28.03.2024

Russian News Crew Attacked Amid U.S. Govt Crackdown on Portland Protests

Russia’s Channel One broadcaster said it believes federal agents ripped off its journalist’s helmet and knocked down its cameraman with a baton, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported Wednesday.

“It looks like our group suffered at the hands of the security services,” Channel One presenter and head of news programming Kirill Kleimenov told RIA Novosti.

Camouflaged men attacked a Russian news crew during a crackdown on anti-racism protesters in the western U.S. city of Portland, Russian state-run television said Wednesday.

Channel One journalist Yulia Olkhovskaya and cameraman Vyacheslav Arkhipov received minor injuries and their equipment was destroyed, Kleimenov said.

Protests have swept across the United States following the death of African-American man George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer in late May. Portland became the latest flashpoint after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deployed Border Patrol troops and federal marshals to quell the protests and clashes broke out between the troops and protesters.

President Donald Trump has threatened to send federal officers to more U.S. cities to restore order, describing the protesters in Portland as «anarchists and agitators.» Protesters accuse Trump of painting their largely peaceful movement as violent for political gain.

The Russian Foreign Ministry called on U.S. authorities to stop attacks on members of the press following the incident.

Russia’s mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said “we strongly condemn the police attack” on the Channel One news crew.

Trump Nominee to Russia: Abandon ‘Flying Chernobyl’ Nuclear Missile

U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee for a top arms control post in the State Department has said Russia should stop developing what he believes is a dangerous nuclear-powered cruise missile.

The Burevestnik, which NATO designates as SSC-X-9 Skyfall, is believed to have exploded during secret rocket engine tests at sea in northern Russia last August, killing five scientists. Russian media have described the Burevestnik, which President Vladimir Putin has hailed as being unlimited in range and able to evade U.S. missile shields, as a “small flying Chernobyl.”

Marshall Billingslea, Trump’s nominee for the arms control post, said he’s been “very clear with my Russian counterpart that these are enormous wastes of funds” and that Moscow should “cease and desist and abandon these kinds of destabilizing ideas.”

“We frankly don’t think these weapons should exist at all,” Billingslea told U.S. senators during nomination hearings Tuesday.

He said Russian-U.S. arms control negotiations would cover some of the nuclear and hypersonic weapons that Putin unveiled ahead of his re-election in 2018, but stressed that they should include the Burevestnik.

“Why on earth would you have a nuclear-powered, nuclear-tipped cruise missile? That is nothing more than a flying Chernobyl,” Billingslea told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 

“Just think about the radioactive plume that it would generate as it circles. There’s no good argument and logic for having these kinds of doomsday systems.”

Billingslea tweeted earlier in July that the U.S. views the Burevestnik and the Poseidon “doomsday drone” as “terrible concepts” that Russia should shelve.

Shortly after the deadly August 2019 accident, Trump said that the U.S. had “similar, though more advanced” missiles than the Burevestnik.

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