Robert_Chadwick1 and bsky.opusvii

National Security, Geopolitics, Anti-totalitarianism and Law & Order. Vigilia Pretium Libertatis NATO SHAPE motto

[Laura Rozen @lrozen]

“On May 20, …I emailed [Gabbard], her press secretary and her chief of staff. I let them know we planned to proceed with a story about her association with Butler. …
Two days later, Fox News reported that Gabbard — whose departure had been rumored for months — would be leaving the position of DNI this month” https://t.co/gFTigiyoVZ

[Edward Lucas @edwardlucas]

If you are going to be at the NATO summit, try to come to this. Many thanks to @MunSecConf for giving us an #alliesinankara slot. Tickets will be scarce but DM me and I will do my best

[Sally Simpson @SalT25a]

@OpusVI1 @NewYorkStateAG https://t.co/pV8WILeX3h

https://t.co/dK1lzcIJlW

[Army Media 🇺🇦 @armyinformcomua]

🇺🇦🍒Melitopol Cherry: How Russia stole a century-old Ukrainian brand — and got caught

On March 27, 2022, armed Russian soldiers in balaclavas broke down the doors of a Ukrainian agricultural company's head office in Melitopol.
They beat the security guard. They took the building at gunpoint.

The target: Melitopolska Chereshnya — "Melitopol Cherry" — one of Ukraine's most recognised agricultural brands, built around the Melitopol cherry variety that has made the Zaporizhzhia region famous across Europe for over a century. The deep red Melitopol cherry — with its distinctive sweetness and short harvest season — has been a UNESCO-recognised part of Ukrainian cultural heritage and an export product known across Eastern Europe.

Two Russian "investors from Moscow" followed shortly after: Oleksandr Abramov from Kaluga and Ihor Gorbunov from Volgograd, arriving in an unplated white Mercedes-Benz GL. They told staff they were the new owners. Those who disagreed were threatened with "the basement."

What followed was a textbook Russian occupation property seizure:

→ April 2, 2022: production facilities in Sadove and Kostiantynivka seized by force
→ June 17, 2022: a mirror company — "Melitopolskaya Chereshnya LLC" — registered in Krasnodar, Russia, with Abramov as director
→ Autumn 2022: occupation authorities issued transfer documents handing all property, land, and equipment to Abramov
→ July 2024: the brand "Melitopolska Chereshnya" registered with Russia's patent office — stolen trademark included

The harvest was picked by Ukrainian workers under duress and shipped to Russia and occupied Crimea. The product was sold through Russian commercial channels. The business was folded into the Russian MAGMA corporate group.

This is not looting. This is systematic, documented, legally structured property confiscation as state policy — designed to strip occupied territories of their economic assets and transfer them permanently to Russian ownership.

On June 21, 2026, the Komunarskyi District Court of Zaporizhzhia sentenced both men to 12 years imprisonment for war crimes against property. The court ordered joint compensation of over 170 million UAH to Melitopolska Chereshnya, over 35 million UAH to Vrozhainyi, and 1 million UAH to the company owner.
The verdict is in absentia. Both men remain in Russia.
But their names, passport numbers, addresses, and criminal records are published — in full — in Ukraine's Book of Executors of the Ukrainian People.

Ukraine cannot reach them today. It documented everything so it can reach them tomorrow.

Every occupier who seized Ukrainian property believing the paperwork made it legal should understand: Ukraine's courts are working. The files are open. The verdicts are being issued.

The Melitopol cherry will return to its owners.

So will justice.

Source: Book of Executors of the Ukrainian People, June 2026

#Ukraine #UAF #WarCrimes #StopRussianAggression #RussiaUkraineWar #Accountability

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

It may only last 60 days (I doubt it; likely would become permanent), but the US Treasury’s waiver is effectively rolling back 40-year plus of American oil sanctions against Iran.

Even US refiners are allowed to import Iranian oil and pay for it in greenback!!!

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

The oldest hand to sign the Declaration of Independence shook so badly the man could barely hold the pen. He signed anyway, and what he said while doing it should be carved somewhere. Here's the story.

Stephen Hopkins was born in Rhode Island in 1707. No money, no fancy schooling, almost no formal education at all. His mother and grandfather taught him at home, and from there he did the rest himself. He read everything he could get his hands on and became a surveyor and an astronomer by sheer self-teaching.

A poor self-taught kid then did this with his life. Justice of the peace at 23. Speaker of the Rhode Island House seven times. Chief justice for eleven years. Governor nine separate times. He basically taught himself into running an entire colony.

He was also a complicated man, and honesty demands we say it. He had enslaved people in his household, and later in life he turned against the trade, freeing people he held and pushing a 1774 bill to stop the importation of slaves into Rhode Island. A man wrestling with his own contradictions in real time.

By the time independence came, he was old. Nearly 69 when he got to the Continental Congress, one of the oldest men in the room, second in age only to his friend Benjamin Franklin.

And here's the thing. He was sick. He had palsy, a condition that made his hands shake so violently that writing was genuinely painful. For a man whose whole life ran on reading and writing, his own hands were betraying him.

So when the moment came to sign the most dangerous document in America, treason against a king, he could barely do it. He reached over with his left hand, gripped his trembling right hand to steady it, and forced the pen across the page.

And as he did it, he said the line they should put on a wall:

"My hand trembles, but my heart does not."

He went on to help draft the Articles of Confederation before his health finally pulled him out of public life. He died in 1785.

A self-made man, an old man, a shaking man, who looked down at hands that would barely obey him and signed his name to a revolution anyway.

Stephen Hopkins. The heart doesn't tremble.

[Robert_Chadwick1 and bsky.opusvii @OpusVI1]

@SalT25a @NewYorkStateAG Details, please.

[Sally Simpson @SalT25a]

@NewYorkStateAG

trump admin stopped a criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn who were examining the circumstances behind the president’s clemency grant that freed a private equity exec who was convicted in a $1.6B scheme that defrauded thousands of investors.

[UNICEF Ukraine @UNICEF_UA]

We're heartbroken to hear reports of a 13-y/o boy killed with his father and grandmother in an attack in Shostka, Sumy region, which also injured his mother, 10-y/o brother and 13-y/o sister.

Another family devastated by a brutal attack.

Children in #Ukraine need peace!

[Alexandra Prokopenko @amenka]

An underreported story in a recent @thebell_io newsletter: Russia is preparing to automatically transfer the pension savings of 36 million people — 2.9 trillion rubles ($40 billion) — into a new fund controlled by VEB and VTB, without their consent. The official framing is "expanding rights." The real motive is creating a captive pool of long-term capital that the state can direct toward its own investment priorities, with foreign markets closed and the budget deficit widening. w @kolyandr
https://t.co/xfJRDxO1SY

[Rep. Don Bacon 🇺🇸✈️🏍️⭐️🎖️ @RepDonBacon]

Iran’s government may be the most repressive, murdering regime in the world towards its own people. It is world’s leading exporter of terrorism… internationally and domestically.

[Jon Swaine @jonswaine]

New from me: Tulsi Gabbard, her guru and the mysterious messages that helped shape her political career https://t.co/hLMFJBZBLB

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa]

Keir, thank you for all our cooperation, your support, and the joint decisions that have helped make our Europe and our protection of life stronger.

The United Kingdom has been, is, and will remain among the world’s leaders. Here in Ukraine, we deeply value Britain, and every meeting and every conversation we have had has always been filled with real substance.

Thank you for always being in touch, always engaged, and always striving to do what is needed and what will truly help.

I wish the United Kingdom and all British people every success as well as realisation of your national goals. We have confidence in Britain.

Keir, you are always a welcome guest in Ukraine.

@Keir_Starmer

[Robert_Chadwick1 and bsky.opusvii @OpusVI1]

@brockm And incompetently. A controlled unqualified asset.

[Mike Brock🇺🇸 @brockm]

Senate Republicans sold out our national security. Knowingly and willingly. https://t.co/lY8gNBXRNc

[Andrii Sybiha 🇺🇦 @andrii_sybiha]

The date of June 22nd, 1941, has been one of the core ideological topics since Soviet times and continues to be so under Putin.

This propaganda has always “forgotten” Stalin’s purges of Soviet officers prior to the war, his regime’s cooperation with the Third Reich, war against Finland, and his complete absence during the initial days of the war. All of these and other factors contributed to catastrophic outcomes for the Soviet Union in the very beginning of the Nazi invasion.

Yes, at a terrible cost, the Soviet Union's peoples, including the Ukrainian people, eventually prevailed and drove the Nazi invaders out.

Their feat will always be remembered in Ukraine. Every Ukrainian family has been burnt by that horrific war, whose frontline crossed over Ukraine twice, first from west to east and again from east to west.

Ukraine lost at least eight million people, including approximately three million soldiers and five million civilians.

In this context, it is especially infuriating that Moscow has been working for decades to erase the memory of the heroic fight against Nazism by Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, Georgians, Armenians, Belarusians, and other peoples, instead trying to attribute this multinational feat exclusively to the Russian people.

When Soviet-Russian propaganda spoke about June 22nd, 1941, it always called the Third Reich’s attack “perfidious” and underlined that it happened at 4 am “without the declaration of war.”

But on February 24th, 2022, Russia did absolutely the same. A perfidious attack against Ukraine, approximately at 4am, “without the declaration of war,” from all fronts, aiming at destroying our nation.

The Ukrainian people and state withstood it and we are now legitimately bringing the war back to the aggressor’s territory.

But the truth is that Moscow has lost any moral right to utilize this date for its current war propaganda.

If the current leadership in Moscow, who have nothing to do with the WWII victory, are looking for fascists to defeat, they should look no further than the mirror.

[Marc Polymeropoulos @Mpolymer]

“Ukrainians approached the challenge with the same sense of determination many Americans felt after 9/11," Bogan said. "There was an understanding that the stakes were existential and the only option was to keep moving forward." https://t.co/jDKAPD1vs5

[Rep. Don Bacon 🇺🇸✈️🏍️⭐️🎖️ @RepDonBacon]

The 9/11 Memorial in NYC is well done. May we never forget the 2,977 innocent victims killed on 9/11. We can never ignore that there are terrorists who are willing to kill as many Americans as possible. We must always be vigilant.

[Estonian Defence Forces | Eesti Kaitsevägi @Kaitsevagi]

Estonia has received its first IRIS-T SLM medium-range air defence system at Ämari Air Base. 🇪🇪🛡️

The combat-proven system strengthens our ability to counter airborne threats at greater ranges and altitudes, marking a major leap forward in Estonia’s air defence capabilities and NATO security.

#WeAreNATO #AirDefence

[Mark Dubowitz @mdubowitz]

Boston middle school sent an email apologizing to Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, and Lebanese students who were offended by a mandatory Holocaust lesson.