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Category: Russia

  • Review of Russia without Blinders

    Russia without Blinders: From the Conflict in Ukraine to a Turning Point in World Politics [Original title: La Russie Sans Oeilleres: Du conflit en Ukraine au tournant geopolitique mondial] edited by Maxime Vivas, Aymeric Monville and Jean-Pierre Page. (Paris, France: Editions Delga, 2022.)

    Today the conflict in Ukraine advances every day and intensifies with Russian destruction of the Ukrainian infrastructure, with the western gift to Ukraine of more and more sophisticated and destructive weapons, with provocations like the missile aimed at Poland, and the Ukrainian attacks within Russia. Presently, the conflict in Ukraine has brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

    In 1962, U.S. leaders believed that Russian missiles in Cuba posed such a national security threat that they were willing to risk nuclear war to get them removed. Yet, the U.S. and NATO propose creating exactly this kind of threat to Russia.  The gravity of the current situation is obvious if one can imagine the reaction of Russian leaders at the prospect of American/NATO nuclear missiles in Kiev two hours flight from Moscow.  Thus, the lack of an outcry against the war in Ukraine and the almost complete absence of calls for a ceasefire and negotiations constitute one of the most glaring and dangerous aspects of the present moment.

    Though Washington officials and the mainstream media always refer to this conflict as Putin’s “unprovoked war,” seldom has a conflict been so clearly provoked as this one. The expansion of NATO since 1991 and U.S. insistence that Ukraine be allowed to join NATO are the most obvious and proximate causes of this conflict.  By increasing economic sanctions against Russia, by arming of Ukraine with ever more sophisticated weapons, and by saying that Putin is a “butcher” who “can no longer remain in power” (Biden in March 2022) and by insisting that Ukraine’s right to join NATO is non-negotiable, the United States continues to escalate the conflict and place a negotiated settlement further out of reach.

    In spite of this situation in the United States and Europe, no movement for peace in Ukraine has emerged. Aside from a few right-wing outliers like Senator Rand Paul and a hastily withdrawn letter to Biden from the House Progressive Caucus calling for negotiations, no elected officials have denounced American behavior or called for peace. Almost no intelligent and informed discussion of the war occurs in the media and none at whatsoever in the recent electoral debates. The entire nation seems plunging into the unknown with blinders on.

    This makes the current volume an island of facts and reason in a sea of insanity. Russia without Blinders was edited by Aymeric Monville, the head of Delga Editions, the main Marxist publishing house in France, Maxime Vivas, author of a recent book on the anti-Chinese “ravings” in France, and Jean-Pierre Page, a writer and past director of the International Department of the French General Confederation of Labor (CGT). It has seventeen contributors mostly scholars, writers and activists in France, whose contributions fall under three headings: Russophobia, the Origins of the Conflict, and Russia and the World. While exposing the phobia and propaganda that has completely obscured the meaning of this war, the book, in the words of the editors, aims to be not pro-Russian but pro-truth.

    To the extent that the book’s many authors and subjects could be reduced to a simple argument it would be this: The war in Ukraine did not begin with the Russian invasion of February 23, 2022, but was rooted in events at least as far back as the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its meaning is far more serious than the simpleminded notion that this is an “unprovoked” war driven by a madman’s desire to restore the Czarist empire. Rather, this war is symbolic of a seismic change in international relations and balance of forces that has occurred since the collapse of the Soviet Union and which has intensified in recent years with the economic recovery of Russia, now the world’s eleventh largest economy and the rise of China, which has become the world’s second largest economy. The United States and its European vassals are determined to hold on to their superiority and even expand their economic, military, and ideological dominance. The authors further argue that these imperial ambitions are doomed to fail and that the war is actually showing the limits of American power and the emergence of a multipolar world. That is, the machinations of American imperialism are giving rise to its opposite, a growing resistance to American dominance not only by  Russia and China and but also by much of Africa, Asia and Latin America. This resistance manifests itself by the rejection of American hypocritical espousal of democracy, sovereignty, and the rule of law, as well as the rebellion against the domination of the American dollar, American sanctions, and American neoliberal policies.

    It is impossible for a short review to do justice to the array of topics and the wealth of information and the high quality of research contained in these articles, which unfortunately are only available in French. Therefore, I will focus on the book’s main arguments as to the origin of the war and the increasing isolation and weakness of the U.S. revealed by the war.

    Bombarded as we are by daily horror stories of Putin’s madness and  authoritarianism and Russian war atrocities, torture, executions, mass graves, kidnappings, and civilian bombings, it is hard to focus on the causes of the conflict. Yet, without some factual understanding, it is easy to be swept up by war hysteria. The history reveals that far from this being an “unprovoked war,” it was provoked by the expansion of NATO and the longstanding designs on Ukraine by American policy-makers.

    Several aspects of this “hidden history” of the war stand out. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, central Asia, especially Ukraine, has assumed major importance in the thinking of strategists concerned with preserving American world dominance. In The Grand Chessboard (1997), Zbigniew Brzezinski said, “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia…. and America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.” According to Brzezinski, on this international chessboard, Ukraine is the “geopolitical pivot.” Ukraine is a vast territory rich in gas, oil, wheat, rare minerals, and nuclear power. If “Russia regains control over Ukraine,” it automatically acquires the potential to become “a powerful imperial state,” and a challenge to the U.S.

    Since 1990, the U.S. has tried to drive a wedge between Ukraine and Russia. In 1990, as the Soviet Union dissolved, the Ukrainians participated in a referendum in which some 90 percent voted to remain in a union with Russia. The United States, however, promoted Ukrainian leaders hostile to Russia. In 2010 Viktor Yanoukovitch was elected president. Yanoukovitch tried to weave a course friendly both to Russia and European Union. In the legislative election of 2012, Yanoukovitch’s party won more seats than the other three parties combined. The next year, however, when he refused to sign an agreement of association with the European Union, mass demonstrations encouraged by the U.S. broke out in what became known as the Euromaidan movement. The administration of President Barack Obama supported, financed and coached this movement, which was taken over by right-wing nationalists including neofascists and which eventually forced the president to flee the country.  On December 13, 2013, the U.S. State Department’s Undersecretary for Europe, Victoria Nuland, said that the U.S. had invested over five billion dollars in promoting democracy in Ukraine, that is to say in promoting the movement that ousted the democratically elected president. Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the American ambassador to Ukraine, played an active role in choosing the new government of Ukraine that included neo-fascists.

    In 2019, during the administration of Donald Trump, Vladimir Zelenskyy was elected president of Ukraine. The millionaire comedian, who is now lauded as the heroic defender of democracy, had a sordid past completely overlooked by the American media. The Pandora Papers exposed him as one of the corrupt world leaders with vast wealth stored in offshore accounts.  Moreover, Zelenskyy was closely connected to the corrupt oligarch, Igor Kolomoisky, the owner of the TV station where Zelenskyy’s show appeared and the owner of a major bank, Privat Bank, whose assets the government seized for corruption in 2016. In power, Zelenskyy made a leader of the neo-nazis the governor of Odessa. He also outlawed trade unions and a dozen political groups, including the Communist Party. Also, Zelenskyy pursued military action against the separatists in the Donbas, a pro-Russian and largely working class area of Ukraine. Since 2014, military strikes on the Donbas have killed 14,000 and wounded 40,000 citizens. The worst atrocities were linked to the neo-fascist army unit the Azov Battalion. Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who served as the American-picked Prime Minister between 2014 and 2016, referred to the citizens of Donetsk and Lugansk as “non-humans.”

    According to Page, under Zelenskyy, the U.S. completely “colonized” Ukraine. It sent billions of dollars of military aid and advisors, built 26 laboratories for biological research, seized a big role in Ukrainian industry and media, allowed American agribusiness to buy huge tracts of farmland, and proposed Ukraine joining NATO. Zelenskyy in turn ended all relations with Russia and suppressed all political opposition.

    This was the background to the Russian intervention of February 2022. Putin gave three objectives for this action: to de-nazify Ukraine, to de-militarize Ukraine, and to stop the massacre of citizens in the Donbas.

    When NATO met on March 24, 2022, Biden said that the conflict in Ukraine meant that there was going to be a “new world order” and “we must direct it.” Biden also said that Putin was a butcher. The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said: “Our special military operation is designed to put an end to the rash expansion and rash course toward the complete international domination by the United States and other western countries.”

    The book’s argument that the imperial designs of the United States is important and incontestable. The other thrust of the argument–that the war symbolizes the decline of American power and a realignment of global forces–is equally important though more debatable. Jean-Pierre Page and other of the book’s contributors contend that the U.S. attempt to isolate Russia politically and weaken it economically is doomed to fail. In the first place, Russia is one of the most economically self-sufficient nations of the world. The Russian economy has rebounded from the Soviet collapse and privatization and represents one the world’s largest economies. Moreover, it is rich in natural resources — gas, oil, coal, gold, wheat, nickel, aluminum, uranium, neon, lumber among other things. The idea that economic sanctions, which have never proved an effective instrument of international policy (witness the Cuban blockade), are going to force Russia to relent in the face of NATO expansion, which it sees as an existential threat, is simply delusional.

    Furthermore, the expectation that the rest of the world would go along with the unilateral economic sanctions, which are illegal under the United Nations charter, has proven to be phantasmagorical. In spite of a tremendous campaign of cajoling, pressure, and threats, the United States has not managed to win the backing of any countries outside of Europe. The countries constituting BRICS–Brazil, India, China and South Africa have rejected sanctions, but so have such other large regional economies as Mexico, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia, Algeria and Egypt. The resistance to U.S. sanctions is part of a larger resistance to the domination of American neoliberal policies and the U.S. dollar. More and more countries have agreed to buy oil and other commodities with rubles, yuans and gold in place of the once mighty dollar. In the words quoted by of one of the book’s contributors, Tamara Kunanayakam, the resistance to sanctions is the sign or a new more fragmented global order in which states are avoiding the geopolitical objectives of the grand powers to pursue their own economic needs.

    For all of its merits, the book is not without limitations. For all its strengths in exposing the imperialist ambitions and machinations of the U.S., the book ignores the fact that Russia also has its monopoly capitalists with designs on expanding to Ukraine and elsewhere, and Russia, too, is also part of the imperialist stage of world history. For a book looking at Russia “without blinders,” the authors are strangely blind to Russian imperialism. Lenin argued that is not just a policy but a stage in the development of capitalism dominated by monopolies and finance. As Andrew Murray has pointed out (Communist Review Autumn 2022), Russia ticks off many of the boxes of Lenin’s description of imperialism.  It present “an astonishing degree of economic monopolization” with 22 oligarchic groups accounting for 42 percent of employment and 39 percent of sales. In finance, Sberbank provides banking for 70 percent of Russians, controls a third of all bank assets, and operates in twenty-two countries. Moreover, Russia has repeatedly used military interventions in Chechnya, Kazakhstan and other former Soviet republics as well as in Syria and (with the mercenary Wagner Group) west Africa. Simply put, in Murray’s words Russia “is an imperialist power.”

    At the Ideological Seminar in Caracas, Venezuela, in the fall of 2022, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) put forward a similar analysis (see MLToday.com, November 6, 2022): “Recently, in the face of developments and especially the imperialist war in Ukraine, other CPs have focused only on the obvious responsibilities of the US, the EU, and NATO, which has been advancing and encircling Russia for years. In fact, this was combined with the approach that Russia is a capitalist but not an imperialist power. This approach is detached from the fact that imperialism is not just an aggressive policy but capitalism in its modern stage, the monopoly stage. Today, large monopolies prevail in the entire world and in Russia. The plans of NATO, the US, and the EU in the past 30 years have clearly been a powder keg for this conflict, but when did this powder keg begin filling up? Did it not begin with the overthrow of socialism, the dissolution of the USSR —in fact through a coup d’état— against the will of the majority of its peoples? Wasn’t it then when factories, mines, oil, natural gas, precious metals, and labour power became a commodity once again? Wasn’t it then when, after 7 decades of socialist construction, all of the above became once again a bone of contention for the capitalists, for the big monopoly enterprises?”

    If the authors of this volume are still wearing blinders with regard to Russia, some are also wearing rose tinted lenses with respect to the emergence of a “fragmented global order” or a “multipolar world.” Of course, the authors are right to point out the decline of American influence as represented by resistance to American sanctions against Russia and the domination of the American dollar and influence. Nevertheless, without actually saying so, some of the authors suggest that this shift in the global balance of forces represents something new and fundamental, and that it might provide a check on imperial expansion and imperial wars. Whether the authors really believe this and whether this idea has any validity remains to be seen, but it is helpful to recall the ideas of Lenin.

    In 1916 Lenin wrote his classic analysis of imperialism, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Lenin distinguished his view of imperialism from the leading competing view, that of the social-democrat Karl Kautsky. On the surface both Lenin and Kautsky had similar views of imperialism.  They both recognized the development of monopoly capital and finance capital, and saw it leading to expansion, exploitation and war.   For Lenin, however, imperialism was a stage, the latest stage, of capitalist development, the stage of monopoly capital that succeeded competitive capital.  For Kautsky, imperialism represented a policy adopted by the monopolists.  The implications of these different points of view were monumental. For Lenin, only revolutionary struggle against monopoly capital could end imperialism and end imperialist wars. Kautsky, however, thought it was possible to replace imperialist policies by other pacifist policies. Kautsky insisted that it was possible to imagine a new stage of economic development, “ultra-imperialism,” where the world would be divided up among a few great monopolies among whom peace would be possible.  The First World War and the Second World War effectively swept Kautsky’s ideas about ultra-imperialism and a pacific imperialist world into the dustbin. Kautsky is barely known let alone read today.

    I would suggest that some of Kautsky’s ideas have been picked up or reinvented by contemporaries. The idea of an emerging new stage of multipolarity resembles Kautsky’s stage of super-imperialism. Some of those enamored by the emergence of multipolarity think that it represents a fundamental change in the global balance of forces and seem to think it can countervail the imperialist drive for expansion and war and thus provide a basis for peace within the framework of imperialism. Two of the writers of this volume even say that the time is coming when an alliance of Russia, China, India, Latin America and the Arab world can “prevent” the financial oligarchs of the world from “launching the third world war.”  The problem is that such thinking, however beguiling, avoids a tough-minded understanding of the fundamental nature of imperialism rooted in capitalism’s insatiable drive for profit, exploitation, and expansion. It may not be necessary for worldwide socialist revolution in order to stop any particular imperialist conflict, but under the imperialist stage of capitalism war is omnipresent and unavoidable. This understanding imperialism provides a better basis for struggle against it than social democratic illusions about the efficacy of multipolarity. Let’s hope that it will not take another world war to banish these illusions.

  • First published at Marxist-Leninism Today.

    • The post Review of Russia without Blinders first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • New Study Blows Up Myth That Russian Bots Swayed 2016 Election for Trump



    A study published Monday by researchers at New York University eviscerated liberal Democrats’ assertion that the Russian government’s disinformation campaign on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election had any meaningful impact on the contest’s outcome.

    The study, which was led by NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, is based on a survey of nearly 1,500 U.S. respondents’ Twitter activity. The researchers—who also include scholars from the University of Copenhagen, Trinity College Dublin, and Technical University of Munich—concluded that while “the online push by Russian foreign influence accounts didn’t change attitudes or voting behavior in the 2016 U.S. election,” the disinformation campaign “may still have had consequences.”

    According to the paper:

    Exposure to Russian disinformation accounts was heavily concentrated: Only 1% of users accounted for 70% of exposures. Second, exposure was concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans. Third, exposure to the Russian influence campaign was eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians. Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.

    “Despite this massive effort to influence the presidential race on social media and a widespread belief that this interference had an impact on the 2016 U.S. elections, potential exposure to tweets from Russian trolls that cycle was, in fact, heavily concentrated among a small portion of the American electorate—and this portion was more likely to be highly partisan Republicans,” said Joshua A. Tucker, co-director of the Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) and one of the study’s authors.

    “The specter of ‘Russian bots’ wreaking havoc across the web has become a byword of liberal anxiety and a go-to explanation for Democrats flummoxed by Trump’s unlikely victory.”

    Gregory Eady of the University of Copenhagen, and one of the study’s co-lead authors, cautioned that “it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election, or on faith in American electoral integrity.”

    The new study may boost arguments of observers who contend that Democrats bear much of the blame for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat by former GOP President Donald Trump. Clinton’s loss, many say, is largely attributable to a deeply flawed Democratic ticket consisting of two corporate candidates including a presidential nominee who, according to former Green presidential contender Ralph Nader, “never met a war she did not like,” and an anti-abortion vice presidential pick in Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.

    “That Russian intelligence attempted to influence the 2016 election, broadly speaking, is by now well documented,” The Intercept’s Sam Biddle wrote in an analysis of the study. “While their impact remains debated among scholars, the specter of ‘Russian bots’ wreaking havoc across the web has become a byword of liberal anxiety and a go-to explanation for Democrats flummoxed by Trump’s unlikely victory.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Two Parties Of Capitalist Imperialists: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    They don’t just call Democrats “communists” and “Marxists” in order to attack Democrats, they do it to disappear the entire giant expanse of political spectrum that exists to the left of the capitalist imperialist Democratic Party. They want you to think that’s as far left as it gets.

    Democrats refer to themselves as “the left” for the same reason. Both mainstream factions work to shrink the Overton window into a tug-o-war between Republican capitalist imperialists and Democrat capitalist imperialists. Between two opposing factions of neoliberal neocons.

    ❖

    The problem with the belief that we must start new social media companies because the US government keeps infiltrating the popular social media companies is that it does nothing to confront the huge problem that the US government keeps infiltrating popular social media companies. Until we turn and squarely address the problem that the world’s most powerful government keeps infiltrating the popular online platforms we use to communicate with each other in order to interfere in our communications, they’re just going to keep doing it. Their actions need to be stopped.

    Sure you can keep starting new social media companies in response to this problem, but they’ll either remain small platforms without any meaningful influence or they’ll be overpowered by the US government and made to facilitate US information interests. That’s the real issue. To accept that we can only have unrestricted political speech on small platforms is to accept that we can have free speech so long as no one hears us. That we can say whatever we want as long as we speak it into a hole in the ground.

    Starting new platforms isn’t the solution to this problem. The solution to this problem is loud, forceful, aggressive opposition to the US government interfering with the way people communicate with each other on the internet until they stop. This is actually very possible to do, because the US government needs to preserve its image as an upholder of liberal values. If that image starts to deteriorate as public awareness grows that they’re working to censor worldwide political speech, their behavior will need to change. So what we can do is work to grow public awareness and opposition to the US government’s increasingly intrusive operations in Silicon Valley.

    That’s a much better use of our energy than self-isolating our dissident speech in small online platforms that have no mainstream impact. US government agencies would love it if we’d all self-quarantine ourselves in the obscure margins of the internet where we can’t infect the mainstream herd with wrongthink. We’d be doing their work for them. It’s better to stay on the largest platforms and work to open some eyes.

    ❖

    “China’s going to invade Taiwan!”

    “What? How do you know?”

    “Well we’re pouring tons of weapons into Taiwan, and we know we’d definitely invade if the Chinese were doing that in Cuba.”

    “Ahh. So you’ve got some solid intelligence then.”

    ❖

    I’m often accused of “praising” or “supporting” Russia or China, which is funny because I never actually do. People are just so accustomed to being told the US and its allies are pure good and its enemies are pure evil that anything outside this looks wildly imbalanced to them.

    It’s possible to saturate a civilization so thoroughly with propaganda that the entirely normal baseline act of focusing one’s criticisms on the world’s most powerful and destructive power center looks freakish and suspicious in contrast to what you’re accustomed to consuming. In reality, criticizing the US-centralized empire with appropriate and proportional forcefulness and focus looks like treasonous support for enemy nations for the same reason sunlight would seem shocking and abrasive to someone who’s lived their whole life in a cave.

    ❖

    We do not live in a free society, we live in a highly controlled society where we are psychologically manipulated into mental homogeneity in service of the powerful. Criticizing foreign countries for not having freedom like ours helps make our own society even more tightly controlled.

    We’re told we’re freer than other countries so that we won’t see how unfree we are. You can’t look down your nose at countries like China or North Korea and still clearly see how controlled and homogenized your own country is. You can’t celebrate your freedom while still lucidly understanding your oppression.

    The illusion of freedom is precisely where the reality of our imprisonment hides. We’ve been conditioned to mistake being able to choose between two fake political factions for political freedom. To mistake being able to regurgitate what we’ve been propagandized into saying for free speech.

    People say “I’m free because where I live I can say, do and experience anything I want!” But that’s not true; you can’t. You can only say, do and experience what you’ve been conditioned to want to say, do and experience by the mass-scale psychological manipulation you’ve been marinating in since birth. You can do what you want, but they control what it is that you want.

    There’s no better illustration of how unfree we are than the way westerners all think the same thoughts about how unfree people are in countries the western empire just so happens to disapprove of. We bleat in unison, “I’m so glad I don’t live in a tyrannical homogenized country like China where people aren’t free to be individuals.”

    We won’t be free until our minds are free. Until all of us (not just the lucky few who happen to stumble outside the narrative matrix) are able to shape their own perspectives based on truth rather than on what benefits the powerful. Until we’re able to become true individuals.

    ___________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Three Possibilities for the War in Ukraine in 2023



    In the end, as in any war, the most important factor in the future course of the Ukraine conflict will be what happens on the battlefield. There are essentially three possibilities, though each of these would bring in its wake a range of potential consequences: a Ukrainian breakthrough; a Russian breakthrough; and a stalemate roughly along the present lines of military control.

    With Russian forces increasing in numbers and dug in along shorter front lines with massive artillery support, it will be a major challenge for the Ukrainian army to break through. Nonetheless, the Ukrainians have astonished the world so often since the Russian invasion began that further victories cannot be excluded.

    If Ukrainian troops were to break through to the Sea of Azov, isolating Crimea; or if they succeeded in recapturing a large part of the separatist eastern Donbas region that Russia has backed since 2014, then it seems likely that in response Russia would threaten, and possibly execute, some form of drastic escalation. This might begin with the symbolic bombardment (with conventional missiles) of NATO air bases or supply lines in Poland or Romania. In any event, the Kremlin’s intention would also be to raise the possibility of a slide towards nuclear war between Russia and the United States.

    Such a Russian attack would most probably lead to a limited and proportional U.S. military response (for example, the bombardment of a Russian base in the occupied part of Ukraine). Faced with the danger of nuclear war, however, powerful voices in the United States and Europe would also most likely call for a ceasefire in Ukraine, arguing that Kyiv had won a sufficient victory by recapturing almost all of the territory it has lost since the Russian invasion of February 2022 (though not most of the areas occupied by Russia and its local allies since 2014). The West would be helped in proposing a ceasefire if a further Russian defeat had led to the fall of President Putin, as this would be seen as a great Western and Ukrainian success in itself.

    However, with Ukraine apparently on the road to complete victory, such moves for a ceasefire would meet fierce resistance from the Ukrainian government, from certain NATO members including Poland and the Baltic states, and from important sections of the U.S. political establishment and media. The outcome of such a crisis therefore cannot presently be predicted; but clearly the risk of escalation to full-scale war between NATO and Russia would be extremely high.

    A Russian offensive leading to a victorious breakthrough does not seem to be part of Russian plans in the short term, apart from limited moves to take the town of Bakhmut in the western Donbas. All the indications are that Russian forces are fortifying their existing lines so as to prevent any more Ukrainian successes like the recapture of the eastern part of Kharkiv region and of the city of Kherson. However, if Ukrainian forces suffer heavy casualties and use up their ammunition stocks and armored vehicles in failed offensives over the next few months, then a successful Russian counter-offensive might be a real possibility.

    Western intelligence estimates are that Ukrainian and Russian casualties have been roughly equivalent — and Russia has three and a half times Ukraine’s population. In the war’s first months, Russia’s potential advantage in manpower was nullified by the Putin regime’s unwillingness (for domestic political reasons) to send conscripts into action and to call up reserves. These shortages are now being rectified by the call-up of 300,000 additional troops (albeit of very questionable quality). Russia is also producing considerably more artillery shells than Ukraine is either producing itself or receiving from the West, and it is not clear how far increased U.S. production can make up for this shortfall in the next few months.

    Given the record so far and the continued limits on Russian manpower, armor and ammunition, however, there is no realistic chance that a Russian breakthrough could lead to the capture of Kyiv. It is not even remotely likely that Russia could capture Kharkiv, while Russia’s withdrawal from Kherson to the left bank of the Dnieper River makes an offensive against the Ukrainian Black Sea ports of Mykolaiv and Odessa virtually impossible.

    However, if Russia captures the whole of the Donbas region and strengthens its land bridge to Crimea, it seems highly likely that Putin would claim that key Russian goals (as set out at the start of the invasion) have been achieved, and that Moscow would then offer a ceasefire and peace talks without preconditions.

    Such a Russian offer would also open up deep splits within the West, and between Western countries and Ukraine; for, with the possibility of Ukrainian victory fading into the distant future, and the prospect of an unending war, many in the West would argue that a ceasefire would be the best deal that Ukraine was ever likely to get.

    This argument would gain strength from the fact that only a stable ceasefire would end Russia’s destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure and allow Ukraine and its partners to begin the long and very expensive process of rebuilding the Ukrainian economy so as to advance Kyiv’s hopes of joining the European Union. This could also appeal to some pragmatic Ukrainians, who might believe that a ceasefire and economic growth would allow Ukraine to strengthen its armed forces so as to resume the war at a later date — something that Russia’s attacks on the Ukrainian economy are presently making very difficult.

    Ukrainian and Western opponents of accepting a Russian-proposed ceasefire of course would argue that this would allow Russia to build up its own forces for a future new war, although this argument would be weakened if Moscow declared publicly that its war aims had been achieved.

    Barring a breakthrough by either side, the prospect is that of an indefinite and bloody stalemate along the present battle lines, reminiscent in many respects of the situation on the western front in World War I. The question would then be how long it will take — and how many people will have to die — before both sides become exhausted and decide that there is no point in continuing the struggle.

    The scene would then be set for an unstable ceasefire such as has existed between India and Pakistan in Kashmir for most of the past 75 years; or indeed a much larger version of the ceasefire in the Donbas from 2015 to 2022. Such a ceasefire would be accompanied by peace negotiations, but also by periodic explosions of violence and possibly full-scale war.

    Such a ceasefire would be better than the present massive bloodshed in Ukraine; but unless accompanied by successful negotiations to reach a settlement or at least minimize armed tensions, it would be fraught with negative elements: the potential for new wars, not only in Ukraine but also between Russia and other former Soviet states; the difficulty of Ukrainian reconstruction and progress towards the European Union; the impossibility of restoring minimally cooperative Western relations with Russia; and the likelihood of stronger cooperation between Russia, China, and Iran.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • War in Ukraine, Drought Pushed Global Food Prices to All-Time High in 2022



    Russia’s war on Ukraine, climate change-intensified drought, and other factors drove global food prices to a record high and worsened hunger around the world in 2022, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said Friday.

    The FAO Food Price Index—which tracks monthly changes in the international prices of grain, vegetable oils, and other commonly traded food commodities—averaged 143.7 points last year. That marked the highest level since records began in 1961 and an increase of 14.3% over the 2021 average, according to the Rome-based U.N. agency.

    As The Associated Press reported:

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February exacerbated a food crisis because the two countries were leading global suppliers of wheat, barley, sunflower oil, and other products, especially to nations in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia that were already struggling with hunger.

    With critical Black Sea supplies disrupted, food prices rose to record highs, increasing inflation, poverty, and food insecurity in developing nations that rely on imports.

    The war also jolted energy markets and fertilizer supplies, both key to food production. That was on top of climate shocks that have fueled starvation in places like the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya are badly affected by the worst drought in decades, with the U.N. warning that parts of Somalia are facing famine. Thousands of people have already died.

    In the month of December, the FAO Food Price Index fell to an average of 132.4 points, a slight decrease from the previous year. The U.N. attributed most of the decline to a recent drop in the price of palm, soy, rapeseed, and sunflower oils. Lower vegetable oil prices, which hit an all-time high in 2022, came as a result of reduced global import demand, expectations of a seasonal boost in soy oil production in South America, and declining crude oil prices, according to the FAO.

    While world prices of wheat and maize surpassed previous records in 2022, the price of both cereals declined slightly in December, the organization said, thanks to ongoing harvests in the Southern Hemisphere, which increased global supply.

    The price of rice, however, rose last month, as did the price of sugar and cheese, FAO noted. Beef and poultry prices fell slightly in December, but that came at the end of a year in which dairy and meat prices reached their highest levels since 1990.

    “Calmer food commodity prices are welcome after two very volatile years,” FAO Chief Economist Maximo Torero said in a statement. “It is important to remain vigilant and keep a strong focus on mitigating global food insecurity given that world food prices remain at elevated levels, with many staples near record highs, and with prices of rice increasing, and still many risks associated with future supplies.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • ‘Keep Hypocrisy to Yourself,’ Says Ukraine Official After Putin Orders Christmas Truce



    Under pressure from a key religious leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday announced a 36-hour cease-fire for the war on Ukraine launched last February—a move swiftly criticized by an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

    Putin’s decision came after the head of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) said that “I, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill, call on all parties involved in the internecine conflict to establish a Christmas cease-fire from 12:00 pm Moscow time on January 6 to 12:00 am on January 7 so that Orthodox people could attend church services on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day.”

    The Russian president said in a statement that “taking into account the appeal of His Holiness Patriarch Kirill, I instruct the minister of defense of the Russian Federation to introduce from 12:00 January 6, 2023 until 24:00 January 7, 2023, a cease-fire along the entire line of contact between the parties in Ukraine.”

    “Based on the fact that a large number of citizens professing Orthodoxy live in the combat areas,” Putin continued, “we call on the Ukrainian side to declare a cease-fire and give them the opportunity to attend services on Christmas Eve, as well as on the Day of the Nativity of Christ.”

    As Bloomberg reported:

    For Putin, the offer is “a play at generosity for the public,” Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of R.Politik political consultant, wrote in Telegram. She noted that after Ukrainian missile strikes on January 1 killed scores of Russian troops in occupied territory, “he certainly doesn’t want something like that to happen on Christmas.”

    Russia’s Ministry of Defense said Monday that Ukrainian rockets killed 63 soldiers in Russian-occupied Donetsk. The ministry also confirmed Thursday that troops have been instructed to observe the temporary cease-fire ordered by Putin.

    Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, responded to the developments Thursday by blasting both the ROC—known for its leader’s close relationship with the Kremlin—and the Russian Federation (RF) cease-fire.

    “ROC is not an authority for global Orthodoxy and acts as a ‘war propagandist,’” Podolyak tweeted. “ROC called for the genocide of Ukrainians, incited mass murder, and insists on even greater militarization of RF. Thus, ROC’s statement about [a] ‘Christmas truce’ is a cynical trap and an element of propaganda.”

    After the Kremlin’s decision, Podolyak added: “First. Ukraine doesn’t attack foreign territory and doesn’t kill civilians. As RF does. Ukraine destroys only members of the occupation army on its territory… Second. RF must leave the occupied territories—only then will it have a ‘temporary truce.’ Keep hypocrisy to yourself.”

    Ukrainian citizens and soldiers who spoke with CNN expressed skepticism that Putin’s directive will actually halt fighting.

    “They shell us every day, people die in Kherson every day. And this temporary measure won’t change anything,” Pavlo Skotarenko, a resident of the Ukrainian region where at least four people were killed Thursday, told the network by phone. “Their soldiers here on the ground will continue to fire mortars. The provocations will happen for sure.”

    From the beginning of the invasion through Monday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights “recorded 17,994 civilian casualties in Ukraine: 6,919 killed and 11,075 injured.” However, the office “believes that the actual figures are considerably higher.”

    Skotarenko said that “the only positive thing from this possible cease-fire is that our guys may have a day or two for rest and reset.”

    Russia’s planned cease-fire did not seem to signal a step toward ending the war. The Kremlin said in a statement that during a Thursday phone call, Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “discussed the situation around Ukraine. Russia laid an emphasis on the destructive role of Western countries who have been pumping the Kyiv regime with weapons and military hardware as well as providing it with operational information and assigning targets to it.”

    In response to Erdogan’s willingness to mediate, the Kremlin added that “Putin reiterated that Russia is open to a serious dialogue, given authorities in Kyiv meet demands that have been repeatedly put forward, with due account taken of the new territorial realities,” a reference to regions of Ukraine occupied by Russia.

    Zelenskyy also spoke with Erdogan on Thursday. The Ukrainian president said that the two leaders “discussed security cooperation of our countries, nuclear safety issues, in particular the situation at [Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant]. There should be no invaders there. We also talked about the exchange of prisoners of war with Turkish mediation [and] the development of the grain agreement. We appreciate Turkey’s willingness to take part in the implementation of our peace formula.”

    The developments Thursday came after over 1,000 faith leaders in the United States—including Bishop William J. Barber II, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Dr. Cornel West, Rev. Liz Theoharis, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, and Sikh leader Valarie Kaur—signed a statement calling for Christmas truce inspired by World War I, shortly before the holiday celebrated by many around the world on December 25.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Noam Chomsky: Another World Is Possible. Let’s Bring It to Reality.

    It’s a truism that the world is in a dismal state; indeed, there are too many great challenges facing our world and the planet is in fact at a breaking point, as Noam Chomsky elaborates on an exclusive interview below for Truthout. What’s less widely recognized is that another world is possible because the present one is simply not sustainable, says one of the world’s greatest public intellectuals.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Germany misses 2022 climate target due to Ukraine war fallout

    Germany used more renewable energy than ever in 2022. However, it once again failed to reach its CO2-reduction goal as Russia’s war in Ukraine prompted a return to more coal and oil use, a think tank has reported.

    Europe’s biggest economy emitted 761m tonnes of greenhouse gases last year, just one tonne fewer than in 2021. This overshot the target of 756m tonnes, the energy think tank Agora Energiewende said in a statement.

    Agora’s Germany director Simon Mueller said:

    CO2 emissions are stagnating at a high level, despite significantly lower energy consumption by households and industry.

    This is an alarm signal with regard to climate targets.

    The German government had aimed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 40% by 2020 compared with 1990 levels. However, it has yet to achieve this feat. For 2022, Germany managed a 39% reduction from 1990 levels, Agora calculated.

    The setback comes despite a record 4.7% drop in energy consumption last year, partly in response to soaring fuel prices because of the war in Ukraine.

    The hidden price of war

    The energy saving gains were wiped out by the government’s decision to burn more coal and oil to make up for the loss of Russian natural gas deliveries, Agora said. As the Canary’s Tracy Keeling has previously highlighted:

    War is always an environmental catastrophe, and one we can ill afford in our age of climate and ecological crises.

    The turn to fossil fuels also overshadowed another milestone: renewables accounted for 46% of Germany’s power supply mix last year, an all-time high. The increase was mainly down to favourable weather conditions for wind and solar power.

    Chancellor Olaf Scholz has stressed repeatedly that the return to fossil fuels is a temporary measure sparked by an energy crisis, and that his government remains committed to combatting global warming.

    Germany still aims to phase out coal-fired power plants by 2030, and to become carbon neutral by 2045.

    However, Agora stated that Berlin needed to drastically ramp up the expansion of renewables this year.

    In order to meet key targets set for 2030, Germany would have to double its solar energy production and more than triple wind power capacity.

    Energy Minister Robert Habeck said the government would present its own CO2 calculations for 2022 in March.

    He insisted Germany was on “the right course” but acknowledged the ongoing “need for action”, particularly in cutting emissions from the transport sector.

    Additional reporting via Agence France-Presse

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons, resized to 770×403 pixels

    By Alex/Rose Cocker

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The First US Onslaught to “Weaken” Post-Cold War Russia

    The first post-cold war assault on Russia by the West began in the early 1990s well before the expansion of NATO. It took the form of a U.S.-induced economic depression in Russia that was deeper and more disastrous than the Great Depression that devastated the U.S. in the 1930s. And it came at a time when Russians were naively talking of a “Common European Home” and a common European security structure that would include Russia.

    The Disastrous Russian Depression Resulting from Western supervised “Shock Therapy.”

    The magnitude of this economic catastrophe was spelled out tersely in a recent essay by Paul Krugman who wondered whether many Americans are aware of the enormous disaster it was for Russia. Krugman is quite accurate in describing it – but not in identifying its cause.

    The graph below shows what happened to Russia beginning in the early 1990s as a result of the economic policies that were put in place under the guidance of U.S. advisors, the economist Jeffrey Sachs, perhaps the foremost among them. Sachs describes his contribution here. These policies drive an economy abruptly from a centrally planned economy with price controls to an economy where prices are determined by the market. This process is often described as “shock therapy.”

    The plot shown above is from the World Bank (The link is here.) in accord with the standards set by the World Bank under the policies of Creative Commons.

    The plot shows that, upon the onset of “shock therapy” in 1991, the economy of Russia crumbled to 57% of its level in 1989, a decline of 43%! By comparison the U.S. economy in the Great Depression of the 1930s fell to 70% of its pre-Depression level, a decline of 30%. The life expectancy dropped by roughly 4 years in Russia during that period. Poverty and hopelessness became the norm. From my experience, few Americans know of this, and fewer still understand its magnitude.

    “Shock Therapy” Applied to Poland Did Not Result in Prolonged Depression. Why?

    The data for Poland are also shown for comparison in the chart above. Why? Because “shock therapy” was also carried out in Poland beginning two years earlier than Russia, in 1989. A glance at the graph above shows the striking difference between the two and the graph below reinforces that view. Below the real GDP’s for both Russia and Poland normalized to a value of 100 for the first year of their transitions to a market economy are shown in a 2001 IMF staff paper by Gerard Roland, “Ten Years After…Transition and Economics.” (China is also included by Roland. One lesson is that China moved to a market economy without “shock therapy,” did so with astonishing success and without putting itself at the mercy of the largesse of the U.S.)

    Roland, Gérard. “Ten Years after … Transition and Economics.” IMF Staff Papers 48 (2001): 29–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4621689. Figure 1. Cited by Krugman here.

    It is immediately clear that Poland went through a brief downturn lasting two years but recovered quickly, unlike Russia which continued in a slump for 16 years. Why the difference between the two? A big part of the answer is provided by economist Jeffrey Sachs who was in the forefront of advisors for the transitions in both countries and hence is a man who knows whereof he speaks. As Sachs put it in an interview here on DemocracyNow!, he was present during a “controlled experiment” where he could observe what led to such different outcomes. He says:

    I had a controlled experiment, because I was economic adviser both to Poland and to the Soviet Union in the last year of President Gorbachev and to President Yeltsin in the first two years of Russian independence, 1992, ’93. My job was finance, to actually help Russia find a way to address, as you (the interviewer, Juan Gonzalez) described it, a massive financial crisis. And my basic recommendation in Poland, and then in Soviet Union and in Russia, was: To avoid a societal crisis and a geopolitical crisis, the rich Western world should help to tamp down this extraordinary financial crisis that was taking place with the breakdown of the former Soviet Union.

    Well, interestingly, in the case of Poland, I made a series of very specific recommendations, and they were all accepted by the U.S. government — creating a stabilization fund, canceling part of Poland’s debts, allowing many financial maneuvers to get Poland out of the difficulty. And, you know, I patted myself on the back. ‘Oh, look at this!’

    I make a recommendation, and one of them, for a billion dollars, stabilization fund, was accepted within eight hours by the White House. So, I thought, ‘Pretty good.’

    Then came the analogous appeal on behalf of, first, Gorbachev, in the final days, and then President Yeltsin. Everything I recommended, which was on the same basis of economic dynamics, was rejected flat out by the White House. I didn’t understand it, I have to tell you, at the time. I said, ‘But it worked in Poland.’ And they’d stare at me blankly. In fact, an acting secretary of state in 1992 said, ‘Professor Sachs, it doesn’t even matter whether I agree with you or not. It’s not going to happen.’

    And it took me, actually, quite a while to understand the underlying geopolitics. Those were exactly the days of Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and what became the Project for the New American Century, meaning for the continuation of American hegemony. I didn’t see it at the moment, because I was thinking as an economist, how to help overcome a financial crisis. But the unipolar politics was taking shape, and it was devastating. Of course, it left Russia in a massive financial crisis that led to a lot of instability that had its own implications for years to come.

    But even more than that, what these people were planning, early on, despite explicit promises to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was the expansion of NATO. And Clinton started the expansion of NATO with the three countries of Central Europe — Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic — and then George W. Bush Jr. added seven countries — Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic states — but right up against Russia…

    The Neocons at Work, Carrying Out “The Wolfowitz Doctrine,” the Latest Expression of the Post-WWII U.S. Drive for Total Global Domination.

    It is quite clear that the goal of the United States was not to help Russia but to bring it down, and Sachs correctly links that to the US quest for global hegemony first set forth in the months before Pearl Harbor and reiterated by the neocons who are now its champions. Among them Sachs mentions Paul Wolfowitz whose “doctrine” sums up the goals of the post-Soviet era with the words:

    Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.

    We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

    What better way to achieve this goal than to reduce the economy of Russia to a basket case? Sachs draws a direct line from the Great Russian Depression of the 1990’s and early 2000’s to the expansion of NATO, the U.S. backed coup of a duly elected President in Ukraine in 2014 and on to the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, also designed to “weaken” Russia. The hand of the US was at work every step of the way.

    NYT’s Krugman Fails to Discuss the Hand of the US in the Great Russian Depression – not part of the Narrative That’s Fit to Print.

    In his article Krugman describes the difference in outcomes between Poland and Russia but he does not describe different factors that distinguish the two countries and might serve as causes of the different outcomes. Sachs points out one such cause which he witnessed firsthand.

    Krugman makes no mention of Sachs’s experience which Sachs himself has discussed repeatedly in interviews (like the one quoted for example, here) and in various written accounts going back to 1993 and a lengthy account in 2012 wherein he describes the lack of aid from the West as his “greatest frustration.” Sachs’s account is no secret and certainly a competent economist would know of it.

    Certainly there were other factors contributing to this tragedy which Sachs himself discusses here. But there is no doubt that the actions of the US and the West were critical factors in the Great Russian Depression. An understanding of this goes a long way in making sense of events leading up to the present moment of U.S. proxy war in Ukraine and the brutal sanctions imposed on Russia. This understanding, however, does not fit the narrative to which the NYT confines itself – and its readers.

    The post The First US Onslaught to “Weaken” Post-Cold War Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Can NATO and the Pentagon Find a Diplomatic Off-Ramp from the Ukraine War?

    Photo credit: Economic Club of New York

    NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, known for his staunch support for Ukraine, recently revealed his greatest fear for this winter to a TV interviewer in his native Norway: that the fighting in Ukraine could spin out of control and become a major war between NATO and Russia. “If things go wrong,” he cautioned solemnly, “they can go horribly wrong.”

    It was a rare admission from someone so involved in the war, and reflects the dichotomy in recent statements between U.S. and NATO political leaders on one hand and military officials on the other. Civilian leaders still appear committed to waging a long, open-ended war in Ukraine, while military leaders, such as the U.S. Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, have spoken out and urged Ukraine to “seize the moment” for peace talks.
     
    Retired Admiral Michael Mullen, a former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair, spoke out first, maybe testing the waters for Milley, telling ABC News that the United States should “do everything we possibly can to try to get to the table to resolve this thing.” 
     
    Asia Times reported that other NATO military leaders share Milley’s view that neither Russia nor Ukraine can achieve an outright military victory, while French and German military assessments conclude that the stronger negotiating position Ukraine has gained through its recent military successes will be short-lived if it fails to heed Milley’s advice.
     
    So why are U.S. and NATO military leaders speaking out so urgently to reject the perpetuation of their own central role in the war in Ukraine? And why do they see such danger in the offing if their political bosses miss or ignore their cues for the shift to diplomacy?
     
    A Pentagon-commissioned Rand Corporation study published in December, titled Responding to a Russian Attack on NATO During the Ukraine War, provides clues as to what Milley and his military colleagues find so alarming. The study examines U.S. options for responding to four scenarios in which Russia attacks a range of NATO targets, from a U.S. intelligence satellite or a NATO arms depot in Poland to larger-scale missile attacks on NATO air bases and ports, including Ramstein U.S. Air Base and the port of Rotterdam.
     
    These four scenarios are all hypothetical and premised on a Russian escalation beyond the borders of Ukraine. But the authors’ analysis reveals just how fine and precarious the line is between limited and proportionate military responses to Russian escalation and a spiral of escalation that can spin out of control and lead to nuclear war. 
     
    The final sentence of the study’s conclusion reads: “The potential for nuclear use adds weight to the U.S. goal of avoiding further escalation, a goal which might seem increasingly critical in the aftermath of a limited Russian conventional attack.” Yet other parts of the study argue against de-escalation or less-than-proportionate responses to Russian escalations, based on the same concerns with U.S. “credibility” that drove devastating but ultimately futile rounds of escalation in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other lost wars.
     
    U.S. political leaders are always afraid that if they do not respond forcefully enough to enemy actions, their enemies (now including China) will conclude that their military moves can decisively impact U.S. policy and force the United States and its allies to retreat. But escalations driven by such fears have consistently led only to even more decisive and humiliating U.S. defeats. 
     
    In Ukraine, U.S. concerns about “credibility” are compounded by the need to demonstrate to its allies that NATO’s Article 5—which says that an attack on one NATO member will be considered an attack on all—is a truly watertight commitment to defend them.
     
    So U.S. policy in Ukraine is caught between the reputational need to intimidate its enemies and support its allies on the one hand, and the unthinkable real-world dangers of escalation on the other. If U.S. leaders continue to act as they have in the past, favoring escalation over loss of “credibility,” they will be flirting with nuclear war, and the danger will only increase with each twist of the escalatory spiral.  
     
    As the absence of a “military solution” slowly dawns on the armchair warriors in Washington and NATO capitals, they are quietly slipping more conciliatory positions into their public statements. Most notably, they are replacing their previous insistence that Ukraine must be restored to its pre-2014 borders, meaning a return of all the Donbas and Crimea, with a call for Russia to withdraw only to pre-February 24, 2022, positions, which Russia had previously agreed to in negotiations in Turkey in March.
     
    U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Wall Street Journal on December 5th that the goal of the war is now “to take back territory that’s been seized from [Ukraine] since February 24th.” The WSJ reported that “Two European diplomats… said [U.S. National Security Adviser Jake] Sullivan recommended that Mr. Zelenskyy’s team start thinking about its realistic demands and priorities for negotiations, including a reconsideration of its stated aim for Ukraine to regain Crimea, which was annexed in 2014.”
     
    In another article, the Wall Street Journal quoted German officials saying, “they believe it is unrealistic to expect the Russian troops will be fully expelled from all the occupied territories,” while British officials defined the minimum basis for negotiations as Russia’s willingness to “withdraw to positions it occupied on February 23rd.”
     
    One of Rishi Sunak’s first actions as U.K. Prime Minister at the end of October was to have Defence Minister Ben Wallace call Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu for the first time since the Russian invasion in February. Wallace told Shoigu the U.K. wanted to de-escalate the conflict, a significant shift from the policies of former Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

    A major stumbling block holding Western diplomats back from the peace table is the maximalist rhetoric and negotiating positions of President Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian government, which has insisted since April that it will not settle for anything short of full sovereignty over every inch of territory that Ukraine possessed before 2014.
     
    But that maximalist position was itself a remarkable reversal from the position Ukraine took at cease-fire talks in Turkey in March, when it agreed to give up its ambition to join NATO and not to host foreign military bases in exchange for a Russian withdrawal to its pre-invasion positions. At those talks, Ukraine agreed to negotiate the future of Donbas and to postpone a final decision on the future of Crimea for up to 15 years.
     
    The Financial Times broke the story of that 15-point peace plan on March 16, and Zelenskyy explained the “neutrality agreement” to his people in a national TV broadcast on March 27, promising to submit it to a national referendum before it could take effect. 
     
    But then U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson intervened on April 9 to quash that agreement. He told Zelenskyy that the U.K. and the “collective West” were “in it for the long run” and would back Ukraine to fight a long war, but would not sign on to any agreements Ukraine made with Russia. 
     
    This helps to explain why Zelenskyy is now so offended by Western suggestions that he should return to the negotiating table. Johnson has since resigned in disgrace, but he left Zelenskyy and the people of Ukraine hanging on his promises. 
     
    In April, Johnson claimed to be speaking for the “collective West,” but only the United States publicly took a similar position, while France, Germany and Italy all called for new cease-fire negotiations in May. Now Johnson himself has done an about-face, writing in an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal on December 9 only that “Russian forces must be pushed back to the de facto boundary of February 24th.”
     
    Johnson and Biden have made a shambles of Western policy on Ukraine, politically gluing themselves to a policy of unconditional, endless war that NATO military advisers reject for the soundest of reasons: to avoid the world-ending World War III that Biden himself promised to avoid. 
     
    U.S. and NATO leaders are finally taking baby steps toward negotiations, but the critical question facing the world in 2023 is whether the warring parties will get to the negotiating table before the spiral of escalation spins catastrophically out of control.

    The post Can NATO and the Pentagon Find a Diplomatic Off-Ramp from the Ukraine War? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Now it is the turn of the Moscow Helsinki Group to be liquidated

    Tanya Lokshina, Associate Director, Europe and Central Asia Division, reported on 21 December 2022 on how the Moscow Helsinki Group MHG), Russia’s oldest Human Rights Group, faces ‘Liquidation’

    Moscow Helsinki Group’s logo
    Moscow Helsinki Group’s logo.  © 2022 Moscow Helsinki Group

    Last week, Russia’s Justice Ministry filed a petition with the Moscow City Court seeking “liquidation” of the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG), a leading Russian human rights organization.

    On 12 May Tanya Lokshina received one of MHG’s annual awards for contributions to human rights and the Russian human rights movement. She writes: “By then, in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the authorities had shut down Human Rights Watch’s Moscow office, along with the offices of 14 other foreign nongovernmental organizations. I had already left the country with the rest of our team, and my 9-year-old son received the beautifully framed award on my behalf. I first saw it several weeks later, when he joined me in Tbilisi, Georgia, where I had relocated to continue my work. I generally don’t display awards and diplomas, but receiving one from MHG was so special that it now hangs on my wall.”

    MHG was founded in 1976 by Soviet dissidents to expose governmental repression. It lasted nine months before the government jailed or forced practically all its members into exile. After the USSR’s collapse, the group revived in the 1990’s under the leadership of Lyudmilla Alexeeva, a legendary human rights defender, and has been working tirelessly to expose abuses, build up a country-wide human rights movement in Russia, and advocate for the rule of law. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2018/12/10/russian-human-rights-defender-ludmila-mikhailovna-alexeeva-is-no-longer/]

    The liquidation lawsuit is based on the Justice Ministry’s ad hoc inspection of MHG. The liquidation petition cites several supposed violations of Russia’s stifling legislation on nongovernmental organizations, including the group being registered in Moscow but operating elsewhere in Russia, and the group’s charter lacking information on the location of its executive body. These are obviously bureaucratic pretexts that could not justify such a drastic move.

    This year, Moscow courts liquidated four other major human rights groups in addition to Memorial, so it’s hard to find optimism for a fair trial for MHG. But it’s not hard to be optimistic about Russia’s human rights movement. It outlasted the Soviet Union; it will outlast today’s oppressors. See: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/12/12/foreign-agent-law-in-russia-from-bad-to-worse/

    https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/21/russias-oldest-human-rights-group-faces-liquidation

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • I Support Western Values More Than The West Does: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    I’m often criticized as being “anti-west”, but I am not anti-west, I am pro-west. I am so pro-west that I want our values of peace, freedom, democracy, truth and justice to be real life things that exist in actual western civilization and not just a fiction that is taught to western schoolchildren.

    I am so pro-west that I want the west to embody the actual western values it pretends to embody. I am so pro-west that I support the practice of spreading western values to the west. I’m a western cultural imperialist, except I want to do western cultural imperialism to the west. I’m like a conquistador, a western colonialist setting sail to spread the wonders of western civilization to these godless western savages. Except instead of actually just bringing them murder, slavery, theft and disease I really am trying to bring them western civilization.

    I am so pro-west that I want the western values that were sold to me as a child to be actual things that actually exist. And because I support western values much more than the actual west does, I get called “anti-west” and told to move to China. Shit, they should move to China.

    A guy I follow on Twitter named David Gondek put it very nicely: “There is nothing wrong with western civilization that living up to its own professed principles wouldn’t fix.”

    It’s not “anti-west” to want the west to end warmongering, militarism, censorship, propaganda, government secrecy, oligarchy, injustice, oppression and exploitation, it is pro-west. The “western values” of peace, justice, equality, democracy, freedom and accountability that we were taught in school are very good things. The only problem is that the west doesn’t actually value them.

    ❖

    To be clear, the US empire is getting everything it wants out of the war in Ukraine. It claims out of one side of its mouth that this was an unprovoked invasion that it never wanted, while admitting this war is giving it everything it ever wanted out the other side. The US did not just luckily stumble into a happy coincidence that just happens to advance all of its longstanding geostrategic agendas against a longtime geopolitical target. It deliberately created this situation, and only a baby-brained idiot would believe otherwise.

    Putin isn’t waging this war because he thought it would be a nice idea to grab a bit more land, he’s waging it because he assessed that he’d need to fight off NATO aggressions in Ukraine at some point and it would be easier to do it now than later. People say “Hurr hurr, if the US provoked this war to advance its own interests then Putin’s an idiot for falling for it,” but anyone who’s ever played chess knows strategy is often about forcing your opponent to choose between two bad options, either of which benefit you.

    There’s still this notion in some anti-imperialist factions that Putin is a brilliant strategic wizard who is outfoxing the empire in a game of 5D chess, but really he’s just fighting on the back foot against a far wealthier, far more powerful foe, and it’s costing his nation dearly.

    Whether Ukraine “wins” this war or not is irrelevant to the fact that the US empire was for relatively little cost able to create a massive sinkhole for Moscow to pour its energy and attention into, freeing up the imperial machine to focus on turning the screws on China.

    ❖

    Friendly reminder that China poses a threat solely to the US empire and its agendas of planetary domination, not to the US as a country. Empire architects are intentionally confusing Americans and other westerners by conflating these two issues in a massive propaganda campaign.

    ❖

    Being a child of wealthy parents is like being born into a cult whose entire focus is reinforcing class solidarity for the ruling class. Their social culture, academic culture, family culture etc are all dedicated to building an elite commonality that excludes the common riff raff.

    That’s why the ruling class have such vastly superior class solidarity to the working class. Most of us aren’t raised with an acute awareness that we are very different from the ruling class and that their interests conflict with our own, but everyone in the ruling class is. By the time they’re mature enough to take the reins, members of the ruling class have been run through an entire cultural processing system dedicated to forming solidarity with their class, while the rest of us have been focused on keeping our heads above water.

    ❖

    One of the dopiest beliefs on the “populist right” currently is that the ruling elites care about normalizing wokeism and social justice. Our rulers don’t give a fuck about trans rights or whatever, they only care about fanning the flames of culture war to prevent a class war. Our rulers would happily incinerate every trans person in the world if it meant cementing their rule. The instant Black Lives Matter sloganeering ceases to be politically useful it will be flushed down the toilet. They don’t care about marginalized groups, they just use them.

    It’s so stupid. Like yeah, powerful plutocrats and secretive government agencies are scheming to normalize LGBT rights because they stopped caring about power and domination and just love wokeness now. Good thinking, dipshit.

    In reality, marginalized groups pose no threat to you in any way whatsoever. You are meant to view them as the enemy so that you don’t view your rulers (who don’t care about either of you) as the enemy.

    ❖

    Rightists who think of themselves as anti-establishment rebels while clapping along with Trump, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk are exactly the same as Democrats who called themselves The Resistance for clapping along with Mueller and Rachel Maddow. They’re the same kind of mainstream dupes, just with different narratives.

    “Resistance” liberals thought they were fighting the man because they were trying to get the president arrested. MAGA rightists think they’re fighting the man because something something deep state. But in reality they’re both just mainstream partisans who fully support the imperial uniparty.

    At least Democrats are honest about being Democrats. Rightists will clap along with mainstream Republican politicians and mainstream Republican pundits and then call other people mainstream partisan NPCs. Really they’re exactly the same. They’re Republicans LARPing as nonpartisan free thinkers.

    ❖

    I don’t dismiss mainstream politicians and media because it’s inherently bad to be mainstream, I do it because right now we live in a highly controlled civilization wherein the only things permitted to go mainstream are those that help (or at least do not hinder) our rulers. Right now the ruling class which controls all means of mainstream elevation only elevates things which either (A) actively advance their interests or (B) normalize the status quo we live in with things like shows and movies that depict people thriving under our current systems.

    So right now there’s a wisdom in rejection of the mainstream. But we shouldn’t confuse that with the idea that being mainstream is always bad. Our goal should be to have our own healthy values of peace, equality and justice be the mainstream one day.

    It’s a sign of toxicity to be elevated to the mainstream under the current status quo. But we should keep in mind that if we are successful in changing the status quo, the shifting of what becomes mainstream will one day be a sign of health.

    ______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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  • Ukrainian Women Prove Resilient in the Face of War



    The war in Ukraine is having growing negative effects on women and girls’ health and well-being. They encompass not only gender-based violence but include all aspects of women’s and girls’ lives. Access to basic services and life-saving sexual and reproductive healthcare has been drastically disrupted.

    Since the 2013 Maidan revolution, also known as the “dignity revolution,” Ukrainian women have been increasingly engaged in the political, social, and economic affairs of the country. This engagement has led to an increase in women’s political participation, manifested by gains in parliamentary seats and in village and regional councils. As a result, Ukraine has ratified or joined most international agreements on gender equality.

    The years of conflict… increased and deepened pre-existing gender inequalities and created new ones such as arbitrary killings, rape, and trafficking.

    In spite of these advances, however, gender inequalities persist, bolstered by traditional norms that promote systemic discrimination and biases against women and girls. These inequities have been aggravated by the war conducted by Russia in eastern Ukraine since 2014. The years of conflict since then have increased and deepened pre-existing gender inequalities and created new ones such as arbitrary killings, rape, and trafficking.

    The war has particularly affected marginalized and disadvantaged groups such as female-headed households, internally displaced persons, Roma people, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ people. As a result, women facing multiple forms of discrimination are in need of special assistance.

    Today, millions of people have fled Ukraine and millions more—nearly two-thirds of them women and children—have been internally displaced and, as a consequence, do not have access to essential services such as healthcare, employment, and housing. Poverty and dependency on social assistance have increased and have pushed many women into the unprotected informal sectors of the economy.

    The Covid-19 pandemic, which began in Ukraine on March 3, 2020, threatened the gains that had been made on women’s rights, economic empowerment, and access to healthcare. Prolonged restrictions on mobility, particularly for women and young people, have increased despair and isolation, and have increased its negative effect on people with mental health challenges. Young people and children are forced to sacrifice their future so they can survive in the present.

    Even in times of peace, women tend to be more food insecure than men, but the war in Ukraine has exacerbated the number of women experiencing hunger, energy insecurity, and economic instability. The Russian aggression on Ukraine has provoked a redistribution of family roles, adding to the already heavy burden of women who, in addition to traditional home responsibilities are now obliged to look for additional sources of income.

    Women who are caring for children face extreme shortages of essential medicines, healthcare, and funds to obtain basic items, including baby food and formula. Many women face the challenge to accommodate and feed internally displaced people. This increases their unpaid care and domestic work responsibilities, often at the expense of their physical and mental health and well-being.

    The martial order issued by the Ukraine State Border Guard Service at the beginning of the Russian invasion that led to tens of thousands of civilians fleeing to other countries decreed that those between 18 and 40 years old should stay in the country. It is estimated that 95% of single-parent households are headed by single mothers, who now face increased pressure to provide for their families while male family members are more directly involved in defense activities.

    Despite the heavy burdens imposed by the war, Ukrainian women have shown considerable resilience and have contributed greatly to defense efforts. It is estimated that women make up 25% of the Ukrainian armed forces. This is an almost 10% increase from the beginning of the Russian invasion. Women have integrated fully into the armed forces, performing duties as soldiers and holding positions of command.

    The Russian military leaders didn’t expect such a strong resistance from the Ukrainian soldiers, and even less from a Ukrainian army strengthened by the participation of women, something that needs to be acknowledged and honored as a critical factor in the defense of their country.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Negotiate Now! A Call for Diplomacy in Ukraine



    The Russo-Ukrainian War drags on like a bad dream. Admittedly, there are slight glimmers of hope: Russian President Vladimir Putin stated his readiness to participate in an international peace conference; but Ukraine must firstrecognize Russian annexations, especially Crimea and territories around Kherson, demilitarize, and also guarantee Russian security. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has stated that he, too, is willing to negotiate; but Russia must first meet ten conditions including withdrawal from all Ukrainian territories including Crimea. The insincerity on both sides is striking: negotiations are unnecessary when the demands of each have been met in advance.

    Negotiate now! The stated preconditions for talks are merely excuses to delay them. There is no time to wait. Waves of Russian bombs are blasting Kyiv and Ukraine’s cities to bits while its Kamikaze drones have struck 600 miles into Russia, whose citizens are languishing under stringent sanctions. The defeats have mounted and Putin’s possible successors including Yevgeny Prigozhin, the power behind “Wagner,” the savage mercenary group, are sharpening their knives. Following the failure of the Russian president’s initial land strategy, which littered Ukraine with mass graves, his air attacks have wrecked one-third of Ukraine’s electric grids and power stations leaving one-third of its citizens without heat, water, or electricity in freezing temperatures. Estimates are that 100,000 Russian soldiers have already been killed. Thousands of Ukrainian lives have been lost at the front, and many more at home through lack of consumer staples, hospital beds, and medicines. Those numbers will climb: Russia is preparing for a counter-attack using 200,000 fresh troops, Belarus might open a “second front,” Ukraine is continuing its land-war and employing ever more lethal missiles.

    The humanitarian catastrophe is worsening and the global community must prioritize the material needs of everyday citizens (and soldiers) over those of governments.

    Contradictions also exist whose resolution is possible only with the success of negotiations between these warring states:

    • Ukraine is completely reliant on Western humanitarian and military in defending its sovereignty. Terminating aid is unthinkable though indefinitely maintaining it at current levels is impossible.
    • Under present circumstances, Russia has an incentive to drag out the conflict while Ukraine feels the pressure to win an unwinnable war as quickly as possible. Either way, further escalation is likely.
    • Ukraine’s territorial victories have led Russia to bomb civilian targets mercilessly in a spiraling increase of violence. That will lead Ukraine to attempt strengthening its aviation corps, and air defense systems, whereas Russia will expand its army to protect against invasion. However, what both sides present as “defensive” strategies will likely turn into future offensives.
    • Leaders of Ukraine and Russia have staked their reputations on military victory even though their economies are on the verge of collapse, and their citizens are despairing. The national interests of civil society, and the national interests of the state, are thus objectively in conflict.

    Congress has just provided the American military with a 35% increase and a total budget of $813 billion. Much of it is intended to replenish weapons already sent to Ukraine, and new weapons will surely need replenishing in the future. Close to $20 billion has already gone to Ukraine and upwards of $48 billion has just been allocated for the coming year, including “patriot” defense missiles. However, the United States seems ready for talks: President Joe Biden has refused to send battle tanks, precision missiles, and fighter jets to Ukraine even while pressuring Iran to cease sending drones to Russia. That can all change. The House of Representatives in 2023 will have a new Republican majority controlled by its far-right wing. That faction’s most extremist representatives are very influential. They blame inflation on aid to Ukraine, call for abolishing it completely, and consider this “Biden’s war.”

    The United Kingdom is the second largest donor to Ukraine; it has provided roughly 2.3 billion euros in aid during 2022. However, the UK is expecting a recession; it is still reeling from Brexit, erratic economic policies, and its inflation rate is over 10%. The European Union is now shouldering more of the burden by implementing a total embargo on importing Russian oil. This will negatively impact the Russian economy, but also create hardships for its own citizens. Fissures are also growing between the Eastern and Western democracies over how to distribute the costs of aid as well as the destructive capacities of weapons sent to Ukraine. Understandably, Eastern countries are more worried about Russian territorial ambitions than their Western counterparts. They also differ in their views on possibility of war between NATO and Russia. Nevertheless, it would be irresponsible for any of them to ignore signs of an alliance forming between Russia, Iran, China, Belarus, and other dictatorships, to counter NATO.

    Western media justifiably salutes the courage and resilience of Ukraine in facing Russia’s genocidal invasion. However, support for the citizens of Ukraine is uncritically conflated with support for the government’s war efforts. Such thinking is compounded by fears of “appeasement,” though costs imposed by this war should temper Russia’s imperialist ambitions for the foreseeable future. Self-styled realists’ dismissal of negotiations with Russia reinforces their indifference to turning prolongation of the war into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Meanwhile, human rights activists bemoan Russian atrocities even as they endorse policies that assure their continuance. Should the situation worsen for Russia, probabilities increase that Putin will launch a “tactical” nuclear strike.

    Negotiations cannot wait until that happens, there is a withdrawal of forces, and the war aims of each side are accepted. That is especially the case since rough parameters for an agreement exist.

    • Negotiations must include all nations directly or indirectly involved in the conflict, and initially call for immediate de-escalation and troop withdrawals to the borders of March 23, 2022.
    • Security guarantees are necessary for both nations: Ukraine must agree to become a neutral and non-nuclear state, and agree to remain outside NATO in exchange for permission join the EU. Sanctions on Russia would be lifted in accordance with its de-escalation of the conflict.
    • Monitoring the implementation of peace and investigating human rights violations must involve independent international agencies. For example, the UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) will need to oversee plans to deal with refugees, exchange of prisoners, collection of corpses, and elimination of land-mines.
    • Creating an international “fund, similar perhaps to the global climate fund, is necessary for the reconstruction of Ukraine.

    Continuing support for Ukraine is vital, but it must come with conditions. Even speculative suggestions for peace are necessary when there is only talk of war. The humanitarian catastrophe is worsening and the global community must prioritize the material needs of everyday citizens (and soldiers) over those of governments. Not to talk about peace is to perpetuate war—pure and simple—and that is something the people of Russia and Ukraine cannot afford. Negotiate now!

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Putin Planned Before Invasion to Cut Off Ukraine’s Electricity During the Winter

    Despite international calls for a holiday ceasefire, the Russian military launched massive missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian towns and energy infrastructure this week, killing several civilians and robbing millions more of heat and light as the new year approaches. Russian President Vladimir Putin is clearly punishing Ukrainians for resisting his invasion and locking his forces in a bloody…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Can Russia and Ukraine Negotiate an End to War Amid New Wave of Strikes?

    The war in Ukraine is now in its 11th month, and Russia unleashed a new bombardment this week of cities across the country, including the capital Kyiv. This comes as both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin have expressed a willingness to negotiate an end to the war — but their positions remain so far apart that there are no real hopes of peace talks…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Kosovo Closes Main Border With Serbia Amid Protests, Rising Tensions



    Kosovo shut down its largest border crossing with Serbia on Wednesday, underscoring the extent to which tensions between the two Balkan countries are rising.

    Albanian-majority Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 with Western support, roughly a decade after North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces intervened and carried out a bombing campaign on behalf of ethnic Albanians during a 1998-1999 civil war.

    Serbia has refused to recognize the statehood of its former province, however. Instead, according to Agence France-Presse, Belgrade has encouraged 120,000 ethnic Serbs living in Kosovo to defy Pristina’s authority—especially in northern Kosovo where Serbs constitute the majority.

    According to Al Jazeera: “About 50,000 Serbs living in ethnically divided northern Kosovo refuse to recognize the government in Pristina or the status of Kosovo as a country separate from Serbia. They have the support of many Serbs in Serbia and its government.”

    As AFP reported:

    The latest trouble erupted on December 10, when ethnic Serbs put up barricades to protest the arrest of an ex-policeman suspected of being involved in attacks against ethnic Albanian police officers—effectively sealing off traffic on two border crossings.
    After the roadblocks were erected, Kosovar police and international peacekeepers were attacked in several shooting incidents, while the Serbian armed forces were put on heightened alert this week.
    Late Tuesday, dozens of demonstrators on the Serbian side of the border used trucks and tractors to halt traffic leading to Merdare, the biggest crossing between the neighbors—a move which forced Kosovo police to close the entry point on Wednesday.

    Due to recent border blockades and closures, just three entry points between the two countries remain open. The obstructions are “preventing thousands of Kosovars who work elsewhere in Europe from returning home for holidays,” Al Jazeera noted.

    “Kosovo’s government has asked NATO’s peacekeeping force for the country, the approximately 4,000-strong KFOR, to clear the barricades” erected on its side of the border, the news outlet reported. “KFOR has no authority to act on Serbian soil.”

    KFOR commander Major General Angelo Michele Ristuccia said Wednesday in a statement that “it is paramount that all involved avoid any rhetoric or actions that can cause tensions and escalate the situation.”

    “Solutions should be sought through dialogue,” he added.

    On Tuesday, Kosovo Interior Minister Xhelal Sveçla accused Serbia, under the influence of Russia, of trying to destabilize its former province by supporting ethnic Serbs who have been demonstrating for weeks in northern Kosovo.

    According to Al Jazeera:

    Serbia denies it is trying to destabilize its neighbor and says it only wants to protect the Serbian minority living in what is now Kosovan territory… not recognized by Belgrade.
    Moscow said on Wednesday that it supported Serbia’s attempts to protect ethnic Serbs in northern Kosovo but denied Pristina’s accusation that Russia was somehow stoking tensions in an attempt to sow chaos across the Balkans.

    Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov called it “wrong” to blame Moscow for escalating tensions between Kosovo and Serbia.

    “Serbia is a sovereign country, and naturally, it protects the rights of Serbs who live nearby in such difficult conditions, and naturally reacts harshly when these rights are violated,” said Peskov.

    “Having very close allied relations, historical and spiritual relations with Serbia, Russia is very closely monitoring what is happening, how the rights of Serbs are respected and ensured,” he added. “And, of course, we support Belgrade in the actions that are being taken.”

    In a joint statement released Wednesday, the European Union and the United States called on all parties “to exercise maximum restraint, to take immediate action to unconditionally de-escalate the situation, and to refrain from provocations, threats, or intimidation.”

    Serbian Defense Minister Miloš Vučević on Wednesday described the barricades as a “democratic and peaceful” means of protest and said that Belgrade has “an open line of communication” with Western diplomats on resolving the issue.

    “We are all worried about the situation and where all this is going,” said Vučević. “Serbia is ready for a deal.”

    As AFP reported, “Northern Kosovo has been on edge since November when hundreds of ethnic Serb workers in the Kosovo police as well as the judicial branch, including judges and prosecutors, walked off the job.”

    “They were protesting a controversial decision to ban Serbs living in Kosovo from using Belgrade-issued vehicle license plates—a policy that was eventually scrapped by Pristina,” the news agency noted. “The mass walkouts created a security vacuum in Kosovo, which Pristina tried to fill by deploying ethnic Albanian police officers in the region.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • We’ve Reached Peak Zelensky. Now What?



    When the president of the poorest, most corrupt nation in Europe is feted with multiple standing ovations by the combined Houses of Congress, and his name invoked in the same breath as Winston Churchill, you know we’ve reached Peak Zelensky.

    It’s a farcical, almost psychotic over-promotion, probably surpassed only by the media’s shameful, hyperbolic railroading of the country into war with Iraq, in 2003. Paraphrasing Gertrude from Hamlet, “Methinks the media doth hype too much.”

    Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity.

    Let’s remember that before ascending to his country’s presidency, Volodymyr Zelensky’s greatest claim to fame was that he could play the piano with his penis. I’m not joking. And he ran on a platform to unite his country for peace, and for making amends with Russia. Again, I’m not joking.

    Now, he’s Europe’s George Washington, FDR, and Douglas MacArthur all rolled into one and before whom the mighty and powerful genuflect.

    Please. The only place to go from here is down. And, that is surely coming. Soon.

    Consider some inconvenient facts that the fawning media, which is essentially the public relations arm of the weapons industry, doesn’t want you to know.

    The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, recently let slip that the Ukrainian army has lost more than 100,000 troops in the eight months since the beginning of the war. Over the nine-year span of the Vietnam War, the U.S. with a population six times that of Ukraine, lost a total of 58,220 men.

    In other words, on a per day, per capita basis, Ukraine is losing soldiers at a rate 141 TIMES that of U.S. losses in Vietnam. The U.S. lost the public on Vietnam when middle class white boys began coming home in body bags. Does anybody with half a brain believe such losses in Ukraine are sustainable? Does anybody have another plan to avert such slaughter?

    Von der Leyen is among the shrewdest public figures in the world. What she is doing is laying the predicate for Western withdrawal from Ukraine and ending the War. If you look at the facts on the ground, not the boosterish propaganda ladled out by the media, you can understand why.

    In a matter of weeks, Russia, with its hypersonic missiles, destroyed half of Ukraine’s electrical power infrastructure. This, as winter is coming on. It can just as easily take out the other half, effectively bombing Ukraine back into the Stone Age. Is that what anybody wants?

    The startling, indeed, terrifying part of this is that neither Ukraine nor the West have any defense against these hypersonic missiles. They travel so fast, and on variable trajectories, they cannot be shot down, even by the most advanced Western systems. They represent one of the greatest asymmetries in deliverable destructive power in the history of warfare, probably dwarfed only by the U.S.’s possession of atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

    Again, there is no effective defense against them. The Russians have them. The Ukrainians don’t. Game over. Can you understand why leaders in the West are beginning to wake up?

    On the conventional front, the Ukrainians are having trouble securing even conventional weapons to defend themselves. U.S. arms suppliers are working around the clock to replace their own stocks and the stocks that European countries have given to Ukraine. But the backlog is running into years. A recent headline from The Wall Street Journal stated, “Europe is Rushing Arms to Ukraine but Running Out of Ammo.”

    Finally, the U.S. has committed $112 billion to Ukraine. That includes $45 billion just slipped into the omnibus funding bill against the likelihood that a Republican-controlled House will cut such funding, almost certainly substantially.

    That’s more than $10 billion per month since the war started in February. And that doesn’t even count the subsidies, both material and financial, from the EU which amount to billions of dollars more per month.

    Without such subsidies, Zelensky would not have lasted a month in the war. How many hours do you think he is going last once that flow dries up? And it surely is.

    The Europeans are coming to realize that their continent is being de-industrialized, literally moved backwards an entire epoch in economic terms, because of their willingness to serve as the doormat for the U.S.’ imperial war against Russia. Not even they, with their supine fealty to U.S. domination, are willing to commit collective economic suicide on behalf of the U.S.

    France’s Macron and Germany’s Scholz are suggesting that accommodations to Russian interests must be devised in order to bring about a peaceful settlement of the war.

    Macron suggested in a television address to his nation that an antagonized Russia is not in the security interests of Europe. “We need to prepare what we are ready to do…to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table.”

    Scholz was even more specific. In an article in Foreign Affairs he declared, “We have to go back to the agreements which we had in the last decades and which were the basis for peace and security order in Europe.”

    This is a direct repudiation of the U.S.’s maximalist position before the start of the War, that Russia’s security needs were of no interest to a marauding NATO.

    Even U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is now mooting the idea that territorial concessions must be on the table. In a Wall Street Journal article, Blinken stated that, “Our focus is…to take back territory that’s been seized from [Ukraine] since February 24th.”

    Notice, that this is a significant climb down from the U.S.’ earlier position that all Russian gains since 2014, including Crimea, must be reversed before negotiations could begin. And this is just Blinken’s opening hand. More concessions are sure to follow as Russian gains become greater and their likelihood of being reversed, lesser.

    Put these four things together: staggering, unsustainable losses of soldiers; terrifying, indefensible asymmetries of destructive power; inability to supply oneself with even conventional defensive weapons; and categorically reduced support from your most important backers.

    Does that sound like the formula for winning a war? It is not. It’s the formula for losing the war, which is why von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz, and Blinken are now laying pipe for getting out. The tide is going out under Zelensky. He will soon be remembered as a Trivial Pursuits question, or an answer on Jeopardy: “The only modern head of state known to be able to play the piano with his penis.” Ding. “Contestant #3?” “Who is Volodymyr Zelensky?”

    A peace will soon be declared. Russia will keep the Donbas and Crimea in recognition of the facts on the ground. Both sides will be better off for this. The Donbas is ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally Russian, which is why it voted overwhelmingly for assimilation into Russia. Besides, if Kiev loved them so much, it wouldn’t have murdered 14,000 of them over the past eight years and resumed massive shelling in early February of this year, before the Russian invasion.

    Ukraine will foreswear any future affiliation with NATO. This is Putin’s highest priority and what he asked for–and was denied–in his request to the U.S. and NATO last December, before the invasion was launched. If Russia begins its much-feared winter offensive, as many expect, Ukrainian generals will dispatch Zelensky in a coup rather than send their few remaining soldiers to certain annihilation.

    U.S. grain and pharma conglomerates will buy up Ukrainian farmland—some of the best in the world—for pennies on the dollar. This is the standard MO of U.S. multinational vultures coming in after the kill to pick apart the carcasses. U.S. weapons makers will look for and help provoke the next feeding frenzy, much as they materialized Ukraine barely a year after the humiliating U.S. defeat in Afghanistan derailed their last gravy train.

    Russia and China, driven together by U.S. bullying, will continue to constellate the nations of the Global South into an anti-Western bloc committed to collaborative, mutually profitable, peaceful development. The U.S. and its closest allies will cower behind the walls they’ve constructed of the ever-shrinking share of the global economy that they can manage to hold as their own.

    Ukraine will prove a turning point in the dismantling of U.S. hegemony over global affairs that it has enjoyed—and, let’s be honest, often abused–since 1945. The U.S. public is not psychically prepared for such a come down. But that is the cost of living in the fantasy world that the media lavishes up to keep that self-same public ignorant, fearful, confused, entertained, and distracted.

    Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity. We need to be on the lookout for their next gambit to pillage the treasury and advance their own private interests above those of the nation. It will surely come.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • The Ukraine Crisis Is a Classic ‘Security Dilemma’

    On December 27 2022, both Russia and Ukraine issued calls for ending the war in Ukraine, but only on non-negotiable terms that they each know the other side will reject.

    Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Kuleba proposed a “peace summit” in February to be chaired by UN Secretary General Guterres, but with the precondition that Russia must first face prosecution for war crimes in an international court. On the other side, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov issued a chilling ultimatum that Ukraine must accept Russia’s terms for peace or “the issue will be decided by the Russian Army.”

    There is no moral high ground in relentless, open-ended mass slaughter, managed, directed and in fact perpetrated by people in smart suits and military uniforms in imperial capitals thousands of miles from the crashing of shells, the cries of the wounded, and the stench of death.

    But what if there were a way of understanding this conflict and possible solutions that encompassed the views of all sides and could take us beyond one-sided narratives and proposals that serve only to fuel and escalate the war? The crisis in Ukraine is in fact a classic case of what International Relations scholars call a “security dilemma,” and this provides a more objective way of looking at it.

    A security dilemma is a situation in which countries on each side take actions for their own defense that countries on the other side then see as a threat. Since offensive and defensive weapons and forces are often indistinguishable, one side’s defensive build-up can easily be seen as an offensive build-up by the other side. As each side responds to the actions of the other, the net result is a spiral of militarization and escalation, even though both sides insist, and may even believe, that their own actions are defensive.

    In the case of Ukraine, this has happened on different levels, both between Russia and national and regional governments in Ukraine, but also on a larger geopolitical scale between Russia and the United States/NATO.

    The very essence of a security dilemma is the lack of trust between the parties. In the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cuban Missile Crisis served as an alarm bell that forced both sides to start negotiating arms control treaties and safeguard mechanisms that would limit escalation, even as deep levels of mistrust remained. Both sides recognized that the other was not hell-bent on destroying the world, and this provided the necessary minimum basis for negotiations and safeguards to try to ensure that this did not come to pass.

    After the end of the Cold War, both sides cooperated with major reductions in their nuclear arsenals, but the United States gradually withdrew from a succession of arms control treaties, violated its promises not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, and used military force in ways that directly violated the UN Charter’s prohibition against the “threat or use of force.” U.S. leaders claimed that the conjunction of terrorism and the existence of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons gave them a new right to wage “preemptive war,” but neither the UN nor any other country ever agreed to that.

    U.S. aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere was alarming to people all over the world, and even to many Americans, so it was no wonder that Russian leaders were especially worried by America’s renewed post-Cold War militarism. As NATO incorporated more and more countries in Eastern Europe, a classic security dilemma began to play out.

    President Putin, who was elected in 2000, began to use international fora to challenge NATO expansion and U.S. war-making, insisting that new diplomacy was needed to ensure the security of all countries in Europe, not only those invited to join NATO.

    The former Communist countries in Eastern Europe joined NATO out of defensive concerns about possible Russian aggression, but this also exacerbated Russia’s security concerns about the ambitious and aggressive military alliance gathering around its borders, especially as the United States and NATO refused to address those concerns.

    In this context, broken promises on NATO expansion, U.S. serial aggression in the greater Middle East and elsewhere, and absurd claims that U.S. missile defense batteries in Poland and Romania were to protect Europe from Iran, not Russia, set alarm bells ringing in Moscow.

    The U.S. withdrawal from nuclear arms control treaties and its refusal to alter its nuclear first strike policy raised even greater fears that a new generation of U.S. nuclear weapons were being designed to give the United States a nuclear first strike capability against Russia.

    On the other side, Russia’s increasing assertiveness on the world stage, including its military actions to defend Russian enclaves in Georgia and its intervention in Syria to defend its ally the Assad government, raised security concerns in other former Soviet republics and allies, including new NATO members. Where might Russia intervene next?

    As the United States refused to diplomatically address Russia’s security concerns, each side took actions that ratcheted up the security dilemma. The United States backed the violent overthrow of President Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014, which led to rebellions against the post-coup government in Crimea and Donbas. Russia responded by annexing Crimea and supporting the breakaway “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk.

    Even if all sides were acting in good faith and out of defensive concerns, in the absence of effective diplomacy they all assumed the worst about each other’s motives as the crisis spun further out of control, exactly as the “security dilemma” model predicts that nations will do amid such rising tensions.

    Of course, since mutual mistrust lies at the heart of any security dilemma, the situation is further complicated when any of the parties is seen to act in bad faith. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently admitted that Western leaders had no intention of enforcing Ukraine’s compliance with the terms of the Minsk II agreement in 2015, and only agreed to it to buy time to build up Ukraine militarily.

    The breakdown of the Minsk II peace agreement and the continuing diplomatic impasse in the larger geopolitical conflict between the United States, NATO and Russia plunged relations into a deepening crisis and led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Officials on all sides must have recognized the dynamics of the underlying security dilemma, and yet they failed to take the necessary diplomatic initiatives to resolve the crisis.

    Peaceful, diplomatic alternatives have always been available if the parties chose to pursue them, but they did not. Does that mean that all sides deliberately chose war over peace? They would all deny that.

    Yet all sides apparently now see advantages in a prolonged conflict, despite the relentless daily slaughter, dreadful and deteriorating conditions for millions of civilians, and the unthinkable dangers of full-scale war between NATO and Russia. All sides have convinced themselves they can or must win, and so they keep escalating the war, along with all its impacts and the risks that it will spin out of control.

    President Biden came to office promising a new era of American diplomacy, but has instead led the United States and the world to the brink of World War III.

    Clearly, the only solution to a security dilemma like this is a cease-fire and peace agreement to stop the carnage, followed by the kind of diplomacy that took place between the United States and the Soviet Union in the decades that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which led to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and successive arms control treaties. Former UN official Alfred de Zayas has also called for UN-administered referenda to determine the wishes of the people of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk.

    It is not an endorsement of an adversary’s conduct or position to negotiate a path to peaceful coexistence. We are witnessing the absolutist alternative in Ukraine today. There is no moral high ground in relentless, open-ended mass slaughter, managed, directed and in fact perpetrated by people in smart suits and military uniforms in imperial capitals thousands of miles from the crashing of shells, the cries of the wounded and the stench of death.

    If proposals for peace talks are to be more than PR exercises, they must be firmly grounded in an understanding of the security needs of all sides, and a willingness to compromise to see that those needs are met and that all the underlying conflicts are addressed.

  • ‘Every War Ends in a Diplomatic Way’: Ukrainian Foreign Minister Floats February Peace Summit



    Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Monday that his government is aiming to hold a “peace summit” in February with the goal of ending Russia’s assault, which is now in its 10th month.

    “Every war ends in a diplomatic way,” Kuleba said in an interview with the Associated Press. “Every war ends as a result of the actions taken on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.”

    Kuleba suggested the summit could be mediated by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, a vocal advocate of diplomatic talks to end an invasion that has killed thousands of civilians, devastated Ukraine’s infrastructure, and sparked a massive humanitarian crisis.

    “The United Nations could be the best venue for holding this summit, because this is not about making a favor to a certain country,” the foreign minister said. “This is really about bringing everyone on board.”

    But Kuleba added that Ukraine would only extend an invite to Russia if it first faced war crimes prosecution in an international court—a precondition certain to draw objections from Moscow. The International Criminal Court is currently investigating alleged war crimes by Russian forces in Ukraine.

    Kuleba’s remarks came hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin said he is “ready to negotiate” an end to the war, though he has refused to discuss withdrawing forces from the territories he illegally annexed in September.

    Peace talks to end the war in Ukraine have been backed by dozens of countries around the world.

    During his visit to the United States last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a “just peace” would entail “no compromises as to the sovereignty, freedom, and territorial integrity of my country” and “payback for all the damages inflicted by Russian aggression.”

    Zelenskyy recently dropped his demand that Putin be removed from power before peace talks can resume.

    The Biden White House approved another $2 billion in military assistance for Ukraine during Zelenskyy’s visit, agreeing to send the war-torn country a Patriot missile system as well as so-called precision bomb kits.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • The Claim That The Ukraine War Advances US Interests Discredits The Claim That It’s “Unprovoked”

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    One of the most illustrative examples of how the mainstream worldview is based on narratives rather than facts is the way Republican officials like senate minority leader Mitch McConnell have been branded servants of Russia despite consistent track records as virulent Russia hawks.

    “Moscow Mitch”, as Democrats absurdly titled him during the height of Russiagate hysteria in 2019, gave a speech on the Senate floor on Wednesday arguing that the primary reason to back Ukraine in its war against Russia is because doing so serves US interests.

    “President Zelensky is an inspiring leader,” McConnell said in his speech ahead of the Ukrainian president’s visit to Washington. “But the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests. Helping equip our friends in Eastern Europe to win this war is also a direct investment in reducing Vladimir Putin’s future capabilities to menace America, threaten our allies, and contest our core interests.”

    McConnell argued that backing Ukraine “will massively wear down the arsenal that is available to Putin for future efforts to use bullying and bloodshed,” taking a stab at the Biden administration for not requesting more money for this immensely useful proxy war.

    “So I’ll say it one more time. Continuing our support for Ukraine is morally right, but it is not only that. It is also a direct investment in cold, hard, American interests,” McConnell said. “That’s why Republicans rejected the Biden Administration’s original request for Ukraine assistance as insufficient.

    “Finally, we all know that Ukraine’s fight to retake its territory is neither the beginning nor end of the West’s broader strategic competition with Putin’s Russia,” McConnell concluded. “Increasing the pressure on Putin’s regime can and should be a bipartisan priority.”

    You see US empire lackeys gushing all the time about how extraordinarily efficient and cost-effective the proxy war in Ukraine is for furthering US interests against Russia, which is funny because they spend the rest of the time talking about how this invasion was “unprovoked” and rending their garments about how horrible it is. The official imperial position is somehow simultaneously (A) “We hate this war and never wanted it,” and (B) “This war benefits us tremendously.”

    The only way to reconcile these two positions is to believe that Vladimir Putin acted against the interests of Russia in the service of the United States by invading Ukraine, for no other reason than because he is too stupid and evil to do otherwise. The other choice is to do what most empire loyalists do and simply not think very hard about those obvious contradictions.

    Alternatively, you can consider the possibility that Putin was pressured into choosing between two bad options by the many aggressive provocations the empire has been making for years. Empire apologists always claim that western provocations had nothing to do with the invasion of Ukraine, but if that’s true then why did so many western experts spend years warning that western provocations would lead to an invasion of Ukraine?

    Plainly the claim that the US is just an innocent bystander helping its good buddy Ukraine because it loves freedom and democracy is discredited by the claim — often made by those very same claimants — that this war serves US interests. But you hear them bounce seamlessly between the two all the time.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    Some of the usual suspects are using Zelensky's visit to whine about how expensive aid to Ukraine is, so it's a good opportunity for this CEPA report that notes that for just 5% of the US military budget, we've disabled 50% of Russia's military power. https://t.co/T4ksyeqx3M

    — Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux) December 21, 2022

    There’s a viral thread making the rounds on Twitter right now by a historian named Brett Devereaux that exemplifies this perfectly. In the first tweet in the thread he’s enthusing about how “for just 5% of the US military budget, we’ve disabled 50% of Russia’s military power,” then in the very next post in the thread he’s weeping about what a humanitarian crisis the war is and how we just want peace, and then in the very next post after that he’s saying “from a pure realpolitik perspective, Putin’s war was a massive blunder that has strengthened the US global position, degrading Russian capabilities (which frees up resources for other threats) and strengthening our alliances.”

    California representative Adam Schiff, who has been calling this war “unprovoked” since the invasion, was saying all the way back during the Trump impeachment hearings of 2020 that “the US aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

    Another congressman, Dan Crenshaw, said on Twitter this past May that “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea.”

    “It is in America’s interests to help Ukraine defeat one of our most powerful foes,” tweeted The Atlantic’s David French in the wake of Zelensky’s PR appearance in Washington.

    “It is in America’s national security interests for Putin’s Russia to be defeated in Ukraine,” tweeted warmongering senator Lindsey Graham.

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    US chauvinism & warmongering is so ingrained that @AdamSchiff can openly declare, in Jan 2020, that US uses Ukraine to “fight Russia over there,” and our elites applaud. Fast forward two years later when Russia fights back, and the same circle is outraged. pic.twitter.com/6B4QVFSZvV

    — Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) February 26, 2022

    Statements like these should fully discredit the official narrative that the US is helping Ukraine fight off an unprovoked attack by a reckless tyrant. These are mutually contradictory positions; either it’s a completely unprovoked invasion that Washington didn’t want, or it’s an excellent way of getting Washington everything it wants. It’s nonsensical and naive to believe both.

    But of course they do not discredit the official Ukraine narrative in the eyes of the public, because the US has the most effective propaganda machine that has ever existed. The many glaring inconsistencies and misdeeds of the empire are simply airbrushed away with a little spin and sweet talk.

    If it weren’t for the imperial spin machine, nobody would believe the US just coincidentally stumbled its way into a lucky proxy war that happens to help it advance its agendas of global domination.

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  • More Than 1,000 Faith Leaders in the US Call for a Christmas Truce in Ukraine

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has wrapped up a one-day visit to Washington, D.C., where he called on the Biden administration and lawmakers to provide more military and financial aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russia. This was Zelensky’s first overseas trip in nearly a year, since the war began. Ahead of the trip, over 1,000 faith leaders in the United States called for a Christmas…

    Source

  • America’s 2022 Allocations to Ukraine Total $112 Billion

    During this year, the U.S. Government has allocated $112 billion to Ukraine, in order to defeat Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine. Russia allocates normally $60 billion per year for its entire military, but this year has increased that 40% to $84 billion, because of its invasion of Ukraine. Russia invaded Ukraine because, on 17 December 2021, Russia had demanded that the U.S. Government and its NATO anti-Russian military alliance stop trying to place its missiles on and near Russia’s borders (especially in Ukraine, which is the nearest of all bordering nations to Moscow); and, on 7 January 2022 America and NATO said no. Russia then invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, in order to prevent Ukraine from becoming a launch-pad for U.S. missiles. That’s what the war in Ukraine is — and always has been — about, from the Russian viewpoint: not being faced with U.S. missiles that are only a five-minute missile-flight-time away from Russia’s central command in Moscow.

    The war in Ukraine started in February 2014, by America’s coup there that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected neutralist Government and replaced it by a rabidly anti-Russian and pro-American one on Russia’s border, in order ultimately to become able to place just 317 miles away from the Kremlin U.S. missiles which would be only a five-minute flight-time away from nuking Russia’s central command — far too little time in order for Russia’s central command to be able to verify that launch and then to launch its own retaliatory missiles. It would be nuclear checkmate of Russia, by the U.S. (with the assistance of its NATO allies, which then would include Ukraine).

    Whereas Russia’s objective is to not become nuclear checkmated by America placing its missiles that close to Moscow, America’s objective is to nuclear checkmate Russia in order to capture the world’s largest and most resource-rich country — to force Russia to capitulate and become another U.S. ‘ally’ (that is, vassal-nation).

    President Biden had requested Congress to add $38 billion more this year for Ukraine than the $67 billion that was funded earlier in the year, but Congress decided to increase his requested amount by $7 billion (almost a 20% increase in his suggested increase), so that there will be a total of $45 billion added to the $67 billion previously allocated, for a total U.S. allocation to Ukraine this year of $112 billion. That amount is $28 billion more than Russia will have spent this year for all of its military — the vast majority of which Russian military expenditure isn’t being allocated to the war in Ukraine, but instead to other aspects of Russia’s defense against the threat to its national security from America and its allies. America alone has been spending annually  on its military around 20 times what Russia has been spending on its; and, in order to make America’s expenditure appear not to be so gargantuan as it actually is, large portions of it are being paid out from other federal Departments than the Defense (or Aggression) Department, but the total annual U.S. military expenditures have, for over a decade, been over a trillion dollars per year.

    On November 16, I headlined “U.S. Will Have Spent $100B on Ukraine This Year,” and now it’s clear that my prediction was on the conservative side, by $12 billion.

    The post America’s 2022 Allocations to Ukraine Total $112 Billion first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Chomsky: Advanced US Weaponry in Ukraine Is Sustaining Battlefield Stalemate

    It’s now more than 300 days since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the conflict has intensified rather than subsided, with Ukrainian leaders expressing fears of impending mass infantry attacks from Russia and U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken announcing this week that the U.S. will send Ukraine $1.8 billion in military aid, including a Patriot missile battery. On December 21…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Washington Preps for Visit From Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy This Week

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will visit Washington D.C. on Wednesday to meet with U.S. President Joe Biden and speak directly to Congress, which is set to vote later this week on increasing funding for Ukraine as it continues its war against Russia. Zelenskyy’s visit to the U.S. capital will be his first foreign trip since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops to…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Former German Chancellor Merkel Admits that Minsk Peace Agreements Were Part of Scheme for Ukraine to Buy Time to Prepare for War with Russia

    War was inevitable outcome of 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine

    Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in an interview with Die Zeit, published on December 7, that “the 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It…used this time to become stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the modern Ukraine.”

    These comments echoed those of Petro Poroshenko, the former president of Ukraine, who came to power in snap elections after the 2014 coup d’état. Regarding his signing of the Minsk Accord, Poroshenko repeated in a Deutsche Welle interview last June his previous admission: “Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war—to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces.”

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel gives a joint news conference with Ukrainian President following their talks at the Mariinsky palace in Kiev, on August 22, 2021.
    Angela Merkel [Source: cnbc.com]

    Meaning that Ukraine had no real intention of following the accords, but wanted to buy time while Ukraine built fortifications and developed a military strong enough to wage a war of aggression against the Russian-tilted Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which had demanded autonomy from the Ukrainian government installed in the February 2014 coup.

    Petro Poroshenko [Source: thefamouspeople.com]

    Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych (2010-2014) became a target for regime change when he spurned an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan and instead drew his country closer to Russia.

    When protesters backed by the U.S. did not have enough signatures for Yanukovych’s impeachment, they overthrew his government by force and hunted down Yanukovych’s supporters. The new Ukrainian government further tried to impose draconian language laws and attacked the people of eastern Ukraine after they voted for their autonomy after the coup—an attack that began right after then-CIA director John Brennan visited Ukraine.1

    RTR3ON7I
    People cast ballots at polling station in Donetsk following U.S.-backed coup in May 2014. [Source: newsweek.com]

    Signed originally on September 5, 2014, by Ukraine, Russia, rebel leaders in eastern Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), with mediation by leaders in France and Germany, the Minsk agreement had followed a twelve-point protocol advocating for a cease-fire in the fighting between the Ukrainian military and Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and to decentralize power, giving those Republics autonomy which they had voted for in popular referenda.

    October 17, 2014: Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, in talks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, right, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (foreground) and French President Francois Hollande (center back). [Source: consortiumnews.com]
    Map Description automatically generated
    Map of the buffer zone established by the Minsk protocol. [Source: wikipedia.org]

    Additional provisions included the withdrawal of illegal armed groups and mercenaries from Ukraine, the release of hostages and illegally detained persons, the establishment of security zones and independent monitoring of the conflict zones, prosecution and punishment of war criminals, and continuance of inclusive national dialogue.

    Unfortunately, the Minsk protocol was never followed, and conflict in eastern Ukraine persisted, leading to the signing of the Minsk II protocol in February 2015.

    This protocol reaffirmed many aspects of the first Minsk agreement, including the promotion of decentralization and autonomy for the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics, which was to be enshrined in a new Ukrainian constitution that was to recognize the diversity of religions, languages and cultures within Ukraine.2

    The Ukrainian right sector, however, vowed not to follow Minsk II, claiming that it was unconstitutional and the U.S. State Department accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of violating the protocol by deploying Russian Armed Forces around the contested city of Debaltseve to assist the Donetsk Army. (Putin’s spokesman denied this and said that Russia could not assist in the implementation of Minsk II because it was not involved in the conflict.)

    Sergey Lavrov [Source: thefamouspeople.com]

    When a law was passed in the Ukrainian parliament granting Donetsk and Luhansk partial autonomy, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the “law was a sharp departure from the Minsk agreements because it demanded local elections under Ukrainian jurisdiction.”

    A person with blonde hair Description automatically generated with medium confidence
    Maria Zakharova [Source: it.sputniknews.com]

    Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Angela Merkel’s comments on December 7 were nothing short of the testimony of a person who openly admitted that everything done between 2014 and 2015 was meant to “distract the international community from real issues, play for time, pump up the Kyiv regime with weapons, and escalate the issue into a large-scale conflict.”

    Merkel’s statements “horrifyingly” reveal in turn that the West uses “forgery as a method of action,” and resorts to “machinations, manipulation, and all kinds of distortions of truth, law, and rights imaginable.”

    Loss of Trust

    Russian President Vladimir Putin for his part told journalists at a Eurasian Union Summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, on December 103 that he had thought the leader of the Federal Republic of Germany, even though Germany was on Ukraine’s side, had been sincere in negotiating the Minsk agreements, but now it was apparent that “they were deceiving us. The only purpose was to pump arms into Ukraine and get it ready for hostilities. We are seeing this, yes. Apparently, we got our bearings too late, frankly. Perhaps we should have started all this sooner, but we still simply hoped to come to terms under these Minsk peace agreements.”

    For Putin, Merkel’s admission shows that “we did everything right by starting the special military operation. Why? Because it transpired that nobody was going to fulfill these Minsk agreements. The Ukrainian leaders also mentioned this, in the words of former President Poroshenko, who said he signed the agreements but was not going to fulfill them.”

    During the news conference following the visit to Kyrgyzstan.
    Putin addressing Merkel’s revelations at press conference following Eurasian Union Summit meeting. [Source: en.kremlin.ru]

    According to Putin, now the issue of “trust is at stake. Trust as such is already close to zero, but after such statements, the issue of trust is coming to the fore. How can we negotiate anything? What can we agree upon? Is it possible to come to terms with anyone, and where are the guarantees? This is, of course, a problem. But eventually we will have to come to terms all the same. I have already said many times that we are ready for these agreements, we are open. But, naturally, all this makes us wonder with whom we are dealing.”

    Fitting a Larger Pattern of Deception

    A person in a suit talking to another person Description automatically generated with low confidence
    James A. Baker with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 in Moscow making a false promise. Gorbachev should have known from U.S. history never to trust an American leader. [Source: nsarchive.gwu.edu]

    Western treachery over the Minsk agreements is far from a historical anomaly.

    Following the end of the Cold War, the George H. W. Bush administration promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not be expanded one inch eastward in exchange for Russia accepting the reunification of Germany and removing troops it had stationed in East Germany.

    But in 1998, the Clinton administration certified NATO expansion into Romania, Poland and Hungary, triggering a new Cold War.

    Decades earlier, the United States had deceived the Soviets by failing to abide by the Yalta agreements when it covertly armed neo-Nazis to try to foment counter-revolutions in pro-communist governments that were being established in Eastern Europe.

    When the U.S. invaded Russia with six other countries in 1918 following the Bolshevik Revolution, President Woodrow Wilson deceived his own commanding General, William S. Graves, who was told that he was going to Russia to protect the Trans-Siberian Railway and a Czech military delegation when his real purpose was to support Czarist military officers intent on re-establishing the old order in Russia.4

    American troops in Siberia, 1918. [Source: historycollection.com]

    How the West Brought War to Ukraine

    Benjamin Abelow’s new book, How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe (Great Barrington, MA: Siland Press, 2022), demonstrates that the official U.S. narrative about the war in Ukraine is not only wrong but “the opposite of truth.”

    A lecturer in medicine at Yale University with a degree in European history who lobbied Congress on nuclear weapons policy, Abelow writes that “the underlying cause of the war lies not in an unbridled expansionism of Mr. Putin, or in paranoid delusions of military planners in the Kremlin, but in a 30-year history of Western provocations, directed at Russia, that began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued to the start of the war.”5

    How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe by [Benjamin Abelow]
    [Source: amazon.com]

    The key U.S./Western provocations detailed by Abelow are:

    1. The expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a hostile anti-Russian military alliance, over a thousand miles eastward, pressing it toward Russia’s borders in disregard of assurances previously given to Moscow.
    2. Withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the placing of anti-ballistic launch systems that could accommodate and fire offensive nuclear weapons such as nuclear-tipped Tomahawk cruise missiles at Russia, from newly joined NATO countries.
    3. The Obama administration’s laying the groundwork for and possibly directly instigating an armed, far-right coup in Ukraine, which replaced a democratically elected pro-Russian government with an unelected pro-Western one that had four high-ranking members who could be labeled neo-fascist.
    4. The conducting of countless NATO military exercises near Russia’s border, including ones with live-fire rocket exercises whose goal was to simulate attacks on air-defense systems inside Russia.
    5. The assertion that Ukraine would become a NATO member.
    6. Withdrawal by the U.S. from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, increasing Russia’s vulnerability to a U.S. first strike.
    7. The U.S.’s arming and training of the Ukrainian military through bilateral agreements and holding of regular joint military training exercises inside Ukraine.
    8. Leading the Ukrainian leadership to adopt an uncompromising stance toward Russia, further exacerbating the threat to Russia.6
    [Source: gordonhahn.com]

    Abelow makes clear that, if the situation were reversed and Russia or China carried out equivalent steps near U.S. territory, the U.S. would surely respond with a preemptive military attack on the aggressors that would be justified as a ‘matter of self-defense.’

    So why should Russia be maligned when it is acting as any country would under similar circumstances? And why is it so hard for Americans to stand against their government’s reckless, deceitful and criminal policies that have greatly heightened the risk of nuclear war?

  • Originally published at CovertAction Magazine.
    1. Kees van der Pijl, Flight MH17: Ukraine and the new Cold War: Prism of Disaster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 103.
    2. Russian expert Nicolai Petro noted at the time that there was one major omission to Minsk II—an end to anti-terrorist operations against the East, which would not have passed the Kyiv parliament. Van der Pijl, Flight MH17, 146.
    3. At this summit, Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko presented proposals to strengthen the Eurasian Economic Union consisting of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia, including by promoting development of modern industries and subsidizing interest rates on loans for industrial projects. Lukashenko stated: “We need to improve, at all costs, the blood circulatory system of our union…. It is already clear to everyone that the era of dollar dominance is coming to an end. The future belongs to trade blocs, which will be made in national currencies. Belarus and Russia are no longer using the U.S. dollar in their main settlements. It is important that other partners actively join this process.”
    4. Years after Graves came back to the U.S., he wrote a scathing memoir, America’s Siberian Adventure, 1918-1920 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith Publishers Inc., 1931) and was accused in turn of being a communist sympathizer.
    5. Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe (Great Barrington, MA: Siland Press, 2022), 7.
    6. Abelow should add that the ultimate goal of U.S. policy is to trap Russia into a quagmire and bankrupt the country by ratcheting up sanctions, resulting in the growth of civil unrest and overthrow of Vladimir Putin, who is hated because he restored Russia’s economic sovereignty following the misrule of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and tightened Russian economic integration with Germany, threatening to undermine Anglo-American dominance in Central and Eastern Europe. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Repeating ’70s Strategy of Grand Chess-Master Brzezinski: Biden Appears to Have Induced Russian Invasion of Ukraine to Bankrupt Russia’s Economy and Advance Regime Change,” CovertAction Magazine, March 1, 2022; Van der Pijl, Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War, 3.
    The post Former German Chancellor Merkel Admits that Minsk Peace Agreements Were Part of Scheme for Ukraine to Buy Time to Prepare for War with Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ukrainian human rights activist Maksym Butkevytch remains a prisoner of war

    Maksym Butkevytch, a well-known Ukrainian journalist, human rights defender and pacifist, is being held as a prisoner of war, after the capture of his Ukrainian army platoon by Russian occupying forces in June. Isabelle Merminod and Tim Baster report.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • NATO Chief Voices Fear Of War With Russia While US Greenlights Drone Strikes On Russian Territory

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    In what Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp describes as “a rare acknowledgment of the dangers of backing Ukraine,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg acknowledged a fear of something going “horribly wrong” and leading to a hot war between the nuclear-armed alliance and Russia.

    In an article titled “‘I fear a full-blown war between the West and Russia’, Nato chief warns,” The Telegraph writes the following:

    “I fear that the war in Ukraine will get out of control, and spread into a major war between Nato and Russia,” said Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, responding to a question about his greatest fears for the winter in an interview.

     

    He told Norwegian broadcaster NRK on Friday that he was confident such a scenario could be avoided but that the threat was there.

     

    “If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong,” he added.

    And things absolutely can go horribly wrong when dealing with an increasingly aggressive standoff between nuclear superpowers, as we have seen from history. The last cold war saw many nuclear close calls as a result of technical malfunctions and misunderstandings, including an incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the only thing which prevented a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine from deploying its weapon on the US military was one officer refusing to go along with two others who were giving the orders to fire.

    We got a taste of this horror once again last month in the long minutes following erroneous reports that Russia had launched missiles at NATO member Poland. The fact that cooler heads have prevailed up until this point does not mean that nuclear brinkmanship is safe, anymore than a game of Russian roulette not ending after the first couple of trigger pulls would mean that Russian roulette is safe to play.

    So Stoltenberg is correct to be afraid. There absolutely are too many things that can go horribly wrong in such a standoff, and there are simply too many unpredictable moving parts for anyone to feel confident that this will not happen.

    And it’s pretty crazy to hear Stoltenberg voice these concerns even while the Pentagon gives the go-ahead for Ukraine to begin launching long-range attacks on targets inside Russia in its war that is being backed by the United States, because those two positions would seem to be pretty strongly at odds with each other.

    In an article titled “Pentagon gives Ukraine green light for drone strikes inside Russia,” The Times reports as follows:

    The Pentagon has given a tacit endorsement of Ukraine’s long-range attacks on targets inside Russia after President Putin’s multiple missile strikes against Kyiv’s critical infrastructure.

     

    Since daily assaults on civilians began in October, the Pentagon has revised its threat assessment of the war in Ukraine. Crucially, this includes new judgments about whether arms shipments to Kyiv might lead to a military confrontation between Russia and Nato.

     

    This represents a significant development in the nine-month war between Ukraine and Russia, with Washington now likelier to supply Kyiv with longer-range weapons.

    The Times quotes a “US defence source” as saying the following: “We’re not saying to Kyiv, ‘Don’t strike the Russians [in Russia or Crimea]’. We can’t tell them what to do. It’s up to them how they use their weapons. But when they use the weapons we have supplied, the only thing we insist on is that the Ukrainian military conform to the international laws of war and to the Geneva conventions.”

    “They are the only limitations but that includes no targeting of Russian families and no assassinations. As far as we’re concerned, Ukraine has been in compliance,” the source says, which is a strange assertion given that US intelligence has reportedly concluded Ukraine was behind the assassination of the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin.

    “Ukraine has been careful to use its own drones, not US-supplied weapons, to carry out the strikes,” The Times reports, while also noting that “Pentagon officials have made it clear that requests from Kyiv for longer-range US weapons, including rockets and fighter bombers which could be used for even more effective strikes inside Russia or occupied Crimea, are being seriously considered.”

    This revelation comes days after Ukraine launched its most brazen attack into Russian territory yet, with drone strikes on bases which killed multiple Russian soldiers and damaged two nuclear-capable bombers. Not too long ago the US waging a proxy war that features direct attacks on Russia’s nuclear forces would have been an unthinkably terrifying prospect, yet that’s where we’re at now, and it only seems to be escalating.

    Empire apologists will try to make this a conversation about whether Ukraine has a “right” to attack Russian territory, which is a red herring from the real issue at hand. Obviously Ukraine has a right to attack a nation that is attacking it; that’s not the point. The real issue is the danger of provoking a hot war between nuclear superpowers, which even the NATO Secretary-General is becoming increasingly nervous about.

    The western power alliance continually ramping up aggressions to test how far it could provoke Russia is what led to this conflict in the first place. Now we’re at a point where there isn’t much space for Russia to back up before it’s against the ropes and potentially pressed to do something nobody wants. These people should not be talking about escalation, they should be talking about de-escalation. We need diplomacy, de-escalation and detente, and we need them yesterday.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • U.S. Asks More Nations to Become Targets of Russian and Chinese Missiles

    According to a December 6th report by the Congressional Research Service, the United States Government is, and since May has been, offering inducements to foreign countries that are not yet bases from which the U.S. is being allowed to position and launch missiles against Russia and/or China, to become such bases, which would make those nations become additional targets for Russian and/or Chinese missiles. The U.S. is seeking to spread Russia’s and China’s military targets to countries that aren’t yet such targets. Doing this would increase the amounts of weaponry that are being sold, and that would especially benefit American weapons-manufacturers because America is the world’s largest manufacturer of military weapons, and also because the second and third largest such manufacturers, Russia and China, have weapons-producers that are majority-owned by their Government itself, and therefore the weapons-makers there don’t respond primarily to investors, but instead to the nation’s actual and authentic national-defense needs (the Government’s needs). America’s ‘Defense’ firms, such as Lockheed Martin, fund the careers of and thereby control its politicians and Government and its ‘defense’-policies, in order to be able to control their own markets, which are mainly the U.S. Government but also the U.S.-allied Governments (which likewise are controlled largely by such private investors in military-related firms), but in both Russia and China, which still retain socialism regarding their military manufacturers, the Government controls its “Defense” firms; and, so, their defense-policies are strictly for defense (that national, instead of private, purpose), whereas in America and its allied countries, the ‘defense’-firms are for aggression (because producing wars is what benefits the investors in those firms, which control their own Government and its ‘allies’ or vassal-Governments).

    Here is the passage from the Congressional Research Service report:

    Reportedly, in May 2022, the Secretary of the Army stated the Army did not yet have basing agreements for longrange systems but “discussions were ongoing” with a number of countries in the Indo-Pacific region. Given the importance of basing, Congress might examine ongoing efforts to secure Army long-range precision fires unit basing in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific region.

    These Governments “in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific region” are close enough to Russia, and to China, so that if the United States goes to war against Russia and/or China directly (instead of, as now, indirectly — such as it does in both Ukraine on Russia’s border, and Taiwan on China’s border) to conquer Russia and/or China, then those missiles, which will be targeted against one or both of those two countries, will be within range of either Moscow or else Beijing, and will, therefore, become assets adding to America’s likelihood of entirely controlling a post-WW-III world. Largely because military weapons are, in the U.S. and its ‘allied’ countries, controlled by private investors (basically by U.S.-and-allied billionaires), the U.S. Government’s main objective is to control a post-WW-III world. In other words: that Government’s main objective is aggression (defense is actually only secondary). By contrast, in both Russia and China, the entire militaries are designed and function solely for the purpose of national defense, which means preventing, instead of winning, a WW III. In both Russia and China, the ONLY objective of the military, and the MAIN objective of all OTHER policies, is, in fact, defense of the nation. In the U.S. and its ‘allied’ nations, the MAIN objective of the entire Government is expansion of the U.S. empire for it to control ultimately every nation — which means the conquest of every nation that isn’t already part of it. Whereas the top objective of the U.S. Government is imperial — not to prevent but to win a WW III — the top objective of its targeted nations (or ‘enemies’) is instead national (actually to prevent a WW III). And this explains the respective foreign (including military and diplomatic) policies, on each of the two sides: imperialistic versus anti-imperialistic. That is how to interpret and understand each side: it is the difference in perspective — that of the predator (on America’s side), versus that of its prey (on the side of the predator’s intended victims).

    A commonly expressed view by proponents of the predator’s side in international relations is that if its side becomes defeated or fades, then there will be no basic change except the identity of the predator. That viewpoint (everyone’s being psychopathic) might be universally true in the state of nature, but not necessarily in the state of civilization. Both Russia and China have repeatedly condemned, on a moral basis — an anti-imperialistic basis — the predatory perspective in international relations, the win-lose or “zero-sum-game” view, and have — at least verbally — promised that if and when the U.S. becomes defeated or simply fades-out, both Russia and China will move forward ONLY on a win-win (i.e., anti-imperialistic) basis regarding all other nations. America’s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passionately expressed, repeatedly, both in private and in public, the same commitment, to an only win-win future, that Russia and China now express: a repugnance and rejection of any and all imperialism. However, his immediate two successors, Truman and Eisenhower, despised FDR and promptly committed the U.S., on 25 July 1945, to America’s ultimately conquering the entire world. America has been on that path ever since (to win WW III), and the Biden Administration is especially obsessively so. (Perhaps Biden fears he’ll die soon and wants to be around to see America controlling the entire world, so is rushing things along; but, in any case, he is turning out to be a terrific performer for the people who invested in him, among the mega-donors, including, for example, a former Vice Chairman and top investor in Lockheed Martin who helped organize Biden’s billionaires, and — as a Democrat, which means hypocrite — had said publicly that “I frankly believe that both Democrats and Republicans [referring only to members of Congress — the people whom people such as he himself buy] … are overly influenced by the defense industry in this country.” Biden keeps his secret promises to his mega-donors, but ignores his public promises to his voters. That’s the way America’s ‘democracy’ works.)

    In the imperial world of government-by-corruption, government is for sale always to the highest bidders, and in the vassal-nations it means that “ongoing efforts to secure Army long-range precision fires unit basing in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific region” will — since that will necessarily mean their own nation’s becoming targeted by the missiles of Russia and/or China — a “public/private partnership” or legal bribe being paid to the vassal-nation’s leaders in order for the U.S. Government to be able to win that ultimate sacrifice of the given vassal-nation. Of course, such bribes are private, not public, since those are vassal-nations and their ‘democracy’ is only a mockery of the real thing.

    The post U.S. Asks More Nations to Become Targets of Russian and Chinese Missiles first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Australia imposes sanctions on Iran’s morality police and 13 Russians and Iranians

    Penny Wong announces Magnitsky-style sanctions to punish Iran’s violent crackdown on protesters and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

    The Australian government will use human rights sanctions to punish “egregious human rights violations and abuses” by Iranian and Russian perpetrators.

    The Australian foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, announced the Magnitsky-style sanctions (named for the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison after exposing corruption in Russia) have been imposed on 13 Russian and Iranian individuals.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.