Biting His Master in the A$$ … It wouldn’t surprise me as the divided country is led by corrupt western oligarchs and has in its history been a source for the illegal arms trade.
Missile expert softens claim that Ukraine sent rocket engines to North Korea (UPDATE) | Kyiv Post |
An International Institute for Strategic Studies missile expert, quoted by The New York Times as saying Ukraine could be the source of illegal shipments of new rocket engines for intercontinental ballistic missiles to North Korea, appeared to backtrack on Aug. 14.
“I don’t believe Ukr gov’t condoned or knew, if the engines were sourced in Ukr.,” Michael Elleman tweeted. “To the contrary, Ukr arrested North Koreans in 2012! [Btw when ousted president Yanukovich led the nation – Oui] Let me be clear about DPRK’s (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) source of ICBM engine: Yuzhnoye (in Dnipro, Ukraine) is one of several possible sources, there are other potentials in Russia.”
The tweets came after Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council on Aug. 14 denied reports in the U.S. press that a Ukrainian missile plant was the likely source of rocket engines that have boosted North Korea’s missile program.
The New York Times, in an article entitled “North Korea’s Missile Success Is Linked to Ukrainian Plant, Investigators Say,” published earlier on Aug. 14, quoted Elleman and sources in U.S. intelligence agencies as saying that the rocket engines – identified as RD-250s – “probably” came from Ukraine’s Pivdenmash (often referred to by its name in Russian, Yuzhmash ) missile plant.
Continued below the fold …
However, in contrast to the newspaper’s headline, the article’s authors provide no evidence that Pivdenmash, a 73-year-old plant in the city of Dnipro, 500 kilometers south of Kyiv, illegally supplied the engines to the regime in North Korea, which is under international sanctions because of its nuclear weapons program.
Elleman, who was interviewed by the New York Times, wrote in a report about the advance of North Korea’s missile program that “Russia and/or Ukraine” could be the source of the engines. He said there was no evidence North Korea had the capability of developing such engines on its own, or that Pyongyang had been aided by foreign engineers.
The authors of the article, quoting Elleman, speculate that persons working at Pivdenmash might have been motivated to send the engines to North Korea because the plant has been in financial distress since Ukraine’s EuroMaidan Revolution ousted Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. However, no evidence that this actually happened was given.
Ukraine’s Security and Defense Council’s Secretary Oleksandr Turchynov, responding to the claim, said Russia’s security services were trying to frame Ukraine and that the New York Times has spread “false information.” According to him, the Ukrainian defense-industrial complex has never supplied weapons and military technology to North Korea.
“Ukraine has never supplied rocket engines and any missile technology to North Korea,” Turchynov said on Aug. 14. “We believe that this anti-Ukrainian campaign was triggered by the Russian secret services to cover their participation in the North Korean nuclear and missile programs.”
He said Ukraine considers the regime in Pyongyang “totalitarian, dangerous and unpredictable,” and supports all sanctions against this country, as well as sanctions against Russia, “the regime of which is becoming increasingly similar to the North Korean one.”
Ukraine’s Pivdenmash said the story was built on “untrustworthy facts.”“The assumptions of the authors of the publication, and of the `expert’ cited by them, regarding the possible connection of Ukraine with the progress of North Korea in the development of missile technologies, have nothing to do with reality,” Pivdenmash stated on Aug. 14 in a post on its website.
The company claims the only product the plant currently exports has no connection to any defense or military programs – RD-843 rocket engines, which it sells to Italy for that country’s space program.
« click for more info »
U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry (right) Ukraine Minister of Defense Valeriy Shmarov (center) and Russian Federation Minister of Defense General of the Army Pavel Grachev (left) celebrate the completed dismantlement of Silo 110 by planting sunflowers in the field.Russia’s Energomash has yet to comment on the claims, according to a report by the UK newspaper The Telegraph.
No comment from Pivdenmash is included in the New York Times’ story. The main source in the story, missile expert Michael Elleman, worked in Russia for six years, heading the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program for dismantling Russia’s obsolete long-range missiles.
- ○ Attacking Iran: Did US just torpedo Israeli deal for a base in Azerbaijan? | CS Monitor – March 30, 2012 |
○ Israeli Arms Exporter Demonstrated Drone to Azeri Buyers by Attacking Armenian Army Positions | Tikun Olam – Aug. 13, 2017 |
The Ukraine, just as Georgia and Azerbaijan have a close working relationship with the military industrial complex of the Jewish State of Israel. Read also the reports by the coalition of the Friends of Israel Initiative. Founded by Spanish PM Aznar of Iraq War fame, US ambassador to UN John Bolton and US Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.
- Officially launched at a British House of Commons event hosted by the Henry Jackson Society in July 2010, FOII says it aims “to counter the growing efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel and its right to live in peace within safe and defensible borders.”
○ Former Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar launches pro-Israel initiative | FP – 2010 |
○ The New (Alt) Right: A new reality for the defense of Israel in Europe [pdf]
○ EU Jewish leaders warned against embrace by alt-right nationalists | EurActiv – Jan. 24, 2017 |
[Update-1]
On numerous occasions I have linked to articles by James Risen at the NY Times, an excellent investigative journalist.
- ○ Reporter and press freedom advocate James Risen to join The Intercept and First Look Media H/T Marie3
In BooMan’s archive of diaries – James Risen
Recently I came across his writings about Hunter Biden in the Ukraine working for a corrupt oligarch …
Earlier in a diary about Iraq where Risen was outstanding and earned him the Pulitzer Prize …
- CIA Program of Illegal Targeted Killings Creates Uproar by Oui on July 14, 2009
There were at least three distinct groups in the Ukraine wokring on U.S. election interference: corrupt government in Kyiv with Poroshenko on behalf of Clinton, a number of opposition oligarchs in support of Trump and a group of hackers around Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, located in Kharkov, Ukraine. I had come across his name earlier in the Kathy Sierra incident I highlighted a decade ago and recently his support for Chicago GOP millionair Smith backing Trump in an attempt to hack or obtain the DNC or Clinton papers.
The “weev” is anti-establishment, anti-Putin and clearly in the pro-Trump camp of the Alt-right. He is linked tot the Ukrainian ultra-right of the Maidan victory.
- “Trump’s political base wants to see the kind of spirited resistance to Jewish Communists that Muzychko displayed.”
A lot of covert action in the Ukraine since the coup d’état of February 2014. We’ll know what happened in a few decades or so …
○ Maidan Revolt: How the Events of Sniper Fire In Instytutska Street Unfolded
○ The Extreme Right in Ukraine (2012) [pdf]
○ Ex-Ukraine Leader Tymoshenko Faces Heat For Comments About Nuking Russians
○ Misogyny by Oui @BooMan on March 7, 2016
Recent diary …