Tag: Russia

Scoop: U.S. ambassador refuses Kremlin push to leave Russia

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The United States ambassador to Russia is refusing to leave the country after the Kremlin “advised” him to return home following new Biden administration sanctions, two sources briefed on the situation tell Axios.

Why it matters: John Sullivan, a respected diplomat who President Biden has, so far, retained from the Trump era, is at the center of one of the most important early tests of Biden’s resolve.

  • Russia’s foreign ministry announced Friday it would expel 10 American diplomats and bar current officials, such as Attorney General Merrick Garland, from visiting Russia. Continue reading.

Biden proposes summit, raises Ukraine escalation in call with Putin

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President Biden spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday and proposed that they meet for a summit “in a third country in the coming months,” according to the White House.

Why it matters: The call comes amid a Russian build-up on Ukraine’s borders, and after Putin reacted furiously to an interview in which Biden agreed that the Russian president was a “killer.”

  • Biden expressed U.S. support for Ukraine, raised “concerns over the sudden Russian military build-up,” and called on Russia to reduce tensions, per a White House readout. Continue reading.

Biden’s NSC to focus on global health, climate, cyber and human rights, as well as China and Russia

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The incoming Biden administration plans to restructure and expand the operations of the White House National Security Council, establishing new senior positions on global health, democracy and human rights, and cyber and emerging technology, signaling a sweeping shift in priorities, according to a senior adviser to the Biden transition.

Russia, which the Trump administration had subsumed into the NSC directorate for European affairs, will again be given its own NSC senior director, the adviser said, speaking on the condition of anonymity before the plans and positions were announced Friday.

“We expect to be taking a stronger position on China than has been the case in past Democratic administrations,” with significant new staff positions to handle “a much more assertive China abroad and a much more repressive China” at home, the adviser said. Continue reading.

US government caught blindsided over sophisticated cyber hack, experts say

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Russia has long been viewed as a threat in cyberspace. But after one of the most successful cyber intrusion campaigns in U.S. history, questions are being raised over how the federal government was so completely blindsided by an attack many experts have seen coming.

The successful hacking of multiple federal agencies and tens of thousands of individual federal and private entities — widely presumed to be a Russian intrusion and which federal officials warn is ongoing — managed to subvert sophisticated protections by targeting third-party software contractor SolarWinds.

“We shouldn’t have been surprised, the Russians are very sophisticated, they are very dedicated and relentless, and this appeared to be a soft target they were able to exploit,” Christopher Painter, the former State Department cybersecurity coordinator under both the Trump and Obama administrations, told The Hill on Friday.  Continue reading.

Federal investigators find evidence of previously unknown tactics used to penetrate government networks

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Federal investigators reported Thursday on evidence of previously unknown tactics for penetrating government computer networks, a development that underscores the disastrous reach of Russia’s recent intrusions and the logistical nightmare facing federal officials trying to purge intruders from key systems.

For days, it has been clear that compromised software patches distributed by a Texas-based company, SolarWinds, were central to Russian efforts to gain access to U.S. government computer systems. But Thursday’s alert from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security said evidence suggested there was other malware used to initiate what the alert described as “a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations.”

While many details remained unclear, the revelation about new modes of attack raises fresh questions about the access that Russian hackers were able to gain in government and corporate systems worldwide. Continue reading.

Here’s why there was no mention of Russia or Michael Cohen in NYT tax bombshell: Trump biographer

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Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston has literally written the book on President Donald Trump and his finances. Trump’s supporters have already gone after the report saying that it vindicated the president because there was no mention of Michael Cohen or Russia anywhere in the New York Times bombshell report.

Breitbart editor-at-large Joel Pollak celebrated the news and claimed, without evidence, that the taxes must have come illegally from the IRS. The personal tax returns did show, however, that Trump made an absurdly large amount of money from handling the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

As Cay Johnston explained, those things wouldn’t be on Trump’s personal taxes; it would fall under the Trump Organization. Continue reading.

Trump Still Defers to Putin, Even as He Dismisses U.S. Intelligence and the Allies

New York Times logoSay this about President Trump’s approach to Moscow: It’s been consistent.

WASHINGTON — On the eve of accepting the Republican nomination for president four years ago, Donald J. Trump declared that he would pull out of NATO if American allies did not pay more for their defense, waving away the thought that it would play into the hands of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has spent his career trying to dismantle the Western alliance.

Asked about his deference to the Kremlin leader, Mr. Trump responded, “He’s been complimentary of me.”

This week, as his renomination nears, Mr. Trump announced that he was pulling a third of American troops from Germany. He declared in recent days that he had never raised with Mr. Putin, during a recent phone conversation, American intelligence indicating that Russia was paying a bounty to the Taliban for the killing of American soldiers in Afghanistan, because he distrusted the information from his own intelligence agencies. Nor has he issued warnings about what price, if any, Mr. Putin would pay for seeking to influence the 2020 election or pushing disinformation about the coronavirus. American intelligence agencies say Russia is trying both. Continue reading.

Germany rejects Trump’s proposal to let Russia back into G7: foreign minister

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany has rejected a proposal by U.S. President Donald Trump to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin back into the Group of Seven (G7) most advanced economies, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in a newspaper interview published on Monday.

Trump raised the prospect last month of expanding the G7 to again include Russia, which had been expelled in 2014 following Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region.

But Maas told Rheinische Post that he did not see any chance for allowing Russia back into the G7 as long as there was no meaningful progress in solving the conflict in Crimea as well as in eastern Ukraine. Continue reading.

House panel demands Pentagon briefing on Russian bounties

Top Republican says they’ve given the Pentagon 48 hours and any delay ‘will not be acceptable’

House Armed Services Committee leaders have pressed the Pentagon for a briefing by Tuesday on reports that Russian spies have been paying insurgents in Afghanistan to kill U.S. troops.

Adam Smith, D-Wash., the committee’s chairman, and Mac Thornberry of Texas, the panel’s top Republican, requested the briefing and have yet to finalize it, Thornberry told reporters Monday, saying: “It will not be acceptable to delay.”

“It is absolutely essential that we get the information and be able to judge its credibility,” Thornberry said of the reports about Russian payments to any Taliban-linked militants who kill Americans. Continue reading.

Trump and Putin Discuss Russia’s Attendance at G7, but Allies Are Wary

New York Times logoThe British and Canadian governments oppose admitting Russia into the bloc, as President Trump continues a renewed courtship of Russia’s leader.

President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia spoke by telephone on Monday, two days after Mr. Trump said he would invite Mr. Putin to attend a Group of 7 summit in the United States in September, the latest instance of a renewed round of personal diplomacy between the two leaders this year.

Hours after the Kremlin first described the call on its website, the White House released a statement saying that the men had discussed “the latest efforts to defeat the coronavirus pandemic and reopen global economies” and “progress toward convening the G7.” A largely similar Kremlin readout said Mr. Trump had initiated the call, and a senior White House official said Mr. Trump had extended a personal invitation to Mr. Putin to attend the gathering, which the president will host.

Russia was expelled in 2014 from what was known as the Group of 8 after Mr. Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. Mr. Trump has supported re-entry but even as he reached out to Mr. Putin, key U.S. allies reiterated that Russia was an outlaw nation that should be denied readmittance into the group of industrialized nations, whose members include the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Japan. Continue reading.