the video.

Many of the other conspiracy theories Greene has espoused are linked to the QAnon community.

The Pizzagate conspiracy theory 

THIS IS A REDO OF THE RIGHT WING EVANGELICAL

SATANIC PANIC OF THE 1980'S

Kori and Danielle Hayes at a Pizzagate demonstration, outside the White House in Washington, DC on March 25, 2017. 

Michael E. Miller/The Washington Post via Getty Images

CNN reported that in a 2017 blog post, Greene shared a link to a far-right website that suggested "Pizzagate," the 2016 conspiracy theory alleging that Clinton and aides ran a child-trafficking ring out of a DC pizza restaurant, was real.

"Shockingly, the website tells about information that was only whispered about and called conspiracy theories," Greene wrote, according to CNN.

"Pizzagate" was the precursor to QAnon, which originated in 2017.

Frazzledrip

Greene has expressed belief in the existence of "Frazzledrip," a fictitious video that conspiracy theorists claim shows Hillary Clinton and aide Huma Abedin sexually assault a child before slicing off her face and wearing it as a mask.

The vulgar conspiracy theory spread on YouTube in 2018, as the Washington Post reported. YouTube videos claiming that "Frazzledrip" existed were viewed millions of times that year, the Post found. "Frazzledrip" folklore remains popular in the QAnon community.

Greene made Facebook comments about "Frazzledrip," which were recently reported by left-leaning nonprofit Media Matters for America (MMFA), in May 2018.

Greene posted a picture of the mother of a slain New York Police Department detective, Miosotis Familia, and a commenter said that Familia had "watched a horrific video" allegedly seized from the laptop of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, Abedin's ex-husband. The commenter said that the video showed Abedin and Clinton "filleting" a child's face, according to screenshots obtained by MMFA.

Greene liked the comment, and replied, "Yes Familia." In a subsequent comment, she said, "Most people honestly don't know so much. The msm disinformation warfare has won for too long!"

Denials that 9/11 and mass shootings took place

A recently resurfaced video shows Marjorie Taylor Greene harassing Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg on Capitol Hill before she became a representative for Georgia. Twitter/@fred_guttenberg

Greene has baselessly questioned whether the deadly shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, and Parkland, Florida, actually took place.

In several 2018 Facebook comments, Greene agreed with other users that the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was a "false flag" event. MMFA reported the comments, which have since been deleted from Greene's Facebook page.

When another commenter in 2018 claimed that "none of the School shootings were real," the September 11, 2001, attacks were staged by the US government, and that the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was staged, Greene agreed.

"That is all true," she said in a comment, according to screenshots reported by MMFA.

All of those claims are false and have been debunked.

A recently resurfaced video from earlier that year shows Greene accosting David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland shooting, who was 17 at the time, in Washington, DC. Hogg was in town to advocate for gun control at the Capitol. Greene followed the teen down the street, calling him a "coward," just weeks after the shooting at his high school killed 17 people.

In a Facebook post later that year, Greene claimed that Pelosi "tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that 'we need another school shooting' in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control."

Linda Beigel Schulman, the mother of one of the Parkland shooting victims, told MSNBC in an interview aired Sunday that she spoke to Greene on the phone, and the congresswoman admitted to believing that the shootings had actually taken place.

Schulman said Greene refused to join her on MSNBC to publicly make the admission. "For Congresswoman Greene, politics trumps truth, because lies and conspiracy theories are more important to her than honesty," Schulman said.

The conspiracy theory that space lasers controlled by a Jewish family caused wildfires

Perhaps the most shocking of all of Greene's conspiracy theories is the idea that lasers in space had caused the deadly Camp Fire in California in the fall of 2018. The Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California's history.

QAnon believers and other conspiracy theorists popularized the space laser theory, and Greene posted about it on Facebook, MMFA found.

Greene said she believed the Rothschild investment bank was involved in the creation of the lasers. "Could that cause a fire? Hmmm, I don't know," she said of laser beams in space. "I hope not! That wouldn't look so good for PG&E, Rothschild Inc, Solaren or Jerry Brown who sure does seem fond of PG&E."

Rothschild is controlled by the Rothschild family, a wealthy Jewish family from Germany that has for centuries been the subject of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Such claims play a huge role in QAnon, which is partly based on anti-Semitic tropes.

Read More: QAnon builds on centuries of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that put Jewish people at risk

The conspiracy theory that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been replaced by a body double

In February 2019, while Greene was a conservative commentator, she was a guest on a streaming show on a pro-Trump website, and a viewer called in to suggest that a recent public appearance of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was actually a body double. "I do not believe that was Ruth. I don't think so," Greene responded, MMFA first reported.

The claim that Justice Ginsburg had previously died and was replaced by a body double was hugely popular in the QAnon community in the summer of 2019, as Travis View, the co-host host of the "QAnon Anonymous" podcast, has reported.

The false claim that Trump won the 2020 presidential election

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., wears a "Trump Won" face mask as she arrives on the floor of the House to take her oath of office on opening day of the 117th Congress at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 3, 2021 Erin Scott/Pool via APMore

Greene was one of numerous Republican lawmakers to deny the validity of President Joe Biden's election win, even wearing a "TRUMP WON" mask on the House floor on January 3.

She has repeatedly tweeted about her belief that Trump won the election and encouraged her constituents to hold onto that idea. In a December 23 tweet, she said, "The people re-elected Donald Trump. Now, it's time to #FightForTrump." She shared a petition supporting the Stop the Steal movement, which inspired the January 6 rally that led to the deadly Capitol riot.

Claims that Trump won the election sparked the frenzy that led to the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6. More than 200 people have already been arrested on charges related to the insurrection.

Read the original article on Insider

Israel-Palestine war: Britain's epidemic of unchallenged anti-Palestinian racism

Peter Oborne, Imran Mulla
10 October 2023 

The UK risks importing the bloodshed from Gaza if its supposedly mainstream thinkers continue to recklessly deploy venomous and inflammatory anti-Muslim bigotry

Pro-Palestinian supporters march near the Israeli embassy in London on 9 October, 2023 (Reuters)

British Home Secretary Suella Braverman weighed into the Gaza conflict on Sunday by issuing a public warning that there “must be zero tolerance for antisemitism or the glorification of terrorism on the streets of Britain”.

She was right to do so. Even the most fervent supporters of the Palestinian cause must recognise that it is one of the duties of a British home secretary to prevent violence and hatred erupting on British streets - and never more so than when war breaks out in the Middle East, with the passions it engenders on all sides.

More than ever, at times like this there is a need for decency, level-headed thinking and civility.

Unfortunately, the home secretary’s intervention has so far been one-sided.

Over the last 48 hours, Britain has experienced an epidemic of almost unchallenged anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Muslim bigotry - and Braverman has been inexcusably silent.

What is more, this bigotry has been perpetrated by people in a position of responsibility.
'Islamic bloodlust'

Take the editor of the British newspaper Jewish News, Richard Ferrer. He wrote in the Daily Express on Sunday that Hamas’s military attack on Israel was “plain and simply historic Islamic bloodlust, passed down through the generations from birth”.

This rhetoric is venomous, and arguably a form of blood libel. After a backlash, the word “Islamic” was changed to “Islamist”.

The editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Jake Wallis Simons, said on the same day that “much of Muslim culture is in the grip of a death cult that sacralised bloodshed. Not all, but many Muslims are brainwashed by it”. After a backlash, he deleted the tweet. Note he left it up for over a day.

These inflammatory remarks risk importing the bloodshed in Gaza into Britain itself.

Moreover, such talk of “Islamic bloodlust” and a Muslim “death cult” is not just dangerous - it’s historically false. It’s worth remembering that when the Jews were driven out of Christian Spain in 1492, many found safety in the Islamic world, above all the Ottoman Empire.

The Jewish historian Avi Shlaim, emeritus professor of international relations at Oxford University, exploded this false narrative in his recent book Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, stressing the “old tradition of religious tolerance and long history of relative harmony between the different sections of society” in his native Iraq.

As Shlaim pointed out: “It took Europe much longer than the Arab world to accept the Jews as equal co-citizens.”

Outright bigotry

It is hard to exaggerate how solemn this moment is in the history of the modern Middle East. It is the most frightening since the Yom Kippur war 50 years ago.

At such times, there is a special responsibility on those in a position of influence to respond calmly and to avoid inflammatory language.

However, others have joined in. The former editor of the Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, has tried to weaponise the tragic events of the last few days with the comment: “Vote Starmer get Islam” - framing British Muslims as an existential enemy.

Imagine the reaction if MacKenzie had warned that voting for Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives meant that you “get Hinduism”. This would be immediately called out as outright bigotry.

Douglas Murray, a prominent right-wing commentator who writes regularly for the Spectator and the Sun, tweeted a photo of two men in New York holding a sign saying “Jews for a free Palestine”. He described them as “the stupidest people in NY today. Jews for mass suicide”.

“British Jews braced for hate crimes as pro-Palestinian groups celebrate,” read one headline in the Times on Sunday, explicitly connecting pro-Palestinian groups to antisemitic attacks.

It is becoming acceptable in much of British discourse to imply that the Palestinian flag itself - which is not the Hamas flag - is somehow murderous, terroristic and antisemitic

Antisemitism is foul, but it is offensive and dangerous to imply that any expression of Palestinian identity or support for Palestinian self-determination - a legitimate struggle under international law - is considered morally wrong and even terroristic.

It is becoming acceptable in much of British discourse to imply that the Palestinian flag itself - which is not the Hamas flag - is somehow murderous, terroristic and antisemitic.

This means there is no way for Palestinians to express their identity without being smeared as terrorists.

Support for Palestinian freedom and self-determination is viewed as "barbaric". Even a hint of solidarity with Palestinians is treated as support for brutality.

And it’s not just journalists.

War crimes

James Orr, a professor of philosophy and religion at Cambridge University, captioned a video of a crowd in Manchester waving Palestinian flags and signs saying “Freedom for Palestine” and asked: “Have Britain's streets witnessed anything more morally abhorrent than this?”

Some would say they have. And one wonders how Palestinian students at Cambridge might feel about Orr’s attitude.

Israel-Palestine war: How Gaza turned the tables on its gaoler

sRead More »

Cambridge academic Charlotte Proudman tweeted a video of a car emblazoned with a Palestine flag honking next to a motorbike flying the same flag and captioned it: “Celebrating the murders and kidnapping of Israelis is quite possibly the most heinous act of public hate I have seen on the streets of London.”

Meanwhile, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ordered the Israeli flag to be projected onto 10 Downing Street, while promising “unequivocal support” for Israel.

Yet recent history teaches us that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza. Nearly 1,500 Palestinian civilians were killed in 2014 in Operation Protective Edge. In 2018, more than 200 Palestinians in Gaza were shot dead by Israeli snipers, and 36,000 injured during the peaceful Great March of Return protests.

On Monday, the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, ordered a full siege of the Gaza Strip, including a ban on the admission of food, electricity and fuel. This smacks of collective punishment for Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians, which would be a war crime under international law.

Yet, when given the opportunity to condemn this on television, Britain’s Foreign Secretary James Cleverly would not do so.

Paradoxically enough, some of the Israeli press is much more balanced than the British coverage. Haaretz, Israel’s leading liberal newspaper, published an editorial on Sunday declaring Hamas’s attack to be “the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu”.

It accused Netanyahu of failing “to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir to key positions, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians”.

Sunak’s decision to give a blanket endorsement to whatever Netanyahu’s Israel might do in the days and nights to come is not simply a betrayal of the Palestinians - it’s reckless and irresponsible.

The views expressed in this article belong to the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Peter Oborne won best commentary/blogging in both 2022 and 2017, and was also named freelancer of the year in 2016 at the Drum Online Media Awards for articles he wrote for Middle East Eye. He was also named as British Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2013. He resigned as chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015. His latest book is The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam, published in May by Simon & Schuster. His previous books include The Triumph of the Political Class, The Rise of Political Lying, Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran and The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism.

Imran Mulla has written for The Critic, Conservative Home, Athwart, Panoramic the Magazine and Traversing Tradition among others.

 

Flag Administrators Denounce ITF’s Targeted Inspection Campaign

ITF said it would conduct as many as 1,000 inspections for safety, maintenance, and welfare issues in the coming eight weeks (ITF file photo)

PUBLISHED MAR 21, 2023 6:59 PM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

 

Days after the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) announced it was launching a target inspection program in the Mediterranean aimed at safety, maintenance, and seafarer welfare issues, the four flags cited by the union are all responding calling the accusations false and untrue, and not representative of the efforts undertaken by the flags. They cite inaccuracies in the union’s statements and the flags’ ongoing efforts to resolve issues and enforce standards.

“The ITF’s campaign does not reflect the reality of the situation regarding PISR,” responds the Palau International Ship Registry (PISR), one of the four cited by the union. The ITF said that it would be targeting up to 1,000 ship inspections for vessels operating in the Mediterranean in the coming eight weeks. They listed Palau along with ships flagged to the Cook Islands, Sierra Leone, and Togo as the targets saying that ships from these flags had over 5,200 deficiencies or detentions issued by European Port State Control enforcement agencies, as listed by the Paris MOU between 2020 and 2022.

“The statistical evidence presented by ITF to justify its unwarranted attack on PISR is wholly inaccurate, misinterpreted, and therefore clearly misleading. The negative picture presented of PISR is misguided, as any objective observer with maritime knowledge will understand,” the flag administrator wrote in its response. They are calling into question the rationale behind the campaign.

PISR reports that in the past three years, only two vessels in its registry were sent for demolition from the Mediterranean. Neither of these vessels they state recorded unsafe shipping issues or abandonment cases.

Further, like all the flag administrators, PISR responds to and takes seriously any case of abandonment reported to the administrator. The flags point out that the financial issues that drive most shipowners to abandon a crew or ship are beyond their control, but they respond to their responsibilities under the Maritime Labor Convention.

“PISR has taken immediate action to address all cases brought to the Flag administration to benefit seafarers’ rights under the MLC,” they write noting as recorded in the International Labour Organization’s official abandonment database, PISR swiftly addressed and officially resolved all abandonment issues. 

The flags also refute the broader accusation that the ships operating under these flags account for numerous detentions and deficiencies. PISR says as per the last Paris MoU report, it only had nine detentions out of 162 inspections in the last five years.

“No other flag state has improved its standing within the Paris Memorandum of Understanding (Paris MoU) in the last five years. PISR for consecutive years has been in the top third tier of the Grey List in both Paris MoU and Tokyo MoU.”

The flags report they have been working with the international community with PISR noting that its vetting process, for example, which includes looking into the vessel’s age, ownership, and past performance history, has been audited by international bodies, including the IMO during IMSAS audits. 

PISR notes it applies a strict vetting process for vessel acceptance. Similarly, the International Ship Registry of Togo in its response to Tradewinds cited the number of ship registration requests it rejects. They told Tradewinds they turned down 148 vessels last year and since 2020 more than 200 ships have been deregistered.

The flags all responded citing their disappointment in the ITF’s efforts. The union has frequently targeted flags of convenience in its campaigns. The administrators targeted in this latest effort believe it would be more constructive to work with the flags in their efforts to improve the situations for seafarers.

FROM THE RIGHT

'False crisis' regarding Russia hurts relations between U.S. and Ukraine, experts say

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that he had not seen the intelligence assessments regarding an invasion, and that the warnings were stoking panic.

By Susan Katz Keating

JUST THE NEWS
Updated: February 14, 2022 - 

The situation in Ukraine is a "false crisis" that has hurt relations between Washington and Kyiv, as the Biden Administration increasingly claims to know the date and method of a Russian incursion against its neighbor, experts told Just the News.

The experts made their comments Monday while appearing on the John Solomon Reports podcast.

"It's a false crisis," said international relations expert Kiron Skinner, who served as an adviser at the State Department under Donald Trump. She made that assessment, she noted, because "there's been a war of attrition going on between Kyiv and Moscow for eight years."

International tension has spiked recently as Russia maintains an estimated 100,000 troops along its border with Ukraine and has issued ominous statements about "the start of a countdown" and claims that Moscow is being "provoked."

The U.S. has repeatedly announced that Moscow plans to stage a "false flag" provocation in order to justify an attack on Ukraine, and has said that the attack is "imminent," and could occur this week. The State Department on Monday shuttered its main embassy in Kyiv, and moved the operations to the western city of Lviv.

The announcements and predictions strike a sour note in government circles in Kyiv, according to Dan Hoffman, a former station chief for the CIA in Moscow.

"The relationship between the United States and Ukraine is strained right now, to say the least, because Russia has got 130,000 troops on the border," Hoffman told Just the News. "President Zelenskyy, rightly so, is questioning, well, where's the intelligence?"

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday said that he had not seen the intelligence assessments regarding an invasion, and that the warnings were stoking panic.

"I think there is too much information out there today about a deep full scale war on Russia's part," Zelenskyy said. "There is even talk of appropriate dates. We understand all the risks. We understand that the risks are there. If anyone has any additional information about a 100% chance of an invasion, they should give it to us."

Alternating between English and Ukrainian, Zelenskyy continued: "I have to speak with our people as President, and I say the truth to people, and the truth is that we have different information."

Information regarding an attack comes through intelligence channels, the administration has said. But the information and the subsequent leaks prompt questions from the former station chief, Hoffman.

"The Biden administration's kind of substituting diplomacy for releasing, declassifying intelligence, thinking that by declassifying intelligence they're going to influence Vladimir Putin's behavior," Hoffman said. "I think that's frankly a little bit lazy."

The method falls short, he noted.

"We haven't influenced his behavior at all," Hoffman said. But Putin might be influencing ours.

The administration perhaps thinks "they're doing something by releasing intelligence that, frankly, I think it's possible Vladimir Putin is feeding us anyways."

Putin may not want an invasion, but has been "probing," Skinner said.

Predictions from the West, meanwhile, about an imminent invasion are harmful to Ukraine, that country's president said.

"The best friend of our enemies is panic in our country," Zelenskyy said. "All this information, it only fuels panic. It doesn't help us."

Facebook’s Preferential Treatment Of US Conservatives Puts Its Fact-Checking Program In Danger
Facebook’s employees and fact-checking partners say they are left in the dark about how the company decides what content stays up and what comes down.

Posted on August 13, 2020

Ben Kothe / BuzzFeed News; Getty Images

On May 8, Prager University, a nonprofit conservative media outlet, published a video on Facebook that incorrectly claimed “there is no evidence that CO2 emissions are the dominant factor” in climate change. Within days, Climate Feedback, a nonpartisan network of scientists and a member of Facebook’s global fact-checking partnership, rated the content as false — a designation that was supposed to result in serious consequences.

It was PragerU’s second strike for false content that month, which under Facebook’s own policies should have triggered “repeat offender” penalties including the revocation of advertising privileges and the specter of possible deletion.

But it didn't. As first reported by BuzzFeed News last week, a Facebook employee intervened on PragerU’s behalf and asked for a reexamination of the judgment, citing “partner sensitivity” and the amount of money the organization had spent on ads. Eventually, while the false labels on PragerU’s posts remained, Facebook disappeared the strikes from its internal record and no one — not the public, the fact-checkers, or Facebook’s own employees — was informed of the decision.

Meanwhile, PragerU cashed in on the fact-checks of its climate misinformation. On May 19 — the day after it received its first strike for false content — it launched a fundraiser. “Facebook is using biased 3rd party fact-checkers to flag content and censor conservatives," the organization told its more than 4.2 million followers. "Is Facebook now the arbiter of truth?”

The campaign raised $21,637.

Since at least late 2016, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has defended Facebook by insisting it should not be “an arbiter of truth,” while creating a third-party fact-checking program to fill that role of umpire. But journalists and researchers at the dozens of organizations that make up Facebook’s fact-checking operation say the company is often just that. Some told BuzzFeed News they were surprised to learn their verdicts had been ignored or overruled by Facebook in a closed-door process with little transparency, and warned that this risks undermining the program’s credibility.

“They are the arbiters of the consequences for publishing false or misleading information,” said one fact-checker who asked not to be named for fear of repercussions from Facebook.

“If people want to evade consequences, it’s easy to do it,” they added.

“They are the arbiters of the consequences for publishing false or misleading information.”

Some employees at the social network agreed. Last week, after BuzzFeed News revealed Facebook executives and staff were intervening in fact-check disputes on behalf of right-wing publishers, workers wondered if the company was caving to loud critics and political pressure.

“Mark likes to say how Facebook should not be ‘the arbiter of truth,’” one person wrote in an internal Facebook employee group. “But escalations... that are focused on partners who are ‘sensitive’ sound exactly like us meddling in this area. How do we reconcile this contradiction?”

Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, said that even though Facebook doesn’t want to be in the business of declaring what is true and false, it still makes a lot of choices in how it structures its policies and fact-checking program that leave it “in the driver seat.”

“There will be a pretty big reckoning around fact-checking,” she said. “People don’t really understand it either and they see it as a panacea for problems on social media platforms.”
Do you work at Facebook or another technology company? We'd love to hear from you. Reach out at craig.silverman@buzzfeed.com, ryan.mac@buzzfeed.com, or via one of our tip line channels.

Facebook did not answer a list of specific questions related to the preferential treatment of right-wing pages that had received misinformation strikes. Previously the company had said that while it “defer[s] to third-party fact-checkers on the rating that a piece of content receives” only it is “responsible for how we manage our internal system for repeat offenders.”

"Facebook is the only company to partner with more than 70 fact-checking organizations worldwide to fight the spread of viral misinformation,” Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said in a statement for this story. “There is no playbook for a program like ours and we’re constantly working to improve it based on feedback from our partners and what we see on our platform.”





Jack Gruber / USA TODAY NETWORK


“The Arbiter of Truth”

Four days after the 2016 US presidential election, Zuckerberg posted a mea culpa to Facebook addressing mounting evidence that misinformation spread and amplified on the platform might have influenced its result. In the post, the Facebook CEO — who had previously said misinformation on the social network influencing the election was a "pretty crazy idea" — acknowledged hoaxes and fake news did exist on the social network.

“This is an area where I believe we must proceed very carefully though. Identifying the ‘truth’ is complicated,” he wrote. “While some hoaxes can be completely debunked, a greater amount of content, including from mainstream sources, often gets the basic idea right but some details wrong or omitted. … I believe we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”

Facebook launched a third-party fact-checking program a month after Zuckerberg’s post, and its CEO’s sentiment has become a common refrain from the social network’s executives. Debates on whether Facebook is a media company that’s responsible for the content on its platform have shifted to whether or not the company should play a role in identifying — and subsequently removing — misinformation.

Now, as the US heads toward another contentious presidential election, Zuckerberg is again rolling out the “arbiter of truth” talking point. "I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online," he told Fox News in May. “Private companies probably shouldn't be, especially these platform companies, shouldn't be in the position of doing that."

"They’re saying, ‘We don’t want to be the arbiters of truth,’ but they do want to be the arbiter of whether pages are taken down or not."

But internal discussions and documents recently obtained by BuzzFeed News and NBC News revealed that Facebook has been doing just that, deciding whether or not to penalize pages after they’ve received strikes for misinformation and, at times, casting aside judgments made by its fact-checking partners seemingly for fear of political blowback or lost revenue. Unlike fact-checkers, Facebook does not disclose the reasons and evidence it uses to make decisions to remove misinformation strikes or otherwise choose to overrule its fact-checking partners.

“The problem with what they’re doing is they’re saying, ‘We don’t want to be the arbiters of truth,’ but they do want to be the arbiter of whether pages are taken down or not,” said Peter Cunliffe-Jones, the founder of Africa Check, who now serves as an adviser to the International Fact-Checking Network. “And there is no transparency about that decision making process.”

Cunliffe-Jones suggested Facebook take a page from its fact-checkers and publish its rationale for removing misinformation strikes and other reversals, lest it undermines trust in the entire process.

“I do understand that even Facebook can’t provide granular detail on every decision made across millions of decisions, but on the significant ones they can,” he said. “I think it would help to develop trust in the process. And if the process [at Facebook] is not trustworthy, that would expose it.”

The lack of transparency to which Cunliffe-Jones referred has roiled the social network’s own employees. Following BuzzFeed News’ story that revealed preferential treatment for conservative pages and personal interventions from executives including vice president of global public policy Joel Kaplan, an internal message board called “Let’s Fix Facebook (the company),” which has about 10,000 members, exploded in conversation.

“The silence on this is unacceptable. Both the pipeline intervention and the firing,” wrote one employee, referring to the removals of misinformation strikes and the dismissal of an engineer who gathered and revealed evidence of it.

“Can we also use this as an opportunity to be more transparent about fact-checking in general?” asked another employee. “Not just internally but also to our users? How escalations and appeals work, who can do them, who is doing them, aggregated statistics about posts labeled...”

“If someone at Facebook is trying to help us, they’re not doing a very good job.”

The lack of transparency has also upset those being penalized for misinformation rulings, including the executives at PragerU. Craig Strazzeri, PragerU’s chief marketing officer, said his organization appealed the fact-check decisions with Climate Feedback in May but was not aware of any Facebook employees working on their behalf to get the strikes removed.

“If someone at Facebook is trying to help us, they’re not doing a very good job,” Strazzeri said, noting that PragerU’s organic reach was cut following the two false fact-checks. PragerU was still able to run ads during that time period, according to Strazzeri, who noted that the company’s page is once again under scrutiny after two more strikes for misinformation since May.

Emmanuel Vincent, the director of Science Feedback, the not-for-profit organization that runs Climate Feedback, said PragerU only disputed one of its two May verdicts, which it upheld as false. He's concerned that PragerU has found a way to use fact-checks to its advantage.

"Each time they get a strike, they can raise money,” he said.



Bloomberg / Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg speaks during a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing in Washington, DC, July 29.


Repeat Offenders

Facebook's level of attention to concerns from American conservatives on its platform is unlike any other constituency in the world, according to the fact-checkers who spoke to BuzzFeed News. Some worry that’s detrimental to international efforts to police the platform for misinformation. Cunliffe-Jones told BuzzFeed News Facebook has failed to act against repeat offender financial scam pages in countries like Kenya.

“It’s been clear from quite early on that there’s a problem with the way that some pages that are repeat offenders seem to keep on operating,” Cunliffe-Jones said. “I’ve noted this from pages that have been repeatedly fact-checked [in Kenya]. With these pages, I don’t think there’s a political game. I think it’s a lack of attention — and that’s also harmful.”

Other international fact-checkers said Facebook’s emphasis on the US election cause it to be less responsive to issues in other parts of the world. One journalist at a fact-checking outlet in a G7 country said Facebook’s lack of local staff causes the company to at times ask its checking partners to help with decisions about how to apply company policy.

“They're not as well-staffed in some of the other markets outside the US. So they actually do lean on the fact-checkers a little bit more about some of the policy things,” said the journalist.


Bourgeois said Facebook values the expertise of local checkers. “We frequently speak to fact-checkers in different regions to understand how misinformation is spreading in their countries and languages. This is not in lieu of relying on the expertise of our own teams, it’s in addition.”

"...there’s not much bandwidth for anything outside the US at the moment at Facebook."

Agence France-Presse has fact-checkers in more than 30 countries, making it Facebook’s biggest partner in the program. Phil Chetwynd, the global news director of AFP, said his organization has not felt pressure from Facebook about its ratings, though anything having to do with the US is given a different level of scrutiny by the company.

“You can feel there’s not much bandwidth for anything outside the US at the moment at Facebook,” he said. “There’s just a tremendous concentration of resources on the US.”

Chetwynd said one of the values of participating in the fact-checking program for organizations like AFP is knowing that repeat offenders face consequences. If Facebook fails to enforce its policies, it reduces the value of fact-checkers. And the lack of transparency around the internal decision-making process for removing misinformation strikes only makes things worse.

“Most fact-checkers have developed a very constructive relationship with Facebook, but this issue around transparency has always been a point of frustration,” he said. “It is something we have voiced to them many times both privately and publicly — we do not get nearly enough precise data on the impact of our fact-checks on the platform. Our feeling is that making this data public would only add to the credibility of our work and the fact-checking program in general.”

The Opinion Exemption

Over the past two months, Facebook and its fact-checking partners have been discussing one of the more contentious issues in their partnership: the so-called opinion exemption. Facebook’s policy is that opinion articles, like statements from political leaders, are exempt from review.

Internal documents obtained by BuzzFeed News show that Facebook employees have cited this policy as justification for removing misinformation strikes from PragerU and pro-Trump activists Diamond and Silk after fact-checkers issued them. A Facebook partner manager for PragerU said the false claims the publication made about the climate crisis should fall under the “opinion loophole.”

On Tuesday, Facebook seemingly closed this loophole explaining in a policy update that if “content is presented as opinion but is based on underlying false information - even if it’s an op-ed or editorial - it's still eligible to be fact-checked.”

"It’s not the best thing for a fact-checker to learn their flag has been removed by Facebook from the media.”


Baybars Örsek, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said the policy update will help ensure that misinformation can’t be embedded in op-ed pieces. But he noted that Facebook can still decide whether a piece of fact-checked content is opinion or not. The company can remove misinformation strikes without informing a fact-checker of its decision. That lack of transparency is a problem.

“At the end of the day, it’s not the best thing for a fact-checker to learn their flag has been removed by Facebook from the media,” he said.

Other fact-checkers echoed Örsek’s concerns. One said they wished Facebook had to publicly disclose when it removes a misinformation strike. Such an obligation would make it difficult for the company to give preferential treatment to “the partners who pay a lot of money to Facebook, or the partners who could say something and be heard at the very high levels of the company.”

That appeared to be the case with PragerU, which has managed to avoid severe punishment — and monetize it.

PragerU has raised at least $400,000 from Facebook fundraisers protesting alleged censorship on Facebook and YouTube since late 2018, according to a review by BuzzFeed News. On Aug. 5, it launched a fundraiser on Facebook in response to the company’s removal of a PragerU post featuring a now-infamous video initially circulated by Breitbart News of a group of doctors making false and potentially harmful claims about COVID-19.

It raised $66,844. ●


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Moscow shooting poses awkward questions for Russia's intelligence agencies

Reuters
Updated Mon, March 25, 2024 



LONDON (Reuters) -Russia's security state has been ruthlessly effective at detaining Vladimir Putin's opponents but was caught off guard by a mass shooting near Moscow, raising questions about its priorities, resources and intelligence gathering.

Charged with hunting down Ukrainian saboteurs inside Russia, with keeping anti-Kremlin activists in check, and with disrupting the operations of hostile foreign intelligence agencies, the FSB, the main successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, has its hands full.

That, say former U.S. intelligence officials and Western security analysts, helps explain why it may have overlooked other threats, including that posed by Islamist militants, such as ISIS-K, which claimed responsibility for the attack.


“You can’t do everything,” Daniel Hoffman, a former senior CIA operations officer who served as the agency’s Moscow station chief, told Reuters.

“You dial up the pressure on the locals and sometimes you don’t get the intelligence you need on a potential terrorist attack. That’s where they failed.

"It’s possible they’re overextended dealing with the war in Ukraine and dealing with political opposition. This one slipped through the cracks.”

The FSB has said Friday's concert hall attack was "painstakingly" planned and that the gunmen had carefully hidden their weapons.

Putin on Monday said that radical Islamists were the ones who had carried out the attack, but said that Russia still wanted to understand who had ordered it and said there were many questions for Ukraine to answer. Ukraine denies any involvement.

When asked on Monday if the assault represented an intelligence service failure, the Kremlin said that Russia's standoff with the West meant intelligence-sharing was not happening in the way it used to.

"Unfortunately, our world shows that no city, no country can be completely immune from the threat of terrorism," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. Russia's intelligence services worked tirelessly to defend the country, he added.

Still, Friday's shooting, in which at least 139 people were killed and 180 injured, has undermined one of Putin's longstanding pledges to the Russian people: to ensure stability and security.

It has also shaken some residents of the Russian capital who have largely been insulated from the violence of the Ukraine war despite occasional drone strikes.

Putin, a former KGB officer who won another six years in power earlier this month, has weathered similar crises before and there is no visible threat to his grip on power now.

His response, judging from his previous behaviour and a statement on Saturday, will be to meet force with greater force.

Four of 11 men detained in connection with the attack have been charged with terrorism and appeared in court after being interrogated: one apparently with his ear missing and one in a wheelchair amid calls from some lawmakers for the death penalty to be re-introduced. Peskov declined to answer a journalist's question about whether they had been tortured.

MISSED WARNINGS?

Whether the men were tasked by Islamic State as the militant group and the West asserts, or whether there may have been some kind of Ukrainian connection as Putin has hinted - and Kyiv has flatly denied - there were warning signs which do not appear to have been heeded.

Security analysts said the manner in which the attack and escape were carried out was evidence of extensive reconnaissance of the venue beforehand and Russian media published CCTV footage of one of the gunmen visiting at an earlier date.

On March 7, the U.S. embassy in Moscow issued a security alert to Americans, telling them it was "monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts".

On March 19, three days before the killing spree, Putin delivered a speech to FSB chiefs in which he dismissed what he said were "provocative" Western warnings about a terrorist act.

"All these actions resemble outright blackmail and the intention to intimidate and destabilise our society," said Putin.

Nina Krushcheva, a professor of international affairs at The New School in New York, said the FSB appeared to have had Islamic State on its radar.

But she said Putin's view that Russia was locked in an existential struggle with a U.S-led West would have made it difficult for Moscow to take at face value a security warning from the United States.

"There's a lot of mistrust. It's not like America isn't involved in misinformation," she said.

"In Putin's world, where it is an existential battle between Russia and the West that wants to undermine Russia and demolish it, of course he wouldn't believe it because how does he know from his own KGB background that America is not creating its own false flag (operation)."

A false flag operation is an act committed with the intent of disguising the source of responsibility to pin blame on another party.

ISLAMIC STATE

John Sipher, who served a stint in Russia during his career in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, said he believed the FSB may have dropped the ball because it was too busy focusing on political and other threats to Putin and his government.

“The (security services) are more about protecting the Kremlin than they are about protecting the people,” said Sipher, who predicted that Putin would now use the attack to justify some new action or against the West and Ukraine.

Another warning came on March 2 in southern Russia when FSB special forces killed six gunmen whom they identified as members of Islamic State.

Three of the men were on a federal wanted list and the militants had killed three policemen the previous year. The FSB found a weapons stash.

On March 7, the FSB said it had prevented an attack on a synagogue in Moscow that had been plotted by an Islamic State cell and that the attackers had been killed in a shootout.

Riccardo Valle, a researcher on jihadist movements, said the March 2 incident should have set off warning lights.

"I think the fact the security forces discovered that there is a network of Islamic State in Russia, and a strong one capable of acquiring weapons and putting up strong resistance against special forces - this should have raised the alarm in Moscow security agencies," Valle said in a phone interview.

"Maybe it did but they were not able to prevent the attack in time," said Valle, director of research at the Islamabad-based research and news platform The Khorasan Diary.

He said it was also clear from previous statements and attacks by ISIS-K, including on the Russian embassy in Kabul in 2022, that the group had Russia in its sights.

(Editing by Alison Williams)

Russia blames Kyiv, West over Moscow gun attack

AFP
Tue, March 26, 2024 

Russia on Tuesday sought to shift blame for the Moscow concert hall attack onto Ukraine and its Western backers, despite the Islamic State group claiming responsibility for the massacre of at least 139 people.

The Kremlin's security services have been scrambling to explain how gunmen on Friday managed to carry out the worst attack in Russia in over two decades.

President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged that "radical Islamists" conducted the bloody assault, but suggested they were linked to Ukraine, two years into the Kremlin's offensive on the country.

The head of Russia's FSB security agency Alexander Bortnikov said Tuesday that while those who had "ordered" the attack had not been identified, the assailants were heading to Ukraine and would have been "greeted as heroes".

"We believe the action was prepared both by the radical Islamists themselves and, of course, facilitated by Western special services, and Ukraine's special services themselves have a direct connection to this," Bortnikov was cited as saying by Russian news agencies.

Ukraine has fiercely rejected any accusations from Moscow that it was tied to the assault, with a top aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky saying the Kremlin was looking to cover up the "incompetence" of its intelligence agencies.

- Belarus undermines Kremlin narrative -

Russia's closest international ally, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, appeared to undermine the Kremlin's main narrative -- saying that the attackers tried to enter his country first before heading to Ukraine.

"There was no way they could enter Belarus. They saw that. That's why they turned away and went to the section of the Ukrainian-Russian border," he said.

The Kremlin has expressed confidence in the country's powerful security agencies, despite questions swirling over how they failed to thwart the massacre after public and private warnings from the United States.

Islamic State jihadists have said several times since Friday that they were responsible, and IS-affiliated media channels have published graphic videos of the gunmen inside the venue.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday said Paris had information that the jihadists were responsible and warned Russia against exploiting the attack to blame Ukraine.

The concert hall massacre was a major blow for Putin just over a week after he claimed a new term after one-sided elections the Kremlin billed as an endorsement of his military operation against Ukraine.

Putin on Monday said for the first time that "radical Islamists" were behind last week's attack, but sought to tie it to Kyiv.

Without providing any evidence, Putin connected the attack at Crocus City Hall to a series of incursions into Russian territory by pro-Ukrainian sabotage groups, and said they were all part of efforts to "sow panic in our society".

- Eighth suspect remanded -

A court in Moscow meanwhile on Tuesday remanded an eighth suspect in custody over the attack at the Moscow concert hall.

Moscow earlier announced it had detained 11 people in connection with the attack, which saw camouflaged gunmen storm into Crocus City Hall, open fire on concert-goers and set the building ablaze.

The court's press service said the latest suspect to be remanded was a man originally from the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan.

Officials said he was ordered to be held in detention until at least May 22, without detailing the exact accusations against him.

Four men charged on Sunday with carrying out the attack are citizens of Tajikistan, also in mainly Muslim Central Asia.

Three more suspects -- reportedly from the same family and including at least one Russian citizen -- were charged on terror-related offences on Monday.

A Turkish official said two of the Tajik suspects had travelled "freely between Russia and Turkey" ahead of the attack.

The two had both spent time in Turkey shortly before the attack and entered Russia together on the same flight from Istanbul, the official said.

All of those held in custody have been charged with terrorism and face up to life in prison.

The Kremlin has so far pushed back at suggestions the death penalty will be re-introduced after the attack.

Much of Putin's inner circle thinks Ukraine had nothing to do with the Moscow terror attack, badly undermining him, report says

Mia Jankowicz
Wed, March 27, 2024 



Putin's inner circle isn't buying his claim that Kyiv is connected to the Moscow terror attack, Bloomberg reported.

Putin continues to say that Ukraine had a role in the attack, which was claimed by ISIS-K.

He thinks that pushing the theory is beneficial for galvanizing support for his war, per Bloomberg.

Many Kremlin insiders disagree with President Vladimir Putin's claims that Ukraine may be connected to last Friday's terror attack in Moscow, Bloomberg reported.

While Putin and some of his followers continue to publicly push the idea of Ukraine's role in the attack, behind the scenes few people in Moscow's top business and political circles support the theory, insiders told the outlet.

Ukraine has denied any connection to the attack, and no credible evidence has emerged for its involvement.

On Friday, armed attackers stormed the Crocus City Hall in Moscow, opening fire and killing at least 137 people during a rock concert. ISIS-K, a terror group based in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility.

Four suspects, who appeared in court on Sunday, were described in Russian state media as coming from Tajikistan.

Addressing the nation the day after the attack, Putin said that Ukraine had provided the attackers with an escape route at its border.

Making no mention of ISIS-K, he said: "They tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the state border," NPR reported.

On Monday, Putin switched to blaming ISIS-K for the attack, but continued to allude to a Ukrainian connection.

"The United States, through various channels, is trying to convince its satellites and other countries of the world that, according to their intelligence data, there is supposedly no Kyiv trace in the Moscow terrorist attack," he said, according to CNBC.

But Putin's narrative was undermined even by Belarusian President Alexandr Lukashenko, a close ally, who said that the suspects had first tried to go to his country.

"There was no chance they could enter Belarus," he said, according to the state-run Belarusian Telegraph Agency. "So they took a turn and headed to the Ukraine-Russia border."

According to Bloomberg, Putin has been confronted with his inner circle's doubts.

Citing a person with knowledge of the situation, the outlet reported that Putin was in a meeting where officials agreed that Ukraine had no connection to the attack.

Even so, Putin was committed to the idea that it would help mobilize support for the war there, the person reportedly said.

Putin loyalists have continued to advance the theory without presenting any evidence.

Alexander Bortnikov, director of Russia's FSB security service, said on television that he believed Islamist radicals were aided by Western special services, and that "the special services of Ukraine are directly related to this," Reuters reported.

Asked whether ISIS or Ukraine was responsible, Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Russia's security council, said it was Ukraine, adding later that there were "many" indications of Kyiv's involvement, per Reuters.

Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the FSB and Russian intelligence, told Bloomberg that Russia's security services "know this was Islamic State, but after Putin's remarks they have no choice but to follow orders and prove that there was Ukrainian or Western involvement."