[vox_mundi]

Ukrainian Hackers Release Emails Tying Top Russian Official to Uprising

MOSCOW — A group of Ukrainian hackers has released what it says are the emails of a senior Kremlin official that show a direct Russian role in creating and directing the rebel uprising in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

The group claimed to have hacked the account of Vladislav Y. Surkov, for years President Vladimir V. Putin’s chief domestic political adviser and now the top official overseeing Russia’s Ukraine policy.

The group released what it says are thousands of letters to and from Mr. Surkov’s office email account, adding a fat dossier to this year’s vast spill of emails around the world and showing high-level Kremlin meddling in Ukraine.

... Mr. Peskov also said that Mr. Surkov does not use email. And, in fact, only aides to Mr. Surkov answered the correspondence, leaving the extent of his personal involvement unclear.

While Russia’s hand in Ukraine has hardly been a secret, the emails, if genuine, provide fine-grained detail of Mr. Surkov’s office in setting up separatist enclaves in Ukraine’s east.

They also shed light on the workaday activity of a Russian propaganda shop, including a rare example of a draft text apparently edited in Mr. Surkov’s office that can be compared with a final version.


Vladislav Y. Surkov, the top official overseeing Russia’s Ukraine policy.

The Ukrainian hacker group, calling itself CyberHunta — a mocking reference to the Russian assessment that the Kiev government is a fascist junta — released 2,337 emails from the address [email protected], many from 2014 as the eastern Ukrainian separatists established their mini-states.

The correspondence included the spreadsheet of a budget to set up a small newspaper in Donetsk, the capital of the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic.

One email alerted Mr. Surkov’s office to rebel casualties in June 2014 that included a paratrooper from Pskov, a town in northern Russia. At the time, there was considerable political sensitivity over the deaths of Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

In another letter, lists of candidates for separatist government positions arrived in Mr. Surkov’s inbox before their appointments.

Mr. Surkov, a former advertising executive, is widely seen as an architect of Mr. Putin’s domestic political framework and the post-Communist ideology of “sovereign democracy,” a term he coined. In 2013, he told an audience in London, “I am the author, or one of the authors, of the new Russian political system.”

In recent weeks, there have been reports of high-level meetings at the White House to discuss ways to punish Moscow, including sanctions and covert action against Russian targets.

[Plantagenet]

There's never been any doubt from the beginning that Russia was behind the fighting in Ukraine. Putin himself admitted he sent Russian troops to invade Crimea. The subsequent fighting in eastern Ukraine is a bit more murky, but the role of the Russians cannot be doubted. For instance, the tribunal that investihated the shoot down of the passenger jet over Ukraine found strong evidence that the missile was fired from a Russian army truck manned by Russian solders that had been sent into eastern Ukraine by the Russians to aid the "rebels."

Of course the Obama administration saw fit to downplay the role of the Russians because it allowed Obama to avoid doing anything significant to help the Ukrainians. Unfortunately Putin took Obama's reluctance to take a strong stand as a sign of weakness, and it has ultimately produced what is essentially a new Cold War, with Russia and the US both ratcheting up their forces in Europe and threatening a nuclear confrontation.

I'm a little nervous that Putin may try to push Obama even further in the few months before President Hillary takes over, assuming that Obama is a wimp who will always back down in the face of Putin's actions.

Cheers!

[Sixstrings]

NBC news report:

Payback? Russia Gets Hacked, Revealing Putin Aide's Secrets

unlike the reported Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee, the Ukrainian hack reached deep into the office of the Russian president.

"This is a serious hack," said Maks Czuperski, head of the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council (DFRL), which has searched through the email dump ...

"We have seen so much happen to the United States, other countries at the hands of Russia," said Czuperski. "Not so much to Russia. It was only a question of time that some of the anonymous guys like Cyber Hunta would come to strike them back."

A senior U.S. intelligence official said the U.S. "had no role" in the hack. ...

A senior U.S. official, asked if the material was authentic, told NBC News that there was "nothing to indicate otherwise."
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-crisis/payback-russia-gets-hacked-revealing-putin-aide-s-secrets-n673956

[dissident]

Yeah, sure thing there. The punitive suppression operation called the "anti-terrorist operation" launched by the illegal Kiev coup regime in March of 2014 had nothing to do with the backlash by the locals. Perhaps the shelling of cities, towns and villages by the Kiev regime forces that continues to the present day is evidence of the friendship that the Banderites have for the locals.

https://dninews.com/article/heavy-shell ... ian-forces

Please sell us more unicorn stories, twerp.

In the run up to the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda there was a build up of hate speech in Rwanda media and government officials called for attacks on Tutsis. The Kiev regime maggots and their media mouthpieces did exactly the same thing. The core of the Kiev regime is composed of Hitler's allies, the Banderites, who have a record of genocide (cf. the extermination of Poles in western Ukraine: http://www.volhyniamassacre.eu/). You expect that ethnic Russians in Crimea and the Donbas to trust these maggots.

You information bubble residents, who have no clue about what happens anywhere outside NATO, think you sound intelligent when you post such crap. You sound like the idiots that you are. I applaud Russia for supplying the rebels with arms and volunteers. If you f*cking hypocrites can support the al Nusra terrorist butchers in Syria in the name of "freedom and democracy" then others can offer support to stave off ethnic cleansing by a coup regime.