Russia: It's up to Trump team to make first move to improve ties

[Kid Berwyn]

Like in the Old Days.



Russia: It's up to Trump team to make first move to improve ties

By Guy Faulconbridge and Vladimir Soldatkin
Reuters, December 26, 2024

Summary

* Foreign Minister Lavrov: If Trump is serious, so are we
* Lavrov says any Ukraine peace deal must be legally watertight
* Washington should make first move, Lavrov says

MOSCOW, Dec 26 (Reuters) - Russia is willing to work with Donald Trump's incoming administration to improve relations if the U.S. has serious intentions to do so but it is up to Washington to make the first move, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday.

Trump, who will return as U.S. president on Jan. 20, styles himself as a master dealmaker and has vowed to swiftly end the war in Ukraine but not set out how he might achieve that beyond getting President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian counterpart President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to agree to end the fighting.

But the Americans broke (off) the dialogue, so they should make the first move," Lavrov, Putin's foreign minister for over 20 years, told reporters in Moscow.

Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine has left tens of thousands of dead, displaced millions of people and triggered the biggest rupture in relations between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

U.S. officials cast Russia as a corrupt autocracy that is the biggest nation-state threat to the United States and has meddled in U.S. elections, jailed U.S. citizens on false charges and perpetrated sabotage campaigns against U.S. allies.

Continues…

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-security-must-be-guaranteed-by-any-ukraine-peace-deal-lavrov-says-2024-12-26/

[Scrivener7]

1. Oh, and surely they will.

[Kid Berwyn]

5. FIVE FACTS that expose Trump's Russia links

From The Peter Tatchell Foundation (2018):

FIVE FACTS that expose Trump’s Russia links

Here are 5 top facts everyone should know about Trump’s long collusion with Russian organised criminals.

1.) Trump’s main financial backer for the Trump Tower Toronto was a Russian-Canadian billionaire who got the money by selling a massive steel mill in Ukraine for nearly a billion dollars. $100 million of that money was paid to a Kremlin-backed fixer, likely as a bribe to VERY high Russian officials. The Chairman of the Bank who financed the deal? Vladimir Putin.

2.) Trump bought his home in Palm Beach, Florida for $41 million. A few years later, with no real increase in the value — he sold it for $95 million — the most expensive home in America at the time! Why? A major Russian oligarch bought it — we don’t know yet why he effectively ‘gave’ Trump $54 million. But it’s classic money laundering practice.

3.) Trump’s real estate deals were often fuelled by Russian money, typically passed through shady shell companies. 77% of Trump Soho apartments were bought with cash by such mysterious companies. At least 13 people with links to Russian oligarchs or mobsters lived in Trump properties, including one of Russia’s top mobsters. One even ran a high-stakes illegal gambling ring in the apartment right below Trump’s!

“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” — Donald Trump JR, 2008

4.) Trump’s financial broker and “Senior Advisor” was a Russian convicted felon named Felix Sater, widely known as a mafia figure who once stabbed someone in the face with a broken margarita glass, requiring over 100 stitches. Sater helped set up shell companies, and arranged funding for Trump’s projects, including plans for Trump Tower Moscow. He’s also part of Putin’s inner circle. Here’s one email he wrote to Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen in November, 2015:

“Michael I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will.” New York Times, August 27, 2017

5.) Trump’s other main business is casinos — which are classic money laundering vehicles. One of his casinos was 100 times found in violation of federal rules protecting against money laundering, and paid the largest fine ever levied against a casino for having “willfully violated” anti-money laundering rules. Trump has a legal obligation to do “due diligence” for all his businesses to prevent laundering. His senior executive’s comment on this was “Donald doesn’t do diligence”.

Source: https://www.petertatchellfoundation.org/heres-why-trump-colludes-with-putin/

ETA: We’ve learned a lot more since then, and yet he walks free.

[Scrivener7]

9. You should post this as an OP every month until he's out of office.

[eShirl]

2. Like taking candy from a baby.

[Kid Berwyn]

6. What President jokes about weakening the FBI with our nation's enemies?

President (sic) Trump gestures to Russia's ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, as he speaks to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office on Wednesday, May 10, 2017. (Alexander Shcherbak/TASS/Getty Images)



“I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job," Trump said, according to The Times. "I faced great pressure because of Russia. That's taken off.” He added, "I'm not under investigation."

Sources:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/10/527755991/trump-meets-with-russias-lavrov-at-the-white-house-today

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-nut-job-james-comey-russia-2017-5

[surfered]

3. Maybe ties would improve if you didn't invade your neighbors. Just saying...

[Kid Berwyn]

7. Peace is a Racket

Donald Trump Has 'Obligations' to Those Who Brought Him to Power—Putin Ally

Newsweek, November 12, 2024

A Vladimir Putin aide has warned Donald Trump that he is "obliged" to fulfill promises he made during his presidential campaign to bring peace to Ukraine.

The President-elect said repeatedly during his campaign to secure his return to the White House that he would put a stop to the more than two and a half years of war in Ukraine "within 24 hours."

And Nikolai Patrushev, part of the Russian president's inner circle and former Secretary of the Security Council, told the Russian newspaper Kommersant that Trump was duty-bound to act on his words.

Patrushev said: "To achieve success in the elections, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.

"During the preelection period, he made many statements to attract voters to his side, who ultimately voted against the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current U.S. presidential administration.

"But the election campaign is over, and in January 2025, it will be time for the specific actions of the elected president. It is known that election promises in the United States can often diverge from subsequent actions."

Continues…

https://www.newsweek.com/vladimir-putin-nikolai-patrushev-donald-trump-russia-1984360

PDF PS: With apologies to Smedley Butler.

[Dennis Donovan]

4. "Americans broke (off) the dialogue..."

That's "official channels." Vlad and Trump are still communicating on the down-low.

[Kid Berwyn]

8. Semion Mogilevich translation services ("Money Talks.")

Trump’s ties to the Russian mafia go back 3 decades

Journalist Craig Unger talks Russia, Trump, and “one of the greatest intelligence operations in history.”

by Sean Illing
Vox, January 12, 2019

Excerpt…

Sean Illing
I’ll ask you straightforwardly: Do you believe the Russian government successfully targeted and compromised Trump?

Craig Unger
Yes, absolutely. But let’s go back in time, because I think all of this began as a money-laundering operation with the Russian mafia. It’s well known that Trump likes doing business with gangsters, in part because they pay top dollar and loan money when traditional banks won’t, so it was a win-win for both sides.

The key point I want to get across in the book is that the Russian mafia is different than the American mafia, and I think a lot of Americans don’t understand this. In Russia, the mafia is essentially a state actor. When I interviewed Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who is a former head of counterintelligence in the KGB and had been Vladimir Putin’s boss at one point, I asked him about the mafia. He said, “Oh, it’s part of the KGB. It’s part of the Russian government.”

And that’s essential to the whole premise of the book. Trump was working with the Russian mafia for more than 30 years. He was profiting from them. They rescued him. They bailed him out. They took him from being $4 billion in debt to becoming a multibillionaire again, and they fueled his political ambitions, starting more than 30 years ago. This means Trump was in bed with the Kremlin as well, whether he knew it or not.

Sean Illing
Let’s dig into this a bit. You claimed just now, as you do in the book, that the Russian mafia has been using Trump-branded real estate to launder money for over three decades. What evidence do you have to back this up?

Craig Unger
You really have to go back 20 or 30 years to understand who the key Russians were, what role they played in the Russian mafia, and how they related to Trump.

The very first episode that’s been documented, to my knowledge, was in 1984 when David Bogatin — who is a Russian mobster, convicted gasoline bootlegger, and close ally of Semion Mogilevich, a major Russian mob boss — met with Trump in Trump Tower right after it opened. Bogatin came to that meeting prepared to spend $6 million, which is equivalent to about $15 million today.

Bogatin bought five condos from Trump at that meeting. Those condos were later seized by the government, which claimed they were used to launder money for the Russian mob.

Continues…

https://www.vox.com/world/2018/9/12/17764132/trump-fbi-russia-new-york-times-craig-unger

[aka-chmeee]

10. You bet!

And when the US invades Greenland, he'll know they're on the same page.