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Category: Russia

  • Ukraine Is A Pawn In The United States’ Fight To Prevent A Multipolar World

    This week, Clearing the FOG speaks with Brian Becker, a leader of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the host of The Socialist Program, for a socialist perspective of the war in Ukraine. Becker discusses why it was a mistake for Russia to invade and how it has shored up support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) even though Russia has legitimate security concerns and the United States did not appear to be willing to stop provoking an invasion. He also talks about the real racism exposed by this war, the impact of the media misinformation campaign on people on the left and the current state of the extreme right wing fascist movement. Becker offers an important lens for viewing the conflict and understanding what to do about it.

    The post Ukraine Is A Pawn In The United States’ Fight To Prevent A Multipolar World appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Worthy And Unworthy Victims

    Rulers divide the world into worthy and unworthy victims, those we are allowed to pity, such as Ukrainians enduring the hell of modern warfare, and those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed, or ignored. The terror we and our allies carry out against Iraqi, Palestinian, Syrian, Libyan, Somali and Yemeni civilians is part of the regrettable cost of war. We, echoing the empty promises from Moscow, claim we do not target civilians. Rulers always paint their militaries as humane, there to serve and protect. Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable.

    This lie can only be sustained among those who are unfamiliar with the explosive ordinance and large kill zones of missiles, iron fragmentation bombs, mortar, artillery and tank shells, and belt-fed machine guns.

    The post Worthy And Unworthy Victims appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • A Proposed Solution To The Ukraine War

    Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, what was a regional conflict has become a global hybrid war with ever-greater stakes, not least the risk of nuclear war.

    Perhaps the greatest danger lies in the difference of motives between parties, which is also the fundamental cause of this war: Russia seeks security, while the U.S. and its NATO allies have been using Ukraine to deny that security — to “break Russia,” in Henry Kissinger’s 2015 phrase. The U.S. does not want peace, unless it be the peace of a conquered Russia. That is why there is no obvious end to the escalations and counter-escalations. The U.S. and NATO see opportunity in the war they have been trying so hard to provoke.

    The tragedy is that few people seem to understand that at the root of the Ukraine crisis is a specific strategy known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine

    The post A Proposed Solution To The Ukraine War appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • To Punish Russia The ‘Liberal Order’ Attempts To Suicide Itself

    The ‘west’ had failed to understand Russia’s need to act. It has failed to make the necessary commitments, and accept Russia’s reasonable demands, to avoid the struggle. In consequence it will now fall apart. The knee-jerk reaction to Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine will, as Alastair Crooke writes, lead to the end of the ‘liberal order’.

    The post To Punish Russia The ‘Liberal Order’ Attempts To Suicide Itself appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Russia’s feminists are in the streets protesting Putin’s war

    Russian feminists have united against the occupation and war in Ukraine under the banner of Feminist Anti-War Resistance.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Russian socialists on anti-war protests, sanctions and politics on the street

    Charlie Kimber asked the Socialist Tendency of the Russian Federation for the latest news from the anti-war frontline.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Greene Bought Oil, Defense Stocks While Complaining About War Profiteers

    Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, joined by members of the Freedom Caucus, speaks at a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on September 22, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    New financial filings reveal that far right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) bought up to $15,000 in stock in defense manufacturers and energy companies two days before Russian forces invaded Ukraine.

    On February 22, Greene bought stocks in defense industry giant Lockheed Martin and military supplier Caterpillar. She also bought between $1,000 and $15,000 worth of stock in Chevron and NextEra Energy, a utility and energy company.

    All of these companies’ stocks have grown in the weeks since Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, with Lockheed Martin up by about 20 percent since then.

    The purchases came the day before Greene complained on Twitter about war profiteering. “War and rumors of war is [sic] incredibly profitable and convenient,” she wrote. “And just like that, the media has a lie to use as the reason for our shattered economy and out of control inflation.” The next day, after Russian troops launched attacks across Ukraine, Greene said that the invasion was “no surprise” – contrary to what experts on the situation were saying.

    According to Greene’s own logic, however, if the invasion was no surprise, then she would also be one of the war profiteers that she complained about in her tweet. Armed conflict is incredibly beneficial for the defense industry; stocks for major European and U.S. defense contractors are soaring due to the conflict.

    Oil companies have also been looking to exploit the invasion in order to expand oil and gas exploration in the U.S. Immediately surrounding the initial attacks, oil companies and conservative lawmakers, including Greene, began calling for expanding oil production.

    Like they appear to have done with inflation, oil companies may be jacking up prices for oil at the pump, in order to make a tidy profit as the conflict continues. Stocks in Exxon, Chevron and other oil giants have gone up in recent weeks.

    Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) criticized Greene’s fortuitous stock purchases on Monday, saying “Add this to the list of why members of Congress should never be allowed to trade stocks.” According to Insider, Greene is among the most active stock traders in Congress.

    It’s illegal for members of Congress to trade stock based on privileged information that isn’t available to the public, as that would constitute insider trading. It’s unclear if Greene could have been operating on insider information in this instance, although this seems unlikely given the circumstances.

    However, defense contractors including Lockheed Martin were boasting in January that escalating tensions between Ukraine and Russia could be good for business. Lockheed Martin spends tens of millions of dollars lobbying Congress each year.

    Members of both parties of Congress have been pushing to ban stock trading for members of Congress, either by forcing them to put their individual stocks in a blind trust or by requiring them to divest from stocks altogether. The Committee on House Administration has scheduled a hearing on the issue, taking a critical step toward passing such legislation, which anti-corruption organizations say is crucial.

    Though there are some Republicans who have voiced their support for such legislation, Greene does not appear to be one of them.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ukrainian Security Services Arrest Young Communist Leaders

    On Sunday, March 6, the Ukrainian security services arrested Mikhail Kononovich and his brother Aleksandr Kononovich. Both are from the leadership of the Leninist Communist Youth Union of Ukraine (LKSMU). The press service of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) stated on Sunday that the Kononovich brothers were arrested from capital Kiev and put in jail. The SBU has accused them of being propagandists with pro-Russian and pro-Belarusian views with the goal of destabilizing the internal situation in Ukraine and create the “necessary information picture” for Russian and Belarusian channels. The World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) denounced the arrest of the LKSMU leaders in Ukraine and urged progressive youth groups across the world to mobilize to demand for their freedom as their lives are in serious danger in the custody of the security forces.

    The post Ukrainian Security Services Arrest Young Communist Leaders appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • When Did the Ukraine War Begin?

    Viewing the Ukraine war as starting with the current Russian invasion leads to very different conclusions than if you consider that the starting point of this war was the 2014 US-orchestrated coup in Ukraine. The coup, which had elements of an authentic popular revolt, has been used by outside powers to pursue geopolitical ends.

    The conception that the war started on February 24 of this year is like viewing the “invasion” by the US and its allies of Normandy in June 1944 against the “sovereign” and “democratic” Vichy French as the start of World War II. Never mind that the Vichy government was a puppet of the Nazis; that the opportunities to negotiate had long been rejected; that the war had been raging for years; and that the only option for stopping the Nazis was militarily.

    The US imperial army

    NATO, it should be understood, is an army in the service of the US empire. Viewing it simply as an alliance of nominally sovereign entities obscures that it is commanded as a tool of US foreign policy in its stated quest of world dominion; that is, “full spectrum dominance.” The “alliance” members must fully integrate their militaries under that command along with purchasing US war equipment and offering up their own citizens as troops.

    After the implosion of the Soviet Union and the supposed end of the first cold war, instead of NATO being disbanded, the opposite occurred. There was no “peace dividend” and no honoring of the promise that NATO would not expand any further. Instead, NATO stampeded east towards the borders of the Russian Federation adding fourteen new members of former USSR republics and allies.

    Even before the 2014 coup, the US’s fateful decision in 2006 to draw Ukraine into NATO posed an existential threat to Russia. By December 2021, according to “realpolitik” international relations scholar John Mearsheimer, a US-armed Ukraine had become a de facto member of NATO, crossing a red line for Russia. Mearsheimer concludes, “the west bears primary responsibility for what is happening today.”

    Failure of peaceful negotiations

    Speaking before the UN on March 2, the Venezuelan representative identified the breach of the Minsk Protocols, with the encouragement of the US, as the precursor of the present crisis in Ukraine.

    After the 2014 coup in Ukraine, the Minsk Protocols were an attempt at a peaceful settlement through “a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line, release of prisoners of war, constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government to certain areas of Donbas, and restoring control of the state border to the Ukrainian government.” Moscow, Kyiv, and the eastern separatists were all parties to the agreements.

    The Russian perception of negotiations with the western alliance in the run-up to the invasion, as reported by the New York Post, was described using insensitive terminology as “like the mute with the deaf” by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on his meeting with his British counterpart. (NOTE: the NYP, even in the updated version of the article, refers to Lavrov as the “Soviet” Foreign Minister, forgetting that the USSR hasn’t been around for over 30 years.)

    Following the latest round of “sweeping” US-imposed sanctions on Russia, their Foreign Ministry announced, “we have reached the line where the point of no return begins.” Such sanctions are a form of warfare as deadly as bombs.

    Upsides of war for the US and the downsides for everyone else

    War is a great diversion for Joe Biden, whose popularity has been slipping due to a lackluster domestic performance. The US empire has much to gain: further unifying NATO under US domination, reducing Russian economic competition in the European energy market, justifying increasing the US war budget, and facilitating sales of war material to NATO vassals.

    NATO has dumped over a trillion dollars in arms and facilities into the border countries next to Russia and continues to this day to pour lethal weapons into Ukraine. The leader of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi C14 recently bragged on YouTube (while other voices are censored): “We are being given so much weaponry not because as some say ‘the west is helping us,’ not because it is best for us. But because we perform the tasks set by the west…because we have fun, we have fun killing.”

    More than 14,000 people have been killed in the eastern Ukraine region of Donbas in warfare between ethnic Russians and Ukrainian regular military/right-wing paramilitaries in the eight years since the coup. The self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, beleaguered enclaves in the Donbas of largely ethnic Russians, seceded from Ukraine and were recognized by Russia on February 21.

    The semi-governmental (over 80% US government funded) Rand Corporation’s playbook for the US and its allies says it all: “pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress – overextend and unbalance – Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad.”

    The conflict could have ruinous consequences for the Russian Federation, according to western sources and even some people who identify as left in Russia. As a bonus for the US, according to Juan S. González, the US National Security Council’s senior director for the Western Hemisphere, the sanctions against Russia are “by design” intended to hurt Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, all targeted by Washington for regime change. And, of course, for Ukrainians of all ethnicities there is no winning in a war.

    It is difficult to think what other options Russia has to defend itself. Perhaps there are some, but surely they are slim. It should be clear that the US has continually been the aggressor even if some do not agree with the Russian response. As Phyllis Bennis with the Institute for Policy Studies argues, the US provoked this war.

    Severing Russia from Europe

    The peaceful integration of Russia with the rest of Europe would be a great threat to the US empire. A unified or even a cordial Europe could truly herald the end of US hegemony. The long-game geopolitical goal of preventing the unification of Europe may well be the fundamental aim of US foreign policy in that continent.

    What would become of “US strategic interests” if peace were to break out in Europe, and Russia would become partners with Germany, France, and Italy? A potentially more independent Europe, including Russia, would challenge the US-dominated Atlanticist project.

    The extreme hostility that the US took to the Nord Stream 2 project, which would have piped Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea directly to Germany, went beyond the narrow economism of favoring US liquefied natural gas (LNG) suppliers. Where Washington’s earlier efforts of imposing illegal unilateral economic sanctions on its NATO ally faltered, the current conflict will surely discourage any rational and cooperative economic association of Russia with its western neighbors.

    The severing of Russia from the rest of Europe is a tremendous victory for the US imperial project. This is especially the case, when there were recent moves in the direction of economic, cultural, and political exchange, which have now been reversed.

    Spheres of Influence and inter-imperialist rivalry

    Russia shares a 1,426-mile border with Ukraine and considers that region within its security perimeter, vital to its national security. The US, which is 5,705 miles from Ukraine, considers the world its sphere of influence. Clearly, there is a conflict of interest.

    The contemporary geopolitical dynamic has evolved from the one Lenin described in 1916 in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which was then characterized as one of inter-imperialist rivalry. This theory is not entirely adequate to understand today’s world dominated by a single superpower (with its European Union, British, and Japanese junior partners). Surely, national centers of capital continue to compete. But over-arching this competition is a militantly imposed unipolar pax Americana.

    There is just one superpower with hundreds of foreign military bases, possession of the world’s reserve currency, and control of the SWIFT worldwide payment and transaction system. Simply reducing the conflict to one of contesting capitalists obscures the context of empire.

    Further, even if one just understands the present situation as one of a clash of two imperialist camps, that does not preclude taking sides. Surely World War II was an inter-imperialist war, but that did not prevent socialists from opposing the Axis pole and supporting the allies. The US is ever more aggressively stirring up the pot, not only in Ukraine, but also Taiwan, Africa, and elsewhere.

    Asymmetry of the Forces

    The forces are asymmetrical in this contest. Russia and the US may have comparable nuclear arsenals, but Russia has no bases of any kind in North America compared to at least six nuclear and many more conventional bases for the US in Europe. The US military budget is 11.9 times the size of Russia’s, not to mention the war chests of Washington’s NATO allies. Similarly, the US economy is 12.5 times as large as Russia’s. Of the Fortune 500 top international corporations, only four are Russian compared to 122 from the US. Russia’s labor productivity is only 36% of the US’s. In terms of finance capital, the US has 11 of the world’s top 100 banks; Russia has one. Far from being a key exporter of capital, Russia is a leader in capital flight, in part owing to sanctions imposed by the US and its allies.

    As analyst Stansfield Smith concludes, Russia “plays very little part in the quintessential imperialist activity: the export of capital to the periphery and the extraction of profit from developing countries’ labor and resources.” Russia is a target of US-led imperialism; Ukraine is caught in the crossfire.

    Hypocrisy of the “international community”

    If only the outrage over the Russian invasion had some ethical grounding by what is misleadingly called the “international community,” but is in reality the US and its subalterns. Biden’s touted “rules based order” is one where the US makes the rules and the rest of the world follows its orders, in contradiction to the Charter of the UN and other recognized international law.

    From Cuba, journalist Ángel Guerra Cabrera laments: “our region witnessed flagrant US violations of those principles in Guatemala, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Grenada and Panama, the last three through direct invasions. Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are current examples of a US policy that flatly denies its assertion, not to mention Puerto Rico.”

    International law expert Alfred de Zayas reminds us that the so-called “international community seems to have accepted egregious violations of Art. 2(4) [of the UN Charter] by the US against Cuba, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela; by NATO countries against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yugoslavia; by Israel against all its Arab neighbors, including the Palestinians and Lebanese; by Saudi Arabia against Yemen; by Azerbaijan against Nagorno Karabakh, by Turkey against Cyprus, etc.”

    How this war will end

    Regardless of how one sides – or not – in the new cold war, it is instructive to understand the context of the conflict. This is especially so when views outside the dominant US narrative, such as those of Russian outlets Sputnik and RT that hosted US intellectuals like Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, are being silenced.

    This article addressed how this war began. How it will end or even if it will end is another story. The world is spiraling into a new cold war, emanating from a region formally at peace under socialism.

    Expressing a view from the standpoint of the Global South, former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva commented: “we do not want to be anyone’s enemy. We are not interested, nor is the world, in a new cold war…which is for sure dragging the whole world into a conflict that could put humanity in danger.” If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that the end of endless war will come with end of the US imperial project that provoked this crisis.

    The post When Did the Ukraine War Begin? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Not by Bread Alone, but Mainly by Platitudes

    Unlike many who seem to believe that freedom of movement (since 2020 extinguished in the EU) must mean an end to national borders, I have only felt that borders should be recognised as the product of political will and history.

    In the entrance to the museum at the Invalides in Paris there is a quote attributed to Charles de Gaulle, “France was made with the sword.” The idea that anywhere in Europe especially borders are natural or that they are defined by some innate qualities is absurd.1

    However, following the principles first proposed in international law (by the British, speaking through their ventriloquist Woodrow Wilson) that nations were to be recognised based on ethnic or language “self-determination”, the only peoples permitted to exercise such political will were granted their “patent” by the British Empire after the Great War. This was consistent with British policy of dismembering all its competitors; e.g., Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The October Revolution seemed to offer Britain and its US partner the opportunity to redesign the Russian Empire too.

    In order to defeat those forces, a brutal war had to be waged and the system of soviet republics was created both to endow many non-Russian populations with elements of self-determination and to defend the territorial integrity of the Russian Revolution.2 We know that Ukraine emerged as a modern state in this context. War, civil war, and negotiation created a state out of the eastern remnants of Austria-Hungary, Poland and Russia. Such configurations have always benefitted British (today Anglo-American) imperial interests. Precisely those qualities were to promote the use of Ukraine against Russia, in the way Croatia has been used against Serbia but on a far greater scale.

    In the entrance to the museum at the Invalides in Paris there is a quote attributed to Charles de Gaulle, “France was made with the sword.”

    British objectives have always been to use “cultural” weapons to create or maintain internally fragmented states which can be manipulated through federal structures dependent upon external arms and finance. All of the white dominions of the British Empire were created as federations ruled from above.3 There was clearly legitimate fear among those who supported nationalism in the US that the British would subvert the federal system to their advantage, especially during the Civil War. In fact, they obtained this goal in 1913 and consolidated it by 1918 through the “Bank of England” model of public-private partnership.4 But that is another story.

    A major source of confusion in the debate about Ukraine and Russia’s incursion is the question of Ukrainian sovereignty, on which a wide range of people oppose Russia’s actions because it should not attack a sovereign state (naively drawing on the prohibitions of the UN Charter). Moreover, the claim that Russia should not have violated Ukrainian sovereignty is based on the erroneous belief that Ukraine was invaded. This assertion is based on ignorance. Quite aside from the international-law issues posed by the sovereign claims of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), and hence whether they could exert sovereign rights to conclude treaties and hence invite military aid, there is the long-standing original threat and active aggression of NATO in and through Ukraine’s governments. The recognition of sovereignty does not outweigh the right of self-defense.5 The fact that the Russian Federation has not engaged in military retaliation for multiple violations of its territory does not mean that it has waived or forfeited those territorial rights. 6

    That is the ultimate premise upon which most of the critique and attack on Russian military action has been based. There is a principle of English common law by which the convention of traversing private property can create a prescriptive easement – a right of way – which the titular owner of the property can no longer obstruct.7 Title must be actively and conspicuously asserted to remain enforceable. This is augmented by the concept of adverse possession whereby a party may assert title to land occupied for a given period and have that title sustained against the original owner by virtue of that owner’s failure or neglect to challenge the possession. In other words, there is no such thing as absolute title: it must always be effectively asserted.

    Common law, while not necessarily enshrined in statutes, can be seen as an expression of the underlying social and psychological conventions prevailing in a regime. Although a nation-state would not appear comparable with a private home or farm, the material beliefs held and practiced in daily life do shape the prejudices of those who debate politics and political concepts. That is what makes this kind of law “common” – as opposed to the details of statutes or treaties.

    The Anglo-American view of sovereignty is implemented by people for whom such fluid ideas of property, title and boundaries are conventional. This can be seen throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in every aspect of international-law practice. Even the so-called international judiciary has been formed or deformed by such assumptions, with some contradictory concessions to continental jurisprudence. The extremes to which disputes in Britain and the US lead to litigation are also an indication of the operational instability of legal conventions and norms – and of the level of aggression in everyday violation of whatever norms may be created by statute or courts.

    NATO often appears absurd because its continental European bureaucrats utter pronouncements wholly at odds with their own cultural and legal traditions in order to articulate the policies generated by their Anglo-American principals. On the other hand this is part of the Anglo-American sleight of hand: framing their imperial designs in the alien terms of continental European politics. No amount of fealty or obsequy can conceal the fact that neither Stoltenberg nor Von der Leyen are natural “common law” politicians.8 That is one reason their insincerity is so blatant. They both try to present essentially Anglo-American imperial objectives as if they were continental peninsular. Their statements are incredulous and can be dismissed on their face. The real issue — which they are employed to conceal — is the anti-Russian policy of the Anglo-American Empire. To rectify the name of this policy and the actions derived from it would openly deny any pretense of sovereignty in occupied Germany and the vassal monarchies that comprise the core of NATO.9

    So to return to the debate about the war that continued with Russia’s military response in the Ukraine, the issues ought to be described in the way the antagonists actually see them and not using the distorted language of professional propagandists.

    The world has been at war no later than when behind the pretext of a constructive “emergency of international concern” — an asset of the Anglo-American international organisation cartel — presented the fictive requirements for a global state of martial law.10 Let us call it what it is. Martial law is imposed for a state of war. The enemy in this case was the world’s ordinary population — the 99% some would say. As I wrote two years ago, the WHO exercised implied authority to empower the Anglo-American Empire to commence a global counter-insurgency.11 Like similar counter-insurgency wars fought by that Empire, the focus of operations has been the global drug-weapons-energy cartel. This cartel is managed by the espionage organisations and organised criminal gangs shielded by US-UK forces and those of their closest allies.12

    Under these conditions of global counter-insurgency, the Anglo-American Empire has intensified its operations (war) against its historical enemies/competitors Russia and China. The guiding principle by which this war is fought in the saturation propaganda of the biggest psychological operation since the founding of the Roman Catholic Church can be stated simply: Use it or lose it. There are no human rights, civil rights or sovereign rights which the Anglo-American Empire is obliged to respect. The only rights anyone has are those that the person or nation actually exercises. That exercise must be “open and notorious” (the words comes from common law meaning generally known and as such undeniable).

    Beginning in March 2020 most of the world’s citizenry was tricked and bullied into surrendering all their natural rights.13 Now, two years later, they are finding just how difficult it is to counter adverse possession of all they surrendered under martial law. At the same time, “astute” observers have failed to take seriously the trespass of NATO and other forces of the Anglo-American Empire’s cartels. They have willfully ignored the conspicuous assertion of sovereign rights and privileges by Russia (and China). They have downplayed or ignored – when not apologising for – the violations committed since 1991 (at least).

    The Russian Federation, pursuant to the decisions of its highest legislative and executive bodies, ordered deployment of military force to actively and conspicuously assert its sovereign rights against a government controlling a territory adjacent to it which has collaborated in attacks on its territory and people, violating those sovereign rights. Thus, consistent with the more general (as opposed to Anglo-American) concepts of international law, it is engaged in the right to self-defense. This claim is not diminished or forfeited either by failure to so act earlier or by the refusal of the opposing party to acknowledge violations committed.

    The end of the military operations by forces of the Russian Federation in Ukraine can only be considered in the context of a resolution (dare anyone say “end”) of the world war commenced by the Anglo-American Empire in 2020. Threats by agents and assets of that regime to continue guerrilla war against Russia in Ukraine only amplify the necessity of grasping the Russian actions in Ukraine as a response to Anglo-American aggression. Until the subjects of that Empire are capable of grasping that and accepting responsibility for that aggression (not only against Russia) and reasserting those human rights they forfeited to their criminal oligarchs two years ago, (not only) central Europe will remain a very messy place indeed.

    1. The cultural historian Morse Peckham was fond of saying that “man does not live by bread alone, but mainly by platitudes.” Historically Ukraine has been a “bread basket”. Germany has certainly been able to turn much of its arable land into fields of biomass because Western domination of the Ukrainian economy permits importation of cheap grain from Ukrainian fields. Many of the strategic goals of Unternehmen Barbarossa (the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union) lay in Ukraine: grain, oil, access to the Black Sea, etc. historically, the West has only paid lip service to Ukrainian sovereignty.
    2. In his address to the Russian people on 21 February 2022, Vladimir Putin credited Lenin with the creation of the Ukraine as a republic. He argued that this—as part of Lenin’s policy for the nationalities issue—was intended to assure Bolshevik control over Russia. Putin presents himself as an opponent of the Soviet Union, hence he considers such a policy negative and a violation of Russian sovereignty. However, Lenin was not immune to the problems of suppressing foreign intervention in the Russian civil war—of which the US was a part with troops in Russia until 1921. Lenin had to accommodate both the Wilsonian ideology and the threatened disintegration of Russia through foreign invasion. The Soviet Union would not have been the first federal state to factually deny the formal conditions of federation; e.g. the US Civil War.
    3. The “white dominions” were those constituents of the empire covered by the Statute of Westminster (1931): Australia, Canada, Irish Free State, Newfoundland (which was not yet part of Canada), New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa. Conspicuously absent was India. Along with India, the rest of the British Empire was not “self-governing”.
    4. The Federal Reserve Act (1913) was based on the Aldrich Plan conceived secretly at the so-called Jekyll Island conference (1910). The design of the Federal Reserve System was based on many key features of the Bank of England, a privately owned bank with monopoly powers over the country’s money. Coherence with the BoE model was assured by the participation of the Warburg and Morgan interests. Although the Aldrich Plan failed in Congress, a modified version was adopted. The key element was the private control of the nation’s monetary system—as in the UK.
    5. The US circumvented the  ostensible intent of the UN Charter to enshrine the prohibition of war (the 1928 ”Kellogg-Briand Pact”, General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy) and establish the UN as the sole venue for international disputes, with the Security Council responsible for the use of force by including provisions that permitted so-called “collective security” arrangements. This sleight of hand was used to justify the creation of NATO outside the UN framework. NATO has commonly been portrayed as a defence against the Soviet-led “Warsaw Pact”. This too is propaganda. NATO was founded before the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Union only initiated its own collective security agreement after US bombing of the Soviet Union while the US was waging war against Korea and China (1951-53).
    6. In Putin’s address to the Russian nation on 24 February 2022, he detailed the NATO transgressions which Russia had endured since 1991. Many of these went unreported or under-reported at the time. Rick Rozoff (Anti-Bellum) has been posting blow-by-blow reports of NATO actions all along Russia’s border for years using NATO press releases and official publications for operations from Estonia to Kazakhstan.
    7. The inception of a prescriptive easement can be prevented by appropriately defending the ownership rights. A well-known example is the closure of the central court of Rockefeller Plaza in New York City (where the ice rink is) for one day in the year to interrupt the period of otherwise continuous public access that would create such a prescriptive easement.
    8. Jens Stoltenberg is the Norwegian NATO General Secretary. Ursula von der Leyen is the President of the European Commission, the junta that runs the European Union on behalf of its multi-national corporate cartels.
    9. While it is tempting to assume that NATO is comprised of democracies, the fact is that core members are monarchies; e.g., United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, and Spain. Until 1974, NATO included outright dictatorships like Portugal, Spain, Greece and Turkey. Constitutionalism notwithstanding, monarchy has been an essential part of NATO’s political culture.
    10. The declaration of a “health emergency of international concern“ by the Gates-dominated, Rockefeller-founded World Health Organization in 2020 was only possible by regulatory manipulation and statutory deception perpetrated after the 2009 “Swine Flu pandemic“. The definition of “pandemic” was changed. This bureaucratic fraud has been discussed everywhere except by the general public which is still misled by official deceit.
    11. In Dissident Voice: From Rags to Riches (2 April 2020) “The First Circle” (24 April 2020), “Economic Epidemic” (2 May 2020), “The Fourth Circle” (29 September 2020). See also “The Military and Intelligence  Origins of Public Health” (1 October 2021) and The Real Anthony Fauci, reviewed there.
    12. Douglas Valentine, The CIA as Organised Crime, also  reviewed by this author.
    13. George Carlin rendered a very sober summary of the problem of rights, as popularly understood in the West –“Rights and Privileges”.
    The post Not by Bread Alone, but Mainly by Platitudes first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Russia’s Disinformation Machine Runs So Deep, Some Don’t Know War Is Happening

    Ukrainian servicemen assist a person while people cross a destroyed bridge as they evacuate the city of Irpin, northwest of Kyiv, during heavy shelling and bombing on March 5, 2022, 10 days after Russia launched a military invasion on Ukraine.

    Imagine that you, as a refugee from extreme violence in Ukraine, called your family across the border for help — and were flatly told they did not believe you, that there was no war. You’ve witnessed the indiscriminate shelling of your city, including your own apartment building. You have been hiding in a train station with a thousand others as the crash and smash of an artillery bombardment shakes the rubble from the cracked ceiling. You’ve seen dead people, soldiers and civilians, left in the street. If this is not real, “real” does not exist. How can your relatives in Russia not know this is happening?

    The Washington Post explains:

    As Ukrainians deal with the devastation of the Russian attacks in their homeland, many are also encountering a confounding and almost surreal backlash from family members in Russia, who refuse to believe that Russian soldiers could bomb innocent people, or even that a war is taking place at all.

    These relatives have essentially bought into the official Kremlin position: that President Vladimir V. Putin’s army is conducting a limited “special military operation” with the honorable mission of “de-Nazifying” Ukraine. Mr. Putin has referred to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a native Russian speaker with a Jewish background, as a “drug-addled Nazi” in his attempts to justify the invasion.

    Those narratives are emerging amid a wave of disinformation emanating from the Russian state as the Kremlin moves to clamp down on independent news reporting while shaping the messages most Russians are receiving.

    It is estimated that there are approximately 11 million people in Russia with relatives in Ukraine. It would be an act of stupendous hubris for Russian President Vladimir Putin to believe he could keep so many in the dark about the reality of Ukraine, but this is exactly what he has endeavored to do. Most of what passed for an independent press in Russia has been swept away, and overwhelmingly, the information being provided comes from Russian state media. There is no war, they preach, no mass civilian displacement. This is a limited act of liberation to free Ukraine from Nazi control by way of precision strikes on military targets only, they say, with Russian soldiers bringing food and warm clothes to all affected civilians.

    It is an absolute wonder, however thoroughly horrifying, that Putin is attempting to pull off a gaslighting of such magnitude. Russia is not North Korea, isolated nearly entirely by an all-controlling authoritarian state. Russia is a world power, and has a booming international oil and gas business that has made itself globally indispensable even as Putin rains war crimes down on a neighbor. Indeed, it is that very energy sector that has saved it from the worst possible sanctions so far. Attack Russia’s oil economy and the rest of Europe — which depends heavily on Russian oil — could go dark, badly rattling the resolve of NATO in the face of crumbling economies and a restive population.

    However, Russia’s disinformation campaign should not look entirely unfamiliar to us in the United States. Let us not forget that, not so long ago, we were led into a long and bloody war under the false pretenses of “weapons of mass destruction,” which reverberated across mainstream media. In certain media sectors, those official lies echo strongly to this day.

    And then, there is the lie-based future Donald Trump and his allies have been striving to construct for the U.S. for the last seven years. Any story not in praise of Trumpism is immediately labeled false, backed by an anti-logic that mangles civic discourse beyond recognition. Even trying to deconstruct a Trumpist’s “fake news” charge is a victory for the one leveling it, because it means you have accepted the premise that it could be fake news, thus giving partisans just enough of a peg to hang their hat on.

    With a tight enough media bubble, reinforced by the long-espoused idea that other viewpoints stem from evil sources and must be shunned as a moral imperative, a segment of any population can be manipulated and even controlled in ways that leave those outside looking in astonished and stunned. While Trump likely would not have been able to hide a whole war with a neighbor, he has painted a masterwork of disinformation about COVID-19, masks, vaccines and basic safety measures. Tens of millions have bought what he is peddling, to the ongoing detriment of the COVID fight, leaving the country badly fractured and unable to escape the gravity well of the pandemic.

    Yet, we in the U.S. independent media know well that state attempts to manipulate public opinion cannot easily quell grassroots movements. Where there is war and repression, there is resistance, and the same is true in Russia in this moment. More than 13,000 antiwar protesters have been arrested in Russia, and still they come.

    And resistance to the tyranny of the outside invaders is a touchstone of the Ukrainian ethos. They will not surrender it lightly.

    Meanwhile, those of us in the United States, confronting Putin’s disinformation machine, must not assume that it can be torn down by sanctions, our own military and state mechanisms of information warfare. Rather, we must take note of the fact that if many thousands of Russians are protesting in the face of massive state repression, grassroots channels of information are being used and new ones created. We must work our hardest to amplify our own channels for truth, particularly those that lift up grassroots resistance movements. As Khury Petersen-Smith writes in Truthout, “Our challenge is to build protest across borders that stands in solidarity with those facing the violence of war, and is independent — and defiant of — the governments where we reside.”

    If Voice of America can do it in the name of U.S.-sponsored propaganda, we can do it for the truth, for Ukraine, and for people everywhere suffering through a starvation diet of lies.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • National Endowment for Democracy Deletes Records of Funding Projects in Ukraine

    A picture containing text, flag Description automatically generated
    [Source: ned.org]

    Deletion needed to preserve big lie of an unprovoked Russian invasion

    The National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—a CIA offshoot founded in the early 1980s to advance “democracy promotion” initiatives around the world—has deleted all records of funding projects in Ukraine from their searchable “Awarded Grants Search” database.

    The archived webpage captured February 25, 2022 from 14:53 shows that NED granted $22,394,281 in the form of 334 awards to Ukraine between 2014 to the present. The capture at 23:10 the same day shows “No results found” for Ukraine. As of right now, there are still “No results found” for Ukraine.

    Searching using “Ukraine” as a keyword (as opposed to a “Project Country” in the original captures) yields “No results found.” Searching for the titles of the funded projects listed in the last “intact” web capture yields no results.

    Additionally, the current database search criteria have been restricted, previously funding from 2014 to present could be searched, currently only 2017 to present is searchable per the drop-down menus. There are multiple news reports before February 25 corroborating this $22,394,281 amount.

    Validating the Big Lie

    The erasure of the NED’s records is necessary to validate the Biden administration’s big lie—echoed in the media—that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked.”

    In a recent statement of solidarity with Ukraine, the NED acknowledged that it had been a “proud partner of Ukraine’s civil society groups, media outlets, and human rights defenders since 1989—before the Ukrainian people declared independence in 1991—as they have confronted enormous challenges in building an independent and free country.”

    NED President Duane Wilson admitted at an NED forum on Ukraine on March 4 that Ukraine was the NED’s fourth largest grant-making program around the world. Wilson said that “the endowment is proud that we have had Ukraine as a major partner since 1989, before independence, supporting Ukrainian civil society organizations.”

    A person in a suit and tie Description automatically generated with medium confidence
    Duane Wilson [Source: ned.org]

    Exposing Russian but Not Ukrainian War Crimes

    The NED’s anti-Russian agenda was detailed by one of the speakers at the March 4th forum, Olha Aivagurski, who said that a lot of her work with an NED funded NGO focused on documenting Russian war crimes.

    Neglected was Ukrainian army war crimes, whose scale is detailed in a new RT News documentary “Donbass, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.”

    It includes footage of excavation of mass grave sites in Donbass where neo-Nazi militias attached to the Ukrainian army massacred and then buried hundreds of civilians.1

    A picture containing outdoor, wooden, wood, old Description automatically generated
    Mass grave site in Luhansk featured in RT news documentary but not mainstream U.S. media. [Source: aljazeera.com]

    The NED, however, is committed to advancing the cartoonish narrative depicting Ukraine as a valiant David fighting the evil Russian bear.

    Color Revolutions

    The NED played a pivotal role in helping to trigger the conflict with Russia by supporting two color revolutions directed against Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych—a potential successor to Volodymyr Zelensky if Russia wins.

    The 2004 color revolution replaced Yanukovych with Viktor Yushchenko, who favored admitting Ukraine to NATO and adopted an International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment program that benefitted U.S. investors while cutting social programs.

    Image -- The Orange Revolution: demonstration.
    Ukraine’s 2004 orange revolution. [Source: encyclopediaofukraine.com]

    NED activists employed a broad public relations strategy that included: a) busing paid out-of-town protesters into Kyiv; b) creating an online TV protest station and agitation paraphernalia; and c) providing offshore training to the anti-Yanukovych student leadership. The strategy was based on the writings of Gene Sharp and a template that the NED had successfully employed in Serbia with a youth group called “Otpor,” which helped secure the defeat of socialist Slobodan Milosovic in September 2000 elections.

    Gene Sharp: Author of the nonviolent revolution rulebook - BBC News
    Coup maestro Gene Sharp. [Source: bbc.com]

    A parallel approach was used during the February 2014 Maidan Square uprising which resulted in Yanukovych’s ouster—he had been reelected in 2010—and the advent of a pro-Western regime in Kyiv.

    During the fall of 2013, the NED named as a Dante Fascell fellow Sergii Leschenko, a journalist who exposed how Yanukovych had paid Republican party strategist Paul Manafort $1.2 million as a political consultant.2

    A person in a suit and tie Description automatically generated with low confidence
    [Source: cima.ned.org]

    As a sign of the NED’s influence, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (2014-2020)—a main beneficiary of the Maidan coup currently awaiting trial on treason charges—bestowed the Order of Princess Olga, one of Ukraine’s highest honors, on Dr. Nadia Diuk,[42] a former vice president and senior adviser to the NED for Europe and Eurasia.

    Ukraine's Democratic Choice – Nadia Diuk - YouTube
    The late Nadia Diuk, right, pontificates at NED forum. [Source: youtube.com]

    Preserving Fiction of an Unprovoked Russian Invasion

    In 2020, the NED provided $4.6 million to Ukraine for purposes that included raising awareness of alleged human rights abuses by Russia in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and fomenting opposition and resistance to Russia.

    The large scope of the NED’s program makes clear the organization’s importance. However, with the Biden administration intent on preserving the fiction that the Russian invasion/counter-offensive was unprovoked, censorship and the deletion of records is necessary.

    [Camilla Thompson contributed to the reporting.]

  • First appeared on CovertAction Magazine.
    1. A U.S. journalist quoted in the film, George Eliason, stated that he repeatedly sent reports of war crimes to American media outlets which ignored him.
    2. Leschenko subsequently became a member of parliament where he lobbied for Ukraine’s closer integration with Europe. At the time, Leschenko joined the party of Ukraine’s fifth president Petro Poroshenko, but then supported neoliberal Volodymr Zelensky. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Leschenko compared Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler.
    The post National Endowment for Democracy Deletes Records of Funding Projects in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Would A “Cold” War Be The Best News Around?

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been widely described as the beginning of a new cold war, much like the old one in both its cast of characters and ideological nature. “In the contest between democracy and autocracy, between sovereignty and subjugation, make no mistake — freedom will prevail,” President Biden asserted in a televised address to the nation the day Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. But while Russia and the West disagree on many issues of principle, this is not a replay of the Cold War. It’s an all-too-geopolitical twenty-first-century struggle for advantage on a highly contested global chessboard. If comparisons are in order, think of this moment as more akin to the situation Europe confronted prior to World War I than in the aftermath of World War II.

    The post Would A “Cold” War Be The Best News Around? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Ukraine’s Top Negotiator Says Kiev Open To ‘Non-NATO Models’

    In an early sign of compromise following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine late last month, a senior member on Kiev’s negotiation team said his country is open to remaining outside of the NATO military bloc – a key security concern raised by Moscow time and again.

    The post Ukraine’s Top Negotiator Says Kiev Open To ‘Non-NATO Models’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Ukrainian anarchists are calling for international support

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February has left many people feeling powerless. More than 1.7 million Ukrainian people have been forced to flee the country. And the United Nations has recorded at least 1,123 civilian casualties since since the conflict began, although it admits that figures may actually be much higher. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service estimates that at least 2000 civilians have died.

    Moreover, Belarusian troops are now backing up the Russian invading forces.

    On 5 March, the UN reported that at least 19 children had been killed and 31 injured. One of those killed was a schoolgirl called Polina who was shot dead on 5 March by Russian forces. Polina was in her final year at primary school. She was killed when Russian forces opened fire on her family car as they fled Kyiv. The previous day, an 18-month-old baby was killed in Mariupol.

    For more on the devastation and suffering caused by the Russian invasion, you can read this article by Tom Coburg for The Canary.

    Supporting the resistance

    Amid the destruction, people are busy organising resistance to the invasion as well as providing mutual aid to refugees, and they need our support. Anarchists in Ukraine are mobilising against the Russian invasion. They’re calling for international support and solidarity. An article published by Ukrainian anarchists on the CrimethInc website a few days before the Russian invasion started reads:

    Anarchists are now trying to create horizontal grassroots ties in society, based on common interests, so that communities can address their own needs, including self-defense.

    Ukrainian anarchists have now set-up their own international detachment to resist the Russian invasion.

    But this isn’t the first time anarchists in Ukraine have organised themselves militarily. During the revolutionary war that followed the overthrow of the Russian monarchy, Nestor Makhno and other anarchists set up an independent peasant army. It grew to as many as 100,000 people. An anarchist revolution based on “village assemblies, communes and free soviets” developed in Ukraine, until the Maknovist army was finally tragically defeated by the Bolshevik Red Army in 1921.

    Operation Solidarity

    Operation Solidarity is a new initiative supporting those displaced by the Russian attack. It’s also fundraising to support the armed resistance against the invasion. Support packs containing first aid kits and personal hygiene items – funded by international donations – are now ready to be sent to “comrades in the unit of the Territorial Defenсe Forces”.

    The Operation Solidarity website – launched just after the invasion – reads:

    We are supporters of horizontal society, solidarity and cooperation from different cities of Ukraine. Today we have united in the volunteer project [Operation Solidarity] in order to jointly help all healthy forces of society to counteract imperialist aggression against our country. We plan to collect humanitarian aid and fundraising in favor of territorial defense fighters and in support of all grassroots initiatives that unite people in confronting a common threat. We also plan to help refugees, host social events and spread the practices of equal decision-making and direct democracy.

    Operation Solidarity is asking people to share information, organise demonstrations and events, and – importantly – donate funds.

    Funds for tactical masks and radios

    Anarchists in Ukraine are calling for international support to buy:

    – Bulletproof vests of class 4 or higher (x30);

    – Ballistic helmets (x30);

    – Tourniquets and pouches (x15 + more);

    – Military first aid kits and pouches (x30);

    – IIFS (Individual Integrated Fighting Systems) (x30);

    – Knee pads (x15 pairs);

    – Walkie-talkies, headsets and pouches (x30);

    – Tactical gloves (x30 pairs).

    Operation Solidarity is managing donations.

    International solidarity is our weapon

    There are many ways that you can organise to support the anti-authoritarian struggle against Russian imperialism in Ukraine from the UK. This could be through organising a fundraiser or awareness-raising event wherever you are, or sharing news about the struggle. You could also donate to Operation Solidarity. The people of Ukraine need our support. We need to show them that they are not alone.

    Featured image via Medium/BlackHeadquarter

    By Tom Anderson

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Repression of Protesters Intensifies in Russia as More Than 13,000 Are Arrested

    Repression of Protesters Intensifies in Russia as More Than 13,000 Are Arrested

    We speak to Russian activist and historian Ilya Budraitskis after over 5,000 antiwar protesters were detained on Sunday as part of a sweeping crackdown on Russian civil society and the media. Activists in Russia are relying on alternative outlets such as social media for information, as the Russian government continues to censor major news outlets. Writers and independent news outlets such as Novaya Gazeta have faced the threat of criminal investigations for spreading so-called disinformation, which includes using the words “invasion” and “war” to describe Russia’s military actions in Ukraine, says Budraitskis.

    Please check back later for full transcript.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Russian Invasion Isn’t a Cold War Replay. It Could Portend Something Worse.

    This photograph taken on March 4, 2022, shows a school building damaged by shelling in the city of Chernihiv in Ukraine.

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been widely described as the beginning of a new cold war, much like the old one in both its cast of characters and ideological nature. “In the contest between democracy and autocracy, between sovereignty and subjugation, make no mistake — freedom will prevail,” President Biden asserted in a televised address to the nation the day Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. But while Russia and the West disagree on many issues of principle, this is not a replay of the Cold War. It’s an all-too-geopolitical twenty-first-century struggle for advantage on a highly contested global chessboard. If comparisons are in order, think of this moment as more akin to the situation Europe confronted prior to World War I than in the aftermath of World War II.

    Geopolitics — the relentless struggle for control over foreign lands, ports, cities, mines, railroads, oil fields, and other sources of material and military might — has governed the behavior of major powers for centuries. Think of Gibraltar, Pearl Harbor, the diamond mines of Africa, or the oil fields of the Middle East. Aspiring world powers, from the Roman Empire on, have always proceeded from the assumption that acquiring control over as many such places as possible — by force if necessary — was the surest path to greatness.

    During the Cold War, it was considered uncouth in governing circles to openly express such blatantly utilitarian motives. Instead, both sides fabricated lofty ideological explanations for their intense rivalry. Even then, though, geopolitical considerations all too often prevailed. For example, the Truman Doctrine, that early exemplar of Cold War ideological ferocity, was devised to justify Washington’s efforts to resist Soviet incursions in the Middle East, then a major source of oil for Europe (and of revenue for American oil firms).

    Today, ideological appeals are still deployed by top officials to justify predatory military moves, but it’s becoming ever more difficult to disguise the geopolitical intent of so much international behavior. Russia’s assault on Ukraine is the most ruthless and conspicuous recent example, but hardly the only one. For years now, Washington has sought to counter China’s rise by bolstering U.S. military strength in the western Pacific, prompting a variety of countermoves by Beijing. Other major powers, including India and Turkey, have also sought to extend their geopolitical reach. Not surprisingly, the risk of wars on such a global chessboard is likely to grow, which means understanding contemporary geopolitics becomes ever more important. Let’s begin with Russia and its quest for military advantage.

    Fighting for Position in the European Battlespace

    Yes, Russian President Vladimir Putin has justified his invasion in ideological terms by claiming that Ukraine was an artificial state unjustly detached from Russia. He’s also denigrated the Ukrainian government as infiltrated by neo-Nazis still seeking to undo the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II. These considerations seem to have grown more pervasive in Putin’s mind as he assembled forces for an attack on Ukraine. Nevertheless, these should be viewed as an accumulation of grievances overlaying an all too hardcore set of geopolitical calculations.

    From Putin’s perspective, the origins of the Ukrainian conflict date back to the immediate post-Cold War years, when NATO, taking advantage of Russia’s weakness at the time, relentlessly expanded eastward. In 1999, three former Soviet-allied states, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, all previously members of the Warsaw Pact (Moscow’s version of NATO), were incorporated into the alliance; in 2004, Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia were added, along with three former actual republics of the Soviet Union (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). For NATO, this staggering enlargement moved its own front lines of defense ever farther from its industrial heartlands along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. Meanwhile, Russia’s front lines shrank hundreds of miles closer to its borders, putting its own heartland at greater risk and generating deep anxiety among senior officials in Moscow, who began speaking out against what they saw as encirclement by hostile forces.

    “I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe,” Putin declared at a Munich Security Conference in 2007. “On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?”

    It was, however, NATO’s 2008 decision to offer membership to Georgia and Ukraine, two former Soviet republics, that thoroughly inflamed Moscow’s security anxieties. After all, Ukraine shares a 600-mile border with Russia, overlooking a large swath of its industrial heartland. Should it ever actually join NATO, Russian strategists feared, the West could deploy powerful weapons, including ballistic missiles, right on its border.

    “The West has explored the territory of Ukraine as a future theater, future battlefield, that is aimed against Russia,” Putin declared in a fire-breathing address on February 21st, just before Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border. “If Ukraine was to join NATO it would serve as a direct threat to the security of Russia.”

    For Putin and his top security aides, the invasion was primarily intended to preclude such a future possibility, while moving Russia’s front lines farther from its own vulnerable heartland and thereby enhancing its strategic advantage in the European battlespace. As it happens, they seem to have underestimated the strength of the forces arrayed against them — both the determination of ordinary Ukrainians to repel the Russian military and the West’s unity in imposing harsh economic sanctions — and so are likely to emerge from the fighting in a worse position. But any geopolitical foray of this magnitude entails such draconian risks.

    Mackinder, Mahan, and U.S. Strategy

    Washington, too, has been guided by cold-blooded geopolitical considerations over the past century-plus and, like Russia, has often faced resistance as a result. As a major trading nation with a significant dependence on access to foreign markets and raw materials, the U.S. has long sought control over strategic islands globally, including Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines, using force when needed to secure them. That quest continues to this day, with the Biden administration seeking to preserve or expand U.S. access to bases in Okinawa, Singapore, and Australia.

    In such endeavors, U.S. strategists have been influenced by two major strands of geopolitical thinking. One, informed by the English geographer Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), held that the combined Eurasian continent possessed such a large share of global wealth, resources, and population that any nation capable of controlling that space would functionally control the world. From that followed the argument that “island states” like Great Britain and, metaphorically speaking, the United States, had to maintain a significant presence on the margins of Eurasia, intervening if necessary to prevent any single Eurasian power from gaining control over all the others.

    The American naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) similarly held that, in a globalizing world where access to international commerce was essential to national survival, “control of the seas” was even more critical than control of Eurasia’s margins. An ardent student of British naval history, Mahan, who served as president of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, from 1886 to 1893, concluded that, like Britain, his country must possess a powerful navy and a range of overseas bases to advance its status as a preeminent global trading power.

    From 1900 on, the United States has pursued both geopolitical strategies, though on opposite sides of Eurasia. With respect to Europe, it has largely hewed to Mackinder’s approach. During World War I, despite widespread domestic misgivings, President Woodrow Wilson was persuaded to intervene by the Anglo-French argument that a German victory would lead to a single power capable of dominating the world and so threatening vital American interests. The same line of reasoning led President Franklin Roosevelt to support U.S. entry into World War II in Europe and his successors to deploy substantial forces there to prevent the Soviet Union (today, Russia) from dominating the continent. This, in fact, is NATO’s essential reason for existing.

    In the Asia-Pacific theater, however, the United States has largely followed Mahan’s approach, seeking control over island military bases and maintaining the region’s most powerful naval force. When, however, the U.S. has gone to war on the Asian mainland, as in Korea and Vietnam, disaster and ultimate withdrawal followed. As a result, Washington’s geopolitical strategy in our time has focused on maintaining island military bases across the region and ensuring that this country keeps its overwhelming naval superiority there.

    Great-Power Competition in the Twenty-First Century

    In this century, Washington’s increasingly fraught post-9/11 global war on terror (GWOT), with its costly and futile invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, came to be viewed by many strategists in Washington as a painful and misguided diversion from a long-established focus on global geopolitics. A fear only grew that it was providing China and Russia with opportunities to advance their own geopolitical ambitions, while the U.S. was distracted by terrorism and insurgency. By 2018, America’s senior military leadership, reaching the end of its patience with the endless war on terror, proclaimed a new strategic doctrine of “great-power competition” — a perfect euphemism for geopolitics.

    “In this new era of great power competition, our warfighting advantages over strategic competitors are being challenged,” explained Secretary of Defense Mark Esper in 2019. As the Pentagon winds down the GWOT, he noted, “we are working to re-allocate our forces and equipment to priority theaters that enable us to better compete with China and Russia.”

    That, he went on to explain, would require concerted action on two fronts: in Europe against an increasingly assertive, well-armed Russia, and in Asia against an ever more powerful China. There, Esper sought an accelerated buildup of air and naval forces along with ever closer military cooperation with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and — increasingly — India.

    In the wake of this country’s Afghan War defeat, such an outlook has been embraced by the Biden administration which, at least until the current crisis over Ukraine, saw China, not Russia, as the greatest threat to America’s geopolitical interests. Because of its growing wealth, enhanced technological capacity, and ever-improving military, China alone was viewed as capable of challenging American dominance on the geopolitical chessboard. “China, in particular, has rapidly become more assertive,” the White House stated in its Interim National Security Strategic Guidance of March 2021. “It is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system.”

    In early February, to provide high-level guidance for a “whole-of-nation” struggle to counter China, the White House issued a new “Indo-Pacific Strategy,” just as Russia was mobilizing its forces along Ukraine’s borders. Describing the Indo-Pacific as the true epicenter of world economic activity, the strategy called for a multifaceted effort to bolster America’s strategic position and — to use a word from another age — contain China’s rise. In a classic expression of geopolitical thinking, it stated:

    “Our objective is not to change [China] but to shape the strategic environment in which it operates, building a balance of influence in the world that is maximally favorable to the United States, our allies and partners.”

    In implementing this blueprint, Biden’s national security team views key islands and sea passages as vital to its strategy for containing China. Its senior officials have emphasized the importance of defending what they call the “first island chain” — including Japan and the Philippines — that separates China from the open Pacific. Smack in the middle of that chain is, of course, Taiwan, claimed by China as its own and now viewed in Washington (in a typical Mahanian fashion) as essential to U.S. security.

    In that context, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Affairs Ely Ratner told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in December:

    “I’d like to begin with an overview of why Taiwan’s security is so important to the United States. As you know, Taiwan is located at a critical node within the first island chain, anchoring a network of U.S. allies and partners that is critical to the region’s security and critical to the defense of vital U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific.”

    From Beijing’s point of view, however, such efforts to contain its rise and prevent its assertion of authority over Taiwan are intolerable. Its leaders have repeatedly insisted that U.S. interference there could cross a “red line,” leading to war. “The Taiwan issue is the biggest tinderbox between China and the United States,” said Qin Gang, China’s ambassador to the U.S., recently. “If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road for independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in the military conflict.”

    With Chinese warplanes regularly intruding on Taiwan-claimed airspace and U.S. warships patrolling the Taiwan Strait, many observers expected that Taiwan, not Ukraine, would be the site of the first major military engagement arising from the great-power competition of this era. Some are now suggesting, ominously enough, that a failure to respond effectively to Russian aggression in Ukraine could induce Chinese leaders to begin an invasion of Taiwan, too.

    Other Flashpoints

    Unfortunately, Ukraine and Taiwan are hardly the only sites of contention on the global chessboard today. As great-power competition has gained momentum, other potential flashpoints have emerged because of their strategic location or access to vital raw materials, or both. Among them:

    • The Baltic Sea area containing the three Baltic republics (and former SSRs), Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all now members of an expanded NATO. Vladimir Putin would ideally like to strip them of their NATO membership and once again place them under some form of Russian hegemony.
    • The South China Sea, which borders China as well as Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. China has laid claim to almost this entire maritime expanse and the islands within it, while employing force to prevent other claimants from exercising their developmental rights in the area. Under Presidents Trump and Biden, the U.S. has vowed to help defend those claimants against Chinese “bullying.”
    • The East China Sea, its uninhabited islands claimed by both China and Japan. Each of them has sent combat planes and ships into the area to assert their interests. Late last year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured Japan’s foreign minister that Washington recognizes its island claims there and would support its forces if China attacked them.
    • The border between India and China, which has been the site of periodic clashes between the militaries of those two countries. The U.S. has expressed sympathy for India’s position, while pursuing ever closer military ties with that country.
    • The Arctic, claimed in part by Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia, and the United States, is believed to harbor vast reserves of oil, natural gas, and valuable minerals, some lying in areas claimed by two or more of those countries. It is also seen by Russia as a safe haven for its nuclear-missile submarines and by China as a potential route for trade between Asia and Europe.

    In recent years, there have been minor clashes or incidents in all of these locations and their frequency is on the rise. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tensions are only going to increase globally, so keep an eye on these flashpoints. History suggests that global geopolitics rarely ends peacefully. Under the circumstances, a new cold war — with militaries largely frozen in place — might just prove good news and that’s about as depressing as it gets.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ilhan Omar Criticizes Biden Visit to Saudi Arabia Over Oil as “Wildly Immoral”

    Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is seen at al-Safa Royal Palace in Mecca on May 31, 2019.

    U.S. President Joe Biden’s advisers are reportedly discussing a possible trip to Saudi Arabia this spring to urge the kingdom to ramp up oil production amid fears of a supply shortage as the United States mulls a ban on Russian crude imports.

    But progressive members of Congress and anti-war commentators were quick to pan the idea of further deepening U.S. ties with Saudi Arabia, pointing to the years-long, catastrophic assault the kingdom has been waging on Yemen since 2015 — often with military and diplomatic support from the U.S. government.

    “Our response to Putin’s immoral war shouldn’t be to strengthen our relationship with the Saudis, who are currently causing the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet in Yemen,” U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) wrote in a Twitter post late Sunday. “Yemenis might not matter to some geopolitically, but their humanity should. This is a wildly immoral act.”

    Axios reported Sunday that a Biden trip to Saudi Arabia would be part of an attempt to “help repair relations and convince the Kingdom to pump more oil.”

    “A hat-in-hand trip would illustrate the gravity of the global energy crisis driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Axios continued. “Biden has chastised Saudi Arabia, and the CIA believes its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was involved in the dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.”

    While the Biden administration has blamed bin Salman for the brutal murder of Khashoggi, it has thus far refused to take steps to punish the Saudi leader. The Biden administration has also been accused of reneging on its promise to end U.S. support for the Saudi kingdom’s war on Yemen, which continues to cause immense suffering and civilian deaths.

    In response to its report on a possible Biden trip to Saudi Arabia in the coming weeks, a White House spokesperson told Axios that the administration doesn’t “have any international travel to announce at this time, and a lot of this is premature speculation.”

    Basav Sen, director of the Climate Justice Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, said Sunday that if Axios’ reporting is accurate, “it’s a disastrously bad idea.”

    “President Biden and his administration are out of touch with reality if they’re pushing for more oil and gas production, in this country or anywhere else,” Sen argued.

    MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan said during his show late Sunday that he finds it “odd that we are going to send our president to Saudi Arabia to say, ‘Give us more oil while you bomb Yemen so we don’t have to get oil from Russia as it bombs Ukraine.’”

    Axios’ report came as Biden administration officials and congressional leaders considered moving to impose a ban on Russian oil imports to the U.S., a proposal framed as part of an attempt to isolate Russia in response to its deadly assault on Ukraine, which has entered its second week with no end in sight. The potential for an import ban on Russian crude helped send oil prices surging.

    As Bloomberg noted Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said over the weekend that “the White House is in ‘very active discussions’ with its European allies about a ban to tighten the economic squeeze on President Vladimir Putin.”

    “The U.S. has so far resisted restrictions on Russian crude imports due to concerns about the impact of rising prices on consumers,” the outlet observed, “but most buyers are refusing to take it, resulting in an embargo in all but name.”

    The U.S. imported an average of roughly 209,000 barrels of crude oil per day from Russia in 2021. According to the International Energy Agency, Russia is the second-largest exporter of crude oil in the world behind Saudi Arabia.

    As The Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein reported last month, “While the media focuses on the conflict in Ukraine, a major cause of the gas price spike has gone overlooked: Moscow’s partnership with Saudi Arabia has grown dramatically in recent years, granting the two largest oil producers in the world the unprecedented ability to collude in oil export decisions.”

    “The desert kingdom’s relationship with the U.S. has chilled in the meantime, as demonstrated earlier this month, when President Joe Biden pleaded with the Saudis to increase oil production — a move that would not only have helped to alleviate rising inflation and gas prices, but also reduced Russia’s extravagant profits amid its aggression against Ukraine,” Klippenstein wrote. “The Saudi king declined.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Russia’s Actions in Ukraine are NOT “Unprovoked”

    The post Russia’s Actions in Ukraine are NOT “Unprovoked” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ukrainian Extremists Prevent People From Leaving Mariupol City and Execute Mayor of Kreminna

    Ukrainian extremist battalions are preventing civilians from leaving the Ukrainian city of Mariupol through a humanitarian corridor, and took them as human shields. Also, Ukrainian extremists executed Mayor of city of Kreminna, Vlodymyr Struk after abducting him from his home.

    The post Ukrainian Extremists Prevent People From Leaving Mariupol City and Execute Mayor of Kreminna appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Talking Up War Is Easy, As Westminster’s Political Outbidding Continues

    The UK’s Premier Johnson, stung by his own Tory right-wingers’ accusations of being “too soft” last week, is setting the agenda for the UK blundering into an all out war with Russia. He wrote  today in The New York Times “Putin must fail and must be seen to fail in this act of aggression”. The humiliation aspect in “seen to fail” is a provocative folly.

    A few days ago it was Labour that was emerging as the more bellicose  party, insisting on ever-more inflammatory measures.  

    The background to this appears to be the case that the UK and its NATO allies are using the Russian invasion of Ukraine to conduct a many faceted destabilisation campaign against Russia, with the aim of removing Putin and the eventual dismemberment of the Russian state. 

    The post Talking Up War Is Easy, As Westminster’s Political Outbidding Continues appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Another Casualty Of The Ukraine Conflict: The Truth

    Unfortunately, observation is blurred and selective. We are poor witnesses to ourselves. Sometimes, we never do gain the perspective needed for a clear rendering of what happened, how we felt and what we did. Oddly, the more peculiar the experience, the less the inclination and ability to reflect on it. Such is the case in regard to the current Ukraine affair. That singular feature is itself noteworthy. For that is not due to indifference – quite the opposite. Washington is the producer and would-be director of the drama as well as the co-star.

    The post Another Casualty Of The Ukraine Conflict: The Truth appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Putin Issues Warning About “Future of Ukrainian Statehood” Amid Refugee Crisis

    People arrive to the Western Railway Station from Zahony after crossing the border at Zahony-Csap as they flee Ukraine on March 6, 2022, in Budapest, Hungary.

    Despite evacuation efforts hampered by Russian shelling, Ukraine is enduring Europe’s most rapidly escalating refugee crisis since the second world war, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees said Sunday.

    “More than 1.5 million refugees from Ukraine have crossed into neighboring countries in 10 days — the fastest-growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II,” tweeted the commissioner, Filippo Grandi.

    Also highlighting the crisis created by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.N. Refugee Agency warned Sunday that “in the coming days millions more lives will be uprooted, unless there is an immediate end to this senseless conflict.”

    Putin, whose deadly assault has been marked by mounting war crime allegations, has shown no signs that he is willing to withdraw Russian forces or cease air attacks that have made it harder for civilians to seek safety. In the Ukrainian city Mariupol, for example, shelling on Sunday led an evacuation effort to be canceled the second day in a row.

    During a televised meeting with Russian flight attendants on Saturday, Putin blamed the war on Ukraine’s leaders and slammed Ukrainian resistance to the invasion.

    “If they continue to do what they are doing, they are calling into question the future of Ukrainian statehood,” he said. “And if this happens, it will be entirely on their conscience.”

    The Russian president also attacked economic sanctions that Western governments have imposed in response to the Russian invasion.

    “These sanctions that are being imposed, they are akin to declaring war,” Putin said. “But thank God, we haven’t got there yet.”

    Putin’s rhetoric since launching the assault of Ukraine on February 24 has heightened concerns about potential nuclear war.

    While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy continues to pressure Western governments and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, anti-war activists and experts fear such action would trigger a further escalation that could have catastrophic consequences on a global scale.

    Global anti-war protests were held throughout the weekend demanding an immediate end to Russia’s war on its neighbor as well as an end to NATO expansion that has long fueled tension in the region.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Why It’s Hard for Most People in the US to Talk About War

    Hundreds of anti-war protesters are gathered at the Times Square in New York City, United States on February 26, 2022, to protest against Russian attacks on Ukraine.

    When former U.S. President George W. Bush released a statement on Ukraine — “condemning Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine,” and calling on the American people to “stand in solidarity with Ukraine and the Ukrainian people as they seek freedom and the right to choose their own future” — I thought to myself, Not now, man. You’re hurting more than you’re helping. And that’s because, as very few Americans will need reminding, the Bush administration took advantage of the public’s emotional vulnerability after the 9/11 militia attacks and preexisting racial dynamics to successfully fabricate the bogeyman of “weapons of mass destruction” and lead the United States to invade and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of fighting terror.

    As Russia is bombing Ukraine under the purported banner of “de-nazification,” so too is the U.S. still dropping bombs in the name of combating “terror.” According to the monitoring group Airwars, the United States Coalition in Iraq and Syria is responsible for at least one civilian death in Syria, AFRICOM declared a strike in Somalia, and the U.S. is alleged to have made a strike in Yemen — all this year. To underscore the devastation these airstrikes can have on local communities, The New York Times recently published a detailed report investigating this and how supposed Pentagon accountability measures are not actually functioning.

    I think of statements like Bush’s as sort of “moral lemons” — stances that might look good at first glance, but actually don’t take you anywhere if you buy them. The U.S.’s “moral lemons” are actually a key part of the Russian disinformation strategy. Platforms like RT, Ruptly, Soapbox, Redfish, Breakthrough News, and more take advantage of the lack of accountability around U.S. war crimes to pump out social-media-friendly content on the subject alongside Kremlin disinformation.

    Such disinformation includes claims that, for example, Syrian first responders are actually terrorists, or that NATO is entirely to blame for the invasion of Ukraine, or that distort legitimate concerns about the far right in Ukraine into sweeping claims aimed at justifying the military invasion. It’s remarkably successful, including with many people who are vocally against the “war on terror” and other U.S. wars and interventions — an issue area that is resource-scarce, shame and guilt-driven, and prone to burning people out. But it cannot be emphasized enough: The U.S.’s own imperialist hypocrisy is in a symbiotic relationship with Russian imperialist propaganda. They feed off each other as a means to stir up their own nationalism.

    But left-oriented commentators are not the only ones who struggle to talk about war. Many more people will struggle to talk about war in a way that doesn’t reflect their own racial biases. For example, CBS News Foreign Correspondent Charlie D’Agata was swiftly condemned and later apologized for saying: “ [Ukraine] is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully too — city, where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.”

    Nick Bilton at Vanity Fair said in a now-deleted tweet: “This is arguably the first war we’ve seen (actually seen in real-time) take place in the age of social media,” seemingly forgetting how the Syrian struggle against authoritarianism was so well-documented online, it directly led to dramatic growth in open-source intelligence investigation as a field.

    And as Dalia Hatuqa pointed out on Twitter in response to a tweet by the AP regarding Ukraine and Gaza, biases go down to the prepositional level. “Notice the use of ‘in’ and ‘on’ here,” she says, illustrating how framing Israeli airstrikes as happening “in” Gaza as opposed to “on” Gaza makes it harder for the reader to suss out power dynamics underlying the occupation.

    Indeed, most people in the U.S. have no idea how to talk about war. And in a country that pours investments into producing sophisticated drone weapons, developing and exporting policing methods, and recruiting young people into the military — not to mention killing millions of people through our military operations — conversations about war these days are relatively few and far between, except in moments like this one, when the issue tops international headlines.

    Still, with the rise in popularity of the phrase “end endless wars,” it seems that most people in the United States say they don’t like war: An AP poll finds that 66 percent of Americans don’t believe the war in Afghanistan was worth fighting, for example, while a majority also don’t want the U.S. to take a major role in Russia’s assault on Ukraine. Despite the fact that war, weapons, and security are a foundational part of our culture and a primary financial priority (half of U.S. income taxes go directly to the Pentagon, where we collectively outspend the world on defense), people in the U.S. are currently unenthusiastic about war. So why can’t most of us talk about this central element of our society in useful terms?

    To put it simply: Not liking war is not the same as being antiwar. Where war involves a style of conflict engagement that is rooted in domination, subjugation and armament, being antiwar involves a style of conflict engagement that is rooted in cooperation, collaboration and disarmament. This means many things, on the practical and spiritual level. For example, there are literal campaigns for nonproliferation and weapons disarmament. There is also the ability of disarming someone emotionally in order to de-escalate conflict.

    But to help you imagine what antiwar work looks like on a societal level: The 2020 summer protests calling to defund and abolish police were under the politics of abolition, which itself is also antiwar, as abolition seeks to change the way we understand and engage in conflict, security and safety. Also consider the level of civil mobilization we witnessed in the lead-up to Biden’s inauguration: Almost every sector of society made a statement backing the peaceful transfer of power. The idea that an election could be stolen was so widely repugnant, it forced even “nonpolitical” organizations to take a stance.

    Today, the level of civil noncompliance with the Russian state in support of Ukrainian sovereignty is astounding: In sports, banking, media, in meeting rooms and on the streets, people are speaking up and refusing to go along with “business as usual.” I cheer loudly for noncompliance against Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian state in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, and not without emotion: Russian bombing raids decimated Ghouta, Douma, Aleppo and many other cities in Syria.

    And so, because I detest war, I have to push for the same treatment to be applied to all militarized offenses, from Yemen to Occupied Palestine to Syria to Myanmar and beyond. Call for a ceasefire and disarmament. Amplify strategic messaging on how to desert the army. Freeze assets of the wealthiest state backers. Pressure companies to drop contracts. And so on. This would mean noncompliance with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, the Assad regime and the Myanmar state, to name a few states, until disarmament.

    This would, of course, mean noncompliance with the United States. And this brings us back to the heart of the issue of why it’s difficult to talk about war in this country. One point that people who are rightly skeptical of the United States struggle with goes something like this: Yes, Russian imperialism is bad, but I am in the United States and I am only responsible for the United States. Everything that is happening is all very sad, but we have to focus on resisting our own state’s aggression, since it’s being done in our name and is our primary responsibility.

    Questions of the moral responsibility that U.S. citizens bear in regards to war, and their duty to act and in what ways, have been debated for many decades. But my instinct is that contemporary manifestations of this sentiment are influenced in no small part by the protests leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and protests continuing after the fact. Notably, on February 15, 2003, over 800 cities worldwide mobilized against the U.S. war on Iraq. It did not stop the United States. One glaring difference between this effort to stop war and other case studies is the degree to which we see the usual “neutral” or “nonpolitical” power players take a stance. I don’t believe we saw Coca-Cola cutting contracts with the U.S. military, or sports teams refusing to play the U.S. on the world stage — and it’s worth asking why. In a way, people are saying: We tried noncompliance with war before and it wasn’t enough to stop one of the most hellish campaigns wrought in our name.

    While I can understand why any person might conclude “People in the U.S. only have to worry about the imperialism done in our names,” I do not advise anyone to stay there ideologically, as it’s a position rooted often in fear and is ultimately isolationist. Consider for example, that within our own country are people who have fled wars started by other imperial states — should we tell them to check their political realities at the border? Consider also that states themselves collaborate on policing, surveillance and military campaigns. Consider that wealth and capital also operate transnationally. And consider that people from war zones and the so-called “Global South” have been writing explicitly to U.S. left commentators criticizing our navel-gazing, or as Volodymr Artiukh called it in his recent letter, “U.S.-splaining.”

    So, what should a U.S. antiwar left do today? Take advantage of this moment to educate on Putinism and Russian state propaganda. Acknowledge how the role of NATO is fitting into the conversation today, dispel myths, and offer resources to help more people learn about what it is. Promote the idea of Russians leaving or deserting the army while in battle, and amplify cases of Russian dissent. Connect with former Soviet Union organizations who share the same principles against war and work together on narrative strategy. Educate about the racial inequities of war — of how racial hierarchies play out at borders, of how Russia’s devastating years’ long military campaign in Syria was normalized. Update your geopolitical map: Russia is still bombing Syria, also has a military presence in Libya, backs Ethiopia in its war on Tigray and is the leading arms supplier to the Modi regime.

    And at the same time, we must pour more resources into antiwar work, because without accountability, reparations and reconciliation for U.S. war crimes, it will continue to be challenging for us to talk about war. I’m particularly inspired by the youth-led energy of Dissenters, which is “building local teams of young people across the country to force our elected officials and institutions to divest from war and militarism” and working collaboratively to create new antiwar ecosystems. In addition to materially supporting groups like these, let’s also agitate at our workplaces to make it easier for workers to donate our time to antiwar work and thereby build more vibrant antiwar cultures.

  • Putin, Lenin, Imperialism And The (Real) History Of Ukraine

    Ukraine is a place few people in this country can find on a map. Far fewer have any idea of when and how the Ukrainian state originated, or how it has related to its neighbors over time. So I might make up any random narrative about it, weaving in bits and pieces of truth here and there, and perhaps the majority of my listeners would nod agreeably at my presentation finding no flaws. There are a whole lot of ingredients to work with and to play with when it comes to Ukraine’s history.

    The post Putin, Lenin, Imperialism And The (Real) History Of Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Social media reveals the true nature of Putin’s war on the people of Ukraine

    Content warning: this article includes footage of dead and horrifically wounded civilians

    Over several days, we’ve witnessed images and video footage of Russian military attacks on towns and cities across Ukraine. Most appear to be in residential areas. Footage shows bodies of dead Ukrainians or of the severely wounded crying for help. Much of the video footage was shared on social media. It reveals a war of sheer terror and attrition.

    The reality of Vladimir Putin’s war

    People on the frontline have filmed the reality of what’s happening, as well as the horrific consequences.

    This footage further down, shared by journalist Jake Hanrahan, shows the shocking aftermath of an attack in a residential area of Chernivsky (warning: graphic images):

    There are also claims that Russia deployed cluster bombs in at least three residential areas in the city of Kharkiv:

    This video on Twitter showed multiple missile attacks on a residential area in Kharkiv (referred to here as “Kharkov” – its name in Russian):

    Meanwhile, one video shows what’s purportedly a Russian tank swerving to crush a moving car and any passengers inside it:

    And here, what’s said to be a residential block in Kyiv has been drastically damaged by an attack:

    Shown here is the bombardment of Chernihiv (first video) and the “absolute destruction” of Borodyanka (second video):

    More footage, broadcast on Channel 4 News, shows the devastation in Borodyanka:

    Moreover, a World Health Organisation interactive database shows that five health facilities in Ukraine were attacked.

    And there are claims that a thermobaric bomb launcher, which uses “oxygen from the surrounding air to generate a high-temperature explosion”, was launched towards the Ukrainian border.

    War crimes

    As previously published by The Canary, anarchist and political commentator Noam Chomsky has unequivocally stated that:

    the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a major war crime, ranking alongside the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Hitler-Stalin invasion of Poland in September 1939

    Human Rights Watch (HRW) claims that on 28 February the Russian military deployed cluster bombs in Kharkiv. HRW explains:

    An international treaty bans cluster munitions because of their widespread indiscriminate effect and long-lasting danger to civilians.

    HRW added how more cluster bombs were used in an attack on a hospital:

    On February 24, a Russian ballistic missile carrying a cluster munition struck just outside a hospital in Vuhledar, a town in the Ukrainian government-controlled Donetska region, killing four civilians and injuring another ten, six of them healthcare workers.

    Mixed messaging

    On 27 February, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy issued an appeal for foreign nationals to come to his country to fight against the Russian invaders. He said:

    Anyone who wants to join the defence of Ukraine, Europe and the world can come and fight side by side with the Ukrainians against the Russian war criminals.

    In response, UK foreign secretary Liz Truss announced that:

    If people want to support that struggle [against the Russians in Ukraine] I would support them in doing that.

    Devon Live pointed out that under the Foreign Enlistment Act 1870, it is an offence for a UK citizen to “fight for a foreign power at war with a state the UK is at peace with”. But it fails to mention the “last successful prosecution” under this act: that of Leander Starr Jameson in 1896. Moreover, Devon Live added that the legislation: “was not able to be used against people enlisting in the French Foreign Legion, or fighting against general Franco in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s”.

    Should it be shown that someone aided or joined a proscribed terrorist organisation, they could face prosecution in the English courts. But in a 2020 case, charges were dropped against three British men in regard to support for the mainly Kurdish YPG (Peoples Protection Units). This was after it was shown that British authorities had not banned the units, which were provided with British support. As for Shamina Begum, she lost her British citizenship after being accused of joining Daesh (Isis/Isil), though she was groomed as a 15-year-old.

    Widening solidarity

    Meanwhile people across Europe are offering support to the people of Ukraine in other ways.

    For example, in Berlin hundreds of people welcomed refugees as they arrived from Ukraine, offering them accommodation:

    This Romanian website lists a number of sites that are providing assistance to Ukrainians, while this site lists “Real ways you can help Ukraine as a foreigner”. And this website provides information on how to provide accommodation to Ukrainian refugees.

    Meanwhile, an interactive map provides live updates on resources, including accommodation, for Ukrainian refugees.

    According to the BBC, more than one million Ukrainian refugees have escaped their country and are seeking help from neighbouring countries, although the UK government’s policy on Ukrainian refugees remains unclear.

    Demonstrations

    There have been demonstrations across Europe in solidarity with the Ukrainian people. For example, on the weekend of 26/27 February, Berlin saw at least 100,000 demonstrators take to the streets and thousands gathered in the Estonian capital of Tallinn. It was the same in Bern, Helsinki, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Sofia, Madrid, Brussels and London.

    And in Russia, undaunted by the likelihood of years of imprisonment, anti-war protesters are planning more demonstrations in a number of cities:

    Putin’s ‘rationale’ for the war

    On 21 February, in a televised address, president Putin explained his rationale for taking military action against Ukraine. He further explained that he regards the people of Russia and of Ukraine as being one. Moreover, he believes Ukraine is not a sovereign state and that it was “entirely created by Russia”.

    Some of Russia’s concerns about NATO expansion are outlined in this leaked cable published by WikiLeaks. 

    An article in The Conversation summarises some of the arguments regarding Russian-Ukrainian relations. For example, it’s argued that from the Russian perspective:

    Russia’s security concerns are in fact genuine, and that NATO expansion eastward is seen by Russians as directed against their country. Putin has been clear for many years that if continued, the expansion would likely be met with serious resistance by the Russians, even with military action.

    However, the irony is that should Putin succeed in annexing much of if not all of Ukraine, Russia will end up bordering three additional NATO member countries: Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. Either Putin has not thought this aspect through, or he has designs to expand the Russian Federation even more.

    Media shutdowns, but no place to hide

    Much of the footage of attacks on Ukrainian residential areas will not be seen by people in Russia now that Facebook and Twitter are blocked by the Russian authorities. This follows restrictions on Sputnik and Russia Today in the EU. Russian television “liberal” stations TV Rain and Ekho Moskvy have also closed down. That is reportedly because they deliberately broadcast “false information about the actions of Russian military personnel” in Ukraine.

    Meanwhile there’s documented evidence to support that the Russian military has committed war crimes. Consequently, Putin and his generals and ministers can be subject to arrest and prosecution at the International Criminal Court should a case be established.

    But that is of little comfort to the people of Ukraine, many of whom have lost everything – their family members, their homes, their cities. They want the war to end not in weeks or months but now.

    Featured image via YouTube

    By Tom Coburg

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Sanctions May Sound “Nonviolent,” But They Quietly Hurt the Most Vulnerable

    People line up to withdraw U.S. dollars at a Tinkoff ATM in a supermarket on Tverskaya street in Moscow, Russia, on March 3, 2022. The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian military has sent the Russian ruble plummeting, leading uneasy people to line up at banks and ATMs to withdraw U.S. dollars as they worry that their saving would devalue even more in the near future.

    Today, people around the world are demonstrating against the disastrous Russian invasion of Ukraine, and rallying against potential escalation and expansion of the war by other world powers.

    The current invasion is raising a dilemma for progressives in the U.S. who are sympathetic to the plight of the people of Ukraine, who believe that the invasion is abhorrent and unacceptable, and who want to stop Russia’s actions, but who question the notion that the U.S. can intervene in a way that is ultimately good and not harmful.

    In particular, we are faced with the question of whether to support economic sanctions against Russia. Those of us who are grappling with the question are right to be skeptical.

    If there were ever a hope for narrow sanctions targeting President Vladimir Putin and other individuals in the Russian oligarchy that would spare ordinary people of Russia, the possibility of such an approach has quickly evaporated. In the immediate days after the invasion began, the U.S. coordinated with the European Union, Japan and Canada to sanction Russia’s Central Bank and exclude Russia’s banks from SWIFT, the world’s primary inter-bank communication and currency exchange system. The result has been a crash of the Russian ruble. Individuals are lining up at ATMs and banks in Russia’s cities as they lose access to cash and see their savings threatened overnight.

    Of course, those who have the fewest resources to survive in Russia — not the most powerful — will be hurt the most.

    This was entirely predictable. As London-based financier and campaigner against Putin’s government Bill Browder told NPR about blocking Russia from SWIFT, “This is what was done against Iran. And it basically knocks them — any country that’s disconnected — back to the Dark Ages economically.”

    The impact on Iran that Browder so casually refers to has been disastrous. Ostensibly meant to target the country’s regime for nefarious activities, U.S. sanctions have resulted in such isolation for the Iranian economy that the currency has crashed. The sanctions have especially impacted Iranian health care, severely undermining the country’s ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, and producing shortages of medicines and medical supplies, particularly for people with rare illnesses. In other words, it is the most vulnerable who have suffered the most.

    The experience of U.S. sanctions’ impacts around the world is important, especially because Washington and other Western capitals hold up sanctions as an alternative to war. We should understand them instead, however, as a weapon of war. Their devastating impact results in widespread suffering that may be quieter or less visible to most in the U.S. than an invasion or airstrikes are, but that is no less deadly.

    Moreover, the U.S. has tended to combine a policy of sanctions with military operations — particularly in Iraq and Iran. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 1991 and imposed economic sanctions, and then invaded the country again in 2003. The U.S. bombed Iraq intermittently between the invasions while maintaining the sanctions — which led to the malnourishment of hundreds of thousands of children, promoted infectious disease outbreaks and disproportionately impacted people with disabilities in Iraq. And when Donald Trump unleashed his “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran, he did so while stationing aircraft carriers off of Iran’s coast and repeatedly threatening airstrikes.

    The fact is that sanctions against Iraq in the past, Iran today, and perhaps Russia now, were designed to inflict harm on those countries’ populations with the objective of “regime change.” The sanitized term refers to actions of a government to change who is in power in another country. The U.S. uses economic sanctions to produce a level of misery in the places they target in order to foment unrest. Not only is this profoundly anti-democratic, it is also historically ineffective. The U.S. has maintained economic sanctions on Cuba, for example, since 1960 following the 1959 victory of the Revolution in that country. The government that came to power through the Cuban Revolution remains to this day, but generations of Cubans have suffered because of the U.S. embargo.

    It is likely that economic sanctions will punish ordinary people in Russia for the horrendous actions of their leader. But there is an additional danger with a broader and more lasting impact: that the U.S. and its allies will take the opportunity of using sanctions in response to Putin’s invasion to re-legitimize the use of sanctions in general. If the policy of sanctions gets a new lease on life, the U.S. will continue to deploy it against countries — and most will have fewer resources than Russia does to mitigate the effects.

    As those who want a more just world, it makes sense that we may feel pushed to support U.S. sanctions against Russia in the hope that it will force some restraint on Putin’s aggression. Unfortunately, the historic and current examples of U.S. sanctions regimes — and the sorts of sanctions that we are already seeing take shape in Western responses to Moscow’s invasion and their impacts — compel us to take a stance that is fundamentally critical of Washington’s use of sanctions rather than hopeful that they will benefit the people of Ukraine and the cause of peace.

    We are called instead to find and create our own ways of building solidarity with Ukrainians, and be clear in demanding that our sympathies are not manipulated to build up U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) militarism — an outcome that will only produce more hardship. In fact, if we want the U.S. to respond to the situation in Eastern Europe, we should demand the demilitarization of the continent by the U.S. and NATO. There is absolutely no justification for Putin’s actions against Ukraine. But it is the case that the U.S. maintains nuclear weapons across the continent and has been adding to the militarization of Eastern Europe in particular in recent years. This includes the opening of a new naval base in Poland where a NATO missile system will be housed. That militarism escalates tensions. Right now, the people of Ukraine are paying the price.

    As we find our own voice of protest, we can take tremendous inspiration from the outpouring of dissent in Russian cities against the war and in solidarity with Ukrainians. Our challenge is to build protest across borders that stands in solidarity with those facing the violence of war, and is independent — and defiant of — the governments where we reside.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ukraine Is A Sacrificial Pawn On The Imperial Chessboard

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The war is not going well for Kyiv, and it would be unreasonable to expect that to change. As a vastly superior military force overwhelms the US client state, reality is in the process of crashing down hard in the face of western liberals who bought into the war propaganda that the brave, sexy comedian was leading an upset victory to kick Putin’s ass out of Ukraine.

    Zelensky is now raging at NATO powers for refusing to intervene militarily against Russia, apparently having previously been given the impression that the US-centralized empire might risk its very existence defending its dear friends the Ukrainians from an invasion.

    “Unfortunately, today there is a complete impression that it is time to give a funeral repast for something else: security guarantees and promises, determination of alliances, values that seem to be dead for someone,” Zelensky said Friday.

    “All the people who will die starting from this day will also die because of you,” Ukraine’s president added. “Because of your weakness, because of your disunity.”

    It must be hard, the process of learning that you were never actually a valued partner in western civilization’s fight for freedom and democracy. That you were always just one more sacrificial pawn on the imperial chessboard.

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    New: Zelensky in late night address tonight slams NATO over ruling out no-fly zone. “This is the self-hypnosis of those who are weak, insecure inside, despite the fact they possess weapons many times stronger than we have," he said.

    — Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) March 4, 2022

    In a new article titled “U.S. and allies quietly prepare for a Ukrainian government-in-exile and a long insurgency“, The Washington Post reports that US officials anticipate Russia will reverse its early losses and successfully drive the Zelensky regime out of the country, after which “a long, bloody insurgency” is planned against the invaders backed by billions of dollars in US funding. 

    The US has a history of working to draw Moscow into gruelling, costly military quagmires which monopolize its military firepower while leaching it of blood and treasure. Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, author of US hegemonic manifesto The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, openly bragged about having lured Russia into its own Vietnam fighting the US-backed mujahideen in Afghanistan for a decade.

    Just two years ago then-US Special Representative for Syria engagement said during a video event hosted by the Hudson Institute that his job was to make Syria “a quagmire for the Russians”.

    So this isn’t something new or out of the blue, and what it means is that all the self-righteous posturing by the western political/media class about the need to pour weapons into Ukraine is not really about saving Ukrainian lives (only negotiating a ceasefire can do that), but about seizing this golden opportunity to hurt Russia’s geostrategic interests as much as possible. Ukraine on its own is powerless to stop Russia from taking Kyiv no matter how many weapons are sent, but those weapons can be used to fight a “long, bloody insurgency” after that happens which costs many more lives, keeps Moscow militarily preoccupied and hemorrhaging money, and ultimately hurts Putin’s popularity at home.

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    The US government's strategy of creating and funding an insurgency gave birth to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and then did the same with ISIS in Syria.

    Now Washington is going to repeat this with bloodthirsty neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

    What could possibly go wrong! https://t.co/XHUwgAmB57

    — Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 5, 2022

    This by itself would do a great deal to advance US interests, but on top of that you’ve got the even greater benefit of manufacturing international consent for unprecedented acts of economic warfare against the entire nation of Russia, as well as killing Nord Stream 2 and rallying immense support for NATO and the imperial military/intelligence machine. The western world is now a united front against the Sauron-like menace of Vladimir Putin in much the same way it united against the threat of global terrorism after 9/11, and we’re probably only seeing the beginnings of the agendas this will be used to roll out.

    We can expect these agendas to be used in an attempt to impoverish, undermine, agitate, and ultimately collapse and balkanize Russia, as the CIA and Washington swamp monsters have wanted to do since the fall of the Soviet Union. This would leave China standing alone without its nuclear superpower guard bear and much more vulnerable to imperial operations geared toward thwarting the emergence of a true multipolar world, a goal US imperialists have had in writing for three decades.

    That’s a whole lot of potential benefit to the US empire just for losing Ukraine. Kind of like sacrificing a pawn to get the queen in chess.

    I think a big part of why I and others wrongly underestimated the likelihood of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was that the cost-to-benefit math never made sense; on paper Moscow stands so much more to lose by this action in the long term than it stood to gain. There was also a bit of an assumption that the empire would rather Russia not take Ukraine, preferring to gradually encroach with NATO salami slicing tactics than give up a useful client state on Russia’s border.

    But chess is all about out-maneuvering your opponent to leave them nothing but bad options to choose from, and in the end leaving the king with no safe moves. The drivers of empire would have known that, as the late Justin Raimondo explained all the way back in 2014 for Antiwar, Putin could not afford to lose Ukraine to the west without losing crucial support in Russia. Combine that with increased attacks on Donbas separatists and the west’s adamant refusal to make even the most meaningless concessions like guaranteeing they wouldn’t add a nation to NATO who they had no intention of adding anyway, and you can understand if not support Putin’s drastic course of action.

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    The US Is Not Trying High-Level Diplomacy to End the Fighting in Ukraine
    Pentagon leaders haven't spoken to their Russian counterparts, and Biden has no plans to talk with Putin
    by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Ukraine #Russia #Biden #Putin https://t.co/IzZWgzCwXV pic.twitter.com/xr4ZV5j6fk

    — Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) March 5, 2022

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    If the US/NATO had the option of choosing between (1) ending the war in Ukraine tomorrow by assuring Russia Ukraine will never join NATO, or (2) having every Ukrainian die in a long war of resistance against Russia, they will pick (2).

    The US/NATO dont want a diplomatic solution

    — Josh || 김은총 (@JoshC0301) March 5, 2022

    No meaningful diplomatic effort is being made by Washington to end the violence. Ukrainian lives are being spent like pennies to facilitate the agenda of US planetary domination by whipping up international support for the strangulation of Russia while pouring vast fortunes into the military-industrial complex rather than taking even the tiniest step toward de-escalation, diplomacy and detente.

    And it’s entirely possible that this was all planned years in advance.

    Is it a coincidence that before this started we were bombarded with shrieking anti-Russia narratives for five years, all of which were initiated by secretive and unaccountable intelligence agencies and none of which have ever been substantiated with hard evidence? The discredited conspiracy theories that there was a Kremlin asset in the Oval Office had nothing to do with Ukraine. Neither did the plot hole–riddled and still completely unproven claim that Russian hackers intervened in the US election, or the baseless claim that St Petersburg trolls did the same. Neither did the claim that Russia was paying Taliban-linked fighters to kill US troops in Afghanistan, which was eventually walked back by the same intelligence cartel that made it.

    All these hysterical anti-Russia narratives were shoved in everyone’s face day after day, year after year, with nothing really uniting them apart from the fact that they drove up general anxiety about Russia and that they were initiated by the US intelligence cartel. Even the empty Ukrainegate scandal which led to Trump’s unsuccessful impeachment was initiated by a CIA officer who just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

    And while all those shrill narratives about a Putin puppet serving as America’s commander-in-chief were being aggressively hammered into public consciousness, Trump’s actual policies toward Moscow were extremely hawkish and aggressive. Beneath the narratives about Kremlin servitude, a new cold war was being dangerously escalated.

    And now, lubricated years in advance by these mass-scale anti-Russia narratives, I’ve got western liberals in my social media notifications with blue and yellow profile pictures calling me a Russian propagandist and a Kremlin shill all day, every day. Because of that mass-scale propaganda campaign, we were paced to this point all the way from where we were at a few years ago when Obama was mocking Mitt Romney for his then-outlandish Russia hawkishness.

    So we’re looking at increasingly aggressive confrontations between the US power alliance and the China-Russia bloc for the foreseeable future in a struggle which has already erupted in hot war and could easily get infinitely worse. All because a few manipulators in high places convinced the US establishment that global unipolar domination would be a good thing. Many of these unipolarist empire architects were involved in the murderous and influential Project for a New American Century (PNAC), whose founding members are now providing expert punditry on what should be done about the war in Ukraine.

    Michael Parenti saw this all coming long ago:

    The PNAC plan envisions a strategic confrontation with China, and a still greater permanent military presence in every corner of the world. The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to control the world’s natural resources and markets, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, and power to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere — including North America — the blessings of an untrammeled global “free market.” The end goal is to ensure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as such, but the supremacy of American global capitalism by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing superpower.

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    There is a temptation to engage China to further isolate Russia. This will not work. We are in a new cold war. China and Russia are allies. They're out to get us. The west needs to understand that we're out to get them too.

    — Eli Lake (@EliLake) March 3, 2022

    We should not have to live this way. We should not have to see the horrors of war inflicted upon humanity with the risk of total nuclear annihilation hanging over our heads every minute of every day, all for some dopey grand chessboard maneuverings of a few sociopaths who can’t just let humanity be.

    There is no good reason why nations cannot simply collaborate with each other for everyone’s benefit. There is no good reason we should accept these omnicidal games of planetary conquest as inevitable, normal, or fine. If our minds weren’t so pervasively locked down by mass-scale psychological manipulation, there is no way we would stand for this madness.

    I don’t know if the US will succeed in this grand strategic confrontation to prevent the rise of a multipolar world. From where I’m sitting it depends on which side of the conflict has more tricks up their sleeve, and that could easily be the emerging China-centralized alliance of which Russia is a key player. But I do think it’s far too early for anyone to declare that the US-led world order is over and a true multipolar world has solidified.

    There are many moves on the chessboard still to be played.

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  • The Focus On Russia Distracts From What The US Government Is Doing

    The current escalation of the conflict between the United States and Russia, two nations with the most nuclear weapons, places the world in great danger of a major war. It is the people of Ukraine who are bearing the brunt of this violence, which the United States government claims is “unprovoked,” but comes after more than eight years of direct intervention in the country, including a coup in 2014 led by the US. It is the people of the world who will need to rise up together to demand an end to this and all wars.

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    The post The Focus On Russia Distracts From What The US Government Is Doing appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Tens of thousands join rallies around the world in support of Ukraine

    Demonstrators gathered in cities across Europe, the US and South America to demand an end to Russia’s invasion

    Tens of thousands of people demonstrated in cities including Santiago, Vancouver Paris and New York in support of Ukraine, demanding an end to Russia’s invasion.

    The protesters rallied on Saturday against Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attack, which began on 24 February and appeared to be entering a new phase with escalating bombardment.

    Continue reading…

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