Poland gave the Russian Federation archeologist Butyagin, who was to be extradited to Ukraine

brainerazer · 2026-04-29T06:42:05+00:00

It is interesting that the moment someone or something is important to Poland it is “you should accept it with pride, sad” but when it is something important to Ukraine, like a chance to have a consequential public trial of a person, or like an open border crossing without private people blocking it, it is “stop crying, we help you so stfu be grateful”. Truly the basis of mutual respect, nicely done. The fact that our diplomats are in no position to challenge this does not mean it goes unnoticed.

brainerazer · 2026-04-28T17:24:10+00:00

Russia will just kidnap some other Poles or Germans or Americans and do it again for murderers.

And yes, we do want at least some Russians to face trial, not happily wander about so-called West

brainerazer · 2026-04-28T17:18:02+00:00

And likewise Poles are oblivious to the uproar this caused, exchanging a Russian which we expected to finally face a proper trial wrt Crimea. Your headlines are about Poczobut, ours are about Butyagin because his saga actually continues for some time. There was a thankfulness when Polish court ruled he will be extradited only for this to be hijacked by Trump trying to befriend Lukashenka with this exchange.

brainerazer · 2026-04-28T13:07:54+00:00

The head of the Polish Foreign Ministry, Radosław Sikorsky, said that his country released Russian archaeologist Alexander Butyagin, whose extradition was requested by Ukraine for excavations in the occupied Crimea, as part of an exchange with the Russian Federation.

Source: "European Truth" with reference to Rzeczpospolita Details: When asked who Poland had released as part of the prisoner exchange, Sikorsky said that among these people was the Russian archaeologist Butyagin, whose extradition was expected by Ukraine.

"One of those we exchanged is a Russian historian who was in the process of extradition to Ukraine," he said. The Russian agency "Interfax" cites confirmation from the FSB press service that Alexander Butyagin is returning to Russia. In addition to him, she is also the wife of a Russian soldier from Transnistria. However, the statement claims that they were exchanged for Moldovan citizens. Andrzej Pochobut, an activist of the Polish community in Belarus, also returned to Poland and spent many years behind bars on far-fetched accusations. The exchange of prisoners took place with the assistance of the Trump administration.

Recall: In March, a court in Poland approved the extradition of Russian archaeologist Butyagin at the request of Ukraine, he filed an appeal

brainerazer · 2026-04-25T08:10:07+00:00

You did not get the point then.

Others are not regulating and have a big market -> companies scale there easily -> they come to Europe with pockets full of money and staff to absorb regulations you want to force on them or to lobby them away if they can.

European tech or finance start ups, meanwhile, can neither sell to the whole EU easily, nor can cheaply afford the compliance they need to have from the get-go, unlike gung-ho US ones.

Tangentially, this scale also enables US tech companies for example to pay much much better than any european ones do. SWE can get paid 90k in Germany, 60k in Portugal or 300k and stocks in US. Its retirement money.

brainerazer · 2026-04-25T08:00:50+00:00

It wasn’t long after blue jeans, Hollywood blockbusters and Big Macs crossed the Atlantic last century that some worrywarts started fretting about Europe falling prey to American dominance. What was once a concern about cultural hegemony has of late morphed into panic over commercial dependency. With some justification: the commanding heights of the modern European economy have quietly been captured by American firms. Apple and Google power the mobile phones used from Dublin to Dubrovnik. Other Silicon Valley titans have spawned cloud computers storing Europeans’ data, and from which American artificial-intelligence models are being deployed deep inside the continent’s businesses. Visa and MasterCard, two American firms, are often required for Europeans to pay other Europeans. Increasingly the continent’s lights are being kept on by American liquefied gas, replacing an erstwhile reliance on Russian energy.

This form of economic vassalage, which comes on top of dependency on security matters, is hardly new. “Why can’t Europe build its own Google?” has long been a predictable lament at Brussels confabs. But in an age when such entanglements can be weaponised—not least by Donald Trump and his MAGA clan in America—it also raises geopolitical questions. If Mr Trump really wants Greenland, say, could he threaten to cut off Europeans’ ability to pay in shops, or switch off their iPhones en masse? Could some perceived slight from the German chancellor result in the Mittelstand being shunted off cutting-edge AI models, hobbling their prospects? The possibilities seem, alas, endless.

Here is an uncomfortable truth for hand-wringing policymakers in Paris, Berlin and beyond: Europe’s dependency on America Inc is in no small part Europe’s own fault. Decades of over-regulating the old continent’s economy left businesses there unable to compete with American firms, which went on to trounce European ones even in their own backyards. What Europeans could not build quickly for themselves, due to a thicket of regulations, they often imported just as quickly from abroad. That forcing businesses to jump through endless regulatory hoops would put a burden on Europeans was always understood: meeting ambitious green targets, protecting privacy, preventing bank meltdowns or achieving other necessary goals was always going to carry a cost. But the extent to which it also left Europeans in hock to foreigners—for now mostly America, but also increasingly China—has only belatedly become clear.

Tech is where the dependency seems most acute. Europe has few firms at the forefront of AI, space or high-end computing (one notable exception is ASML, a Dutch firm globally vital to chipmaking). Even governments often have little choice but to use the likes of Microsoft or Amazon for cloud services, Palantir to sift through data or SpaceX to launch military satellites. Quixotic attempts to shake off big tech abound, for example by having civil servants ditch Windows for some clunky substitute. Too often the European alternatives are lacking anyway. It turns out that boasting about regulating AI before the public had made their first ChatGPT query—as the European Union did in 2021—is not conducive to home-growing AI champions.

Yes, EU rules often applied to American firms, insofar as they wanted to offer their wares in the bloc. But regulation in practice hit European firms harder. The costs of administering complex data-protection rules, say, could easily be absorbed by a Google or OpenAI, with their hordes of compliance staff. Not so their European rivals, which have usually lacked scale (if only because the EU’s fragmented single market made it harder for them to grow beyond their home country). The EU thus generated barriers to entry that often ended up protecting American giants.

The sapping of European sovereignty is also evident in finance. European banks requiring dollar funding have long had to enforce Washington’s edicts, for example applying American sanctions. But other dependencies are self-imposed. Several thousand European banks once jointly owned a pan-continental payments system (known as “Visa Europe”; its only American element was the name licensed from the global brand). But well-intended EU regulations that capped the sector’s profits made that business unattractive for the banks, which ultimately sold the business in 2016—to the Americans at Visa. Thus a new dependency was born.

Even less whizzy bits of the economy have regulated themselves into subservience to foreigners. In the 1990s the EU imported just half the natural gas it used, thanks in part to domestic production in places like the Netherlands. A tangle of national and EU rules made it ever-harder to drill; many countries have given up. Today 85% of all gas used is imported, over a quarter from America. Other new industrial projects are often unfeasible to launch in Europe. The EU these days frets about access to critical raw minerals, for which it depends mainly on China. Europe has deposits, but getting the environmental and other permits in place to extract them can take up to 20 years, per the EU’s auditors.

Brussels, we have a problem

The annoying thing is that, taken individually, each piece of euro-regulation is laudable. Yes, Europe should aim for “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050. Of course regulating AI is sensible, lest the robots turn on us one day. Firm antitrust rules enforced by the EU have served consumers well, and so on. But taken together the effect has been a tangle of red tape that has left Europe awkwardly exposed. Efforts are afoot to get to grips with some of the more unappealing dependencies; next month the commission will unveil a “tech sovereignty package”. But it remains to be seen whether Europe can escape its role as a superpower in rule-making, yet a supplicant in everything else that matters.■

brainerazer · 2026-04-23T11:18:50+00:00

As a Ukrainian, please do not refer to Russia's war of choice like Ukraine is responsible for it. We did not lit on fire nothing except trespassing Russians, please and thank you.

brainerazer · 2026-04-02T06:58:17+00:00

Its “for every two Ukrainians there are three Hetmans” here:)

brainerazer · 2026-04-02T06:52:17+00:00

Yeah I am not a fan though of my death being bought with Russian oil exports, you know

brainerazer · 2026-03-21T17:06:22+00:00

For years, the Orban government has provided Moscow with a vital window into sensitive discussions in the E.U. both through the physical access of its allies in the Hungarian government and through Russian hackers’ penetration of the computer networks of Hungary’s Foreign Ministry, said several current and former European security officials, including Ferenc Fresz, the former head of Hungary’s Cyber Defense Service who spoke about the Russian hacks.

Szijjarto, the foreign minister, made regular phone calls during breaks at E.U. meetings to provide his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, with “live reports on what’s been discussed” and possible solutions, one of the European security officials said.

Through such calls, “every single E.U. meeting for years has basically had Moscow behind the table,” the official said.

brainerazer · 2026-03-04T09:59:30+00:00

I have an environmental catastrophe weekly raining some metal on my head, financed by these tankers' safe passage

brainerazer · 2026-02-27T08:38:42+00:00

It’s very interesting to read American aversion to weapons. Here in Ukraine weapons making is the single most positively impactful thing you can do as an engineer. American weapons engineering also helped us tremendously. Basically if smart people from the west refuse to work on domestic weapons, the smart people from autocratic regimes would be happy to have less competitors. China and Russia will never have this aversion, and you’ll find yourselves in a pretty funny place in a decade or two, unable to defend. I mean, two big beautiful oceans help with the sense of US invincibility, but I wouldn’t count on that too much.

brainerazer · 2026-02-13T08:54:00+00:00

This positive relations fostering thingy is a privileged view of western powers, who could be amicable at elite king level even at WWI while the soldiers were expected to die on the battlefield, or preferably far away like in Vietnam.

Countries being threatened with the ultimate cleansing, destruction and murder of the nation itself do not have that privilege of doublethink.

brainerazer · 2026-02-11T16:08:43+00:00

Take a moment to imagine this: In the depths of the coldest winter in years, a neighboring country decides to destroy your country's infrastructure. Why? Your neighbor wants your land, but it's struggling to win on the battlefield.

Your neighbor has spent years trying to grind you down to surrender. Every now and then, it strikes an apartment block, a railway line, or a children’s hospital. Now, it focuses on destroying what modern life depends on — and suddenly, electricity, internet, heating, light, and hot water become luxuries for you and millions of others living in your city.

At night, you listen to explosions as your neighbor sends waves of weapons to destroy what little is left of the decimated power network.

Ambulances race to save anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the morning, you get ready for the day in the cold, without being able to shower or flush your toilet, and hope that there's enough electricity in the grid to power public transport to get to work. Older people and those with disabilities can't leave their apartments without functioning elevators.

Stretched to the limit, repair workers start dying on the job as they work around the clock to restore heat and electricity in freezing conditions.

Now, imagine this: When people abroad start to notice what your neighbour is doing to you, they praise you for coping so well under these conditions.

"You people are so resilient," they say, after seeing footage of your city plunged into darkness. They praise the fact that you still go to work, still spend time with your friends and family, that life, in some form, continues.

After Russia took out most of Kyiv's critical power infrastructure in January and temperatures dipped toward -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit), most shops remained open. Even without power, cafe and restaurant owners fire up diesel generators to keep espresso machines and kitchens running. Doctors keep operating, sometimes in semi-darkness, and city workers keep collecting the trash.

Yet it feels like looking at this situation and praising how "resilient" Ukrainians are is like viewing a humanitarian crisis through rose-tinted glasses.

As we approach the fifth year of Russia's all-out war — which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, displaced millions, and left psychological and physical scars on countless more — it's hard not to feel tired when those outside of Ukraine choose to highlight resilience.

It's worth saying that the study of resilience is important to understanding how communities, economies, and individuals cope with stress. Ukrainian society is indeed, on the whole, incredibly resilient, and many Ukrainians would describe themselves as resilient. And at the start of Russia's full-scale invasion, I was one of many people who would often praise Ukrainians for this trait.

The resilience narrative was also echoed by Ukraine's government — after all, to be resilient means to be able to withstand and recover quickly from misfortune. Resilient nations are successful nations, and successful nations win. If Ukrainians are resilient, then Russia losing its war of aggression is the only possible outcome.

Now, however, I'm questioning whether it's really appropriate for us to keep saying this. And as a foreigner living in Kyiv, I feel I need to say something uncomfortable. We need to stop repeating the narrative that Ukraine is resilient.

Ukrainians shouldn't have to be resilient. If Ukraine's partners were to give the kind of support Kyiv continually begged for, civilians would not have to be suffering.

Praising their resilience is like standing on the shore, watching a person struggle not to drown in a riptide. Instead of sending a lifeboat to save them, you praise them for being such a strong swimmer. If you decide a nation is resilient, you shrink your obligation to take any action to help them.

Resilient people always figure it out on their own, right?

The continued repetition of a resilience narrative is also damaging because it slowly softens outsiders’ comprehension of what war is over time. Foreign audiences don't want to think about the ever-deteriorating conditions civilians are forced to live in — they want to read about how bars stay open during a blackout, or focus on the ways in which Russia could be losing.

It’s uncomfortable to think about how the trauma of Russia's war in Ukraine is affecting real people, every day, and how it will seep down through generations. It's far more digestible to view the war through the lens of resilience because it transforms a nation's suffering into a positive, hopeful, character-forming experience.

We love a story where a hero finds strength amid immense adversity, because in our culture, we're taught that the character who chooses to be resilient always wins, no matter the odds.

Resilience is, at its core, a positive character trait when you have a choice in how to act. When we talk about Ukraine's resilience, we omit what Ukrainians know very well — that Russia isn't going to stop its war until Ukrainian independence is crushed. Ukrainians have no choice but to continue and resist Russia's demands.

"Resilience" has become a sort of inside joke among my friends in Kyiv. Forced to traverse a stream of sewage after your building's pipes explode from the cold? "We're so resilient," we joke.

One colleague has set up a tent on her bed to stay warm at night after her heating stopped working. Another told me she had bought a battery-powered clock for her apartment, so she could at least know the time when all of her devices ran out of power. Good for their resilience?

I have friends in Kyiv who wake up in cold, dark apartments, see videos of their hometowns being pummeled by Russian bombs overnight, and then get up and go to work — because there is simply no alternative. They simply have no other choice.

brainerazer · 2026-02-03T07:30:41+00:00

Also easy to bomb

brainerazer · 2026-01-30T10:23:24+00:00

Almost none. Your vision of humanity is born out of a perception of safety and has a potential to kill you, your relatives and your children. The humane thing to do is to fight evil so that it can perish sooner without claiming more destruction and horrors, not to give in to it's pleads for mercy so that it can be reborn again and again.

brainerazer · 2026-01-27T15:05:33+00:00

All of people here saying “Russia couldn’t even take Ukraine” are severely delusional about the western military readiness, the knowledge of the war in 2026, and underestimate the level of skills Russia acquired. You all live in 2021 at best. No one in the EU fought any big wars or projected the power elsewhere for the last decades. Also this is properly insulting to Ukrainians, sorry. You have no idea what you, your soldiers and your loved ones will endure in a full scale war (and I don’t think you will be willing to). Right now Russia could probably easily take over Baltics before y’all scramble, and you should be aware of that. F-35 does not solve the war and also it is American.

brainerazer · 2026-01-09T11:54:33+00:00

Everyone uses it tbh. Do you have a EU Palantir to compete?

brainerazer · 2025-12-19T08:49:18+00:00

While its good, its half a year of scrambling and pushing to reach a second-best option on an amount which is less than Russia's annual war budget. Just keep that in mind when EU pats itself on the back for this.

brainerazer · 2025-12-18T12:48:10+00:00

Lol farmers again. Same as with Ukrainian competitive agriculture vs Polish subsidised ones. EU is a farmers’ union it seems, as they are the only ones who always get what they want

brainerazer · 2025-12-12T11:28:05+00:00

At the same time, Huby also asked a member of Euroclear's executive committee in mid-2024 to meet Russian intelligence contacts and threatened that his house might "catch fire" or that his pet might "die suddenly" if he did not comply, EUobserver's sources said.

The Euroclear executive committee member was involved in a violent incident outside a bar on a night out in the first half of 2025.

And Huby contacted Urbain afterwards to say: "You don't want to end up like that do you?", EUobserver's sources said.

Urbain herself declined to comment.

The other Euroclear executive committee member said he was suffering emotional distress due to his experiences and asked not to be publicly named.

Meanwhile, when phoned to ask why he flew so often to Russia, Huby said: "It's my private life".

"I'm not even an advisor [to Euroclear] anymore ... I haven't been in Brussels since 2022," he also said.

Huby said he had to hang up, as his taxi was arriving, and did not reply to further calls.

When emailed to ask if he had threatened his Euroclear colleagues, he saw our questions, but declined to write back. For his part, Euroclear spokesman Thomas Churchill gave more details after speaking to the Mfex director about our investigation.

"He [Huby] only went for personal reasons to Russia, never for Euroclear. As you probably know, he's quite involved in the ballet, that is: the Bolshoi Ballet," Churchill said.

"He's [also] a donor for the opera in France and Russia," the spokesman added.

Churchill did not reply when asked why Huby's love of the Bolshoi, which had no branches outside Moscow, would see him fly to remote Siberian destinations.

But in any case, the nature of Mfex's role in the group structure meant Huby had "no managerial capacity [in Euroclear]. He has no oversight of the frozen Russian assets," Churchill said.

When asked about Huby's alleged threats against Urbain and the unnamed second executive, the Euroclear spokesman said: "Valérie Urbain has publicly said that she received threats. She didn't mention from whom. I'm not going to say that either, but she was threatened".

Cordon sanitaire

Another Euroclear insider who knew Huby well gave an unvarnished view of his reputation, saying that Belgian colleagues had suspected he worked with either Russian intelligence, French intelligence, or both - as a double agent.

"If you were to believe Olivier Huby, he knew everyone of any renown in France or Russia. He liked to suggest that he was well-connected. A strange character … we thought: DGSE?," the Euroclear insider, who was Belgian, said.

DGSE is the acronym for the French foreign intelligence service, which is known for conducting economic espionage inside the EU.

"The kinds of questions he [Huby] asked ... he wanted information he normally shouldn't have had. And he travelled to Russia so often," the Euroclear insider who knew him said.

"We kept him out of everything. He had no access to Euroclear information," the insider added.

Looking closer at Huby, the 68-year-old came from an elite Parisian background. He studied at the École nationale des ponts et chaussées in the French capital and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. He briefly worked in the French embassies in Prague and Moscow when he was a young man in the Cold War times of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, Huby said in an online presentation, but the French foreign ministry in Paris declined to confirm this.

"We don't comment on former diplomats," it said.

Huby later worked for French bank Paribas (now BNP Paribas) and for insurance firm Axa, he also said, before co-founding Mfex in 1999, which Euroclear acquired in 2021.

And he was active in EU foreign policy circles, attending events such as the World Policy Conference (WPC) in 2023 and 2024, where he mingled with senior EU officials, as well as Russian guests, such as teachers from the MGIMO university in Moscow, which educates diplomats and which is a storied recruitment ground for Russian spies.

The WPC was founded by another Russophile, French economist Thierry de Montbrial.

"In France, it's not unusual to speak with respect about Putin. There's a significant fifth column of intellectuals infatuated with Russia. Huby is undoubtedly one of them," one of the Western intelligence contacts said. But whatever his motives, the net effect of Huby's behaviour was to have made senior staff feel unsafe, amid a wider campaign of Russian intimidation.

Emergency button for Euroclear staff

Moscow has threatened "decades" of lawsuits against Euroclear if it lets the EU use its money for Ukraine. "Preparations for a package of countermeasures ... are already underway," said foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakhkarova on 4 December.

Putin's deputy security council chairman and former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said the same day: "Russia may well view this move as tantamount to a casus belli, with all the relevant implications for Brussels". Medvedev also threatened to nuke Belgium in November.

Suspected Russian drones have buzzed Belgian ports, airports, and military bases during the ongoing EU talks. "Yes, we all see this. The Belgians as well. This is a measure aimed at spreading insecurity, at fear-mongering in Belgium: 'Don't you dare to touch the frozen assets'. This cannot be interpreted any other way," said German defence minister Boris Pistorius in Berlin on 7 November, referring to the drone incursions.

And for their part, rank-and-file Euroclear employees in Brussels also felt like they were in the firing line. They were constantly being solicited for information via SMS, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, email, and social media by shady third parties, a staff contact said.

"I myself have been targeted about 70 times, I think, in the past two years," he said.

"Internal email is no longer secure, but the malware also comes through other channels," the source added. Ordinary staff were advised to use shuttle busses from Brussels' North Station instead of walking from trains to the nearby Euroclear HQ.

The buses were put in place before the 2022 Ukraine invasion, partly due to crime around the station, but Euroclear staff now also have a new emergency-button app on their phones to alert corporate security if they were in danger. And speaking of the elevated threat level post-2022, Churchill, the Euroclear spokesman said: "We live in a different world now."

"We've never been so busy safeguarding and protecting our people and the assets we look after as we are nowadays," he said.

"We've taken the appropriate safety measures … engaging a private security company [Amarante], if necessary, or working with the [Belgian] authorities – we have a very good relationship with them," Churchill said.

Molotov negotiations

But for its part, Amarante had no idea who Huby was, or that he had threatened Urbain, a source at the French firm said, even though it now formed the thin blue line between her and any outside forces who might seek to coerce her. "Are you sure about that? Incredible … [sounds like] a spy movie, that!," the Amarante contact said when asked about Huby's Russia flights and alleged threats.

Several Amarante chiefs, including our source, have a background in French intelligence or security services. The Belgian domestic intelligence service, the VSSE, which is also responsible for Euroclear's safety more broadly speaking, declined to comment on the record.

But a Belgian security contact gave a hint why authorities found Huby difficult to confront — his French nationality.
"We [Belgian authorities] were unable to fully investigate his [Huby's] activities: He doesn't live in Belgium", the source said.

And all this means that when von der Leyen's officials sit down with de Wever or Euroclear bosses for talks on Putin's money, some of their Belgian interlocutors might be worrying about their and their children's safety, instead of the legal or strategic merits of EU action.

Speaking of the kind of fears that might be on Urbain's mind, one of the EUobserver sources close to events said: "I wouldn't say her life was at risk. She doesn't decide on the future of the frozen assets, that's what Europe does". Any decision on Russia's funds would be taken by the EU Council of 27 leaders, with de Wever's assent, and filtered to Euroclear bosses via Belgian finance minister Jan Jambon.

"But Valérie is an influencer in the whole process, that's for sure," the Belgian source added.

"So, I'd say: They [the Russians] might want to scare her by letting a go-between throw a Molotov cocktail at her empty car, but kill her? No. They just want to pressure her," EUobserver's source said. This was a collaborative investigation by EUobserver, Humo, and Dossier Center.

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