Carrying banners reading, “Their gas, your cash” beside images of U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, eight members of Greenpeace Belgium took to the sea on Thursday to protest the arrival of U.S. and Russian liquefied natural gas imports into the port of Zeebrugge, as part of a larger campaign to push the European Union to abandon fossil gas by 2035.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté argues that the US and NATO provoked Russia in Ukraine by expanding NATO, dismantling arms control, installing military assets threatening Russia, meddling in Ukraine and blocking multiple opportunities for peace.
The post How NATO Provoked Russia In Ukraine And Undermined Peace appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
In the United States, for more than a hundred years, the ruling class interests tirelessly propagated anti-communism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy.
— Michael Parenti, “Left Anticommunism”
I will argue below that the liberal Russia-phobic meltdown over Ukraine is because allowing a truthful dialogue would reveal that it was a proxy war against Russia, provoked by the United States. This, in turn, would risk a political identity crisis among those for whom belief in “The Russia Threat” has been a touchstone of their political identity. What are the consequences when one’s deepest political beliefs are exposed as not just deeply flawed but morally wrong? What if one concludes or even suspects that they’ve been complicit in sending over one million Ukrainian soldiers — human beings — to their needless deaths? What if the 80-year narrative about a Russian invasion of Europe never had any basis in fact and that remains true today? Why are the real reasons that European leaders went along with Biden and now seek to sabotage peace in Ukraine? What if one discovers that NATO was an extension of US imperialism? If the “Russian threat” is called into question by the evidence, what else is one forced to rethink about the United States, one’s political identity and past behavior? What happens when it’s no longer possible for one to claim the moral high ground? I wrote the essay (abridged here) some five years ago and I’m reposting it because I believe it has special salience today.
To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. — Charles Taylor
In the early 1980s, which now seems a few lifetimes ago, I began offering a college seminar course titled “The Politics of Personal Identity,” quickly dubbed “POPI” by students. It was designed as a capstone course and limited to twelve seniors. Most of the identity groupings around today were addressed in readings, films and guest speakers. During the final weeks of the course, each student was responsible for giving a 45-minute oral presentation: “Who Am I? What Do I Believe? Why Do I Believe It?” This was followed by a lengthy period of questioning from the other seminar members and myself. Each of our guest speakers gave presentations on this topic and I presented my own on the last day of class. Germane to this was an exploration one’s political beliefs and their consequences was the critical component of the course and in what follows below.
Before exploring identities like race, gender, class, ethnicity and others, we attempted to establish a framework by including the work of Canadian philosopher and political activist Charles Taylor and specifically, his pioneering ideas on the politics of identity. [Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).]
For Taylor, “Selfhood and the good, or in another way, selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes. We are selves only in that certain issues matter to us. What I am as a self, my identity, is essentially defined by the way things have significance for me… We are selves only in that we move in a certain space of questions, as we seek and find an orientation to the good.” By his light, “Who I am” is most crucially this space of moral orientation “within which my most defining relations are lived out.”
Taylor goes on, “My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame within which I can attempt to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.” [Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (1989).]
And this isn’t just a strong preference or attachment. It means that people are saying that if they were to lose this commitment or identification, “they would be at sea, as it were, they wouldn’t know anymore, for an important range of questions, what the significance of things was for them.”
There is a sense of the ‘self’ that conveys to these beings of requisite depth to their identity or those who at the very least are struggling to find one. Others, who we judge as shallow, also have commitments but we see them as conventional and not the result of deep searching. And, as Taylor notes, those without any framework at all are pathologically amoral.
We also read some work by the character actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, including this passage about how to act in a morally responsible way:
My daily obligation was, first and foremost, to learn how to make a correct and careful study of the world. If I didn’t know what the world was like, how could I know what action to take? And so it turns out that morality insists upon accuracy — painstakingly steady and researched. (Wallace Shawn, Appendix to Aunt Dan & Lemon (1987).
Shawn’s prescriptive obligation to study how the world works is especially difficult given that Americans are the most heavily propagandized citizens in the word. In any event, I hoped that Shawn’s words would resonate with the students, most of whom had also taken my intro course: International Politics: How the World Works, the bookend course to POPI. I was gratified that virtually all of the seminar participants made the connection and often referenced the intro course. (Note: I’m painfully aware of the immense difference between an intro course with two sessions for fourteen weeks to examine a subject versus the forced, frustrated and episodic nature of most exchanges about politics on Facebook and elsewhere.)
And further, one cannot be a self strictly on one’s own. For starters, who did I interact with that helped me achieve self-realization? Who are those around me right now who contribute to my self-understanding? Beyond the standard sources, how widely have I searched? Is there evidence to support my conclusions — in this case about the USSR/Russia — or am I relying only on tradition, feelings and the accepted authorities? How has the “community” or culture within which I identify, affected my moral stands? Finally, it’s virtually impossible to have a sense of who/where I am without some grasp of how we got there. This can be painful and tempting to avoid, especially as one advances in age and possible regrets loom. Taylor asks us to consider what type of life is worth living? “E.g., what would a rich meaningful life, as against an empty one, or what would constitute an honorable life or the like?”
In sum, my argument was that there’s a virtually seamless web connecting knowing ourselves, knowing how the world works, and knowing that something needs to be done — starting with oneself. Uncertainty, deliberation and experimentation about the specific course of action don’t detract from the wisdom found in the Asian proverb “To know and not to act is not to know.”
Change is scary. My cautionary note to younger folks was that the older one gets the harder it is to rethink one’s political identity and question beliefs in which one has a considerable material and especially, psychic investment. Too many people adopt conventional liberal views and behavior in hopes this will stave off the gnawing feeling that something is seriously wrong.
The post A Few Thoughts on Political Identity, Morality and Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Olson.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
It seems impossible to have a discussion with those who insist on calling for more billions for weapons, training, and mercenaries for Ukraine even after US/NATO wars have destroyed so many millions of lives. The cheerleaders for the US war in Ukraine are as misguided and indoctrinated by the Biden regime as the dupes who believe that Trump will bring us peace. Biden’s minions, like Trump’s, stake their position on a mountain of lies, lack of information, wishful thinking, and hatred of the other while invoking high-sounding words like sovereignty, democracy, and freedom.
The post End The War In Ukraine, US/NATO Out Of Eastern Europe appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The vast majority of people in Greenland oppose becoming part of the United States, despite Donald Trump’s threats to colonize their land.
A staggering 85% of Greenlanders do not want to join the US, according to a poll published in January by a Greenlandic newspaper.
Just 6% of people in Greenland support Trump’s proposal to annex their homeland. (The remaining 9% are undecided.) Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark, although polls have long shown that the majority of people there, who are of indigenous Inuit descent, consider themselves to be a separate country and want formal independence.
The post 85% Of Greenland Oppose Joining USA, But Trump Wants To Colonize It appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
For the record, it was the U.S., from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden, that provoked the Ukrainian tragedy. And now it is the Europeans who can stop it.
NATO’s Eastern expansion led to the bloodiest military conflict in Europe since the Second World War, one that could lead to a Third.
Donald Trump in his first term tried to exit this crisis, only to be subjected to the Russiagate “scandal” and two unsuccessful impeachment efforts led the bipartisan U.S. War Party.
Eventually, they succeeded and took back power, facilitating Joe Biden’s 2020 victory with various manipulations, including producing a letter signed by 51 top, retired U.S. intelligence officers falsely blaming Russia for the criminal contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop that included his father’s involvement.
The post It’s Up To Europe’s Citizens appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Hours after President Donald Trump announced an agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin to avoid attacks on energy infrastructure in Ukraine, Russia conducted an attack on said infrastructure. The attack was reciprocated by a Ukrainian attack on Russian energy facilities shortly after. Trump touted the limited ceasefire agreement — technically a retreat from his previous aim to have a…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Sufficiently gruesome to learn of the casualties in the Ukraine/Russo war. More gruesome to learn that the statistics don’t reflect actuality and are only another weapon ─ humiliate the opponent and have the public believe the enemy ignores the deaths of its soldiers.
The Kyiv Independent (?), Friday, March 14, 2025, “General Staff: Russia has lost 891,660 troops in Ukraine since Feb. 24, 2022.” In January 2025, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense estimated that 430,790 Russian troops were killed in 2024 alone.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies (ISSS) is less sanguine: “…as of early January 2025, the IISS estimates that a minimum of 172,000 Russian troops have been killed and 611,000 wounded, of which at least 376,000 are severely wounded (disabled), with up to an accumulated 235,000 wounded but recoverable.”
For one simple reason, the statistics don’t seem credible ─ other longer and more deadly wars had fewer casualties. The much, much longer Vietnam War had much less American casualties and the horrific World War II, which featured several beach invasions and large infantry battles, had less American dead and about the same casualties as claimed for the Russian battalions in their present war.
In the three years of war in Ukraine, no large infantry battles have occurred; the battles are mainly heavy weapons pulverizing a civilian area, followed by troops entering and occupying after the area is leveled and the enemy leaves. The Russians may have lost a large number of troops in the early stage of the war (30,000?), during the attempt to invade Kiev and the decision to leave. Later months do not indicate the same rate of casualties. In the next largest battle, three months in Mariupol, Ukraine claims to have killed 6,500 Russian soldiers. Even if this is slightly exaggerated, the next largest battle had only 2000 mortalities/month, which equates to 72,000 deaths in three years of equally intensive battles, of which there were none. On the southern front, Russia captured Kherson with few losses and retreated across the Dnieper when Ukraine launched its only large offensive, ceding Kherson and showing no intention of sacrificing soldiers in a losing battle.
Contrasting with Kyiv Independent’s stats, is Mediazona, an independent (?) Russian online news source that methodically searched records to obtain military losses. Their meticulous “data service, in collaboration with the BBC Russian Service and a team of volunteers, concluded that, “…Over 95,000 people fighting for Russia’s military have now died as the war in Ukraine enters the fourth year…. Given the estimate above, the true number of Russian military deaths could range from 146,194 to 211,169.”
Why is the number of Russians killed in the three-year war a meaningful and controversial topic? This is Ukraine’s way of informing the public that it may have lost territory but is not losing the war. Russia cannot continue gaining meager ground with a massive number of their soldiers permanently interred in the ground. Russia will be forced into compromise. Dubious logic.
The Russians have all they want — Crimea, the Russian mainland linked to Crimea, and the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts incorporated into Russia. The war map, as of March 2025, tells that story
The Donetsk basin reaches to the dark lines. Russia needs only to capture Pokrovsk and Kramatorsk to control all the cities of the Donetsk Oblast, and effectively all of Donetsk and Luhansk. Their troops are at the gates of both cities. Super nationalist Vladimir Putin will not rest until his nation controls all of Donetsk, nor will he allow those who have died for that cause to lie buried without the cause succeeding.
Why this farce of “let’s end the war,” without ending the war, is a mystery. Zelensky mentions “guarantees,” undoubtedly meaning that other nations will prevent Russia from interfering again in Ukraine sovereignty. Doesn’t the Ukraine president realize that guarantees are only words on paper, that European governments say what they mean but don’t mean what they say and that governments who change with international styles may not recognize a previous government’s decisions. A solid guarantee has NATO or UN troops at the border between the two warring nations, a prelude to World War III.
“Only the dead have seen the end of war.” ─ George Santayana, “Tipperary.”
The post Gruesome Disinformation first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Russians are coming and Europe is preparing for war.
Hysteria has gripped the continent.
It is being spread by political elites who claim peace in Europe is no longer a given.
“Never again” is now a motto forgotten. As if two world wars born in Europe were not enough.
These are the only possible assessments to be drawn from the extraordinary March 5 European Union summit in Brussels at which rearmament and renewed militarization of Europe became the cause to unite an increasingly disunited EU.
Meanwhile, leading media are doing their part to whip up the cries of war.
The post War Fever Grips Europe appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Nothing could have been clearer than Russia’s repeated conditions for a permanent end of the war, rather than a temporary ceasefire: Ukraine’s neutrality, its demilitarization and denazification, the inclusion of four Russian-speaking oblasts into the Russian Federation and treaties establishing a new security architecture in Europe.
Equally clear was Ukraine’s utter rejection of these conditions, demanding instead the return of every inch of its territory, including Crimea, and Ukraine’s membership in NATO.
It is the reason the two sides are still fighting a war.
The post The Phony Ceasefire appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Thousands of Syrian Alawites continue to seek sanctuary at a Russian air base, fearing for their lives in the wake of a series of horrific sectarian massacres carried out by Syrian government-affiliated extremist armed groups.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday that about 9,000 people were seeking refuge at Hmeimim, an air base established by Russia as part of its 2015 intervention in the US-backed war that began in 2011 to topple the Syrian government of former president Bashar al-Assad.
Thousands of people have been sheltering at the Hmeimim Air Base near the coastal city of Jablah since 7 March, when extremist militants went from house to house in predominantly Alawite towns and villages, killing residents and looting and burning their homes.
The post Thousands Of Syrian Alawites Shelter At Russian Base appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
May 18, 2015: Remains of an Eastern Orthodox church after shelling by the Ukrainian Army near Donetsk International Airport. Eastern Ukraine. (Mstyslav Chernov. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Special to Consortium News and published there on February 25, 2025
The way to prevent the Ukraine war from being understood is to suppress its history.
A cartoon version has the conflict beginning on Feb. 24, 2022 when Vladimir Putin woke up that morning and decided to invade Ukraine.
There was no other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent country.
Please use this short, historical guide to share with people who still flip through the funny pages trying to figure out what’s going on in Ukraine.
The mainstream account is like opening a novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though it’s the beginning of the story.
Thirty years from now historians will write about the context of the Ukraine war: the coup, the attack on Donbass, NATO expansion, rejection of the Minsk Accords and Russian treaty proposals — without being called Putin puppets.
It will be the same way historians write of the Versailles Treaty as a cause of Nazism and WWII, without being called Nazi-sympathizers.
Providing context is taboo while the war continues in Ukraine, as it would have been during WWII. Context is paramount in journalism.
But journalists have to get with the program of war propaganda while a war goes on. Journalists are clearly not afforded these same liberties as historians. Long after the war, historians are free to sift through the facts.
The Ukraine Timeline
World War II— Ukrainian national fascists, led by Stepan Bandera, at first allied with the German Nazis, massacre more than a hundred thousands Jews and Poles.
1950s to 1990 – C.I.A. brought Ukrainian fascists to the U.S. and worked with them to undermine the Soviet Union in Ukraine, running sabotage and propaganda operations. Ukrainian fascist leader Mykola Lebed was taken to New York where he worked with the C.I.A. through at least the 1960s and was still useful to the C.I.A. until 1991, the year of Ukraine’s independence. The evidence is in a U.S. government report starting from page 82. Ukraine has thus been a staging ground for the U.S. to weaken and threaten Moscow for nearly 80 years.
November 1990: A year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (also known as the Paris Charter) is adopted by the U.S., Europe and the Soviet Union. The charter is based on the Helsinki Accords and is updated in the 1999 Charter for European Security. These documents are the foundation of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The OSCE charter says no country or bloc can preserve its own security at another country’s expense.
Dec. 25, 1991: Soviet Union collapses. Wall Street and Washington carpetbaggers move in during the ensuing decade to asset-strip the country of formerly state-owned properties, enrich themselves, help give rise to oligarchs, and impoverish the Russian, Ukrainian and other former Soviet peoples.
1990s: U.S. reneges on promise to last Soviet leader Gorbachev not to expand NATO to Eastern Europe in exchange for a unified Germany. George Kennan, the leading U.S. government expert on the U.S.S.R., opposes expansion. Sen. Joe Biden, who supports NATO enlargement, predicts Russia will react hostilely to it.
1997: Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser, in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, writes:
“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”
New Year’s Eve 1999: After eight years of U.S. and Wall Street dominance, Vladimir Putin becomes president of Russia. Bill Clinton rebuffs him in 2000 when he asks to join NATO.
Putin begins closing the door on Western interlopers, restoring Russian sovereignty, ultimately angering Washington and Wall Street. This process does not occur in Ukraine, which remains subject to Western exploitation and impoverishment of Ukrainian people.
Feb. 10, 2007: Putin gives his Munich Security Conference speech in which he condemns U.S. aggressive unilateralism, including its illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq and its NATO expansion eastward.
He said: “We have the right to ask: against whom is this [NATO] expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”
Putin speaks three years after the Baltic States, former Soviet republics bordering on Russia, joined the Western Alliance. The West humiliates Putin and Russia by ignoring its legitimate concerns. A year after his speech, NATO says Ukraine and Georgia will become members. Four other former Warsaw Pact states join in 2009.
2004-5: Orange Revolution. Election results are overturned giving the presidency in a run-off to U.S.-aligned Viktor Yuschenko over Viktor Yanukovich. Yuschenko makes fascist leader Bandera a “hero of Ukraine.”
April 3, 2008: At a NATO conference in Bucharest, a summit declaration “welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO”. Russia harshly objects. William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, and presently C.I.A. director, warns in a cable to Washington, revealed by WikiLeaks, that,
“Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. … Lavrov stressed that Russia had to view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat.”
A crisis in Georgia erupts four months later leading to a brief war with Russia, which the European Union blames on provocation from Georgia.
November 2009: Russia seeks new security arrangement in Europe. Moscow releases a draft of a proposal for a new European security architecture that the Kremlin says should replace outdated institutions such as NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
The text, posted on the Kremlin’s website on Nov. 29, comes more than a year after President Dmitry Medvedev first formally raised the issue. Speaking in Berlin in June 2008, Medvedev said the new pact was necessary to finally update Cold War-era arrangements.
“I’m convinced that Europe’s problems won’t be solved until its unity is established, an organic wholeness of all its integral parts, including Russia,” Medvedev said.
2010: Viktor Yanukovich is elected president of Ukraine in a free and fair election, according to the OSCE.
2013: Yanukovich chooses an economic package from Russia rather than an association agreement with the EU. This threatens Western exploiters in Ukraine and Ukrainian comprador political leaders and oligarchs.
February 2014: Yanukovich is overthrown in a violent, U.S.-backed coup (presaged by the Nuland-Pyatt intercept), with Ukrainian fascist groups, like Right Sector, playing a lead role. Ukrainian fascists parade through cities in torch-lit parades with portraits of Bandera.
Protesters clash with police in Kiev, Ukraine, February 2014. (Wikimedia Commons)
March 16, 2014: In a rejection of the coup and the unconstitutional installation of an anti-Russian government in Kiev, Crimeans vote by 97 percent to join Russia in a referendum with 89 percent turnout. The Wagner private military organization is created to support Crimea. Virtually no shots are fired, and no one was killed in what Western media wrongly portrays as a “Russian invasion of Crimea.”
April 12, 2014: The Coup government in Kiev launches war against anti-coup, pro-democracy separatists in Donbass. Openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion plays a key role in the fighting for Kiev. Wagner forces arrive to support Donbass militias. U.S. again exaggerates this as a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext,” says U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who voted as a senator in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 on a completely trumped up pre-text.
May 2, 2014: Dozens of ethnic Russian protestors are burnt alive in a building in Odessa by neo-Nazi thugs. Eight days later, Luhansk and Donetsk declare independence and vote to leave Ukraine.
Sept. 5, 2014: First Minsk agreement is signed in Minsk, Belarus by Russia, Ukraine, the OSCE, and the leaders of the breakaway Donbass republics, with mediation by Germany and France in a Normandy Format. It fails to resolve the conflict.
Feb. 12, 2015: Minsk II is signed in Belarus, which would end the fighting and grant the republics autonomy while they remain part of Ukraine. The accord was unanimously endorsed by the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 15. In December 2022 former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admits West never had intention of pushing for Minsk implementation and essentially used it as a ruse to give time for NATO to arm and train the Ukraine armed forces.
2016: The hoax known as Russiagate grips the Democratic Party and its allied media in the United States, in which it is falsely alleged that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to get Donald Trump elected. The phony scandal serves to further demonize Russia in the U.S. and raise tensions between the nuclear-armed powers, conditioning the public for war against Russia.
May 12, 2016: The US activates missile system in Romania, angering Russia. U.S. claims it is purely defensive, but Moscow says the system could also be used offensively and would cut the time to deliver a strike on the Russian capital to within 10 to 12 minutes.
June 6, 2016: Symbolically on the anniversary of the Normandy invasion, NATO launches aggressive exercises against Russia. It begins war games with 31,000 troops near Russia’s borders, the largest exercise in Eastern Europe since the Cold War ended. For the first time in 75 years, German troops retrace the steps of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union across Poland.
German Foreign Minister Frank Walter-Steinmeier objects. “What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further through saber-rattling and warmongering,” Steinmeier stunningly tells Bild am Sontag newspaper. “Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken.”
Instead, Steinmeier calls for dialogue with Moscow. “We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation,” he warns, adding it would be “fatal to search only for military solutions and a policy of deterrence.”
December 2021: Russia offers draft treaty proposals to the United States and NATO proposing a new security architecture in Europe, reviving the failed Russian attempt to do so in 2009. The treaties propose the removal of the Romanian missile system and the withdrawal of NATO troop deployments from Eastern Europe. Russia says there will be a “technical-military” response if there are not serious negotiations on the treaties. The U.S. and NATO essentially reject them out of hand.
February 2022: Russia begins its military intervention into Donbass in the still ongoing Ukrainian civil war after first recognizing the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Before the intervention, OSCE maps show a significant uptick of shelling from Ukraine into the separatist republics, where more than 10,000 people have been killed since 2014.
Ukrainian troops in the Donbass region, March 2015. (OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
March-April 2022: Russia and Ukraine agree on a framework agreement that would end the war, including Ukraine pledging not to join NATO. The U.S. and U.K. object. Prime Minister Boris Johnson flies to Kiev to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop negotiating with Russia. The war continues with Russia seizing much of the Donbass.
March 26, 2022: Biden admits in a speech in Warsaw that the U.S. is seeking through its proxy war against Russia to overthrow the Putin government. Earlier in March he overruled his secretary of state on establishing a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft in Ukraine. Biden opposed the no-fly zone, he said at the time, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”
September 2022: Donbass republics vote to join the Russian Federation, as well as two other regions: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
May 2023: Ukraine begins a counter-offensive to try to take back territory controlled by Russia. As seen in leaked documents earlier in the year, U.S. intelligence concludes the offensive will fail before it begins.
June 2023: A 36-hour rebellion by the Wagner group fails, when its leader Yevegny Prigoshzin takes a deal to go into exile in Belarus. The Wagner private army, which was funded and armed by the Russian Ministry of Defense, is absorbed into the Russian army. The Ukrainian offensive ends in failure at the end of November.
September 2024: Biden deferred to the realists in the Pentagon to oppose long-range British Storm Shadow missiles from being fired by Ukraine deep into Russia out of fear it would also lead to a direct NATO-Russia military confrontation with all that that entails.
Putin warned at the time that because British soldiers on the ground in Ukraine would actually launch the British missiles into Russia with U.S. geostrategic support, it “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”
November 2024: After he was driven from the race and his party lost the White House, a lame duck Biden suddenly switched gears, allowing not only British, but also U.S. long-range ATACMS missiles to be fired into Russia. It’s not clear that the White House ever informed the Pentagon in advance of a move that risked the very World War III that Biden had previously sought to avoid.
February 2025: The first direct contact between senior leadership of the United States and Russia in more than three years takes place, with a phone call between the countries’ presidents and a meeting of foreign ministers in Saudi Arabia. They agree to begin negotiations to end the war.
*****
This timeline clearly shows an aggressive Western intent towards Russia, and how the tragedy could have been avoided if NATO would not allow Ukraine to join; if the Minsk accords had been implemented; and if the U.S. and NATO negotiated a new security arrangement in Europe, taking Russian security concerns into account.
The post Ukraine Timeline Tells the Tale first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Peace In Ukraine Coalition is cautiously optimistic about emerging possibilities for ending the war in Ukraine. It is a good thing that the U.S. and Russia are talking. An end to the hostility between the two nuclear superpowers would bring a sigh of relief to people all over the world.
We do not know if the Trump administration, Russia and Ukraine will be able to achieve a lasting peace in Ukraine. We encourage diplomacy, however, rather than fear it. We want the killing to stop as soon as possible. For three years we have been calling for a ceasefire, negotiations and an end to US weapons shipments that fuel the war.
The post Seize the Moment: End The War In Ukraine! appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has signaled that he’s open to a ceasefire in Ukraine but that he has “questions” about the 30-day US-Ukraine proposal that need to be discussed.
“The idea itself is the right one, and we definitely support it,” Putin said, according to The New York Times. “But there are questions that we need to discuss, and I think that we need to talk them through with our American colleagues and partners.”
The Russian leader listed potential conditions for a 30-day truce, including a guarantee that Ukraine wouldn’t be supplied with more weapons.
The post Putin Signals He’s Open To Ceasefire appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
China, Russia, and Iran released a joint statement on 14 March demanding an end to “unlawful” US sanctions against the Islamic Republic after meetings in Beijing between the three countries, which were aimed at jumpstarting stalled nuclear talks between Tehran and Washington.
The three countries “emphasized the necessity of terminating all unlawful unilateral sanctions” after talks hosted by Beijing on Friday morning, according to the joint statement read out by Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaxou.
“The three countries reiterated that political and diplomatic engagement and dialogue based on the principle of mutual respect remains the only viable and practical option in this regard,” read the joint statement.
The post Iran, Russia, China Reject ‘Unlawful’ US Sanctions After Tripartite Meeting appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry revealed on 12 March that Beijing will host high-level talks with Russia and Iran this week for negotiations on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear energy program.
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu will chair the tripartite summit scheduled for Friday. Joining him will be Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi to “exchange views on Iran’s nuclear activities and regional security issues,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning stated on Wednesday.
A spokesman from Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the talks in Beijing would focus on “developments related to the nuclear issue and the lifting of sanctions.”
The post China To Host Russia, Iran For Nuclear Talks; Iran Answers Trump’s Letter appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
The race to ReArm Europe showed no signs of slowing during a debate in the European Parliament on Tuesday, as political representatives across the spectrum threw their weight behind the military expansion plans of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa. The only occasional rebuke from centrist and right-wing parties was that the proposal doesn’t go far enough in light of Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the widening disconnect between his administration and European governments.
The post The European Union Fast-Tracks Militarization; Pushes Rearmament appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Read a version of this story in Korean.
Construction has begun on a road bridge that would connect North Korea and Russia over the Tumen River that separates the countries, South Korean satellite imagery revealed.
This would be the first road bridge between these two allies, allowing trucks and buses to transfer goods and people. There is already a rail bridge between the two countries, which recently have been strengthening ties.
South Korean firm SI Analytics announced that it captured the photos on March 3, and they showed that preparatory work had begun for an 830-meter (900-yard) section of road, including the bridge over the frozen river in the northeastern part of North Korea.
Experts said that when completed, the bridge will likely boost trade and tourism in North Korea, and possibly increase Moscow’s influence in the region.
One expert said that it seems as if Russia agreed to build this bridge in exchange for North Korean support in its war with Ukraine. North Korea has sent an estimated 12,000 soldiers to fight in Russia’s war against Ukraine, although neither Moscow or Pyongyang has publicly confirmed this.
On the Russian side of the border, the satellite images show that preliminary work for the bridge reaches less than 300 meters (330 yards) from the land.
A yellow structure, believed to be a pillar that would hold up the bridge, can be seen on the frozen surface of the river. Additionally, construction materials can be seen in a staging area on the Russian side.
“The groundwork will be completed before the river thaws, with the actual bridge pillars being installed in the spring,” SI Analytics said.
Meanwhile, on the North Korean side, construction is underway on the road that would connect to the bridge. It appears that the ground has been compacted, but the road has yet to be paved. Heavy equipment like bulldozers, trucks and smaller cars can be seen at the construction site.
Moscow selected contracting firm TonnelYuzhStroy LLC, to oversee design and construction of the bridge, with a deadline for completion set at Dec. 31, 2026, media outlet Interfax.ru reported.
“Although the Russian government has allocated a two-year construction period, it seems that the rush to complete the groundwork even in the bitter cold is intended to show ‘tangible results’ in accordance with the demands of Russian President Vladimir Putin,” SI Analytics said.
North Korea observers said that the construction of the bridge would be a boon for overland shipping between North Korea and Russia, as only one other bridge connecting the two countries exists, and it is only for trains.
The new bridge will contribute to North Korea’s economic growth, Joung Eunlee, a research fellow at the Seoul-based Korea Institute for National Unification, told RFA Korean.
“Land routes can actively transport much more logistics and people than railways,” she said. “If a bridge is built between North Korea and Russia, then the volume of goods transported will be much larger than railways, the transport time will be faster, and the volume of trade will likely increase.”
The bridge is likely being built in return for North Korean military support of Russia in its war with Ukraine, said Bruce Bennett of the U.S.-based RAND Corporation.
“Creating a new bridge would be a direct way for Russia to increase trade with North Korea,” he said. “I believe there is no doubt that this is, at least, a partial payoff to North Korea.”
The new bridge is likely to lead to increased economic, social and military exchanges, and could weaken the effectiveness of sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear ambitions, SI analytics said. Additionally it could reorganize the balance of power in the region, increasing Russian influence at the expense of Chinese.
“China’s response will likely to be a key variable going forward,” SI Analytics said.
But the overall effect of the new bridge could also be relatively mild, Kim Young-hee, from the Institute for North Korean Studies, at Dongguk University in South Korea, told RFA.
“It would have an economic effect, but North Korea would require a lot of travel by train or car to enable trade with Russia,” she said. “Geographically, China is better. Russia is far away, so transportation costs are higher than to trade with China.”
She said that trading with China was more cost effective, so Pyongyang would likely still trade primarily with Beijing.
Translated by Claire S Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Cheon Soram for RFA Korean.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Europe’s resistance to America’s rapprochement with Russia and peace efforts for Ukraine means stagnation which will only hinder its development towards a more autonomous structure.
Another point of Hahn’s piece is made in his discussion about the future configuration of the government in Kiev. It is a warning to those who want to remove Zelenski:
Despite Zelenskiy’s weakened position domestically and internationally, this at least partially illegitimate president may be the last or next to last surviving pillar of the Maidan regime and the Ukrainian state. For all his narcissism, egoism, corruption, and mounting authoritarianism, Zelenskiy currently holds the Ukrainian elite together and is the face of Ukraine abroad, still well-liked in Europe. He remains a figure that minimally satisfies all the various factions in Ukrainian politics and is able to hold off opposition elements, many of which he has emasculated by banning parties and media and by either forcing their leaders into exile or arresting them (e.g., former President Petro Poroshenko and Viktor Medvedchuk).
The post Gordon Hahn On Europe’s Role And A Possible Coup In Kiev appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
With U.S.-Russia tensions as dangerously high as they’ve been since the worst days of the Cold War, there is potential new evidence that Russia was not behind a hack of the Democratic National Committee, although Congress and the U.S. mainstream media accept the unproven allegation of Russia’s guilt as indisputable fact.
The possible new evidence comes in the form of a leaked audiotape of veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in which Hersh is heard to say that not Russia, but a DNC insider, was the source of the Democratic emails published by WikiLeaks just before the start of the Democratic National Convention in late July 2016.
The post FBI Due To Release List Of Seth Rich Files Monday appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Woman at rally supporting peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Berlin, Germany. (Photo: Reuters)
When European Union leaders met in Brussels on February 6 to discuss the war in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron called this time “a turning point in history.” Western leaders agree that this is an historic moment when decisive action is needed, but what kind of action depends on their interpretation of the nature of this moment.
Is this the beginning of a new Cold War between the U.S., NATO and Russia or the end of one? Will Russia and the West remain implacable enemies for the foreseeable future, with a new iron curtain between them through what was once the heart of Ukraine? Or can the United States and Russia resolve the disputes and hostility that led to this war in the first place, so as to leave Ukraine with a stable and lasting peace?
Some European leaders see this moment as the beginning of a long struggle with Russia, akin to the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, when Winston Churchill warned that “an iron curtain has descended” across Europe.
On March 2, echoing Churchill, European Council President Ursula von der Leyen declared that Europe must turn Ukraine into a “steel porcupine.” President Zelenskyy has said he wants up to 200,000 European troops on the eventual ceasefire line between Russia and Ukraine to “guarantee” any peace agreement, and insists that the United States must provide a “backstop,” meaning a commitment to send U.S. forces to fight in Ukraine if war breaks out again.
Russia has repeatedly said it won’t agree to NATO forces being based in Ukraine under any guise. “We explained today that the appearance of armed forces from the same NATO countries, but under a false flag, under the flag of the European Union or under national flags, does not change anything in this regard,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on February 18. “Of course this is unacceptable to us.”
But the U.K. is persisting in a campaign to recruit a “coalition of the willing,” the same term the U.S. and U.K. coined for the list of countries they persuaded to support the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. In that case, only Australia, Denmark and Poland took small parts in the invasion, Costa Rica publicly insisted on being removed from the list, and the term was widely lampooned as the “coalition of the billing” because the U.S. recruited so many countries to join it by promising them lucrative foreign aid deals.
Far from the start of a new Cold War, President Trump and other leaders see this moment as more akin to the end of the original Cold War, when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik in Iceland in 1986 and began to bridge the divisions caused by 40 years of Cold War hostility.
Like Trump and Putin today, Reagan and Gorbachev were unlikely peacemakers. Gorbachev had risen through the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party to become its General Secretary and Soviet Premier in March 1985, in the midst of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and he didn’t begin to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan until 1988. Reagan oversaw an unprecedented Cold War arms build-up, a U.S.-backed genocide in Guatemala and covert and proxy wars throughout Central America. And yet Gorbachev and Reagan are now widely remembered as peacemakers.
While Democrats deride Trump as a Putin stooge, in his first term in office Trump was actually responsible for escalating the Cold War with Russia. After the Pentagon had milked its absurd, self-fulfilling “War on Terror” for trillions of dollars, it was Trump and his psychopathic Defense Secretary, General “Mad Dog” Mattis, who declared the shift back to strategic competition with Russia and China as the Pentagon’s new gravy train in their 2018 National Defense Strategy. It was also Trump who lifted President Obama’s restrictions on sending offensive weapons to Ukraine.
Trump’s head-spinning about-turn in U.S. policy has left its European allies with whiplash and reversed the roles they each have played for generations. France and Germany have traditionally been the diplomats and peacemakers in the Western alliance, while the U.S. and U.K. have been infected with a chronic case of war fever that has proven resistant to a long string of military defeats and catastrophic impacts on every country that has fallen prey to their warmongering.
In 2003, France’s Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin led the opposition to the invasion of Iraq in the UN Security Council. France, Germany and Russia issued a joint statement to say that they would “not let a proposed resolution pass that would authorize the use of force. Russia and France, as permanent members of the Security Council, will assume all their responsibilities on this point.”
At a press conference in Paris with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, French President Jacques Chirac said, “Everything must be done to avoid war… As far as we’re concerned, war always means failure.”
As recently as 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, it was once again the U.S. and U.K. that rejected and blocked peace negotiations in favor of a long war, while France, Germany and Ital
Former German Chancellor Schröder took part in the peace negotiations in Turkey in March and April 2022, and flew to Moscow at Ukraine’s request to meet with Putin. In an interview with Berliner Zeitung in 2023, Schröder confirmed that the peace talks only failed “because everything was decided in Washington.”
With Biden still blocking new negotiations in 2023, one of the interviewers asked Schröder “Do you think you can resume your peace plan?”
Schröder replied, “Yes, and the only ones who can initiate this are France and Germany… Macron and Scholz are the only ones who can talk to Putin. Chirac and I did the same in the Iraq war. Why can’t support for Ukraine be combined with an offer of talks to Russia? The arms deliveries are not a solution for eternity. But no one wants to talk. Everyone sits in trenches. How many more people have to die?”
Since 2022, President Macron and a Thatcherite team of iron ladies – European Council President von der Leyen; former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock; and Estonia’s former prime minister Kaja Kallas, now the EU’s foreign policy chief – have promoted a new militarization of Europe, egged on from behind the scenes by European and U.S. arms manufacturers.
Has the passage of time, the passing of the World War II generation and the distortion of history washed away the historical memory of two world wars from a continent that was destroyed by war only 80 years ago? Where is the next generation of French and German diplomats in the tradition of de Villepin and Schröder today? How can sending German tanks to fight in Ukraine, and now in Russia itself, fail to remind Russians of previous German invasions and solidify support for the war? And won’t the call for Europe to confront Russia by moving from a “welfare state to a warfare state” only feed the rise of the European hard right?
So are the new European militarists reading the historical moment correctly? Or are they jumping on the bandwagon of a disastrous Cold War that could, as Biden and Trump have warned, lead to World War III?
When Trump’s foreign policy team met with their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia on February 18, ending the war in Ukraine was the second part of the three-part plan they agreed on. The first was to restore full diplomatic relations between the United States and Russia, and the third was to work on a series of other problems in U.S.-Russian relations.
The order of these three stages is interesting, because, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted, it means that the negotiations over Ukraine will be the first test of restored relations between the U.S. and Russia.
If the negotiations for peace in Ukraine are successful, they can lead to further negotiations over restoring arms control treaties, nuclear disarmament and cooperation on other global problems that have been impossible to resolve in a world stuck in a zombie-like Cold War that powerful interests would not allow to die.
It was a welcome change to hear Secretary Rubio say that the post-Cold War unipolar world was an anomaly and that now we have to adjust to the reality of a multipolar world. But if Trump and his hawkish advisers are just trying to restore U.S. relations with Russia as part of a “reverse Kissinger” scheme to isolate China, as some analysts have suggested, that would perpetuate America’s debilitating geopolitical crisis instead of solving it.
The United States and our friends in Europe have a new chance to make a clean break from the three-way geopolitical power struggle between the United States, Russia and China that has hamstrung the world since the 1970s, and to find new roles and priorities for our countries in the emerging multipolar world of the 21st Century.
We hope that Trump and European leaders can recognize the crossroads at which they are standing, and the chance history is giving them to choose the path of peace. France and Germany in particular should remember the wisdom of Dominique de Villepin, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder in the face of U.S. and British plans for aggression against Iraq in 2003.
This could be the beginning of the end of the permanent state of war and Cold War that has held the world in its grip for more than a century. Ending it would allow us to finally prioritize the progress and cooperation we so desperately need to solve the other critical problems the whole world is facing in the 21st Century. As General Milley said back in November 2022 when he called for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, we must “seize the moment.”
The post Is This the Beginning or the End of a New Cold War? first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Apparently, the greatest battles are fought within ourselves, and I can kind of run with that right now.
On one hand, you have the ex-comedy guy that somehow ended up in charge of a country with a bit of a Nazi problem, Voldemort Zelenskyy.
President Zelenskyy may well do something for Home Counties women of a certain age, but I’m always going to be a tad sceptical of a man that said he wants his country to become a “big Israel”.
Part of this drive to become a big Israel involves “conscription squads” descending on towns and cities across Ukraine, searching for men between the ages of 25 and 60, KIDNAPPING them, and forcing them to sign up to stand in front of Putin’s army.
I still see a few lost souls on the left with a Ukrainian flag next to their social media user names. Honestly, Ukraine and Zelenskyy are no friends of ours, although they do have a deep and intimate relationship with the British tax payer.
May I remind you, Zelenskyy described the fugitive leader of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, as the greatest statesman of our times.
Child killer, ethnic cleanser, tyrant, evil genocidal murderer — add one of your own if you like — but greatest statesman of our times? Fuck off.
Then on the other hand, you have the greatest threat to world peace since himself, a Hillbilly MAGA fanatic masquerading as a vice president, and the world’s richest person egging them on from the sidelines.
President Donald Trump definitely doesn’t do anything for Home Counties women of a certain age, but I have absolutely no scepticism towards Trump, because he makes no secret of his desire to turn Gaza into a rich (white) man’s paradise.
What can I say about Trump that hasn’t already been said?
Robert De Niro, an actor that is entirely familiar with portraying violent and dangerous characters, said of Trump:
I’ve spent a lot of time studying bad men. I’ve examined their characteristics, their mannerisms, the utter banality of their cruelty. Yet there’s something different about Donald Trump. When I look at him, I don’t see a bad man. Truly. I see an evil one.
So there you have it. Two cheeks of the same, yet entirely different arse.
While some on the left will applaud Trump for cutting out the supply of American arms to Ukraine, let us not forget the very same American idiot is arming Israel to “finish the job”, in Gaza.
Don’t get me wrong, president Zelenskyy got exactly what he deserved. I’m regularly sickened to see European leaders emptying their respective countries’ coffers to fund and fuel further death and destruction.
Did anyone ask you how you felt about cuts to vital public services to fund a conflict in a former Soviet state? Nor me.
What the Labour Party takes from Britain’s poorest pensioners with one hand, they give to Zelenskyy to fight an unwinnable war with the other.
Putin’s Russia is likely to win, and no amount of sabre rattling, Euros, or British Pounds from domestically-desperate liberals is going to change that.
Why aren’t the far-right flag shaggers apoplectic with rage with the military welfare being gifted to the tiresome Zelenskyy when there were 2,270 homeless veteran cases reported last year? The double standards are truly staggering.
This has to end somewhere and somehow because it is unsustainable and entirely unacceptable when there is a vast array of problems both home and abroad that need to be prioritised way ahead of Zelenskyy’s pocket money.
We seem to live in an age where the corporate media demand that you pick a side. If you’re not screaming “Slava Ukraini” from the rooftops you’re labelled a Putin apologist.
The Putin apologist label is often used to stifle perfectly legitimate criticisms of the Ukrainian regime in the same way Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters were wrongly accused of being virulent antisemites to stifle perfectly legitimate criticisms of the Israeli pariah state.
If we carry on as we are, Keir Starmer’s final bill for the Ukraine distraction will end up making Brexit look like a bargain.
I know it’s not a popular opinion amongst the British people, but if Ukraine is our problem so is Gaza, Lebanon, and South Sudan.
Why should a failed colonialist country like Britain get to decide the life of a child from Kyiv is worth more than the life of a child from Rafah?
Nearly 900,000 Russian sons and daughters have died fighting this needless war. Countless Ukrainian’s have perished, many of whom had absolutely no choice but to lay down their lives for someone else’s conflict.
Unless peace prevails, it will be British sons and daughters that pay the ultimate price for NATO’s ongoing expansion and Putin’s aggressive response.
The voices for peace are few and far between. There is no weakness in declaring death and destruction must come to an immediate end. A strong leader understands that every war starts with words and ultimately, ends with words.
Britain simply does not have that leadership. Starmer is no different to any of the previous occupants of Number 10, Downing Street.
If Keir Starmer was a genuinely principled leader, he wouldn’t be allowing British Labour MPs to parade members of Ukraine’s far-right Azov Brigade around parliament, would he?
Vote Labour, get Neo-Nazis.
They secretly harbour ambitions of a return to the ‘halcyon days’ of the British Empire and a time when Britain had an armed forces that rampaged and robbed its way around the world with no fucks given for the millions of victims of its colonial desires.
Zelenskyy got the brutal stage-managed slap he well and truly deserved, be in no doubt of that. Britain now has to decide if they want to be next in line for a pasting, and while that is unlikely to come from a mesmerised Donald Trump, it will take a bit more than a state visit to stop Mr Putin from reaching out and putting little isolated Keir Starmer flat on his backside.
Featured image via Rachael Swindon
This post was originally published on Canary.
