Because of the seeming alignment of the new administration (regime?) of the United States with Russia, I am reading books which help me try to understand how this dramatic situation has evolved.
After the war, the US employed German scientists who had led the world in rocket and other technologies.
In fact, the U.S. armed forces and civilian agencies sought long-term advantages for the United States through the seizure of Third Reich technologies that they saw as superior to, or competitive with, Allied ones—notably aircraft, rockets, and missiles. The people who had invented or designed these weapons were needed to help transfer the technology. So what began as a short-term advisory project quickly evolved into a program of permanent immigration.
See
This incorporation of German expertise helped build the US post war military knowledge which became the envy of the world, and triggered the Russian desire to steal its secrets.
To find more about those scientists relocated to US soil, follow the link below to learn how their sinister past was of no interest compared to the value of their research knowledge. They taught eager US weapons scientists and substantially contributed to the growing military industrial complex.
Extract below from ‘Putin’s People’, by Elizabeth Belton:
Dresden, East Germany. Putin working as a KGB agent organising recruitment of German students to assist the Soviet Union developing technology in rocket and aircraft design through espionage of western industry.
The Stasi owned a tourist hotel on the river Elbe where visiting scientists would stay and get honey trapped, then blackmailed into revealing trade secrets.
The hotel was owned by the Stasi’s department of tourism, and its palatial restaurants, cosy bars and elegant bedrooms were fitted out with hidden cameras and bugs. Visiting businessmen were honey-trapped with prostitutes, filmed in their rooms and then blackmailed into working for the East.[25] ‘Of course, it was clear to me we used female agents for these purposes. Every security service does this. Sometimes women can achieve far more than men,’ said Jehmlich with a laugh.[26]……….
…..Putin’s chief tasks was gathering information on NATO, the ‘main opponent’,[27] and Dresden was an important outpost for recruiting in Munich and in Baden-Württemberg five hundred kilometres away, both home to US military personnel and NATO troops.[28]
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‘Most of the East German high-tech smuggling came through Dresden,’ said Franz Sedelmayer, a West German security consultant who later worked with Putin in St Petersburg and started out in the eighties in the family business in Munich selling defence products to NATO and the Middle East.[9] ‘Dresden was a centre for this black trade.’ It was also a centre for the Kommerzielle Koordinierung, a department within the East German foreign trade ministry that specialised in smuggling operations for high-tech goods under embargo from the West. ‘They were exporting antiques and importing high-tech. They were exporting arms and importing high-tech,’ said Sedelmayer. ‘Dresden was always important for the microelectronics industry,’ said Horst Jehmlich.[10] The espionage unit headed by East Germany’s legendary spymaster Markus Wolf ‘did a lot’ for this, added Jehmlich. He remained tight-lipped, however, on what exactly they did. The Dresden Stasi foreign-intelligence chief, Herbert Kohler, served at the same time as head of its information and technology intelligence unit,[11] a sign of how important smuggling embargoed goods was for the city. Ever since Germany was carved up between East and West in the aftermath of World War II, much of the eastern bloc had relied on the black market and smuggling to survive. The Soviet Union’s coffers were empty after the ravages of the war, and in East Berlin, Zürich and Vienna organised-crime groups worked hand in hand with the Soviet security services to smuggle cigarettes, alcohol, diamonds and rare metals through the black market to replenish the cash stores of the security services of the eastern bloc. Initially the black-market trade had been seen as a temporary necessity, the Communist leaders justifying it to themselves as a blow against the foundations of capitalism. But when, in 1950, the West united against the Soviet-controlled bloc to place an embargo on all high-tech goods that could be used for military means, smuggling became a way of life. The free choices of capitalism and the drive for profit in the West were fuelling a boom in technological development there. By comparison, the planned socialist economy of the eastern bloc was frozen far behind. Its enterprises were bound only to meet annual production plans, its workers and scientists left to procure even the most basic goods through informal connections on the grey market. Isolated by the Iron Curtain, smuggling became the only way for the eastern bloc to keep up with the rapidly developing achievements of the capitalist West.[12]
As I mentioned in my recent 12th March piece, ‘The Long Game’ I quote extracts from Chris Unger’s book ‘American Kompromat’. He writes of the targeting of a young Donald Trump as an American asset by the now expanded Russian Mafia into America. This was in 1987.
Chris Unger also tells us how easy it was to get the Jewish emigres, forced to work covertly for the KGB in return for a life in America, to infiltrate the United Nations:
According to Shvets, the awkward legend was often a tell that revealed how the KGB disguised and falsified the personal histories of its operatives. As a result, he looked for how Jews and other beleaguered ethnic minorities were given perks by the KGB if they played along; how some jobs at the United Nations and in the USSR were reserved for those in the KGB; which institutions were really KGB fronts; and how disinformation was disseminated to hide the truth. When tradecraft was poorly done, he said, it was a dead giveaway…………………………….In the end, of course, their various lucrative enterprises would create the need to launder untold billions of dollars, a need that could best be filled by a wealthy real estate developer who had loads of luxury condos to sell and was willing to look the other way when it came to the source of the money. To a large extent, Trump’s involvement with the Russian Mafia and his subsequent financial dealings with the Russians is a matter of public record—even though it was strikingly absent from the Mueller Report. For more than three decades, at least thirteen people with known or alleged links to the Russian Mafia held the deeds to, lived in, or ran criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties. Many of them used Trump-branded real estate to launder vast amounts of money by buying multimillion-dollar condos through anonymous shell companies. And the Bayrock Group, the real estate development company that was based in Trump Tower and had ties to the Kremlin, came up with a new business model to franchise Trump condos after he’d lost billions of dollars in his Atlantic City casino developments—all of which made the perpetually bankrupt Donald Trump rich again and would lead to a new post-Soviet age of kleptocracy, in which America was injected with the virus of oligarchy and ended up with Donald Trump in the White House.
The US website, link shown below, describes the spread and influence of the Russian Mafia in the US and 50 other countries. Organised Crime has gone hand in hand with politics for decades:
The Red Mafiya is the most brilliant and savage Russian mob organization in the world; the Russian mob virtually controls Russia. In addition, both the Bush and the Clinton Administrations have unwittingly facilitated the Russian mob and the untrammeled corruption of Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Russian Mafiya’s invasion of politics in the United States is still in its early stages, but it already poses a huge threat to United States national security interests abroad….
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/red-mafiya-how-russian-mob-has-invaded-america
2015:
Eastern Ukrainian Bratva flourishing to help foment the unrest in Ukraine:
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/gangs-russia-ruthless-mafia-networks-extending-their-influence-1495644
Present day Russian linked criminal networks assist continuing sanction escape and flow of weapons and goods.
See:
Russia, Ukraine, and organized crime and illicit economies in 2024
It is also worth considering the impact of Russian Jews on the Palestinian population, though not because of crime, but sheer numbers needing homes and jobs:
borderslynn 
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