Sunday, June 12, 2022

12: Cryptocrash, Trump

‘Trump Was at the Center’: Jan. 6 Hearing Lays Out Case in Vivid Detail an attempted coup orchestrated by Mr. Trump that culminated in the deadly assault on the Capitol ........ Mr. Trump endorsed the hanging of his own vice president as a mob of his supporters descended on Congress. They also said they had evidence that members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. ......... the full story of a remarkable assault on U.S. democracy, orchestrated by a sitting president, that led to a deadly riot, an impeachment and a crisis of confidence in the political system. .........

“Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy”

......... “And ultimately, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down the Capitol and subvert American democracy.” ......... The prime-time hearing featured dramatic video of the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group, leading the assault on the Capitol, and the emotional testimony of a Capitol Police officer who suffered a traumatic brain injury at the hands of the mob. ......... “What I saw was a war scene,” the officer, Caroline Edwards, one of the more than 150 officers injured in the rampage, testified. “I saw officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up.” She added: “I was slipping on people’s blood. It was carnage. It was chaos.” .......... The committee is publicly telling the story of how a sitting president undertook unprecedented efforts to overturn a democratic election, testing the guardrails of American democracy at every turn. Mr. Trump and his allies challenged President Biden’s victory in the courts, at state houses and, finally, in the streets. ........... President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to convince huge portions of the U.S. population that fraud had stolen the election.” ......... “Our democracy remains in danger,” Mr. Thompson said. “Jan. 6 and the lies that led to insurrection have put two and a half centuries of constitutional democracy at risk. The world is watching what we do here.” ............. when Mr. Trump learned of the mob’s threats to hang Vice President Mike Pence, he said, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” and added that Mr. Pence “deserves it.” ......... Members of the panel see themselves as carrying out a critical function, much as fact-finding committees did in investigating the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the Watergate scandal in 1973 and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. ........... outlined how Mr. Trump had been told repeatedly that there was no election fraud, he added, “Don’t believe me?” ......... Trump “lit the fuse” for the riot with his lie of a stolen election. .......... Mr. Trump did nothing to stop the violence for more than three hours while the assault was underway. ....... The committee has interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses and accumulated more than 140,000 documents. It has a staff of about 45 employees, including more than a dozen former federal prosecutors and two former U.S. attorneys, and has spent millions on its work.



The Fight to Survive Russia’s Onslaught in Eastern Ukraine The war has become, as one Ukrainian soldier put it, a game of “artillery Ping-Pong.” ........ Russia’s war in Ukraine is not the same conflict that it was earlier this spring. The Russian Army’s initial campaign, in February and March, was a three-front invasion with little coherence or military logic. Ukrainian troops mounted small-unit ambushes and used rocket-propelled grenades, antitank weapons, and drones to destroy Russian troop formations and armor. Viral videos show their direct strikes, with tanks disappearing in flame and smoke. Now the Russian military has regrouped its forces for a more targeted assault in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, drawing on its advantages in artillery and airpower.......... “Russia is making fitful but incremental gains, and Ukraine’s position in the Donbas is more precarious than it once seemed.” I spent several days in the Donbas recently, where a number of officers and enlisted soldiers told me that Ukrainian infantry rarely see the enemy. Rather, battles are often fought at distances of ten miles or more. The war has become, as one soldier told me, a game of “artillery Ping-Pong.” ........... Lately, he had heard what he thought was a new artillery system in the field—it sounded “like the wild roar of a dinosaur,” he said. ........ “If before they simply marched in large columns, now they have started to actually fight,” he said. The Russian Army has split its forces into smaller groups, which it uses, along with a sizable fleet of drones, to identify and target Ukrainian positions, hitting them with artillery and air strikes. When a particular zone or village has effectively been levelled, ground troops—a mixture of regular Russian soldiers, Wagner mercenaries, and fighters mobilized from the Russia-backed separatist territories in Donetsk and Luhansk, Tarnavsky said—move in to try to seize the rubble. ............ Russia has had, by his count, a five-to-one manpower advantage. Tarnavsky also estimated that Russia has an advantage of up to seven-to-one in artillery batteries and a similarly large stockpile of munitions. ........ Russian forces can rely on wave after wave of indiscriminate fire from large-calibre artillery, along with missile and air strikes, to soften Ukraine’s defenses, inflicting large casualties before they advance. .......... Russia’s disproportionate reliance on heavy weaponry. ...... individual Ukrainian artillery systems targeted by Iskander missiles, which cost an estimated five million dollars a shot. “That’s a very expensive pleasure,” he said. “You have to be very rich, or very desperate.” ......... Zelensky, has said that as many as a hundred soldiers are killed each day, and five hundred wounded ......... mass mobilization efforts and an influx of volunteers have doubled the ranks of the armed forces since February ............ “A lot of regular military personnel have been killed,” he said. “They are replaced by doctors and mechanics. We have manpower, but much of this core”—those with combat experience who could lead and motivate new recruits—“is either dead or wounded.” .......... “The shelling simply never ends, they are firing at you for days on end—it’s exhausting, and starts to eat at you,” Greek said.

“It feels as if they are trying to smash into atoms every Ukrainian soldier and every inch of Ukrainian land in the Donbas.”

............. After that, Greek said, “They simply went crazy.” Russian aircraft flew four sorties over Derekh’s position, and the artillery fire was unceasing. A guided missile, likely launched by a Russian fighter jet, hit Derekh’s dugout. He was killed instantly. “You can be brave and experienced and know what to do in every situation,” Greek said. “But Fortuna also decides a lot.” According to Greek, counting the dead and wounded, the unit has lost around forty per cent of its combat strength. .......... their morale and fighting spirit seemed high, but nearly all of them expressed a sense of helplessness in the face of unrelenting shelling ......... these days, Russian units tend to pull back at first contact, then let artillery batteries positioned behind them pummel Ukrainian forces at long range. ........ Shells from a 152-millimetre artillery gun started to land around him—large-calibre munitions meant to destroy armored vehicles and groupings of infantry. Vladislav described the experience of finding himself under a cloud of fiery metal. “It starts with a loud whistle and you feel something fly past. Then comes the explosion, followed by the blast wave. Last is the shrapnel, which swarms through the air like flies: thpht thpht thpht,” he said, mimicking the sound. “All you want to do is hide, not breathe, dig deeper in the ground.” The earth heaved and branches snapped as shrapnel ripped through the forest. A tree fell and covered Vladislav in his trench. The blast knocked him unconscious. ........... Vladislav told me he was eager and ready for battle, but not this kind. “When a person is shooting at you, you have a clear idea of how to fight back, of where to direct your adrenaline,” he said. “But when a piece of metal is flying at you, you don’t know where the enemy is and how to survive. I’m a rifleman, I have no weapon to defend myself from that.” .......... Can Russia grind down Ukrainian forces and continue its metre-by-metre advance faster than Ukraine can receive substantial numbers of Western artillery systems and munitions? ......... more powerful artillery, they said, and U.S.-made Excalibur munitions, which are guided by G.P.S. for improved accuracy. ........ The ground was covered with body parts: arms, legs, a child with his head blown off. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” Honcharenko said, “and frankly, it would have been better if I never did.” ........... “They have a goal to capture a certain territory, and let’s say they manage to do that, but to what end?” He went on, “They don’t care about what they’re capturing, what will be left for them to occupy. It will be impossible to rebuild what they are destroying. They will end up with some empty fields dotted with ruins.” .......... “Let me give you my professional opinion as mayor: if we don’t get heavy weapons in two or three weeks, we’re fucked.”

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