#sergey mironov

[proudlymale]

Sergey Mironov

[odinsblog]

🗣️This is literally a war crime

A key political ally of Vladimir Putin has adopted a child seized from a Ukrainian children's home, according to documents uncovered by BBC's Panorama.

Sergey Mironov, the 70-year-old leader of a Russian political party, is named on the adoption record of a two-year-old girl who was taken in 2022 by a woman he is now married to.

Records show the girl's identity was changed in Russia.

The child, originally named Margarita, was one of 48 who went missing from Kherson Regional Children's Home when Russian forces took control of the city.

They are among about 20,000 children who, according to the Ukrainian government, have been taken by Russian forces since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Earlier this year the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children's Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, for the alleged illegal deportation of Ukrainian children to Russian-controlled territory, with the intention of permanently removing them from their own country.

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Sergey Mironov

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Photography by Sergei Mironov

[russianreader]

The Most Dangerous Places in the World to Be a Child

ZZ Top: Russian politician Sergei Mironov and his wife have been accused of kidnapping an infant girl from Ukraine Sergei Mironov, leader of the party A Just Russia–Patriots–For Truth, and his wife adopted a child taken out of Ukraine. The ten-month-old girl’s personal data was completely changed. Now she bears the surname Mironova, and her birthplace is listed as Podolsk, a city in the Moscow…

[mariacallous]

A Russian disinformation campaign is deploying everything from high-ranking lawmakers and government officials to lifestyle influencers, bloggers, and powerful state-run media outlets to stoke divisions in the United States around the Texas border crisis.

WIRED has also obtained exclusive access to data from two separate disinformation research groups that demonstrate a coordinated Russian effort on Telegram and X (formerly Twitter) to sow discord by pushing the narrative that the US is heading for civil war.

The disinformation campaign began in earnest in late January, and expanded after Russian politicians spoke out when the US Supreme Court lifted an order by a lower court and sided with President Joe Biden’s administration to rule that US Border Patrol officers were allowed to take down razor-wire fencing erected by the Texas National Guard. Days later, when Texas governor Greg Abbott refused to stand down, former Russian president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, who is currently deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, claimed that the Texas border dispute is “another vivid example of the US hegemony getting weaker.”

“Establishing a People’s Republic of Texas is getting more and more real,” Medvedev added on X, claiming the situation could lead to “a bloody civil war which cost thousands upon thousands of lives.”

Others chimed in: “It’s high time the American president, following in his predecessor Obama’s footsteps, declares ‘Texas must go’ and assembles an international coalition to liberate its residents in the name of democracy,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram. Russian lawmaker Sergey Mironov even offered Texas help: “If necessary, we are ready to help with the independence referendum. And of course, we will recognize the People’s Republic of Texas if there is one,” Mironov wrote on X.

After these comments, state media, influencers, and bloggers quickly got involved. Over the past two weeks, state-run media outlets like Sputnik and RT have called the dispute between the Texas governor and the Biden administration a “constitutional crisis” and an “unmitigated disaster,” while one Sputnik correspondent posed a video on the outlet’s X account, stating: “There’s a big convoy of truck drivers going down there. So, it can very easily get out of hand. It can genuinely lead to an actual civil war, where the US Army is fighting against US citizens.”

On Telegram, there were clear signs of a coordinated effort to boost conversations around the Texas crisis, according to analysis shared exclusively with WIRED by Logically, a company using artificial intelligence to track disinformation campaigns.

“The idea of targeting highly contentious US domestic issues and amplifying them via their own channels—it’s the standard Russian playbook for disinformation,” Kyle Walter, director of research at Logically, tells WIRED.

The channels on Telegram include those run by TV presenters, bloggers who report on Russia’s military, and social media influencers, each of whom have hundreds of thousands of followers. One of the accounts, belonging to Russian TV personality Vladimir Solovyov, has more than 1.2 million followers, and he claimed the “the US was close to civil war.”

When I'm trying to identify disinformation operations in the wild I need to understand the initial signals and ideas that Russian state media and influencers are sharing,” Walter tells WIRED. “Russian Telegram channels just blew up overnight, and started really dialing into messaging specifically about the possibility that Texas could be an independent state, the possibility that there could be a US civil war.”

Russian state media echoed these claims, and published a flood of articles with headlines featuring phrases like “Civil War 2.0.” They also spread conspiracies claiming that “US elites will keep the border wide open.”

Last week, the Russian Telegram channels and state media also began to boost the ‘Take Our Border Back’ convoy led by far-right extremists, sovereign citizens, QAnon adherents, and anti-vaccine conspiracists who traveled from Virginia to the border in Texas in support of Abbott. “Fears of FBI Spying on ‘Take Our Border Back’ Convoy Show US Democracy Dying,” one Sputnik headline read last week.

The convoy’s official channels on Telegram were also infiltrated by Russian accounts, though some were removed or called out by the US-based members of the group. “They are in every single group on any social media,” one member who calls themselves ‘Eat Putin’s Heart’ wrote on Telegram in response to a question about why Russians were members of the group. “They want a civil war/chaos more than anything. What’s bad for America is great for Russia.”

Researchers at Antibot4Navalny, a Russian anti-disinformation research group that has been closely tracking a Russian disinformation network known as Doppelganger on X, shared data exclusively with WIRED that shows a network of bot accounts previously linked to the Doppelganger campaign has been deployed online in the past week to discuss the Texas issue.

While previous Doppelganger campaigns shared links to fake websites designed to look like legitimate ones but with fake articles, this campaign linked to websites run built and maintained by the Doppelganger operatives to push narratives to suit their needs. One article, for example, appeared on a fake site called Warfare Insider, and stated that Texas “has become a battleground symbolizing the clash between state and federal authorities.

In recent days, the bots have also been responding to posts unrelated to Texas by referencing the situation at the border.

Some experts have been linking this campaign to previous Russian disinformation campaigns. Already, it echoes the incident when Russian operatives were accused of organizing an anti-immigrant rally and a counterprotest event to their own rally in Texas ahead of the 2016 election.

Caroline Orr, a behavioral scientist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland who tracks disinformation online, wrote in her newsletter Weaponized that the term “Free Texas” in Russian was being “used extensively [on X], and nearly exclusively, by Russian accounts associated with the notorious Internet Research Agency, which housed the 2016 election interference operation.”

The IRA was a Kremlin-linked troll farm launched in St. Petersburg that gained notoriety for its role in attempting to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election. It was run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin who also ran the Wagner mercenary group until he died in a mysterious helicopter crash last year.

There also appear to be a number of Russian accounts on X posing as pro-Texas groups, in another echo of 2016 when an account that claimed to be run by Tennessee Republicans was outed as Russian-run.

One of the suspect accounts is the Texan Independence Supporters, which has already been called out for spelling errors and constantly referencing Ukraine and Russia. On Sunday, the account claimed “we are a Texan organization, not Russian. We can definitely assure ya’ll [sic] that we’re not Russian.”

Before this, Russia had already been accused of dipping its toe in the 2024 US presidential election—including boosting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign—but Walters says the effort to push the Texas crisis narrative marks an escalation in the Kremlin’s efforts.

“This is the first thing that I see as a potentially significant concern to look out for, because I think it is an area [where] they could fairly easily cause more divide in the US,” he says.

[the-real-zhora-salome]

Missing Ukrainian child traced to Putin ally - BBC News

Another day, another Russian war crime.

[fandom-geek]

A key political ally of Vladimir Putin has adopted a child seized from a Ukrainian children's home, according to documents uncovered by BBC's Panorama.

Sergey Mironov, the 70-year-old leader of a Russian political party, is named on the adoption record of a two-year-old girl who was taken in 2022 by a woman he is now married to.

Records show the girl's identity was changed in Russia. Mr Mironov denies the allegations.

The child, originally named Margarita, was one of 48 who went missing from Kherson Regional Children's Home when Russian forces took control of the city.

They are among about 20,000 children who, according to the Ukrainian government, have been taken by Russian forces since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022.

[...] Ukraine says it has identified 19,546 children who have been taken to Russia. It claims that fewer than 400 have returned. Russia disputes these figures.

Moscow says it will reunite children with family or friends if a legitimate claim is made and they travel to get them. But many parents do not know where their children are, and the process of finding and retrieving them is difficult and complex.

We know of only one child from Kherson Children's Home who has been brought back to Ukraine. Last month, three-year-old Viktor Puzik, who had been in the facility waiting for an operation for a health condition, was collected from Crimea by his mother, Olha.

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These Black Witches Are More Magical Than Halloween Myths Would Have You Believe

Source: Sergey Mironov / Getty

Black magic originated as a term to describe magic by Black folks. Over time “black magic” has been equated to darkness, demons, and evil. This was intentional propaganda by white supremacy to separate Black folks from our ancestral magic. MADAMENOIRE spoke with five modern-day Black witches to separate the truth from myths surrounding black magic and witchcraft. For the purpose of this article witchcraft is a catch-all term to describe nature-based spiritual practices and a witch is someone who participates in these practices.

Black Witch

Black Witch is a non denominational Pagan who grew up in a Christian household. At 15, after listening to the band of Christians P.O.D—short for Payable on Death—she started questioning Chrisitanity and realized that she didn’t believe most of what she was taught. She happened across Paganism after reading a book called Where to Park Your Broomstick by Lauren Manoy and felt more at home with a nature and metaphysics based belief.

Dianté Vance-Jewett

Dianté is a Black queer witch. Although he wasraised in an open-minded Christian household,he found some of the teachings of the Church demeaning. He sought a spirituality that didn’t view him as an abomination. With his Rags to Witches podcast co-host Fiona, he wasintroduced to crystals and tarot reading in college and learned he was a witch.

Frankie Nicholson

Frankie is a Puerto Rican and Black Pagan witch. After watching The Craft with his aunt at five years old, he realized he was a witchbecause he could do the same thing the characters did. From there, he learned more about being a witch. Although he grew up in a Catholic household, as he got older, he realized that there was santeria and rootwork present in his family’s faith.

Juju

Juju, the host of A Little Juju podcast, is a Hoodoo and Orisha devotee. She was baptized Catholic and switched to many different Christian denominations. In 2016, through online circles and community conversation, she learned that Hoodoo has always been a part of her life as a Black American even if she didn’t have the language for it. It was after watching Beyonce’s Lemonade visuals, that she sought out more information about Orishas and found a house and a godparent.

Keon

Keon, known online as Millennial Soul Food, is a Hoodoo who’s initiated into Ifa Isese. They were introduced to Hoodoo through their grandma who was a Seer, and in 2014, they joined a Hoodoo coven in Chicago. After a series of random synchronicities while living in New Orleans, they received a reading from a woman who later became their godmother when they were initiated into Ifa Isese.

MN: Thank y’all for agreeing to speak with Madame Noire. What do you think the media gets wrong about witchcraft and Black magic?

Dianté: In the media, you never really see the races mixed together. It’s not showing that witches are inclusive. It’s still showing that we’re kind of segregated.

Black Witch: It’s more than some random White girl chanting bad rhymes over a candle and it isn’t some stereotypical voodoo queen with wild hair. Men can be witches. A witch is a person, not a species. Folk magick is built into culture, not some weird outlier in opposition to science and medicine. And there certainly is a rhyme and reason in magic but new age and pop culture heavily erodes and ignores that, which is both aggravating and insulting.

Frankie: It’s like, “Let’s get this money. Let’s be beautiful.” They make it more about the outer when it’s about the inner. I noticed on social media, especially with younger people, everybody wants to do a hex. Everybody wants to do a love spell. Everybody wants to get somebody back. That’s not what it really is about.

Juju: It can do all of those bad things that y’all show, but that’s not the full story. The scale is uneven when showing the negative impacts of witchcraft and not the healing aspects of what it is.

Keon: In a lot of occult arts there’s left hand and right hand paths. Left hand is cursing and the right hand is uplifting. The media misconstrues a lot of primary focuses of witches and occultists. Most of the time it’s about figuring out your own limitations and using your spiritual practices or magic to fill in the gaps or find out more about yourself.

So, witchcraft is not demonic. It’s not a consumable good and it’s not all about curses. Why do you think the media focuses so heavily on these things?

Juju: Why would you want someone to know who they are if you’re trying to enslave them and you are enslaving them? Why would you want them to have faith? Why would you want them to feel that they have power? Why would you want them to conjure a new reality? You wouldn’t. I think that’s a partial reason as to why [the media says] “We’re gonna show the evilness and demonic nature of these traditions because we don’t want you to know that we actually are very afraid of them because we know what they can do, and we don’t want y’all to do that.”

And what can witchcraft do?

Juju: It is a healing tradition. It’s accountability. It helps you ground yourself in identity. Black folks are always striving to understand more about ourselves, who we are, and who we come from—whether that is a continent or whether that is South Carolina. Knowing those roots and being able to pinpoint some family history or personality traits or even the generational traumas and generational joys.

Keon: A big part of witchcraft is working with your shadow, and to become a more powerful witch you have to understand your own shadow and vulnerabilities. Understanding my own intergenerational trauma has really helped inform my magic and also mentorship with people. Witchcraft is also about returning to nature and getting in alignment with practices that are hundreds of years old.

Frankie: Setting intentions, being consistent with your prayers, doing the work, and then watching it manifest. That’s the real magic. Because if you don’t do the work, you can sit on the couch all day and nothing’s gonna change.

It seems like being a witch is about discipline, consistency, and healing. How has being a witch changed your day to day life?

Frankie: I’m blessed. As a child, you think you know what spirituality is. You think you know what prayer is. You think you know what faith is, but now that I’m an adult, I realize I know what it is now.

Juju: I know I’m able to wake up and ground myself in a practice, and I have ritual to rely on. I truly believe that ritual can change your life. Whatever you decide to practice regularly and internalize can completely shift your day and shift your experiences and your outlook on life. These traditions, particularly ancestral veneration and talking to my dead people shift my outlook all the time. I’m able to have a level of accountability that I didn’t have before because I can consult spirits. I can talk to people who see so much farther than I see. I think that in itself just impacts everything else.

Black Witch: I’m happier in it far, far more than I would have been in Christianity. I have hardships like everyone else but at least I feel like I can handle them better. Plus I like polytheism, it works for me since I feel like it helps me understand the world around me better.

Dianté: Witchcraft has helped me dive deeper into myself. Ever since I discovered I was a witch, I’ve been focusing on healing myself. That’s helped because for a long time I was such a people pleaser. Discovering that I’m a witch means I don’t have to go through this. I can manifest my own destiny.

Keon: With Ifa, it helped give me a blueprint for my spirituality. It helped me learn more about my spiritual gifts. It’s really helped me ground myself. With Ifa, specifically, there’s a set of character principles and then if you’re initiated you get taboos to help with structuring your life. It’s helped me understand more about my spiritual boundaries, my approach to relationships, and different mantras I need to focus on for my own spiritual path.

Do y’all have any advice for Black people who are interested in magic?

Frankie: Black people, know your roots. Before the slave trade, what were our ancestors practicing? Who were they praying to? What were they worshiping?

Juju: It’s important to know that there are things that exist that want us free because we see so many lies and tales about the things that don’t want us free, but imagine if we ground ourselves in the things that people have used that even got them free.

Black Witch: It isn’t a magic cure but it does help to become more comfortable in the self. Black culture already has things like ancestor worship built into it, folk remedies like ginger for a bad stomach, and ideas such as “speaking something into existence.” In a way, it is kind of already woven into the culture already.

So a lot of Black people already practice witchcraft?

Frankie: When people pray to God, you’re setting an intention, and you’re praying for something to happen. When you light up that candle and you look at it, and you blow that candle out for your birthday, you did a spell. When you sit there and you go to the cathedral and get that holy water, you bought a potion. When you take a shower after a hard day at work, you’re washing off old energy.

Since it’s Halloween, I’m curious as to why it’s such a big event for witches?

Keon: In the Northern hemisphere, specifically, we see the weather go from warm to cold as a time where a lot of spiritualists, pagans, and witches see the veil as becoming thinner because we see death occur more in nature. That’s why we see people celebrating Halloween because that’s the harvest of the seeds the ancestors have helped us sow.

The concept of liminality is also important because in nature, we see the trees change colors, the leaves change colors as they go through the liminal phase between living and death. That is a central concept to Halloween and the Day of the Dead as to why you see people giving more offerings to ancestors like Brujería in Mexico, Fèt Gede with the Haitian Vodou people, and Halloween with witches. It’s more about remembering and honoring the harvest and honoring the cyclical transitions in nature.

Thank you. I’ve never made that connection before. Final thoughts?

Frankie: Just better yourself. Try to do as best as you can because the world is going crazy. We have a pandemic. We have a lot of deaths going on which is weird. We have a lot of people saying their opinions on the Internet that don’t pay no one else’s bills, but everybody’s got to be heard. It’s too much going on. Just focus on yourself, focus on your spirits, focus on being your best self, because I’d rather go out smiling than being angry in my heart. I’d rather go out smiling.

The practice of witchcraft is self-love, self-respect, and honoring yourself. It is a lot of magic to it and it is weird, but it’s very real.

RELATED CONTENT: Hoodoo Heritage Month: Conjuring, Culture, And Community

[argumate]

Several members of the Russian State Duma expressed concern about the dire situation on the frontlines in Ukraine during the Duma’s first plenary meeting of its autumn session on September 13. Leader of the Russian Communist Party Gennady Zyuganov stated that Russia needs to announce full mobilization because the Russian “special military operation” is a war. Zyuganov said that one can end a “special military operation” at any time, but that a war can end only in victory or defeat, and “we have no right to lose” this war.  Leader of the “Fair Russia—For Truth” Party Sergey Mironov called for social “mobilization,” in which regular Russians would pay attention more to the war in Ukraine, rather than for full military mobilization.

social mobilisation, sending thoughts and prayers to the volunteer battalions fighting in Ukraine

good to see that the Russian Communist Party hasn't forgotten its roots

[russianreader]

Sledgehammers

Sergei Mironov receives sledgehammer as gift from Yevgeny Prigozhin: “Together we will punch a hole in the Nazi ideology” Sergei Mironov, leader of the party A Just Russia and a State Duma deputy, thanked Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin for the sledgehammer, which the businessman sent as a gift to the politician. “With its [the tool’s] help, together we will punch a hole in the Nazi…

[mariacallous]

Sergey Mironov, the chairman of the party A Just Russia — For Truth, and his wife, Inna Varlamova, adopted a girl deported from Ukraine’s Kherson region and had her name changed, according to an investigation conducted by independent Russian outlet iStories and the documentary film studio Top Hat/Hayloft Productions. The outlet notes that this is “the first documented case of such a high-ranking Russian politician adopting a Ukrainian child.”

According to iStories, Mironov and Varlamova got married in October 2022, though they never officially announced a wedding. This was Mironov’s fifth marriage, and Varlamova’s fourth. She worked in Russia’s Federation Council for over nine years. Since 2015, she has worked for the State Duma. She has known Mironov since at least the fall of 2019 — that’s when photographs of them together first started appearing.

In late August 2022, Varlamova arrived in Ukraine’s Kherson region with Yana Lantratova, the deputy head of A Just Russia’s faction in the State Duma. They visited the Kherson region’s children’s hospital, where 10-month–old Margarita Prokopenko and two-year old Ilya Vashchenko underwent treatment. According to Natalia Lyutikova, head of the hospital’s pediatric department, Mironov’s wife arrived to the hospital with Tatyana Zavalskaya, who was appointed by the Russian authorities as the head of a local orphanage. After the children were examined, Zavalskaya started calling daily, demanding that the children be discharged, states Lyutikova. She added that Zavalskaya said “that woman [Varlamova] chose them and will take them to Moscow, everything is ready, as well as the tickets.”

The next day after they were discharged, Margarita and Ilya were taken from the orphanage, where they had been until the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. According to official reports, they were brought to Moscow for examination and rehabilitation. The Ukrainian outlet Hromadske wrote that Zavalskaya took the children from the hospital and accompanied them while they were being transported to annexed Crimea.

A week later, the children appeared in the Moscow region. A department of the Social Development Ministry in the Moscow region sent a request to the Kherson orphanage, asking to send documents that Margarita and Ilya had been left without parental care. In November 2022, the Moscow region’s Podolsk city court considered a civil case, which involved Inna Varlamova and the department of the Social Development Ministry. In Russia, all adoptions must be approved by a court, iStories noted.

In December 2022, one month after the court’s decision, Mironov and Varlamova adopted Margarita, according to documents obtained by iStories. At that point, she was just over a year old. Her name was then legally changed in Russia to Marina Sergeyevna Mironova, according to journalists. A source familiar with the situation told iStories that Margarita’s biological mother had her parental rights taken away and that her father was dead, though she has other relatives. According to iStories, it was known by September 2023 that Ilya was in the Moscow region and had received a new birth certificate.

Maria Chashchilova, a lawyer, noted that adopting children taken from Ukraine to Russia can be considered a violation of the Convention on the Prevention of Genocide, which is described as “forcible transfer of children from one group to another.” According to Chashchilova, the legal consequences for the adoptive parents are difficult to predict in such a situation, though the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague can issue an arrest warrant.

Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Children’s Rights Commissioner, has said that Russians cannot adopt children from Ukraine’s occupied territories. Lvova-Belova and Mironov didn’t respond to questions from journalists.

In March 2023, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova. They are suspected of illegally deporting children from Ukraine’s occupied territories to Russia.

Sergey Mironov called iStories’ report “a fake from the Ukrainian special services and their western handlers.” “I’m already used to information attacks. All of them have one goal — discrediting those who currently hold an irreconcilably patriotic stance. You’re wasting your time. The truth will still win. And Russia will bring the SVO to a complete victory,” he wrote.