international banking – The Optimistic Conservative

Big bank, big bust: Another dot-path connected with Ukraine and the suddenly legitimate laptop

Another timeline gets interesting.

The New York Times’s admission this past week that the Hunter Biden laptop was not Russian disinformation has come at an opportune time. It’s an obscurely opportune time, to be sure. But it’s opportune nonetheless.

What makes it so is a reminder that the seed money used to start a cybersecurity non-profit called Global Cyber Alliance (GCA), whose interests and personalities rather remarkably replicated those of Russiagate and Alfa-gate in 2015 and 2016, came from an asset forfeiture settlement with the French banking giant BNP Paribas.

Those dots connect. Some readers already know how. For others, here’s the BNP angle. Continue reading “Big bank, big bust: Another dot-path connected with Ukraine and the suddenly legitimate laptop”

December 2021: Russia making major strategic moves

Russia busting some big moves.

This will not by any means be a comprehensive treatment. Time is a big factor right now, and it’s more important to enlarge the landscape image of what’s going on by presenting recent developments together.

In the latest TOC Ready Room, we looked at Russia’s announcement about being “forced” to deploy intermediate-range missiles to Europe, which would be an overt violation of the terms of the now-defunct 1987 INF Treaty.

That in itself is a major move; “tectonic,” we might say, using the adjective deployed by Dmitry Medvedev in 2011 about the Arab Spring.

As discussed on 15 December, I assess Russia’s move to be as much about a shifting orientation vis-à-vis China as about Russia’s relations with NATO Europe. But it’s definitely about NATO Europe (and North America) as well. Continue reading “December 2021: Russia making major strategic moves”