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Putin seizes $100m from Google to fund Russia’s war machine (in 2020)

Putin seizes $100m from Google to fund Russia’s war machine

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/08/25/putin-seizes-100m-from-google-to-fund-russias-war-machine/

Bailiffs funnel tech giant’s cash to pay for war propaganda

Degoogle, and also avoid any company with an international arm incorporated in Russia, or outside of Russia, apparently:

Google is seeking a ruling [in US and English courts] to block [RT] from pursuing its assets in foreign jurisdictions such as South Africa, Turkey and Serbia.

According to the Turkish filings, Russian courts have determined that Google owes Tsargrad 32.8bn roubles (£273m)... [the penalty] doubles every 24 hours... Russian courts had “levied unprecedented fines and arbitrary legal penalties against Google in an attempt to limit access to information on our services and as a punishment for our compliance with international sanctions against Russian individuals and organisations”.

39 comments

DaddleDew

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Aaaand... Whatever company hadn't pulled their assets out of Russia yet are now scrambling to do it.

MentalEdge

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For real.

Putin, please do nestle next.

Lost_My_Mind

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See, I'm torn. I don't want russia to have ANY money at all.

.........but I DO also hate nestle.

MentalEdge

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Oh I don't think nestle would give Putin shit. I just want Putin to try, and by doing so burn that particular bridge. Nestle isn't gonna stop doing business in Russia any other way.

sloppy_diffuser

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Let em fight it out!

Ruling class does it all the time. Keep citizens enraged on issues of race, gender, religion, sports, and so on so they are distracted from realising the one true war of ruling class vs everybody else.

/s in a sense that shit flung at the ruling class tends to roll downhill. If nestle loses a bunch of money, they will raise prices to keep the infinite growth machine running. If Russia steals a bunch of money, they have more capital for weapons.

Its kind of lose/lose for us :(

Joncash2

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Aaaand... we're upvoting comments of people that obviously have not read the article.

New court documents filed in the US shows that Russian authorities “seized” Google’s money from their bank account in Moscow in 2022 around the time Putin invaded Ukraine.

This happened at the time of the initial invasion and this article is just talking about the lawsuit over it.

So, unless your trying to imply that Google should have been able to see the future, your comment is inappropriate. I only point this out because you're so highly voted up and are clearly spreading misinformation.

morphballganon

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Their implication is wrong but they didn't explicitly state any falsehoods

zik

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To be fair, the seizure happened back in 2020 when companies were still in the process of removing themselves from Russia. And it happened in retaliation for google complying with international sanctions against Russia.

They're important details. And you would have seen them in the article if you'd read it.

kungen

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Locked article, but yeah, thanks.

Bakersfield

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Paywalls are easily bypassed by archiving the page:

https://archive.is/SqVCQ

givesomefucks

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Putin doesn't care, he's old enough he's facing his own mortality and his "capstone achievement" is regaining as much ex Soviet territory as possible.

He thought he'd steamroll Ukraine and move on to the next, for someone like Putin he'd consider his entire life a failure if he doesn't get it.

And he's not trump, he's evil as fuck but he's not an idiot. He knows he won't live forever and this is the last push.

Doesn't matter if the whole country dissolves the day after he dies, he wants Russia to cover as much land as possible the day before.

It's an insanely dangerous geopolitical position even before factoring in Israel attacking Russia's allies, like I'm legit surprised no ones declared war today.

I know people are optimistic because Kamala's almost definitely going to win, but trump isn't the only shit show on the schedule.

InternetUser2012

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Stealing from google to fund your war that you're getting ammo from North Korea. Things are not going well for Putin are they.

mp3

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I just hope Disney still have some money in Russia and he dares stealing from the mouse itself. He'll be in for quite the ride.

Imperor

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I don't know. Disney lost against Ron DeSantis on home turf. Not quite sure what they are going to do against a foreign actor.

MinFapper

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O_o they lost?

I didn't follow it till the end but I thought they were kicking his ass

Imperor

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Sadly they did not kick his ass. They sort of settled in the end, but they lost their special status and self governance stuff to a board controlled by DeSantis but he put a few pro Disney faces on that board to get it all to settle. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_v._DeSantis

BigDanishGuy

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The Mouse, uh, finds a way...

I definitely wouldn't want to steal from Mr Mouse

mindlight

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There's no greater sign of the Russian economy booming than Russia using ceased money from 2022 to purchase ammo from North Korea.

NuXCOM_90Percent

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I mean... I am also all for degoogling. But considering they are dealing with illegal attacks by russia because they stood up to war criminals... maybe this is not the best time to campaign against them?

ChlkDstTtr

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I think we can do both. Google is trying to keep from repatriating profits so they don’t need to pay taxes. Russia took it. Fuck Russia, but I can’t feel too bad for Google.

Dagnet

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Enemy of my enemy is still my enemy, fuck them both

zik

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They took them in 2020 while they were pulling out of Russia, not recently.

NuXCOM_90Percent

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All it does is make it look like a "bitch eating crackers" scenario. With the added benefit of making it sound like people are pro-russia.

SteveFromMySpace

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they stood up to war criminals

That’s a funny way of spelling “didn’t go out of their way to accommodate a second tier world power and its population that is barely half of the US’s and doesn’t spend a fraction of what other nations do on their enterprise services.”

No financial incentive. Not impressed.

neidu2

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Such measures are needed when you decide to enter into a money-burning competition where the opponent team has roughly 20 times your GDP

linearchaos

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100M? Is he going to buy a few tanks a plane or two and take the guys to five guys? In the scheme of warfare that's chump change.

ChicoSuave

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Convert it to rubles, cut the price of materiel to cost, and the end result is a bit more than that. However, Russia started this SMO with rewards and bonuses given out like the country was a tech stock at an IPO. Now they have to pay out those bonuses since it's been 2 years and they haven't managed to kill off every single enlisted schmuck. They are also continuing to entice more from other countries with strong currencies, requiring more signing bonus money.

Oh, and Wagner suffered some big losses this year and that will need to be patched up with whatever talent and vehicles are available. Frankly, Putin has a lot of big bills and every bit of ~~other people's~~ money counts.

acosmichippo

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The article says it's for propaganda. RT etc.

OsrsNeedsF2P

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No paywall:

https://archive.is/SqVCQ

foggy

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lol no man that looks fine. Keep going. You're almost there or something.

Gullible

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Google makes little money in Russia and they pulled the overwhelming majority of their equipment and people out of the country. Russia doesn’t care to offer external websites. Update chrome to offer Tor out of the box while you can and ignore the fine entirely.