Nick chats to the Swedish Axel Gordh Humlesjö, the award-winnning Swedish investigative journalist and author about Vladamir Putin's agents have corrupted the West's banking system to fund the an illegal and genocidal war against Ukraine and their own fraudulently funded life-styles.

Axel @axelhumlesjo co-authored The Honey Trap, a book that exposed how Putin's Kremlin laundered billions through one of Sweden's most important banks - Swedbank - initially by using honeytrap sex agents to gain Kompromat on senior bank executives.

The astonishing story of the corruption of Swedbank - often described as "the most Swedish of Swedish banks" - sheds a bright light on how the Russian state has targeted banks in the West to launder money, by-pass sanctions and fund its war against Ukraine. It's how Putin and his oligarch cronies effectively turned London into "Londongrad". It has enabled the Kremlin to gain astonishing influence over large parts of Europe's financial systems and to undermine the foundations of the West itself.

Axel explains to Nick @NickCohen4 how a lot a lot of the money has been funnelled through banks, different kinds of shady, companies and dodgy offshore accounts. Russia has then used this money in a range of different ways - trying to influence political elections and referendums and funding extremist parties. Even now Russia - yet again - is thought to be using it resources to secure the election of Donald Trump as president. Putin is desperate for his stooge to be back in the White House - confident Trump will do his bidding and betray Ukraine and force it to accept surrender on Russia's ignominious and dangerous terms.

Even more tragically though, Russia's state kelptocrats have even funnelled money from the people of Ukraine and others to line their own their own pockets and use it to by-pass sanctions and fund the Russian war machine.

Danske Bank - the largest bank in Denmark was also used by Russian entities in what was described as the world's biggest ever money laundering scandal.Almost €1 trillion of suspicious transactions flowed from Estonian, Russian, Latvian and other sources through the Estonia bank branch of Danske Bank from 2007 to 2015. In December 2022, Danske Bank pleaded guilty and agreed to a $2 billion fine in a case from the US Department of Justice.

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Swedish authorities are also starting to mete out punishment to the executives who destroyed Swedbank - including former chief executive Birgitte Bonnensen who the Swedish Appeal Court sentenced last month to 15 months in prison for gross fraud. But the damage to the West - it security and financial systems - is long-standing.

The Honey Trap, Swedbank, Russia and the World's Biggest Money Laundering Scheme by Axel and his colleague Lars Berge was described by the respected author of Putin's People and Washington Post journalist Catherine Belton as " A fantastic, page-turning book about how Russian intelligence infiltrated Sweden’s biggest bank and used it as a vehicle for money laundering. It is one of the most gripping spy adventures I’ve read..."

Nick Cohen's @NichCohen4 regular Substack column Writing from London on politics and culture from the UK and beyond is another must-read.

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Nick Cohen talks to Phillips P. O'Brien - the American author, historian and professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St Andrews about the West's bungling over Ukraine.

First the West's so-called "intelligence community" catastrophically miscalculated Ukraine's ability in fighting Russia, believing Putin's criminally insane invasion of February 2022 would be over almost before it started. Ever since then the West has been messing #Ukraine around at every turn, micromanaging President Volodomyr Zelenskyy's @ZelenskyyUa military response in accordance with its own interests, rather than those of the Ukrainians, and denying him the weapons he needs to take the war decisively to Russia.

Phillips describes the West's failure as "the triumph of too much imagination". Western leaders had imagined a Russian military that doesn't exist. They have imagined an escalation threat from Russia that doesn't exist. "So actually what they're doing is letting their imagination of what they would expect to happen," says Phillips.

@PhillipsPOBrien blames the US in particular for trying to micromanage war which means #Ukraine has been denied weapons it desperately needs. Phillips tells Nick, "you cannot micromanage a war. That what you can do is help Ukraine to win it. And that you can do. You can give Ukraine the weapons and let them use it in such a way that you know, you could at least defeat the Russian military that you could have some control over."

Mistakenly, the West clings onto the notion of the so-called "escalatory ladder" where giving Ukraine the weapons it desperate needs leads eventually to a nuclear retaliatory strike from Moscow. Phillips describes this as illusion - just like the other Western bogeyman of the war eventually toppling Putin and leaving Russia in dangerous chaos, creating an even greaer threat to the West.

Phillips says the result: the world now has a "Goldilocks war" that's "not too old, not too cold" where the Ukraine is allowed only to wear down the Russian military, but not break it. Phillips says this strategy has lead to "the sort of quagmire we see now."

You can read Phillips own regular Substack column - Phillips's Newsletter.

Nick Cohen's @NichCohen4 regular Substack column Writing from London on politics and culture from the UK and beyond is another must-read.

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The political commentator and Tory observer Nick Tyrone @NicholasTyrone reports back directly to Nick Cohen from the Conservative Party Conference in a wet and windy Birmingham where four rather mediocre and charisma-lite candidates are vying to be - astonishingly - the 6th Tory leader in 8 years!

Nick found the Tories weirdly euphoric at suddenly finding themselves not in charge of sorting out the huge mess they have created and dangerously deluded about themselves and their policies. Neither the party leadership contenders strutting the light fantastic at Birmingham nor the dwindling and ageing party membership showed any contrition for the disasters they have visited on the country - mainly austerity, Brexit, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss - deciding instead to double down on their old batshit obsessions from leaving the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights to their failed Rwanda scheme and busted immigration policies.

Seemingly buoyed up by Labour's current rocky poll ratings, the Tories seem eerily confident that their failed doctrines and continued lurch to the extreme right will somehow entice the electorate back into the fold by 2029. After all, it must be the voters who got in wrong on July 4th! However, the moderate so-called "one nation" Tory wing of the party are silent, apparently not yet prepared to hold the right wing Europhobes to account for the hole they all find themselves in.

Meanwhile, the far right is on the rise in the UK, as evidenced by the riots, and are hoping to draw in supporters disillusioned by the Tories and all too easily manipulated by the its lies and hate-filled narratives. The Farageist hard right even claims it can destroy what's left of the Tory party and replace it at the next election.

Nick Tyrone @NicholasTyrone writes for Substack as Neoliberal Centrist Dad - nick.tyrone.substack.com - a must read if you're desperate for the return of sanity to our national political discourse.

Nick Cohen's @NichCohen4 regular Substack column Writing from London on politics and culture from the UK and beyond is another must-read.

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