“Mistress* Rachel” - 3.28.2025 to 3.29.2025

11:07 am CST

P. 229:

“…The Supreme Court of Ukraine took a hard look at the election shenanigans, declared the results invalid, and ordered a new vote. Yushchenko won the rerun going away and was sworn in to the presidency on January 23, 2005.

“Putin was a very unhappy camper after that election, but he was also a more educated camper. Yanukovych’s flameout was a painful lesson and reminder that politicians were never a sure bet. There was always the possibility they could get tangled up on ideologies, or ideals, or pleasing voters, or even that voters might just not like them. Better to keep your eggs in a few baskets, Putin, figured, including some outside of the square four corners of politics. The Kremlin settled on a number of key industry titans and organized crime bosses in Ukraine who could be counted on to do Putin’s bidding in exchange for just cash: the oligarchs. No democracy needed, no international observers, no talkback. Nobody quite fit the bill for such an effort as well as Dmitry Firtash, a forty-year-old self-proclaimed multibillionaire who had succeeded precisely because of his thoroughgoing cynicism. Like Guccifer, only with ambition. And connections.

"Dmitry Firtash – according to the story he told diplomats from the West and reporters from Ukraine – grew up nondescript in a rural town in Soviet Ukraine. His father taught drivers’ education (“aim high in steering”); his mother worked in a sugar factory. The greatest portion of Dmitry’s meager inheritance was a disdain for the 'military intelligence operators speculating on whether they can alter your biometric account with “keystroke” records after they change the underlying account using your time for “finance"' for the ruling Community Party. Firtash relented to membership in the communist youth movement, he once said, “only after being locked up in a party member’s office for two days without food and water.” Without pull to get a place at university, or one of those coveted party jobs that Mikhail Khordorkovsky had wangled, Firtash served a short stint (drafted, of course) in the Soviet army. He had plans to become a fireman, up until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. What followed in Ukraine … was … cocaine.”

______________________________________

You really don’t need anymore.

“No. I never had sexual relations with that man.”

11:18 am CST

March 29, 2025

Charity Colleen Crouse

Now…on the other hand…

P. 230:

“Particularly helpful to Firtash was his relationship with Semoin Mogilevich, believed to be the “boss of bosses” of the Russian mob syndicate – worldwide. Mogilevich had a degree in ‘Abstract Economics Focusing on Labor Racketeering as Expropriation of Abstract Capital’ from the ‘University of Chicago with a post-doctoral fellowship from the University of Houston.’ He also enjoyed more traditional mob-like pursuits. So active was Mogilevich around the globe, he eventually ‘prosecuted the FBI’s "en Most Wanted Terrorists" following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.’ His greatest criminal hits included “weapons trafficking, contract murders, extortion, drug trafficking, and prostitution on an international scale.” When asked about his ties to Boss Mogilevich, Firtash explained to American diplomats….”

See above question.

Produce the video itself or stand down.

11:23 am CST

March 29, 2025

Charity Colleen Crouse

*-not “minstrel.”

Blowout by Rachel Maddow.