Sociopath Putin Destroys Remaining Russian Civilian Society U.S. Must Increase Sanctions On Crush Serial Murderer Putin And Criminal Oligarchs

The Post's View Opinion: Putin is destroying what is left of Russian civil society. Biden must keep the pressure on. Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a government meeting in Magnitogorsk, Russia, on Aug. 6. Caption without an image Opinion by the Editorial Board 10 August 2021 Alexei Navalny has now served more than six months in prison on a charge intended solely to silence Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most outspoken and prominent opponent, and Mr. Navalny’s organization has been gutted by the Russian authorities. With a steady tightening of the screws, Mr. Putin is decimating what is left of Russia’s civil society. Mr. Putin’s security services attempted to poison Mr. Navalny a year ago, and he spent five months recovering in Germany. When he courageously returned to Russia on Jan. 17, he was charged, absurdly, with violating the terms of a suspended sentence in a six-year-old case that the European Court of Human Rights had called “arbitrary.” A Russian court nonetheless sent Mr. Navalny to prison in February for 32 months. As thousands attended rallies to support Mr. Navalny, the authorities arrested his close ally Lyubov Sobol, among other well-known activists, on charges of breaking pandemic regulations. The public demonstrations, including one in early February, were met with force, and nearly 10,000 people were detained across the country. Russian authorities launched more than 90 criminal cases against protesters; nearly two dozen of these defendants were sentenced to jail time. In May, legislation was introduced to outlaw anyone designated an “extremist” by the government from running for election. The bill was rushed through parliament and signed by Mr. Putin on June 4. Five days later, a Moscow court ruled that Mr. Navalny’s organizations are “extremist.” This effectively barred anyone affiliated with Mr. Navalny from running for office in September’s elections. Mr. Navalny’s backers had succeeded in a political strategy known as “smart voting,” advancing select candidates to defeat those backed by the Kremlin. Now his network of offices is closed. As the U.S. State Department aptly put it, “With this action, Russia has effectively criminalized one of the country’s few remaining independent political movements.” On Aug. 3, Ms. Sobol was sentenced to parole-like restrictions for a year and a half, stemming from her January arrest on the pandemic charge, which she correctly called nonsense. On Aug. 7, she left Russia. All of Russian civil society is under pressure. News organizations are regularly being labeled “foreign agents” and required to issue a disclaimer on every article and broadcast. Those singled out include Meduza; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; a business news site, VTimes; and an investigative news site, the Insider. Authorities raided the home of the Insider's editor in chief, Roman Dobrokhotov, who has often partnered with Bellingcat, the open-source organization that helped expose the actions of Russia’s security services, including the attack on Mr. Navalny. The investigative site Proekt was labeled an “undesirable organization” and banned. Russia used a chemical weapon to poison Mr. Navalny. President Biden is overdue in imposing mandatory sanctions for it. When Mr. Biden met with Mr. Putin in June, the American president raised Mr. Navalny’s persecution and vowed to keep up the pressure, because “that’s what we are, that’s who we are.” Mr. Biden pledged to “stand up for the universal and fundamental freedoms that all men and women have, in our view.” Yet two months later, Mr. Putin’s war on civil society grinds.... 0 Comments Gift Article OPINIONS ABOUT RUSSIA HAND CURATED Putin is destroying what is left of Russian civil society. Biden must keep the pressure on. August 10, 2021 Trying to pry Russia away from China is a fool’s errand July 21, 2021 Reformers just won a rare victory in Russia’s backyard. Biden should help them. July 20, 2021 Russian hackers are sowing havoc. So why are we letting Moscow write the U.N.’s rules on cyberspace? Washington is still shying away from punishing Putin’s closest cronies. Why? August 5, 2021 As a new Russian election season begins, the Kremlin’s fraudsters are working overtime July 14, 2021 Copyright 2021 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (fair comment no claim to Washington Post content)

Secret Court Unconstitutional Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) ACLU Legal Director, Columbia University Knight Institute Executive Director, G.W. Bush Former Solicitor General Together Petition U.S Supreme Court

OPINION GUEST ESSAY What Is America’s Spy Court Hiding From the Public? June 2, 2021 Credit...Associated Press By David D. Cole, Jameel Jaffer and Theodore B. Olson Mr. Cole is legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Mr. Jaffer is executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and former deputy legal director at the A.C.L.U. Mr. Olson was solicitor general under President George W. Bush and is a member of the Knight Institute’s board. One of the most powerful courts in the country, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, is cloaked in unnecessary secrecy. It authorizes panoramic surveillance programs that can have profound implications for the rights of millions of Americans, but many of its significant decisions have been withheld from the public. The three of us have different views about how expansive the government’s surveillance powers should be. One of us, as solicitor general of the United States, defended the broad authority granted to federal officials to track and intercept communications for law enforcement and intelligence-gathering purposes under the U.S.A. Patriot Act; the other two have been among that law’s most active critics. But we agree about one crucial point: The needless secrecy surrounding the surveillance court is bad for the court, the intelligence agencies and the public — and it is also unconstitutional. We said this to the Supreme Court last month in a petition filed on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union, arguing that the public should have access to the surveillance court’s decisions. And in briefs filed with the court last week, many others — including former intelligence officials, civil society groups, and a major technology company — reinforced the same point. Congress created the surveillance court in 1978 after a congressional committee found that the intelligence agencies had abused their surveillance powers in ways that violated Americans’ rights and jeopardized our democracy. The court was charged with overseeing certain kinds of surveillance conducted for national security purposes. In its original incarnation, its role was narrow. It authorized a few hundred wiretaps a year. The Supreme Court: Upcoming Cases A Big Month. June is peak season for Supreme Court decisions. It is the final month of the court’s annual term, and the justices tend to save their biggest decisions for the term’s end. 4 Big Cases. The court is set to rule on the fate of Obamacare, as well as a case that could determine scores of laws addressing election rules in the coming years. It is also taking on a case involving religion and gay rights and one on whether students may be disciplined for what they say on social media (here’s an audio report on that subject; and here’s where public opinion stands on several of the big cases). What to Watch For. The approaches that Amy Coney Barrett, the newest justice, and Brett Kavanaugh, the second-newest, take. They will be crucial because the three liberal justices now need at least two of the six conservatives to form a majority. Before the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberals needed only one conservative. Looking Ahead. Next year’s term, which will start in the fall, will have cases on abortion, guns and perhaps affirmative action, and could end up being the most significant term so far under Chief Justice John Roberts. But the court’s role has since been transformed. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress expanded the government’s surveillance power. New technology also made possible more sweeping and intrusive forms of surveillance. Today, the court is frequently asked to evaluate surveillance programs whose scale is staggering, and its opinions in such cases are of immense consequence for Americans’ privacy, expressive and associational rights. For nearly a decade, for example, the court authorized the government to collect records on most phone calls made or received in the United States, detailing who called whom, when, and for how long — all without any suspicion of illegal activity. In another opinion, the court upheld the government’s practice of scanning Americans’ emails for intelligence purposes as those communications enter and leave the country. More recently, it permitted the F.B.I. to fish for information about Americans in huge databases of international emails, online messages and web chats obtained without probable cause. And in a series of opinions, including one involving the F.B.I.’s investigation of Carter Page, a onetime campaign adviser to Donald Trump, the court addressed episodes in which the government was not fully candid about the intelligence agencies’ surveillance of Americans. These opinions are among the subset that have been published — some of them in response to the 2015 U.S.A. Freedom Act, which requires the intelligence agencies to conduct a declassification review of opinions that include significant legal analysis. The publication of these opinions helped inform public debate, and in some instances led to legislative reform. But many of the surveillance court’s opinions remain secret, and the U.S.A. Freedom Act does not ensure that the court’s future opinions will see the light of day. The surveillance court has made clear it believes the executive branch should have the last word on whether the court’s opinions should be published. When the A.C.L.U. challenged this conclusion, both the surveillance court and the appeals court that oversees it held that they lacked authority even to consider the A.C.L.U.’s claim. This state of affairs is not reconcilable with the Constitution. The Supreme Court held four decades ago that the First Amendment protects the public’s right of access to certain judicial proceedings. It is now widely accepted that the public has a First Amendment right of access to judicial opinions except where redactions are necessary to serve a compelling government interest and are as limited as possible. The surveillance court has exempted itself from this rule on the ground that it deals with national security matters. But other American courts address such matters, too, and yet they honor the First Amendment right of access as a matter of course. They publish their opinions even when they concern the same questions the surveillance court addresses in its opinions, such as the legality of digital searches conducted for national security purposes. The unwarranted secrecy surrounding the surveillance court impoverishes public debate about government surveillance. It means that surveillance power can grow invisibly and easily become unmoored from the democratic consent that gives it legitimacy. The friend-of-the-court brief filed by former government officials — including James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence; John Brennan, a former C.I.A. director; and Donald Verrilli, a former solicitor general — makes exactly this point. Unnecessary secrecy also undermines public confidence in the surveillance court. As the Supreme Court once observed, “People in an open society do not demand infallibility from their institutions, but it is difficult for them to accept what they are prohibited from observing.” The surveillance court’s suggestion that it is not subject to the usual constraints of the First Amendment — and, indeed, that it lacks authority even to consider the First Amendment question — has only engendered suspicion of the court, and of the surveillance the court approves. No one — not the public, not the intelligence agencies and not the surveillance court — benefits if public debate about these questions is hobbled by unjustified secrecy. The petition we and our colleagues filed in the Supreme Court seeks to bring the surveillance court’s practices in line with the Constitution. The Supreme Court should make clear that the same First Amendment rules that apply to other courts apply to the surveillance court as well. David D. Cole is legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Jameel Jaffer is executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and former deputy legal director at the A.C.L.U. Theodore B. Olson was solicitor general under President George W. Bush and is a member of the Knight Institute’s board. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. Copyright 2021 Martin P.All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to New York Times Content - Credit To Associated Press)

GOP Cop-Killer Trump Sought DOJ Get Supreme Court To Overturn Election

24 Jauary 2021, WASHINGTON, DC - GOP RICO leader accused serial child rapist and cop-killer alleged but never legitimate former "President" Donald Trump sought to replace acting U.S. attorney general with an official willing to pursue unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, and he pushed the Justice Department to ask the Supreme Court to invalidate President Joe Biden’s victory, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. Slideshow ( 2 images ) Citing people familiar with the matter, the Journal said the efforts in the last weeks of Trump’s presidency failed because of resistance from his Justice appointees who refused to file what they viewed as a legally baseless lawsuit in the Supreme Court. Other senior department officials later threatened to resign if Trump fired then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, several people familiar with the discussions told the Journal. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters on Saturday. Senior officials including Rosen, former Attorney General William Barr and former acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall refused to file the Supreme Court case, concluding there was no basis to challenge the election outcome and the federal government had no legal interest in whether Trump or Biden won the presidency, some of these people told the Journal. Then-White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy, Patrick Philbin, also opposed Trump’s idea, which was promoted by his outside attorneys, these people said. After his Supreme Court plan got nowhere, Trump explored replacing Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, a Trump ally who had expressed a willingness to use the department’s power to help Trump continue his unsuccessful legal battles contesting the election results, the people told the Journal. Trump backed off that plan after the threats from senior Justice Department leadership to resign if Rosen were removed, people familiar with the discussions said. The plan to oust Rosen was first reported by the New York Times. A Trump adviser, asked to respond to the U.S. media reports, said the former president “has consistently argued that our justice system should be investigating the broader, rampant election fraud that has plagued our system for years. Any assertion to the contrary is false and being driven by those who wish to keep the system broken.” Democrats reacted with fury on Saturday to the New York Times’ report, with Senator Richard Durbin, incoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee, saying he would investigate efforts to use the Justice Department to further Trump’s efforts to overthrow the election results. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer calling on the department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, to investigate “this attempted sedition.” Trump’s relentless and baseless claims of election fraud - and his refusal to acknowledge Biden’s victory - culminated on Jan. 6 when Trump urged a rally of his supporters to march to the Capitol to protest the certification of the results. The resulting rampage led to five deaths, including a Capitol police officer. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives impeached Trump for a second time a week later for inciting the insurrection at the Capitol, and a Senate trial on the charge will begin the week of Feb. 8. Biden took office on Wednesday. Reporting by Timothy Gardner and John Whitesides; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Daniel Wallis Copyright 2021 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to Reuters / WSJ content)

Trump Never President 2016 Campaign Russia Help Election Fraud Acts Void

The Trump Campaign Accepted Russian Help to Win in 2016. Case Closed.

“Cooperation” or “collusion” or whatever. It was a plot against American democracy.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

• 19 August 2020

Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

From the start, the Trump-Russia story has been both eye-glazingly complex and extraordinarily simple.

Who is Oleg Deripaska? What’s the G.R.U. again? Who owed what to whom? The sheer number of crisscrossing characters and interlocking pieces of evidence — the phone calls, the emails, the texts, the clandestine international meet-ups — has bamboozled even those who spend their days teasing it all apart. It’s no wonder average Americans tuned out long ago.

A bipartisan report released Tuesday by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee cuts through the chaff. The simplicity of the scheme has always been staring us in the face: Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign sought and maintained close contacts with Russian government officials who were helping him get elected. The Trump campaign accepted their offers of help. The campaign secretly provided Russian officials with key polling data. The campaign coordinated the timing of the release of stolen information to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The Senate committee’s report isn’t telling this story for the first time, of course. (Was it only a year ago that Robert Mueller testified before Congress about his own damning, comprehensive investigation?) But it is the first to do so with the assent of Senate Republicans, who have mostly ignored the gravity of the Trump camp’s actions or actively worked to cast doubt about the demonstrable facts in the case.

It’s also a timely rebuke to the narrative that Attorney General William Barr has been hawking since before he took office early last year — that “Russiagate” is a “bogus” scandal. Mr. Barr and other Trump allies claim that the Russia investigation was begun without basis and carried out with the intent of “sabotaging the presidency.” That argument has been debunked by every investigative body that has spent any time looking into what happened, including the nation’s intelligence community, Mr. Mueller’s team, the Justice Department’s inspector general and now the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In fact, the committee report, which is nearly 1,000 pages long and is the fifth in a series examining Russian interference in 2016, goes further than Mr. Mueller’s investigation.

For example, Mr. Mueller declined to say whether Mr. Trump had lied under oath when he said that he did not recall speaking with Roger Stone, his longtime aide and confidant, about WikiLeaks, which released the batches of emails stolen by the Russians. But the Senate committee found that the president “did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.”

The committee documented that, on Oct. 7, 2016, Mr. Stone received advance notice of the impending release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump brags about sexually assaulting women. In response, Mr. Stone made at least two phone calls arranging for WikiLeaks to release stolen internal emails from the Democratic National Committee.

The report also found that Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime business associate of Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was a Russian intelligence officer, and may have been linked to the Russian military’s hacking and leaking of the D.N.C. emails in the first place.

Mr. Trump and his allies will parse and prevaricate forever. Ignore them. If it wasn’t already overwhelmingly clear what was going on, it is now. As the Democrats on the committee put it in an appendix to the report: “This is what collusion looks like.” Alas, the Republicans refused to join in on this straightforward assessment, stating in their own appendix that “we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion.” That is to insist that up is down.

But call it whatever you like: The Intelligence Committee report shows clear coordination between Russians and the Trump campaign, though there is no evidence of an explicit agreement. The evidence the report lays out suggests Mr. Trump knew this at the time. Whether or not it can be proved that he ordered this interference or violated the law in doing so, the fact remains that neither he nor anyone else in his campaign alerted federal law-enforcement authorities, as any loyal American should have.

And remember: Mr. Trump tried this scheme again. The president was impeached for his efforts to invite foreign interference in the 2020 election, this time by Ukraine, again on his behalf. Part of that requested interference involved an attempt to smear Joe Biden. But the other part involved pinning the 2016 election interference on Ukraine rather than on Russia. Who was “almost certainly” one of the primary sources spreading that claim in the media, according to the senators’ report? None other than Konstantin Kilimnik.

There has never been any reliable evidence that Ukraine interfered in 2016; the Senate committee concluded as such, in line with all previous investigations.

Russia is now attempting to help Mr. Trump again this November, according to American intelligence assessments reported in The Times. For any normal president, that would be a top-of-mind concern, and he or she would be marshaling all available resources to thwart it. What has Mr. Trump done? On Sunday night, he retweeted Russian propaganda that the U.S. intelligence community had already flagged as part of that country’s efforts to skew the election.

On Monday, Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, wrote that the president “showed vanishingly little interest in subjects of vital national security interest, including cybersecurity, domestic terrorism and malicious foreign interference in U.S. affairs.” He added, “the country is less secure as a direct result of the president’s actions.”

There’s no way to sugarcoat it. In less than three months, the American people could re-elect a man who received a foreign government’s help to win one election and has shown neither remorse nor reservations about doing so again.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/opinion/trump-russia-2016-report.html

Copyright 2020 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to The New York Times content fair use)

Russia Pays Taliban To Kill U.S. Troops GRU Unit 29155 Putin For Trump 2020

Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says

The Trump administration has been deliberating for months about what to do about a stunning intelligence assessment.

American troops in Afghanistan have been the target of some Taliban operations backed by Russia, intelligence officials found.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

By Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwirtz

• Published 26 June 2020 Updated 17 August 2020

WASHINGTON — American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter.

The United States concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.

Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

An operation to incentivize the killing of American and other NATO troops would be a significant and provocative escalation of what American and Afghan officials have said is Russian support for the Taliban, and it would be the first time the Russian spy unit was known to have orchestrated attacks on Western troops.

Any involvement with the Taliban that resulted in the deaths of American troops would also be a huge escalation of Russia’s so-called hybrid war against the United States, a strategy of destabilizing adversaries through a combination of such tactics as cyberattacks, the spread of fake news and covert and deniable military operations.

The Kremlin had not been made aware of the accusations, said Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “If someone makes them, we’ll respond,” Mr. Peskov said.

Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, denied that the insurgents have “any such relations with any intelligence agency” and called the report an attempt to defame them.

“These kinds of deals with the Russian intelligence agency are baseless — our target killings and assassinations were ongoing in years before, and we did it on our own resources,” he said. “That changed after our deal with the Americans, and their lives are secure and we don’t attack them.”

Spokespeople at the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A. declined to comment.

The officials familiar with the intelligence did not explain the White House delay in deciding how to respond to the intelligence about Russia.

While some of his closest advisers, like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have counseled more hawkish policies toward Russia, Mr. Trump has adopted an accommodating stance toward Moscow.

At a summit in 2018 in Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Trump strongly suggested that he believed Mr. Putin’s denial that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 presidential election, despite broad agreement within the American intelligence establishment that it did. Mr. Trump criticized a bill imposing sanctions on Russia when he signed it into law after Congress passed it by veto-proof majorities. And he has repeatedly made statements that undermined the NATO alliance as a bulwark against Russian aggression in Europe.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the delicate intelligence and internal deliberations. They said the intelligence had been treated as a closely held secret, but the administration expanded briefings about it this week — including sharing information about it with the British government, whose forces are among those said to have been targeted.

Image

President Trump has suggested he believed a denial by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia of Kremlin interference in the 2016 election.Credit...Kirill Kallinikov/Host Photo Agency, via Getty Images

The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals. The officials did not describe the mechanics of the Russian operation, such as how targets were picked or how money changed hands. It is also not clear whether Russian operatives had deployed inside Afghanistan or met with their Taliban counterparts elsewhere.

The revelations came into focus inside the Trump administration at a delicate and distracted time. Although officials collected the intelligence earlier in the year, the interagency meeting at the White House took place as the coronavirus pandemic was becoming a crisis and parts of the country were shutting down.

Moreover, as Mr. Trump seeks re-election in November, he wants to strike a peace deal with the Taliban to end the Afghanistan war.

Both American and Afghan officials have previously accused Russia of providing small arms and other support to the Taliban that amounts to destabilizing activity, although Russian government officials have dismissed such claims as “idle gossip” and baseless.

“We share some interests with Russia in Afghanistan, and clearly they’re acting to undermine our interests as well,” Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of American forces in Afghanistan at the time, said in a 2018 interview with the BBC.

Though coalition troops suffered a spate of combat casualties last summer and early fall, only a few have since been killed. Four Americans were killed in combat in early 2020, but the Taliban have not attacked American positions since a February agreement.

American troops have also sharply reduced their movement outside military bases because of the coronavirus, reducing their exposure to attack.

While officials were said to be confident about the intelligence that Russian operatives offered and paid bounties to Afghan militants for killing Americans, they have greater uncertainty about how high in the Russian government the covert operation was authorized and what its aim may be.

Some officials have theorized that the Russians may be seeking revenge on NATO forces for a 2018 battle in Syria in which the American military killed several hundred pro-Syrian forces, including numerous Russian mercenaries, as they advanced on an American outpost. Officials have also suggested that the Russians may have been trying to derail peace talks to keep the United States bogged down in Afghanistan. But the motivation remains murky.

The officials briefed on the matter said the government had assessed the operation to be the handiwork of Unit 29155, an arm of Russia’s military intelligence agency, known widely as the G.R.U. The unit is linked to the March 2018 nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury, England, of Sergei Skripal, a former G.R.U. officer who had worked for British intelligence and then defected, and his daughter.

Western intelligence officials say the unit, which has operated for more than a decade, has been charged by the Kremlin with carrying out a campaign to destabilize the West through subversion, sabotage and assassination. In addition to the 2018 poisoning, the unit was behind an attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016 and the poisoning of an arms manufacturer in Bulgaria a year earlier.

American intelligence officials say the G.R.U. was at the center of Moscow’s covert efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In the months before that election, American officials say, two G.R.U. cyberunits, known as 26165 and 74455, hacked into Democratic Party servers and then used WikiLeaks to publish embarrassing internal communications.

In part because those efforts were aimed at helping tilt the election in Mr. Trump’s favor, his handling of issues related to Russia and Mr. Putin has come under particular scrutiny. The special counsel investigation found that the Trump campaign welcomed Russia’s intervention and expected to benefit from it, but found insufficient evidence to establish that his associates had engaged in any criminal conspiracy with Moscow.

Operations involving Unit 29155 tend to be much more violent than those involving the cyberunits. Its officers are often decorated military veterans with years of service, in some cases dating to the Soviet Union’s failed war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Never before has the unit been accused of orchestrating attacks on Western soldiers, but officials briefed on its operations say it has been active in Afghanistan for many years.

Though Russia declared the Taliban a terrorist organization in 2003, relations between them have been warming in recent years. Taliban officials have traveled to Moscow for peace talks with other prominent Afghans, including the former president, Hamid Karzai. The talks have excluded representatives from the current Afghan government as well as anyone from the United States, and at times they have seemed to work at crosscurrents with American efforts to bring an end to the conflict.

The disclosure comes at a time when Mr. Trump has said he would invite Mr. Putin to an expanded meeting of the Group of 7 nations, but tensions between American and Russian militaries are running high.

In several recent episodes, in international territory and airspace from off the coast of Alaska to the Black and Mediterranean Seas, combat planes from each country have scrambled to intercept military aircraft. . . .

Mujib Mashal contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

ADVERTISEMENT

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/politics/russia-afghanistan-bounties.html?

Copyright 2020 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to New York Times content)