Our first major initiative will be a Competitiveness Compass 🧭

Building on the three pillars of the Draghi report.

Innovation, decarbonisation, security.

Everyone in the team will contribute.

Several months ago I was anonymously sent a pile of documents from the mid-80s originating from the KGB archives in Kyiv. These documents outlined a KGB recruitment into “Stuart”, or David Pugliese who “works in foreign mass media” and who is…

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..“studied with the perspective of possible operative use”. Another document described “Stuart’s” contact “Ivan”, who allegedly became his handler. Some have speculated that “Ivan” is Fred Weir, a correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor. He’s lived in Moscow since 1986.

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Fred and his uncle John were active in the Communist Party of Canada, which was originally founded by Ukrainian Canadians. Both of them also worked for the Canadian Tribune.

The documents concerning Mr. Pugliese themselves were proven to be authentic by experts, but they don’t clearly show…

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…that Pugliese was a Russian agent. A leading expert on KGB operations suggested that the documents confirm Pugliese was recruited by 1984, meaning that he was accepting conspiratorial methods of work and taskings directly from Moscow, and by 1990 he was also receiving money.

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As is tradition in democratic countries, Mr. Pugliese had the possibility to defend himself against these strong claims. He stated that the documents had “factual errors and falsehoods” about his personal life. For example, he claimed that he didn’t live in Ottawa in 1984.

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Interestingly, the journalism school, where Pugliese graduated in 1986, is at Carleton University in Ottawa - the records of his graduation are from their convocation. Considering this takes about 4 years of studies, this would imply he was living in the region during that time.

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His BA in psychology is from Lakehead University, which is still in the province of Ontario, but 1500 km from Ottawa. Strangely, in his bio at SpaceNews David claims that he has a Bachelor’s degree in political science from the same university. This is so confusing!

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To be fair, all this happened a long time ago and it’s almost impossible to say whether David was indeed recruited by the KGB, but as a reporter at a Canadian newspaper with a relatively small circulation, David really seems to like writing about the “Ukrainian Nazis”.

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A quick Google search brings up dozens of articles he wrote about Ukraine, and in the last eight years, there are many articles written by him either attacking Ukraine or Canada’s support of Ukraine and referencing “Ukrainian neo-Nazis”.

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Kirill Kalinin, a former employee at the Russian embassy who also ran their social media platforms and acted as their spokesman, often shared Pugliese’s articles and tagged him in tweets. After Kalinin was kicked out of Canada, he gave an exclusive interview to Pugliese.

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In one of his articles, Pugliese cited the director-general of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, which was then led by Oleksandr Feldman, a former member of a pro-Kremlin party, Opposition Platform – For Life, founded by the grandfather of Putin’s daughter, Viktor Medvedchuk.

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Within a 1½ year period before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and continuing for a few months into the invasion, David used the words “Nazi” and “Ukraine” more than two dozen times, basically just copying the Kremlin’s “Nazi” narratives.

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