Month: August 2024

Madrid/Washington — They are known as “illegals” — spies who operate under the guise of normal jobs.

Since Russia lost many of its valuable spy assets when dozens of diplomats were expelled from Western countries after the invasion of Ukraine, these civilian agents have become essential.

Experts in Russian intelligence told VOA that this was the “renaissance of illegals,” with 90% of operations now carried out by these shadowy figures.

The August 1 hostage swap, in which American journalists and Russian rights activists were exchanged for an assassin and spies, exposed how some of these “illegals” operate.

Many manage to avoid detection by working in innocuous jobs that allow them access to events and people of interest to Moscow. The prisoner swap included supposed art dealers and a freelance journalist.

President Vladimir Putin welcomed back Russian couple Artem and Anna Dultsev, who posed as Argentinians and ran a tech start-up and gallery in Slovenia, and Spanish-Russian freelance reporter Pablo Gonzalez, also known as Pavel Rubtsov.

On the surface, Gonzalez worked as a reporter for media outlets that included DW and VOA, specializing in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. But in reality, according to the head of the British MI6 secret service, he was gathering information on Russian opposition groups and trying to destabilize Ukraine in the run up to Moscow’s full-scale invasion.

Polish authorities detained Gonzalez in February 2022. Until August 1, he was held in a high-security jail on charges of spying for Russia — allegations he had denied.

Media watchdogs condemned the conditions in which Poland held Gonzalez, but footage of him being welcomed by Putin after the swap appeared to confirm his primary role was spy craft, not journalism.

Gonzalez himself gave VOA a cryptic answer to a request for an interview. Referring to an earlier VOA article about his release, Gonzalez said through his Spanish wife, Oihana Goiriena, “If there are no more speculations, then I don’t know what you want to talk about.”

 

Russian roots

Speaking perfect Russian and Spanish, Gonzalez forged a career in journalism after studying Slavic studies at the University of Barcelona. But despite his new life in the West, he retained much sympathy for his country of birth.

A source with knowledge of the Russian intelligence sector who did not want to be named told VOA that Gonzalez grew up in Spain’s Basque country, where sympathies for a regional independence movement are common — and, in left-wing circles, support for Putin is not unusual.

This meant many who met him did not question his pro-Russian leanings; far fewer suspected he secretly worked for Russian intelligence.

“This is a renaissance for illegals,” Oleksandr V. Danylyuk, an expert in subversive Russian and Soviet special services, told VOA from Kyiv.

“Historically, it was so difficult to travel abroad. [These spies] can travel, they can live, they can join governments, businesses,” said Danylyuk, who is an associate fellow of the London-based Royal United Services Institute, a defense think-tank.

“Some people are still not convinced that illegals are important, but it is 90% of all the [Russian intelligence] activity.”

Danylyuk said part of their value is that millions of Russians — and foreign-national Kremlin sympathizers — can travel freely without suspicion.

“They can travel to Silicon Valley and steal secrets, and they can recruit Westerners. Why would you need to use diplomats?” he said. “For some specific tasks, yes, but in fact for other operations you would use illegals, and you would have spymasters.”

Danylyuk said one purpose of illegals is to exert influence on the Western world by infiltrating radical protest groups or opposition organizations.

In 2016, Gonzalez engaged with leaders of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom — named after the Russian opposition politician assassinated in 2015 — where he became close with key members of the group.

Nemtsov’s daughter and co-founder of the foundation, Zhanna Nemtsova, said she was a target of Gonzalez’s espionage.

“I was the first to tell Agentstvo about Pablo Gonzalez/Pavel Rubtsov in May 2023 after I had access to the case materials,” she wrote on social media X on August 27. Agentstvo is an independent Russian media outlet.

Gonzalez collected detailed reports on his contacts with Nemtsova and the foundation, Agentstvo said.

Spy operations

Marc Marginedas, a correspondent for Spanish newspaper El Periodico, said despite the expulsions of Russian diplomats after the Ukraine invasion, the Russian intelligence service is like a small army.

“Tens of thousands of people work for the different branches of the intelligence services in Russia. Some sources elevate this to hundreds of thousands if it includes those working not on a regular basis,” said Marginedas, who specializes in the former Soviet states and Middle East.

Staff in Russian embassies and state-run media organizations, he added, are probably forced to work in some kind of intelligence capacity.

Marginedas agreed that “illegals” are now a mainstay of Moscow’s spying operation.

“Russia has invested heavily in ‘illegal’ agents who do not enjoy diplomatic protection,” he said.

“They provide them with a personal alibi that is very difficult to track down. Latin American countries, with not very tight controls and regulations when providing citizenship to foreigners, are very useful for this purpose.”

Marginedas said that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine resulted in large numbers of suspected Russian spies being expelled from embassies around the world. So, when Putin appeared at the airport in Moscow to welcome the agents in the prisoner swap in August, it sent a specific message.

“Following the war in Ukraine and the mass expulsions of Russian diplomats from Western countries, its capacities were seriously undermined,” Marginedas said.

“Putin, by receiving those people with pomp at [Moscow’s] airport and promising them jobs and medals, was sending out the message to the future spies that the Russian state will not abandon its spies.”

A journalist who knew Gonzalez said his real identity came as a shock.

Xavier Colas, who works for the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, has known Gonzalez since 2014 when they met in Ukraine.

“He was not a person who pretended to be a journalist. He really was one. He did reports and traveled and knew what he was talking about,” Colas said. “He styled himself as an expert in Ukraine and other [post-Soviet] republics. He knew his stuff.”

Colas, whom Russia expelled earlier this year, also said Gonzalez espoused “pro-Russian” arguments that attacked Ukraine and the European Union and claimed Alexei Navalny, the late opposition leader imprisoned by Russia, was being treated well by the Russian government.

Navalny died in a penal colony in the Arctic in February.

“Gonzalez’s opinions were very pro-Russian. But he was not some stupid young radical journalist. He knew what he was talking about, but his arguments did not make sense,” Colas remembers.

He said that Gonzalez worked for mostly regional newspapers such as the pro-separatist Basque Gara newspaper, but he never seemed short of funds to travel to all parts of Ukraine and Syria.

Gonzalez worked for Spanish outlets Publico, La Sexta and Gara. He also worked as a freelancer for Voice of America in 2020 and 2021 and the public broadcasters Deutsche Welle and EFE.

VOA hired Gonzalez via a third-party freelance media platform. After learning of his arrest in Poland, the broadcaster removed his content.

Deutsche Welle did not reply to a request for comment. But Miguel Angel Oliver, president of EFE, told VOA: “We have not made any comment. Gonzalez worked for EFE over two years ago. It was a brief collaboration principally about photographs at the start of the Ukraine war.”

Colas said he thought Gonzalez came from “a wealthy Basque country family.” It was a shock, he said, when Gonzalez emerged from a plane with a Russian hitman and other spies.

“I knew for a while that the Spanish secret services believed he was a spy. But this was still a shock for me,” he said.

Intelligence services

Three different intelligence services had no doubt about where Gonzalez’s real loyalties lay — even if his colleagues and many peers were in the dark.

Spanish secret services, who spoke on background to a VOA reporter, said they believed he was a Russian spy. And Polish security services said Gonzalez was included in the prisoner swap because of “common security issues” with the United States.

In a statement, they said: “Pavel Rubtsov, a GRU officer arrested in Poland in 2022, [had been] carrying out intelligence tasks in Europe.”

Richard Moore, the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, said at the Aspen Security Forum in 2022 that Gonzalez was an “illegal” arrested in Poland after “masquerading as a Spanish journalist.”

“He was going into Ukraine to be part of their destabilizing efforts there,” Moore said.

Gonzalez has always denied spying for Russia.

His lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, noted the case of Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter Russia detained on false espionage charges who was freed in the prisoner swap and welcomed by U.S. President Joe Biden.

“Nobody in the USA has questioned that Gershkovich was simply a journalist. We think that neither Gershkovich nor Pablo Gonzalez are spies, but journalists are trapped in a new kind of cold war, where truth matters little,” he told VOA.

Boye also acted as a lawyer for Edward Snowden and Carles Puigdemont, a fugitive former Catalan independence leader wanted in Spain on charges of embezzlement and misuse of public funds. (Boye himself has faced legal action, convicted in a 1996 trial involving Basque separatists.)

Gonzalez is now living in Russia, but his wife, Goiriena, still lives with the couple’s three children in Spain’s Basque country. She told VOA that she remains in touch with her husband daily by social media or telephone.

“So far there is no news of him coming back from Russia,” she said. “I think he has to recover from everything he has been through.”

While living in Warsaw in the run-up to Russia’s invasion, Gonzalez had a girlfriend, named in local media as Magdalena Chodownik. She has since been charged by Polish authorities with assisting espionage but denies the charge.

Chodownik, who has worked for several European outlets, declined to comment to VOA when asked about Gonzalez.

Spain’s Foreign Ministry did not reply when asked by VOA if Gonzalez will be allowed to return to Spain to see his family while Poland has accused him of spying.
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Moscow, Russia — A helicopter with 22 people aboard, most of them tourists, has gone missing in Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula in the far east, regional authorities said Saturday.

“Today at about 1615 (0415 GMT) communication was lost with a Mi-8 helicopter … which had 22 people on board, 19 passengers and three crew members,” Kamchatka Governor Vladimir Solodov said in a video posted on Telegram.

Rescue teams in helicopters have been searching into the night for the missing aircraft, focusing on a river valley that the helicopter was due to fly along, Russian authorities said.

The Mi-8 is a Soviet-designed military helicopter that is widely used for transport in Russia.

The missing helicopter had picked up passengers near the Vachkazhets ancient volcano in a scenic area of the peninsula known for its wild landscapes, pristine rivers, geysers and active volcanoes.

Kamchatka, which is nine hours ahead of Moscow, is a popular tourist destination.

A source in the emergency services told TASS news agency that the helicopter disappeared from radar almost immediately after taking off and the crew did not report any problems.

The local weather service said there was poor visibility in the airport area.

Accidents involving planes and helicopters are frequent in Russia’s far eastern region, which is sparsely populated and where there is often harsh weather.

The emergencies ministry said the search and rescue operation was being hampered by thick fog in the area.

In August 2021, a Mi-8 helicopter with 16 people on board, including 13 tourists, crashed into a lake in Kamchatka due to poor visibility, killing eight.

In July the same year, a plane crashed as it tried to land on the peninsula, with 22 passengers and 6 crew aboard, all of whom were killed.
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BERLIN — Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region is legitimate and covered by Kyiv’s right to self-defense, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told German weekly Welt am Sonntag in his first reaction to the advance into Russian territory.

“Ukraine has a right to defend itself. And according to international law, this right does not stop at the border,” Stoltenberg told the paper, adding that NATO had not been informed about Ukraine’s plans beforehand and did not play a role in them.

The NATO chief said Ukraine was running a risk with the advance onto Russian territory but that it was up to Kyiv how to conduct its military campaign.

“(Ukrainian) President (Volodymyr) Zelenskiy has made clear that the operation aims to create a buffer zone to prevent further Russian attacks from across the border,” he said.

“Like all military operations, this comes with risks. But it is Ukraine’s decision how to defend itself.”

Kyiv launched a major cross-border incursion into the Kursk region on August 6, while Moscow’s troops keep pressing towards the strategic hub of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine.

The incursion was also discussed at a meeting of the NATO-Ukraine-Council on Wednesday that was requested by Kyiv amid Moscow’s biggest wave of air attacks on its neighbor.

The council, grouping members of the Western military alliance and Ukraine, was established last year to enable closer coordination between the alliance and Kyiv.

Russia has called the Kursk operation a “major provocation” and said it would retaliate. 
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KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian air defenses shot down 24 out of 52 drones launched by Russia during overnight attacks on eight regions across Ukraine, the air force said Saturday.

It said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app that 25 Shahed drones had fallen on their own and three others had flown toward Russia and Belarus. There were no reports of anybody being hurt in the attacks or of any major damage being caused.

Ukraine uses electronic warfare as well as mobile hunting groups and aircraft defenses to repel frequent Russian drone and missile strikes.

Air alerts sounded several times during the overnight drone attacks, with many people rushing to shelters in the middle of the night.

In the capital, Kyiv, where alerts lasted for about four hours, it was the fourth drone attack this week, officials said.

All drones targeting the city were downed and no major damage was reported, Kyiv city officials said.

Ukrainian air defenses also shot down Russian drones in the Poltava, Cherkasy, Kyrovohrad and Dnipropetrovsk regions in central Ukraine, in the Chernihiv and Sumy regions in the north and the Mykolayiv region in the south.

Regional officials in the Cherkasy region said the drones’ debris had damaged several private houses.

The Russian forces also launched five missiles during the attack, the Ukrainian air force said, but gave no other details.

Meanwhile, five people were killed and 46 injured in a Ukrainian attack on the southwestern Russian city of Belgorod late Friday, the local governor said. Vyacheslav Gladkov said that 37 of the injured, including seven children, were hospitalized.

Video from a car dashboard, posted on social media and purporting to demonstrate the attack, showed another car being blown up while moving on the road. Seconds later an explosion is seen on the other side of the road. Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the video.

Russia’s Investigation Committee said on its Telegram channel that it had initiated a criminal case into the Belgorod attack.

Authorities also reported that a woman was injured Saturday during Ukrainian shelling of the border town of Shebekino in the Belgorod region.

Ukraine has staged frequent attacks on Belgorod and other Russian border regions in recent months. The city has been the focal point of the attacks.

Ukraine and Russia say they do not deliberately target civilians in the war that began when Russia sent thousands of troops into its smaller neighbor in February 2022. Moscow has called the invasion a “special military operation.”
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KYIV, Ukraine — When the air raid siren bellows in the dead of night, the women in arms rush to duty.

Barely two months since joining the mobile air-defense unit, 27-year-old Angelina has perfected the drill to a tee: Combat gear fitted, anti-aircraft machine gun in place, she cruised behind the wheel of a pickup, singing along to a Ukrainian song about rebellion.

The rest unfolded in seconds: Under a tree-lined position near Kyiv’s Bucha suburb, she and her five-woman unit mounted the gun, checked the salvo and waited. The chirp of crickets filled the silence until the Russian-launched Shahed drone was shot down — on this August night, by a nearby unit — another menace to near daily life in Ukraine eliminated.

To shoot down a drone brings her joy. “It’s just a rush of adrenaline,” said Angelina, who like other women in the unit spoke to The Associated Press on condition only their first names or call signs be used, in keeping with military policy.

Women are increasingly joining volunteer mobile units responsible for shooting down Russian drones that terrorize Ukrainian civilians and energy infrastructure as more men are sent east to the front line.

While women make up only a tiny fraction of the country’s armed forces, their service is vital. With tens of thousands of men reportedly recruited every month, women have stepped up as crucial operations from coal mines to territorial defense forces accept them to fulfill traditionally male roles.

At least 70 women have been recruited into the Bucha defense forces in recent months for anti-drone operations, said the area’s territorial defense commander, Col. Andrii Velarty. It’s part of a nationwide drive to attract part-time female volunteers to fill the ranks of local defense units.

The women come from all walks of life — stay-at-home moms to doctors like Angelina — and call themselves the “Witches of Bucha,” a nod to their role of keeping watch over the night skies for Russian drones.

Some were motivated to volunteer by the Russian massacre of hundreds of Bucha residents during the monthlong occupation of the Kyiv suburb by Russian troops soon after the February 2022 invasion. Bodies of men, women and children were left on the streets, in homes and in mass graves.

“We were here, saw these horrors,” said Angelina, who treated wounded residents, including children, during the Russian occupation.

So when she spotted a sign calling for female recruits on a highway while driving in June with her friend, Olena, also a doctor, “we didn’t hesitate,” she said.

“We called and were immediately told ‘Yes, come tomorrow,’” she said. “There is work that we can do here.”

A grueling training

At a training session deep inside Bucha’s forest this month, female recruits ranging in age from 27 to 51 were being tested on how quickly they could assemble and disassemble rifles. “I have eighth graders who can do this better,” their instructor shouted.

The recruits were taught about a variety of weapons and mines, tactics and how to detect Russian infiltrators — their skills adapted to a war in which their enemy’s methods are always changing.

“We train no less than men,” said Lidiia, who joined a month ago.

A 34-year-old sales clerk with four children, Lidiia said her main motivation was to do her part to protect her family. Her children have looked at her differently since she began wearing army fatigues, she said.

“My younger son always asks, ‘Mom, do you carry a gun?’ I say, ’Yes.’ He asks, ‘Do you shoot?’ I say, ‘Of course I do.’”

“I’ve always been the best for them, but now I’m the best in a slightly different way,” she said.

On July 31, she was on duty when Russia launched 89 Shahed drones, all of which were destroyed. Lidiia was an assistant machine-gunner that night.

“We got ready, we went to the call, we found that there were a lot of targets all over Ukraine,” she said. “We had night-vision devices so it was easy to spot the target.”

What did she feel as her unit shot down three of the drones? “Joy and some foul language,” Olena said.

After shooting down drones, the day job begins

When the sun rose, Angelina and Olena removed their heavy combat gear and went home to slip on surgical scrubs. Another shift, this time at the intensive care unit at the hospital where they work, was about to start.

By midnight, they would be back near the tree line, waiting for incoming Russian drones. “Today I slept for two hours and forty minutes,” Olena said.

There is no escape from the war for both women.

Their boyfriends are soldiers, and Angelina, an anesthesiologist, met hers at the hospital where he was recovering from a combat wound to his foot.

Seeing the numbers of wounded Ukrainian soldiers was one reason she decided to volunteer.

“To bring our victory closer. If we can do something to help, why not?” she said.

Angelina’s boyfriend worries every time she is on duty and the air raid alarm sounds. He texts her, “be careful” and when it ends, “write to me” — despite it being much scarier on the front lines, she said.

‘We are no longer women, we are soldiers’

The Russian drone attacks are typically more intense at night, but daytime attacks are just as deadly. The drone unit spends entire nights driving back and forth from their base in the forest to the position. Sometimes they stand there for hours waiting to shoot.

“There is nothing easy about it. In order to shoot it down, you have to train constantly,” Angelina said. “I have to train all the time, including on simulators.”

Their platoon commander, a confident woman with long braided hair who goes by the call sign Calypso, leads training in shooting, assault skills and combat medicine every Sunday.

There’s no difference between the male and female volunteers, she said.

“From the moment we come to serve, sign a contract, we are no longer women, we are soldiers,” she said. “We have to do our job, and men also understand this. We don’t come here to sit around and cook borscht or anything.”

“I have a feeling the girls and I would shoot down these Shaheds with our bare hands, with a stick, if we had to — anything to stop them from landing on our children, friends and family.”

The women in the mobile-fire units are on duty every two or three days. They work in groups of five, with a machine gunner, assistant, fire support, a driver and commander.

“Of course, war is war, but no one has canceled femininity,” Calypso said. “It doesn’t matter whether you hit a Shahed with painted eyes or not, the work is still going on. And not everyone has a manicure.”

As more women are trained to join the ranks of the territorial defense forces, the safer Ukraine’s skies will be, Angelina said.

“This means that I can make at least some small contribution to the fact that my mother sleeps peacefully, that my brothers and sisters go to school peacefully and they can meet their friends peacefully,” she said.

“So that my godsons can also grow under a relatively peaceful sky.”
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Berlin — The German army on Friday vacated an air base in junta-run Niger and flew its final troops home, completing a withdrawal from the restive Sahel nation.

At the end of May, Germany and Niger reached an interim agreement allowing the German military to continue operating its airbase in the capital, Niamey, until the end of August.

But negotiations to extend that agreement broke down, notably because the base’s personnel would no longer benefit from immunity from prosecution.

Senior German and Nigerien military officials read out joint statements announcing the completion of the withdrawal.

“This withdrawal does not mark the end of military cooperation between Niger and Germany, in fact the two sides are committed to maintaining military relations,” they said.

Five cargo planes carrying 60 German troops and 146 tons of equipment landed at the Wunsdorf air base around 6:30 pm local time (1630 GMT), where they were met by state secretary for defense Nils Hilmer.

Germany had operated the base in Niger since February 2016, and it once housed some 3,200 personnel.

Niger has been run by a military government since a coup d’etat in July 2023 ousted president Mohamed Bazoum, who has been held as a prisoner ever since.

The regime has turned its back on other Western allies such as France and the United States to turn towards Russia and Iran.

A similar shift has taken place in neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso, which are likewise ruled by military leaders and faced with violence from jihadist groups. 
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london — Russia has accused the European Union of “theft” after the bloc transferred the first tranche of profits from frozen Russian assets to Ukraine to boost its military capabilities in the face of Moscow’s invasion. The G7 group of leading industrialized nations plans a similar scheme.

However, there are concerns that the asset schemes could prompt some countries to cut their own bilateral funding to Ukraine, after Germany indicated it could end bilateral military aid for Kyiv after 2025.

The European Union said Friday that it had so far provided around $48 billion in military aid to Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion. The bloc has begun providing military and civilian aid to Ukraine using profits from $300 billion worth of confiscated Russian assets, following an EU agreement struck in May.

“We have mobilized the first tranche of windfall profits from Russian frozen assets. It’s 1.4 billion [euros, or $1.55 billion]. Part of it is going directly to Ukraine in order to boost the Ukrainian defense industry. By March, we will have the second tranche of the windfall profits,” EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell told reporters Friday.

Russian anger

Moscow described the transfer of profits from its frozen assets as “theft.”

“These are illegal actions. They will definitely have legal consequences. This is nothing but illegal expropriation — in Russian, theft — of our money, our assets,” Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in a phone call Thursday.

The G7 also agreed in June to use frozen Russian assets to finance a $50 billion loan to provide military aid for Ukraine, although that scheme has yet to be finalized.

Germany indicated this month that it intends to end bilateral military aid for Ukraine from 2026 as it seeks to close a $13 billion budget deficit. Berlin said the G7 asset mechanism could help pay for the shortfall.

Germany is currently Ukraine’s second-biggest bilateral donor, after the United States. The move to end that support has come under widespread criticism, said analyst Liana Fix of the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations.

“The political signal that it sends is devastating: that the biggest donor in absolute terms in Europe, Germany, suddenly stops its support for Ukraine, especially as it is unclear when and how exactly this G7 mechanism on the Russian frozen assets will work,” Fix said.

“The idea of the G7 instrument was to communicate to [Russian President] Vladimir Putin that it doesn’t make sense for him to outwait the West, right? That he cannot hope that at some point the West will stop support. And so this is a contradicting sign now — that the moment another financial source has been tapped, suddenly Ukraine funding is cut out of the budget,” Fix told VOA.

Political pressure

Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently insisted Germany would continue to support Kyiv.

“We will support Ukraine as long as it will be necessary and we will be the biggest national supporter of Ukraine in Europe,” Scholz told reporters during a visit to Moldova on August 21.

Amid enduring economic pressures at home, Scholz is facing domestic political difficulties, said Fix.

“Although the foreign policy has not changed, it shows changing priorities. Because before, for the governing coalition, Ukraine support was sacred. Nothing could be changed about that. And it shows how desperate the governing coalition in Berlin is for their political survival, ahead of elections in the autumn in eastern Germany.”

Long-range missiles

Meanwhile, the European Union on Thursday urged member states and Western allies to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles to target sites inside Russia.

“The military platform for Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure should not stay off limits for elimination, should not be a sanctuary for Russia attacking Ukraine,” Borrell told reporters.

“To facilitate Ukraine to respond to the Russian aggression inside Russian territory is in accordance with international law. And I don’t see why someone says it is going to war against Moscow. No, we are not going to war with Moscow. We are delivering arms to Ukraine, that’s all,” he added.
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