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US Says Russia Hacked Energy Grid, Punishes 19 for Meddling (apnews.com)
Associated Press: Pushing back harder on Russia, the Trump administration accused Moscow on Thursday of a concerted hacking operation targeting the U.S. energy grid, aviation systems and other infrastructure, and also imposed sanctions on Russians for alleged interference in the 2016 election. It was the strongest action to date against Russia by the administration, which has long been accused of being too soft on the Kremlin, and the first punishments for election meddling since President Donald Trump took office. The sanctions list included the 13 Russians indicted last month by special counsel Robert Mueller, whose Russia investigation the president has repeatedly sought to discredit. U.S. national security officials said the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and intelligence agencies had determined that Russian intelligence and others were behind a broad range of cyberattacks beginning a year ago that have infiltrated the energy, nuclear, commercial, water, aviation and manufacturing sectors. Further reading: Russian Government Cyber Activity Targeting Energy and Other Critical Infrastructure Sectors (US-Cert); U.S. blames Russia for cyber attacks on energy grid, other sectors (Reuters); U.S. says Russian hackers targeted American energy grid (Politico); Trump administration finally announces Russia sanctions over election meddling (CNN); U.S. sanctions on Russia cite 2016 election interference -- but remain largely symbolic (USA Today); U.S. Sanctions Russians Charged by Mueller for Election Meddling (Bloomberg); and Trump Administration Sanctions Russians for Election Meddling and Cyberattacks (The New York Times).
Seems like they've chosen to sanction people already identified and charged by Mueller, but not anyone close to Putin.
#DeleteChrome
No "sanctions" of any sort will actually hit any of them, they are all safe in Russia. Americans are just a senile, alcoholic group of cretins who cannot accept that they have lost power and relevance at an international level. They are simply powerless against Putin. He won everywhere, in all of the geopolitical crises of the last decade: Ukraine, Syria, even the Snowden case. And they lost. Yawn...
Both Eltsin and Putin were little more than US placed viceroys in practice. Putin only recently started to show any sort of irreverence to his overlords kinda like False Dmitry I. But make no mistake, it's not about Russia, it's about clowns in US trying to make an external scapegoat for their own mistakes.
Really. Really? You think that America went out of its way to avoid ISIS in Syria? You taint the rest of your post by starting off with that, makes it hard to take you at all seriously.
America was reluctant to get involved in Syria in general, because the factions that it wanted to back, the so called "moderate rebels", were basically nonexistent as actual fighting forces on the ground, which was revealed particularly embarrassingly a couple years ago. Not because the US wanted to stay out of the way of ISIS, America only majorly got involved in the war itself at all because of ISIS and its rapid early expansion, particularly into Iraq. The only other faction in Syria that America really has anything close to a good relationship at all with is the Kurds, which itself is a very complicated relationship, given that some of the Kurdish groups are basically old school communists and the Turks, ostensible NATO allies of the US, have been waging their own war against the Kurds on the Turkey-Syria border.
The US clearly wanted Assad to lose, if for no other reason than he's allied with Russia and Iran and has been a thorn in Israel's side due to the Syrian relationship with Hezbollah. But the US spinned its wheels for so long under Obama, not even getting started about Trump, because it didn't know anyone around who it actually wanted to win that had a remote chance of doing so. The typical US allies of the region, Sunni led countries like Turkey, have been less restrained their support for Assad's enemies.
It is sort of curious how hard you are arguing for the Assad side, is it support for him in particular or is it because the Russians or Iranians are fighting on his side? Assuming for the sake of argument that he didn't use sarin gas, its hard to argue that the Syrian government hasn't engaged in plenty of other war crimes. Take your pick of what you would find acceptable from Amnesty International's 2017/2018 report if you don't believe me or think I have an unacceptable US bias, since that doesn't let the US allied side of the war off the hook.
The thing about chemical weapons in general is that they are not particularly effective as weapons of war, they are too uncontrollable and tend to go where the wind takes them, regular explosives are better for destroying military targets. Chemical weapons are weapons of terror, and their use should be viewed through that lens. See the Russian poisoning of the ex-spy in Britain with a Soviet era nerve agent in the past couple of weeks if you want an example of that. Or is that too sore of a topic, as well?