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Category: Russia

  • Blackwater Is In The Donbas With The Azov Battalion

    While the Ukrainian president himself takes a more cautious stance, the Ukrainian armed forces are massing in Donbas close to the Donetsk and Lugansk area inhabited by Russian populations. According to reports from the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, units of the Ukrainian Army and National Guard amounting to about 150,000 men are positioned there, the news is overshadowed by our mainstream which speaks only of the Russian deployment. They are armed and trained, and so effectively commanded by US-NATO military advisers and instructors.

    The post Blackwater Is In The Donbas With The Azov Battalion appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Russia & China Hatch Sanctions Busting Plan To Limit Use Of Dollar

    Amid a worsening stand-off between East and West, Russia and China are increasingly contemplating using their own currencies in mutual settlements and finding ways to work together to counter sanctions, Moscow’s envoy in Beijing has disclosed.

    Speaking as part of an appearance on YouTube channel Soloviev Live on Wednesday, Andrey Denisov weighed in on the impact of embargoes imposed by Western nations on ties between the two nations.

    The post Russia & China Hatch Sanctions Busting Plan To Limit Use Of Dollar appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • US Militarism Is a Cause of Tension in Eastern Europe, Not a Solution

    Ground personnel unload weapons, including Javelin anti-tank missiles, and other military hardware delivered on a National Airlines plane by the United States military at Boryspil International Airport near Kyiv on January 25, 2022, in Boryspil, Ukraine.

    The rising tensions between Ukraine, Russia, the United States and other NATO countries — and the resulting discourse in U.S. media — show that American leaders love an international crisis.

    In a crisis, the American public is often discouraged from asking questions — and when they do, militarism is usually the answer.

    Even as Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky discourages panic and downplays the idea that a Russian invasion is imminent, American officials are portraying armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine as inevitable — and U.S. military support of Ukraine as necessary.

    “What’s the alternative?” asked retired Brigadier General and former Defense Attaché to Moscow Peter Zwack in an interview on NPR. “Do we just let them get invaded, or do we make the cost so high on the ground-level military — but also the diplomatic and the economic?”

    The choice being put forward is between military action or inaction; to opt for “inaction” is presented as an abandonment of Ukraine. Zwack’s prescription is “lethal weapons” — specifically Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

    And the U.S. is delivering. In just over a week, the U.S. made four shipments of weapons to Ukraine — a move that has U.S. arms manufacturers anticipating soaring profits for their shareholders.

    The particular kind of crisis story that American officials are deploying in the situation with Ukraine is a familiar one: An underdog faces a threat from an authoritarian regime, so the United States must come to the rescue with a military response.

    In an interview on NPR, Republican Representative and Chair of Congress’s Ukraine Caucus Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania offered a historical analogy often invoked by American officials to justify military action.

    “When we defended Kuwait in Operation Desert Shield,” Fitzpatrick said, “we sent a message to the world that you cannot violate the territorial integrity of an independent nation. And Ukraine should be no different. We have to send a very strong and unequivocal message to Vladimir Putin, which would also be a message to Xi Jinping, to Kim Jong Un and other bad actors around the world that this is not OK to do.”

    Fitzpatrick’s interviewer didn’t question his response. But his example of U.S. military action in Iraq in 1991 shows exactly why it’s critical to question the narrative being pushed by U.S. media, especially during times of crisis.

    In Fitzpatrick’s account of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the U.S. appears to be a bystander responding to Iraqi actions. But his story conveniently omits the fact that just prior to its invasion of Kuwait, Iraq counted the U.S. as an ally — one that supplied it with weapons during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. It also ignores that the story did not end with Desert Shield.

    The U.S. quickly shifted its supposed defense of Kuwait into its own invasion — Operation Desert Storm — of Iraq. In that assault, the U.S. killed some 100,000 Iraqis and shattered the country. It then imposed catastrophic economic sanctions on Iraq, which were responsible for the deaths of another million Iraqis. It accompanied this policy with air patrols of Iraq, and bombed the country intermittently over the next decade. And finally, the U.S. invaded once again in 2003, occupied Iraq after and maintains about 2,500 troops there to this day.

    Cherry-picking past examples of U.S. intervention excludes vital context and falls short of telling the whole story. Narratives like these obscure ongoing, longstanding military operations and other policies that make the world more dangerous and which have no end in sight.

    Still, there are moments when officials share details that unintentionally reveal that U.S. involvement in the crisis on the Ukrainian border is far more complicated than they have been acknowledging.

    With 8,500 U.S. troops readied for deployment, a journalist asked during a White House press conference if sending forces to the countries that NATO counts as its “Eastern Flank” might escalate the situation rather than calm it. “We’ve had troops in the Eastern Flank countries for decades,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki replied.

    Indeed, the U.S. maintains an enormous, nuclear armed military presence in Europe — and in the years leading up to the current crisis, it has spent millions of dollars arming Ukraine in particular.

    Since the 2014 conflict in Ukraine, in which Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, the U.S. has sent hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Ukraine — in 2015, 2018, 2019 and 2020 — including its celebrated Javelin missiles.

    Psaki’s admission begs some follow-up questions: If U.S. troops and weapons have already been in Ukraine for years — and in Europe for decades — but their presence has not deterred Russia from mobilizing troops to the Ukrainian border, why does the Pentagon think that more weapons and troops will do so now? And could it be, perhaps, that this same U.S. militarism is a cause of rising tension in Eastern Europe, rather than its solution?

    It would be wrong to minimize the potential devastation of a Russian invasion of Ukraine should one occur. But U.S. actions are raising tensions rather than resolving them. While they speak of Ukrainian sovereignty, it is clear that U.S. officials are primarily preoccupied with Russian military aggression that they see as threatening a world order that the U.S. presides over. And as Representative Fitzpatrick makes clear, they also want to send a message to China and other states that they consider hostile.

    Ultimately, increased U.S. militarism in Eastern Europe — as history has repeatedly made clear — will only make the situation worse.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • War in Ukraine Could Be Humanitarian Catastrophe for Millions in the Region

    War in Ukraine Could Be Humanitarian Catastrophe for Millions in the Region

    As tensions grow between Russia and NATO over a potential invasion of Ukraine, up to 2 million people in eastern Ukraine are at risk of massive displacement and violence if the conflict escalates. We speak with the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Jan Egeland, who is on the ground in Ukraine and says a war could roll back nearly a decade of humanitarian progress made in the Ukrainian region. “We need reconciliation, we need peace,” says Egeland on the messages he is hearing from Ukrainians.

    TRANSCRIPT

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

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

    We go now from Moscow, Russia, to Kyiv, Ukraine, to look at the situation in eastern Ukraine and the humanitarian crisis unfolding there as some 2 million people face the threat of violence and displacement if the conflict escalates.

    For more, in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, we go to speak with Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

    Jan, welcome back to Democracy Now! You were just in eastern Ukraine visiting the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and the contact line, where tensions are high. Can you describe what you saw?

    JAN EGELAND: Well, I was there now for the last 72 hours, met with lots of completely exhausted, freezing, poor, miserable communities along the contact line. And their message, of course, to the world is: You know, enough of this political military chess game that everybody is obsessed with. We are suffering now. We’ve suffered for eight years with conflict. Our communities have been divided in Donetsk and in Luhansk. There is a frontline that has gone through families and communities now for eight years. We need — we need reconciliation. We need peace. Stop this escalation towards another catastrophe.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Jan, as you’ve pointed out, it’s not just the risk of increasing numbers of refugees and IDPs as a result of the present situation. There are already 1.6 million internally displaced Ukrainians who have been forced to flee their homes in the midst of this ongoing war in Donbas.

    JAN EGELAND: Indeed, there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. Some of them are working as my colleagues here in Ukraine. I have colleagues here who haven’t seen their parents for years, because all of the border crossings — not border crossing. These are crossings of the contact line, the frontline, which is within Ukraine and through Luhansk and Donetsk. There are seven crossing points. Six of them are basically shut. There is one where there are still people being able to cross on foot. It’s 90% down from what it was before the COVID, which became the excuse of especially the authorities in the nongovernment-controlled areas to keep people out.

    Now, this suffering has been ongoing for too long, really. We were able to make progress in recent years. The numbers came down in the people still being displaced. We operate with a figure of 850,000. We were planning to do further progress. Now all of this risks to be erased in an instant. If there is war, there will be hundreds and hundreds of thousands of more people displaced. Two million people live within 20 kilometers of the frontline on either side.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Russians Are Coming: Are Beijing and Moscow at the Cusp of a Formal Alliance?

    It should matter little to the Chinese that American diplomats and a handful of their western allies will not be attending the Beijing Winter Olympics in February. What truly matters is that the Russians are coming.

    The above is not an arbitrary statement. It is supported with facts. According to a survey conducted by China’s Global Times newspaper, the majority of the Chinese people value their country’s relations with Russia more than that of the EU and certainly more than that of the United States. The newspaper reported that such a finding makes it “the first time in 15 years that China-US ties did not top the list of the important bilateral relations in the Global Times annual survey.”

    In fact, some kind of an alliance is already forming between China and Russia. The fact that the Chinese people are taking note of this and are supporting their government’s drive towards greater integration – political, economic and geostrategic – between Beijing and Moscow, indicates that the informal and potentially formal alliance is a long-term strategy for both nations.

    American hostilities towards China, as seen by the Chinese, have become unbearable, and the Chinese people and government seem to have lost, not only any trust, however modest, of Washington, but of its own political system as well. 66 percent of all Chinese either disapproved of the US democratic system – or whatever remains of it – or believe that US democracy has sharply declined. Ironically, the vast majority of Americans share such a bleak view of their own country, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2019 and again by the Michigan Public Policy Survey in 2021.

    This leads us to two possible conclusions: First, the Chinese people will not be pushing for an American-style democracy any time soon and, second, the Chinese trust in the US does not hinge on what political party controls the White House or Congress.

    While the Chinese negative view of the US is unmistakably clear, Beijing remains hopeful that existing divisions with the European Union would allow it to expand economically in a region that is rife with financial and political opportunities, thus strategic growth. This fact offers China and Russia yet another area of potential cooperation, as Russia is also keen to expand into the European markets using its recently completed Nord Stream 2 gas project. Though Europe is already struggling with gas shortages, Europeans are divided on whether Russia should be allowed to claim a massive geostrategic influence by having such sway over the EU energy needs.

    Germany, which already receives nearly a third of its gas supplies from Russia – through Nord Stream 1 – is worried that allowing Nord Stream 2 to operate would make it too dependent on Russian gas supplies. Under intense pressure from Washington, Germany is caught between a rock and a hard place:  it needs Russian gas to keep its economy afloat, but is worried about American retaliation. To appease Washington, the German government threatened, on December 16, to block the new pipeline if Russia invades Ukraine. But is Germany in a position that allows it to make such demands?

    Meanwhile, Washington is keeping a close watch on Russia’s and China’s strategic expansion westward, and it views the ‘threat’ posed by both countries with great alarm. In his recent visit to Scotland to take part in the COP26, US President Joe Biden accused China and Russia of “walking away” on “a gigantic issue”, referring to climate change. China has “lost the ability to influence people around the world and here in COP. The same way I would argue with Russia,” Biden said on November 3.

    But will such rhetoric make any difference, or sway traditional US allies to boycott the lucrative deals and massive economic opportunities presented by the two emerging Asian giants?

    According to Eurostat, in 2020, China overtook the US as Europe’s largest import and third-largest export partner. Moreover, according to Nature magazine, most European countries largely depend on Russian energy sources, with the European Union estimated to import nearly 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia.

    In the face of these vastly changing realities, the US seems to be running out of options. The Summit for Democracy, orchestrated by Washington last December, seemed like a desperate cry for attention as opposed to celebrating the supposed democratic countries. 111 countries participated in the conference. The participants were handpicked by Washington and included such countries as Israel, Albania and Ukraine. China and Russia were, of course, excluded, not because of their lack of democratic credentials – such notions are often of no relevance to the politicized US definition of ‘democracy’ – but because they, along with others, were meant to be left isolated in the latest US hegemonic move.

    The conference, expectedly, turned out to be an exercise in futility. Needless to say, the US is in no position to give democracy lessons to anyone. The attempted coup in Washington by tens of thousands of angry US militants on January 6, 2021 – coupled with various opinion polls attesting to Americans’ lack of faith in their elected institutions – places the US democracy brand at an all-time low.

    As the US grows desperate in its tactics – aside from increasingly ineffectual sanctions, aggressive language and the relentless waving of the democracy card – China and Russia continue to draw closer to one another, on all fronts. In an essay entitled ‘Respecting People’s Democratic Rights’, written jointly by the ambassadors of Beijing and Moscow in Washington, Qin Gang and Anatoly Antonov wrote in the National Interest magazine that the democracy summit was “an evident product of (US’s) Cold-War mentality,” which “will stoke up ideological confrontation and a rift in the world, creating new ‘dividing lines’.”

    But there is more than their mutual rejection of American hostilities that is bringing China and Russia closer. The two countries are not motivated by their fear of the American military or some NATO invasion. Russia’s and China’s militaries are moving from strength to strength and neither country is experiencing the anxiety often felt by smaller, weaker and relatively isolated countries that have faced direct or indirect US military threats.

    To push back against possible NATO expansion, the Russian military is actively mobilizing in various regions at its western borders. For its part, the Chinese military has made it clear that any US-led attempt aimed at altering the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait would provoke an immediate military retaliation. In a virtual meeting with the US President, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned Biden on November 16 that the US was “playing with fire”. “Whoever plays with fire will get burnt,” he threatened.

    The Chinese-Russian alliance aims largely at defending the two countries’ regional and international interests, which are in constant expansion. In the case of China, the country is now a member of what is considered the world’s largest economic pact. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which was officiated on January 1, covers a global market that caters to around 30 percent of the world’s population.

    Russia, too, operates based on multiple regional and international alliances. One of these military alliances is the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which is currently involved in ‘peacekeeping’ operations in Kazakhstan. From Syria in the Middle East, to Venezuela in South America to Mali in West Africa and beyond, Russia’s military influence has increased to the extent that, in September 2021, Moscow signed military cooperation agreements with Africa’s two most populous nations, Nigeria and Ethiopia, challenging the traditional dominance of the US and France on the African continent.

    Informally, China and Russia are already operating according to a regional and global model that can be compared to that of the now-defunct Warsaw Treaty Organization (1955-91), a political and military alliance between the Soviet Union and several Eastern European countries that aimed at counter-balancing the US-led NATO alliance. The Warsaw Pact pushed back against US-led western hegemony and labored to protect the interests of the pact’s members throughout the world. History seems to be repeating itself, though under different designations.

    Historically, the two countries have had a difficult and, at times, antagonistic relationship, dating back to the 19th century. During the Nikita Khrushchev era, Beijing and Moscow even broke their ties altogether. The Sino-Soviet split of 1960 was earth-shattering to the extent that it transformed the bipolarity of the Cold War, where China operated as an entirely independent party.

    Though diplomatic relations between Beijing and Moscow were restored in 1989, it was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union that cooperation between both nations intensified. For example, the decision, in 1997, to coordinate their diplomatic positions in the United Nations gave birth to the Joint Declaration on a Multipolar World and the Establishment of a New International Order. That agreement between Russia and China laid the foundations for the actively evolving multi-polar world that is currently transpiring before our eyes.

    Present reality – namely US, NATO, EU pressures – has compelled Russia and China to slowly, but surely, cement their relationship, especially on the economic, diplomatic and military fronts. Writing in Carnegie Moscow Center, Alexander Gabuev explained that, according to data provided by the Russian Federal Customs Service, “China’s share in Russian foreign trade grew from 10.5 percent in 2013 (before the Ukraine crisis and sanctions) to 16.7 percent in 2019 and 18.3 percent in the pandemic-struck 2020.”

    Moreover, the two countries are holding regular large-scale joint military exercises, aimed at strengthening their growing security and military cooperation.

    This already close relation is likely to develop even further in the near future, especially as China finds itself compelled to diversify its energy sources. This became a pressing need following recent tensions between Australia, a NATO member, and China. Currently, Australia is the main natural gas supplier to Beijing.

    On its own, Russia cannot conclusively defeat Western designs. China, too, despite its massive economic power, cannot play a geopolitical game of this caliber without solid alliances. Both countries greatly benefit from building an alternative to US-led political, economic and military alliances, starting with NATO. The need for a Russian-Chinese alliance becomes even more beneficial when seen through the various opportunities presenting themselves: growing weakness in the US’s own political system, cracks within US-EU relations and the faltering power of NATO itself. Turkey, for example, though a NATO member, has for years been exploring its own geopolitical alliances outside the NATO paradigm. Turkey is already cementing its ties with both Russia and China, and on various fronts. Other countries, for example, Iran and various South American countries, that have been targeted by the US for refusing to toe Washington’s political line, are desperately seeking non-western alliances to protect their interests, their sovereignty and their heavily sanctioned economies.

    While it is still too early to claim that China and Russia are anywhere near a full-blown alliance of the Warsaw nature, there is no reason to believe that the cooperation between both countries will be halted, or even slow down anytime soon. The question is how far are Beijing and Moscow willing to go to protect their interests.

    The post The Russians Are Coming: Are Beijing and Moscow at the Cusp of a Formal Alliance? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Chechen politician threatens to ‘rip heads off’ family of activist

    Death threat follow arrest in Russia of mother of exiled anti-torture lawyer Abubakar Yangulbayev

    A Chechen politician has threatened to “rip the heads off” the family of an anti-torture activist whose mother was arrested and forcibly returned to the tightly controlled republic.

    Zarema Musayeva, the mother of Abubakar Yangulbayev, an exiled former lawyer for the Committee Against Torture, was detained by Chechen forces in mid-January in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod.

    Continue reading…

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

  • After Failed Talks, Russia Will Likely Target Persian Gulf

    For some reason, in the aftermath of this month’s failed talks among the Russian, American and NATO representatives in Geneva, everybody is talking as though they believe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is imminent. From the officials of the U.S. State Department, Pentagon and NATO to the intelligence agencies and the media, nearly everyone is talking as though they have not the slightest doubt that Russia intends to invade.

    However, in a Friday meeting with president Biden, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Biden not to provoke panic, saying that he did not see a greater threat now then during a similar massing of troops last spring.

    The post After Failed Talks, Russia Will Likely Target Persian Gulf appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Propaganda Warps Our Very Humanity: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    There’s so much more to propaganda than just manufacturing consent for governments and wars. It trains us what to value. What to think a successful human being looks like. Where to place our interest, energy and attention. It shapes our very personalities. It warps our humanity.

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    Show me someone who doesn’t think propaganda has much power and I’ll show you someone who’s been highly propagandized.

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    If people could understand the massive, yawning gulf between the world as it actually exists and the narratives we’ve been fed about it since childhood, there’d be immediate revolution. The real world is as different from the propaganda world as it is from any work of fiction.

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    The CIA is officially forbidden to conduct operations in the US. What the CIA is not officially forbidden to is hand an unscrupulous American news reporter a bombshell scoop about a foreign government which just so happens to build a narrative in the US that advances CIA objectives.

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    That which has been presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. It applies to arguments, it applies to claims by US intelligence agencies.

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    Propaganda has distorted people’s perception of reality so severely that Twitter cares more about musicians pulling their content from an app because they don’t like a podcaster than the fact that the most powerful government in the world is flirting with nuclear war.

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    America’s buddies Saudi Arabia and Israel have been bombing their neighbors constantly with extensive US support. The friendship between these nations and the US exists not in spite of their nonstop military butchery but exactly because of it.

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    If all the countries involved in a dispute say there won’t be a war and only one country says that there will be, it’s not hard to figure out who the aggressor and instigator is.

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    There are easily ten thousand issues in this world that are of greater concern than the fact that Russia annexed a small territory that overwhelmingly wanted to be annexed in 2014.

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    It’s not that I always side against the US, it’s that I side against whatever side is in the wrong and that tends to be the most powerful and destructive regime in the world. If you don’t think believe the US could be consistently on the wrong side of foreign policy disputes, it’s because you’ve been extensively propagandized about its behavior on the world stage.

    It can’t rightly be called anti-US bias if your criticisms of the US are unassailably correct. You simply cannot dispute the fact that no other government is doing anything that rises anywhere near the level of depravity as spending the 21st century killing millions of human beings in wars of aggression. It’s not that I have some arbitrary grudge against the United States and frame all my positions on every issue to fit that bias, it’s that the US really is quantifiably and demonstrably the most tyrannical government on earth by an extremely wide margin and thus naturally tends to be in the wrong.

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    The social engineers will always prefer to censor dissident voices online via algorithm manipulation rather than overt deplatforming when given the choice, simply because it silences a lot more people with a lot less public outcry.

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    If you agree with an ideological faction on every issue it’s not because you share the same values and principles, it’s because you suffer from a lack of values and principles. You’re just a blind follower of the herd.

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    Gonna go get a degree from an Ivy League university and become a senior fellow at a prominent think tank so I can make extremely intelligent observations like “Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler and Ukraine is Poland” and “Xi Jinping is Adolf Hitler and Taiwan is Poland”.

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    We’re seeing the narrative that Tucker Carlson is a Russian agent aggressively pushed by mainstream pundits not to attack Carlson himself, but to manufacture the consensus that anyone who criticizes US policy on Russia is suspicious and untrustworthy.

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    If you get your information about the world from Tucker Carlson you’re just as MSM-brainwashed as if you get your information about the world from Brian Stelter or Rachel Maddow. The brainwashing just happens in slightly different ways. Sure Carlson might say true things I agree with sometimes, but so does Anderson Cooper; they just tell different truths and different lies. Propaganda doesn’t work if it’s all bullshit all the time; there has to be some truth mixed in.

    The people in my mentions who regurgitate MSM talking points on China because they heard it from Tucker Carlson think they’re so very different from the people in my mentions who regurgitate MSM talking points on Russia because they heard it from Wolf Blitzer, but they’re not. They’re exactly the same.

    The TV man is not your friend.

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    If Russia was an actual threat they wouldn’t have to keep lying about it all the time.

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    In ancient history our stress hormones were used on saber toothed tiger attacks. Now they’re used on made-up mental narrative fluff like whether we’re adequate, what others think of us, a podcaster saying things we don’t like, Vladimir Putin annexing Eastern Europe, or China taking over the world.

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    It’s not legitimate to complain that people talk about problems without taking action or offering solutions. Spreading awareness that there’s a problem is taking action toward a solution. All positive shifts in human behavior are always preceded by an increase in awareness.

    You’re not going to get to solutions until a sufficiently large percentage of the populace understands and accepts that they are needed. Even if you do come up with the perfect solution on your own without the help of the collective, you won’t have the numbers to enact it. Maybe you’ve read a bunch of books and got a fancy degree and you’ve come up with the perfect utopian model for society, but it’s going to make jack dick difference if only you know it. People first need to understand that our current systems don’t work, and then to understand why.

    ______________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Rostec’s National Service of Sanitary Aviation received six new helicopters

    The Russian Helicopters Holding Company of Rostec State Corporation delivered six helicopters to PSB Leasing Group for the National Service of Sanitary Aviation (NSSA). Three Ansats and three Mi-8MTV-1s produced by the “Kazan Helicopters” were sent to the country’s regions. The helicopters are supplied under a contract for 66 machines, which was signed a year […]

    The post Rostec’s National Service of Sanitary Aviation received six new helicopters appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • America Is Reaping What It Sowed In Ukraine

    So what are Americans to believe about the rising tensions over Ukraine? The United States and Russia both claim their escalations are defensive, responding to threats and escalations by the other side, but the resulting spiral of escalation can only make war more likely. Ukrainian President Zelensky is warning that “panic” by U.S. and Western leaders is already causing economic destabilization in Ukraine.     

    U.S. allies do not all support the current U.S. policy. Germany is wisely refusing to funnel more weapons into Ukraine, in keeping with its long-standing policy of not sending weapons into conflict zones. Ralf Stegner, a senior Member of Parliament for Germany’s ruling Social Democrats, told the BBC on January 25th that the Minsk-Normandy process agreed to by France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in 2015 is still the right framework for ending the civil war.

    The post America Is Reaping What It Sowed In Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Perilous Gulf Widens Between Russia & US At The UN

    Tensions in U.S.-Russia relations soared yet higher on Monday as the two powers voiced polar opposite positions on events surrounding Ukraine and European security at the U.N. Security Council. The U.S. and its allies on the council painted a stark picture of an outlaw Russia threatening to invade Ukraine, while Russia sought to zoom out to the larger picture of Western threats to Russia’s security. Russia attempted to have the “provocative proposal” by the U.S. to hold the meeting stopped by calling for a procedural vote on the agenda, arguing that Washington was engaging in “megaphone diplomacy” and wanted to “whip up” the same “hysteria” about “so-called Russian aggression” in the Security Council that it had been whipping up through the media.

    The post Perilous Gulf Widens Between Russia & US At The UN appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Press Stunned As Ukraine Leader Points Finger At West

    IN A STUNNING and unexpected outburst this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that his country’s current problems came from the west rather than the east. The fears of a looming war were built on news stories that Russia had troops on the border it shares with the country—but this was not unusual, and there had been a similar assembly of soldiers a year ago, he said. The truth was that threat level had not changed, he told a press conference this week. Furthermore, the real threat to Ukraine was not Russia, but the “destabilization of the situation inside the country” he told journalists. The cause of the panic was the press itself, Zelensky said.

    The post Press Stunned As Ukraine Leader Points Finger At West appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • America Is Reaping What It Sowed In Ukraine

    So what are Americans to believe about the rising tensions over Ukraine? The United States and Russia both claim their escalations are defensive, responding to threats and escalations by the other side, but the resulting spiral of escalation can only make war more likely. Ukrainian President Zelensky is warning that “panic” by U.S. and Western leaders is already causing economic destabilization in Ukraine.     

    U.S. allies do not all support the current U.S. policy. Germany is wisely refusing to funnel more weapons into Ukraine, in keeping with its long-standing policy of not sending weapons into conflict zones. Ralf Stegner, a senior Member of Parliament for Germany’s ruling Social Democrats, told the BBC on January 25th that the Minsk-Normandy process agreed to by France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in 2015 is still the right framework for ending the civil war.

    The post America Is Reaping What It Sowed In Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • What Has Been Asserted Without Evidence May Be Dismissed Without Evidence

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    We’re being bashed in the face with western propaganda about the Ukraine situation with increasing forcefulness. Every day now we’re seeing things like “analysts” claiming Putin definitely wants a large-scale war, very familiar-looking puff pieces about Ukrainian guerrilla freedom fighters based on claims by anonymous intelligence sources, think pieces on why Americans should all care about Ukrainian freedom from Kremlin tyranny, and, of course, a lot of entirely unsubstantiated assertions about what Russia is doing.

    Despite the British government’s evidence-free claim that Russia was planning to install a puppet regime in Ukraine being debunked within hours and then shown to be a US intelligence claim dishonestly packaged as a British one days later, mass media outlets still to this day repeat the allegation like it’s a real thing. Despite the entirely unevidenced US government claim that Russia was plotting to stage a false flag attack in eastern Ukraine failing to prove true in subsequent weeks, US Senator Bob Menendez went on CNN over the weekend and declared that this false flag which never actually, physically happened was grounds to sanction Russia effective immediately.

    The US political/media class is just saying whatever it wants about what Russia is doing and planning to do with no regard for facts or evidence. Nothing is too cartoonishly hysterical; in fact the more clickbaity and attention-grabbing the better. They feel free to scattergun these outlandish claims willy nilly all over our information ecosystem because five years of Russia hysteria have taught them that they will suffer exactly zero professional consequences when they are proven wrong, and that they will in fact see their stars rise as a reward for advancing the interests of the US empire.

    So they’re just churning out all these plot hole-riddled stories about hordes of Russian troops being on the verge of a full-scale Ukraine invasion with complete disinterest in what’s actually happening and the reality on the ground. And people are lapping it right up. My social media notifications are full of people calling me a Kremlin operative for disputing the official line about Russia and Ukraine as this barrage of mass-scale psychological manipulation washes over our entire civilization.

    It’s interesting how in all the talk about “media literacy” over the last few years and the push to teach the public to distinguish between real news and fake news, the overwhelming majority of the mainstream public has remained blissfully unaware that it’s actually bad practice to swallow unevidenced assertions by western government officials about countries the US doesn’t like. Despite this government’s extensive and thoroughly documented history of lying to us about exactly this sort of thing over and over again for generation after generation, it’s still considered perfectly normal and acceptable to just deep throat whatever it tells us to believe without the slightest twinge of gag reflex.

    So this is just a quick, friendly reminder while all this Ukraine stuff is happening that the burden of proof is always on the party making the claim, and that any claim that has been presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. This applies to individuals, and it most certainly applies to untrustworthy governments as well.

    The epistemological razor “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” is generally attributed to Christopher Hitchens, who ironically has a rather significant history of failing to follow his own advice when it comes to claims made by western government agencies. But that’s precisely when it is most important to take Hitchens’s razor to heart: not when you’re arguing with someone about whether or not God exists, but when a very consequential claim is being made by the most powerful people on our planet.

    Anything that’s been asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. It’s true of arguments, it’s true of government claims, and it’s especially true of claims coming from governments that we know for a fact make false claims all the time.

    What this means is that a simple “Nah” is all that’s required whenever you’re presented with these claims, or if you’re feeling particularly generous a “Proof or it didn’t happen.” If anyone objects to your low-energy dismissal of their parroting claims by western governments, simply tell them that what has been put forward without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. They might want you to try to prove their position wrong, but that ain’t how the burden of proof works, buttercup.

    Hitchens’s razor. It slices. It dices. It wins arguments. It keeps the news man from turning your brain into clam chowder. Use it, and use it often.

    _____________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon 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.

  • Amid US-Russia Escalation, Activists Emphasize NATO Is “Not About Security”

    Belgian Peace Activist Says NATO Has Outlived Its Purpose

    To speak about the key role NATO is playing in the Ukraine crisis, we speak with Ludo De Brabander, spokesperson of the peace organization Vrede vzw in Belgium, where NATO is headquartered. De Brabander says NATO has outlived its purpose, and touches on how activists in NATO countries like Belgium are pushing against narratives in the media that war with Russia is necessary.

    Please check back later for full transcript.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • More Than 100 Antiwar Groups Call on Biden to End Brinksmanship With Russia

    Antiwar activists demonstrate against the escalating conflict with Russia in Ukraine in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., on January 27, 2022.

    More than 100 advocacy organizations representing millions of people across the U.S. demanded Tuesday that the Biden administration take immediate steps to defuse tensions with Russia as the two nuclear-armed powers remain perilously close to war over Ukraine.

    “We call upon President Biden to end the U.S. role in escalating the extremely dangerous tensions with Russia,” the progressive groups said in a joint statement spearheaded by CodePink and RootsAction.org. “It is gravely irresponsible for the president to participate in brinkmanship between two nations that possess 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons.”

    The statement — signed by 105 organizations, including Physicians for Social Responsibility, Just Foreign Policy, and Peace Action — came hours after a sharp verbal back-and-forth between U.S. and Russian representatives at a United Nations Security Council meeting, which did little to abate fears of a looming military conflict.

    During her remarks at the U.N. gathering, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield accused Russia of “attempting, without any factual basis, to paint Ukraine and Western countries as the aggressors to fabricate a pretext for attack.”

    Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya responded by alleging that the U.S. is the one “provoking escalation” with false claims about Russia’s intentions in Ukraine, which has ambitions of joining NATO — something Russia views as a severe security threat.

    Nebenzya also accused the U.S. of elevating “nationalists, radicals, Russophobes, and pure Nazis” to power in Kyiv by backing the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s government.

    Thus far, the U.S. has rejected Russia’s demand for a guarantee of no “further eastward expansion” of NATO. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are set to speak by phone Tuesday after the two countries exchanged written proposals that did not appear to presage a diplomatic breakthrough.

    In their joint statement on Tuesday, the 105 anti-war groups argued that the roots of the present crisis are “entangled in the failure of the U.S. government to live up to its promise made in 1990 by then-Secretary of State James Baker that NATO would expand not ‘one inch to the East.’”

    “Since 1999, NATO has expanded to include numerous countries, including some that border Russia,” the groups noted. “Rather than dismissing out of hand the Russian government’s current insistence on a written guarantee that Ukraine will not become part of NATO, the U.S. government should agree to a long-term moratorium on any NATO expansion.”

    While the Biden administration has publicly said it is committed to pursuing dialogue and diplomacy with Russia, it has simultaneously continued pouring arms into Ukraine and placed thousands of U.S. troops on standby for possible deployment to Eastern Europe.

    Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction.org, told Common Dreams on Tuesday that “the emergency that we now face is literally putting humanity’s survival at risk,” given the thousands of nuclear weapons the U.S. and Russia possess.

    “It’s not enough for officials in Washington to say that they hope diplomacy will find a solution — we’ve heard that many times just before the U.S. plunged into one new war after another,” said Solomon. “The major cause of this conflict is that the United States has pushed NATO up to Russia’s borders and now is continuing to ship very large quantities of weapons to Ukraine, a situation that the U.S. government would never tolerate if Russia were doing the same near the USA’s borders.”

    “Whatever you think about the current Ukraine conflict, we all have the most profound possible interest in de-escalating it to prevent a clash between the world’s two nuclear-weapons superpowers,” Solomon continued. “Polling shows that most Americans want the U.S. government to compromise with Russia in this terribly dangerous conflict — yet the mainstream media and vast majority of Congress members are whipping up a frenzy of uncompromising jingoistic fervor. They might as well be telling the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’ to giddyup.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ajamu Baraka: ‘We Need To Demand The US Cease Operating As A Rogue State’

    As the United States, with the aid of Western allies and the corporate media, escalates aggression toward Russia using Ukraine as the vehicle, it is necessary to take time to look at the bigger picture of the United States’ disregard for international law and the impact that is having globally as well as the push to expand NATO and how that is causing significant division within the alliance. Clearing the FOG speaks with Ajamu Baraka, a long time international human rights defender and the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace, about the United States as a rogue state and what that means for Black America. He also discusses the state of the antiwar movement in the US and the black misleadership class, plus what we need to be doing as US hegemony and the white supremacist-based American Exceptionalism that undergirds are being challenged.

    The post Ajamu Baraka: ‘We Need To Demand The US Cease Operating As A Rogue State’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Checkmate In Ukraine

    The Russian mantra of “not one inch eastward” is derived from an oral promise made by former Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev at the time of German reunification. But Russia’s goal is not to score debating points, but rather to reverse NATO policy and posturing it deems harmful to its national security.

    To this end, the primary purpose of Russia’s military buildup is to expose the political, military and economic impotence of the U.S./NATO partnership by a range of crises — independent of any military incursion into Ukraine — for which the U.S. and NATO have no viable response other than to give in to most, if not all, of Russia’s demands for security guarantees.

    The post Checkmate In Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Top Weapons Companies Boast Ukraine-Russia Tensions Are A Boon For Business

    As the United States weighs more involvement in the growing conflict between Ukraine and Russia, some of the largest weapons companies in the world — Raytheon and Lockheed Martin — are openly telling their investors that tensions between the countries are good for business. And General Dynamics, meanwhile, is boasting about the past returns the company has seen as a result of such disputes.

    The post Top Weapons Companies Boast Ukraine-Russia Tensions Are A Boon For Business appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • America Is Reaping What It Sowed in Ukraine

    U.S. allies in Ukraine, with NATO, Azov Battalion and neo-Nazi flags. Photo by russia-insider.com

    So what are Americans to believe about the rising tensions over Ukraine? The United States and Russia both claim their escalations are defensive, responding to threats and escalations by the other side, but the resulting spiral of escalation can only make war more likely. Ukrainian President Zelensky is warning that “panic” by U.S. and Western leaders is already causing economic destabilization in Ukraine.

    U.S. allies do not all support the current U.S. policy. Germany is wisely refusing to funnel more weapons into Ukraine, in keeping with its long-standing policy of not sending weapons into conflict zones. Ralf Stegner, a senior Member of Parliament for Germany’s ruling Social Democrats, told the BBC on January 25th that the Minsk-Normandy process agreed to by France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in 2015 is still the right framework for ending the civil war.

    “The Minsk Agreement hasn’t been applied by both sides,” Stegner explained, “and it just doesn’t make any sense to think that forcing up the military possibilities would make it better. Rather, I think it’s the hour of diplomacy.”

    By contrast, most American politicians and corporate media have fallen in line with a one-sided narrative that paints Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine, and support sending more and more weapons to Ukrainian government forces. After decades of U.S. military disasters based on such one-sided narratives, Americans should know better by now. But what is it that our leaders and the corporate media are not telling us this time?

    The most critical events that have been airbrushed out of the West’s political narrative are the violation of agreements Western leaders made at the end of the Cold War not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, and the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in February 2014.

    Western mainstream media accounts date the crisis in Ukraine back to Russia’s 2014 reintegration of Crimea, and the decision by ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine to secede from Ukraine as the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics.

    But these were not unprovoked actions. They were responses to the U.S.-backed coup, in which an armed mob led by the neo-Nazi Right Sector militia stormed the Ukrainian parliament, forcing the elected President Yanukovich and members of his party to flee for their lives. After the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington, that should now be easier for Americans to understand.

    The remaining members of parliament voted to form a new government, subverting the political transition and plans for a new election that Yanukovich had publicly agreed to the day before, after meetings with the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Poland.

    The U.S. role in managing the coup was exposed by a leaked 2014 audio recording of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt working on their plans, which included sidelining the European Union (“Fuck the EU,” as Nuland put it) and shoehorning in U.S. protege Arseniy Yatsenyuk (“Yats”) as Prime Minister.

    At the end of the call, Ambassador Pyatt told Nuland, “…we want to try to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing.”

    Nuland replied (verbatim), “So on that piece Geoff, when I wrote the note, [Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake] Sullivan’s come back to me VFR [very quickly?], saying you need [Vice President] Biden and I said probably tomorrow for an atta-boy and to get the deets [details?] to stick. So Biden’s willing.”

    It has never been explained why two senior State Department officials who were plotting a regime change in Ukraine looked to Vice President Biden to “midwife this thing,” instead of to their own boss, Secretary of State John Kerry.

    Now that the crisis over Ukraine has blown up with a vengeance during Biden’s first year as president, such unanswered questions about his role in the 2014 coup have become more urgent and troubling. And why did President Biden appoint Nuland to the # 4 position at the State Department, despite (or was it because of?) her critical role in triggering the disintegration of Ukraine and an eight-year-long civil war that has so far killed at least 14,000 people?

    Both of Nuland’s hand-picked puppets in Ukraine, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk and President Poroshenko, were soon mired in corruption scandals. Yatsenyuk was forced to resign after two years and Poroshenko was outed in a tax evasion scandal revealed in the Panama Papers. Post-coup, war-torn Ukraine remains the poorest country in Europe, and one of the most corrupt.

    The Ukrainian military had little enthusiasm for a civil war against its own people in Eastern Ukraine, so the post-coup government formed new “National Guard” units to assault the separatist People’s Republics. The infamous Azov Battalion drew its first recruits from the Right Sector militia and openly displays neo-Nazi symbols, yet it has kept receiving U.S. arms and training, even after Congress explicitly cut off its U.S. funding in the FY2018 Defense Appropriation bill.

    In 2015, the Minsk and Normandy negotiations led to a ceasefire and the withdrawal of heavy weapons from a buffer zone around the separatist-held areas. Ukraine agreed to grant greater autonomy to Donetsk, Luhansk and other ethnically Russian areas of Ukraine, but it has failed to follow through on that.

    A federal system, with some powers devolved to individual provinces or regions, could help to resolve the all-or-nothing power struggle between Ukrainian nationalists and Ukraine’s traditional ties to Russia that has dogged its politics since independence in 1991.

    But the U.S. and NATO’s interest in Ukraine is not really about resolving its regional differences, but about something else altogether. The U.S. coup was calculated to put Russia in an impossible position. If Russia did nothing, post-coup Ukraine would sooner or later join NATO, as NATO members already agreed to in principle in 2008. NATO forces would advance right up to Russia’s border and Russia’s important naval base at Sevastopol in the Crimea would fall under NATO control.

    On the other hand, if Russia had responded to the coup by invading Ukraine, there would have been no turning back from a disastrous new Cold War with the West. To Washington’s frustration, Russia found a middle path out of this dilemma, by accepting the result of Crimea’s referendum to rejoin Russia, but only giving covert support to the separatists in the East.

    In 2021, with Nuland once again installed in a corner office at the State Department, the Biden administration quickly cooked up a plan to put Russia in a new pickle. The United States had already given Ukraine $2 billion in military aid since 2014, and Biden has added another $650 million to that, along with deployments of U.S. and NATO military trainers.

    Ukraine has still not implemented the constitutional changes called for in the Minsk agreements, and the unconditional military support the United States and NATO have provided has encouraged Ukraine’s leaders to effectively abandon the Minsk-Normandy process and simply reassert sovereignty over all of Ukraine’s territory, including Crimea.

    In practice, Ukraine could only recover those territories by a major escalation of the civil war, and that was exactly what Ukraine and its NATO backers appeared to be preparing for in March 2021. But that prompted Russia to begin moving troops and conducting military exercises, within its own territory (including Crimea), but close enough to Ukraine to deter a new offensive by Ukrainian government forces.

    In October, Ukraine launched new attacks in Donbass. Russia, which still had about 100,000 troops stationed near Ukraine, responded with new troop movements and military exercises. U.S. officials launched an information warfare campaign to frame Russia’s troop movements as an unprovoked threat to invade Ukraine, concealing their own role in fueling the threatened Ukrainian escalation that Russia is responding to. U.S. propaganda has gone so far as to preemptively dismiss any actual new Ukrainian assault in the East as a Russian false-flag operation.

    Underlying all these tensions is NATO’s expansion through Eastern Europe to the borders of Russia, in violation of commitments Western officials made at the end of the Cold War. The U.S. and NATO’s refusal to acknowledge that they have violated those commitments or to negotiate a diplomatic resolution with the Russians is a central factor in the breakdown of U.S.-Russian relations.

    While U.S. officials and corporate media are scaring the pants off Americans and Europeans with tales of an impending Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials are warning that U.S.-Russian relations are close to the breaking point. If the United States and NATO are not prepared to negotiate new disarmament treaties, remove U.S. missiles from countries bordering Russia and dial back NATO expansion, Russian officials say they will have no option but to respond with “appropriate military-technical reciprocal measures.”

    This expression may not refer to an invasion of Ukraine, as most Western commentators have assumed, but to a broader strategy that could include actions that hit much closer to home for Western leaders.

    For example, Russia could place short-range nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad (between Lithuania and Poland), within range of European capitals; it could establish military bases in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and other friendly countries; and it could deploy submarines armed with hypersonic nuclear missiles to the Western Atlantic, from where they could destroy Washington, D.C. in a matter of minutes.

    It has long been a common refrain among American activists to point to the 800 or so U.S. military bases all over the world and ask, “How would Americans like it if Russia or China built military bases in Mexico or Cuba?” Well, we may be about to find out.

    Hypersonic nuclear missiles off the U.S. East Coast would put the United States in a similar position to that in which NATO has placed the Russians. China could adopt a similar strategy in the Pacific to respond to U.S. military bases and deployments around its coast.

    So the revived Cold War that U.S. officials and corporate media hacks have been mindlessly cheering on could very quickly turn into one in which the United States would find itself just as encircled and endangered as its enemies.

    Will the prospect of such a 21st Century Cuban Missile Crisis be enough to bring America’s irresponsible leaders to their senses and back to the negotiating table, to start unwinding the suicidal mess they have blundered into? We certainly hope so.

    The post America Is Reaping What It Sowed in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Saving The World From Nuclear War

    These are dark days for both our nation and the world. Climate change is wreaking havoc everywhere, a global pandemic continues its onslaught, our nation’s experiment in democracy is threatened by a slow-motion insurrection and, to top it all off, our nation has taken the lead in pushing Russia toward a war over Ukraine that is capable of going off the rails into a full-scale nuclear war (and that is not hyperbole!).

    At least four or five U.S. OHIO Class “Trident” ballistic missile submarines are currently at sea on “hard alert” in their designated patrol areas—ready to launch any or all of their 20 Trident II D5 ballistic missiles, bristling with thermonuclear warheads, at the command of the President. 

    The post Saving The World From Nuclear War appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Antiwar Groups Pan Biden for Announcing Troop Deployment to Eastern Europe

    President Joe Biden speaks to the press about the situation in Ukraine, after arriving on Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, on January 28, 2022.

    Anti-war advocates accused the Biden administration of continued warmongering late Friday into Saturday after President Joe Biden confirmed he plans to send U.S. troops to Eastern Europe.

    “I’ll be moving troops to Eastern Europe in the NATO countries in the near term,” Biden told reporters at Joint Base Andrews late Friday. “Not too many.”

    Earlier this week, the president announced that 8,500 troops were standing ready for a potential deployment to confront what the White House says is an imminent attack by Russian forces in Ukraine—despite pleas by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop creating “panic.”

    In a phone call Thursday night, Zelensky reportedly questioned the Biden administration’s belief — promoted by the corporate media — that a Russian invasion is “imminent.”

    “I’m the president of Ukraine, I’m based here and I think I know the details deeper than any other president,” Zelensky told the press after the call. “The image that mass media creates is that we have troops on the roads, we have mobilization, people are leaving for places. That’s not the case. We don’t need this panic.”

    Veteran journalist John Pilger tweeted that Zelensky’s comments exposed “the warmongering of Biden… as a crime.”

    As Common Dreams reported Friday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin expressed hope that a diplomatic approach could avoid conflict with Russia, which has demanded a guarantee that Ukraine will be excluded from NATO, along with other security measures.

    Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley also spoke Friday and called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to pursue diplomacy — after Putin reportedly spoke to French President Emanuel Macron about implementing a diplomatic agreement forged in 2014.

    Milley warned that there will be “horrific” consequences if Russia invades Ukraine.

    “Given the type of forces that are arrayed, the ground maneuver forces, the artillery, the ballistic missiles, the air forces, all of it packaged together — if that was unleashed on Ukraine, it would be significant, very significant, and it would result in a significant amount of casualties,” he told reporters.

    Peace group CodePink accused the Biden administration of reaching “putting the entire world at risk” while the U.S. public and international leaders make clear their anti-war stance.

    “Russia doesn’t want war. Ukraine doesn’t want war. The American people don’t want war,” tweeted the group. “The Biden administration needs to get with the program and STOP endangering us all.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • MSM Pundits Push Idea That Criticizing US Policy On Russia Makes You A Russian Agent

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    One thing I’ve been meaning to write about these last few days has been the way mass media pundits have been insinuating or outright asserting that Fox News host Tucker Carlson is literally an agent of the Russian government.

    Carlson has been accused of promoting Russian propaganda by mainstream narrative managers for frequently criticizing the Biden administration’s hawkish posture toward Russia regarding the entirely unsubstantiated claim that Moscow is preparing to launch an unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine. We’ve been seeing things like Anderson Cooper innocently musing that “It is striking how neatly Kremlin propaganda seems to dovetail with Carlson’s talking points” and this CNN segment from December with Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter and tinfoil hat Russiagater Julia Ioffe wondering aloud about why Russian state media seem to be so fond of Carlson. By mid-January, Democratic Party operatives were openly demanding that Carlson be investigated for violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

    “This isn’t journalism, it’s an ongoing FARA violation. Tucker Carlson needs to be prosecuted as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation and treason under Article 3, Sec. 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution for aiding an enemy in hybrid warfare against the United States,” tweeted former DNC official Alexandra Chalupa, best known for colluding with the Ukrainian government in 2016 on opposition research against Donald Trump.

    The accusations and insinuations increased, eventually leading to Carlson outright denying being a Russian agent in a recent interview with The New York Times saying, “I’ve never been to Russia, I don’t speak Russian. Of course I’m not an agent of Russia.”

    As you would expect, this denial was then spun by the same demented mainstream pundits who’ve spent the last five years being wrong about Russia as evidence that Carlson is a Russian agent.

    “Tucker Carlson told The New York Times he’s not a Russian agent amid controversy over his pro-Kremlin stance,” blares a headline by Business Insider.

    “What would a Russian agent say if asked if they were a Russian agent?” tweeted former FBI special agent Clint Watts in response to Carlson’s denial.

    “Tucker Carlson Denies Being Russian Agent After Taking Kremlin’s Side,” says a viral tweet by former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi.

    “Narrator: After he helped destroy American Democracy, it turned out he was, indeed, a Russian agent … though a rather silly one,” added MSNBC’s cartoonish “intelligence” expert Malcolm Nance.

    “Tucker Carlson is walking proof that you don’t need to be an agent to be a useful idiot,” former FBI agent Peter Strzok told MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace, apparently less willing to commit to the bit than his FBI peers.

    “Why hasn’t Tucker Carlson registered as a foreign agent?” reads a viral tweet from the notorious Lincoln Project.

    I’ve never gotten used to the insane McCarthyite accusations which US liberals will hurl without a second thought at anyone who disagrees with them. Every time it happens it startles and alarms me, and this latest trend of claiming that opposition to US military posture toward a nuclear superpower constitutes evidence of being a treasonous foreign intelligence operative is a marked uptick in the madness.

    I’m highlighting this deranged behavior not to defend the odious Carlson, but to point out that it works very much in the US empire’s favor to have a bunch of influential narrative managers aggressively manufacturing the consensus that anyone who criticizes America’s posture toward Russia is suspicious and untrustworthy.

    The mass media, whose primary job is to propagandize the masses and who have an extensive history of lying to the public to manufacture consent for war, are not pushing the belief that Tucker Carlson is suspicious and sinister for questioning the official narrative about Russia. They are pushing the belief that anyone is suspicious and sinister for questioning the official narrative about Russia. That’s the message that people are receiving from this line that’s being pushed by narrative managers and ex-federal agents. Anyone who is successfully indoctrinated with this belief will become inoculated against wrongthink about that nation because they will reflexively distrust the motives of anyone who says anything that differs from the officially authorized line.

    That’s the real value of this framing for the imperial propagandists. They don’t care about Tucker Carlson, who serves their agendas more often than not. They care about making sure that current and future establishment narratives about Russia will be swallowed hook, line and sinker by the mainstream public without the slightest twinge of gag reflex. You don’t even need to silence dissent if you can simply render it impotent.

    It’s worth considering the possibility that all the artificially manufactured Russia hysteria we’ve seen over the last five years has been geared toward building public support for the exact escalations we are seeing today. After all, it says a lot that Russiagate began with unevidenced claims by US intelligence agencies who have an extensive track record of lying, resulted in the reignition of a new cold war against a nation long targeted for destruction by the US intelligence cartel, and now there are tons of weapons being flown in to Ukraine and US troops are being moved to Eastern Europe in response to a threat we’ve still seen no evidence is actually real.

    Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. If you can control what people believe about a certain thing, then you can control what they will do and what they will allow in response to that thing. Controlling people’s beliefs about reality is controlling their reality. If you can convince people that anyone who disputes what you’re saying about a government you don’t like is suspicious and not to be trusted, then you can keep them believing everything you say about that government.

    It’s clear that it is very, very important to the narrative managers that we believe what we are told about Russia. Now we’re just waiting to find out toward what specific end that agenda is being driven.

    ____________________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Washington Post Publishes a Commentary Full of Lies Against Putin

    On January 29, the Washington Post published an op-ed by the well-known Yale neoconservative Timothy Snyder, titled “Putin’s case for invading Ukraine rests on phony grievances and ancient myths.” Key passages in Snyder’s article are:

    Last July, Vladimir Putin supplied the mythical basis [BAD LINK FROM SNYDER: here is a functional link to see Putin’s article] for Russian war propaganda in an essay titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” The essential idea is that Russia has the right to Ukraine because of things that happened a thousand years ago in Kyiv. … It takes some fanciful thinking to see here a reason for Russia to invade Ukraine in the 21st century, as it seems prepared to do. … Putin’s idea is that Ukraine is a fraternal nation because of how he personally feels about the past. This is known as imperialism. It flies in the face of the basic legal principle of state sovereignty and the basic moral principle of democracy.

    Putin’s article did NOT assert that “Russia has the right to Ukraine because of things that happened a thousand years ago in Kyiv.” It didn’t even assert that “Russia has the right to invade Ukraine.” Furthermore, the allegation that Putin’s view that’s expressed there advocates “imperialism. It flies in the face of the basic legal principle of state sovereignty and the basic moral principle of democracy” is likewise a boldfaced lie. Moreover, Russia’s Government has consistently denied that it has any intention to invade Ukraine, but instead asserts that if Ukraine invades Donbass, then Russia will not allow that invasion to conquer the residents there. Russia’s position has consistently been that only the people who live in Donbass have the right to determine whether or not — and the terms under which — they will be ruled by the government in Kiev that was installed (against the will of over 90% of them) in February 2014 when the democratically elected President of Ukraine was forcibly overthrown by what America’s Government calls a “democratic revolution,” and by what Russia’s Government and the head of the “private-CIA” U.S. firm Stratfor, and many historians, call a coup, which was imposed by the Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning U.S. President Barack Obama’s Administration, in order to replace Russia’s naval base on Crimea by a new U.S. naval base there (which Obama wasn’t able to do, though his coup conquering Ukraine otherwise succeeded). Several of the mercenaries that the U.S. hired (some from Georgia, for example, as shown in these videos) subsequently confessed to having participated in it. (And, subsequently, the U.S. regime charged Putin with ‘aggression against Ukraine’, and with ‘seizing Crimea’, and issued sanctions against Russia for that.)

    Here are some key passages from Putin’s article (the article that Snyder lies against):

    The determination of nationality, particularly in mixed families, is the right of every individual, free to make his or her own choice. But the fact is that the situation in Ukraine today is completely different because it involves a forced change of identity. And the most despicable thing is that the Russians in Ukraine are being forced not only to deny their roots, generations of their ancestors but also to believe that Russia is their enemy. … And I will say one thing – Russia has never been and will never be ‘anti-Ukraine’. And what Ukraine will be – it is up to its citizens to decide.

    Putin, as well as Francois Hollande of France, and Angela Merkel of Germany, brought the Donbass government and the Ukraine government together in 2015 and got the Donbass and Ukraine to sign onto an agreement in Minsk, promising that those two then-warring parties would call a truce until both of them would agree to negotiate together and arrange some degree of autonomy for Donbass within the Ukrainian federation, but after it was all signed, Ukraine (with backing from the U.S.) steadily refused to negotiate at all with Donbass. Merkel, Hollande, and Putin, had worked together to get the Minsk accords agreed-to and signed by the two sides, but the Ukrainian side then stonewalled, refusing to comply with the agreement. Putin’s consistent position has been the same as Hollande’s and Merkel’s, on this, and remains so to this day: BOTH sides must comply. (Donbass has always been willing, but Ukraine never.)

    The rest of Putin’s article is a history of the relationship that has existed between Russia and Ukraine. Snyder’s article that alleges to be about Putin’s article ignores that history, just as he lies about the rest of the article. And that’s from a Professor at Yale.

    (The present article is being submitted to over 200 U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media including the Washington Post, for possible publication.)

    The post The Washington Post Publishes a Commentary Full of Lies Against Putin first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Endless War is the Empire’s Last Dance

    This moment of history will be remembered for the massive shift in global relations currently underway. On one side stands the forces of peace and multipolarity led by China, Russia, and their allies in the Global South. On the other is the forces of empire and conquest spearheaded by the U.S. and its allies. The conflict between these two “camps” is about much more than competing visions for planetary development. World politics have transitioned from a war between socialism and capitalism to a protracted struggle for the survival of humanity itself.

    The post Endless War is the Empire’s Last Dance appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • A War Only America & Britain Seem To Want

    The telephone call between U.S. President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenensky on Thursday was said to have not “gone well,” according to a senior Ukrainian official.

    The official said Zelensky urged Biden to “calm down the messaging” on the situation in Ukraine and that Ukrainian intelligence did not see a Russian threat the same way the U.S. did, according to a report on CNN.  It is  “dangerous but ambiguous,” the official quoted Zelensky as telling Biden, and that “it is not certain that an attack will take place.”

    The post A War Only America & Britain Seem To Want appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Media Beats War Drums With Russia Over Ukraine While US/Saudis Kill Hundreds In Yemen

    Journalists Benjamin Norton And Alan MacLeod Join Mnar Adley To Discuss How The Mainstream Media Spent The Last Week Beating Drums Of War With Russia While Ignoring A New Deadly US-Backed Saudi Onslaught In Yemen.

    The post Media Beats War Drums With Russia Over Ukraine While US/Saudis Kill Hundreds In Yemen appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Call To Action: No War With Russia Over Ukraine

    Once again, our world is facing an imminent threat of war between two major nuclear powers. As in the past, the United States is using the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the vehicle to wage war in clear violation of international law and the Charter of United Nations.

    The Biden administration is currently flying $200 million worth of weapons and other “lethal aid” to Ukraine and has 8,500 US troops on standby to enter that country. ‘Nonessential’ US diplomatic personnel and their families are being withdrawn from the country. The corporate media is lockstep in its portrayal of Russia as the enemy who is about to invade Ukraine. These actions constitute a de facto declaration of war, while the corporate media fan the flame of war.

    The post Call To Action: No War With Russia Over Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Will Putin Accept Half A Loaf?

    The eagerly awaited “written response” from the U.S. and NATO to Russia’s security proposals is now in the hands of President Vladimir Putin. And yet there is no sign the West caved in on Moscow’s insistence that NATO rescind its 14 year-old invitation to Ukraine to join NATO.

    Those who expected the Russians to react to the West’s refusal to “redraw the security architecture of Europe” by promptly attacking Ukraine can breathe a bit easier. Although Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters Thursday that the responses from the US and NATO provide “little ground for optimism,” he quickly added “there always are prospects for continuing a dialogue, it’s in the interests of both us and the Americans.”

    The post Will Putin Accept Half A Loaf? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • True Colors: Red, White, Black & Blue

    With a bold and completely self-sabotaging diplomatic blunder, one which fails on every level including the least rigorous sanity test, this past Wednesday the U.S. was one of two nations to vote against a UN resolution designed to discourage the glorification and promotion of Nazi ideology. The other nation was Ukraine, which currently is overrun and effectively ruled by Jew-hating, Russia-hating, LGBT-hating neo-Nazis, who openly flaunt their allegiance to Stepan Bandera, a collaborator with the Third Reich during WWII.

    The reason the U.S. supports such Jew-hating, Russia-hating thugs is obvious. It’s an effective way to intimidate Russia and initiate a proxy war.

    Let’s state this up front: U.S. support for Ukraine is not symbolic. It’s a blatant act of geopolitical aggression. While it’s certainly not out of character for the U.S. to align itself with vile regimes, playing this game in this particular arena escalates risk of major war to a new unprecedented level. Russia has over 7,000 nuclear weapons. While it has pledged no first use, it has stated openly that it will use them if their survival as a nation is threatened.

    The U.S. has sent mixed signals as to whether it would support Ukraine in a war with Russia. At the same time, the U.S. and its allies have ships in the Black Sea, and are regularly skirting Russia’s borders with reconnaissance and nuclear-armed bombers. The U.S. and its NATO allies already have troops in Ukraine, supposedly training the military there to “defend” itself. There are now several NATO bases in the country. Intentionally or unintentionally, military conflict in this region by any actors could put the U.S. and Russia in direct confrontation.

    The marriage of deception and hubris is the gain-of-function for recklessness. Lies are like viruses. They can’t be contained. The lies surrounding the 2014 Ukraine coup, the subsequent “invasion” of Crimea, the military aggression of Russia in the Donbas, coupled with the power-drunk delusions and self-righteousness cavalierly deemed ‘exceptionalism’, are a self-replicating storm which has overwhelmed Western media, our State Department, all of our presidents, and more dangerously Congress, which constitutionally has the responsibility for declaring war. Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton and Jim Inhofe, virulent war hawks with a lot of clout, are pushing a bill through the Senate called GUARD (Guaranteeing Ukraine’s Autonomy by Reinforcing its Defense). It proposes significantly increasing the amount of lethal weapons, employs confrontational, insulting language which slanders Russia and makes unfounded accusations about Russia’s behavior and deployment of troops within its own borders. The aid package is supposedly intended to counter Russia’s non-existent aggression against Ukraine. More weapons will only feed Ukraine’s delusion that it can take on Russia militarily. At minimum, it will give Ukraine better odds at succeeding if they decide to attack the Donbas region. This isn’t the blind leading the blind. It’s the crazies leading the crazies.

    Hypocrisy is apparently equally contagious.

    The purpose of the UN resolution (you can read it HERE for yourself) is: “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”.

    The U.S. takes the specious and patently ridiculous position that the resolution would infringe on free speech. Well, we officially discourage female genital mutilation, black markets for human organs, and pedophilia. Supporting laws banning these and other socially unacceptable practices hasn’t interfered with discussion online, debates on TV, YouTube videos, publication in academic journals and the media on these controversial topics. Besides, on page 3 of the UN resolution itself, it explicitly states:

    Stressing that the purpose of addressing hate speech is not to limit or prohibit freedom of speech, but to prevent incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence, which shall be prohibited by law …

    To make the American position even more disingenuous is the campaign in the U.S. and much of the West to prevent any criticism of Israel and its cruel oppression of the Palestinians, including the passage of laws prohibiting BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions), the coordinated effort to incentivize Israel to end the occupation of Palestine, an effort which perfectly parallels the same strategy used against the apartheid regime of South Africa in the 80s. The prohibitions around BDS and voicing legitimate challenges to Israel’s oppressive, cruel and genocidal treatment of Palestinians amount to not just suppression of free speech but silencing of dissent and a direct legal assault on noble and necessary attempts to halt grotesque criminality and abuse of power.

    Such is hypocrisy, self-contradiction, and shame. But to make an omelet you have to break some eggs. To maintain an empire you have to abandon a few principles. To march to war you have to villainize the peacemakers. To destroy the world and end all life you have to abandon reason and restraint. Winning is everything, even if you lose everything. Salute the flag. Bow down to the red, white, black & blue.

    The post True Colors: Red, White, Black & Blue first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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