Media: Lithuania Helps US Reveal Small Arms, Putin and Chemical Issue

For nearly a week, the United States and Russia have been discussing a new crisis in bilateral relations, which allegedly emerged after Biden answered a question from an ABC News reporter in an interview. The journalist asked Biden: “You know Vladimir Putin. ‘Do you think he is a murderer?” “Hmm, yes,” replied the US president, this is what caused Russia’s ire and provoked a reaction from Putin himself.

However, such exchanges overshadowed Biden’s other more important words: The US leader also added that Putin would “pay” to interfere in the US elections. He says he warned the Russian president about it in January.

“We talked a long time … I know him well. Our dialogue began with my words: I know you, you know me.” If I’m sure this has happened, get ready, “said the American leader. What he meant by preparing alone can be guessed.

However, a recent article in The Daily Beast brought together the stories of several stories that link not only the stories of Alesian Navaln, a lawyer who revealed corruption and the mysteriously dead lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, but also Russia’s role in the elections. presidential elections of 2016. Donald Trump.

It was Trump’s environment, more specifically his son’s conversations with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnickaya, a fact that the former president recognized, had become the subject of a single investigation. Now it turns out that these talks at the Trump Tower skyscraper were just an attempt to cover up Russia’s secret chemical weapons program.

Sanctions against a German company

Documents that The Daily Beast claims to have received from the Lithuanian authorities show that in 2016, 230 million people argued at the Trump Tower skyscraper. a dollar embezzlement scheme tied to the black market in Russia’s weapons of mass destruction program.

The money laundering ring, which scandalous attorney N. Veselnitskaya tried to cover up during the infamous 2016 meeting at the Trump Tower skyscraper, is linked to the German chemical company Rio-Chemie, which the Biden administration reported earlier in other 14 companies. March issued sanctions. Rio-Chemie for its “activities in support of Russia’s weapons of mass destruction programs.”

Corruption schemes linked to the criminal world and the black market in Russia are not new. As well as the fact that Putin made an attempt to downplay the importance of international corruption investigations in an attempt to find out exactly why Magnitsky was assassinated. This latest lawyer revealed that 230 million pockets of Russian taxes paid were stolen. Dollars. They are now linked to a chemical weapons program secreted by the Russian intelligence services.

After discovering a large-scale theft of state money, Magnitsky was arrested and eventually “died” in a Russian prison cell, although there was no evidence that he was killed.

After his death, governments around the world adopted a series of sanctions named after him: Lithuania was one of the first in Europe. The worst blow to Russia at that time was the United States’ Magnitsky act, which Russian lawyer N. Veselnickaja tried to persuade, sent to the United States by Russian prosecutor Yuri Chaika himself in 2016, tried to persuade D. Trump, his son and campaign leader Paul. Manafort to repeal the law. Putin also raised this issue during a bilateral meeting with Trump in Helsinki in 2018.

However, in early 2019, Ms. Veselnickaja was trapped: in the United States, she was charged with obstructing the administration of justice in Denez Kaciv’s Prevezon money laundering case.

As Prevezon’s representative, Veselnickaja, along with the Russian Attorney General, Chaika prepared evidence in Prevezon’s favor and presented it to US officials. When Veselnickaya was indicted in the United States, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry made noise, demanded that the United States explain and called the accusation “revenge.”

Complicated corruption scheme

Investigating Veselnitskaya’s activities, the woman herself admitted that in the United States, with Trump’s surroundings, she was not referring to the 2016 presidential elections, but to Putin’s investigations into his own corruption deals. Now everything is in its place, although the scheme is complicated.

According to The Daily Beast, at first it seemed only part of the US administration’s response to an attempt to assassinate Putin’s opponent, Navalna. The latter barely survived the attempt to poison him with Novičiok, a chemical weapon.

US President D. Trump shook hands with the attack, but on March 2, Biden’s team announced sanctions against seven high-ranking Russian officials and 14 companies that produce chemical and biological weapons.

One of the companies that the US government has identified as a participant in Russia’s weapons of mass destruction program is Riol-Chemie. The study, which was compiled by Lithuanian officials and reviewed by The Daily Beast, showed that Riol-Chemie received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a company registered in the British Virgin Islands. The latter is accused of laundering part of the money from the scheme unmasked by S. Magnitsky.

According to sources close to a separate investigation by French officials, financial data shows that two companies were registered in New Zealand, which also received 230 million euros of funding. $ robbery scheme, 1 million. dollars transferred to Riol-Chemie. Riol-Chemie did not respond to requests from The Daily Beast for comment on these events.

An official letter from the United States identifying Riol-Chemie as a sanctioned company does not provide any details about its role in Russia’s weapons program. However, the purchase order documents and invoices seen by The Daily Beast show that the company received components from the now-defunct US manufacturer Aeroflex.

The documents show that Aeroflex, then based in New York, accepted orders for radiation resistant semiconductors and regulators in 2007. These components are often used in the manufacture of missiles and satellites.

The orders were to be delivered to Riol-Chemie, a company based in northern Germany, but documents show that the carefully controlled radiation chips were paid for by another company accused of laundering stolen Russian money.

The documents show the bill was issued to Tolbrist Alliance Inc., a front company that, according to the International Investigative Journalism Consortium’s Offshore Leak Database, is registered only in a mailbox in the British Virgin Islands. .

Once again, it was Lithuanian officials who discovered that Tolbrist Alliance Inc. had received approximately $ 50 million from companies involved in the robbery scheme discovered by S. Magnitsky. Dollars. Financial documents show that Tolbrist paid at least € 1.5 million to Aeroflex. Dollars.

Finally, the US State Department suspended Aeroflex due to violations of hundreds of International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), “mainly related to illegal exports.”

There is no evidence that the company broke the law by delivering radiation-resistant chips to Riol-Chemie, but these transactions took place long before the US government announced that the German company was secretly involved in the illegal operations of Putin’s arms smuggling.

The recurring link between Riol-Chemie and the companies accused of money laundering may also reveal a broader and well-calculated scheme with far-reaching political implications. There is no doubt that the money was probably injected into the black market of the weapons program not without the knowledge of the Kremlin: the person who led the dispersal of the allocated funds had to play a top-secret role in the national security system of Russia.

“This clearly shows why Putin came out of cancer so badly hit by the Magnitsky investigation,” said Bill Browder, who attacked the Kremlin and led an anti-corruption campaign on behalf of his former lawyer, Magnitsky. “Each peeled layer of this onion reveals more and more disgusting and dangerous information.”