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Morin (USA), Cartooning for peace
In Germany, a car plows into a trade union rally. Hypothesis: what if, with 10 days to go before crucial parliamentary elections, this was an “interference attack”? In any case, Trump-Musk and Putin seem to have everything they need to weaken democracy and Europe, and will soon be signing a pseudo-peace agreement in Saudi Arabia, the better to carve up the Ukraine and get their hands on its resources.
A “very fair, very reasonable” exchange. This is how Donald Trump described the deal reached with Vladimir Putin for the release of two prisoners. On one side, the American Marc Fogel, a teacher in an American school in Moscow, who had been sentenced in June 2022 by a Moscow court to fourteen years in prison for importing cannabis for what he claimed was medical use. On the other, a Russian “computer expert”, Alexander Vinnik, who was extradited in August 2022 from Greece to the United States, where he pleaded guilty in May 2024 to conspiracy to launder money via a cryptocurrency exchange platform set up in 2011, just as bitcoin was beginning to rise in value. In France, Alexander Vinnik was also sentenced to five years in prison for “extortion and money laundering in an organized gang”. Among nearly two hundred victims, both local authorities and private individuals, Vinnik had succeeded in holding to ransom the Caisse nationale des allocations familiales, the Union nationale des combattants, and dozens of local authorities (see Le Monde, October 21, 2020). The U.S. Federal Attorney's Office, for its part, extended its investigations to include more extensive packages, and attested that the platform controlled by Alexander Vinnik had laundered more than $4 billion on behalf of criminals, most of the money having been converted into U.S. dollars and Russian rubles. Most of this money laundering involved drug traffickers (cocaine, opioids, fentanyl) operating on the dark net.
Peanuts for Donald Trump. As a fervent apostle of crypto-currencies, didn't he appoint Scott Bessent, a hedge fund manager and long-time campaigner for the “crypto market”, which he sees as “synonymous with freedom”, to the strategic post of Treasury Secretary. Including the freedom to cheat.
As for drug trafficking, Donald Trump didn't need a plea from Putin to have a certain Ross Ulbricht freed in the United States the day after his inauguration, even though he had been sentenced in 2015 to life imprisonment with no possibility of release. Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, had founded the “Silk Road” platform, nicknamed “the drug supermarket”, which made it possible, among other things, to acquire hundreds of kilos of drugs, software designed to unlock computers, but also to recruit hitmen... (see on Rolling Stone magazine, February 4, 2014). In the name of free trade, his release was clamored for by libertarian circles... (1)
Both are fervent crypto-currency enthusiasts...
Left: Ross Ulbricht, drug trafficker sentenced to life imprisonment in 2015, but pardoned by Donald Trump (photo Julia Vie / Rolling Stone).
Right: Scott Bessent, the new US Treasury Secretary (photo Mark Shiefelbein / AP)
Even prior to the U.S. election, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky felt the pinch and tried to win, if not the favor, at least the attention of Donald Trump. But it was all in vain, not only because the American president's entourage is clearly pro-Russian, starting with Tulsi Gabard, the new Director of National Intelligence, whose nomination was ratified the day before yesterday by the US Senate (by 52 votes to 48) despite her numerous stances in favor of the Assad regime in Syria, and of Putin (she herself was financed by a “communications agency” linked to the Kremlin). But also, and above all, because Zelensky had the wrong interlocutor. He naively thought he could have a dialogue with Trump between heads of state. Instead, he is dealing with a lawless rogue who is trampling everything that has been built up since the Second World War in terms of international law, diplomacy and multilateral bodies.
Trump “thinks of the [Russian-Ukrainian] conflict as a potential deal”, explains Samantha de Bendern, associate researcher at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, specializing in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Even the Ukrainian proposal to welcome American mining investments to exploit rare and precious resources (such as titanium, lithium or graphite), which the American tech industry needs, is not enough in Trump's eyes: he wants much more, even if it means sharing the spoils with Moscow.
The recent telephone exchange between Trump and Putin was not prepared, as it should have been, by Keith Kellogg, officially the US special envoy for Russia and Ukraine. Behind the scenes, Donald Trump commissioned another emissary, Steve Witkoff, theoretically in charge of the Middle East. Witkoff is a real estate tycoon and long-time friend of Trump, whom we have already talked about in les humanités (read HERE).
The all-clear signal given to Putin to keep the occupied territories (Crimea and Donbass) will, in any case, be a fool's bargain for the Ukraine. For this territorial “freeze”, far from putting an end to the war, will simply offer Putin a respite before extending the conquest to the rest of Ukraine, the Black Sea and the famous “rare earths” whose “market” will be shared with the United States. That's the plan. Obviously, it can't be stated like that, out of the blue. As much of a rogue as he is, Trump is obliged to respect certain “forms”, especially as he shouldn't be too quickin giving China a free hand in its bid to invade Taiwan.
This scurrilous agreement will therefore take the guise of a “peace agreement” (a new Yalta, rather), negotiated without the Ukraine and in which Europe will be kept out, to be signed in Saudi Arabia. Why Saudi Arabia? Because Trump needs Saudi Arabia to transform Gaza, in Palestine, into the “new Riviera” (it's no coincidence that Steve Witkoff, who knows a thing or two about luxury real estate, has been asked to be the go-between between Riyadh and Moscow). It's a cynical three-rebound bait-and-switch.
Left: Elon Musk (photo DR). Right: after the “Munich bombing”, February 13, 2025. Photo dpa Picture-Alliance.
Of course, Europe will oppose such a plan. But - and this is the common wager between Trump and Putin - what will be left of the European Union in a few months, or even a few weeks? Germany's early parliamentary elections on February 23 will be a decisive test. Olaf Scholz and the Social Democratic Party are struggling, but the conservative CDU is not doing so well either, in the face of the growing power of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). We already know that this anti-democratic, xenophobic party is supported by the neo-Nazi proto-Martian Elon Musk.
But then, as if by coincidence, a few days before a “Munich Conference” on Ukraine, and in a context where the subject of immigration has been made highly inflammable; in the same city of Munich, a young 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker drove a Mini Cooper into the crowd at a rally organized by a German trade union, Ver.di. According to the Bavarian authorities, the perpetrator of the “attack” was “known to the police”, notably for drug-related theft offences.
Even if, at this stage, there's no proof supporting such a hypothesis, it looks like a double-cross. And I wouldn't be overly surprised if, in the next few days or weeks, the investigation were to incriminate the Russian “intelligence services”. The threat of such “interference attacks” has in any case been clearly brandished by certain Kremlin propagandists, such as TV presenter Soloviev and former president Medvedev.
German domestic intelligence has already identified numerous disinformation campaigns on social networks, propaganda actions and cyberattacks aimed at “weakening confidence in democracy”. Outside social networks, another unprecedented “interference” has been identified by German intelligence. Last December, in Berlin, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, some 300 cars were sabotaged using the same modus operandi: the exhaust pipes were clogged with expanding foam, and a sticker bearing the photo of the Greens' chancellery candidate, Robert Habeck, was affixed to the windscreen. That was all it took for German populist newspapers, close to the AfD, to go wild: “Climate radicals attack cars”... In January, four young men were arrested: investigators discovered that they had been “recruited” (with the promise of 100 euros per sabotaged vehicle), via Viber messaging... by a Russian sponsor.
Hand in hand, Elon Musk and the Kremlin appear to be allied in a bid to win over the far right in Germany, which would undermine the European Union: a necessary precondition to be able to quietly, among cronies and thugs, carve up the Ukraine?
Jean-Marc Adolphe
(1). In Capitalisme de l'apocalypse, ou le rêve d'un monde sans démocratie (Le Seuil, January 2025) (Apocalypse Capitalism or the dream of a world devoid of democracy), Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian follows in the footsteps of the most notorious radical libertarians - from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. This masterful investigation takes us from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa at the end of apartheid, from the American South to the city of London, from Dubai to war-torn Somalia, and all the way into the metaverse, revealing in dizzying detail the terrifying progress of capitalism without democracy.
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