Category: Russia

  • There are significant parallels between the international crises in Cuba in 1962 and Ukraine today.  Both involved intense confrontations between the USA and the Soviet Union or Russia. Both involved third party countries on the doorstep of a major power.  The Cuban Missile Crisis threatened to lead  to WW3,  just as the Ukraine crisis does today.

    Cuban  Missile crisis and  the current crisis in Ukraine 

    In 1961, the US supported an invasion of Cuba at the “Bay of Pigs”. Although it failed, Washington’s hostile rhetoric and threats against Cuba continued,  the CIA conducted many assassination attempts against Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

    Cuba, seeking to defend itself, or at least have a means of retaliating in case of another attack, sought missiles from the Soviet Union. The Soviets agreed and began secretly installing the missiles. As a sovereign nation having been attacked and under continuing threat,  Cuba had the right to obtain these missiles.

    US President JF Kennedy thought otherwise. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine, he said the missiles endangered the US and must be removed. He imposed an air and sea quarantine on Cuba and threatened to destroy a Soviet ship traveling in the high seas to Cuba. The world was on edge and there was global fear that World War 3 was about to erupt. In my homeland Canada, we went to bed seriously worried that nuclear war would break out overnight.

    Fortunately for humanity, cooler heads prevailed, and there were negotiations. The Soviets agreed to withdraw the missiles in Cuba.  In return, JFK agreed to withdraw US  missiles in Turkey aimed at the Soviet Union. The Cubans were furious, thinking they had been betrayed and lost their means of defense. But the Soviets had the bigger picture in mind, along with a US commitment to not invade Cuba.

    The situation now in Ukraine has similarities. Instead of missiles in Cuba being a threat to the US, NATO in Ukraine is seen as a threat to Russia.  NATO has steadily expanded east and installed missiles in Poland and Romania.  Since 2008, Russia has explicitly said that Ukrainian militarization by NATO was a red line for them.  Kyiv is much closer to Moscow than Havana is to Washington.  If it were justifiable for JFK to give the ultimatum regarding missiles in Cuba, is it not justifiable that Russia would object to Ukraine being a part of a hostile military alliance?

    Different Responses

    In 1962 the US and Soviet Union realized that escalating tensions and hostilities must be avoided, and they turned to negotiations.   They found a mutually acceptable compromise.

    The situation seems more dangerous today. Instead of seeking an end to the war, the US and NATO are pouring in weapons and encouraging more bloodshed.  It appears to be a proxy war with the US prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian.  There are calls to escalate the conflict.

    Ukraine Background

    Knowing the background to the current crisis is essential to understanding Putin’s actions.  Unknown to most Americans, a  crucial event came in  2014 when a violent US supported coup overthrew the democratically elected Ukraine government. US State Department official Victoria Nuland handed out cookies as Senator John McCain encouraged the anti-government protesters. In a secretly captured conversation with the US Ambassador to Ukraine,  Nuland selected who would run the government after the pending coup. In the final days, opposition snipers killed 100 people on both sides to inflame the situation and “midwife” the coup.  Oliver Stone’s video “Ukraine on Fire” describes the background and events.

    On the first day in power, the coup government  issued a decree that removed Russian as a state language.

    Within weeks Crimea organized a referendum. With 85% participation, 96% voted to leave Ukraine and  re-unite with Russia.  Why did they do this?  Because most Crimeans speak Russian as their first language and Crimea had been part of Russia since 1783.  When Soviet premier Khrushchev  transferred Crimea from the Russian republic to the Ukrainian republic in 1954, they were all within the Soviet Union.

    In Odessa,  anti-coup protesters were attacked by ultra-nationalist  thugs with 48 killed including many burned alive as they sought escape in the Trade Unions Hall. In eastern Ukraine, known as the Donbass, the majority of the population also opposed the ultra-nationalist coup government. Civil war broke out, with thousands killed.

    With the participation of France, Germany, the Kiev government, and eastern Ukraine rebels, an  agreement was reached and approved by the United Nations Security Council. It was called the Minsk Agreement. Russia has repeatedly encouraged the implementation of this agreement. Instead of negotiations and peace, the Kyiv government and NATO have done the opposite. Since 2015, there have been more weapons, more threats, more NATO training, more encouragement of ultra-nationalism plus NATO military exercises explicitly designed to threaten and antagonize Russia. This is not speculation; it is described in a 2019 Rand report about “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia”.

    Endangering the world

    The Biden administration appears to want to prolong the conflict in Ukraine. President Biden declared in a “gaffe” that Putin must be replaced.  Defense Secretary Austin has said the US goal is to “weaken Russia”. Former  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thinks Afghanistan in the 1980’s is a “model” to follow in Ukraine by bogging Russia down in a protracted war. Republican and Democratic senators Graham and Blumenthal visited Kyiv on July 7  and called for sending even more weapons. There is evidence that the US and UK have been advising Ukrainian president Zelensky to NOT negotiate.

    The Need for Courage and Compromise

    With war and  bloodshed happening now, we need cooler heads to prevail as in 1962. We can have a LOSE – LOSE situation, endangering the whole world,  or a compromise which guarantees Ukrainian independence while providing security assurances to Russia.

    JFK had the courage and wisdom to resist the CIA and military generals who wanted to escalate the crisis.  Does Joe Biden? There is a huge difference between the two presidents. JFK knew war first hand. He was injured and his brother died in WW2. He became an advocate for peace.  It may have cost him his life, but millions of people were saved. In contrast, Joe Biden has been a proponent for every US war of the past three decades.  Not only that, he was a major player in the 2014 Ukraine coup and aftermath.

    Since Biden appointed the chief architect of the Ukraine coup, Victoria Nuland,  to be the third top official at the State Department, one cannot realistically expect a change in policy from this administration. Neo-cons are in charge.

    If we are to avoid disaster, others must speak up and demand negotiations and settlement before the situation spirals out of control.

    The post Handling International Crises: From JFK to Biden  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • It was, all and all, an odd spectacle.  The Ladies’ Singles victor for Wimbledon 2022 had all the credentials that would have otherwise guaranteed her barring.  Being Russian-born, news outlets in Britain walked gingerly around The All England Club’s decision to ban Russian players yet permit Elena Rybakina to play.  Sky News noted that, “Moscow-born Elena Rybakina, who represents Kazakhstan, has won the Wimbledon women’s singles title in a year that Russians are banned from the tournament.”

    The April decision by The All England Club to ban both Russian and Belarussian players in response to the Ukraine war did not go down well with the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) and WTA (Women’s Tennis Association).  Their gruff response was to strip Wimbledon of ranking points. “It is with great regret and reluctance that we see no option but to remove ATP Ranking points from Wimbledon for 2022,” stated the ATP in May.  “Our rules and agreements exist in order to protect the rights of players as a whole.  Unilateral decisions of this nature, if unaddressed, set a damaging precedent for the rest of the Tour.”

    For the ATP, discrimination regarding individual tournaments was “simply not viable.”  The WTA followed in step.  “Nearly 50 years again,” declared the body’s chairman Steve Simon, “the WTA was founded on the fundamental principle that all players have an equal opportunity to compete based on merit and without discrimination.”  Individual athletes engaged in an individual sport “should not be penalised or prevented from competing solely because of their nationalities or the decisions made by the governments of their countries.”

    In solidarity, a number of tennis players also opposed the measure.  Serbia’s Novak Djokovic thought the decision “crazy”. Spain’s Rafael Nadal noted how it was not the fault of players as to “what happening in this moment with the war.”  The decision made by the Wimbledon organisers had been taken unilaterally.  “The government didn’t force them to do it.”

    Rather than taking a position of stout, unflagging independence, The All England Tennis Club revealed a craven streak in response to the UK government, which had sought to “limit Russia’s global influence”.  The decision regarding banning Russian and Belarussian players from Wimbledon was “the only viable decision” given its standing as “a globally renowned event and British institution”.  In taking such a position, the Club members had shown they could be as political, aligned and patriotically discriminatory as any other institution claiming fairness.

    The Club also claimed to be doing this for the players.  “We were not prepared to take any actions which could risk the personal safety of players, or their families.  We believe that requiring written declarations from individual players – and that would apply to all relevant players – as a condition of entry in the high-profile circumstances of Wimbledon would carry significant scrutiny and risk.”  Would it not have been better to simply avoid such a scandalous loyalty (or, in this case, disloyalty) test from the start?

    Equally implausible was the argument that the Russian regime was somehow unique in extolling the virtues of its athletes as part of its “propaganda machine”, a point that served to diminish the humanity and individual worth of the sporting figures in question.

    While we can accept the notion that high profile sportspeople are often puppets of the State in question, show ponies watered, fed and even, on occasion, drugged, the decision to specifically target Russia and Belarus could just as well have extended to many other players in many other sports.  A rotten government, in other words, would immediately disqualify the athlete from entering the tournament.  It should have cast grave doubt on Kazakhstan, a country stacked with its own oligarchs and corruption woes.  Little wonder that the entities responsible for the tennis tour were furious.

    At the tournament’s end, the merits of the ban were there for all to see.  The Duchess of Cambridge presented the winning trophy to a Russian-born player, the very thing the Club had sought to avoid.  Tennis fans responded by lighting up the social media scene with acid scorn.  In the biting assessment of tennis writer Mark Zemek, the move by the Club had been exposed “for the morally unimaginative and stupidly cruel decision it was, is, and always will be.”

    Instead of heaping ridicule on the organisers, some press outlets preferred to focus on Rybakina’s switch to Kazakhstan four years ago, something done in the spirit of receiving greater monetary reward.  (So much for the patriotic element.)  “Her win is historic because she is the first player to represent Kazakhstan to win a Grand Slam title.”

    When the press sought to sniff out any lingering Russian loyalties, Rybakina responded to the nonsense with gusto.  “What does it mean for you to feel?  I mean, I’m playing tennis, so for me, I’m enjoying my time here.”  As for how much time she continued to spend in Moscow, Rybakina suggested with mystic obliqueness that she did not “live anywhere, to be honest.”  If only that treatment had been afforded to Daniil Medvedev and his compatriots.

    The post Hoisted by their own Petard: Wimbledon’s Russian Player Ban first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  •  

    Janine Jackson interviewed Dave Zirin about the Supreme Court’s football prayer ruling for the July 1, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220701Zirin.mp3

     

    Coach Joseph Kennedy praying after football game

    Coach Kennedy’s “private, personal prayer” (photo: Sotomayor dissent)

    Janine Jackson: While we still reel from the theft of bodily autonomy from half the population, the right wing–dominated Supreme Court has delivered other blows to principles that many believed were assured.

    In Kennedy v. Bremerton, a 6–3 ruling determined that Washington state high school assistant football coach Joseph Kennedy had a right to pray in the locker room and on the field. And why should a person be denied their right to what the Court described as a “short,” “personal,” “private” exercise of their religious beliefs?

    As our guest and others want us to understand, the court’s ruling relies on a storyline that just doesn’t match the reality, and is much less about freedom than about coercion.

    Dave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation and host of the Edge of Sports podcast. He’s also author of numerous books about sports and their intersection with history, politics and social justice, including What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States, and, most recently, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World, which is out now from New Press.

    He joins us now by phone from Takoma Park. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dave Zirin.

    Dave Zirin: Oh, it’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

    Nation: A Football Coach’s Prayer Is Not About Freedom. It’s About Coercion.

    The Nation (6/27/22)

    JJ: I can feel the heat coming off your piece on this. And I think it’s because of the boldly false premise of this ruling, about the role of coach prayer generally, but in particular about Kennedy. You say that this ruling is wrong from the opening statement. So maybe let’s start there.

    DZ: Here’s the issue; it’s a cliche, but it’s true: You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts. And in the decision that was written by Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch, he relied on his own facts. Let’s put it more simply: He lied in describing what took place in the case.

    And here’s the thing: Coach Kennedy was not off, as Gorsuch writes, praying on his own. He was not off quietly doing this, and he was not fired for doing it. So they painted a narrative of this coach looking for a quiet corner to pray and then this school board, with pitchforks and torches in hand, forcing Kennedy out of his job.

    None of this happened. What Kennedy did in praying in the locker room, and then particularly his prayers after the game on the field, was draw in players to surround him in prayer, asking players to do testimonials about God. All of this thing creates this kind of maelstrom of pressure on the players, that if you are down with your coach, you will pray with your coach. And if you’re not down with that, then, hey, you’re free not to pray with the coach, but anybody who’s ever played high school sports knows that if you don’t do what the coach says, particularly in an autocratic sport like football, you’re going to pay a price for that.

    You’re going to pay a price for it, whether it’s in terms of playing time or, maybe even worse for the high school level, you’re going to pay a price for it in terms of being outcast, in terms of being seen as a locker room distraction, or even worse in the parlance of sports, a locker room cancer.

    And that is what the Supreme Court basically said could now take place, is a process of bullying in high school sports to make players feel coerced into praying with their coach, and that’s unconscionable. It’s absolutely unconscionable. And I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from folks, including tons of stories about what it was like to play high school sports at private or religious institutions, and the degree of religious peer pressure that would take place, and how it would alienate, ostracize and all the rest of it.

    And I should probably add that we would be completely, completely naive if we didn’t just see this as an issue of prayer, but this is about Christian prayer. Like if the coach was Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, whatever you want, Shinto, or wanted to do a prayer of atheism beforehand, there would be a very different response from this Court than Christianity, because this Court has shown itself to be proudly in a relationship with a kind of Christofascism which is quickly overcoming the ruling structures of the United States, if not the people themselves.

    Seattle Times: The myth at the heart of the praying Bremerton coach case

    Seattle Times (6/29/22)

    JJ: And just to underscore the idea of the false narrative, Danny Westneat in the Seattle Times, very close to the issue, wrote a story in which he was saying, as you have said, that Kennedy explained himself. He said he was inspired to start these midfield prayers after he saw an evangelical Christian movie called Facing the Giants, in which a losing team finds God, Christian God, and then goes on to win the state championship.

    So the very idea that he was trying to find a personal private space to pray in private, and that he was being denied that, it’s just wholly not true.

    DZ: And can I say something else? The school district—and I say this as somebody who made phone calls, spoke to people, I’m not just saying this for the purposes of my own narrative—they made every effort to try to accommodate Coach Kennedy. They made every effort to create spaces for him to pray.

    And they did not fire him when he repeatedly and repeatedly ignored what they had to say, thumbed his nose at what they had to say. Look, my wife is a teacher, and if she thumbed her nose at the rules of the district to the degree that Coach Kennedy was doing, she would’ve found herself out of work.

    Now, Coach Kennedy, again and again thumbing his nose at what they’re saying to him, and in the end, you know what they did, they didn’t fire him. They suspended him with pay, with the opportunity to reapply back for his job, and partly because I think they realized how hot button this was.

    Dave Zirin

    Dave Zirin: “There is a political movement in this country that’s playing for keeps. They don’t care how nice you’re going to be about it.”

    They made every effort to try to look like partners in trying to figure this out. And they wanted to look like we want to collaborate with you to find a solution that actually helps and makes everybody feel validated.

    And I think what they learned, which I think a lot of us need to learn, is that there is a political movement in this country that’s playing for keeps. They don’t care how nice you’re going to be about it. They don’t care if you’re willing to meet them halfway. They’re not trying for a bigger piece of the pie. They’re trying to take over the bakery right now.

    And I think the sooner we realize that the better, because a lot of people in the ruling corridors of the Democratic Party really seem to have not gotten the memo.

    JJ: It’s important that it integrates with sports and with athletics here, which I think makes it slot into a different place in some people’s brains. This ruling, it galls, of course, for many reasons, but part of it is the ability for people who have a public platform to express political or social concerns, whether they’re athletes or musicians or artists, it’s framed so differently depending on who they are and what they’re saying.

    DZ: Exactly.

    JJ: It’s related, but if I can just transition you, you’ve written about Muhammad Ali, about Colin Kaepernick. It’s always been true that there’s been a kind of policing of what people can say, if it’s decided that they’re outside of their purview.

    DZ: Yeah. If I could say something about that, I wrote this book The Kaepernick Effect. I interviewed dozens of young people, a lot of them in high school, who took a knee, and they were invariably subject to all kinds of ostracization, pushed off the team, made to feel outcast from the team, oftentimes at the behest of the coach.

    And I think one of the things that we need to come to grips with is that this kind of aggressive Supreme Court–led Christian posturing is political. Because people say, well, that’s just religious, what the coach is doing. Taking a knee during the anthem, that’s a political act, and politics have no place in sports.

    Do you honestly think it’s not political that this coach is defying the school district time and again, is drawing in students into the prayer circle time and again, is thumbing his nose at the concerns of parents time and again, and now, and I wish I could bet money on this, is going to be on the right-wing gravy train probably for the next decade, doing speeches time and again, and maybe there’ll even be one of those Hollywood movies that only a small segment of the population sees, starring, I don’t know, Gina Carano and Kevin Sorbo, whatever, the actors who occupy that space.

    And I think we need to realize that these onward Christian soldiers, like, that’s not just a song to them. This is a movement that they’re trying to build, and trying to collaborate and figure out common solutions I think is going to be a very, very difficult task, because their eye is not on reconciliation.

    NYT: Brittney Griner’s Trial in Russia Is Starting, and Likely to End in a Conviction

    New York Times (6/30/22)

    JJ: Right, right. Thank you for that. And I’m going to let you go, but while I have you, I can’t resist. Today’s New York Times:

    More than four months after she was first detained, the WNBA star Brittney Griner is expected to appear in a Russian courtroom on Friday for the start of a trial on drug charges that legal experts said was all but certain to end in a conviction, despite the clamor in the United States for her release.

    I know I’m asking a lot in a short amount of time, but I know that for a lot of listeners who follow media closely, they’re going to say, “Wait, there was a clamor in the United States for Brittney Griner’s release? Wait, who’s Brittney Griner?” Thoughts on that?

    DZ: We need a much bigger clamor, is my first thought. Brittney Griner is a WNBA superstar. If her name was Tom Brady or Steph Curry, there would be a national day of action to try to get them freed from a Russian prison.

    I mean, Brittney Griner is a political prisoner, make no mistake about it.

    JJ: In Russia, in Russia—we care about Russia, right?

    DZ: Yeah. Facing 10 years behind bars, five years at labor behind bars. I mean, this has nothing to do with drugs. I have serious doubts in the charges in the first place. This is about Ukraine. This is about political posturing. This is about this new cold war that we’re dealing with with Putin.

    And this is about them trying to extract political prisoners out of the United States, who are Russian, in an exchange, and I think we need to apply pressure to our own State Department that bringing Brittney Griner home should be an immediate priority.

    What’s disturbing is the concern that Brittney Griner, because she’s a woman athlete, because she’s from the LGBTQ community, because she presents in a certain way, that she’s just not getting the coverage or the attention that she otherwise would get.

    And I think that’s one of the things also we need to fight against. It’s not just about injustice in Russia; it’s about standing up to injustice and prejudice here at home.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Dave Zirin. He’s sports editor at The Nation, and you can follow his work at EdgeOfSports.com. Dave Zirin, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    DZ: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

     

    The post ‘They Painted a Narrative of This Coach Looking for a Quiet Corner to Pray’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • On June 28-30, 2022, NATO leaders gathered in Madrid, Spain, to discuss the major issues and challenges facing the alliance. The summit ended with far-reaching decisions that will have a dire impact on global peace and security. Hailed as “historic,” the summit was indeed transformative: NATO produced a new Strategic Concept and identified what it says are the key threats to western security, interests, and values — none other than Russia and China.

    “The empire doesn’t rest,” quips Noam Chomsky, a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, in his assessment of NATO’s “historic” summit in the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows. Chomsky is one of the most widely cited scholars in modern history. He is institute professor emeritus at MIT and currently laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona, and has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs.

    C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, as was expected, the war in Ukraine dominated the recent NATO summit in Madrid and produced some extraordinary decisions which will lead to the “NATO-ization of Europe,” as Russia was declared “the most significant and direct threat” to its members’ peace and security. Turkey dropped its objections to Finland and Sweden joining the alliance after it managed to extract major concessions, NATO’s eastern flank will receive massive reinforcement, additional defense systems will be stationed in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, and the U.S. will boost its military presence all across European soil. Given all of this, is it Russia that represents a threat to Europe, or NATO to Russia? And what does the “NATO-ization” of Europe mean for global peace and security? Is it a prelude to World War III?

    We can dismiss the obligatory boilerplate about high principles and noble goals, and the rank hypocrisy: for example, the lament about the fate of the arms control regime because of Russian-Chinese disruption, with no mention of the fact it is the U.S. that has torn it to shreds under W. Bush and particularly Trump. All of that is to be expected in “historic” pronouncements of a new Strategic Concept for NATO.

    The Ukraine war did indeed provide the backdrop for the meeting of NATO powers — with bitter irony, just after the conclusion of the first meeting of the states that signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which passed unnoticed.

    The NATO summit was expanded for the first time to include the Asian “sentinel states” that the U.S. has established and provided with advanced high-precision weapons to “encircle” China. Accordingly, the North Atlantic was officially expanded to include the newly created Indo-Pacific region, a vast area where security concerns for the Atlanticist powers of NATO are held to arise. The imperial implications should be clear enough. There’s a good deal more to say about this. I will return to it.

    U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Russia was strongly affirmed in the Strategic Concept: no negotiations, only war to “weaken Russia.”

    This has been steady policy since George W. Bush’s 2008 invitation to Ukraine to join NATO, vetoed by France and Germany, who agreed with high-level U.S. diplomats for the past 30 years that no Russian government could tolerate that, for reasons too obvious to review. The offer remained on the agenda in deference to U.S. power.

    After the Maidan uprising in 2014, the U.S. began openly to move to integrate Ukraine into the NATO military command, policies extended under Biden, accompanied by official acknowledgment after the invasion that Russian security concerns, meaning NATO membership, had not been taken into consideration. The plans have not been concealed. The goals are to ensure full compatibility of the Ukrainian military with NATO forces in order to “integrate Ukraine into NATO de facto.”

    Zelensky’s efforts to implement a diplomatic settlement were ignored, including his proposals last March to accept Austrian-style neutralization for the indefinite future. The proposals, which had indications of Russian support, were termed a “real breakthrough” by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, but never pursued.

    The official Russian stance at the time (March 2022) was that its military operations would end if Ukraine too were to “cease military action, change its constitution to enshrine neutrality, acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, and recognize the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states.”

    There was a considerable gap between the Ukrainian and Russian positions on a diplomatic settlement, but they might have been narrowed in negotiations. Even after the invasion, it appears that there may have remained some space for a way to end the horrors.

    France and Germany continued to make overtures toward diplomatic settlement. These are completely dropped in the recent Strategic Concept, which simply “reaffirms” all plans to move toward incorporating Ukraine (and Georgia) into NATO, formally dismissing Russian concerns.

    The shifts in the European stance reflect Europe’s increasing subordination to the U.S. The shift was accelerated by Putin’s choice of aggression after refusing to consider European initiatives that might have averted the crime and possibly even opened a path toward Europe-Russia accommodation that would be highly beneficial to all — and highly beneficial to the world, which may not survive great power confrontation.

    That is not a throw-away line. It is reality. The great powers will either find a way to cooperate, to work together in confronting imminent global threats, or the future will be too grim to contemplate. These elementary facts should be kept firmly in mind while discussing particular issues.

    We should also be clear about the import of the new Strategic Concept. Reaffirming the U.S. program of de facto incorporation of Ukraine within NATO is also reaffirming, unambiguously, the refusal to contemplate a diplomatic settlement. It is reaffirming the Ramstein declarations a few weeks ago that the war in Ukraine must be fought to weaken Russia, in fact to weaken it more severely than the Versailles treaty weakened Germany, if we assume that U.S. officials mean what they say — and we can expect that adversaries take them at their words.

    The Ramstein declarations were accompanied by assurances that Ukraine would drive Russia out of all Ukrainian territory. In assessing the credibility of these assurances, we may recall that they come from the sources that confidently predicted that the U.S.-created Iraqi and Afghan armies would resist ISIS [also known as Daesh] and the Taliban, instead of collapsing immediately, as they did; and that the Russian invasion would conquer Kyiv and occupy Ukraine in three days.

    The message to Russia is: You have no escape. Either surrender, or continue your slow and brutal advance, or, in the event that defeat threatens, go for broke and destroy Ukraine, as of course you can.

    The logic is quite clear. So is the import beyond Ukraine itself. Millions will face starvation, the world will continue to march toward environmental destruction, the likelihood of nuclear war will increase.

    But we must pursue this course to punish Russia severely enough so that it cannot undertake further aggression.

    We might pause for a moment to look at the crucial underlying premise: Russia is bent on further aggression, and must be stopped now, or else. Munich 1938. By now this has become a Fundamental Truth, beyond challenge or inquiry. With so much at stake, perhaps we may be forgiven for breaking the rules and raising a few questions.

    Inquiry at once faces a difficulty. There has been little effort to establish the Fundamental Truth. As good a version as any is presented by Peter Dickinson, editor of the prestigious Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert Service. The heart of Dickinson’s argument is this:

    Putin has never made any secret of the fact that he views the territory of modern Ukraine as historically Russian land. For years, he has denied Ukraine’s right to exist while claiming that all Ukrainians are in fact Russians (“one people”). The real question is which other sovereign nations might also fit Putin’s definition. He recently set off alarm bells by commenting that the entire former Soviet Union was historically Russian territory.

    Nor is it clear if Putin’s appetite for reclaiming Russian lands is limited to the 14 non-Russian post-Soviet states. Imperial Russia once also ruled Finland and Poland, while the Soviet Empire after WWII stretched deep into Central Europe and included East Germany. One thing is clear: unless he is stopped in Ukraine, Putin’s imperial ambitions are certain to expand.

    That is clear, requiring no further argument.

    The totality of evidence is given in the linked article. But now another problem arises. In it, Putin says nothing remotely like what set off the dramatic alarm bells. More like the opposite.

    Putin says that the old Soviet Union “ceased to exist,” and he wants “to emphasise that in recent history we have always treated the processes of sovereignisation that have occurred in the post-Soviet area with respect.” As for Ukraine, “If we had had good allied relations, or at least a partnership between us, it would never have occurred to anybody [to resort to force]. And, by the way, there would have been no Crimea problem. Because if the rights of the people who live there, the Russian-speaking population, had been respected, if the Russian language and culture had been treated with respect, it would never have occurred to anybody to start all this.”

    Nothing more is quoted. That’s the totality of evidence Dickinson presents, apart from what has become the last resort of proponents of the thesis that unless “stopped in Ukraine, Putin’s imperial ambitions are certain to expand”: musings of no clear import about Peter the Great.

    This is no minor matter. On this basis, so our leaders instruct us, we must ensure that the war continues in order to weaken Russia; and beyond Ukraine itself, to drive millions to starvation while we march on triumphantly toward an unlivable earth and face increasing risk of terminal nuclear war.

    Perhaps there is some better evidence for what is so “clear” that we must assume these incredible risks. If so, it would be good to hear it.

    Putin’s cited remarks, as distinct from the fevered constructions, are consistent with the historical and diplomatic record, including the post-invasion Russian official stance just quoted, but much farther back.

    The core issue for 30 years has been Ukraine’s entry into NATO. That has always been understood by high U.S. officials, who have warned Washington against the reckless and provocative acts it has been taking. It has also been understood by Washington’s most favored Russian diplomats. Clinton’s friend Boris Yeltsin objected strenuously when Clinton began the process of NATO expansion in violation of firm promises to Gorbachev when the Soviet Union collapsed. The same is true of Gorbachev himself, who accused the West and NATO of destroying the structure of European security by expanding its alliance. “No head of the Kremlin can ignore such a thing,” he said, adding that the U.S. was unfortunately starting to establish a “mega empire,” words echoed by Putin and other Russian officials.

    I am unaware of a word in the record about plans to invade anyone outside the long-familiar red lines: Ukraine and Georgia. The only Russian threats that have been cited are that if NATO advances to its borders, Russia will strengthen its defenses in response.

    With specific regard to Ukraine, until recently Putin was calling publicly for implementation of the Minsk II agreement: neutralization of Ukraine and a federal arrangement with a degree of autonomy for the Donbass region. It is always reasonable to suspect dark motives in great power posturing, but it is the official positions that offer a basis for diplomacy if there is any interest in that course.

    On Crimea, Russia had made no moves until it was about to lose its sole warm water naval base, in the Crimean Peninsula. The background is reviewed by John Quigley, the U.S. State department representative in the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] delegation that considered the problem of Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

    Crimea, he reports, was a particular focus of attention. His intensive efforts to find a solution for the problem of Crimea faced a “dilemma.” Crimea’s population “was majority Russian and saw no reason to be part of Ukraine.” Crimea had been Russian until 1954, when, for unknown reasons, Soviet Communist Party Chair Nikita Khrushchev decided to switch Crimea from the Soviet Russian republic to the Soviet Ukrainian republic. As Quigley notes,

    Even after 1954, Crimea was effectively governed more from Moscow than from Kyiv. When the Soviet Union was dissolved, Crimea’s population suddenly found itself a minority in a foreign country. Ukraine accepted a need for a certain degree of self-rule, but Crimea declared independence as what it called the Crimean Republic. Over Ukraine’s objection, an election for president was called in the declared Crimean Republic, and a candidate was elected on a platform of merger with Russia. At the time, however, the Russian government was not prepared to back the Crimeans.

    Quigley sought a compromise that would provide autonomy for Crimea under a Ukraine-Crimea treaty, with international guarantees to protect Crimea from Ukrainian infringement. The “treaty went nowhere, however…. Ukraine cracked down on the Crimean Republic, and the conflict remained unresolved. Tension simmered until 2014, by which time Russia was prepared to act to take Crimea back. Crimea was then formally merged into the Russian Federation.”

    It’s not a simple matter of unprovoked Russian aggression, as in the received U.S. version.

    Like many others familiar with the region, Quigley now calls for a diplomatic settlement and wonders whether the current U.S. goal “is less to force Russia out of Ukraine than to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.”

    Is there still an option for diplomacy? No one can know unless the possibility is explored. That will not happen if it is an established Fundamental Truth that Putin’s ambitions are insatiable.

    Apart from the question of Putin’s ambitions, there is a small matter of capability. While trembling in fear of the new Peter the Great, western powers are also gloating over the demonstration that their firm convictions about Russia’s enormous military power were quickly dispelled with the Russian debacle in its attack on Kyiv. U.S. intelligence had predicted victory in a few days. Instead, tenacious Ukrainian resistance revealed that Russia could not conquer cities a few miles from its border defended by a mostly citizens’ army.

    But no matter: The new Peter the Great is on the march. Lack of evidence of intention and official proposals to the contrary are as irrelevant to Fundamental Truth as lack of military capacity.

    What we are observing is nothing new. Russian devils of incomparable might aiming to conquer the world and destroy civilization have been a staple of official rhetoric, and obedient commentary, for 75 years. The rhetoric of the critical internal document NSC-68 (1950) is a striking illustration, almost unbelievable in its infantile crudity.

    At times, the method has been acknowledged. From his position as “present at the creation” of the Cold War, the distinguished statesman Dean Acheson recognized that it was necessary to be “clearer than truth” in exercises (like NSC-68) to “bludgeon the mass mind” of government into obedience with elite plans. That was in fact “NSC-68’s purpose.”

    Scholarship has also occasionally recorded the fact. Harvard Professor of Government and long-time government adviser Samuel Huntington observed that “you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine,”

    Today’s formula is no innovation.

    We often tend to forget that the U.S. is a global power. Planning is global: What is happening in one part of the world is often replicated elsewhere. By focusing on one particular manifestation, we often miss the global tapestry in which it is one strand.

    When the U.S. took over global hegemony from Britain after World War II, it kept the same guiding geopolitical concepts, now greatly expanded by a far more powerful hegemon.

    Britain is an island off the coast of Europe. A primary goal of British imperial rule was to prevent a unified hostile Europe.

    The U.S.-run western hemisphere is an “island” off the coast of the Eurasian land mass, with far grander imperial objectives (or “responsibilities,” as they are politely termed). It must therefore make sure to control it from all directions, North being a new arena of conflict as global warming opens it up to exploitation and commerce. The NATO-based Atlanticist system is the Western bulwark. The Strategic Concept and its ongoing implementation places this bulwark more firmly in Washington’s hands, thanks to Putin.

    With virtually no notice, there are similar developments on the Eastern flank of the Eurasian land mass as NATO extends its reach to the Indo-Pacific region under the new Concept. NATO is deepening its relations with its island partners off the coast of China — Japan, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand — even inviting them to the NATO summit, but much more significant, enlisting them in the “encirclement” of China that is a key element of current bipartisan U.S. strategy.

    While the U.S. is firming up its control of the western flank of the Eurasian landmass at the NATO Summit, it is carrying out related exercises at the eastern flank: the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) programs now underway. Under the direction of the U.S. Navy, these are “the grandest of all war games,” Australian political scientist Gavan McCormack writes, “the largest air, land, and sea war manoeuvres in the world. They would assemble a staggering 238 ships, 170 aircraft, 4 submarines and 25,000 military personnel from 26 countries.… To China, scarcely surprisingly these exercises are seen as expression of an anti-China ‘Asian NATO design.’ They are war games, and they are to include various simulations engaging ‘enemy forces,’ attacking targets and conducting amphibious landings on Hawaii Island and in Hawaiian waters.”

    RIMPAC is supplemented by regular U.S. naval missions in China’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). These are merely “innocent passage” in accord with the principle of “freedom of navigation;” the U.S. protests when China objects, as does India, Indonesia, and many others. The U.S. appeals to the Law of the Sea – which bars threat or use of force in these zones. Quietly, the U.S. client state Australia, of course, in coordination with Washington, is engaged in “military espionage” in the EEZ, installing highly sophisticated sensing devices “so that the U.S. can more effectively destroy Chinese vessels as quickly as possible at the start of any conflict.”

    These exercises on the Eastern Flank are accompanied by others in the Pacific Northeast region and, in part, in the Baltic region, with participation of new NATO members Finland and Sweden. Over the years, they have been slowly integrated into the NATO military system and have now taken the final step, pleading “security concerns” that are scarcely even laughable but do benefit their substantial military industries and help drive the societies to the right.

    The empire doesn’t rest. The stakes are too high.

    In official rhetoric, as always, these programs are undertaken for benign purposes: to enforce “the rules-based international order.” The term appears repeatedly in the Strategic Concept of the NATO Summit. Missing from the document is a different phrase: “UN-based international order.” That is no accidental omission: The two concepts are crucially different.

    The UN-based international order is enshrined in the UN Charter, the foundation of modern international law. Under the U.S. Constitution (Article VI), the UN Charter is also “the supreme law of the land.” But it is unacceptable to U.S. elite opinion and is violated freely, with no notice, by U.S. presidents.

    The Charter has two primary flaws. One is that it bans “the threat or use of force” in international affairs, apart from designated circumstances that almost never arise. That means that it bans U.S. foreign policy, obviously an unacceptable outcome. Consequently, the revered Constitution can be put aside. If, unimaginably, the question of observing the Constitution ever reached the Supreme Court, it would be dismissed as a “political question.”

    The rules-based international order overcomes this flaw. It permits the threat and use of force freely by the Master, and those he authorizes. Illustrations are so dramatically obvious that one might think that they would be difficult to ignore. That would be a mistake: they are routinely ignored. Take one of the major international crimes: annexation of conquered territory in violation of international law. There are two examples: Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara in violation of the ruling of the International Court of Justice, and Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights in Syria and Greater Jerusalem in violation of unanimous Security Council orders. All have been supported by the U.S. for many years, and were formally authorized by the Trump administration, now by Biden. One will have to search hard for expressions of concern, even notice.

    The second flaw is that the UN Security Council and other international institutions, like the World Court, set the rules. That flaw is also overcome in the rules-based international order, in which the U.S. sets the rules and others obey.

    It is, then, easy to understand Washington’s preference for the rules-based international order, now forcefully affirmed in the NATO Strategic Concept, and adopted in U.S. commentary and scholarship.

    Turning elsewhere, we do find serious commentary and analysis. Australian strategic analyst Clinton Fernandes discusses the matter in some depth in his book Sub-Imperial Power (Melbourne 2022).

    Tracing the concept to its western origins in British imperial rule, Fernandes shows that

    the rules-based order differs sharply from the United Nations–centred international system and the international order underpinned by international law. The United States sits at the apex of the system, exercising control over the sovereignty of many countries. The United Kingdom, a lieutenant with nuclear weapons and far-flung territories, supports the United States. So do subimperial powers like Australia and Israel. The rules-based international order involves control of the effective political sovereignty of other countries, a belief in imperial benevolence and the economics of comparative advantage. Since policy planners and media commentators cannot bring themselves to say ‘empire’, the ‘rules-based international order’ serves as the euphemism.

    “The economics of comparative advantage,” as Fernandes discusses, is another euphemism. Its meaning is “stay in your place,” for the benefit of all. It is often advised with the best of intentions. Surely that was the case when Adam Smith advised the American colonies to keep to their comparative advantage in agriculture and import British manufactured goods, thus “promoting the progress of their country toward real wealth and greatness.”

    Having overthrown British rule, the colonies were free to reject this kind advice and to resort to the same kinds of radical violation of orthodox free trade principles that Britain used in becoming the world’s great center of manufacturing and global power. That pattern has been replicated with impressive consistency. Those that adopted the favored principle, usually under force, became the third world. Those that violated it became the wealthy first world, including the one country of the South that resisted colonization, Japan, and thus was able to violate the rules and develop, with its former colonies in tow.

    The consistency of the record is close to axiomatic. After all, development means changing comparative advantage.

    In short, the rules-based order confers many advantages on the powerful. One can easily understand why it is viewed so favorably in their domains, while the UN-based order is dismissed except when it can be invoked to punish enemies.

    Turkey continues to resist joining sanctions against Russia and acts, in fact, as a sanctions “safe haven” for Russian oligarchs. Yet it is treated by the U.S. and the NATO alliance in general as a reliable strategic ally, and everyone ignores the fact that Erdoğan’s regime is as blatantly authoritarian and oppressive as that of Putin. In fact, following his somersault vis-a-vis Saudi Arabia, the Biden administration is now warming up to Erdoğan and wants to upgrade Turkey’s fleet of American-made F-16 fighter jets. How should we interpret this anomalous situation within the NATO alliance? Yet another instance of western hypocrisy or the dictates of Realpolitik?

    What is anomalous is that Erdoğan is playing his own game instead of just obeying orders. There’s nothing anomalous about his being “blatantly authoritarian and oppressive.” That’s not a concern [for the U.S.], as in numerous other cases. What is a concern is that he’s not entirely a “reliable strategic ally.” Turkey was actually sanctioned by the U.S. for purchasing Russian missile defense system. And even after the invasion of Ukraine, Erdoğan left open whether he would purchase Russian arms or depart from his “friendship” with Mr. Putin. In this particular regard, Turkey is acting more like the Global South than like NATO.

    Turkey has departed from strict obedience in other ways. It delayed the accession of Sweden and Finland into NATO. The reason, it seems, is Turkey’s commitment to intensify its murderous repression of its Kurdish population. Sweden had been granting asylum to Kurds fleeing Turkish state violence — “terrorists” in Turkish official lingo. There are legitimate concerns that an ugly underground bargain may have been struck when Turkey dropped its opposition to full Swedish entry into NATO.

    The background should not be overlooked. Brutal repression of the Kurds in Turkey has a long history. It reached a crescendo in the 1990s, with a state terror campaign that killed tens of thousands of Kurds, destroyed thousands of towns and villages, and drove hundreds of thousands from their homes, many to hideous slums in barely survivable corners of Istanbul. Some were offered the opportunity to return to what was left of their homes, but only if they publicly blamed Kurdish PKK guerrillas. With the amazing courage that has been the hallmark of the Kurdish struggles for justice, they refused.

    These terrible crimes, some of the worst of the decade, were strongly supported by the U.S., which poured arms into Turkey to expedite the atrocities. The flow increased under Clinton as the crimes escalated. Turkey became the leading recipient of U.S. arms (apart from Israel-Egypt, a separate category), replacing Colombia, the leading violator of human rights in the Western hemisphere. That extends a long and well-established pattern. As usual, the media cooperated by ignoring the Turkish horrors and crucial U.S. support for them.

    By 2000, the crimes were abating, and an astonishing period began in Turkey. There was remarkable progress in opening up the society, condemning state crimes, advancing freedom and justice. For me personally, it was a great privilege to be able to witness it first-hand, even to participate in limited ways. Prominent in this democratic revolution were Turkish intellectuals, who put their western counterparts to shame. They not only protested state crimes but carried out regular civil disobedience, risking and often enduring harsh punishment, and returning to the fray. One striking example was Ismail Beşikçi, who as a young historian was the first non-Kurdish academic to document the horrific repression of the Kurds. Repeatedly imprisoned, tortured, abused, he refused to stop his work, continuing to document the escalating crimes. There were many others.

    By the early 2000s it seemed that a new era was dawning. There were some thrilling moments. One unforgettable experience was at the editorial offices of Hrant Dink, the courageous journalist who was assassinated with state complicity for his defense of human rights, particularly the rights of the Armenian community that had been subjected to genocidal slaughter, still officially denied. With his widow, I was standing on the balcony of the office, observing an enormous demonstration honoring Hrant Dink and his work, and calling for an end to ongoing crimes of state, no small act of courage and dedication in the harshly repressive Turkish state.

    The hopes were soon to wane as Erdoğan instituted his increasingly brutal rule, moving to restore the nightmare from which Turkey had begun to emerge. All similar to what happened a few years later in the Arab Spring.

    Turkey is also extending its aggression in Syria, aimed at the Kurdish population who, in the midst of the horrendous chaos of the Syrian conflicts, had managed to carve out an island of flourishing democracy and rights (Rojava). The Kurds had also provided the ground troops for Washington’s war against ISIS in Syria, suffering over 10,000 casualties. In thanks for their service in this successful war, President Trump withdrew the small U.S. force that served as a deterrent to the Turkish onslaught, leaving them at its mercy.

    There is an old Kurdish proverb that the Kurds have no friends but the mountains. There is just concern that Turkish-Swedish NATO maneuverings might confirm it.

    The NATO summit reached the interesting conclusion that China represents a “security challenge” to the interests and security of its member states, but it is not to be treated as an adversary. Semantics aside, can the West really stop China from exercising an ever-increasing role in global affairs? Indeed, is a unipolar power system a safer alternative to world peace than a bipolar or multipolar system?

    The U.S. is quite openly seeking to restrict China’s role in global affairs and to impede its development. These are what constitute the “security challenge.” The challenge thus has two dimensions, roughly what is called “soft power” and “hard power.”

    The former is internal development of industry, education, science and technology. This provides the basis for the expansion of China’s arena of influence through such projects as the Belt-and-Road (BRI) initiative, a massive multidimensional project that integrates much of Eurasia within a Chinese-based economic and technological system, reaching to the Middle East and Africa, and even to U.S. Latin American domains.

    The U.S. complains, correctly, that Chinese internal development violates the rules-based international order. It does, radically. China is following the practices that the U.S. did, as did England before it and all other developed societies since. China is rejecting the policy of “kicking away the ladder”: First climb the ladder of development by any means available, including robbery of higher technology and ample violence and deceit, then impose a “rules-based order” that bars others from doing the same. That is a staple of modern economic history, now formalized in the highly protectionist investor-rights agreements that are masked under the cynical pretense of “free trade.”

    The “security challenge” also has a military dimension. This is countered by the program of “encircling” China by heavily-armed “sentinel states,” and by such projects as the massive RIMPAC exercises now underway, defending the U.S. off the coasts of China. No infringement on U.S. domination of the “Indo-Pacific” region can be tolerated, even a threat that China might set up its second overseas military base in the Pacific Solomon Islands (the first is in Djibouti).

    Digressing briefly to criminal “whataboutism,” we might mention that the U.S. has 800 bases worldwide, which, along with their very prominent role in “defense” (aka imperial domination), enable hundreds of “low-profile proxy wars” in Africa, the greater Middle East, and Asia.

    Washington, along with concurring commentary in the media and journals of opinion, are quite correct in charging China with violation of the rules-based order that the U.S. upholds, now with even more firm European support than before. They are also correct in deploring severe human rights violations in China, but that is not a concern of the rules-based order, which easily accommodates and commonly vigorously supports such violations.

    The question of how best to enhance world peace does not arise in this connection. Everyone is in favor of “peace,” even Hitler: on their own terms. For the U.S., the terms are the rules-based international order. Others have their own ideas. Most of the world is the proverbial grass on which the elephants trample.

    The climate crisis was also on the agenda at the three-day summit in Madrid. In fact, it was recognized as “a defining challenge of our time” and NATO General-Secretary Jens Stoltenberg informed the world that the organization will “set the gold standard on addressing the security implications of climate change.” Personally, I sure feel better now knowing that militarism can be added to the methods of tackling the climate crisis. How about you?

    How encouraging that NATO will address “the security implications of climate change,” where “security” has the usual meaning that excludes the security of people.

    The issues raised here are the most important of all and are the most easily summarized. The human species is advancing toward a precipice. Soon irreversible tipping points will be reached, and we will be falling over the precipice to a “hothouse earth” in which life will be intolerable for those remnants that survive.

    Military expenses make a double contribution to this impending disaster: first, in their enormous contribution to destroying the conditions for tolerable existence, and second, in the opportunity costs — what isn’t being done with the huge resources devoted to undermining any hope for the future.

    Putin’s aggression in Ukraine made the same double contribution: destruction and robbery of the resources that must be used to avert environmental destruction. All of this couldn’t have happened at a worse time. The window for constructive action is closing while humanity persists on this mad course.

    All else pales into insignificance. We will find ways to cooperate to avert disaster and create a better world, as we still can. Or we will bring the human experiment to an inglorious end.

    It’s as simple as that.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Russian forces fighting for control of eastern Ukraine are believed to be preparing for an “operational pause” after taking control of Luhansk, one of two provinces in the Donbas region that Russian President Vladimir Putin claims to be “liberating” through a devastating war of attrition that has left entire cities in ruin.

    Putin claimed a victory for Russia on Monday and gave awards to military brass for seizing the town of Lysychansk on the western border of the Luhansk Oblast. However, former Russian military commander Igor Girkin questioned the significance of the seizing the city in a “scathing” critique of Russia’s performance in the war, according to an analysis from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a U.S.-based non-partisan policy research organization.

    Girkin, a hardline Russian nationalist who commanded militants during the 2014 war in the contested Donbas, suggested in a blog post that Russian forces have paid too high price for limited gains in Luhansk after weeks of grinding artillery battles and urban combat with U.S.-backed Ukrainian defenders, who are determined to weaken the Russian military and blunt the scope of Putin’s invasion.

    A manpower shortage that has left beleaguered Russian soldiers at the front without replacements is badly damaging Russian morale, Girkin wrote. Putin publicly called on his troops around Lysychansk to rest and regroup, which is likely meant to signal concern for troops “in the face of periodic complaints in Russia” about the treatment of the soldiers, according to the ISW. Putin has so far avoided a mass mobilization of military conscripts at home, leaving independent critics such as Girkin frustrated by military failures and the Kremlin’s unwillingness to call up reserves and wage a wider war on Ukraine.

    It’s unclear how long the “operational pause” in the invasion would last, but ISW analysts and other experts expect Putin’s forces to continue pushing into the neighboring Donetsk Oblast with punishing artillery assaults. Taking time to replenish offensive capability runs the risk of losing ground to Ukrainian counterattacks, Girkin warned.

    Russian troops are reportedly working to establish administrative control of captured territory around Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, two cities on either side of the Donets river that suffered bloody street battles and constant artillery barrages. Russian forces could be preparing to forcibly conscript Ukrainian citizens still living there to fight on the side of Russian and its separatist allies, the ISW reports.

    After months of indiscriminate shelling by Russian forces and Ukrainian counterattacks, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Monday that it will cost $750 billion to rebuild towns, cities and civilian infrastructure damaged by the war. International leaders grappled with a plan to rebuild Ukraine at a summit in Switzerland on Monday, with European nations and other Western allies pledging ongoing support.

    Beyond Lysychansk, limited Russian ground assaults are resulting in incremental territorial gains as Putin’s army seeks out strategic positions before pushing the invasion further west. Sporadic rocket strikes have terrorized civilian areas in recent weeks.

    Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces are using HIMARS missile systems imported from the United States to strike Russian ammunition depots up to 75 kilometers behind the front lines in recent days, a sign of improved military capability after months of facing off with invaders who have superior weapons.

    An apparent sabotage campaign targeting Russian-controlled railways continues in occupied Ukraine as well as inside Russia, where partisans and antiwar activists are working to disrupt the Russian army’s supply lines.

    The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Ukrainian partisans blew up a railway bridge between Melitopol and Tokmak in occupied southeastern Ukraine on July 3, and derailed a separate armored train carrying ammunition near Melitopol a day earlier. Previous sabotage efforts were also successful, suggesting a coordinated resistance campaign in these occupied areas, according to ISW.

    A self-described “cell” of anarchist militants took responsibility for railway sabotage near a Russian artillery depot in the Vladimir Oblast outside of Moscow. In posts on the social media platform Telegram, the militants claimed the sabotage temporarily stalled a train with military equipment and was meant to show “all the partizans [sic] how accessible such targets for sabotage are.”

  • An interview with Senator Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy advisor Matt Duss.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • We must understand Russia’s invasion of Ukraine not to justify it, but to better find a resolution to the conflict.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • A new book on Claude McKay is part of an effort to place the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance within the Black radical tradition.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • President Joe Biden and top subordinates have refused to publicly acknowledge the danger of nuclear war — even though it is now higher than at any other time in at least 60 years. Their silence is insidious and powerful, and their policy of denial makes grassroots activism all the more vital for human survival.

    In the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy was more candid. Speaking at American University, he said: “A single nuclear weapon contains almost 10 times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War.” Kennedy also noted, “The deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.” Finally, he added, “All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.”

    Kennedy was no dove. He affirmed willingness to use nuclear weapons. But his speech offered some essential honesty about nuclear war — and the need to seriously negotiate with the Kremlin in the interests of averting planetary incineration — an approach sorely lacking from the United States government today.

    At the time of Kennedy’s presidency, nuclear war would have been indescribably catastrophic. Now — with large arsenals of hydrogen bombs and what scientists know about “nuclear winter” — experts have concluded that a nuclear war would virtually end agriculture and amount to omnicide (the destruction of human life on earth).

    In an interview after publication of his book The Doomsday Machine, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg summed up what he learned as an insider during the Kennedy administration:

    What I discovered — to my horror, I have to say — is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff contemplated causing with our own first strike 600 million deaths, including 100 million in our own allies. Now, that was an underestimate even then because they weren’t including fire, which they found was too incalculable in its effects. And of course, fire is the greatest casualty-producing effect of thermonuclear weapons. So the real effect would’ve been over a billion — not 600 million — about a third of the Earth’s population then at that time.

    Ellsberg added:

    What turned out to be the case 20 years later in 1983 and confirmed in the last 10 years very thoroughly by climate scientists and environmental scientists is that that high ceiling of a billion or so was wrong. Firing weapons over the cities, even if you call them military targets, would cause firestorms in those cities like the one in Tokyo in March of 1945, which would loft into the stratosphere many millions of tons of soot and black smoke from the burning cities. It wouldn’t be rained out in the stratosphere. It would go around the globe very quickly and reduce sunlight by as much as 70 percent, causing temperatures like that of the Little Ice Age, killing harvests worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on Earth. It probably wouldn’t cause extinction. We’re so adaptable. Maybe 1 percent of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98 or 99 percent would not.

    Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine four months ago, the risks of global nuclear annihilation were at a peak. In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its Doomsday Clock at a mere 100 seconds from apocalyptic Midnight, compared to six minutes a decade ago. As Russia’s horrific war on Ukraine has persisted and the U.S. government has bypassed diplomacy in favor of massive arms shipments, the hazards of a nuclear war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers have increased.

    But the Biden administration has not only remained mum about current nuclear war dangers; it’s actively exacerbating them. Those at the helm of U.S. foreign policy now are ignoring the profound lessons that President Kennedy drew from the October 1962 confrontation with Russia over its nuclear missiles in Cuba. “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war,” Kennedy said. “To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy — or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

    In sync with the overwhelmingly hawkish U.S. media, members of Congress and “national security” establishment, Biden has moved into new Cold War overdrive. The priority aim is to make shrewd moves on the geopolitical chessboard — not to engage in diplomacy that could end the slaughter in Ukraine and prevent the war from causing widespread starvation in many countries.

    As scholar Alfred McCoy just wrote, “With the specter of mass starvation looming for some 270 million people and, as the [United Nations] recently warned, political instability growing in those volatile regions, the West will, sooner or later, have to reach some understanding with Russia.” Only diplomacy can halt the carnage in Ukraine and save the lives of millions now at risk of starvation. And the dangers of nuclear war can be reduced by rejecting the fantasy of a military solution to the Ukraine conflict.

    In recent months, the Russian government has made thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been shipping huge quantities of weapons to Ukraine, while Washington has participated in escalating the dangerous rhetoric. President Biden doubled down on conveying that he seeks regime change in Moscow, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has declared that the U.S. wants the Russian military “weakened” — an approach that is opposite from Kennedy’s warning against “confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.”

    We’d be gravely mistaken to wait for Washington’s officialdom to level with us about nuclear war dangers, much less take steps to mitigate them. The power corridors along Pennsylvania Avenue won’t initiate the needed changes. The initiatives and the necessary political pressure must come from grassroots organizing.

    A new “Defuse Nuclear War” coalition of about 90 national and regional organizations (which I’m helping to coordinate) launched in mid-June with a livestream video featuring an array of activists and other eloquent speakers, drawn together by the imperative of preventing nuclear war. (They included antiwar activists, organizers, scholars and writers Daniel Ellsberg, Mandy Carter, David Swanson, Medea Benjamin, Leslie Cagan, Pastor Michael McBride, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Hanieh Jodat Barnes, Judith Ehrlich, Khury Petersen-Smith, India Walton, Emma Claire Foley, retired Army Col. Ann Wright and former California Gov. Jerry Brown.)

    The U.S. government’s willingness to boost the odds of nuclear war is essentially a political problem. It pits the interests of the people of the world — in desperate need of devoting adequate resources to human needs and protection of the environment — against the rapacious greed of military contractors intertwined with the unhinged priorities of top elected officials.

    The Biden administration and the bipartisan leadership in Congress have made clear that their basic approach to the surging danger of nuclear war is to pretend that it doesn’t exist — and to encourage us to do the same. Such avoidance might seem like a good coping strategy for individuals. But for a government facing off against the world’s other nuclear superpower, the denial heightens the risk of exterminating almost all human life. There’s got to be a better way.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    There’s a lot going on in America and the people are very stressed out and frightened, but don’t worry, there’s nothing the US government won’t do to make sure more High Mobility Artillery Rocket systems get to Ukraine.

    Rest assured Americans: no matter how dark things may seem right now, no matter how insecure and uncertain you may feel, you can sleep soundly knowing your government is moving mountains around the clock to make sure the Ukraine war becomes a strategic quagmire for Moscow.

    The Ukraine war is the single most aggressively trolled issue I’ve ever witnessed. As soon as it started, Twitter was full of brand new accounts swarming anyone who uttered wrongthink about Ukraine, and now there are entire extremely coordinated troll factions working to scare people away from criticizing empire narratives about this war. It’s plainly very inorganic, so it’s good to recall what we know about the trolling operations of western militaries.

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

    Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media | Hacking | The Guardian https://t.co/IFH9KsXTxa

    — Abbas (@Abbas_Muntaqim) July 11, 2021

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    How did we miss this year-old Newsweek report about a secret and unaccountable Pentagon "undercover force" which "carries out domestic and foreign assignments" that include "campaigns to influence and manipulate social media"? https://t.co/zo7liETtnn pic.twitter.com/nTibeLpZxH

    — Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) April 13, 2022

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    British Army unveils ‘Twitter troops’ for social media fight – Channel 4 News https://t.co/OZbpqIOmUj

    — Patricia Dowling (@ketchmeifucan) June 29, 2022

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    We're used to hearing about state-backed Twitter campaigns from the likes of Iran and Russia, but why do we never hear about US and UK social media ops? (Spoiler: it's not because they don't exist) https://t.co/Aj7i3LNAZD

    — WIRED UK (@WiredUK) October 8, 2019

    So the western empire is responding to a war that was caused by NATO expansion by greatly expanding NATO, at the same time we learn that the Biden administration doesn’t even believe Ukraine has any chance of winning that war. This is going great, guys. Good job everyone.

    Sure the worst case scenario of all this brinkmanship with Russia is nuclear war, but on the other hand the best case scenario is securing planetary domination for an empire that has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression for power and profit. Totally worth the risk!

    When you realize the US really only has one political party, you cease seeing one good party protecting people from a bad party and start seeing one giant party threatening to take away people’s civil rights if they don’t obey and submit. You suddenly understand that saying one party is a “lesser evil” is like saying a boxer should want to get hit by his opponent’s left hand because his right cross hurts more. It’s two arms on the same boxer, and they’re both working together to knock you out.

    A boxer doesn’t go into a match planning to get punched in the face by his opponent’s left hand while avoiding the right, he goes in planning to defeat his opponent. The opponent is the uniparty and the oligarchic empire which controls it.

    It is true that each hand is used differently in boxing, with the lead used mostly for jabs and hooks and the rear hand mostly for crosses, but they’re both used together to set up a knockout blow. The fact that the parties are used differently doesn’t mean they’re not working together.

    Most good boxers will tell you they’d rather fight someone with a solid cross than someone with a solid jab. Sure the jab does less damage at first, but it’s such an effective strike that it can nullify your entire offense and grind you down until you can’t continue. In exactly the same way, the Democratic Party is far more effective in shutting down revolutionary movements and stagnating progress than the Republicans, and, just like a jab-cross combination in boxing, is used to set up the Republicans to deliver the knockout blow.

    What is the correct response to this? Is it to say “Hmm, I’d better let him punch me with his left hand, because if I don’t he’ll hit me with his right and it’ll hurt more”? Or is it to bite down on your mouthpiece and start throwing heavy leather until you knock his ass out?

    It’s just a cold hard fact that no matter how strong and independent a woman you think you are, your quality of life will be severely affected by the quality of the person you have babies with. Abortion is the final safeguard against giving birth to the child of an unworthy man. And no matter who you are reading this, you personally know women who’ve been temporarily deceived into thinking they were having sex with a worthy man.

    Forced birthers in the US are like, “We’ll adopt your baby! Okay actually we’ll probably just let them fall through the cracks of a grossly inadequate foster care system leading to a childhood of trauma and neglect, but after that we’ve got a very well-funded prison system that can take care of them.”

    One thing we learned from Covid is that being stuck inside sucks. Space colonization would be like being in permanent lockdown with no windows, no Uber Eats, no birdsong or rain on the roof and no chance of ever going home. Even if it somehow became possible, it’s a dumb idea and I hate it.

    And there’s no reason to believe it will ever become possible. Science is nowhere near finished learning about all the countless ways the human organism is inseparably intertwined with Earth. The belief that we can solve our problems with space colonization is unscientific. We’re just going to have to change how we function as a species.

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

    Astronauts lose decades' worth of bone mass in space that many do not recover even after a year back on Earth, researchers said Thursday, warning that it could be a "big concern" for future missions to Marshttps://t.co/p7Mp9deDih

    — AFP News Agency (@AFP) June 30, 2022

    The biggest obstacle remains the fact that science has no idea how to sustain human life in a way that is separate from earth’s ecosystem. We don’t even have any evidence that it’s possible. We’re no closer to being able to do it than we were a thousand years ago; today’s space stations are not independent of Earth’s ecosystem in even the tiniest way. They’re still 100 percent dependent on terrestrial supplies, which is an unsustainable model if you’re talking about actual colonization.

    The idea of space colonization appeals to the capitalist mentality because it means we can keep expanding our population and keep expanding the economy and keep harvesting and consuming resources in the way we have been. But there’s literally zero scientific evidence that it’s feasible.

    A future of space colonization is a fairy tale we tell ourselves so that we won’t have to change. So we can keep up our egocentric way of functioning without adapting and transcending our self-destructive patterns. We’re like a slacker who refuses to get off their parents’ couch and get their shit together who babbles made-up nonsense about NFT get-rich-quick schemes when asked about their plans for the future.

    Collective extinction is easier to imagine than collective ego death.

    ____________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on FacebookTwitterSoundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fiPatreon or Paypal. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

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  • Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan shakes hands with NTO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, during the NATO Conference in Madrid on 28 June 2022. A handshake of betrayal, as Turkey accepted Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO membership.

    One wonders what forces have influenced Erdogan to betray Russia in particular and the East in general, when accepting NATO membership of the two Nordic countries, against the interests of Russia.

    Why would Turkey want to dance on two fiestas, the western lying, deceiving and collapsing NATO / G7+ wannabe empire, and the progressive, growing and peace seeking fast developing East, or better the Greater Global South?

    Erdogan is a bit like India’s PM Narendra Modi, who wants to be part of the new expanded eastern alliance, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the ASEAN ten-countries’ block, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), as well as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the association of 11 former USSR Republics.

    At the same time Modi, like Erdogan would not want to “lose out”, in case the west may not collapse, or not as quickly as it should. Do they not realize that their “misbehavior”, a benign term to camouflage betrayal, is only tolerated in the case of Turkey because of its geostrategic and geographic location, and in the case of India, because of its sheer size – 1.4 billion people, about the same as the most populous country, China?

    But, under their current leadership, neither country can be trusted as a reliable ally. Not by the east, and not even in the tarnished west.

    Whether the Kremlin had hoped Turkey would stick to her objection against Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO access is immaterial. What counts is that Turkey is no reliable partner and ally for Russia which had already been proven earlier, when Turkey aggressed Syria for her own petty interests, while Russia fought and won Syria’s war against unfounded US aggressions.

    “The concrete steps for our accession to NATO will be agreed among NATO allies over the next two days, but that decision is now imminent,” said Finland’s President, Sauli Niinisto. “I am pleased that this stage on Finland’s journey towards NATO membership has been completed.”

    According to RT (28 June 2022), Turkey will support inviting Finland and Sweden into NATO at the bloc’s summit in Spain, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto announced on Tuesday after a meeting with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson.

    A note on Sweden and NATO: For over 300 years, Sweden and Russia have lived conflict-free side by side. Entering the aggressive NATO clan means a Swedish aggression against Russia.

    The three countries, Sweden, Finland and Turkey, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) at the NATO meeting on 28 June, organized with the support of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

    The MOU stated, for example, that Finland and Sweden pledged to “condemn terrorism in all its forms” and end their support for organizations Ankara has designated as terrorist – including the Kurdish groups PKK and YPG, as well as the movement led by the exiled cleric Fetullah Gulen, Erdogan’s archenemy.

    “Turkey got what it wanted,” Erdogan said after the deal was announced.

    This was another lie because terrorism from Sweden and Finland were never serious threats to Turkey. They were just used by Erdogan to pressure the NATO / G7 “alliance” into some vital concessions.

    Could it be lifting of the killing economic sanctions initiated by Washington and supported by the EU?

    Or, could it be, like in the case of Ukraine – a step towards acceding the corrupt and faltering European Union? A Turkish quest that is already at least two decades old.

    Maybe the luminary Mme. Ursula von der Leyen, unelected Fuehrer of the European Commission, has the answer.

    The post Turkey Once More Betrays the East first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The United States announced at a NATO summit in Madrid plans to build a permanent military base in Poland, as it formally invited Sweden and Finland to join the military alliance after they applied for membership in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We look at the impact of prolonged U.S. military presence in Europe and the overemphasis on Russia or China as enemies to the West at a time when threats to Western liberal democracy seem to be primarily internal. The Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven also discusses possibilities for a peace settlement to end the war in Ukraine. “It’s quite impossible now for Russia to win a total victory in Ukraine, but it does also look very unlikely that Ukraine will be able to win a total military victory over Russia,” says Lieven. “We’re going to end up with some sort of compromise.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: The NATO military alliance has wrapped up a major summit in Madrid. On Wednesday, President Biden announced plans to greatly expand the U.S. military presence in Europe, including building a permanent headquarters for the U.S. 5th Army Corps in Poland, while also deploying more troops to Romania and the Baltic region. Biden said this is part of a broader NATO expansion, in part as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: And together, our allies, we’re going to make sure that NATO is ready to meet threats from all directions across every domain — land, air and the sea.

    AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, NATO formally invited Finland and Sweden to join the military alliance, after Turkey dropped its objection to the move. This comes as the Biden administration has publicly announced it would support the sale of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey.

    Once Finland and Sweden join NATO, it will more than double the border between NATO countries and Russia. Current members of NATO share a 750-mile border with Russia. Finland alone has an 830-mile border with Russia.

    On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned against NATO deploying troops or weapons to the two countries.

    PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: [translated] There’s nothing that might concern us in terms of Finland and Sweden becoming NATO members. If they want to, please go ahead. But they should clearly understand that they didn’t face any threats before this. Now, if NATO troops and infrastructure are deployed, we will be compelled to respond in kind.

    AMY GOODMAN: This all comes as NATO has described China for the first time as a, quote, “systemic challenge to Euro-Atlantic security,” unquote. NATO, which stands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is increasingly focusing on China. The military alliance took the unprecedented step of inviting the leaders of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand to attend the NATO summit in Madrid.

    For more, we turn to Anatol Lieven, senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, author Ukraine and Russia. His latest piece in The Nation is headlined “A Peace Settlement in Ukraine.”

    Anatol, thanks for joining us again. If you can start off by talking about all these developments? As we’re broadcasting, President Biden is actually holding a news conference in Madrid, but the increased troop presence in Europe, Poland establishing a permanent base, Finland and Sweden coming in to the alliance, and inviting South Korea and Japan, New Zealand and Australia to — not into NATO, but to this meeting, so they can start to talk more about what NATO is considering a threat: China.

    ANATOL LIEVEN: Well, that’s a lot to cover. I suppose one thing to note is that, as your report said, I think, today Russia announced that it was withdrawing from Snake Island in the Black Sea on the coast of Ukraine, which it has been occupied since the beginning of the war. And Russia said, of course, it was doing this as a gesture of conciliation, but the general analysis is that Russia was withdrawing from Snake Island because it was simply suffering too many casualties and losses of ships to hold it.

    Now, you know, I think what that does indicate pretty clearly is that on top of the way that Russia was defeated by Ukrainian forces with Western weaponry outside Kyiv, has been fought not quite to a standstill, but almost, in eastern Ukraine, you know, Russia is not the — nearly the military great power that the Russians obviously thought it was, but that it was also portrayed as in the West. And, in fact, a former NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has acknowledged this. So you see there is a certain dissonance between Russia’s actual military strength and performance and NATO’s response, because, you know, to be blunt, if Russia takes weeks and weeks to capture one small town in the Donbas, the thought of it invading Poland or Romania, it’s not actually serious in military terms.

    And as far as Finland and Sweden is concerned, well, you know, one understands perfectly why they have been so alarmed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it is also true that Russia has not threatened either of them militarily since the end of the Cold War. So I suppose that’s one thing to point to.

    I mean, as far as China is concerned, there are, I suppose, two points to raise. The first is that to have set out on a focus on the Chinese threat, while at the same time being deeply embroiled in acute tension with Russia and backing the other side in a war with Russia, you know, does not look like wise strategy for NATO. You know, there should have been some attempt to ratchet down tensions with one or the other.

    I suppose the other obvious point to make is, as you said, I mean, NATO stands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. You know, the members of NATO are all on or close to the North Atlantic. The United States is there because it is an Atlantic power. To the best of my knowledge, China is not present in the Atlantic Ocean. And it does raise the question both of whether NATO should — whether NATO’s charter in fact allows it to deal with China as a threat, or whether you should have a quite different organization for that, but also, of course, whether China is actually a threat to the North Atlantic countries or such — as such, or whether it is only in fact a threat to American primacy in the Far East, which is a very different question.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: I mean, Anatol, when this announcement was made by NATO to include China, they said that China represents — threatens NATO’s, quote, “interests, security and values.” And together with making this statement including China, they also for the first time invited countries from East Asia, as well as Australia and New Zealand — Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Could you explain why you think they did that now and what this implies for the long-term goals of NATO?

    ANATOL LIEVEN: There are two reasons. I mean, one is that, obviously, as China becomes more and more powerful, economically stronger and stronger, it does raise understandable anxieties in the democratic countries of the West. That, however, is not the same as a security threat to Europe.

    And the other — and as far as values are concerned, well, you know, I was listening to the program. I have to say it really seems to me that the obvious threats to Western liberal democracy are internal. You know, they are about all the things that we know about: socioeconomic inequality, demographic change driving internal extremism and cultural anxieties. And China actually has nothing to do with any of this. You know, to some degree, it is actually a distraction. And remember, I mean, you know, the whole point of NATO in the end is to defend Western liberal democracy. Now, by looking militarily at China, even to a degree by — not by supporting Ukraine, you understand — that’s absolutely right — but by building up this idea of Russia as a massive threat to the West, is NATO really concentrating on the most important dangers to liberal democracy, I wonder.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And as far as — to turn now to what the situation in Ukraine is, your recent piece for The Nation is headlined “A Peace Settlement in Ukraine.” If you could elaborate the argument that you make there, and, in particular, the point that you make regarding the status of the Donbas and Crimea and why that must, in any peace settlement, be left for future negotiations?

    ANATOL LIEVEN: Well, the thing is that the first Russian demand, a treaty of neutrality, has actually, in principle, been accepted by President Zelensky. You know, it’s there on the Ukrainian presidential website. The point being, as Zelensky has said, that before the Russian invasion, he went to NATO countries and asked for a guarantee of NATO membership within a reasonable space of time, five years, and they all said, “No, no, no, sorry, you’re not going to get in.” So, you know, fairly enough, Zelensky said, “OK, then, why not a treaty of neutrality?”

    Now, of course, the Ukrainians have asked for some very, very firm guarantees of Ukrainian security as part of a treaty of neutrality. Those, however, I think we won’t go into detail about now, but they are negotiable. You know, we can think of some good ways of addressing that.

    The territorial issues are much more complicated, because there are basically incompatible positions there: the Ukrainian insistance on full sovereignty over all Ukrainian territory as it existed when Ukraine became independent in 1991 and the Russian claim of sovereignty over Crimea and recognition of independence of the Donbas separatist republics. And then there is the issue — you know, I’m sorry, it gets horribly complicated, but these issues always are. There’s the point that Russia has recognized the independence of the Donbas republics on the whole administrative territory of the Donbas but actually still has not occupied that whole territory. You know, half of it is still in Ukrainian hands. So it’s going to be very hard to negotiate.

    However, the Ukrainians have said that if Russia will withdraw from all the new territory it has occupied since the invasion began, Ukraine is prepared to essentially shelve the previous territorial issues for future negotiation — at least that’s what Ukraine said previously, but there have been wildly different statements coming out of the Ukrainian government. It’s clear that there are — well, firstly, that there are deep divisions within the Ukrainian government and elites. And secondly, of course, once again, I mean, very, very understandably, as the war has progressed, as the destruction by Russia has got worse and worse, as there are these revelations of Russian atrocities, so, naturally, the Ukrainians have been more — become more and more embittered, and more and more of them have decided that they have to fight through to total victory.

    But I think, you know, we also have to recognize that viewed from outside — I mean, I’ve said that I think it’s quite impossible now for Russia to win a total victory in Ukraine, but it does also look very unlikely that Ukraine will be able to win a total military victory over Russia. So, in the end, one way or the other, we’re going to end up with some sort of compromise.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, Anatol, if you can comment on the G7 reaching an agreement around a price cap on Russian oil exports, and the backfiring of the sanctions? The New York Times writes, “Despite the sanctions, Russia’s revenues from oil sales have been on the rise, a function of soaring fuel prices, while consumers around the world have faced mounting pain at the gasoline pump.”

    ANATOL LIEVEN: Well, two things about that. The first is that, you know, Western governments should have thought about this before the war, this threat, a very, very obvious one, and done much more to try to avert the war by seeking, well, for example, the treaty of neutrality which Ukraine has now offered, because, I mean, you know, obviously — I mean, not just oil and gas, but food, as well. It was perfectly obvious that massive sanctions against Russia would have this effect on global energy and food prices. So, you know, that’s the first thing.

    The second thing is that, look, we don’t know, but there are already obvious splits behind the scenes between — both between European governments but also between some European governments and America, on the approach to the war in Ukraine and a peace settlement. And, I mean, European officials I’ve talked to in private have said that, you know, going into the autumn, if Germany is facing a winter of a widespread contraction of German industry as a result of lack of energy, if European governments are going into a winter with energy shortages, with radically higher energy prices, if there are by then either serious threats of global recession or if we’re already in a global recession, then, of course, I think you are likely to see much more pressure for a — some attempt at a compromise peace, or at least an agreed ceasefire in Ukraine. And what I tried to do in my essay for The Nation was to suggest to Western policymakers some of the contours — in my view, the only viable contours — of what such a peace settlement could look like.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And do you think, Anatol, finally, that the signs at the moment, I mean, the fact in this — the fact of NATO expansion, the presence now of U.S. troops — increasing presence of U.S. troops in Europe, in symbolic terms the ascension of Finland and Sweden, and NATO saying yesterday — Jens Stoltenberg saying that allies are prepared for the long haul on Ukraine, this, together with the fact that as far as, if one takes Russia’s word for it, if this was all about NATO, things are going not quite as they had planned, what indication is there, given both these things, that anyone, either party, would be interested in beginning negotiations anytime in the near future?

    ANATOL LIEVEN: Well, I mean, you’re absolutely right, of course. And look, I mean, I’m not naive about the chances. But I think, you know, when you said that things have not exactly gone to plan as far as Russia is concerned, that is quite an understatement. You know, this has been a disaster for Russia, of course. And it’s been a disaster militarily. I mean, remember that Russia has actually failed to achieve almost all its key military objectives in Ukraine. It’s failed. It’s been fought to a standstill. And to go on and on like this is going to cost enormous Russian casualties and not necessarily gain any more significant ground. So, that, in principle, creates an incentive to seek an agreement. And, of course, the Ukrainians are also suffering terribly.

    And I think it’s also worth remembering that Ukraine now does have a genuine chance, for the first time, of future membership of the European Union. And that is — I mean, that is really the mark of Ukraine joining the West, much more than NATO, you know, if Ukraine can join the European Union. But it can’t do so as long as it’s in this war with the Ukrainian economy being shot to pieces by the Russians. So there is also, of course, an incentive for the Ukrainian side to try to reach an agreement. But, look, I’m not saying that this is easy.

    As far as Stoltenberg is concerned, I mean, look, remember, Stoltenberg represents the NATO bureaucracy. He doesn’t head a government. He’s not elected. He doesn’t have to care about energy prices, unemployment, inflation, any of these things. He actually doesn’t even have to care about starvation in Africa or the Middle East as a result of food shortages because of the war. So, you know, the people who are ultimately going to make the decisions are the elected politicians, who do have to care about these things.

    AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you, Anatol Lieven, for joining us, senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. We’ll link to your piece in The Nation headlined “A Peace Settlement in Ukraine.”

    Coming up, we look at how the far-right Supreme Court has radically reshaped the United States. We’ll speak with the ACLU’s David Cole. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    Former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo gave a speech at the Hudson Institute last week that’s probably worth taking a look at just because of how much it reveals about the nature of the US empire and the corrupt institutions which influence its policies.

    Pompeo is serving as a “Distinguished Fellow” at the Hudson Institute while he waits for the revolving door of the DC swamp to rotate him back into a federal government position. The Hudson Institute is a neoconservative think tank which has a high degree of overlap with the infamous Project for the New American Century and its lineup of Iraq war architects, and spends a lot of its time manufacturing Beltway support for hawkish agendas against Iran. It was founded in 1961 with the help of a cold warrior named Herman Kahn, whose enthusiastic support for the idea that the US can win a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was reportedly an inspiration for the movie Dr Strangelove.

    A think tank is an institution where academics are paid by the worst people in the world to come up with explanations for why it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid, which are then pitched at key points of influence in the media and the government. “Think tank” is a good and accurate label for these institutions, because they are dedicated to controlling what people think, and because they are artificial enclosures for slimy creatures.

    Pompeo’s speech is one long rimjob for the military-industrial complex which indirectly employs him. He repeatedly sings the praises of the weapons that are being poured into Ukraine, two of them by name: the Patriot missile built by Raytheon and the Javelin missile built jointly by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, both of whom happen to be major funders of the Hudson Institute. He repeatedly decries the “disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan,” and excoriates the Biden administration for failing to control the world’s fossil fuel resources aggressively enough in its efforts to “prostrate itself to radicals.”

    Pompeo, easily ranked among the most fanatical imperialists on the entire planet, hilariously says that “China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a form of imperialism.” He decries a “genocide” in Xinjiang and repeatedly implies that China deliberately unleashed Covid-19 upon the world, calling it “the global pandemic induced by China.” He repeatedly claims that Vladimir Putin is trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union.

    Along with praise for NATO and for the various anti-China alliances in the Indo-Pacific, Pompeo names “Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan” as “the three lighthouses for liberty” which those alliances must work to support militarily. You will notice that those three “lighthouses” just so happen to be the hottest points of geostrategic conflict with the top three opponents of the US empire: Russia, Iran, and China.

    But there are a couple of things Pompeo says which have some real meat on them.

    “By aiding Ukraine, we undermined the creation of a Russian-Chinese axis bent on exerting military and economic hegemony in Europe, in Asia and in the Middle East,” Pompeo says.

    “We must prevent the formation of a Pan-Eurasian colossus incorporating Russia, but led by China,” he later adds. “To do that, we have to strengthen NATO, and we see that nothing hinders Finland and Sweden’s entry into that organization.”

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    To stop a "Pan-Eurasian colossus" from forming, @mikepompeo stresses the importance of #Finland and #Sweden joining @NATO as well as #Russia's resulting increase in military capability if they are denied entry. pic.twitter.com/er0BKvcjEK

    — Hudson Institute (@HudsonInstitute) June 29, 2022

    That’s all the major international news stories of today are ultimately about, right there. Underlying all the smaller news stories about conflicts with nations like Russia, China and Iran, there’s one continuous story about the US power alliance trying to secure planetary domination by relentlessly working to subvert any nation which refuses to align with it, and about the nations who oppose that campaign working against it with steadily increasing intimacy.

    This is all the Russia hysteria from 2016 onward has been about. This is all the phony, hypocritical hand-wringing about Taiwan, Xinjiang and Hong Kong have been about. This is all the staged histrionics about human rights in Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba have been about. It’s all been about manufacturing international consent for an increasingly dangerous campaign to secure unipolar global hegemony at any cost.

    It’s worth calling this to mind, as NATO for the first time designates China a threat due to its alignment with Russia and as NATO’s secretary-general admits that NATO has been preparing for a conflict with Russia since 2014. It is worth calling to mind the fact that the US has had a policy in place since the fall of the Soviet Union to prevent the rise of any rival superpower to deny any serious challenge to its planetary domination. It is worth calling to mind that in 1997 the precursor to the US Space Force committed to working toward “full spectrum dominance,” meaning military control over land, sea, air, and space.

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    US unipolar hegemony.

    They are right that China challenges NATO interests: the NATO cartel's existential goal of enforcing a US global dictatorship, one that imposes neoliberalism on the planet, destroying any country that proposes a state-led, people-centered economic model https://t.co/y5HCWAGkiL

    — Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) June 30, 2022

    People like to talk about secret conspiracies by shadowy cabals to establish a one-world government, but what is by far the most tangible and imminent global domination agenda has been orchestrated right out in the open. The US government has long sought to unite the world under a single power structure, no matter how much violence and devastation it needs to inflict upon humanity and no matter how much world-threatening nuclear brinkmanship it needs to engage in to do so.

    This is the US empire which corrupt psychopaths like Mike Pompeo support. A power structure which wages nonstop wars in order to keep the peace, which continually oppresses populations around the world in order to protect freedom, and which risks nuclear war with increasingly reckless aggression to in order save the world.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on FacebookTwitterSoundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fiPatreon or Paypal. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

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  • The Indian Ministry of Defence (MoD) has successfully test fired an indigenous laser-guided anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) from an Arjun main battle tank on 28 June, the MoD announced via the government’s Press Information Bureau on the same day. The MoD stated that the latest trial evaluated the ATGM’s ability to engage targets at its […]

    The post India advances indigenous tank-launched missile testing appeared first on Asian Military Review.

  • Caleb Maupin reports on the recent allegation of Russian missile targeting an shopping center in Ukraine, dismissed by Russia at the United Nations.

    The post Russia Challenges Western Accusations at UN Security Council first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The CIA and special operations forces from NATO members Britain, France, Canada, and Lithuania are physically in Ukraine, helping direct the proxy war on Russia, according to a report in The New York Times.

    These Western forces are on the ground training and advising Ukrainian fighters, overseeing weapons shipments, and managing intelligence.

    At least 20 countries are part of a US Army-led coalition, guiding Ukraine in its fight against Russian troops.

    Some Ukrainian combatants are even using US flag patches on their equipment.

    This is all according to a June 25 report in The New York Times, titled “Commando Network Coordinates Flow of Weapons in Ukraine, Officials Say.”

    The Times is a de facto organ of the US government. Although technically private, the paper closely follows the line of the CIA and Pentagon.

    The post CIA And Western Special Ops Commandos Are In Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Last week the 14th BRICS Summit took place virtually, chaired by Chinese President Xi Jinping. The BRICS bloc (Brasil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) represents a key political, economic, and scientific force in the international arena. These nations represent half of the world’s population and their collective GDP is greater that $20 trillion.

    In today’s context, the significance of the BRICS summit is increased to the extent that the bloc represents an alternative to the unipolar world of the decaying West.

    What follows are some of the key points from the Summit’s in Beijing:

    Multilateral compromise in the defense of international law, which includes being more inclusive with less developed countries.
    Promote peace and international security without compromising the environment.
    Support for a an open, multilateral, transparent, inclusive, rules-based, non-discriminatory commercial system.

    The post Key Takeaways From BRICS Summit appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Unless the Ukrainians have a decisive victory or a Russian advance is too great to hide, news of the war follows a pattern of headlines:

    Russians shell dozens of Ukrainian towns in the Donbas

    Casualties rise as Russia makes incremental gains in east

    From the New York Times “The ruined industrial city in eastern Ukraine fell after months of Russian bombardment and weeks of urban combat. Like Mariupol, it became emblematic of the savagery of the war.”

    Read similar articles and learn the content rarely follows the headline. Search Google and try to find images of a ruined and severely shelled Severodonetsk. Well, here is one. Take this headline from WION – World Is One News with global headquarters in New Delhi.

    Satellite images reveal widespread destruction in Ukrainian industrial city of Sievierodonetsk

    “High-resolution images collected by Maxar Technologies over a period of 24 hours on Monday show damaged buildings from artillery shelling in downtown Severodonetsk and around a hospital. From a hole in the roof, to charred buildings, the images showcase how the area has been laid waste by constant shelling.”

    Note: Several online media published the exact same display of images and commentary.

    Well, let’s see. Here is the first image.

    Satellite image shows destroyed buildings in Rubizhne, Ukraine, near Sievierodonetsk.

    Oh, not Sievierodonetsk, but a village near Sievierodonetsk.

    This same photo has appeared under other headlines, such as: The Washington Post, Severodonetsk defenders holding out under merciless shelling, mayor says

    “Severodonetsk, an industrial hub, is key to Russia’s plan as its fall would open up the route to Kramatorsk, the main city of Donetsk. At least 70 per cent of Severodonetsk is reported to be under Russian control, though the Ukrainian forces are fighting back. Ukraine repelling Russian attacks. The regional governor, Serhiy Haidai said tough street battles were continuing with varying degrees of success. ‘The situation constantly changes, but the Ukrainians are repelling attacks,’ he said.”

    Next image.

    A 40-meter crater can be seen next to destroyed buildings.

    Evidently, this is not the industrial city of Sievierodonetsk.

    “Sievierodonetsk important for Putin. Russia seeks victory in Sievierodonetsk, which would give it full control of Luhansk province. When Vladimir Putin began his invasion on 24 February, he pledged to “liberate” the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk where were in separatist hands.”

    Next image.

    This image shows a field peppered with craters caused by artillery, northwest of Slovyansk

    “Russian forces have been focused for weeks on seizing Sievierodonetsk, which was home to some 106,000 people before Moscow invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, but the Luhansk region’s governor said Ukrainian forces would not surrender the city.:

    Next image.

    This image shows active artillery shelling in the town of Bogorodichne, Ukraine, northwest of Slovyansk

    Where are photos of Sievierodonetsk?

    “Widespread destruction (of Sievierodonetsk?)”

    O.K.

    This satellite image shows damaged buildings around a hospital in Sievierodonetsk, Ukraine

    Wait a second!

    (1) Where is the widespread destruction? I only see one possible bomb hit. Other dark spots are shadows.

    (2) Is that really a hospital? The Red Cross is on top of vegetation. Has it been photoshopped? Note there is no parking lot nor cars parked by the “hospital.” Don’t people work there or visit?

    CNN published the same image under the headline, “At least 2 hospitals hit by military strikes in Severodonetsk and Rubizhne, new satellite images show.” Does the image show a bombed hospital?

    There must be some images of this heavily shelled Severodonetsk. Googled “heavily shelled Severodonetsk.”

    Came up with the same previous image provided by Maxar Technologies, which showed destroyed buildings in Rubizhne, Ukraine near Severodonetsk. All other images were those of smoke rising over Severodonetsk. None of the images showed damage to the city.

    Smoke rises during shelling of the city of Severodonetsk in eastern Ukraine on May 21

    Tried YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuC7zqWtEpw, which featured a video of Ukraine: images of shelling over Severodonetsk | AFP

    The YouTube video showed only some noise and smoke, no extensive damages

    Washington Post

    “Ukrainian soldiers in Severodonetsk, the eastern city under continuous Russian bombardment, are holding their positions despite relentless shelling, and troops are “doing their utmost to defend the city,” its mayor, Oleksandr Stryuk, said Tuesday. The satellite images show fields full of artillery craters, city blocks reduced to rubble and a 130-foot bomb scar.

    The Ukrainian government has said that about 90 percent of the buildings are destroyed.”

    Press on the link The satellite images show and it will return to the articles – no images, that’s right, no images, and no “about 90 percent of the buildings are destroyed. ”

    Conclusion

    Western media, which tends to always degrade its adversaries, as long as they continue to be adversaries — Russia, China, Iran. Gaddafi Libya and not the post-Gaddafi Libya — report a one-sided view of the war. Other media, attempting to capture audience, sensationalize catastrophes. Obtaining credible reports of the war in Ukraine requires shuffling through several accounts and piecing them together to make a logical analysis. Undoubtedly, Severodonetsk suffered from shelling and had some serious, but not extensive damage. The Russians encircled the city, destroyed the bridges, and then entered the city, which the Ukraine army was not equipped to defend. After two weeks of retreating within the city, the remnants of the Ukrainian army left.

    The post Severodonetsk: Deciphering News of the War in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • This year’s report published at the halfway point of 2022 shines a light on a time of immense upheaval and contestation. The report finds hope, however, in the many mobilisations for change around the world: the mass protests, campaigns and people’s movements for justice, and the many grassroots initiatives defending rights and helping those most in need.

    The report identifies five key current trends of global significance:

    1. Rising costs of fuel and food are spurring public anger and protests at economic mismanagement
    2. Democracy is under assault but positive changes are still being won
    3. Advances are being made in fighting social inequality despite attacks
    4. Civil society is keeping up the pressure for climate action
    5. Current crises are exposing the inadequacies of the international governance system.
    1. Governments around the world are failing to protect people from the impacts of massive price rises worsened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Public anger at a dysfunctional economic system, poverty and economic inequality and corruption is rising. Mass protests are the result. In Sri Lanka, widespread protests against economic mismanagement led to resignation of the prime minister. In Iran people are demanding fundamental change as food prices soar. In Kazakhstan over 200 people were killed with impunity following protests over fuel price rises. But people will continue to protest out of necessity even in the many countries where fundamental freedoms are repressed and state violence is inevitable.
    1. Institutions and traditions of democracy are under increasing attack. Coups are imperilling hard-fought gains. The military has gained power in multiple countries, including Burkina Faso and Sudan. In several others, including El Salvador and Tunisia, elected presidents are removing democratic checks on power. Entirely fraudulent elections have been held in countries as different as Nicaragua and Turkmenistan. Autocratic nationalists have triumphed in elections in countries including Hungary and the Philippines. But at the same time there have been successful mobilisations to defend democracy, not least in theCzech Republic and Slovenia, where people voted out political leaders who fostered divisiveness in favour of fresh and broad-based alternatives. Progressive leaders promising to advance social justice have won power in countries such as Chile and Honduras. In many contexts, including Costa Rica andPeru, a prevailing sentiment of dissatisfaction is leading to a rejection of incumbency and willingness to embrace candidates who run as outsiders and promise disruption.
    1. In politically turbulent times, and despite severe pushback by anti-rights groups, progress has been achieved in advancing women’s and LGBTQI+ rights. The USA, where neoconservative forces are emboldened, is ever more isolated on sexual and reproductive rights as several other countries in the Americas, including Colombia and Mexico, have eased abortion restrictions following civil society advocacy. Opportunistic politicians continue to seek political advantage in vilifying LGBTQI+ people, but globally the normalisation of LGBTQI+ rights is spreading. Most recently, the people of Switzerland overwhelmingly voted in favour of an equal marriage law. Even in hostile contexts such as Jamaica important advances have come through civil society’s engagement in regional human rights systems. But when it comes to fighting for migrants’ rights, only Ukrainian refugees in Europe are being received with anything like the kind of compassion all such people deserve, and otherwise the dominant global sentiment is hostility. Nonetheless, a new generation is forging movements to advance racial justice and demand equity for excluded people.
    1. A young and diverse generation is the same social force that continues to make waves on climate change. As extreme weather gets more common, the brunt of the climate crisis continues to fall disproportionately on the most excluded populations who have done the least to cause the problem. Governments and companies are failing to act, and urgent action on emissions cuts to meet the size of the challenge is being demanded by civil society movements, including through mass marches, climate strikes and non-violent civil disobedience. Alongside these, climate litigation is growing, leading to significant legal breakthroughs, such as the judgment in the Netherlands that forced Shell to commit to emissions cuts. Shareholder activism towards fossil fuel firms and funders is intensifying, with pension funds coming under growing pressure to divest from fossil fuels.
    1. Russia’s war on Ukraine is the latest crisis, alongside recent conflicts in the Sahel, Syria and Yemen, among others, to expose the failure of global institutions to protect people and prevent conflict. The UN Security Council is hamstrung by the veto-wielding role of Russia as one of its five permanent members, although a special session of the UN General Assembly yielded a resolution condemning the invasion. Russia has rightly been suspended from the UN Human Rights Council, but this peak human rights body remains dominated by rights-abusing states. If the UN is to move from helping to prevent crises rather than trying to react to them, effective civil society engagement is needed. The world as it stands today, characterised by crisis and volatility, needs a UN prepared to work with civil society, since civil society continues to seek and secure vital progress for humanity.

    See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/05/26/10th-edition-of-civicuss-state-of-civil-society-report-2021/

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

  • Yesterday I mentioned the burning shopping center in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, of which the Ukrainian president Zelensky falsely claimed that thousand people had been inside. I asked: “Satellite pictures show that the shopping center is right next to the large Kredmash machine plant. Was that the real target of the attack with the shopping center being an unintended casualty?”

    It has now been confirmed that the answer to my question is ‘yes’.

    The post Another Zelensky Lie Debunked – White House Says Ukraine Must Give Up Territory appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Renowned progressive intellectual Noam Chomsky, author of over a 100 books, was recently interviewed by AcTVism. The entire interview is interesting, but the focus here is on the first 20 minutes where the situation in Ukraine is discussed.

    Chomsky lays out the US directive to NATO in the proxy war: “The war must continue until Russia is severely harmed.”

    The professor scoffs at Russian military might. He says that western European countries “are gloating over the fact that the Russia military has demonstrated to be a paper tiger, couldn’t even conquer a couple of cities a couple of kilometers from the border defended mostly by a citizens army, so all the talk about Russian military power was exposed as empty…”

    I grant that Chomsky is indeed a polymath, but is he an expert on military operations? Scott Ritter and Brian Berletic, on the other hand, are Americans steeped in militarism. Berletic is a former US marine and Ritter is a former intelligence officer for the US marines. Both of them explain the Russian strategy in shaping the battlefield. The reason for this is to minimize Russian casualties and Ukrainian civilian casualties. This is unlike American Shock and Awe warfare where “collateral damage” (as killing of civilians by US military is trivialized) is accepted to attain US military objectives. Moreover, since Donbass was the industrial heartland of Ukraine, as well as part of the wheat belt, it is in Russia’s interest to protect the infrastructure and agriculture, as well as protecting the, largely Russian speaking, people of Donbass. However, the perceived slowness of implementing the Russian strategy — surrounding enemy fighters in siege warfare and compelling their surrender — seems to make Russia a paper tiger in Chomsky’s estimation.

    If Russia is a paper tiger, then what does that make Ukraine? Ukraine was trained by NATO, armed by NATO, and fed intelligence by NATO, as well as outnumbering Russian fighters while fighting on home turf?

    Yet Russia has destroyed most of the Ukrainian fighters (including Ukrainian Nazi fighters), obliterated most of their weaponry, including resupplies by NATO, and has liberated Donbass and conquered other parts of Ukraine (a country on the verge of potentially becoming landlocked if it persists in fighting a losing battle).

    Chomsky characterizes western countries as “free democratic societies.” [sic] He follows this by stating, “There is no conceivable possibility that Russia will attack anyone [else]. They could barely handle this [fight with Ukraine]. They had to back off without NATO involvement.”

    The fighting was personalized by Chomsky as Putin’s “criminal aggression” and that Putin acted “very stupidly” because he “drove Europe into Washington’s pocket”: “the greatest gift he could give the United States.” Chomsky would heap more ad hominem at Putin’s “utter imbecility.”

    “The United States is utterly delighted,” states Chomsky. The military-industrial complex is “euphoric.” “Fossil fuel companies are delighted… It’s almost unbelievable the stupidity.”

    Chomsky acknowledges that Ukraine cannot defeat the paper tiger, Russia, and supposedly Russian military actions have united the western world against Russia, as if the western world were not already arrayed against Russia. Yes, Germany backed out of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline for delivery of gas to the German market. But who was hurt more by this?

    Fossil fuel prices have soared and Russia is the beneficiary. Despite sanctions, the Russian ruble is strong. While the western Europeans have remained fidel to their American masters, Africa, South America, and Asia have ignored the sanctions. China, Pakistan, India, among others, have stepped in to import Russian oil and gas.

    While Chomsky points out that the US military-industrial complex and Big Oil are overjoyed by the Russia-Ukraine warring, unmentioned is that average American citizens (and their European counterparts) are not feeling particularly gleeful at spiking gas costs and burgeoning inflation.

    Chomsky keeps his focus on the invasion. “There is no way to justify the invasion. None!” Talk of justification is “totally nonsense,” says Chomsky. He admits that there was “provocation” by the US for ignoring Russian security concerns. “But provocation does not yield justification,” he asserts. “There is nothing that can justify criminal aggression.”

    Why does Chomsky not mention the 8 years that Ukraine had been aggressing Donbass, criminally, where a reported 14,000 Donbass citizens were killed? Russia refers to a genocide perpetrated by Ukraine in Donbass. Russia justified its “special military operation” (what Chomsky calls a criminal aggression) by recognizing the sovereignty of the Lugansk and Donetsk republics and entering into a defensive pact (what NATO is supposed to be about).

    War is anathema, but when diplomacy fails and you are faced with a violent, belligerent hegemon, then sometimes war becomes a necessity. When an animal is backed into a corner, it will come out fighting for its life. The writing was on the wall when the US, a serial violator of international agreements, broke its promise to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move one inch further eastward and then expanded to the Ukrainian border, a red line for Russia. Russia was being backed into a corner. Speaking to the initiator of the war in Ukraine, a question arises: is the animal backed into a corner by a predator an aggressor for realizing that fighting was the only option?

    But no lives needed to have been lost. No territory needed to have been lost (aside from Crimea which had held a referendum in which the population overwhelmingly voted to join Russia; it is a United Nations recognized right of a people to self-determination). And to think that all of this could have been averted if Ukraine had upheld the Minsk agreements that they signed granting autonomy to Donbass, nixed seeking NATO membership, and declared themselves neutral. In other words, honor a contract and use money allotted to militarism for other ends (say, for example, education, employment, and social programs). Sounded like a no-brainer from the get-go, and this has been magnified since the special military operation. But it does not seem to be sinking in to the Russophobia-addled brains of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his coterie.

    All this is missing from Chomsky’s analysis. The Nazified Ukrainian government somehow escapes criticism. The US does not escape criticism, but this is mild compared to the name calling and criticism of Russia. It may not be surprising considering that Chomsky has been criticized for a biased and inaccurate version of Soviet/Russian history.

    The post Is Noam Chomsky a Qualified Military Analyst? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • By Gorethy Kenneth in Port Moresby

    Former prime minister and New Ireland Governor Sir Julius Chan is defending his seat one last time in Papua New Guinea’s 2022 general elections next month because he believes the system of government has failed the country.

    Had the system not “failed miserably”, the iconic New Irelander said he could have called time “a long time ago” — but a lot of things, systems, mechanisms and people had misfired and failed along the way, prompting his last shot at a last term.

    At 83, Sir Julius said this would be the last roll of the dice in his long and illustrious political career in which he was twice prime minister of PNG.

    Showing no signs of fragilities, he was opening a new LLG office in the gold-rich Lihir Islands and campaigning on his resource policy in the neighbouring Anir (Feni) Islands, south of Lihir last week.

    An advocate of power sharing, Sir Julius wants to see New Ireland emerge as an autonomous province of PNG before he retires.

    Autonomy is the rallying call for his reluctance to step down. He reckons mainland PNG will remain immune to autonomous political squabbling but in the islands, it will be as easy as “cutting the rope and floating away”.

    It is the Sunday after the PNG Kumuls’ epic rugby league Test win over Fiji.

    Humorous insight
    We are sitting in the antiquated living room of Sir Julius’ Port Moresby apartment.

    He is a little wry, perhaps taxed by the boat travels in his sparsely isolated home islands, from the past week.

    Not one to shy away from life’s challenges, he even offers a humorous insight into what his political adversaries have dished out in the last couple of months.

    “You know, my opponents have declared me dead four times on Facebook, and every time, I’ve risen from the dead,” he chuckles.

    In a one-on-one exclusive, the knight spoke his mind: “I am not coming back just to play the game, nogat, I am here to score more, otherwise I am just wasting my time. If I don’t get anywhere, I make up my decision in between.”

    Sir Julius said the people must have greater power sharing nationally, on a provincial and local level.

    “Sadly yes, the system of government has failed the people, we must have greater sharing of power, national, provincial and local, greater sharing if not practically practised I think this country will disintegrate,” he said.

    ‘It happened in Russia’
    “I mean we got enough to look at some of the more advanced countries in the world, how it got disintegrated. It happened in Russia, it used to be a big, big, big country, they are now fighting one another.

    “Because of the regional population I think if we don’t change the system and give the other areas of PNG a chance to lead, that too will cause friction as it is at the moment. You increase the electorate… every time you increase one electorate in the New Guinea Islands region.

    “I think you have to increase 10 in other parts of the country so hap blo mi yia, forever and ever. It will go smaller in percentage terms and being human that doesn’t go down too well; everybody wants to participate therefore we have to come up with a system somewhat to adapt [to] that.

    “And when people have that power, they make decisions and when something goes wrong, they cannot throw blame at the government.

    “As it is at the moment, every good is enjoyed at the local government but everything bad is the cause of the national government. And if you allow that to go on for a few years, it will deteriorate this country completely.

    “I [have] got to share this with everybody — the mainland will never break, it’s not easy and it’s just like Israel and all the other countries that [are] next to it. The other countries, you know whenever there is a land problem, they will forever for thousands of years from the days, they will never be able to solve the disputes of the land border.

    “But in the islands, you just cut the rope and we float — we are different. So there it is, that’s my summary and I am not coming back just to play the game, nogat, I am here to score more, otherwise I am just wasting my time. If I don’t get anywhere, I make up my decision in between.”

    Gorethy Kenneth is a senior PNG Post-Courier journalist. Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • On June 23, 2022 a protest was  held outside the offices of Oakland’s rep, Barbara Lee, as a result of her voting in support of the US providing 40 billion to Ukraine for its ongoing war with Russia.   For additional information see this John V. Walsh article published at DV on June 18, 2022.  Here is a video of the protest:

     

    The post Oakland Protest Against Barbara Lee’s Vote for $40 billion to fund War in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, I was easing my way into a new job and in the throes of the teaching year. But that war quickly hijacked my life. I spend most of my day poring over multiple newspapers, magazines, blogs, and the Twitter feeds of various military mavens, a few of whom have been catapulted by the war from obscurity to a modicum of fame. Then there are all those websites to check out, their color-coded maps and daily summaries catching that conflict’s rapid twists and turns.

    Don’t think I’m writing this as a lament, however. I’m lucky. I have a good, safe life and follow events there from the comfort of my New York apartment. For Ukrainians, the war is anything but a topic of study. It’s a daily, deadly presence. The lives of millions of people who live in or fled the war zone have been shattered. As all of us know too well, many of that country’s cities have been badly damaged or lie in ruins, including people’s homes and apartment buildings, the hospitals they once relied on when ill, the schools they sent their children to, and the stores where they bought food and other basic necessities. Even churches have been hit. In addition, nearly 13 million Ukrainians (including nearly two-thirds of all its children) are either displaced in their own country or refugees in various parts of Europe, mainly Poland. Millions of lives, in other words, have been turned inside out, while a return to anything resembling normalcy now seems beyond reach.

    No one knows how many noncombatants have been slaughtered by bullets, bombs, missiles, or artillery. And all this has been made so much worse by the war crimes the Russians have committed. How does a traumatized society like Ukraine ever become whole again? And in such a disastrous situation, what could the future possibly hold? Who knows?

    To break my daily routine of following that ongoing nightmare from such a distance, I decided to look beyond the moment and try to imagine how it might indeed end.

    Current Battlelines

    It’s easy to forget just how daring (or rash) Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was. After all, Russia aside, Ukraine is Europe’s biggest country in land area and its sixth-largest in population. True, Putin had acted aggressively before, but on a far more modest and careful scale, annexing Crimea and fostering the rise of two breakaway enclaves in parts of Donbas, the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk, which are industrial and resource-rich areas adjoining Russia. Neither was his 2015 intervention in Syria to save the government of Bashar al-Assad a wild-eyed gamble. He deployed no ground troops there, relying solely on airstrikes and missile attacks to avoid an Afghanistan-style quagmire.

    Ukraine, though, was a genuinely rash act. Russia began the war with what seemed to be a massive advantage by any imaginable measure — from gross domestic product (GDP) to numbers of warplanes, tanks, artillery, warships, and missiles. Little wonder, perhaps, that Putin assumed his troops would take the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, within weeks, at most. And he wasn’t alone. Western military experts were convinced that his army would make quick work of its Ukrainian counterpart, even if the latter’s military had, since 2015, been trained and armed by the United States, Britain, and Canada.

    Yet the campaign to conquer key cities — Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, and Kharkiv — failed disastrously. The morale of the Ukrainians remained high and their military tactics adept. By the end of March, Russia had lost tanks and aircraft worth an estimated $5 billion, not to speak of up to a quarter of the troops it had sent into battle. Its military supply system proved shockingly inept, whether for repairing equipment or delivering food, water, and medical supplies to the front.

    Subsequently, however, Russian forces have made significant gains in the south and southeast, occupying part of the Black Sea coast, Kherson province (which lies north of Crimea), most of Donbas in the east, and Zaporozhizhia province in the southeast. They have also created a patchy land corridor connecting Crimea to Russia for the first time since that area was taken in 2014.

    Still, the botched northern campaign and the serial failures of a military that had been infused with vast sums of money and supposedly subjected to widespread modernization and reform was stunning. In the United States, the intrepid Ukrainian resistance and its battlefield successes soon produced a distinctly upbeat narrative of that country as the righteous David defending the rules and norms of the international order against Putin’s Russian Goliath.

    In May, however, things began to change. The Russians were by then focused on taking the Donbas region. And bit by bit, Russia’s advantages — shorter supply lines, terrain better suited to armored warfare, and an overwhelming advantage in armaments, especially artillery — started paying off. Most ominously, its troops began encircling a large portion of Ukraine’s battle-tested, best-trained forces in Donbas where besieged towns like Sievierodonetsk, Lysychansk, Lyman, and Popasna suddenly hit the headlines.

    Now, at the edge of… well, who knows what, here are three possible scenarios for the ending of this ever more devastating war.

    1. De Facto Partition

    If — and, of course, I have to stress the conditional here, given repeatedly unforeseen developments in this war — Putin’s army takes the entire Donbas region plus the whole Black Sea coast, rendering Ukraine smaller and landlocked, he might declare his “special military operation” a success, proclaim a ceasefire, order his commanders to fortify and defend the new areas they occupy, and saddle the Ukrainians with the challenge of expelling the Russian troops or settling for a de facto partition of the country.

    Putin could respond to any Ukrainian efforts to claw back lost lands with air and missile strikes. These would only exacerbate the colossal economic hit Ukraine has already taken, including not just damaged or destroyed infrastructure and industries, a monthly budget shortfall of $5 billion, and an anticipated 45% decline in GDP this year, but billions of dollars in revenue lost because it can’t ship its main exports via the Russian-dominated Black Sea. An April estimate of the cost of rebuilding Ukraine ranged from $500 billion to $1 trillion, far beyond Kyiv’s means.

    Assuming, on the other hand, that Ukraine accepted a partition, it would forfeit substantial territory and President Volodymyr Zelensky could face a staggering backlash at home. Still, he may have little choice as his country could find the economic and military strain of endless fighting unbearable.

    Ukraine’s Western backers may become war weary, too. They’ve just begun to feel the economic blowback from the war and the sanctions imposed on Russia, pain that will only increase. While those sanctions have indeed hurt Russia, they’ve also contributed to skyrocketing energy and food prices in the West (even as Putin profits by selling his oil, gas, and coal at higher prices). The U.S. inflation rate, at 8.6% last month, is the highest in 40 years, while the Congressional Budget Office has revised estimates of economic growth — 3.1% this year — down to 2.2% for 2023 and 1.5% for 2024. All this as mid-term elections loom and President Biden’s approval ratings, now at 39.7%, continue to sink.

    Europe is also in economic trouble. Inflation in the Eurozone was 8.1% in May, the highest since 1997, and energy prices exploded. Within days of the Russian invasion, European natural gas prices had jumped nearly 70%, while oil hit $105 a barrel, an eight-year high. And the crunch only continues. Inflation in Britain, at 8.2%, is the worst since 1982. On June 8th, gasoline prices there reached a 17-year high. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development anticipates that the French, German, and Italian economies (the three largest in Europe) will contract for the rest of this year, with only France’s registering an anemic 0.2% growth in the fourth quarter. No one can know for sure whether Europe and the U.S. are headed for a recession, but many economists and business leaders consider it likely.

    Such economic headwinds, along with the diminution of the early euphoria created by Ukraine’s impressive battlefield successes, could produce “Ukraine fatigue” in the West. The war has already lost prominence in news headlines. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s biggest supporters, including the Biden administration, could soon find themselves preoccupied with economic and political challenges at home and ever less eager to keep billions of dollars in economic aid and weaponry flowing.

    The combination of Ukraine fatigue and Russian military successes, however painfully and brutally gained, may be precisely what Vladimir Putin is betting on. The Western coalition of more than three dozen states is certainly formidable, but he’s savvy enough to know that Russia’s battlefield advantages could make it ever harder for the U.S. and its allies to maintain their unity. The possibility of negotiations with Putin has been raised in France, Italy, and Germany. Ukraine won’t be cut off economically or militarily by the West, but it could find Western support ever harder to count on as time passes, despite verbal assurances of solidarity.

    All of this could, in turn, set the stage for a de facto partition scenario.

    2. Neutrality With Sweeteners

    Before the war, Putin pushed for a neutral Ukraine that would foreswear all military alliances. No dice, said both Ukraine and NATO. That alliance’s decision, at its 2008 Bucharest summit, to open the door to that country (and Georgia) was irrevocable. A month after the Russian invasion began, Zelensky put neutrality on the table, but it was too late. Putin had already opted to achieve his aims on the battlefield and was confident he could.

    Still, Russia and Ukraine have now been fighting for more than three months. Both have suffered heavy losses and each knows that the war could drag on for years at a staggering cost without either achieving its aims. The Russian president does control additional chunks of Ukrainian territory, but he may hope to find some way of easing Western sanctions and also avoiding being wholly dependent on China.

    These circumstances might revive the neutrality option. Russia would retain its land corridor to Crimea, even if with some concessions to Ukraine. It would receive a guarantee that the water canals flowing southward to that peninsula from the city of Kherson, which would revert to Ukrainian control, would never again be blocked. Russia would not annex the “republics” it created in the Donbas in 2014 and would withdraw from some of the additional land it’s seized there. Ukraine would be free to receive arms and military training from any country, but foreign troops and bases would be banned from its territory.

    Such a settlement would require significant Ukrainian sacrifices, which is why candidate membership in the European Union (EU) and, more importantly, a fast track to full membership — one of that country’s key aspirations — as well as substantial long-term Western aid for economic reconstruction would be a necessary part of any deal. Expediting its membership would be a heavy lift for the EU and such an aid package would be costly to the Europeans and Americans, so they’d have to decide how much they were willing to offer to end Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II.

    3. A New Russia

    Ever since the war began, commentators and Western leaders, including President Biden, have intimated that it should produce, if not “regime change” in Russia, then Putin’s departure. And there have been no shortage of predictions that the invasion will indeed prove Putin’s death knell. There’s no evidence, however, that the war has turned his country’s political and military elite against him or any sign of mass disaffection that could threaten the state.

    Still, assume for a moment that Putin does depart, voluntarily or otherwise. One possibility is that he would be replaced by someone from his inner circle who then would make big concessions to end the war, perhaps even a return to the pre-invasion status quo with tweaks. But why would he (and it will certainly be a male) do that if Russia controls large swathes of Ukrainian land? A new Russian leader might eventually cut a deal, providing sanctions are lifted, but assuming that Putin’s exit would be a magic bullet is unrealistic.

    Another possibility: Russia unexpectedly becomes a democracy following prolonged public demonstrations. We’d better hope that happens without turmoil and bloodshed because it has nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads, shares land borders with 14 states, and maritime borders with three more. It is also the world’s largest country, with more than 17 million square kilometers (44% larger than runner-up Canada).

    So, if you’re betting on a democratic Russia anytime soon, you’d better hope that the transformation happens peacefully. Upheaval in a vast nuclear-armed country would be a disaster. Even if the passage to democracy isn’t chaotic and violent, such a government’s first order of business wouldn’t be to evacuate all occupied territories. Yet it would be so much more likely than the present one to renounce its post-invasion territorial gains, though perhaps not Russian-majority Crimea, which, in the era of the Soviet Union, was part of the Russian republic until, in 1954, it was transferred to the Ukrainian republic by fiat.

    This Needs to End

    The suffering and destruction in Ukraine and the economic turmoil the war has produced in the West should be compelling enough reasons to end it. Ditto the devastation it continues to create in some of the world’s poorest countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Yemen. Along with devastating droughts and local conflicts, it has led to staggering increases in the price of basic foods (with both Ukrainian and Russian grains, to one degree or another, blocked from the market). More than 27 million people are already facing acute food shortages or outright starvation in those four nations alone, thanks at least in part to the conflict in Ukraine.

    Yes, that war is Europe’s biggest in a generation, but it’s not Europe’s alone. The pain it’s producing extends to people in faraway lands already barely surviving and with no way to end it. And sadly enough, no one who matters seems to be thinking about them. The simple fact is that, in 2022, with so much headed in the wrong direction, a major war is the last thing this planet needs.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • On March 26 U.S. President Joe Biden called for regime change in Russia: ‘Speaking in Warsaw, Poland, on Saturday, President Biden said of Russian President Vladimir Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”‘

    However, other parts of the U.S. government makes unmistakeably clear that its aims in Russia go even much than regime change. Tomorrow the US Government’s Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) will hold a briefing on the “Moral and Strategic Imperative” that makes it necessary to “Decolonize Russia”.

    The White House immediately rushed to talk back that call for regime change and a day later Biden himself denied that he was calling for regime change:

    The post The Neocon’s Dream – Decolonize Russia, Re-Colonize China appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • UK Army chief Patrick Sanders told his troops to prepare for World War III with Russia. Benjamin Norton discusses how Western imperialists are threatening nuclear apocalypse to try to save their declining empires.

    The post British army chief tells troops prepare for World War III with Russia appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Part 3A: Fears of US Political Interference and Coups (the 9/11 Coup of Allende)

     

    Part 3B:  PNAC’s American Empire. Aggressive US Drives for Power and Freedom.

     

    Part 3C:  National Endowment for “Democracy”: A Second CIA

    • Read the entire essay at Countercurrents.

    The post Paradigm for Peace Applied to Ukraine: Proposal for a Peaceful Pathway Forward (Part 3) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Canada is at war with Russia. But the government doesn’t want to talk about it.

    On Saturday the New York Times reported that Canadian special forces are part of a NATO network providing weapons and training to Ukrainian forces. The elite troops are also in the country gathering intelligence on Russian operations.

    The Department of National Defence refused Ottawa Citizen military reporter David Pugliese’s request for comment on the US paper’s revelations. But in late January Global News and CTV reported that the usually highly secretive special forces were sent to Ukraine. (Canadian special forces have been dispatched secretly to many war zones.)

    Alongside special forces, an unknown number of former Canadian troops have been fighting in Ukraine. There have been a bevy of stories about Canadians traveling to Ukraine to join the fight and organizers initially claimed over 500 individuals joined while the Russian government recently estimated that 600 Canadians were fighting there (Both the Canadian organizers and Moscow would have reasons to inflate the numbers). Early on, Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly and Defence Minister Anita Anand both encouraged Canadians to join the fight, which may have violated Canada’s Foreign Enlistment Act.

    Top commanders have also joined the war. After more than 30 years in the Canadian Forces lieutenant-general Trevor Cadieu retired on April 5 (amidst a rape investigation) and was in Ukraine days later. At one-point Cadieu was favoured to lead the Canadian Forces.

    On Saturday a number of media outlets reported that former Chief of the Defence Staff Rick Hillier is heading a strategic advisory group supporting and advising Ukraine’s Territorial Defence Force. The mandate of the Hillier led council is to equip Ukraine’s 100,000-member volunteer reserve force.

    Over the past four months Ottawa has delivered or allocated over $600 million in weapons to Ukraine. They’ve sent 20,000 artillery shells, 4,500 M72 rocket launchers, 7,500 hand grenades, a hundred Carl-Gustaf M2 anti-tank weapons, thousands of rounds of ammunition, light armoured vehicles and other arms to fight Russia.

    Canada has also adopted an unprecedented sanctions regime on Russia. According to Politico, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland led the international charge to freeze over $300 billion in Russian Central Bank assets. Ottawa is also leading the international campaign to seize Russian assets and give them to Ukraine.

    Ottawa has offered more than two billion dollars in direct assistance to the Ukrainian government since the start of the year. Under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund Canada instigated the multi-donor Administered Account for Ukraine. A sizable share of Canada’s assistance has gone to prosecuting the war.

    Ottawa has also put up millions of dollars for the International Criminal Court to investigate Russian officials and has labeled Russia’s war a “genocide”. Canadian officials have repeatedly described the conflict as a fight for freedom while openly spurning peace negotiations.

    The past four months of fighting should be viewed — at least in part — as an escalation in a eight years US/UK/Canada proxy war with Russia. Canadians greatly assisted Ukrainian forces fighting in a conflict that saw 14,000 killed in the Donbas before Russia’s illegal invasion.

    Canada played a significant role in arming and training the Ukrainian military long before Russia’s brutal February 24 invasion. The federal government spent $900 million to train Ukrainian forces following the Canadian-backed overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Between April 2015 and February 2022 Canadian troops — rotated every six months — trained 33,346 Ukrainian soldiers as part of Operation UNIFIER. Canadian military trainers helped restore Ukraine’s “decrepit” army prompting former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to dub former Canadian defence minister Jason Kenney “the godfather of the modern Ukrainian army” due to his role in instigating Operation Unifier.

    UNIFIER reinforced Ukrainian forces fighting in the east and enabled Kyiv to avoid its commitments under the Minsk II peace accord, which was overseen by France and Germany in February 2015. When UNIFIER was launched the Russian Embassy in Ottawa released a statement labeling the mission a “deplorable” move “to assist the military buildup playing into the hands of ‘party of war in Kiev’”, which was their pejorative description for Poroshenko’s government.

    Prior to the February 24 Russian invasion, the US and UK had also spent billions of dollars training and arming the Ukrainian military. The CIA ran a secret training program in Ukraine and over the past four months the agency has helped direct Ukrainian war efforts. Over the past few months, the US, UK and other NATO states have plowed tens of billions of dollars of weaponry into the country.

    While more details on the scope of Western involvement will likely emerge in the coming months and years, there is enough information in the public record to conclude that Canada’s indeed at war in Ukraine. Further escalation is likely, particularly with Lithuania’s recent blockade of the Russian territory of Kalingrad. The 700 Canadian troops leading a NATO mission in Latvia will be on the frontline if fighting spreads to the Baltic states.

    Despite facts on the ground, there’s been no vote in Parliament about whether it’s a good idea for Canada to go to war with a nuclear armed state.

    The post Troops on the Ground Prove Canada is at War with Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization announced Monday that the military alliance will dramatically increase the ranks of its high-readiness forces from 40,000 at present to “well over 300,000” — a 650% boost — as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine rages on for the fifth consecutive month.

    NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg painted the planned move, which alliance leaders are set to adopt during a summit in Madrid this week, as part of the 30-member organization’s efforts to bolster its defense of the Baltic nations, which have been clamoring for a “credible military construct… that will deter” Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    “These troops will exercise together with home defense forces, and they will become familiar with local terrain facilities… so that that they can respond smoothly and swiftly to any emergency,” Stoltenberg said during a press conference on Monday.

    “We will also boost our ability to reinforce in crisis and conflict,” he continued, “including with: more pre-positioned equipment, and stockpiles of military supplies; more forward-deployed capabilities, like air defense; strengthened command and control; and upgraded defense plans, with forces pre-assigned to defend specific allies.”

    Stoltenberg characterized Russia as “the most direct and immediate threat” to the security of NATO, which is also weighing Finland and Sweden’s recent applications to join the military alliance.

    Putin, for his part, has repeatedly cited NATO’s eastward expansion and the U.S.-led alliance’s positioning of troops and weaponry near Russia’s border as a danger to his country’s security, sparking fears that additional NATO troop mobilizations could further inflame tensions between Russia and the West as diplomatic efforts sputter.

    “This is not the path to peace and will not make the world safer,” warned the U.K.-based Stop the War Coalition. “This will cause more death and destruction. We say no to NATO escalation as well as Russian troops out.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The pump don’t work ’cause the vandals took the handles

    — Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” 1965

    A lot of folks, including this writer, were surprised to learn in the Spring of 2018 that the United States had a significant troop presence on Syrian soil.  Of course, America had shot some “Home of the Brave!” cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield only the Arab Spring before (April 7, 2017), marking the first time in the 6-year old conflict that the USA had officially attacked Syria.  The administration of Donald Trumpistan was quite new at the time, and the Corporate Press that was already addicted to Russia-phobing his novel presidency was falling all over themselves with praise for this unhinged action.  Why?  The cruise missile strike was explicitly framed as an “appropriate” response to an alleged Syrian chemical weapons attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun, a claim that has since come under considerable scrutiny; indeed, so much so that employees walking the halls of the OPCW HQ are constantly shifting their eyes, wondering who will blow the whistle next…

    Official American involvement, or threat of involvement, really began during the Summer of 2012, when Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize winning predecessor, Barack Obushma, declared that any Syrian use of WMD would constitute a “red line” for direct U.S. intervention.  Suddenly, visions of another “Iraq” were swirling in the foggy, Mesopotomac air.  The nimble Obama, however, quickly pivoted to assure all and sundry that any American response to such a dastardly deed would not involve “boots on the ground.”  Curiously enough, one year later, an alleged chemweaps attack occurred in the Damascus suburb of Gouta, the blame for which was immediately pinned on the forces of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.  Well, we all know what happened next: nada. Obama cited a lack of Congressional support (like he “needed” it) for punitive action against Syria, and thus his bold “red line” vanished like a desert mirage over Syrian sands…

    The timelines in the Syrian conflict — or conflicts — tend to be a bit more than blurry, but the Obama administration was clearly playing a double game with the American public over Syria.  While blowing some “red line” smoke across mainstream airwaves, Obama, in late 2012, had secretly authorized a CIA mission — Operation Timber Sycamore — to train, then arm, jihadi-style mercenaries for the violent overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.  Of course, the American people and their elected representatives were kept in the dark about all of this Syrian skullduggery while a compliant Corporate Press spewed whatever anti-al-Assad talking points they were fed that day.  The Syrian regime change operation became — or always had been — a pet project of the Obushma administration and those crazy gun-slingers at the CIA, no doubt emboldened by the “success” of the Libya operation.  Timber Sycamore would eventually be phased out by Trump in 2017, but by then the Pentagon was doing most of the heavy lifting for regime change in Syria because — any guesses? — the U.S. already had a few thousand “boots on the ground” there, doing whatever American “boots on the ground” do in countries where they have been covertly “inserted,” and– definitely not invited

    This clandestine, and obviously illegal, American invasion of Syria occurred no later than the end of 2015, but the record is still not clear due to official obfuscation on the subject; indeed, most Americans are still not aware that the Obama administration invaded Syria in the first place, nor that, under the Trump-following administration of Joe “Malarkey,” a large contingent of U.S. troops are still in Syria today, “guarding” 70% of Syria’s oil production against…Well, anyone “We don’t like!”, including the Syrian government.

    Incidentally, the phrase “Syrian Civil War” is totally a Western propaganda construct.  There may have been an iota of credence to this description in 2011, due to the defection of some Syrian military members to the “rebellion” then, but it seems pretty clear by now that this conflict has been overwhelmingly driven by foreign actors.  The major players include, in no particular order:  Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UK, France (“Hey, shout out to Sykes-Picot!”), U$A, Russia, Qatar, Israel, and Iran.  Wow, but how truly “International” this war is!  Of course, various al-Qaeda affiliates and whatever’s left of ISIS — that somewhat nebulous Islamomorphic phenomenon — should be listed as well, except that:  If we followed the money, we’d find that their “jihadist business ventures” are entirely traceable to donors who comprise all of the major international sponsors of this catastrophic conflict, catalogued above.  Considering the fact that American, Russian, Turkish, and Iranian troops operate inside of Syria, while the Israelis have been bombing Syrian “targets” with impunity for years, the myth of a “Syrian Civil War” evaporates under the most cursory inspection.

    “But, What about all of those Terribly Trump-Abandoned Syrian Kurds I heard so much about on NPR in the Fall of 2019?”

    Nevertheless, to return to the issue of American “boots on the ground” in Syria, where they are still, tending to most of Syria’s sacred oil wells, a “humanitarian” mission if ever there was one…It is noteworthy that His Orangeness made a Big Noise about withdrawing all American Forces from Syria in December 2019.  In the event, the Corporate Press was horrified by this “abandonment” of “so Ancient an Ally!” as the Kurds of Syria, and the Pentagon quickly moved to ignore Trump’s blustering on the subject; after all, the Death Star’s in charge these post-9/11 days.  The War Drum Beat goes on, no matter whose Reality Show Starring, or Zombie-ing, in the current case, the Oval Office.

    The power of propaganda for the War Machine after 9/11, of course, cannot be exaggerated; this is especially true of the Syrian Regime Change Operation which, hopefully, represents the last of the 9/11-sprung regime change wars in the “Greater Middle East.”  As a real world example of the power of this propaganda, particularly in the Syrian context, I cite a disputative experience I had with two “Blue-Check Liberal” friends at an Open Mic venue in December of 2019 pertaining to the “Trump withdrawal” of violently trespassing American troops in Syria.  Apparently, NPR, along with every other mainstream Corporate Media outlet, had been blaring the message that Trump was “Abandoning the Kurds!” all day.  Of course, this is a “War Cry!” seldom heard in American media, but there it was, in all of its newly minted talking point glory.

    Not initiating the conversation, as I had not been subjected to this particular propaganda bombardment in toto, I naively commented that the military Americans in Syria had no right to be there in the first place; therefore, it was quite an easy — thus correct and rational — decision to remove these American crisis facilitators from that foreign country.  Both of my friends, who were almost “violently” disagreeing with me, are absolute peaceniks, at least according to their own understandings of their respective “politics,” as far as I can tell.  The most amazing or bizarre a priori fact of this “conversation” is that any acknowledgement of the illegality of an American troop presence in Syria was completely off-limits, or out-of-bounds.  Quite obviously, American soldiers were not illegally inserted on to Syrian soil for the express purpose of shielding Syrian Kurds from harm; instead, they were “infiltrated” there specifically to boost a longstanding effort to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad.  By the way, it almost goes without saying, my two Bluetocratic, anti-Trump peacenik friends had probably never had a single solitary thought about the plight of Syrian Kurds — not to mention any other Kurds! — in the entire consciousness of their lengthy lives.  Such is the power of the post-9/11 propaganda for the War Machine, the Death Star, that is currently stoking a “fake crisis” over Ukraine (more on this in a moment–), with Taiwan waiting in the wings…

    Syria, perhaps, provides the most ironic of all possible bookends to the 9/11-inspired regime change War Regime.  As in Afghanistan, ultimately, after two murderously long decades, the Regime Change War Series seems to have finally crapped out.  Bashar al-Assad’s still in power in Damascus, and the Caliban Taliban are once again the force to be reckoned with in Afghanistan (truth be told, to any Pentagonal Prosperos out there listening, the Taliban never went away, despite the best laid plans of General David Patreus and the Obushma “surge”…).  Iran, of course, as always, is seen as the ultimate “prize” in this latest, post-9/11est rendering of the “Great Game.”  That “game” is obviously up, over, kaput, and doneski.  Small question, a bit rhetorical:  Can the “boys in power” finally grow up and take some responsibility for the World they keep blowing up but pretend to rule by “Rule of Law”?

    Further Note: a Correction

    This piece was originally written back in January 2022, when talk or chatter about a Russian move into Ukraine was just that.  At that time I saw this Media circus — or typical hysterical hype — through a “wag the dog” lens, thus the above phrase “fake crisis over Ukraine.”  After all, one year into the current American regime, it was abundantly obvious that the administration of Joe “Bidenopolous” is a clear and present failure, a political fact that even some of the sleepiest walkers among us are waking up to…

    Well, lo and we were Western Intel Agency told, Mr Putin actually launched his “Special Military Operation” into Ukraine on February 24.  Many an analyst missed the boat on this “special launch,” and for all sorts of reasons, like the possibility of Nuclear War, depending on NATO’s counter-move, or the threat of Russian economy-crippling sanctions, among others.  However, in retrospect, I think it’s worth noting that the initial “wag the dog” optical returns were spectacular for the “Collective West” and Mr Biden, absent-mindedly skippering our economic Titanic.  Suddenly, all of the TransAtlanticans’ self-inflicted problems were “Mad Vlad’s” fault.  Inflation going Weimar-style sideways bonkers?  Hey, no worries, because it’s just “Putin’s Price Hike!”  Yet, this distraction airy spin has worn quite thin by now, it seems.  Far from crushing the Russian economy, an avalanche of Western sanctions has badly boomeranged, leaving Western leaders scrambling amidst the shambling of their own economies, while the Russian military gobbles up more of Ukraine every day, one morsel at a time.  Until further notice, Mr Putin is calling the shots, not Brussels, London, nor the DC regime change crew.

    The other “Thing” to note here, perhaps, is the collapse of the Covid Regime and the attempt to splice its sorry remains into a “Putin’s the Virus!” kind of narrative, with Taiwan still “waiting in the wings.”  Many commentators have emphasized this baton pass, from Covid to Putin, of official Western ideology; CJ Hopkins and Fabio Vighi immediately spring to mind in this context.

    But to return to Syria:  With some degree of geopolitical justice it can be said that the current conflict in Ukraine can be described as “Syria 2.0”.  Many of the same players are in play, including the Oscar-winning “White Helmets” (according to reports) in this Ukrainian showdown although, quite notably, not Israel.  So, what’s up with America’s BFF in the Middle Easternlands?  Well, many a Saul has been blinded “on the road to Damascus,” but the crazy Israelis know a thing or two, and they apparently value their “condominium” with Russia over Syria above their “special relationship” with the United $tates in regard to Ukraine.  Saudi Arabia, too, as well as China, India, and the list goes on and on.  Wasn’t the whole idea to “isolate” Russia?  It would appear that the West is “isolating” itself, instead.

    “Something’s happening here,” as the late 1960s band Buffalo Springfield once sang (“For What It’s Worth”), and it certainly looks like a “paradigm shift” of geo-tectonic proportions is presently playing out upon this Planet.  Who’s to say who “wins,” but maybe, just maybe, “winning” the “Great White Western Way” isn’t the only Game in Town these days?

    The post Stalled Out on the Road to Damascus, Syria first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.