does a bubble pop?

  French Foreign Minister

Jean-Yves Le Drian said late on Saturday.  ”They said they would let some foreigners and Afghans leave freely and (talked) of an inclusive and representative government, but they are lying," Le Drian said on France 5 TV.

"France refuses to recognise or have any type of relationship with this government.  We want actions from the Taliban and they will need some economic breathing space and international relations. It's up to them."  Paris has evacuated about 3,000 people and had held technical talks with the Taliban to enable those departures.  https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taliban-are-lying-frances-foreign-minister-says-2021-09-11/

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Dmitry Tsibukovsky and his wife Anastasia Safonova were detained in 2018 after hanging a banner that read “The FSB is the main terrorist” on the fence of the Chelyabinsk (Urals) regional Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters.  The act was in support of members of the Set’ (“Network”) anti-fascist activist group who were jailed on terrorism charges that rights groups condemned as fabricated.  https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/09/10/russian-couple-imprisoned-over-fsb-terrorist-protest-a75023

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8-30-21  A prosecutor has asked a court to sentence

Dmitry Tsibukovsky, 30, and Anastasia Safonava, 28, to six years in a prison camp for hanging a banner that read “The FSB is the main terrorist” on a fence in Chelyabinsk, a city in the Urals, in February 2018.  https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russians-face-prison-for-banner-protest-9prhg5n87

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3-30-2017  I saw that one of the old men became quite emotional as he stood before the monument, repeatedly brushing at his cheeks to wipe away tears.  Several times he turned and walked purposefully away, as if willing himself to leave, but he never got very far.  He would linger by the trees at the edge of the park and then inevitably make a slow return to the shrine.  Finally I approached him.

"I lived very close to here," he said, "and I was awoken by the sound, I came rushing over and..."  He was a big man, a former sailor, and he waved his hands helplessly over the flower beds.  "Nothing.  Nothing.  They pulled a young boy and his dog out. That was all.  Everyone else was already dead."

But as it turned out the old man had a more personal connection to the tragedy.  His daughter, son-in-law, and grandson had lived at 6/3 Kashirskoye, and they had all perished that morning, too .  Leading me up to the monument, he pointed out their names in the stone, and desperately brushed at his eyes again.  Then he angrily whispered:  "They say it was the Chechens who did this, but that is a lie.  It was Putin's people.  Everyone knows that.  No one wants to talk about it, but everyone knows that."  …  Even the old man in Kashirskoye park ultimately underscored the air of unease that hovers over the topic.  After readily agreeing to a second meeting, at which he promised to introduce me to other victims' families who doubted the government's account, he had a change of heart.  "I can't do it," he said when he called me back a few days later.  "I spoke to my wife and my boss, and they both said that if I meet with you, I will be finished."   I was curious what he meant by "finished," but the old sailor hung up before I could ask….

  Another ex-KGB agent in his search for answers, a former criminal investigator named

Mikhail Trepashkin.  The two men had a rather complicated personal history—in fact, back in the '90s, one allegedly had been dispatched to assassinate the other—but it had actually been Trepashkin, working on the ground in Russia, who had uncovered many of the disturbing facts in the case….Trepashkin had also run afoul of the authorities.  In 2003 he had been shipped off to a squalid prison camp in the Ural Mountains for four years.  By the time of my visit to Moscow last year, however, he was out on the streets again.

  Through an intermediary I learned Trepashkin had two young daughters, as well as a wife who desperately wanted him to stay out of politics; combining these factors with his recent prison stint and the murder of his former colleague, it seemed likely that my approach to him would go as badly as had my conversations with other former dissenters.  "Oh, he'll talk," the intermediary assured me.  "The only way they'll stop Trepashkin is by killing him."

At Trepashkin's request, our first meeting took place at a crowded coffee shop in central Moscow.  One of his aides showed up first, and then twenty minutes later Trepashkin arrived in the company of his bodyguard of sorts, a muscular young man with a crewcut and an opaque stare.

Trepashkin, while short, was powerfully built—a testament to his lifelong practice of a variety of martial arts—and still very handsome at 51.  His most arresting feature, though, was a perpetual amused grin.  It gave him an aura of instant likability, friendliness, although I could imagine that anyone who sat across an interrogation table from him back in his KGB days might have found it unnerving.

For a few minutes we chatted about everyday things—the unusually cold weather in Moscow just then, the changes I'd noticed since my last visit—and I sensed Trepashkin was trying to figure me out, deciding how much to say.

Then he began to tell me about his career at the KGB.  He'd spent most of his years as a criminal investigator who specialized in antiques smuggling.  He was, in those days, an absolute loyalist to the Soviet state—and most especially the KGB. Trepashkin was such a dedicated Soviet that he even supported a group that attempted to thwart the ascent of Boris Yeltsin in favor of preserving the Soviet system.

"I could see that this was going to be the end of the Soviet Union," Trepashkin explained in the coffee shop.  "But even more than that, what would happen to the KGB, to all of us who had made it our lives?   I saw only disaster coming."

And that disaster came.  With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russia plunged into economic and social chaos.  One particularly destructive aspect of that chaos stemmed from the vast legions of Russian KGB officers who suddenly entered the private sector.  Some went into business for themselves or joined on with the mafiyas they had once been detailed to combat.  Still others signed on as "advisers" or muscle for the new oligarchs or the old Communist Party bosses who were frantically grabbing up anything of value in Russia, even as they paid obeisance to the "democratic reforms" of President Boris Yeltsin.

Of all this Trepashkin had an intimate view.  Kept on with the FSB, the Russian successor to the KGB, the investigator found it increasingly difficult to differentiate criminality from governmental policy.  "In case after case," he said, "there was this blending.  You would find mafiyas working with terrorist groups, but then the trail would lead to a business group or maybe to a state ministry.  So then, was this still a criminal case, or some kind of officially sanctioned black operation?  And just what did 'officially sanctioned' actually mean anymore, because who was really in charge?"

Finally in the summer of 1995 Mikhail Trepashkin began work on a case that would change him forever, one that placed him on a collision course with the senior most commanders of the FSB and, Trepashkin says, would lead at least one of them to plot his assassination.  As with so many other incidents that exposed the malevolent rot in post-Soviet Russia, this one centered on events in the breakaway southern republic of Chechnya….

The raid that night was the culmination of an elaborate sting operation, one that Trepashkin had helped supervise, designed to finally bring down a notorious bank-extortion team linked to a Chechen rebel leader named Salman Raduyev.  It was a huge success--caught up in the Soldi dragnet were some two dozen conspirators, including two FSB officers and a Russian-military general.…https://www.gq.com/story/moscow-bombings-mikhail-trepashkin-and-putin