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The Vatican website was inaccessible Wednesday evening, the Holy See press service said, in a suspected cyberattack that the Ukrainian ambassador blamed on Russia.

“Technical investigations were ongoing (at the end of the day) because of abnormal attempts to access the website,” Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said.

On Wednesday afternoon, several Vatican sites were offline for several hours and the official website, vatican.va, was still inaccessible in the evening.

The suspected cyberattack came a day after Russia expressed “indignation” at comments by Pope Francis singling out the alleged role of Russian ethnic minorities in Moscow’s war in Ukraine, news agencies reported Tuesday.

Pope Francis in an interview published Monday said some of the “cruellest” actors among Russia’s ranks in Ukraine “are not of the Russian tradition”, but minorities like “the Chechens, the Buryati and so on”.

Ukrainian ambassador to the Vatican, Andrii Yurash, tweeted: “Russian terrorists reach today sites of City State Vatican: many online pages of different structures of Roman Curia have become inaccessible!”

“Russian hackers one more time demonstrate real face of Russian politics,” he said in English, adding that the cyberattack was a likely “response on last important statements” made by the pope.

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A leaked Kremlin poll has revealed that public support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dropped significantly, with just one in four Russians now in favor.

Published by the Kremlin’s Federal Guard Service (FSO), the report was intended for the eyes of senior government officials, but was leaked to independent Russian news site Meduza.

The fall in public support for keeping Russian soldiers in Ukraine (down from 57 percent in July), follows widespread disapproval of President Vladimir Putin’s calls for mobilization and the forced conscription of hundreds of thousands of Russian men to the front lines.

Last week, the Russian president attempted to placate the public backlash by meeting with the wives and mothers of Russian troops, telling them not to believe “lies” about the invasion during a special event held at his personal residence in Nov-Ogarevo, near Moscow.

“I want you to know that I personally, all the leaders of the country, share this pain,” he said. “We know that nothing can replace the loss of a son.”

The meeting was slammed by the founder of Russia’s Council of Mothers and Wives, Olga Tsukanova, who said in a video address that Putin should meet with “real mothers,” rather than “hand-picked” individuals.

It was later revealed that only one of the 17 women who attended the meeting actually had a son conscripted into the army.

The leaked report marked “for internal use only,” reveals that 55 percent of polled Russians favor engaging in peace talks with Ukraine, while only a quarter still support the war’s continuation. This is a marked change from a July FSO study which found only 30 percent favorable to negotiations.

Fallout from Putin’s conscription gamble

Moscow and other parts of Russia have seen large anti-war protests since Putin’s original conscription announcement in mid-September.

Along with street demonstrations, long queues at border crossings, and the arrest of Russian men refusing to fight in Ukraine, some have taken to more drastic measures to dodge the draft.

On Oct. 1, a widely circulated video on social media showed the friend of a Russian reservist attempting to break his friend’s arm with a sledgehammer so he could not be sent to the front lines in Ukraine.

The clip shows a man raising a sledgehammer and smashing it down onto the arm of the conscripted Russian as he holds it on a wooden bench and covers his face with his other hand.

The draftee then walks away from the bench in a seemingly dazed state, swearing while his limp arm hangs by his side.

Meanwhile, the mobilization of over 300,000 reservists has created the biggest labor shortage in Russia since 1993, according to a Gaidar Institute study published in November.

“Simply put, this will mean that we will have fewer healthy, educated and strong people, the ones who create a country’s GDP,” Vladimir Gimpelson, a labor market economist told The Financial Times this week. “If economic growth were the government’s priority, then I would call this a disastrous mistake.”

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The famous American astronaut Scott Kelly visited Ukraine in the last days of November. It is in his role as an ambassador of the United24 fundraising platform that he helps and supports Ukrainians at international level to receive support and assistance. Kelly is involved in raising money for generators, ambulances – something the country desperately needs right now.

During his visit, he visited Okhmatdit, the specialist children’s hospital in Kyiv and Irpin, a suburb of the capital. The astronaut saw with his own eyes what kind of so-called “peace” Russia brought to Ukraine.

Kyiv Post also met with this legend of the space industry. In the interview, Scott Kelly explained why he decided to become an ambassador of Ukraine, how his Russian friends reacted to this and whether he is ready to develop the Ukrainian space industry.

On Sunday, Nov. 27 President Zelensky warned about new Russian missile attacks. Last week was difficult for Ukrainians and the energy system because of rockets. So, why are you here?

I’m here for a few reasons. One is to raise awareness for the fundraising effort to find these ambulances that are needed to save people. My understanding is that Russia destroys 10 of them a week, so we need to replace them. The other is President Zelensky’s new initiative to raise money for power generators for hospitals.

And also, I’m the technical advisor for a company called StemRad (an Israeli-American start-up company that develops and manufactures personal protective equipment (PPE) against ionizing radiation). It makes belts that protect radiation workers. Like if there was, God forbid, a nuclear accident, this device will save the lives of first responders.

It will allow them to do their jobs better, because they will not feel like they are going to die from it. If they had belts in Chornobyl I think it would have saved 97 percent of the people that died at Chornobyl.

Why did you agree to be the ambassador of the United24 platform?

This war is personal to me for a number of reasons. One is that I have Ukrainian family members. My brother-in-law moved when he was 10 years old from Kharkiv. His kids, my niece and nephew, are Ukrainian-American. I have friends from Ukraine. My Russian language teacher at NASA is Ukrainian. She has been my teacher for 20 years.

She’s from Kharkiv. Her mother and sister were there at the beginning of the war. I helped them get out of there. I actually hired a company to take her to Germany. She is 85 years old.

I believe, above everything else, in democracy and freedom, and the right of free people to determine their future and their destiny. So I think that Russia’s attack on Ukraine is also an attack on democracy.

And anyone who believes in democracy I think has an obligation to do whatever they can to push back against Russia and support Ukraine. So that’s why I’m doing it.

How did your friends and family react to the fact that you’re now a Ukrainian ambassador?

The kids were like…. Isaac and Sasha were shocked. They also held a fundraiser, they made  T-shirts.

My wife helped, and her mum, her sister, helped  kids to design the T-shirts with the Ukrainian word for love – kokhannya.

I was actually working with a kid Ilya from Kharkiv, he designed one of these shirts – with President Zelensky as Captain America, but Captain Ukraine instead.

Really cool. So we were selling those. We raised $6,000. I also raised $500,000 by selling these non-fungible tokens for a Ukrainian fundraiser and gave all the money to this organization called the Global Empowerment Mission. And they are using that to provide food and humanitarian supplies to people that need it.

What about your Russian friends? Were they shocked or not?

I have five, or I would say six. One of them lives in the United States now, and he basically hates everything about Russia. But the five that still live in Russia, all but one of them feel exactly the same way I do about this.

With one exception – they are really embarrassed over it. Because it’s their country doing this. So they have this deep level of embarrassment. One of the five people I talk with fairly regularly is completely brainwashed, out of his frickin’ mind.

The stuff he says to me is not even comprehensible. This guy that I have spent time and space with say to me: “We are just defending ourselves. We had no choice, because the nazis and NATO were going to destroy Russia”. I was like: “You’re fucking crazy!”

But it shows the power of disinformation, how you can affect people’s thinking. We’ve seen it in the U.S. actually, when you get 30 million people following a guy who is basically a cult of personality that has no business being the President of the United States (Donald Trump).

You spent a lot of time with Russian astronauts in space. Did they really use Russian propaganda all the time when you spoke with them?

One of them – yeah. But another couple – don’t. They feel like this is wrong, it’s immoral, it’s illegal. They’re embarrassed for their country.

We have obviously seen using propaganda in space, like with the flag pictures that they had taken (On July 4, U.S Independence Day, Russian astronauts on board the International Space Station took a photo with the flags of the LPR and DPR, two Russia-controlled and dependent enclaves in Ukraine’s Donbas.). You know, it’s hard to understand if they did that willingly or were just told to do it.

It’s quite possible they were willing participants, it’s also quite possible they had no choice.

Do you believe that the Russians are guilty that their government started the war against Ukraine?

It’s a tough question, I think. I had some really good friends, that… One is a medical doctor, another is a chemist, they are in their sixties.

I’m like: you guys need to do something about all this. And they were like: what can we do? We will be thrown in jail!

I said: you need to stand up to your government. And he goes: are you suggesting civil war? That hasn’t worked out well for us in the past.

I think some of them are honestly good people, they want to do something but they don’t know what. They don’t know how. Because the threats of prison and violence are too much for some of them. But I think there are probably other people in Russia. I noticed that Russian mothers signed the petition on Russian Mother’s Day, to end the war.

So you see that there are people who are starting to speak out again. Hopefully, over time, they can feel that they can make more of a difference.

You know when you get a lot of people together, it’s kind of hard to throw 50 million people in prison. I guess Stalin tried to do it (laughs).

So, Russia is spending crazy money on the war with Ukraine. For example, the missiles that Russia fired at Ukraine in November cost over 9 billion dollars. What could have this money been spent on in the space industry?

In the space industry? I don’t think the priority for Russia is… One billion dollars is a lot of money. They should probably spend it on other social programs, trying to get people jobs, get them off the vodka. It’s a major problem there, right?

What do you know about the Ukrainian space industry?

I don’t know a lot. But I know that some of the high-tech hardware that Russia uses and some of the military hardware, some of the stuff, came from Ukraine.  And it’s stuff that Russia has a hard time making themselves.

I know you had a Ukrainian cosmonaut Leonid Kadenyuk who passed away, unfortunately, a few years ago. I think you should have another one.

Find some guy and send him up to the space station soon! Another Ukrainian cosmonaut! I’m going to suggest that to my brother.

Maybe you want to stay in Ukraine and help develop the space industry?

You know I live in the U.S., but certainly want to come back and still be involved.

Do you want to help?

Absolutely. I think you need people to come and help. Because over time I think it’s human nature to get fatigued from things, and people have short memories and they move on to something else.

People that have some kind of influence and can get attention and awareness need to maybe work even harder.

Did Zelensky ask for your help in the space industry in Ukraine?

Not yet. I’d be happy to do that.

If you could choose between life in space without wars here on Earth, or life here on our planet but never flying to space, which would you choose? 

Earth wins every time. Space is cool, it’s fun, but I wouldn’t want to live there forever. Because Earth has everything. In space you get a good view, you float around, the job is interesting and challenging, but everything that is important to me is here on Earth.

I know it’s a little bit cold right now, but this air, after a year in space would be the freshest air you’ve breathed in your life.

You don’t have any of that in space, you don’t have the people you love, your friends, your family. Earth always wins.     

 

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“I KNOW IT WHEN I SEE IT, “Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said about obscenity. And there’s no good way of stopping it, he might have added. We can say the same for genocide. The United Nations defines it as “the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.”

But once we see it, what can we do about it? asks the provocative Israeli cinematographer-director Dror Moreh in a bracing new documentary, “The Corridors of Power,” debuting Dec. 2 on Showtime.

The skillful film portrays a dismal reality and is a horrifying and shaming tour of the killing fields of the 20th and early 21st centuries, from Auschwitz to Cambodia, Kosovo to Libya to Iraq to Syria, making the point repeatedly that good will is not enough. Interspersed with the images are interviews with U.S. policy makers, asked to analyze U.S. failures to respond adequately. While the interviews are in the halls of power, the camera takes us close to the atrocities and the inhumanity—a dead baby lying in the Turkish surf, bodies hacked to death along the road in Rwanda, bunches of corpses floating down a river like logs, chemical attack victims in Syria frothing in convulsions; Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, dragged in terror, tortured, bathed in blood, then left lying dead on a mattress. Moreh almost demands of us: Do not turn away. Silence is complicity. Evil begets evil. 

And hypocrisy. 

Vladimir Putin makes a cameo appearance in 1999, months before he ascended to the Russian presidency, objecting to one of the few times that the United States finally did intervene militarily to stop a genocide, in the Balkans. President Bill Clinton had won support in March 1999 for a NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavian Serbs, who had been slaughtering people in the Muslim province of Kosovo (following their murderous rampages in Bosnia seven years earlier). The Kremlin protested and Putin ironically called for adherence to U.N. principles. 

“The tragedy is that a group of states is attempting to change the international world order that formed after WWII,” Putin said. “The United Nations has been excluded from solving one of the most urgent conflicts of recent times.” Later in Chechnya, Syria, and Ukraine, of course, Putin couldn’t care less about such scruples. Analysts have said that the 2022 invasion of Ukraine was in part Putin’s payback for the NATO bombings triggered by Kosovo.

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At the outset, the film features how U.S. officials in World War II opted not to authorize high risk bombing raids on Nazi death camps. “Detailed information about what was happening in the concentration camps was already available to the Allied forces,” narrative captions tell us over an aerial view of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Camp partially obscured by clouds. “Not a single bomb was dropped on the rail lines leading to the extermination camps or the crematoriums.” (Moreh fails to mention countervailing arguments that the raids posed unacceptable risks to bomber crews and the air command’s decision to concentrate on German infrastructure to shorten the war.) The U.N. Convention on Genocide was adopted in 1948, and two words became the focus of future action: “Never again.”

But it came again all too soon.

Strangely and craftily after that opening, the director has chosen two  questionable authorities to reflect on the limits of governments to deal with genocide, Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the deeply flawed U.S. invasion of Iraq, and Henry Kissinger, President Richard M. Nixon’s national security advisor and later secretary of state during the Vietnam War era.

“When I think about the Holocaust and what came after World War II ended, and how many times people said, ‘Never again, never again,’ and it happens over and over again,” says Wolfowitz. “I can tell you for sure too often there are cases where we make a mockery of this idea of ‘never again.’” Wolfowitz, as deputy secretary of defense under George W. Bush, is sometimes called the architect of the 2003 Iraq War, in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and military, and more than 7,000 U.S. troops and 8,000 contractors died.

Then Kissinger speaks. “If you look at human history, you have to say that genocide has occurred much too frequently. But you cannot simply say the United States has an obligation by military force to oppose evil wherever it exists in the world.” Kissinger, a principal player and strategist during the Vietnam War was harshly criticized, among other things, for his role in the carpet bombing of Cambodia in 1969-1970 and for hiding the fact from Congress. Estimates said that between 150,000 and 500,000 Cambodian civilians died.

Shockers

Wolfowitz and Kissinger, surprising interlocutors to open a 135-minute examination of U.S. attempts to respond to genocide, never appear again in the film. Director Moreh appears to be saying that responsibility can be parceled out across the political spectrum. Good intentions are not good enough.

Moreh has a knack for landing good interviews and asking tough questions. In one of his previous works, The Gatekeepers, he interviewed six former heads of Shinbet, the Israeli internal security service, who candidly related the failure of Israel’s Palestinian policies. This time, the focus is on the failures of U.S. presidents and policy makers to get it right.

Certainly, there are no easy answers. It is  A Problem From Hell, the title of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Samantha Power, whose testimony here serves as the structural and moral backbone of the film. Power, President Obama’s trusted advisor, and one-time U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is presently the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Her memories of dealing with war crimes are deep and seared into her face. Her regrets are many, and she is not alone; the many players interviewed by Moreh, or featured in file footage, appear alternately defensive, confounded, and apologetic.

Pleas to Stop Crimes Ignored

In one searing segment, Powers, in her role at the United Nations, begs the Syrians and the Russians to halt the killing of civilians in Aleppo, Syria. At that point, Bashir al-Assad had ignored President Obama’s warning not to use poison gas.  In November-December 2016 more than 440 civilians—probably many more—had been killed in a series of Russian-led bombing attacks on Aleppo.

“Aleppo will join the ranks of those events in world history that define modern evil, that stain our conscience decades later. Halabja, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and, now, Aleppo,” Power said on Dec. 13, 2016 at the U.N. Security Council. She called out Russia, Iran (which supported the Syrian regime), and the Syrian government itself. Her words overlay images of dead bodies, half-buried under rubble, the wounded, and the distraught survivors of some “950 new distinct impact sites consistent with the detonation of large high explosive bombs across the area during the month,” according to Human Rights Watch. 

“Is there literally nothing that can shame you?” Power demanded of the perpetrators. “Is there no act of barbarism against civilians, no execution of a child that gets under your skin, that just creeps you out a little bit? Is there nothing you will not lie about or justify?”

Testimony throughout the film is startling, enraging, sometimes haunting: Former leaders, such as George H.W. Bush, George Shultz, Madeleine Albright, and Colin Powell are featured. So are key officials like Obama national security aide Ben Rhodes and James Baker, Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff and secretary of state for George H. W. Bush. Sandy Berger, White House national security advisor under President Bill Clinton, acknowledges that in his first years Clinton was confronted with foreign policy challenges without sufficient foreign policy chops to make independent choices. Rwanda paralyzed him. Moreh repeatedly asks the ultimate question: Why did you fail? The answers are often testy

Confronting Colin Powell

Moreh also revisits Colin Powell’s discredited, largely false speech before the U.N. on February 5, 2003, in which he said that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction [it did not] and was preparing for war [it was not].  An interviewer for “Corridors of Power” confronts Powell on the issue. What, he asks, were the real reasons Bush went to war? “Wasn’t it above all [the United States] would show the world that nobody can mess with us, and we will, by force, show them,” the questioner asks.

“You’re putting words into my mouth,” Powell answers angrily. “What you’re saying is: weren’t we just a bunch of idiots who just wanted to show the world how tough we were. And the answer is no.”

Alas, Moreh has no answers on how to prevent another genocide erupting somewhere in the world.  He seems to agree with Anthony Lake, national security advisor under President Clinton, that it’s just human nature for some to turn savage under certain conditions. And there are no easy ways to stop them.

“There will always be genocides or war crimes because human nature hasn’t changed,” says Lake. “The democratic institutions that were put in place 70 years ago are all under assault and in too many countries they are losing, including the values themselves.”

Peter Eisner, a contributing editor to Spytalk, is co-author with Knut Royce of The Italian Letter, How The Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq, among several other books. 

Russian forces tried to advance in eastern Ukraine and trained tank, mortar and artillery fire on Kherson in the south, the Ukrainian military said, as Western allies sought to buttress Ukraine and its neighbours against Moscow.

* The recently liberated Ukrainian city of Kherson has lost its power supply after heavy shelling by Russian forces, the regional governor said.

* Spanish security forces found a third suspected explosive device hidden in an envelope mailed to a European Union satellite centre located at an air force base in Torrejon de Ardoz, outside Madrid, the defence ministry said.

* Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on that big problems had accumulated in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), accusing the West of spurning the chance to make it a real bridge with Russia after the Cold War.

* Russia said the German parliament’s move to recognise the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine as a Soviet-imposed genocide was an anti-Russian provocation and an attempt by Germany to whitewash its Nazi past.
* The U.S. Army awarded a $1.2 billion contract to Raytheon Technologies Co for six National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) for Ukraine on Wednesday, the Pentagon said.

* NATO foreign ministers sought to reassure fragile countries in Russia’s neighbourhood that fear being destabilised by Russia as the conflict in Ukraine drags on.

* Russian President Vladimir Putin has focused his “fire and ire” on Ukraine’s civilian population, bombing more than a third of Ukraine’s water and electricity supply in a strategy that will not work, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

* Russia said it had promoted the chief engineer of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant to become its director, after Kyiv said the plant’s previous boss was abducted by occupying Russian authorities.

* Russia must withdraw its heavy weapons and military personnel from the Zaporizhzhia plant if the U.N. atomic watchdog’s efforts to create a protection zone are to succeed, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said.

* In a grim sign of the energy crisis caused by Russian attacks on Ukraine’s electricity grid, nine people have been killed in fires over the past 24 hours as Ukrainians resorted to emergency generators, candles and gas cylinders in violation of safety rules to try to heat their homes after power outages.

* “Remember one thing – the Russians are afraid. And they are very cold and no one will help them, because they do not have popular support,” – Andriy Yermak, chief of Ukrainian presidential staff.

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