https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/rules-changed-russia-begun-order-040005019.html
Yahoo! News
The Guardian
‘The rules have changed’: has Russia begun to order assassinations on US soil?
Daniel Boffey in London and Andrew Roth in Washington
Sat, September 19, 2026 at 9:00 PM PDT 8 min read
This week the kaleidoscope was shaken. "It looks like starting from today, the rules have changed in America," Dobrokhotov, 43, said. "We will have to change how we behave there. Nowhere is safe."
The game changer overshadowing the Washington conference was an announcement on Tuesday that the US Department of Justice was unsealing indictments in absentia against five individuals allegedly working for Russia's intelligence services who were said to have conspired to "conduct attacks and murders around the world, including in the United States".
Rainbow Six (1998) - by Tom Clancy, author
excerpt, Chapter 39
Clark and Alistair Stanley conferred in a room at Joint Special Operations Command Headquarters, a nondescript building facing a small parking lot.
"So, what gives here?" asked Colonel William Byron. Called "Little Willie" by his uniformed colleagues, Colonel Byron had the most unlikely sobriquet in the United States Army. Fully six-four and two hundred thirty pounds of lean, hard meat, Byron was the largest man in JSOC. The name dated back to West Point, where he'd grown six inches and thirty pounds over four years of exercise and wholesome food, and ended up a linebacker on the Army football team that had murdered Navy 35-10 in the autumn classic at Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium. His accent was still south Georgia despite his master's degree in management from Harvard Business School, which was becoming favored in the American military.
"We're taking a trip here," Clark told him, passing the overheads across the table. "We need a helo and not much else."
"Where the hell is this shithole?"
"Brazil, west of Manaus, on the Rio Negro."
"Some facility," Byron observed, putting on the reading glasses that he hated. "Who built it, and who's there now?"
"The people who wanted to kill the whole fucking world," Clark responded, reaching for his cell phone when it started chirping. Again he had to wait for the encryption system to handshake with the other end. "This is Clark," he said finally.
"Ed Foley here, John. The sample was examined by the troops up at Fort Detrick."
"And?"
"And it's a version of the Ebola virus, they say, modified - 'engineered' is the term they used, as a matter of fact-by the addition of what appears to be cancer genes. They say that makes the little bastard more robust. Moreover, the virus strands were encased in some sort of mini-capsules to help it survive in the open. In other words, John, what your Russian friend told you-it looks like it's fully confirmed."
"What did you do with Dmitriy?" Rainbow Six asked.
"A safe house out in Winchester," the DCI replied. It was the usual place to quarter a foreign national the CIA wanted to protect. "Oh, the FBI tells me that the Kansas State Police are looking for him on a murder charge. Supposedly he killed one Foster Hunnicutt from the state of Montana, or so he has been accused."
"Why don't you have the Bureau tell Kansas that he didn't kill anybody. He was with me the whole time," Clark suggested. They had to take care of this man, didn't they? John had already made the conceptual leap of forgetting that Popov had instigated an attack on his wife and daughter. Business, in this case, was business, and it wasn't the first time a KGB enemy had turned into a valuable friend.
From 8/3/1998 ( ) To 9/15/2026 ( Tuesday ) is 10270 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/15/1993 ( ) is 10270 days
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/members-russian-intelligence-services-network-charged-conspiring-finance-terrorism-and
official US Department of Justice
Press Release
Members of Russian Intelligence Services Network Charged with Conspiring to Finance Terrorism and Commit Murder for Hire in the United States
Tuesday, September 15, 2026
For Immediate Release
Office of Public Affairs
The Department of Justice announced today the unsealing of charges against five individuals working for the intelligence services of the Russian Federation to conduct attacks and murders around the world, including in the United States.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108052/releaseinfo/
IMDb
Schindler's List
Release info
United States December 15, 1993
Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler
Amon Goeth: Oskar, there's a clerical error here at the bottom of the last page.
Oskar Schindler: No, there's one more name I want to put there. I'll never find a maid as well trained as her at Brinnlitz. They are all country girls.
Amon Goeth: [referring to Helen] No. No.
Oskar Schindler: One hand of 21. If you win, I pay you 7400 Reichmarks. Hit a natural and I make it 14800. If I win, the girl goes on my list.
Amon Goeth: I can't wager Helen in a card game.
Oskar Schindler: Why not?
Amon Goeth: Wouldn't be right.
Oskar Schindler: She's going to Auschwitz on Number Two anyway. What difference does it make?
Amon Goeth: She's not going to Auschwitz. I'd never do that to her. No, I want her to come back to Vienna with me. I want her to come to work for me there. I want to grow old with her.
Oskar Schindler: Are you mad? Amon, you can't take her to Vienna with you.
Amon Goeth: No, of course I can't. That's what I'd like to do. What I can do, if I'm any sort of a man, is the next most merciful thing. I should take her into the woods and shoot her painlessly in the back of the head.
Oskar Schindler: I could have got more out. I could have got more. I don't know. If I'd just... I could have got more.
Itzhak Stern: Oskar, there are eleven hundred people who are alive because of you. Look at them.
Oskar Schindler: If I'd made more money... I threw away so much money. You have no idea. If I'd just...
Itzhak Stern: There will be generations because of what you did.
Oskar Schindler: I didn't do enough!
Itzhak Stern: You did so much.
[Schindler looks at his car]
Oskar Schindler: This car. Goeth would have bought this car. Why did I keep the car? Ten people right there. Ten people. Ten more people.
[removing Nazi pin from lapel]
Oskar Schindler: This pin. Two people. This is gold. Two more people. He would have given me two for it, at least one. One more person. A person, Stern. For this.
[sobbing]
Oskar Schindler: I could have gotten one more person... and I didn't! And I... I didn't!
From 6/8/1955 ( from Wikipedia: Timothy John Berners-Lee ) To 3/8/1988 ( as me, Kerry Burgess, while enlisted paygrade E-5, designated Fire Controlman Petty Officer Second Class (FC2), my official enlisted US Navy documents includes: Terrier MK 152 guided-missiles Fire Control Computers Complex Operator (expert technician for all maintenance and operations, down to printed-circuit-board component level diagnosis and repair, UNIVAC digital-computers Mk152 Terrier System for, primarily, SM2-ER {Extended Range} Standard Missiles ordnance) - CF-division, Missile Plot, USS Wainwright CG-28, US Navy, following my graduation Naval Missiles School, Dam Neck, Virginia ) is 11962 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 8/3/1998 ( ) is 11962 days
From 10/24/1989 ( "The Stand" complete edition, by Stephen King ) To 8/3/1998 ( ) is 3205 days
From 11/2/1965 ( me ) To 8/12/1974 ( Gerald Ford, 38th president of USA federal government 1974-1977: Veto of Legislation To Reclassify and Upgrade Deputy United States Marshals ) is 3205 days
From 8/2/1981 ( Lou Cannon writes in the Washington Post that United States President Ronald Reagan is the "Great Communicator" ) To 8/3/1998 ( ) is 6210 days
6210 = 3105 + 3105
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 5/4/1974 ( Richard Nixon, 37th president of USA federal government 1969-1974: Remarks Opening Expo '74, Spokane, Washington ) is 3105 days
From 9/28/1962 ( premiere USA TV series episode "ABC Close-Up!"::"Meet Comrade Student" ) To 6/29/1995 ( the Mir space station docking of the United States space shuttle Atlantis orbiter vehicle mission STS-71 includes me Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps commissioned-officer and United States STS-71 pilot astronaut and my 3rd official United States of America National Aeronautics Space Administration orbital flight of 4 overall ) is 11962 days
From 11/2/1965 ( me ) To 8/3/1998 ( ) is 11962 days
The Seattle Times Sunday, August 2, 1998
An Action-Packed Summer Read -- Tom Clancy's Latest Storms The Shores
By Melinda Bargreen Seattle Times Staff Critic
------------------------------- "Rainbox Six" by Tom Clancy Putnam, $27.95 -------------------------------
Rumblings in the distance are growing louder, as a phalanx of trucks approaches local bookstores. There is a diesel storm rising.
Tom Clancy is back.
Yes, fans, the latest humongous Clancy doorstop of a book - at 752 pages, a veritable Cortez Kennedy among action-thrillers - officially hits stores tomorrow.
Los Angeles Times ARCHIVES
Cornwall, Clancy Leading Summer Charge
Los Angeles Times - Los Angeles, Calif. Author: PAUL D. COLFORD Date: Jul 2, 1998
Tom Clancy's "Rainbow Six" (Putnam) will be available starting Aug. 3. Clancy, one of the heavyweight champs of commercial fiction and master of the techno-thriller, is delivering his first hardcover novel since 1996. He is bringing back John Clark, the former Navy SEAL from "Without Remorse," who takes on a maniacal bunch of terrorists this time around. First printing: around 2 million copies.
http://www.amazon.com/Rainbow-Six-Tom-Clancy/dp/0399143904/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408391541&sr=1-2&keywords=tom+clancy+rainbow+six
amazon
Rainbow Six Hardcover August 3, 1998
by Tom Clancy (Author)
Product Details
Hardcover: 738 pages
Publisher: Putnam Adult; First Edition edition (August 3, 1998)
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/rules-changed-russia-begun-order-040005019.html
Yahoo! News
The Guardian
‘The rules have changed’: has Russia begun to order assassinations on US soil?
Daniel Boffey in London and Andrew Roth in Washington
Sat, September 19, 2026 at 9:00 PM PDT 8 min read
The Russian investigative journalist Roman Dobrokhotov has been the target of an assassination plot in the UK, but now fears Russia extending its reach to the US.Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer
Roman Dobrokhotov had been content enough for his appearance at a conference in Washington DC this week to be publicised, although it was not something he would normally risk in Europe. The dissident Russian journalist was named during a trial in London last year as one of the targets of a Russian spy ring that appeared to have murderous intent.
"Maybe burn him alive on the street, spray him with some super-strong acid, VX, like the North Koreans, or the ricin," a Russian-hired operative had texted of the plans for Dobrokhotov in Britain.
American soil, though, has traditionally been regarded as something of a safe place for those speaking out against the Kremlin, whether it has been under the red flag of the Soviet Union or the tricolour of Vladimir Putin's Russian Federation. It might be possible for Kremlin agents to get away with deploying poison-tipped umbrellas on people crossing London's Waterloo Bridge, as was the fate of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978, but risking such colourful assassinations on the Brooklyn Bridge or indeed anywhere on US territory would be a different matter entirely.
If not part of the so-called Moscow rules, the fabled operating guidelines for western and Russian spies, then there was certainly an adjunct, a gentleman's agreement of sorts, that neither side would kill on each other's soil. That had been the understanding of many of the other dissidents as they prepared to appear at the Washington Dialogue conference on Russian affairs being held in the high-rise office of the National Endowment for Democracy, a short walk from the White House.
This week the kaleidoscope was shaken. "It looks like starting from today, the rules have changed in America," Dobrokhotov, 43, said. "We will have to change how we behave there. Nowhere is safe."
The game changer overshadowing the Washington conference was an announcement on Tuesday that the US Department of Justice was unsealing indictments in absentia against five individuals allegedly working for Russia's intelligence services who were said to have conspired to "conduct attacks and murders around the world, including in the United States".
The most eye-catching claim was that of an audacious plot to recruit unnamed US residents to "eliminate" a prominent Russian dissident living in the US capital. Those named as part of the spy network were a serving officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), Kirill Khrameev, 27, and his father, Yuri Khrameev, 63, who is a former FSB colonel, along with two 35-year-old Cubans, Oemis Romagoza Durruthy and Yaidel Delgado Suarez, nicknamed "the Viking", and a 22-year-old Venezuelan, Angel Eduardo Castro.
The FBI had uncovered encrypted messages – written in Spanish and ineptly shrouded in spy code – commissioning what one of the alleged ring members had described as "gravely serious work": an offer of $40,000 (£30,000) to surveil and then kill someone in Washington that the Russian state wanted to "disappear".
There was talk of bringing in assassins from Mexico to carry out the "construction" (the word used by the agents for murder) but they were "delayed" and so a local killer was sought, according to the indictment. The identity of the purported victim was not revealed by the authorities, but among the rumoured potential targets was Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was freed from jail in Siberia and went to the US as part of a swap for Russian intelligence operatives in 2024. He declined to comment on the case when approached by the Guardian.
The almost unprecedented nature of the plot on US soil was unintentionally highlighted in the indictment itself, which listed a series of assassinations carried out by the Russian intelligence services. There was Paul Klebnikov, an American journalist and historian, murdered in Moscow in 2004. Two years later, Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer, was killed in London by two Russian agents who put radioactive material in his tea. In 2018, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer, and his daughter, survived after being poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in Salisbury in the UK; a local woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after being contaminated. In 2019, a court in Germany found that Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a former commander in the second Chechen war, was assassinated in Berlin, on the order of the Russian state. And in 2024 Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, died while in custody after being previously poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok while outside the country.
"More recently, countries throughout Europe have accused Russia of sabotage operations and extrajudicial targeting," the indictment goes on. "For example, in or about September 2026, a German investigation reportedly linked the GRU's military intelligence services to a drone attack at the Leipzig/Halle airport in Germany."
But no such activities on US soil were raised in the paperwork, and for historically rooted reasons.
"I would describe it as an unwritten set of cold-war rules of the road," said Chris Costa, a former US intelligence chief who is today executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington DC. "The US and Soviet Union conducted aggressive espionage against one another, but there were understood limits, particularly around physically targeting each other's intelligence personnel and families … If these allegations are proved, directing surveillance and murder on US soil crosses a very different line from traditional espionage."
Why would the Russians cross this red line? Jack Devine, a former associate director of operations at the CIA, said that the Kremlin had perhaps become blase about the potential repercussions – but that it could prove to be a misstep.
"The Russians today put far less weight on political criticism internationally, and are less concerned about the ramifications, including sanctions," he said. "Putin has a vision of himself in Russia and in the world as a powerful leader of the old school which he has often reminisced about in his interviews and public statements. I believe it's wrongfooted, and he may be underestimating the long-term internal and external ramifications of this isolation."
For Calder Walton, author and assistant director of the Belfer Center's Intelligence Project at Harvard University, it is not just the Russian motivations that should be analysed. In 2023, Walton revealed in his book Spies that three years earlier a Russian assassination squad had targeted Aleksandr Poteyev, a defector who had been living in the US.
"In the Poteyev episode, American authorities apparently chose secrecy, presumably to protect intelligence sources and methods and avoid a public confrontation with Moscow," he said. "By unsealing this indictment, the justice department is doing something different: exposing the alleged network, warning potential recruits, reassuring threatened dissidents and imposing costs on individuals who might otherwise have continued to operate in the shadows. Public attribution is itself a counterintelligence weapon."
European diplomats in Washington tasked with monitoring the conflict in Ukraine and US-Russian relations also said the exposure of the plot by the FBI indicated a shift in Washington's position. "It's a big deal that the US chose to reveal this now," one said. "The decision to do that raises the profile and shows the clear and imminent threat to dissidents in the US."
Walton added: "The immediate policy consequences may be limited because all five defendants are reportedly abroad and remain at large.
"We should nevertheless expect greater protection for Russian dissidents and defectors, intensified investigation of Russian proxy networks, closer intelligence cooperation with European allies, and potentially further sanctions, expulsions or criminal charges."
Evidence of a heightened state of alert to the risk to dissidents in the US has already emerged. Anastasia Shevchenko, a vocal critic of Putin who fled Russia for Lithuania in 2022 after becoming the first person found guilty of breaking a new law of participating in an "undesirable organisation", said she had been warned at a recent interview for a visa to the US that she could not assume that she would be safe during her visit.
Nikkie Lyubarsky, a research associate at the Soufan Center, an NGO in New York specialising in global security, said the unsealing of the indictment could reflect a "behind the scenes" escalation in tension between the White House and the Kremlin as a result of Russia's reported support for Iran in the continuing conflict with the US and Israel.
"The US publicising [the indictments] now definitely raises some flags in my mind," said Lyubarsky. "It coincides obviously with the sanctions that have just been passed in the House and the CIA director's visit to Russia recently. There's probably some sort of escalation behind the scenes that we're not aware of. It could be tied to Russian intelligence-sharing with Iran. That would be my best guess."
Back at the Washington Dialogue conference, the perhaps understandably conspiratorial-minded dissidents chewing on sandwiches at the lunch break had their own theories. Was Donald Trump seeking to distance himself from the news that the wedding of his son, Donald Trump Jr, had been partly paid for by the Putin loyalist and oligarch Umar Kremlev?
Natalia Arno, the founder and president of the Free Russia Foundation, who experienced symptoms from a suspected poisoning during a 2023 trip to Prague that she believes was commissioned by the Kremlin, said that for all the theorising, one thing had changed undeniably. "We thought the Kremlin wouldn't be as brazen as to do something on United States soil," she said. "It's a different landscape."
- by me, Kerry Wayne Burgess, posted by me: 10:11 PM Pacific-timezone USA Saturday 09/19/2026
