Category: Russia

  • A soldier of the Ukrainian Military Forces watches on position on the front line with Russia-backed separatists not far from Novognativka village in the Donetsk region on February 19, 2022.

    The urgency of diplomatic steps to avert a war in Eastern Europe reached new heights Tuesday following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s move to recognize two breakaway regions in Ukraine as independent and deploy troops — described as “peacekeeping” forces — to the Donbas, heightening fears of an all-out military conflict.

    In a statement late Monday, a spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said that he is “greatly concerned by the decision by the Russian Federation related to the status of certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine.”

    Guterres “calls for the peaceful settlement of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, in accordance with the Minsk Agreements, as endorsed by the Security Council in Resolution 2202,” said the spokesperson. “The secretary-general urges all relevant actors to focus their efforts on ensuring an immediate cessation of hostilities, protection of civilians and civilian infrastructure, preventing any actions and statements that may further escalate the dangerous situation in and around Ukraine, and prioritizing diplomacy to address all issues peacefully.”

    The statement came as the U.S., the European Union, and the United Kingdom prepared to respond to Putin’s actions with a “barrage” of fresh economic sanctions targeting Russia itself as well as Donetsk and Luhansk.

    Shortly after Putin signed decrees formally recognizing the independence of the two self-proclaimed people’s republics in eastern Ukraine, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order barring Americans from investing in the regions and prohibiting “the importation into the United States, directly or indirectly, of any goods, services, or technology from the so-called DNR or LNR.”

    During a call with reporters Monday evening, a senior administration official made clear that Biden’s executive order and other policy moves expected Tuesday “are not the swift and severe economic measures we have been preparing in coordination with allies and partners should Russia further invade Ukraine” — an indication that far more sweeping sanctions could be on the horizon.

    But analysts have cautioned in recent days that economic warfare by the West likely won’t bring the burgeoning conflict with Russia to an end — and could have deleterious economic and humanitarian impacts.

    As such, progressive lawmakers, peace activists, and experts on the region called on world leaders to prioritize diplomatic negotiations to avoid a potentially catastrophic war.

    “De-escalation and diplomacy are the only way to secure peace,” British MP Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour Party leader, said late Monday.

    Anatol Lieven, a senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote Monday that “American condemnation of Russia’s latest action should be accompanied by continued efforts at compromise with Russia.”

    “War between nuclear-armed powers is not an option,” Lieven wrote, alluding to the fact that the U.S. and Russia together possess more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons. “Russia’s action has narrowed the space for diplomacy to resolve this crisis, but not yet destroyed it. As long as there is any hope of preventing a wider war, it is our duty to pursue it.”

    Specifically, peace advocates have called on the U.S. to compromise on its stated readiness to welcome Ukraine into NATO — a position that, as he reiterated during a lengthy address Monday, Putin views as a major security threat to Russia.

    “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized — NATO enlargement — there has been no American diplomacy at all,” Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, wrote in an op-ed for the Financial Times on Monday. “Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”

    “The U.S. should propose a guarantee that NATO will not enlarge to include Ukraine in return for a full withdrawal of Russian forces from the Donbas region and an end to Russian support for the independence of the two Moscow-backed separatist regions in eastern Ukraine, a demobilization along the Russia-Ukraine border, and an assurance of Ukrainian sovereignty,” Sachs argued. “If the U.S. won’t do this, then France and Germany should step forward instead.”

    During an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting on Monday in the wake of Putin’s address, Rosemary DiCarlo — the U.N. under-secretary-general for political and peacebuilding affairs — raised alarm over increased shelling and ceasefire violations in the Donbas in recent days and implored all parties to devote their full attention to achieving a diplomatic resolution.

    “The risk of major conflict is real and needs to be prevented at all costs,” said DiCarlo. “Amid the current risks and uncertainty, it is even more important to pursue dialogue.”

    With tensions dangerously high, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba is set to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington on Tuesday. Later this week, Blinken is scheduled to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva.

    “Even during the most difficult moments… we say, ‘We are ready for negotiations,’” Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for Russia’s Foreign Ministry, said Tuesday. “We are always in favor of diplomacy.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US President Theodore Roosevelt never had much time for peace, seeing its returns as distinctly less than those of war.  Despite his love of military conflict and its touted benefits, he was rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in brokering peace in the Russo-Japanese War.  But for old Teddy peaceniks were sissies, degenerates, and probably sexually dubious.

    The intoxicant that is war tends to besot its promoters, however balanced they might claim to be.  On February 21, the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, seemed to embrace a subliminal message in its programming, notably on the issue of war.  The standard reference?  The outbreak of the Second World War.  September 1939.  Poor Poland, and benighted UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

    The blind, the daft and the reality television viewer may have missed the programming point, but others could not have.  Russian forces are posed on the borders of Ukraine.  In the presses of Australasia, Europe and the United States, there is more talk of war than that of diplomacy.  There is the prospect of much death and many body bags.  Instead of running documentaries, statements or messages on how war might be averted, thereby yielding the floor to diplomacy, the message of conflict has become inexorably clear.

    This is perhaps the most visibly sickening feature of the enterprise.  It is a reminder that war has a seductiveness, acts as a paralytic agent, dulling sensibility whilst arousing other senses.  The opposite is never as inspiring because it is always constructively dull: negotiations, peace, averting death and the cracking of skulls.  Best encourage powers to shred a few people, slaughter the residents of a village or two, and crow about the evils of the enemy.  Add some political garnish: they died in the name of democracy; they were killed because they needed to be enlightened by the rules-based order.

    The message of war was promoted with unbending consistency when it came to the certifiably criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003 by US-led forces.  It was very much in keeping with the rules-based order according to President George W. Bush, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Australia’s own yappy John Howard.  War would take place, whatever the evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities.

    Having decided that invading Iraq would be good copy, the Murdoch Press Empire went to work softening minds and adding Viagra to war adventurism.  Of the stable of papers run by Rupert Murdoch, only one of the 175 – the Hobart Mercury – supported the war.  The project certainly bore rewards in terms of moving opinion.  A Gallup International survey’s findings released on February 4, 2003 revealed that 68 percent of Australians backed military action against Iraq.  Of those Australians surveyed, 89 percent expected war to be imminent.  This was, pure and simple, an incitement to conflict, a hardening of the resolve.

    While it is not NATO, or the United States, that is contemplating an invasion of Ukraine, a country meshed with Russian history and influence, the language of predictability, the undeviating lingo of war, has come to heavily shade the workings of diplomacy.  In London, Washington and Canberra, we are already seeing the position that war will take place.

    Speaking to CBS, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was as good as convinced that “provocations created by the Russian or separatist forces over the weekend, false flag operations” suggested a state of advanced preparedness for invasion.

    UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in his address to the Munich Security Conference, conceded to not fully knowing “what President [Vladimir] Putin intends but the omens are grim and that is why we must stand strong together.”  Should Russia invade, Johnson promised, Russian individuals would be sanctioned, along with “companies of strategic importance to the Russian state”.  Raising capital on London capital markets would be made all but impossible “and we will open up the matryoshka dolls of Russian-owned companies and Russian -owned entities to find the ultimate beneficiaries within.”

    Western press outlets are also aiding in this, using, for the most part, images and material of moving tanks and personnel supplied by the Russian Ministry of Defence.  Even mocking opinions expressed by the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the “invasion date” have been spun as tangible proofs of coming war.

    As New Lines Magazine points out, “the West is doing such an eloquent job of broadcasting the reality of Russian military might” for the Putin regime.  In a conversation with one of the magazine’s authors, the editor of a British “mid-market tabloid” thought that “this invasion stuff is probably all nonsense.”  But no matter.  “Boris needs this to run and run.”

    The headlines and titles of various papers are all too drearily reminiscent of 2003.  “We may be just hours away from war in Europe,” shrieked Mark Almond on February 15 in the Daily Mail.  Some hours have passed since then, but there is no sign of the journalist being held accountable for this nakedly hysterical effusion.

    The Scottish Sun was even more blood thirstily confident, with its February 13 issue trumpeting that there was “48 hours to war.”  Moscow’s “bombing blitz may be early as Tuesday after Prez talks deadlock.”  That same day, The Sunday Telegraph insisted that Russia was plotting an imminent “‘false flag attack to provoke war.”

    The script for invasion, in other words, has already been written, and not necessarily or entirely from the pen of the Russian leader.  The pieces are all in place: the assumption of invasion, the promised implementation of sanctions and limits on raising finance, and strong condemnation.  A fever has taken hold, and it promises to carry away much life and sensibility.

    The post Innate Warmongering: Seeing Conflict in Ukraine as Inevitable first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    So Putin has finally made a move, issuing a decree formally recognizing the sovereignty of the separatist-held Donbas territories in eastern Ukraine known as the DPR and LPR. Russian troops are being deployed to the region in what Putin describes as a “peacekeeping” mission amid a dramatic spike in ceasefire violations.

    “The recognition of the DPR and LPR means Russia’s withdrawal from the Minsk agreements, which were signed in 2014 and 2015 to establish the ceasefire in eastern Ukraine,” writes Antiwar’s Dave Decamp. “Under the Minsk agreements, Ukraine agreed to cede some autonomy to the DPR and LPR. Russia has grown increasingly frustrated over the fact that Kyiv hasn’t fulfilled its end of the agreement.”

    Needless to say, the US empire has not been happy about this move. President Biden has already imposed strict sanctions on the DPR and LPR, saying Moscow’s recognition of their independence “threatens the peace, stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Ukraine, and thereby constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

    “Tomorrow we will be announcing new sanctions on Russia in response to their breach of international law and attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” White House spokesperson Jen Psaki added.

    “This decision represents a complete rejection of Russia’s commitments under the Minsk agreements, directly contradicts Russia’s claimed commitment to diplomacy, and is a clear attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” adds Secretary of State Tony Blinken.

    Other member states of the empire were equally upset about this unforgivable violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty.

    “Canada strongly condemns Russia’s recognition of so-called ‘independent states’ in Ukraine,” tweeted Justin Trudeau. “This is a blatant violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and international law. Canada stands strong in its support for Ukraine – and we will impose economic sanctions for these actions.”

    “Tomorrow we will be announcing new sanctions on Russia in response to their breach of international law and attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” tweeted UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.

    “This further undermines Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, erodes efforts towards a resolution of the conflict, and violates the Minsk Agreements, to which Russia is a party,” says NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

    There are all kinds of criticisms that one can level against this move by Moscow, if one feels that the entire western political/media class screaming all of these criticisms in unison does not have enough amplification. For myself, I would just like to point out that the US-centralized empire is the very last institution on this planet who has any business babbling about the “sovereignty” of other nations. Absolute dead last.

    I say this not out of any kind of fondness for Putin or support for his decisions, but because the absolute worst violator of national sovereignty in the entire world by a truly gargantuan margin complaining about violations of national sovereignty is bat shit insane.

    Pointing out things the US empire has done while it shrieks about the actions of a foreign government will get you accused of “whataboutism”, but it’s not a whataboutism. It’s pointing out that the US is the absolute least qualified government on earth to comment on the issue at hand, so it should shut the whole entire fuck up about it. If the US wants to legitimately complain about the transgressions of unaligned governments, then it must cease being the worst transgressor.

    Some might say, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Okay. But inflicting ten thousand wrongs definitely means you should shut the fuck up about anyone doing one wrong.

    This would after all be the same empire that has is currently circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and waging wars which have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century. Its sanctions and blockades are starving people to death en masse every single day. It works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates by toppling their governments via CIA coups, proxy armies, partial and full-scale invasions, and the most egregious number of election interferences in the entire world, while threatening the entire species with nuclear brinkmanship on multiple fronts.

    What the US and its proxies are doing in Yemen alone is orders of magnitude worse than anything Russia is doing to Ukraine. Or what the US is doing in Afghanistan. Or in Venezuela. Or in Syria. Hell, the Biden administration has already done worse than what Putin just did in recognizing Israel’s outright annexation of the Golan Heights.

    To say nothing of the fact that the US thought so little of Ukrainian sovereignty in 2014 that it was perfectly comfortable staging a coup there with the support of actual neo-Nazi militias, who the liberal media are still running PR segments for to this day even after years of yelling about Donald Trump’s intimacy with the far right. The US thinks so highly of Ukraine’s sovereignty that it’s willing to ramp up cold war brinkmanship with a nuclear superpower to defend it, but not highly enough to refrain from backing literal Nazis to topple its government.

    The US empire criticizing Russia for violating another nation’s sovereignty is like Jeffrey Dahmer criticizing someone else’s eating habits.

    After watching the insane, erratic, dishonest way the western power alliance has been navigating the Ukraine crisis, it is clear to anyone with open eyes that this is the very last institution we should want negotiating a power struggle that could quite literally end our world. We can only hope that the empire’s demise arrives before it manages to get us all killed.

    _______________________________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • There’s been no intelligence revealed at State Dept. briefings, to the U.N., to European allies or Ukraine, but the U.S. wants everyone to believe they’re telling the truth about an imminent Russian invasion and its “kill lists”.

    The post The Growing Scandal Of The Missing Intelligence, Including On Alleged Russian ‘Kill Lists’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet during the U.S.-Russia summit at Villa La Grange on June 16, 2021, in Geneva, Switzerland.

    U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday agreed “in principle” to hold a summit on Ukraine as global fears of a war involving the two nuclear-armed powers remain high.

    In a statement, the office of French President Emmanuel Macron — who spoke separately with Putin and Biden on Sunday — said that both leaders accepted the idea of the summit, though the precise details have yet to be agreed upon.

    Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the U.S.-based peace group CodePink, applauded Macron for brokering the diplomatic effort.

    “If he can get Putin and Biden to meet, if he can stop a war in Ukraine, he will be a hero,” Benjamin wrote in a Twitter post.

    The White House confirmed late Sunday that Biden “accepted in principle a meeting with President Putin,” which could take place following a scheduled meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Europe later this week.

    But preparations for a summit will only move forward if a Russian invasion of Ukraine “hasn’t happened,” the White House said, adding that it is “ready to impose swift and severe consequences” in the event of an invasion.

    The Kremlin, for its part, cautioned that there are not yet “concrete plans” in place for a Putin-Biden summit on Ukraine. According to the Kremlin press service, a topic of discussion between Putin and Macron on Sunday was “NATO countries’ steps aimed at pumping Ukraine with advanced weapons and ammunition.”

    Speaking at a press briefing, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said a firm decision for a Putin-Biden summit “can be made at any moment,” noting that “clearly, tensions are rising, and active contacts are continuing.”

    “The situation is indeed extremely tense, and so far we see no signs of a decrease in the level of tension,” Peskov continued. “Provocations, shelling are becoming more and more intense, of course, this causes very deep concern.”

    Russia has repeatedly denied claims that it is plotting an imminent invasion of Ukraine, a purported plan that U.S. officials say is backed by intelligence that they have thus far refused to make public. Biden said Friday that he is “convinced” Putin has decided to invade Ukraine in “the coming days.”

    White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki echoed the president on Sunday, saying in a statement that “currently, Russia appears to be continuing preparations for a full-scale assault on Ukraine very soon.”

    Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., denied the White House’s assertion earlier Sunday, telling CBS: “There is no invasion. There [are] no such plans.”

    “Russia has publicly… declared its readiness to continue the diplomatic efforts to resolve all outstanding issues,” Antonov added. “Russian troops are on sovereign Russian territory. We don’t threaten anyone.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    After weeks of uncritically passing along completely unevidenced claims about an endlessly imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine, the mass media have suddenly remembered basic journalistic ethics when reporting on claims that Ukraine is plotting an attack on Russia-backed separatists.

    I’ve highlighted a key repeating phrase we’ve been seeing in a few quotes to help you spot the difference between the way the western media cover unevidenced claims about a future attack by Moscow and unevidenced claims about a future attack by Kyiv:

    • “Russian-backed separatists, who have been fighting the Ukrainian government for years, have asserted, without evidence, that Ukraine was planning a large-scale attack on territory they control.”
      ~ The New York Times, February 19
    • “Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed ‘Donetsk People’s Republic,’ announced the evacuation in a video posted on social media. He claimed without evidence that Kyiv was planning its own military assault on the region in the country’s east where the Moscow-supported separatists have been fighting government forces since 2014.”
      ~ NBC, February 18
    • “Dmitry Peskov, the top Kremlin spokesperson, then commented that ‘the situation near the borders of Russia can ignite at any moment,’ insisting without evidence that Ukraine’s forces had taken “provocative actions that have only intensified in the last day or several days.”
      ~ Politico, February 17
    • “Price said the United States was particularly concerned by Russian President Vladimir Putin saying, without evidence, that ‘genocide’ was taking place in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region.”
      ~ Reuters, February 17
    • “On Friday, the Tass news agency reported, without evidence, that the head of the self-proclaimed separatist territory of Donetsk had announced the discovery of 130 mass graves of “victims of Ukrainian aggression.”
      ~ The Washington Post, February 11
    • “While massing troops around Ukraine, Russian officials have made repeated claims, without evidence, that Kyiv was planning to attack Russia or Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine rather than the other way round.”
      ~ The Guardian, February 4

    See if you can spot the difference between the above examples and the way CBS News reports an anonymous government official’s claim that Putin has ordered the invasion of Ukraine to proceed:

    The U.S. has intelligence that Russian commanders have received orders to proceed with an invasion of Ukraine, with commanders on the ground making specific plans for how they would maneuver in their sectors of the battlefield, a U.S. official told CBS News.

    Or the way The Guardian reports on the claim CBS aired:

    US intelligence has detected evidence that Russian troops amassed close to the border with Ukraine have received actual orders to proceed with an invasion, according to news reports.

    Or if those examples are too subtle, how about the way The New York Times reports on the alleged intelligence which prompted Biden’s recent announcement that he is convinced a Russian invasion is imminent:

    U.S. intelligence learned last week that the Kremlin had given the order for Russian military units to proceed with an invasion of Ukraine, information that prompted President Biden to announce that President Vladimir V. Putin had made the decision to attack, U.S. officials said.

     

    Officials declined to describe the intelligence in any detail, anxious to keep secret their method of collecting the information. But intelligence officials have told the administration they have a high level of confidence in the intelligence they have collected in recent months about Russian military planning, as well as about plots by Moscow’s intelligence agencies to try and create a pretext for war.

     

    The administration’s trust in the intelligence has only grown as the world watched the Russian military take steps that American spy agencies had predicted.

    This is super subtle stuff, I know, but see if you can detect the ever-so-slight difference in tone between the way mass media outlets are reporting on claims that Kyiv is about to attack Moscow-supported separatists in eastern Ukraine and the way The Washington Post reports that Putin is plotting to round up journalists and LGBT persons to have them tortured, murdered and disappeared after invading the entire country:

    The United States has informed the United Nations it has credible information showing that Moscow is compiling lists of Ukrainians “to be killed or sent to camps following a military occupation,” according to a letter to the U.N.’s human rights chief obtained by The Washington Post on Sunday night.

     

    The letter alleges that Moscow’s post-invasion planning would involve torture, forced disappearances and “widespread human suffering.” It does not describe the nature of the intelligence that undergirds its assessment.

    Crocker says the Russian military’s targets would include Russian and Belarusian dissidents in exile in Ukraine, journalists and anti-corruption activists, and “vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons.”

    Yep. So subtle you almost need an electron microscope to see it.

    And of course completely unspoken in all this straight-shooting news reporting is that the actual evidence seems to suggest that the separatist factions in Ukraine are indeed under attack with a sharp spike in aggression, as explained here by Moon of Alabama.

    None of these discrepancies would be worth pointing out if the mass media in the western world did not uphold itself as a free and impartial press whose only job is to report the truth about what’s happening in the world. If the western mass media were openly owned and controlled by the United States government for the explicitly stated purpose of distributing imperial propaganda, there would be nothing odd about brazen one-sided reporting which uncritically accepts unevidenced claims by secretive government agencies with an extensive history of lies. The discrepancy is only noteworthy because it highlights another one: the discrepancy between what the western mass media purport to be, and what they actually are.

    _______________________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Foreign secretary Liz Truss has warned that a Russian invasion of Ukraine appears “highly likely” despite Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin tentatively agreeing to hold a crisis summit. It’s unclear what benefit there is in predicting that Biden will fail before the talks have even happened (if it was ever likely that Russia would invade in the first place).

    Brinksmanship

    The US President agreed during diplomatic efforts, against the backdrop of heightened media reporting, to meet his Russian counterpart. But he did so on the condition that Moscow does not invade.

    Some have cast doubt on the idea that Russia will invade (while Putin did illegally annex Crimea, he did so with the support of many within the region – a situation which wouldn’t repeat in Ukraine). Truss, however, did not appear to be revising her concerns that the Kremlin would order an attack, as she warned that the price of an invasion must be “intolerably high” for Russia. Truss, the media, and the Tories have been warning of an invasion ‘any day’ for the past few weeks now.

    The following is Truss describing Russia as being on the brink on 15 February – nearly a week ago:

    Here are some newspapers from 13 February:

    Over a week later, we’ve gone from the “final push” to “last-ditch talks” (Thesaurus owners may notice these are actually the the same thing):

    The growing suspicion, then, is perhaps we’re not on the cusp of war, but that the media/government would rather you think otherwise. Although, saying that, obviously it’s  far-fetched to suggest these people would ‘sex up’ a situation to sell a war to an unwilling public.

    Of course, it could be that Putin does actually intend to invade a hostile and well-armed country of 44 million people that’s backed by multiple nuclear powers. Given the US’s recent loss of the Afghanisatan war, it’s easy to see how a modern land war might appeal to him – especially one on his own border.

    It could also be that Putin is once again sabre-rattling, and that the primary difference is how our media and government are portraying it. We should know either way in the next 48 hours. Or the 48 hours after that. Or the 48 hours after…

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • “This is not going to be a war of Ukraine and Russia. This is going to be a European war, a full-fledged war.” So spoke Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky just days after berating the U.S. for beating the drums of war.

    It is not hard to imagine how Zelensky’s words must have fallen on those European ears that were attentive.  His warning surely conjured up images of World War II when tens of millions of Europeans and Russians perished.

    Zelensky’s words echoed those of Philippine’s President Rodrigo Duterte on the other side of the world at the Eastern edge of the great Eurasian land mass: “When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled flat.”  We can be sure that Duterte, like Zelensky, had in mind WWII which also consumed tens of millions of lives in East Asia.

    The United States is stoking tensions in both Europe and East Asia, with Ukraine and Taiwan as the current flashpoints on the doorsteps of Russia and China which are the targeted nations.  Let us be clear at the outset.  As we shall see, the endpoint of this process is not for the U.S. to do battle with Russia or China but to watch China and Russia fight it out with the neighbors to the ruin of both sides.  The US is to “lead from behind’ – as safely and remotely as can be arranged.

    To make sense of this and react properly, we must be very clear-eyed about the goal of the U.S.  Neither Russia nor China has attacked or even threatened the U.S.  Nor are they in a position to do so – unless one believes that either is ready to embark on a suicidal nuclear war.

    Why should the U.S. Elite and its media pour out a steady stream of anti-China and anti-Russia invective?  Why the steady eastward march of NATO since the end of the first Cold War?  The goal of the U.S. is crystal clear – it regards itself as the Exceptional Nation and entitled to be the number one power on the planet, eclipsing all others.

    This goal is most explicitly stated in the well-known Wolfowitz Doctrine drawn shortly after the end of the first Cold War in 1992.  It proclaimed that the U.S.’s  “first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet union or elsewhere….”  It stated that no regional power must be allowed to emerge with the power and resources “sufficient to generate global power.”  It stated frankly “we must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global power.” (Emphasis, jw)

    The Wolfowitz Doctrine is but the latest in a series of such proclamations that have proclaimed global domination as the goal of U.S. foreign policy since 1941 the year before the U.S. entered WWII.  This lineage is documented clearly in the book by the Quicny Institute’s Stephen Wertheim “Tomorrow, The World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy.

    Let us consider China first and then Russia, the foremost target of the U.S., first.  China’s economy is number one in terms of PPP-GDP according to the IMF and has been since November, 2014.  It is growing faster than the U.S. economy and shows no signs of slowing down.  In a sense China has already won by this metric since economic power is the ultimate basis of all power.

    But what about a military defeat of China?  Can the U.S. with its present vastly superior armed forces bring that about?  The historian, Alfred McCoy, answers that question in the way most do these days, with a clear “no”:

    The most volatile flashpoint in Beijing’s grand strategy for breaking Washington’s geopolitical grip over Eurasia lies in the contested waters between China’s coast and the Pacific littoral, which the Chinese call “the first island chain.

    But China’s clear advantage in any struggle over that first Pacific island chain is simply distance. …The tyranny of distance, in other words, means that the U.S. loss of that first island chain, along with its axial anchor on Eurasia’s Pacific littoral, should only be a matter of time.

    Certainly the U.S. Elite recognizes this problem.  Do they have a solution?

    Moreover, that is not the end of the “problem” for the U.S.  There are other powerful countries, like Japan, or rapidly rising economies in East Asia, easily the most dynamic economic region in the world.  These too will become peer competitors, and in the case of Japan, it already has been a competitor both before WWII and during the 1980s.

    If we hop over to the Western edge of Eurasia, we see that the U.S. has a similar “problem” when it comes to Russia.  Here too the U.S. cannot defeat Russia in a conventional conflict nor have U.S. sanctions been able to bring it down.  How can the U.S. surmount this obstacle? And as in the case of East Asia the U.S. faces another economic competitor, Germany, or more accurately, the EU, with Germany at its core. How is the U.S. to deal with this dual threat?

    One clue comes in the response of Joe Biden to both the tension over Taiwan and that over Ukraine.  Biden has said repeatedly that he will not send U.S. combat troops to fight Russia over Ukraine or to fight China over Taiwan.  But it will send materiel and weapons and also “advisors.”  And here too the U.S. has other peer competitors most notably Germany which has been the target of U.S. tariffs. The economist Michael Hudson puts it succinctly in a penetrating essay, “America’s real adversaries are its European and other allies: The U.S. aim is to keep them from trading with China and Russia.”

    Such “difficulties for the U.S. were solved once before – in WWII.  One way of looking at WWII is that it was a combination of two great regional wars, one in East Asia and one in Europe.  In Europe the U.S. was minimally involved as Russia, the core of the USSR, battled it out with Germany, sustaining great damage to life and economy.  Both Germany and Russia were economic basket cases when the war was over, two countries lying in ruins.

    The US provided weapons and materiel to Russia but was minimally involved militarily, only entering late in the game.  The same happened in East Asia with Japan in the role of Germany and China in the role of Russia.  Both Japan and China were devastated in the same way as were Russia and Europe.  This was not an unconscious strategy on the part of the United States.  As Harry Truman, then a Senator, declared in 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.. . ”

    At the end of it all the U.S. emerged as the most powerful economic and military power on the planet.  McCoy spells it out:

    Like all past imperial hegemons, U.S. global power has similarly rested on geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, now home to 70% of the world’s population and productivity. After the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan failed to conquer that vast land mass, the Allied victory in World War II allowed Washington, as historian John Darwin put it, to build its “colossal imperium… on an unprecedented scale,” becoming the first power in history to control the strategic axial points “at both ends of Eurasia.

    As a critical first step, the U.S. formed the NATO alliance in 1949, establishing major military installations in Germany and naval bases in Italy to ensure control of the western side of Eurasia. After its defeat of Japan, as the new overlord of the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, Washington dictated the terms of four key mutual-defense pacts in the region with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia and so acquired a vast range of military bases along the Pacific littoral that would secure the eastern end of Eurasia. To tie the two axial ends of that vast land mass into a strategic perimeter, Washington ringed the continent’s southern rim with successive chains of steel, including three navy fleets, hundreds of combat aircraft, and most recently, a string of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily to the Pacific island of Guam.

    The U.S. was able to become the dominant power on the planet because all peer competitors were left in ruins by the two great regional wars in Europe and East Asia, wars which are grouped under the heading of WWII.

    If Europe is plunged into a war of Russia against the EU powers with the U.S. “leading from behind,” with material and weapons, who will benefit?  And if East Asia is plunged into a war of China against Japan and whatever allies it can drum up, with the U.S. “leading from behind,” who will benefit?

    It is pretty clear that such a replay of WWII will benefit the U.S.  In WWII while Eurasia suffered tens of millions of deaths, the US suffered about 400,000 – a terrible toll certainly but nothing like that seen in Eurasia.  And with the economies and territories of Eurasia, East and West, in ruins, the U.S. will emerge on top, in the catbird seat, and able to dictate terms to the world.  WWII redux.

    But what about the danger of nuclear war growing out of such conflicts?  The U.S. has a history of nuclear “brinksmanship,” going back to the earliest post-WWII days.  It is a country that has shown itself willing to risk nuclear holocaust.

    Are there U.S. policy makers criminal enough to see this policy of provocation through to the end?  I will leave that to the reader to answer.

    The Peoples of East and West Eurasia are the ones who will suffer most in this scenario.  And they are the ones who can stop the madness by living peacefully with Russia and China rather than serving as cannon fodder for the U.S.  There are clear signs of dissent from the European “allies” of the U.S., especially Germany but the influence of the U.S. remains powerful.  Germany and many other countries are after all occupied by tens of thousands of U.S. troops, their media heavily influenced by the U.S. and with the organization that commands European troops, NATO, under U.S. command.  Which way will it go?

    In East Asia the situation is the same.  Japan is the key but the hatred of China among the Elite is intense.  Will the Japanese people and the other peoples of East Asia be able to put the brakes on the drive to war?

    Some say that a two-front conflict like this is U.S. overreach.  But certainly, if war is raging on or near the territories of both Russia and China, there is little likelihood that one can aid the other.

    Given the power of modern weaponry, this impending world war will be much more damaging than WWII by far.  The criminality that is on the way to unleashing it is almost beyond comprehension.

    The post WWII Redux: The Endpoint of U.S. Policy from Ukraine to Taiwan first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Editor note: Today I have this piece by war reporter Alexander Kots. He set out to find human interest stories among the over 10,000 refugees who have crossed over from the Donbass region into Russia, just in the past couple of days.

    Roughly half of these refugees are technically Russian citizens already, holding Russian passports. The other half being Ukrainian citizens who are resident in the Separatist-controlled Donetsk Peoples Republic (DPR) and Luhansk Peoples Republic (LPR).

    The order (issued by the leaders of those republics) to evacuate women, children, and elderly was given this past Thursday, after the Ukrainian army opened massive artillery barrages on the line of demarcation, threatening massive damage and loss of life to the residential communities.

    The post Donbass Refugees: A Horror Without End appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Washington DC—Local Peace Activists spoke about the growing crisis in East Europe, characterized the crisis as avoidable, and recommended solutions to avoid conflict. As tensions between world powers reached a climax not seen since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and diplomatic efforts between stakeholders seemed all but doomed to fail, the activists drew on years of experience and understanding of global issues to draw their recommendations. Despite ominous developments they still held out hope that war could be averted.

    Their recommendations came as President Joe Biden spoke to the nation on Friday afternoon, saying that diplomacy was still an option. His optimism however, was eclipsed by media reports of shelling in Eastern Ukraine from rebel-held territory, pipeline explosions, a car bomb explosion in Donesk, and the evacuations of most Western Nation embassies from Kiev.

    The post DC Area Peace Activists Discuss Ukraine Tensions appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Amid soaring tensions with Russia, the United States is spending a fortune on foreign interference campaigns in Ukraine. Washington’s regime-change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), has spent $22.4 million on operations inside the country since 2014, when democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown and replaced by a successor government handpicked by the U.S. Those operations included propping up and training pro-Western political parties, funding pliant media organizations, and subsidizing massive privatization drives that benefit foreign multinational corporations, all in an effort to secure U.S. control over the country that NED President Carl Gershman called “the biggest prize” in Europe.

    The post Documents Reveal US Gov’t Spent $22M Promoting Anti-Russia Narrative In Ukraine And Abroad appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Experienced foreign policy analysts such as Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, and Pepe Escobar, while agreeing that the Biden administration is clearly guilty of provoking Russia over Ukraine, are divided over whether it will lead to war. All agree that Russia has no intention of invading Ukraine and that it is clearly justified in demanding safe borders by insisting U.S./NATO withdraw troops and missiles from the countries surrounding it, stop NATO’s “open door” policy, stop putting nuclear weapons in Europe, etc.

    Clearly such demands are consonant with the U.S.’s own historical demands for safe borders, evidenced most clearly in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 when the world nearly suffered a nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba. And equally obvious is the fact that the American posture today is hypocritical in the extreme and can only be accepted by propagandists and those ignorant of history. The Biden administration must assume that most people are ignoramuses and that its obvious belligerence and blatant propaganda will pass as some sort of defense of freedom, even when the U.S. engineered a Ukrainian coup d’état in 2014 in support of Neo-Nazis when Biden was President Obama’s vice-president.  But that was nearly eight years ago, which is an eternity in a country of amnesiacs.

    Whether this U.S. persistent aggression is a propaganda charade or not, it is a most dangerous game. In December 2021, Russia claimed that the U.S. was preparing a false flag event to provoke a Russian response. This was dismissed or ignored by the western media as absurd. Recently, however, the Biden administration has been pounding the message that it is Russia that is preparing a false flag event to blame on Ukraine in order to justify a Russian invasion. The western press, led by The New York Times, CNN, The Guardian, and the Washington Post – stenographers for the CIA, British intelligence, and the Pentagon – have become more hysterical by the day pushing this lie without any evidence whatsoever. It is sardonically comical. If evidence doesn’t exist, of course, it can be manufactured, as with “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, etc.  It’s easy as pie. To call these media the Yellow Press is an understatement.

    When Russia accuses the U.S. of using “information terrorism,” it is of course correct. For we are living in a MKULTRA mind control operation with multiple facets.  Ukraine, Covid, economic warfare, etc. – a hydra-headed monster whose goal is total control of regular people, who are treated as morons incapable of reason and the most basic logic. Toward confirming and strengthening this premise, the media provide a daily menu of mixed and contradictory messages meant to confuse, confound, and mess with people’s sense of their own ability to understand the world.

    If the public is to be convinced that the Russians have started a war, it will be attempted not so much through words as through images, as Gustave Le Bon predicted long ago in his book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.  In analyzing the “crowd mind” in 1895, he was addressing the anxiety the middle class was feeling because of popular unrest. The fear of popular unrest, such as the truckers Freedom Convoy in Canada and the Yellow Vests in France, is today a major factor in the propaganda war waged by the elite press.  Call it class warfare.

    Le Bon argued that the crowd thinks in images, not words, and it is through images that the rulers can control them. Freud agreed with his basic premise that people in groups occupied an “hypnotic state,” while adding that this was also true for individuals who craved illusions. Pessimistic as it was, Le Bon’s point about the crowd thinking in images – “The image itself immediately calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection to the first” – was picked up by all the influential propagandists, including the American father of the euphemistically named “public relations” industry, Edward Bernays. Today it is all about images, still and moving ones.

    Thus, one can expect to see the media using photos and film to create an emotional response in the population to convince it that Russia, not the U.S. is the villain in this standoff.  Yet again, it may not be a standoff, for it is possible that the Biden administration is really intent on war because they have become completely untethered from reality and think such a war is winnable.  Perhaps they think they can entice Russia to take their bait and do something that can be spun as an “invasion” of Ukraine. This would run counter to Russia’s longstanding, patient diplomatic efforts to resolve these matters and to convince the U.S./NATO that the unipolar era is over and now that it is a multipolar world there must be an end to the encircling of Russia with U.S./NATO troops and weapons.

    We shall see. I don’t know whether there will be a major war or not, but I know how it will be managed. I’ll give you six guesses, as does The New York Times with its newly acquired word game, Wordle. The Grey Lady also knows the answer. It’s not “censor,” for that’s six not five letters and they’ve censored the words already. It’s not “slave,” for they have prohibited that word since some people might find it offensive or get the idea that censorship is used to create slaves to the lie. It is, as required, five letters and begins with the letter “I”.

    Try to picture it. It’s easy if you try.

    The post War or Images of War? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    To rule the world, make it rely on a single dominant financial system you control so anyone who disobeys you can be cut off from the economy you’ve made them dependent on for survival—whether they’re a nation, a protest movement, or an individual—without having to fire a shot.

    I don’t “support dictators”, as one will inevitably be accused of doing whenever scrutinizing imperial propaganda narratives. I do however always hope the US fails to accomplish its objectives against every government that it targets, because the US is far and away the single most tyrannical regime on this planet.

    I don’t support tyranny, I oppose it. It just happens that the major force of tyranny in this world isn’t where the TV tells you it is.

    No other regime has spent the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions in wars of aggression. No other regime is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases. No other regime works to destroy any nation which disobeys it using starvation sanctions, war and terror. Only the US-centralized empire does this. While supporting most of the world’s dictators.

    Anyone who talks about the Ukraine situation like it’s just Putin being evil, while ignoring the actions of the US and NATO which got us here, is a disinformation agent.

    You just don’t find this information anywhere in mainstream news and punditry, so you don’t find it anywhere in mainstream discourse either. It’s just “PUTIN EVIL HITLER RAHHHH!” It should really be common sense by now that when the entire western political/media class starts screaming that a government is acting like an evil supervillain you’re probably being propagandized, but most people are still swallowing it hook, line and sinker.

    This is really and truly as deep as most western analysis of this situation goes:

    The onus is not on anyone else to prove that US claims about Russian operations are false, the onus is on the US to prove that they are true. The burden of proof doesn’t magically disappear just because some pundits and politicians said something in an assertive tone.

    Still can’t get over how the liberal media spent years yelling about Trump Nazis and then immediately turned around and started doing PR segments for actual Nazis.

    Boy I haven’t been called a Kremlin propagandist this much since like 2018. Thing is, everything I was saying about western Russia narratives in 2018 has since been completely vindicated.

    It’s not that the US elects incompetent leaders who make bad decisions that kill millions of people with warfare, it’s that the global US empire is held together with military violence and the threat thereof. It’s an intrinsically evil institution and you should always oppose it.

    It’s not that the US government has done evil, it’s that the US government is itself evil. The very way it has set itself up to operate in the world necessarily means it must exert endless violence and oppression to keep populations functioning in its interests. That’s evil.

    The Mafia hasn’t happened to make bad decisions throughout its history that resulted in the unfortunate demise of certain individuals, it’s an institution explicitly set up to reap profits by exerting and threatening violent force. The US empire is exactly the same. Same evil.

    It’s not that the American people keep accidentally electing warmongering thugs, anymore than it’s an accident that the Mafia is always led by men who are willing to bully and kill. The US empire is an intrinsically thuggish and violent institution, and needs that kind of leader.

    The US empire is just a rich man’s mafia. And you should want it gone for the exact same reason you don’t want your neighborhood to be tyrannized by violent mobsters.

    The best critics of empire propaganda are mostly just people who went to journalism school and simply remember what they were taught about how journalism is supposed to look. Their commentary is usually nothing more than pointing out all the mass media lapses in basic journalistic ethics. It’s just kind of where you naturally wind up if you keep your attention on journalism without letting the pressures of the machine squeeze you into forgetting what you know about what it’s supposed to be.

    One of the main things I do here is try to help articulate the scope of the horrors of the empire. Because we’re in it, and it’s so aggressively normalized by the mass media, it becomes easy to overlook, like water for a fish. It’s hard to really notice something you’re marinating in all the time. Hard to see the horror with fresh eyes.

    We have all the information we need to understand the horrific nature of the empire, it just gets obscured and distorted and spun by imperial narrative management, so people don’t really see it clearly. The challenge isn’t so much obtaining evidence of the depravity of the empire as helping people to really, truly see the evidence we already have.

    ____________________________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

  • “For the past 15 years, ever since the Munich speech, Russian officials have been arguing against the unilateral use of force and demanding a UN-centered security system founded on international law. Were we to wake up one day and find that Russian tanks were rolling towards Kiev without any kind of excuse, it would amount to a complete abandonment of 15 years of argumentation as well as a negation of the entire legal/moral position built up by the Russian Federation in that period, a position reinforced just this month in the Putin/Xi statement.”

    The post Russia Is Pressing For More Concessions While Donbas Heats Up appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.


  • This content originally appeared on La Blogothèque and was authored by La Blogothèque.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    Well you’ll be shocked to learn that, while the Ukraine invasion we’ve been told for weeks was happening any day now still has not occurred, the US and UK have declared that Russia attacked Ukraine in an invisible and unverifiable way for which the evidence is secret.

    “The White House blamed Russia on Friday for this week’s cyberattacks targeting Ukraine’s defense ministry and major banks and warned of the potential for more significant disruptions in the days ahead,” AP reports. “Anne Neuberger, the Biden administration’s deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies, said the U.S. had rapidly linked Tuesday’s attacks to Russian military intelligence officers.”

    “Technical information analysis shows the GRU was almost certainly involved in disruptive DDoS attacks,” adds a statement from the UK Foreign Office.

    No evidence for this claim has been provided beyond the assertive tone with which American and British officials have uttered it, but that likely won’t stop arguments from western narrative managers that this “attack” justifies immediate economic sanctions.

    You’ve probably also heard by now that President Biden announced at a press briefing that Vladimir Putin has made the decision to invade Ukraine and violently topple Kyiv “in the coming days,” citing only “intelligence”.

    “What reason do you believe he’s considering that option at all?” a reporter asked Biden after his speech.

    “We have a significant intelligence capability, thank you very much,” the president answered, and made his exit.

    As we were reminded earlier this month in an interesting exchange between State Department spinmeister Ned Price and AP’s Matt Lee, US officials firmly believe that simply placing assertions next to the word “intelligence” should be considered rock solid proof that those assertions are true, and the press are expected to play along with this.

    And indeed, a large percentage of the political/media class is responding to Biden’s unevidenced claim that Putin has decided to launch a full-scale ground invasion of Ukraine as though that invasion is actually happening.

    There are also accusations of false flags amid the fighting in eastern Ukraine and numerous other claims about what Russia is doing as it prepares for this invasion it’s supposed to launch, and it’s all just being blindly accepted as objectively true in mainstream political discourse. Nowhere is it questioned. Nowhere is the fault of the US and NATO in creating these tensions between Russia and Ukraine ever reported, nor are the geostrategic benefits the US hegemon stands to reap from this standoff. Few even bother trying to articulate what Moscow would gain from invading Ukraine, except the occasional infantile “they hate us for our freedom”-style think piece about how Putin just can’t stand democracy.

    If online you question the veracity of any of these claims in light of the extensive history these institutions have of lying to us about just this sort of thing, it’s treated as a freakish and bizarre interjection that is at best misguided and at worst proof that you’re an agent of the Kremlin. I haven’t received so many notifications from people calling me a Russian operative since 2018, which to me is funny because everything I was saying about western Russia narratives in 2018 has since been completely vindicated.

    And I think it’s important while this all unfolds to take a moment to remind ourselves that the burden of proof is always on the party making the claim. This is a basic principle we all hold true in matters of logic and debate and in the legal system, and really anywhere that disputed claims are scrutinized, and it doesn’t magically stop being the case just because a claim is spoken in an assertive tone by powerful people about a country they don’t like. If you make a claim in an irrelevant time-wasting Twitter argument you’ll immediately be asked for proof that it’s true, but if the most powerful government in the world makes an incendiary claim of potentially world-shaping consequence we’re all just expected to accept it, even though that government has a proven track record of making false claims.

    The onus is not on anyone else to prove that the US and UK governments are lying when they make these claims, the onus is on the US and UK governments to prove that they are telling the truth. At some point after Donald Trump’s election it became a mainstream liberal doctrine that you can say whatever you want about Russia no matter how outrageous and suffer no professional consequences if it proved completely false, and nobody’s really been pushing back on that. So many people built entire careers out of suggesting for years on end that the entire Trump family was going to be dragged out of the White House in chains for Kremlin collusion, and when this failed to prove true everyone just acted like it was fine and continued on with their careers.

    But it’s not fine. It’s not okay that this bizarre cold war hysteria environment has melted everyone’s brain over the last five years. It’s not okay that the most basic standards of logic and evidence have been flushed down the toilet. It’s not okay that we now have MI6 spooks and CIA mouthpieces openly acknowledging that the government is using the western press to wage an information war geared at undermining Russia when both the government and the press are supposed to be simply telling us the truth.

    I don’t know what’s going to happen with Ukraine. What I do know is that it would be good to drag the Overton window of acceptable debate kicking and screaming back to the point where the burden of proof needs to be met even, and especially, by the world’s most powerful people. And where, if that burden is not met, their claims are treated with all the disdain they deserve.

    _____________________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Mexico

    Continue reading…

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

  • On Friday, the head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic announced the start of a mass evacuation of the population to Russia after shelling by Ukrainian forces intensified in the breakaway Donbass region.

    The post Civil Defence Sirens Sound In Donetsk After Mass Evacuation Announcement – VIDEO appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Blinken laid out a highly detailed scenario. It’s from a State Department speechwriter, not a Hollywood scriptwriter. Ignoring Vershinin’s plea not to abuse the dignity of the Security Council to further inflame tensions with empty war rhetoric. In fact, no Russian official has issued such a threat, at least not publicly, unlike the daily barrage of U.S. threats against Iraq before it launched a real, old world invasion and occupation. Blinken says the U.S. doesn’t “precisely” know “how things will play out,” but then he lays out precisely what the “world can expect to see.” So do they know or don’t they?

    The post US Doubles Downs On Russian ‘Invasion’ Rhetoric At UN Amid Signs Of Donbass Offensive appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  •  

    FAIR: What You Should Really Know About Ukraine

    FAIR.org (1/28/22)

    This week on CounterSpin: You might think you’re not smart enough to talk about Ukraine. And, especially on US foreign policy, corporate media seem to suggest that any questions you have that fall outside their framework are not just dumb but traitorous, not earnest but dangerously naive. Peace? Diplomacy? The idea that US might have broken promises, might have material and not moral interests? Oh, so you love Putin then!

    There is an interesting, relevant history to the state of tension between the US and Russia over Ukraine; but understanding it involves letting go of the storyline in which the US equals benevolent democracy and Russia equals craven imperialism.

    We got some of that history from Bryce Greene, who wrote about Ukraine recently for FAIR.org.  We’ll hear that conversation this week.

          CounterSpin220218Greene.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Afghanistan.

          CounterSpin220218Banter.mp3

    The post Bryce Greene on Ukraine appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    Post-Iraq the US has zero moral authority. The narrative managers aim to suck you in to arguing about the minutiae of the inner workings of the latest target of the empire, when in fact a simple “Shut the fuck up, it’s none of your business” is all they deserve.

    What the US and its proxies are doing with Yemen is universes more horrific and universes more urgent than what Russia is doing with Ukraine.

    The Ukraine invasion that never arrives is showing us once again that when it comes to Russia you really can just completely ignore all the so-called “experts” in the mainstream media. Just dismiss 100 percent of everything they say. Any random schmuck’s best guess is better than theirs.

    The US has spent years accusing Russia of inflaming far right extremism in America and that whole time they were fixing to ship weapons to Nazis in Ukraine.

    Putin should run an aggressive propaganda campaign insisting the US is about to invade Mexico and threatening severe repercussions if it does, then when the invasion fails to materialize take credit for it and say it’s because of his bold actions against the Biden regime.

    “Oh, right, it’s not like the US already has a history of annexing Mexican territory or anything, you despicable White House propagandist. And I guess you’ve never heard of a little thing called IRAQ??”

    Saying we need to defend Ukrainian democracy is like saying we need to defend Iowa’s fjords.

    To be a westerner is to be continuously inundated with made-up stories about evil tyrants who want to terrorize the world while living under a vast empire that is actually terrorizing the world.

    Boy I feel sorry for all those ignorant assholes who don’t watch the news and have no idea that Putin is invading Ukraine and Trump was a Kremlin agent and Saddam had WMDs and capitalism is totally working and America is the greatest country on earth.

    Looking to the mainstream media for truth is like looking to a prostitute for love. That’s not what they’re there for. That’s not their job.

    The type of financial blockade they’re setting up in Canada today will with 100 percent certainty be used against other protest movements which pose a problem for the powerful tomorrow. Including the ones you support.

    It’s not about Zero Hedge. It’s not about Russian propaganda. It’s not about Covid misinformation, election security, foreign trolls or QAnon. It’s about ruling power structures needing to normalize and expand the regulation of online speech to protect consent for the status quo.

    Few people understand just how important it is for the powerful to control the narrative about what’s going on in the world. It’s the primary thing standing between the status quo and revolutionary change. They’d do anything, and I mean anything, to keep it.

    When governments and their media mouthpieces keep offering diverse and unrelated reasons why online information needs to be more strictly controlled, it’s not hard to see that the strict control of information is itself their real objective. Today they’re back to focusing on “Russian propaganda”. Tomorrow it will be back to “Covid misinformation” or “domestic extremism” or some other justification. But that’s all they are: justifications. For something they already intend to do and have been working toward for a long time.

    It’s like if some stranger kept following you around telling you all different reasons why it’s very important that you hand him your wallet. At a certain point it must occur to you that it’s not really about those reasons he’s giving you, it’s just him trying to get your wallet.

    The US empire does not promote democracy, it violently opposes it and subverts it at every opportunity. Opposing the planetary domination of the US empire is what promotes democracy.

    Westerners are so propagandized that the ones I encounter find it easier to believe I just so happen to support every evil regime in the world, whether capitalist or communist, than to consider the possibility that the US regime is the real evil and I simply oppose that evil. They actually imagine I’m looking at each of the governments being targeted by the US empire, thinking “Hmm, this Kim Jong Un has some good ideas. Oh look, I also agree with Vladimir Putin! And the Iranian government as well! All their positions sound good to me.”

    I mean, how brainwashed do you have to be to think that? It can’t possibly be because the US and its allies are quantifiably the most destructive and murderous power structure in today’s world, and opposing such a beast is a completely normal thing that literally everyone should be doing.

    Person criticizing the most powerful and destructive government on earth = RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA!

    Entire western political/media class pumping out uniform plot hole-riddled narratives about governments who disobey Washington = just the normal news teaching you what’s true.

    Hollywood movies allow us to fantasize about beating up murderous villains, stopping terrorists and defeating evil empires without having to actually stand up to them in real life, which we don’t want to do, because we’re afraid of them, because they’re our own government.

    Internet communists like to talk tough about supporting violent revolution but we all know we’re so far from any kind of real revolution at this point in the game that it’s about as brave as saying you’re willing to fight Skeletor.

    Hollywood, Silicon Valley and the mainstream news media are just as integral a part of the empire as its military.

    Don’t worry if people call you a “contrarian”. Frequently disagreeing with mainstream consensus is probably a sane and healthy thing to do in a profoundly sick society.

    ________________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • It is more than a century since Edward Bernays, the father of spin, invented “public relations” as a cover for war propaganda, writes John Pilger. What is new is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • People gather in Rome to call for peace, February 15, 2022 | Photo Credit: Reuters

    Every day brings new noise and fury in the crisis over Ukraine, mostly from Washington. But what is really likely to happen?

    There are three possible scenarios:

    The first is that Russia will suddenly launch an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

    The second is that the Ukrainian government in Kyiv will launch an escalation of its civil war against the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR), provoking various possible reactions from other countries.

    The third is that neither of these will happen, and the crisis will pass without a major escalation of the war in the short term.

    So who will do what, and how will other countries respond in each case?

    Unprovoked Russian invasion

    This seems to be the least likely outcome.

    An actual Russian invasion would unleash unpredictable and cascading consequences that could escalate quickly, leading to mass civilian casualties, a new refugee crisis in Europe, war between Russia and NATO, or even nuclear war.

    If Russia wanted to annex the DPR and LPR, it could have done so amid the crisis that followed the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014. Russia already faced a furious Western response over its annexation of Crimea, so the international cost of annexing the DPR and LPR, which were also asking to rejoin Russia, would have been less then than it would be now.

    Russia instead adopted a carefully calculated position in which it gave the Republics only covert military and political support. If Russia was really ready to risk so much more now than in 2014, that would be a dreadful reflection of just how far U.S.-Russian relations have sunk.

    If Russia does launch an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine or annex the DPR and LPR, Biden has already said that the United States and NATO would not directly fight a war with Russia over Ukraine, although that promise could be severely tested by the hawks in Congress and a media hellbent on stirring up anti-Russia hysteria.

    However, the United States and its allies would definitely impose heavy new sanctions on Russia, cementing the Cold War economic and political division of the world between the United States and its allies on one hand, and Russia, China and their allies on the other. Biden would achieve the full-blown Cold War that successive U.S. administrations have been cooking up for a decade, and which seems to be the unstated purpose of this manufactured crisis.

    In terms of Europe, the U.S. geopolitical goal is clearly to engineer a complete breakdown in relations between Russia and the European Union (EU), to bind Europe to the United States. Forcing Germany to cancel its $11 billion Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia will certainly make Germany more energy dependent on the U.S. and its allies. The overall result would be exactly as Lord Ismay, NATO’s first Secretary General, described when he said that the purpose of the alliance was to keep “the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.”

    Brexit (the U.K. departure from the EU) detached the U.K. from the EU and cemented its “special relationship” and military alliance with the United States. In the current crisis, this joined-at-the-hip U.S.-U.K. alliance is reprising the unified role it played to diplomatically engineer and wage wars on Iraq in 1991 and 2003.

    Today, China and the European Union (led by France and Germany) are the two leading trade partners of most countries in the world, a position formerly occupied by the United States. If the U.S. strategy in this crisis succeeds, it will erect a new Iron Curtain between Russia and the rest of Europe to inextricably tie the EU to the United States and prevent it from becoming a truly independent pole in a new multipolar world. If Biden pulls this off, he will have reduced America’s celebrated “victory” in the Cold War to simply dismantling the Iron Curtain and rebuilding it a few hundred miles to the east 30 years later.

    But Biden may be trying to close the barn door after the horse has bolted. The EU is already an independent economic power. It is politically diverse and sometimes divided, but its political divisions seem manageable when compared with the political chaos, corruption and endemic poverty in the United States. Most Europeans think their political systems are healthier and more democratic than America’s, and they seem to be correct.

    Like China, the EU and its members are proving to be more reliable partners for international trade and peaceful development than the self-absorbed, capricious and militaristic United States, where positive steps by one administration are regularly undone by the next, and whose military aid and arms sales destabilize countries (as in Africa right now), and strengthen dictatorships and extreme right-wing governments around the world.

    But an unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine would almost certainly fulfill Biden’s goal of isolating Russia from Europe, at least in the short term. If Russia was ready to pay that price, it would be because it now sees the renewed Cold War division of Europe by the United States and NATO as unavoidable and irrevocable, and has concluded that it must consolidate and strengthen its defenses. That would also imply that Russia has China’s full support for doing so, heralding a darker and more dangerous future for the whole world.

    Ukrainian escalation of civil war

    The second scenario, an escalation of the civil war by Ukrainian forces, seems more likely.

    Whether it is a full-scale invasion of the Donbas or something less, its main purpose from the U.S. point of view would be to provoke Russia into intervening more directly in Ukraine, to fulfill Biden’s prediction of a “Russian invasion” and unleash the maximum pressure sanctions he has threatened.

    While Western leaders have been warning of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian, DPR and LPR officials have been warning for months that Ukrainian government forces were escalating the civil war and have 150,000 troops and new weapons poised to attack the DPR and LPR.

    In that scenario, the massive U.S. and Western arms shipments arriving in Ukraine on the pretext of deterring a Russian invasion would, in fact, be intended for use in an already planned Ukrainian government offensive.

    On one hand, if Ukrainian President Zelensky and his government are planning an offensive in the East, why are they so publicly playing down fears of a Russian invasion? Surely they would be joining the chorus from Washington, London and Brussels, setting the stage to point their fingers at Russia as soon as they launch their own escalation.

    And why are the Russians not more vocal in alerting the world to the danger of escalation by Ukrainian government forces surrounding the DPR and LPR? Surely the Russians have extensive intelligence sources inside Ukraine and would know if Ukraine was indeed planning a new offensive. But the Russians seem much more concerned by the breakdown in U.S.-Russian relations than in what the Ukrainian military may be up to.

    On the other hand, the U.S., U.K. and NATO propaganda strategy has been organized in plain sight, with a new “intelligence” revelation or high-level pronouncement for every day of the month. So what might they have up their sleeves? Are they really confident that they can wrong-foot the Russians and leave them carrying the can for a deception operation that could rival the Tonkin Gulf incident or the WMD lies about Iraq?

    The plan could be very simple. Ukrainian government forces attack. Russia comes to the defense of the DPR and LPR. Biden and Boris Johnson scream “Invasion,” and “We told you so!” Macron and Scholz mutely echo “Invasion,” and “We stand together.” The United States and its allies impose “maximum pressure” sanctions on Russia, and NATO’s plans for a new Iron Curtain across Europe are a fait accompli.

    An added wrinkle could be the kind of “false flag” narrative that US. and U.K. officials have hinted at several times. A Ukrainian government attack on the DPR or LPR could be passed off in the West as a “false flag” provocation by Russia, to muddy the distinction between a Ukrainian government escalation of the civil war and a “Russian invasion.”

    It’s unclear whether such plans would work, or whether they would simply divide NATO and Europe, with different countries taking different positions. Tragically, the answer might depend more on how craftily the trap was sprung than on the rights or wrongs of the conflict.

    But the critical question will be whether EU nations are ready to sacrifice their own independence and economic prosperity, which depends partly on natural gas supplies from Russia, for the uncertain benefits and debilitating costs of continued subservience to the U.S. empire. Europe would face a stark choice between a full return to its Cold War role on the front line of a possible nuclear war and the peaceful, cooperative future the EU has gradually but steadily built since 1990.

    Many Europeans are disillusioned with the neoliberal economic and political order that the EU has embraced, but it was subservience to the United States that led them down that garden path in the first place. Solidifying and deepening that subservience now would consolidate the plutocracy and extreme inequality of U.S.-led neoliberalism, not lead to a way out of it.

    Biden may get away with blaming the Russians for everything when he’s kowtowing to war-hawks and preening for the TV cameras in Washington. But European governments have their own intelligence agencies and military advisors, who are not all under the thumb of the CIA and NATO. The German and French intelligence agencies have often warned their bosses not to follow the U.S. pied piper, notably into Iraq in 2003. We must hope they have not all lost their objectivity, analytical skills or loyalty to their own countries since then.

    If this backfires on Biden, and Europe ultimately rejects his call to arms against Russia, this could be the moment when Europe bravely steps up to take its place as a strong, independent power in the emerging multipolar world.

    Nothing happens

    This would be the best outcome of all: an anti-climax to celebrate.

    At some point, absent an invasion by Russia or an escalation by Ukraine, Biden would sooner or later have to stop crying “Wolf” every day.

    All sides could climb back down from their military build-ups, panicked rhetoric and threatened sanctions.

    The Minsk Protocol could be revived, revised and reinvigorated to provide a satisfactory degree of autonomy to the people of the DPR and LPR within Ukraine, or facilitate a peaceful separation.

    The United States, Russia and China could begin more serious diplomacy to reduce the threat of nuclear war and resolve their many differences, so that the world could move forward to peace and prosperity instead of backwards to Cold War and nuclear brinkmanship.

    Conclusion

    However it ends, this crisis should be a wake-up call for Americans of all classes and political persuasions to reevaluate our country’s position in the world. We have squandered trillions of dollars, and millions of other people’s lives, with our militarism and imperialism. The U.S. military budget keeps rising with no end in sight–and now the conflict with Russia has become another justification for prioritizing weapons spending over the needs of our people.

    Our corrupt leaders have tried but failed to strangle the emerging multipolar world at birth through militarism and coercion. As we can see after 20 years of war in Afghanistan, we cannot fight and bomb our way to peace or stability, and coercive economic sanctions can be almost as brutal and destructive. We must also re-evaluate the role of NATO and wind down this military alliance that has become such an aggressive and destructive force in the world.

    Instead, we must start thinking about how a post-imperial America can play a cooperative and constructive role in this new multipolar world, working with all our neighbors to solve the very serious problems facing humanity in the 21st Century.

    The post What Is Going to Happen in Ukraine? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The U.S. manufactured crisis in Ukraine cannot be separated from the drive for full spectrum dominance all over the world. Today the empire uses Ukraine for its purposes, other nations will be next unless there are organized mass movements against US/NATO aggressions.

    The post Ukraine: The Tip of the Spear for the Imperialist Project appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Aaron Mate And Max Blumenthal Speak With Deputy Permanent Representative Of Russia To The UN Dmitri Polyanskiy On Escalated Tensions On The Russian-Ukraine Border, US Accusations Of An Imminent Russian Invasion, And The Context Missing From A US Media That Refuses To Interview Russian Officials.

    The post Russian UN Ambassador Responds To US ‘War Propaganda’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists emerged after World War II as a voice for peace by some of the scientists who developed the then ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Now, its mission has drifted into being an echo chamber for the US imperial project urging President Biden to take even more destabilizing actions against Russia.

    The post The Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists Calls For Escalating US Aggression Against Russia appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The vast majority of people in the world don’t want war, so why do they keep happening? Curtis Daly explores war in this week’s Daly Report.


    Video transcript

    Tensions are rising again between the so-called West and Russia, with Russian troops on the Ukrainian border and politicians of all stripes clamouring to flex their muscles.

    “They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt. It always ends the same” 

    It seems like world leaders may be posturing and pushing us into another war, despite ordinary people the world over wanting peace.…. So, why does the threat of war never seem far away?

    Conflict has been around since the dawn of time, and we can’t cover everything in one video, so let’s look at the more recent imperialist wars.

    British Empire

    Let’s start with the British colonialist empire which began around the 17th century, with the first major colonies in North America and the West Indies.

    Despite some wanting to tell us how good it was – clip ‘proud of British Empire’- It was in fact, a nightmare for the colonised.

    The empire was created and maintained through exploitation and bloodshed. In 1562 John Hawkins was the Captain of the first slave shit that set for Africa. From the mid-17th century, 3.1 million Africans were captured and taken to the Americas.

    As well as slavery, The British Empire was responsible for opium trading, concentration camps, famines and much more.

    But what does this have to do with the wars of today?

    Imperialism and war are intertwined. The British, and the west have always had a hunger for world domination and the plunder of resources. Yesterday it was the Empire, today it’s the war on terror.

    The media and politicians quickly use the excuse of fighting against existential threats or coming to the defence of subjugated peoples, but that’s almost always a pretext. There are many other underlying factors.

    Oil Imperialism

    A Global Observatory study called ‘Oil Above Water’ found that:

    Oil production and known oil reserves are central factors motivating third-party military interventions. More specifically, we demonstrated that the higher the quantities of oil produced and/or owned by a country at civil war, the higher the likelihood of third-party intervention.”

    They go on to say:

    in periods where world oil production is concentrated in the hands of fewer countries, civil wars in oil-producing countries are more likely to attract foreign military involvement.”

    The quest for resources has always been a major driver of war, today oil is a primary one; natural gas, rare earth materials and water could be others.

    Military Industrial Complex

    “In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex”.

    60 years later, despite Eisenhower’s warning, the Military Industrial Complex has expanded exponentially.

    Twelve billion bullets are produced every year. That is almost enough to kill everyone in the world twice. Every day, thousands of people are killed, injured and forced to flee their homes because of gun violence and armed conflict.” – Amnesty

    Just six countries export 80% of the world’s arms; Russia, China, USA, Germany, UK and France.

    The value of the arms trade around the world is around $95 billion. Despite the humanitarian crises weapons obviously cause, perpetual war is incredibly lucrative for arms companies.

    Ask yourself, is the driver of global conflict a difference of values, religious beliefs or political ideologies? Or is conflict manufactured to drive profits?

    We often talk about western values, but what are those? The expansion of global capitalism by deposing democratically elected governments in favour of corporate profits?

    What about the politicians behind wars, what are thier motivations?

    Let’s look at Britain in the early 80s.

    Many argued that the catastrophic defeat for Labour in 1983 was due to it’s radical left wing agenda with the ‘longest suicide note in history’, however what contributed to the defeat was the fact that the Labour Party split, and the Social Democrats and Liberals took millions of votes and a sizeable number of seats that gifted the Tories a win.

    There was also another reason. The Falklands war. Thatcher before the war was the most unpopular PM since world war 2.

    But the Falklands war proved massively popular, as the sound of war drums beating created sympathy and support from the general public.

    Almost every Prime Minister and President has been enamoured with war because they know that war can be used to stoke nationalist fervour, create a common external enemy and so distract the population from their enemy at home: the ruling class. 

    War: what isn’t it good for?

    The United Nations estimates that 82.4 million people are currently displaced, many due to armed conflict.

    According to the ACLED, 100,000 people died from the war in Yemen.

    At least 350,000 were killed during the war in Syria

    The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 saw 46,000 civilians killed and 2.2 million Afghans were displaced.

    According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, between 2010 and 2020, as many as 16,000 civilians were killed from drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.

    Only 1.5 – 2% of drone strikes hit their intended target, meaning 98% of those killed by drones are not the intended target, they are mostly civilians, deemed “collateral damage”.

    There are also the half a million people who died in the Iraq War in what many call the biggest disaster in foreign policy history.

    The bloodshed and misery that war creates in order to enrich the few, to elevate politicians and to continue the cog of the imperialist profit making war machine must end.

    War, what is it good for? For the vast majority of people in the world, you guessed it, absolutely nothing.

    By Curtis Daly

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Incompetent politicians and diplomats are on the level with ill-prepared generals fighting current wars with dated methods.  They err, they stumble, and they may well be responsible for the next idiotic slander, misfire or misunderstanding.  UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is synonymous with Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s idea of groping diplomacy.  Graceless, all confusion, and much ignorance besides, she has been given the task of howling in the Kremlin’s direction, warning that no invasion of Ukraine will be tolerated by Global Britain.

    Truss, former international trade secretary known for her “goofy public persona”, took over from the less goofy and somewhat severe Dominic Raab as foreign secretary in Johnson’s ministerial shake-up last year.  Her time at the Department of International Trade had been dubbed the “Department for Instagramming Truss”, given her insatiable appetite for social media platforms.

    Ideology, not facts, interest her.  As she explained to Politico, “I’m probably one of the more ideological among my colleagues, in that that’s what motivates me.”  Her rapid immaturing has seen her moving ever more towards economic libertarianism, founding the Free Enterprise Group of Conservative MPs keen to savage and prune employment laws and regulations.

    The placing of ideology before facts has somewhat dented her performance at critical points.  In foreign relations, notably when war might be peeking around the corner between Ukraine and Russia, this is telling.  During the course of the BBC’s Sunday Morning show, she claimed that “we are supplying and offering extra support into our Baltic allies across the Black Sea.”

    Identifying the wrong sea enabled Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, the reliably stern ice queen Maria Zakharova, to move in for the kill.  “The Baltic countries are called so because they are located precisely off the coast of this [Baltic] sea.  Not the Black [Sea].”  A grave Zakharova could only reflect that, “If anyone needs to be saved from anything, then it is the world from the stupidity and ignorance of Anglo-Saxon politicians.”

    During that now notorious closed-door meeting between Truss and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, ignorance basked gloriously, with Truss floundering with amateurish accomplishment.  Truss, so goes the account, demanded of the Russian Foreign Minister that his country move its troops away from the Ukrainian border.  Lavrov’s steely point was elementary: Moscow could do what it wanted to within its own borders.

    Then came the grenade, pin removed.  Truss, having previously been interested in trade, probably had her mine on cheese or pork products.  The Foreign Secretary was asked (trap laid in full view) whether the UK recognised sovereignty over Rostov and Voronezh.  According to the Kommersant newspaper, Truss was defiant: the UK would never recognise them as Russian.  In the long tradition of the diplomatic corps, the UK ambassador to Moscow, Deborah Bronnert, had to aid Truss in correction.  Rostov and Voronezh were, well, Russian.

    This gave Lavrov much ammunition in the press conference that followed.  He claimed that talking to Truss was like “speaking to a deaf person who listens but cannot hear”.  Spokesman Dmitry Peskov, when asked about Truss’s limited understanding of the region and, so it went, her brief, seemed to relish it.  “We are not in the position to answer this question.  It’s the Foreign Ministry’s competence.”

    On Sky News, Russia’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Dmitry Polyanskiy, was brutally direct.  “There is always room for diplomacy but, frankly, we don’t trust British diplomacy.  I think in recent years British diplomacy has shown that it is absolutely worthless.”

    The Truss ignorance show did not go down well in those quarters that still feel Britannia has a muscular role to play in foreign affairs.  Having cut his teeth as British ambassador to Moscow, Tony Brenton mourned the Truss Moscow “performance” as completing “the process of the UK  making itself irrelevant to serious diplomatic efforts to resolve the Ukraine crisis.”

    Former editor of the Financial Times, Lionel Barber, homed in on Lavrov as “Putin’s Gromyko”, one who ate “Liz Truss alive on camera, dismissing her as an ignorant lightweight who spends too much time on social media.”

    Martin Fletcher, former foreign editor of The Times, bemoaned Truss’s lass of serious preparation and her visit to Moscow as, for the most part, “a glorified photo opportunity”.  What he would have given for a harder, more disciplined engagement with the Russians, the sort that the late former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was rather good at.

    Some British pundits were left scrounging for nuggets of justification.  James Forsyth clucked his way to suggesting that Lavrov’s rudeness was somehow a “sign that Liz Truss held the line in their meeting”.  Rallying support for Truss was the gossip columnist of the Spectator, who could not stomach the “Brit-poisoning Kremlin” to any degree. “For her part, Truss stayed calm and walked off after the snub, having used her meeting to re-emphasise the British government warnings about the build up of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border.”

    The problem with Truss is fundamental, having little to do with showmanship or any proud display in the face of stupidity or a basic lack of understanding.  She may well be representing a power diminished, but the UK, billing itself as Global Britain, is doing poorly under her hollow, social media driven stewardship.  Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating has even labelled her assessment of Beijing and Russian intentions (for Truss, these are inseparable) as “nothing short of demented.”

    Writing for Spiked, Mary Dejevsky, having cut her teeth as Moscow correspondent for The Times between 1988 and 1992,  showed her talons in explaining why the Truss adventure was, diplomatically, all fizz and utter failure.  “Dispatched for little more than a day trip to Moscow, Liz Truss managed to confirm all of Russia’s negative preconceptions about British diplomacy – arrogance, coldness and an attachment to hypocritical sermonising about ‘values’ – while adding at least one more: ignorance.”  Punchy stuff, and accurate to boot.

    The post Failure in Moscow: Liz Truss loses Britannia’s Way first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    Back in November The Military Times published a Ukrainian intelligence claim, which was picked up and repeated by numerous other mainstream publications, alleging that Russia was going to invade Ukraine by the end of January.

    Then in late January when the calendar debunked the Military Times incendiary headline “Russia preparing to attack Ukraine by late January”, that same outlet ran a much less viral story with the headline “Russia not yet ready for full-scale attack says Ukraine“.

    This past Friday the deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, Melinda Haring, tweeted the following:

    “Putin has big weekend plans in Ukraine: 1) he’s going to cut power and heat, knock out Ukrainian navy and air force, kill general staff and hit them with cyber attack; 2) then install pro-Russian president and 3) resort to full-scale military invasion if Ukraine doesn’t give in.”

    And, of course, none of these things happened. The weekend came and went, Haring issued a sheepish admission that she got it wrong, then immediately turned around and proclaimed that “Putin may strike on Weds”, then later pivoted to “We’ve been so focused on Russian troops and tanks that we missed Moscow’s strategy: strangle Ukraine’s economy and sap the resolve of its people.”

    On January 14th we were told by NBC that we could expect a Russian invasion of Ukraine “within a month’s time”. On February 14th the prediction was as unfulfilled as the wishes of a Jordan Peterson fan on Valentine’s day.

    Then British outlets The Daily Mirror and The Sun told us that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was to come at precisely 1am GMT on Wednesday, citing “American intelligence agencies”. This prediction, whose frightening “DAWN RAID” presentation likely gave sales a bit of a boost, was again debunked by the hands of the clock.

    “The 3am time (1am GMT) when US intelligence sources suspected a Russian attack came and went without incident last night as Putin continued to keep The West guessing,” The Sun’s updated online article now reads.

    Last week the US president told US allies that Putin may invade on February 16th, a prediction Ukraine’s President Zelensky made fun of in a widely misinterpreted joke. This claim also has been discredited by the clock.

    And now we’re being told that nobody seriously believed Russia was going to invade on the 16th, and that February 20th is the real invasion date.

    “The prospect of a Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 16 was always overhyped,” Politico tells us. “The time frame to really keep an eye on is what happens shortly after Feb. 20.”

    Radio evangelist Harold Camping famously predicted that the Apocalypse would occur on September 6, 1994, then again on September 29 of the same year, and then again on October 2. In 2005 he revised his claim and said the real Rapture was coming on May 21, 2011, and then when that failed to pan out he said it was happening on October 21 of that year. Whenever he got a prediction wrong he’d just do some more magic Bible math and move the date into the future.

    Camping was one of many exploitative Christian cult leaders who’ve falsely predicted the Second Coming over the years amassing thousands of followers with an early form of tabloid clickbait. The difference between the Harold Campings of history and the Ukraine invasion prognosticators of today is that Harold Camping died disgraced and disdained instead of being elevated to lucrative positions in the most influential news media outlets on the planet.

    Today’s Harold Campings will invent all kinds of justifications for their shameless participation in a transparent government psyop designed to advanced the unipolarist geostrategic agendas of the US hegemon once their war forecasts fail to bear fruit. The most common justification will be to claim that the Biden administration’s hawkish posturing and strategic information warfare is what deterred the forcible annexation of Ukraine into the Russian Federation. As we discussed previously, this claim is logically fallacious, explained here by Lisa Simpson:

    We’re already seeing this “we stopped the Russian invasion” narrative circulated by unscrupulous pundits like Tom Friedman of the New York Times, whose spectacularly awful career differs from a stopped clock only in that it is wrong two additional times per day.

    “If Vladimir Putin opts to back away from invading Ukraine, even temporarily, it’s because Joe Biden — that guy whose right-wing critics suggest is so deep in dementia he wouldn’t know Kyiv from Kansas or AARP from NATO — has matched every Putin chess move with an effective counter of his own,” writes Friedman.

    Putin could just as easily have launched a virulent propaganda campaign claiming the US is about to invade Mexico any minute now and threatening severe repercussions if it does, and then taking credit when the invasion fails to occur for his bold stance against the Biden regime. It would have been the easiest thing in the world; just copy the western script replacing each instance of “Ukraine” with “Mexico” and each instance of “Crimea” with “Texas”.

    We’re also seeing a new narrative in the oven with claims of a Russian cyberattack against Ukraine, which as an invisible attack whose evidence is classified would serve the imperial face-saving effort, with the added bonus of justifying further economic warfare on Moscow.

    “This is such a transparent scam,” journalist Aaron Maté recently tweeted of the hacking claims. “The warmongers crafting new US sanctions on Russia have repeatedly said that Russian cyberattacks could trigger them. With no invasion happening, this is Plan B.”

    The Ukraine invasion that never arrives is showing us once again that when it comes to Russia you really can just completely ignore all the so-called “experts” in the mainstream media. Just dismiss 100 percent of everything they say, because any random schmoe’s best guess would be better than theirs.

    Looking to the mainstream media for truth is like looking to a prostitute for love. That’s not what they’re there for. That’s not their job. If you believed these predictions, the correct thing to do as they fail to come true is not to engage in a bunch of mental gymnastics justifying it, but to drastically revise the worldview and your media consumption habits which caused you to believe this crap in the first place.

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