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Category: vladimir putin

  • There Is No Such Thing as a Small Nuclear War

    Erik Bulatov (USSR), People in the Landscape, 1976.

    There was a time when calls for a nuclear-free Europe rang across the continent. It began with the Stockholm Appeal (1950), which opened with the powerful words ‘We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples’ and then deepened with the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament (1980), which issued the chilling warning ‘We are entering the most dangerous decade in human history’. Roughly 274 million people signed the Stockholm Appeal, including – as is often reported – the entire adult population of the Soviet Union. Yet, since the European appeal of 1980, it feels as if each decade has been more and more dangerous than the previous one. ‘It is still 90 seconds to midnight’, the editors at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the keepers of the Doomsday Clock) wrote in January. Midnight is Armageddon. In 1949, the clock sat at three minutes to midnight, and in 1980 it had retreated slightly from the precipice, back to seven minutes to midnight. By 2023, however, the clock’s hand had moved all the way up to ninety seconds to midnight, where it remains, the closest we have ever been to full-scale annihilation.

    This precarious situation is threatening to reach a tipping point in Europe today. To understand the dangerous possibilities that could be unleashed by the intensified provocations around Ukraine, we collaborated with No Cold War to produce briefing no. 14, NATO’s Actions in Ukraine Are More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Please read this text carefully and circulate it as widely as possible.

    For the past two years, Europe’s largest war since 1945 has been raging in Ukraine. The root cause of this war is the US-driven attempt to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into Ukraine. This violates the promises the West made to the Soviet Union during the end of the Cold War, such as that NATO would move ‘not one inch eastward’, as US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Over the past decade, the Global North has repeatedly snubbed Russian requests for security guarantees. It was this disregard for Russian concerns that led to the outbreak of the conflict in 2014 and the war in 2022.

    Today, a nuclear-armed NATO and a nuclear-armed Russia are in direct conflict in Ukraine. Instead of taking steps to bring this war to an end, NATO has made several new announcements in recent months that threaten to escalate the situation into a still more serious conflict with the potential to spill beyond Ukraine’s borders. It is no exaggeration to say that this conflict has created the greatest threat to world peace since the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).

    This extremely dangerous escalation confirms the correctness of the majority of US experts on Russia and Eastern Europe, who have long warned against the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, George Kennan, the principal architect of US policy in the Cold War, said that this strategy is ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. The Ukraine war and the dangers of further escalation fully affirm the seriousness of his warning.

    Elif Uras (Turkey), Kapital, 2009.

    How Is NATO Escalating the Conflict in Ukraine?

    The most dangerous recent developments in this conflict are the decisions by the US and Britain in May to authorise Ukraine to use weapons supplied by the two countries to conduct military attacks inside Russia. Ukraine’s government immediately used this in the most provocative way by attacking Russia’s ballistic missile early warning system. This warning system plays no role in the Ukraine war but is a central part of Russia’s defence system against strategic nuclear attack. In addition, the British government supplied Ukraine with Storm Shadow missiles that have a range of over 250 km (155 miles) and can hit targets not only on the battleground but far inside Russia. The use of NATO weapons to attack Russia risks an equivalent Russian counter-response, threatening to spread the war beyond Ukraine.

    This was followed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s June announcement that a NATO headquarter for operations in the Ukraine war had been created at the US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, with 700 initial staff. On 7 June, French President Emmanuel Macron said that his government was working to ‘finalise a coalition’ of NATO countries willing to send troops to Ukraine to ‘train’ Ukrainian forces. This would place NATO forces directly in the war. As the Vietnam War and other conflicts have shown, such ‘trainers’ organise and direct fighting, thus becoming targets for attacks.

    Nadia Abu-Aitah (Switzerland), Breaking Free, 2021.

    Why Is Escalation in Ukraine More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis?

    The Cuban Missile Crisis was the product of an adventurist miscalculation by Soviet leadership that the US would tolerate the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles only 144 km from the nearest US shore and roughly 1,800 km from Washington. Such a deployment would have made it impossible for the US to defend against a nuclear strike and would have ‘levelled the playing field’, since the US already had such capabilities vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The US, predictably, made it clear that this would not be tolerated and that it would prevent it by any means necessary, including nuclear war. With the Doomsday Clock at 12 minutes to midnight, the Soviet leadership realised its miscalculation and, after a few days of intense crisis, withdrew the missiles. This was followed by a relaxation of US-Soviet tensions, leading to the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963).

    No bullets flew between the US and the USSR in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was an extremely dangerous short-term incident that could have ignited large-scale – including nuclear – war. However, unlike the Ukraine war, it did not flow from an already existing and intensifying dynamic of war by either the US or the USSR. Thus, while extremely dangerous, the situation could also be, and was, rapidly resolved.

    The situation in Ukraine, as well as the growing conflict around China, are more structurally dangerous. Direct confrontation is taking place between NATO and Russia, where the US just authorised direct military strikes (imagine if, during the 1962 crisis, Cuban forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union had carried out major military strikes in Florida). Meanwhile, the US is directly raising military tensions with China around Taiwan and the South China Sea, as well as in the Korean Peninsula. The US government understands that it cannot withstand erosion to its position of global primacy and rightly believes that it may lose its economic dominance to China. That is why it increasingly moves issues onto the military terrain, where it still maintains an advantage. The US position on Gaza is significantly determined by its understanding that it cannot afford a blow to its military supremacy, embodied in the regime that it controls in Israel.

    The US and its NATO partners are responsible for 74.3% of global military spending. Within the context of the US’s increasing drive for war and use of military means, the situation in Ukraine, and potentially around China, are, in reality, as dangerous, and potentially more dangerous, than the Cuban Missile Crisis.

    Tatiana Grinevich (Belarus), The River of Wishes, 2012.

    How Are the Warring Parties to Negotiate?

    Hours after Russian troops entered Ukraine, both sides began to talk about a drawdown of tensions. These negotiations developed in Belarus and Turkey before they were scuttled by NATO’s assurances to Ukraine of endless and bottomless support to ‘weaken’ Russia. If those early negotiations had developed, thousands of lives would have been spared. All such wars end in negotiations, which is why the sooner they could have happened, the better. This is a view that is now openly acknowledged by Ukrainians. Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, told The Economist that negotiations are on the horizon.

    For a long time now, the Russia-Ukraine frontline has not moved dramatically. In February 2024, the Chinese government released a twelve-point set of principles to guide a peace process. These points – including ‘abandoning the Cold War mentality’ – should have been seriously considered by the belligerent sides. But the NATO states simply ignored them. Several months later, a Ukraine-driven conference was held in Switzerland from 15–16 June, to which Russia was not invited and which ended with a communiqué that borrowed many of the Chinese proposals about nuclear safety, food security, and prisoner exchanges.

    Velislava Gecheva (Bulgaria), Homo photographicus, 2014.

    While a number of states – from Albania to Uruguay – signed the document, other countries that attended the meeting refused to sign on for a range of reasons, including their sense that the text did not take Russia’s security concerns seriously. Among the countries that did not sign are Armenia, Bahrain, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Libya, Mauritius, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. A few days before the Switzerland conference, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin stated his conditions for peace, which include a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO. This view is shared by those countries of the Global South that did not join the Switzerland statement.

    Both Russia and Ukraine are willing to negotiate. Why should the NATO states be allowed to prolong a war that threatens world peace? The upcoming NATO summit in Washington from 9–11 July must hear, loudly and clearly, that the world does not want its dangerous war or decadent militarism. The world’s peoples want to build bridges, not blow them up.

    Maxim Kantor (Russia), Two Versions of History, 1993.

    Briefing no. 14, a clear assessment of current dangers around the escalation in and around Ukraine, underscores the need, as Abdullah El Harif of the Workers’ Democratic Way party in Morocco and I wrote in the Bouficha Appeal Against the Preparations for War in 2020, for the peoples of the world to:

    • Stand against the warmongering of US imperialism, which seeks to impose dangerous wars on an already fragile planet.
    • Stand against the saturation of the world with weapons of all kinds, which inflame conflicts and often drive political processes toward endless wars.
    • Stand against the use of military power to prevent the social development of the peoples of the world.
    • Defend the right of countries to build their sovereignty and their dignity.

    Sensitive people around the world must make their voices heard on the streets and in the corridors of power to end this dangerous war, and indeed to set us on a path beyond capitalism’s world of unending wars.

    The post There Is No Such Thing as a Small Nuclear War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • There Is No Such Thing as a Small Nuclear War

    Erik Bulatov (USSR), People in the Landscape, 1976.

    There was a time when calls for a nuclear-free Europe rang across the continent. It began with the Stockholm Appeal (1950), which opened with the powerful words ‘We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples’ and then deepened with the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament (1980), which issued the chilling warning ‘We are entering the most dangerous decade in human history’. Roughly 274 million people signed the Stockholm Appeal, including – as is often reported – the entire adult population of the Soviet Union. Yet, since the European appeal of 1980, it feels as if each decade has been more and more dangerous than the previous one. ‘It is still 90 seconds to midnight’, the editors at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the keepers of the Doomsday Clock) wrote in January. Midnight is Armageddon. In 1949, the clock sat at three minutes to midnight, and in 1980 it had retreated slightly from the precipice, back to seven minutes to midnight. By 2023, however, the clock’s hand had moved all the way up to ninety seconds to midnight, where it remains, the closest we have ever been to full-scale annihilation.

    This precarious situation is threatening to reach a tipping point in Europe today. To understand the dangerous possibilities that could be unleashed by the intensified provocations around Ukraine, we collaborated with No Cold War to produce briefing no. 14, NATO’s Actions in Ukraine Are More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Please read this text carefully and circulate it as widely as possible.

    For the past two years, Europe’s largest war since 1945 has been raging in Ukraine. The root cause of this war is the US-driven attempt to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into Ukraine. This violates the promises the West made to the Soviet Union during the end of the Cold War, such as that NATO would move ‘not one inch eastward’, as US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Over the past decade, the Global North has repeatedly snubbed Russian requests for security guarantees. It was this disregard for Russian concerns that led to the outbreak of the conflict in 2014 and the war in 2022.

    Today, a nuclear-armed NATO and a nuclear-armed Russia are in direct conflict in Ukraine. Instead of taking steps to bring this war to an end, NATO has made several new announcements in recent months that threaten to escalate the situation into a still more serious conflict with the potential to spill beyond Ukraine’s borders. It is no exaggeration to say that this conflict has created the greatest threat to world peace since the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).

    This extremely dangerous escalation confirms the correctness of the majority of US experts on Russia and Eastern Europe, who have long warned against the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, George Kennan, the principal architect of US policy in the Cold War, said that this strategy is ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. The Ukraine war and the dangers of further escalation fully affirm the seriousness of his warning.

    Elif Uras (Turkey), Kapital, 2009.

    How Is NATO Escalating the Conflict in Ukraine?

    The most dangerous recent developments in this conflict are the decisions by the US and Britain in May to authorise Ukraine to use weapons supplied by the two countries to conduct military attacks inside Russia. Ukraine’s government immediately used this in the most provocative way by attacking Russia’s ballistic missile early warning system. This warning system plays no role in the Ukraine war but is a central part of Russia’s defence system against strategic nuclear attack. In addition, the British government supplied Ukraine with Storm Shadow missiles that have a range of over 250 km (155 miles) and can hit targets not only on the battleground but far inside Russia. The use of NATO weapons to attack Russia risks an equivalent Russian counter-response, threatening to spread the war beyond Ukraine.

    This was followed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s June announcement that a NATO headquarter for operations in the Ukraine war had been created at the US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, with 700 initial staff. On 7 June, French President Emmanuel Macron said that his government was working to ‘finalise a coalition’ of NATO countries willing to send troops to Ukraine to ‘train’ Ukrainian forces. This would place NATO forces directly in the war. As the Vietnam War and other conflicts have shown, such ‘trainers’ organise and direct fighting, thus becoming targets for attacks.

    Nadia Abu-Aitah (Switzerland), Breaking Free, 2021.

    Why Is Escalation in Ukraine More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis?

    The Cuban Missile Crisis was the product of an adventurist miscalculation by Soviet leadership that the US would tolerate the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles only 144 km from the nearest US shore and roughly 1,800 km from Washington. Such a deployment would have made it impossible for the US to defend against a nuclear strike and would have ‘levelled the playing field’, since the US already had such capabilities vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The US, predictably, made it clear that this would not be tolerated and that it would prevent it by any means necessary, including nuclear war. With the Doomsday Clock at 12 minutes to midnight, the Soviet leadership realised its miscalculation and, after a few days of intense crisis, withdrew the missiles. This was followed by a relaxation of US-Soviet tensions, leading to the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963).

    No bullets flew between the US and the USSR in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was an extremely dangerous short-term incident that could have ignited large-scale – including nuclear – war. However, unlike the Ukraine war, it did not flow from an already existing and intensifying dynamic of war by either the US or the USSR. Thus, while extremely dangerous, the situation could also be, and was, rapidly resolved.

    The situation in Ukraine, as well as the growing conflict around China, are more structurally dangerous. Direct confrontation is taking place between NATO and Russia, where the US just authorised direct military strikes (imagine if, during the 1962 crisis, Cuban forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union had carried out major military strikes in Florida). Meanwhile, the US is directly raising military tensions with China around Taiwan and the South China Sea, as well as in the Korean Peninsula. The US government understands that it cannot withstand erosion to its position of global primacy and rightly believes that it may lose its economic dominance to China. That is why it increasingly moves issues onto the military terrain, where it still maintains an advantage. The US position on Gaza is significantly determined by its understanding that it cannot afford a blow to its military supremacy, embodied in the regime that it controls in Israel.

    The US and its NATO partners are responsible for 74.3% of global military spending. Within the context of the US’s increasing drive for war and use of military means, the situation in Ukraine, and potentially around China, are, in reality, as dangerous, and potentially more dangerous, than the Cuban Missile Crisis.

    Tatiana Grinevich (Belarus), The River of Wishes, 2012.

    How Are the Warring Parties to Negotiate?

    Hours after Russian troops entered Ukraine, both sides began to talk about a drawdown of tensions. These negotiations developed in Belarus and Turkey before they were scuttled by NATO’s assurances to Ukraine of endless and bottomless support to ‘weaken’ Russia. If those early negotiations had developed, thousands of lives would have been spared. All such wars end in negotiations, which is why the sooner they could have happened, the better. This is a view that is now openly acknowledged by Ukrainians. Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, told The Economist that negotiations are on the horizon.

    For a long time now, the Russia-Ukraine frontline has not moved dramatically. In February 2024, the Chinese government released a twelve-point set of principles to guide a peace process. These points – including ‘abandoning the Cold War mentality’ – should have been seriously considered by the belligerent sides. But the NATO states simply ignored them. Several months later, a Ukraine-driven conference was held in Switzerland from 15–16 June, to which Russia was not invited and which ended with a communiqué that borrowed many of the Chinese proposals about nuclear safety, food security, and prisoner exchanges.

    Velislava Gecheva (Bulgaria), Homo photographicus, 2014.

    While a number of states – from Albania to Uruguay – signed the document, other countries that attended the meeting refused to sign on for a range of reasons, including their sense that the text did not take Russia’s security concerns seriously. Among the countries that did not sign are Armenia, Bahrain, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Libya, Mauritius, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. A few days before the Switzerland conference, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin stated his conditions for peace, which include a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO. This view is shared by those countries of the Global South that did not join the Switzerland statement.

    Both Russia and Ukraine are willing to negotiate. Why should the NATO states be allowed to prolong a war that threatens world peace? The upcoming NATO summit in Washington from 9–11 July must hear, loudly and clearly, that the world does not want its dangerous war or decadent militarism. The world’s peoples want to build bridges, not blow them up.

    Maxim Kantor (Russia), Two Versions of History, 1993.

    Briefing no. 14, a clear assessment of current dangers around the escalation in and around Ukraine, underscores the need, as Abdullah El Harif of the Workers’ Democratic Way party in Morocco and I wrote in the Bouficha Appeal Against the Preparations for War in 2020, for the peoples of the world to:

    • Stand against the warmongering of US imperialism, which seeks to impose dangerous wars on an already fragile planet.
    • Stand against the saturation of the world with weapons of all kinds, which inflame conflicts and often drive political processes toward endless wars.
    • Stand against the use of military power to prevent the social development of the peoples of the world.
    • Defend the right of countries to build their sovereignty and their dignity.

    Sensitive people around the world must make their voices heard on the streets and in the corridors of power to end this dangerous war, and indeed to set us on a path beyond capitalism’s world of unending wars.

    The post There Is No Such Thing as a Small Nuclear War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Did The West Provoke The Ukraine War? Sorry, That Question Has Been Cancelled

    Is it possible for an entire ‘mainstream’ media system – every newspaper, website, TV channel – to completely suppress one side of a crucial argument without anyone expressing outrage, or even noticing? Consider the following.

    In February 2022, Nigel Farage, former and future leader of the Reform UK party, tweeted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was:

    ‘A consequence of EU and NATO expansion, which came to a head in 2014. It made no sense to poke the Russian bear with a stick.’

    In a recent interview, the BBC reminded Farage of this comment. He responded:

    ‘Why did I say that? It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man [Putin] a reason to his Russian people to say they’re coming for us again, and to go to war.

    ‘We’ve provoked this war – of course it’s his fault – he’s used what we’ve done as an excuse.’

    The BBC quickly made this a major news story by publishing a front page, top headline piece by BBC journalist Becky Morton who cited, and repeated, high-level sources attacking Farage. Morton wrote:

    ‘Former Conservative Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who is not standing in the election, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Mr Farage was like a “pub bore we’ve all met at the end of the bar”.’

    And:

    ‘Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Mr Farage was echoing Mr Putin’s “vile justification” for the war and Labour branded him “unfit” for any political office.’

    Morton then repeated both criticisms:

    ‘Mr Wallace – who oversaw the UK’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – said Mr Farage “is a bit like that pub bore we’ve all met at the end of the bar” and often presents “very simplistic answers” to complex problems.’

    And:

    ‘Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Mr Farage was “echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine”.’

    Morton piled on the pain:

    ‘Labour defence spokesman John Healey said Mr Farage’s comments made him “unfit for any political office in our country, let alone leading a serious party in Parliament”.

    ‘Former Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson accused Mr Farage of “parroting the Kremlin Line” and “producing new excuses for the brutal, unprovoked attack”.’

    Wallace, Cleverly, Healey and Robertson are all, of course, influential, high-profile figures; compiling their criticisms in this way sent a powerful message to BBC readers. Remarkably, one might think – given the BBC’s supposed devotion to presenting ‘both sides’ of an argument – Morton offered no source of any kind in support of Farage’s argument.

    The BBC intensified its coverage by opening a ‘Live’ blog (reserved for top news stories, disasters and scandals) on the issue, titled:

    ‘Farage “won’t apologise” for Ukraine comments after Starmer and Sunak criticism’

    The BBC reported:

    ‘Keir Starmer has called Nigel Farage’s comments on Ukraine “disgraceful” as Rishi Sunak says they play into Putin’s hands’

    Again, nowhere in the ‘Live’ blog coverage did the BBC cite arguments in support of Farage’s argument. Is it because they don’t exist?

    In June 2022, Ramzy Baroud interviewed Noam Chomsky:

    ‘Chomsky told us that it “should be clear that the (Russian) invasion of Ukraine has no (moral) justification.” He compared it to the US invasion of Iraq, seeing it as an example of “supreme international crime.” With this moral question settled, Chomsky believes that the main “background” of this war, a factor that is missing in mainstream media coverage, is “NATO expansion.”

    ‘”This is not just my opinion,” said Chomsky, “it is the opinion of every high-level US official in the diplomatic services who has any familiarity with Russia and Eastern Europe. This goes back to George Kennan and, in the 1990s, Reagan’s ambassador Jack Matlock, including the current director of the CIA; in fact, just everybody who knows anything has been warning Washington that it is reckless and provocative to ignore Russia’s very clear and explicit red lines. That goes way before (Vladimir) Putin, it has nothing to do with him; (Mikhail) Gorbachev, all said the same thing. Ukraine and Georgia cannot join NATO, this is the geostrategic heartland of Russia.”’

    We know people are interested in Chomsky’s views on the Ukraine war because when we posted a comment from him on X it received 430,000 views and 7,000 likes (huge numbers by our standards).

    In 2022, John Pilger commented:

    ‘The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission.  I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.

    ‘In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.

    ‘In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.’

    Pilger added:

    ‘Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” – except one.

    ‘When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kiev regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.’

    In May 2023, economist Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University wrote:

    ‘Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

    ‘Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion.’ (Our emphasis)

    Sachs has previously been presented as a credible source by the BBC on other issues. In 2007, Sachs gave five talks for the BBC’s Reith Lectures.

    The New Yorker magazine described political scientist Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago as ‘one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War’. Mearsheimer commented:

    ‘I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he [Putin] was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument…’

    There are numerous other credible sources, including Benjamin Abelow, author of How The West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022) and Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (Yale University Press, 2022). Journalist Ian Sinclair, author of The March That Shook Blair (Peace News, 2013), published a collection of material titled:

    ‘Testimony from US government and military officials, and other experts, on the role of NATO expansion in creating the conditions for the Russian invasion of Ukraine’

    Sinclair cited, for example, current CIA Director William Burns:

    ‘Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-nineties, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best and needlessly provocative at worst.’

    And George F. Kennan, a leading US Cold War diplomat:

    ‘…something of the highest importance is at stake here. And perhaps it is not too late to advance a view that, I believe, is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters. The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era’.

    We can understand why the BBC might want to cite Sunak, Starmer, Wallace, Cleverly, Healey and Robertson, but we can’t understand why it would ignore the counterarguments and sources cited above.

    It gets worse. A piece in the Daily Mail essentially repeated the BBC performance with endless vitriolic comments again cited from Sunak, Starmer, Cleverly, Healey, Robertson and several others. And again, no counterarguments.

    A Reuter’s report quoted Sunak and Healey but no counterarguments.

    ITV cited former prime minister Boris Johnson:

    ‘To try and spread the blame is morally repugnant and parroting Putin’s lies.’

    No counterarguments were allowed, other than from Farage himself. At a recent rally, he held up a front-page headline from the i newspaper in 2016, which read, tragicomically:

    ‘Boris blames EU for war in Ukraine’

    That about sums up the state of both Boris Johnson and UK politics generally.

    The Telegraph cited Cleverly and other high-profile sources attacking Farage:

    ‘Tobias Ellwood, the former Tory defence minister, told The Telegraph: “Churchill will be turning in his grave. Putin, already enjoying how Farage is disrupting British politics, will be delighted to hear this talk of appeasement entering our election debate.”

    ‘Lord West of Spithead, the former chief of the naval staff, said: “Anyone who gives any seeming excuse to president Putin and his disgraceful attack … is standing into danger as regards their views on world affairs.” James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “Just Farage echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine.”

    ‘Liam Fox, the former Tory defence secretary, told The Telegraph: “The West did not ‘provoke this war’ in Ukraine and it is shocking that Nigel Farage should say so.”’ (Daily Telegraph, ‘Farage: West provoked Russia to attack Ukraine’, 22 June 2024)

    Again, all alternative views were ignored as non-existent.

    In the Independent, journalist Tom Watling packed his article with comments from Sunak, Starmer and Wallace. Again, no counterarguments were allowed.

    The Guardian cited Sunak, Healey and Cleverly. Again, no counterarguments were included. (Peter Walker, ‘Nigel Farage claims Russia was provoked into Ukraine war’, The Guardian, 21 June 2024)

    With such limited resources, it is difficult for us to wade through all mentions of this story, but we will stick our necks out and suggest that it is quite possible that no sources supporting Farage’s argument have been cited in any UK national newspaper.

    By any rational accounting, this ‘mainstream’ coverage is actually a form of totalitarian propaganda. It has denied the British public the ability to even understand the criticisms. Most people reading these reports will simply not understand why Farage made the claim – it is a taboo subject in ‘mainstream’ coverage – and so they have no way of making sense of either his argument or the backlash. This is deep bias presented as ‘news’. It is fake news.

    And this suppression of honest journalism in relation to one of the most dangerous and devastating wars of our time, in which our own country is deeply involved, is happening in the run up to what is supposed to be a democratic election.

    None of the above is intended as a defence of Farage’s wider political stance. On the contrary, we agree with political journalist Peter Oborne:

    ‘Farage, a close ally of Donald Trump, who has supported Marine Le Pen in France and spoken at an AfD rally in Germany, fits naturally into the rancid politics of the far-right movements making ground across Europe and in the United States.’

    Farage and his far-right views have been endlessly platformed by the BBC.

    Needless to say, the Ukraine war is only one of many key issues that are off the agenda for our choice-as-no-choice political system. In a rare example of dissent, Owen Jones commented in the Guardian:

    ‘Is this a serious country or not? It is egregious enough that this general election campaign is so stripped of discussion about the defining issues facing us at home for the next half decade, whether that be public spending, the NHS or education. But it is especially shocking how quickly the butchery in Gaza – and the position of this imploding government and its successor – has been forgotten.’

    Jones noted:

    ‘On Thursday night’s BBC Question Time leaders’ special, there was not a single question or answer on Gaza.

    ‘Seriously? Clearly this is an issue that matters to many Britons.’

    Earlier this month, Professor Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London commented:

    ‘The most astonishing thing about the UK election campaign is not what the leaders and parties are saying, but what they are NOT saying

    ‘It beggars belief that the #climate is simply not an issue and – as far as I have heard – has not been addressed by either leader

    ‘Just criminal’

    It works like magic: two major political parties ostensibly representing the ‘left’ and ‘right’ of the political spectrum, but both actually serving the same establishment interests, naturally ignore issues that offend power. Establishment media can then also ignore these issues on the pretext that the party-political system covers the entire spectrum of thinkable thought, and that any ideas outside that ‘spectrum’ have no particular right to be heard at election time. Indeed, to venture beyond the carefully filtered bubble of party politics is seen as actually undemocratic. As one ITV journalist reported:

    ‘Outrage at Nigel Farage’s comments about the war in Ukraine has drawn criticism from all corners of British politics.’

    Not quite. They drew criticism from the select few corners of British politics that are allowed to exist in our ‘managed democracy’.

    The post Did The West Provoke The Ukraine War? Sorry, That Question Has Been Cancelled first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • NATO’s Endgame Appears to Be Nuclear War

    The world is at its most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Back then, however, the fear of total destruction consumed the public; today, few people seem even to be aware of this possibility.

    It is easily imaginable that nuclear war could break out between Russia (and perhaps China) and the West, yet politicians continue to escalate tensions, place hundreds of thousands of troops at “high readiness,” and attack military targets inside Russia, even while ordinary citizens blithely go on with their lives.

    The situation is without parallel in history.

    Consider the following facts. A hostile military alliance, now including even Sweden and Finland, is at the very borders of Russia. How are Russian leaders—whose country was almost destroyed by Western invasion twice in the twentieth century—supposed to react to this? How would Washington react if Mexico or Canada belonged to an enormous, expansionist, and highly belligerent anti-U.S. military alliance?

    As if expanding NATO to include Eastern Europe wasn’t provocative enough, Washington began to send billions of dollars’ worth of military aid to Ukraine in 2014, to “improve interoperability with NATO,” in the words of the Defense Department. Why this Western involvement in Ukraine, which, as Obama said while president, is “a core Russian interest but not an American one”? One reason was given by Senator Lindsey Graham in a recent moment of startling televised candor: Ukraine is “sitting on $10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals… I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China.”

    As the Washington Post has reported, “Ukraine harbors some of the world’s largest reserves of titanium and iron ore, fields of untapped lithium and massive deposits of coal. Collectively, they are worth tens of trillions of dollars.” Ukraine also has colossal reserves of natural gas and oil, in addition to neon, nickel, beryllium, and other critical rare earth metals. For NATO’s leadership, Russia and, in particular, China can’t be permitted access to these resources. The war in Ukraine must, therefore, continue indefinitely, and negotiations with Russia mustn’t be pursued.

    Meanwhile, as Ukraine was being de facto integrated into NATO in the years before 2022, the United States put into operation an anti-ballistic-missile site in Romania in 2016. As Benjamin Abelow notes in How the West Brought War to Ukraine, the missile launchers that the ABM system uses can accommodate nuclear-tipped offensive weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missile. “Tomahawks,” he points out, “have a range of 1,500 miles, can strike Moscow and other targets deep inside Russia, and can carry hydrogen bomb warheads with selectable yields up to 150 kilotons, roughly ten times that of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.” Poland now boasts a similar ABM site.

    American assurances that these anti-missile bases are defensive in nature, to protect against an (incredibly unlikely) attack from Iran, can hardly reassure Russia, given the missile launchers’ capability to launch offensive weapons.

    In another bellicose move, the Trump administration in 2019 unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. Russia responded by proposing that the U.S. declare a moratorium on the deployment of short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, saying it wouldn’t deploy such missiles as long as NATO members didn’t. Washington dismissed these proposals, which upset some European leaders. “Has the absence of dialogue with Russia,” Emmanuel Macron said, “made the European continent any safer? I don’t think so.”

    The situation is especially dangerous given what experts call “warhead ambiguity.” As senior Russian military officers have said, “there will be no way to determine if an incoming ballistic missile is fitted with a nuclear or a conventional warhead, and so the military will see it as a nuclear attack” that warrants a nuclear retaliation. A possible misunderstanding could thus plunge the world into nuclear war.

    So now we’re more than two years into a proxy war with Russia that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and has seen Ukraine even more closely integrated into the structures of NATO than it was before. And the West continues to inch ever closer to the nuclear precipice. Ukraine has begun using U.S. missiles to strike Russian territory, including defensive (not only offensive) missile systems.

    This summer, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium will begin sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine; and Denmark and the Netherlands have said there will be no restrictions on the use of these planes to strike targets in Russia. F-16s are able to deliver nuclear weapons, and Russia has said the planes will be considered a nuclear threat.

    Bringing the world even closer to terminal crisis, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg states that 500,000 troops are at “high readiness,” and in the next five years, NATO allies will “acquire thousands of air defense and artillery systems, 850 modern aircraft—mostly 5th-generation F-35s—and also a lot of other high-end capabilities.” Macron has morphed into one of Europe’s most hawkish leaders, with plans to send military instructors to Ukraine very soon. At the same time, NATO is holding talks about taking more nuclear weapons out of storage and placing them on standby.

    Where all this is heading is unclear, but what’s obvious is that Western leaders are acting with reckless disregard for the future of humanity. Their bet is that Putin will never deploy nuclear weapons, despite his many threats to do so and recent Russian military drills to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. Given that Russian use of nuclear warheads might well precipitate a nuclear response by the West, the fate of humanity hangs on the restraint and rationality of one man, Putin—a figure who is constantly portrayed by Western media and politicians as an irrational, bloodthirsty monster. So the human species is supposed to place its hope for survival in someone we’re told is a madman, who leads a state that feels besieged by the most powerful military coalition in history, apparently committed to its demise.

    Maybe the madmen aren’t in the Russian government but rather in NATO governments?

    It is downright puzzling that millions of people aren’t protesting in the streets every day to deescalate the crisis and pull civilization back from the brink. Evidently the mass media have successfully fulfilled their function of manufacturing consent. But unless the Western public wakes up, the current crisis might not end as benignly as did the one in 1962.

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  • In our make-believe politics, the strings pulled by the super-rich are all too visible

    We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible. And yet we are expected to pretend we cannot see those strings. More astonishing still, many people really do seem blind to the puppet show.

    1. The “leader of the free world”, President Joe Biden, can barely maintain his attention for more than a few minutes without straying off topic, or wandering offstage. When he has to walk before the cameras, he does so like he is auditioning for the role of a geriatric robot. His whole body is gripped with the concentration he needs to walk in a straight line.

    And yet we are supposed to believe he is carefully working the levers of the western empire, making critically difficult calculations to keep the West free and prosperous, while keeping in check its enemies – Russia, China, Iran – without provoking a nuclear war. Is he really capable of doing all that when he struggles to put one foot in front of the other?

    2. Part of that tricky diplomatic balancing act Biden is supposedly conducting, along with other western leaders, relates to Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The West’s “diplomacy” – backed by weapons transfers – has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children; the gradual starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians over many months; and the destruction of 70 per cent of the enclave’s housing stock and almost all of its major infrastructure and institutions, including schools, universities and hospitals.

    And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden has no leverage over Israel, even though Israel is entirely dependent on the United States for the weapons it is using to destroy Gaza.

    We are supposed to believe Israel is acting solely in “self-defence”, even when most of the people being killed are unarmed civilians; and that it is “eliminating” Hamas, even though Hamas doesn’t appear to have been weakened, and even though Israel’s starvation policies will take their toll on the young, elderly and vulnerable long before they kill a single Hamas fighter.

    We are supposed to believe that Israel has a plan for the “day after” in Gaza that won’t look anything like the outcome these policies appear designed to achieve: making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinian population is forced to leave.

    And on top of all this, we are supposed to believe that, in ruling that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide, the judges of the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, have shown they do not understand the legal definition of the crime of genocide. Or possibly that they are driven by antisemitism.

    3. Meanwhile, the same western leaders arming Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, have been shipping hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to Ukraine to assist its armed forces. Ukraine must be helped, we are told, because it is the victim of an aggressive neighbouring power, Russia, determined on expansion and land theft.

    And yet we are supposed to ignore the two decades of western military expansion eastwards, via Nato, that has finally coming knocking, in Ukraine, on Russia’s door – and the fact that the West’s best experts on Russia warned throughout that time that we were playing with fire in doing so and that Ukraine would prove a red line for Moscow.

    We are supposed to make no comparison between Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians. In the latter case, Israel is supposedly the victim, even though it has been violently occupying its Palestinian neighbours’ territory for three-quarters of a century while, in flagrant violation of international law, building Jewish settlements on the territory meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.

    We are supposed to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza have no right to defend themselves comparable to Ukraine’s right – no right to defend against decades of Israeli belligerence, whether the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, the apartheid system imposed on the remnant Palestinian population afterwards, the 17-year blockade of Gaza that denied its inhabitants the essentials of life, or the “plausible genocide” the West is now arming and providing diplomatic cover for.

    In fact, if the Palestinians do try to defend themselves, the West not only refuses to help them, as it has Ukraine, but considers them terrorists – even the children, it seems.

    4. Julian Assange, the journalist and publisher who did most to expose the inner workings of western establishments, and their criminal schemes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, has been behind bars for five years in Belmarsh high-security prison. Before that, he spent seven years arbitrarily detained – according to United Nations legal experts – in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, forced to seek asylum there from political persecution. In an interminable legal process, the US seeks his extradition so he can be locked away in near-isolation for up to 175 years.

    And yet we are supposed to believe that his 12 years of effective detention – having been found guilty of no crime – is entirely unrelated to the fact that, in publishing secret cables, Assange revealed that, behind closed doors, the West and its leaders sound and act like gangsters and psychopaths, especially about foreign affairs, not like the stewards of a benign global order they claim to be overseeing.

    The leaked documents Assange published show western leaders ready to destroy whole societies to further western resource domination and their own enrichment – and eager to wield the most outrageous lies to achieve their goals. They have no interest in upholding the supposedly cherished value of freedom of the press, except when that freedom is being weaponised against their enemies.

    We are supposed to believe that western leaders genuinely want journalists to act as a watchdog, a restraint, on their power even when they are hounding to death the very journalist who created a whistleblowers’ platform, Wikileaks, to do precisely that. (Assange has already suffered a stroke from the more than a decade-long strain of fighting for his freedom.)

    We are supposed to believe that the West will give Assange a fair trial, when the very states colluding in his incarceration – and in the CIA’s case, planned assassination – are the ones he exposed for engaging in war crimes and state terrorism. We are supposed to believe that they are pursuing a legal process, not persecution, in redefining as the crime of “espionage” his efforts to bring transparency and accountability to international affairs.

    5. The media claim to represent the interests of western publics in all their diversity, and to act as a true window on the world.

    We are supposed believe that this same media is free and pluralistic, even when it is owned by the super-rich as well as western states that were long ago hollowed out to serve the super-rich.

    We are supposed to believe that a media completely dependent for its survival on revenues from big corporate advertisers can bring us news and analysis without fear or favour. We are supposed to believe that a media whose primary role is selling audiences to corporate advertisers can question whether, in doing so, it is playing a beneficial or harmful role.

    We are supposed to believe that a media plugged firmly into the capitalist financial system that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008, and has been hurtling us towards ecological catastrophe, is in a position to evaluate and critique that capitalist model dispassionately, that media outlets could somehow turn on the billionaires who own them, or could forego the income from the billionaire-owned corporations that prop up the media’s finances through advertising.

     

    We are supposed to believe that the media can objectively assess the merits of going to war. That is, wars waged serially by the West – from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine to Gaza – when media corporations are embedded in corporate conglomerations whose other big interests include arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.

    We are supposed to believe that the media uncritically promotes endless growth for reasons of economic necessity and common sense, even though the contradictions are glaring: that the forever growth model is impossible to sustain on a finite planet where resources are running out.

    6. In western political systems, unlike those of its enemies, there is supposedly a meaningful democratic choice between candidates representing opposing worldviews and values.

    We are supposed to believe in a western political model of openness, pluralism and accountability even when in the US and UK the public are offered an electoral scrap between two candidates and parties that, to stand a chance of winning, need to win favour with the corporate media representing the interests of its billionaire owners, need to keep happy billionaire donors who fund their campaigns, and need to win over Big Business by demonstrating their unwavering commitment to a model of endless growth that is completely unsustainable.

    We are supposed to believe that these leaders serve the voting public – offering a choice between right and left, between capital and labour – when, in truth, the public is only ever presented with a choice between two parties prostrated before Big Money, when the parties’ policy programmes are nothing more than competitions in who can best appease the wealth-elite.

    We are supposed to believe that the “democratic” West represents the epitome of political health, even though it repeatedly dredges up the very worst people imaginable to lead it.

    In the US, the “choice” imposed on the electorate is between one candidate (Biden) who should be in pottering around his garden, or maybe preparing for his final, difficult years in a care home, and a competitor (Donald Trump) whose relentless search for adoration and self-enrichment should never have been indulged beyond hosting a TV reality show.

    In the UK, the “choice” is no better: between a candidate (Rishi Sunak) richer than the British king and equally cosseted and a competitor (Sir Keir Starmer) who is so ideologically hollow that his public record is an exercise in decades of shape-shifting.

    All, let us note, are fully signed up to the continuing genocide in Gaza, all are unmoved by many months of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian children, all are only too ready to defame as antisemites anyone who shows an ounce of the principle and humanity they all too obviously lack.

    The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.

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  • Ukraine, Continued Aid, and the Prevailing Logic of Slaughter

    War always commands its own appeal.  It has its own frazzled laurels, the calling of its own worn poets tenured in propaganda.  In battle, the poets keep writing, and keep glorifying.  The chattering diplomats are kept in the cooler, biding their time.  The soldiers die, as do civilians.  The politicians are permitted to behave badly.

    With Ukraine looking desperately bloodied at the hands of their Russian counterparts, the horizon of the conflict had seemingly shrunk of late.  Fatigue and desperation had set in.  Washington seemed more interested in sending such musically illiterate types as the Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Kyiv for moral cuddling rather than suitably murderous military hardware.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin, mindful of the losses inflicted on his own side in the conflict, thought it opportune to spring the question of peace talks.  On June 14, while speaking with members of the Russian Foreign Ministry, he floated the idea that Russia would cease combat operations “immediately” if Ukraine abandoned any aspirations of joining NATO and withdrew its troops from the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

    Rather than refrigerate the conflict into its previous frozen phase, Putin went further.  It would end provided that Kyiv accepted Moscow’s sovereign control over the four regions as “new territorial realities”.  Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine would also be afforded protections; sanctions imposed by Western states would be lifted.  “Today,” he stated, “we have put forward another concrete, genuine peace proposal.  If Kyiv and Western capitals reject it as they have in the past, they will bear political and moral responsibility of the ‘continuation of the bloodshed.’”

    He further added that, as soon as Ukraine began withdrawing its military personnel from Donbas and Novorossiya, with an undertaking not to join NATO, “the Russian Federation will cease fire and be ready for negotiations.  I don’t think it will take long.”

    Length and duration, however, remain the signal attributes of this murderous gambit.  Ukraine’s defeat and humbling is unacceptable for the armchair strategists in the US imperium, along with their various satellites.  NATO’s obsessive expansion cannot be thwarted, nor can the projection of Washington’s influence eastwards from Europe.  And as for the defence contractors and companies keen to make a killing on the killings, they must also be considered.

    This was unpardonable for the interests of the Biden administration.  The Washington War Gaming Set must continue.  Empires need their fill, their sullied pound of flesh.  Preponderance of power comes in various forms: direct assault against adversaries (potentially unpopular for the voters), proxy enlistment, or the one degree removed sponsorship of a national state or entity as a convenient hitman.  Ukraine, in this sense, has become the latter, a repurposed, tragic henchman for US interests, shedding blood in patriotic gore.

    In keeping with that gore, US President Joe Biden, in announcing a funding package for Ukraine from the G7 group, promised that “democracies can deliver”.  The amount on the ledger: $US50 billion.  “We are putting our money to work for Ukraine, and giving another reminder to Putin that we are not backing down.”  That particular amount is derived from frozen Russian assets outside Russian territory, most of it from the Russian Central Bank amounting to US$280 billion.  The circumstances of such freezing will, in future, be the subject of numerous dissertations and legal challenges, but that very fact suggests that Ukraine’s allies are tiring from drawing from their own budgets.  We support you, but we also hate to see the money of our taxpayers continually splurged on the enterprise.

    Biden’s remarks from the Hotel Masseria San Domenico in Fasano have a haunting quality of repetition when it comes to US support for doomed causes and misguided goals.  The fig leaf, when offered, can be withdrawn at any given movement: South Vietnam, doomed to conquest at the hands of North Vietnam; Afghanistan, almost inevitably destined to be recaptured by the Taliban; Kurds the Marsh Arabs, pet projects for US strategists encouraged to revolt only to be slaughtered in betrayal.

    Thus goes Biden: “A lasting peace for Ukraine must be underwritten by Ukraine’s own ability to defend itself now and to deter future aggression anytime […] in the future,” Biden explains, drawing from the echo of Vietnamisation and any such exultation of an indigenous cause against a wicked enemy.   The idea here: strengthen Ukrainian defence and deterrence while not sending US troops.  In other words, we pay you to die.

    The NATO disease, poxy and draining, rears its head.  Weapons and ammunition are to be provided to Ukraine along with the expansion of “intelligence-sharing” and training while “enhancing interoperability between our militaries in line with NATO standards”.  Money is to be put into Ukraine’s own defence industry so that they can duly “supply their own weapons and munitions”.  In the floral bouquet, a cautionary note is appended.  “In terms of longer range of weapons into the interior of Russia we are not changing our positions.”  Killing is always a matter of quantum, and calculation.  The note for Kyiv is clear: use the weapons but do so carefully.

    As for the logistics of finance, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan is already voicing concerns about the complexity of the funding venture.  “The simple proposition is we got to put these assets to work.  The complex proposition is how you do that specifically.”

    While Putin has turned his nose up at the UN Charter in its solemn affirmation of the sovereignty of states, Washington has taken its own wrecking ball to the text.  It has meddled, fiddled and tampered with the internal affairs of states while accusing Russia of the very same thing.  Spiteful of history and its bitter lessons, it has employed such saboteurs as former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland to undertake such tasks, poking the Russian Bear while courting and seducing the Ukrainian establishment.  The horror is evident for all to see, and unlikely to halt.

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  • Why Did It Take Russia So Long to Realize Donbass Was Worth Fighting for?

    Scott Ritter: Why did it take Russia so long to realize Donbass was worth fighting for?

    © Scott Ritter

    On May 26, the Donetsk People’s Republic marked the tenth anniversary of the first battle for the region’s international airport. This was a key clash in the fight between Ukraine and local citizens who opposed the nationalist-dominated government that had seized power in Kiev as a result of the US-backed coup in February 2014. The anniversary was but one in a succession of similar commemorations of events which, together, draw attention to the fact that the war in Donbass has been ongoing for a decade.

    Earlier this year I traveled to the Chechen Republic, Crimea, and the New Russian territories of Kherson and Zaporozhye, all locations which comprised what I called Russia’s “Path of Redemption,” the geographic expression of actions undertaken by Moscow. The fourth – and final – destination of my trip, the two people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk that are collectively referred to as the Donbass, brought this journey to a close. By visiting the literal ground zero of the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict, I was able to put a punctation mark at the end of a long and complicated passage which delved into the very essence of modern-day Russia – what it means to be Russian, and the price the Russian nation has been willing to pay to preserve this definition.

    When I crossed the border between Zaporozhye and Donetsk, there was no doubt that I was entering a war zone. The bodyguards from the Sparta Battalion that had escorted my vehicle as we drove through Kherson and Zaporozhye was replaced by a heavily armed detachment of camouflaged Russian soldiers, a constant reminder of the ever-present threat posed by Ukrainian partisans and saboteurs. I was being driven in an armored Chevy Tahoe, the former property of a Bank of Russia executive which had been re-purposed for this trip. My host, Aleksandr Zyryanov, the Director of the Investment Development Agency of Novosibirsk, was at the wheel. My fellow passengers were Aleksandr’s close friend and comrade, Denis, and Kirill, a resident of Saint Petersburg who was our point of contact with several Russian military units in Donbass we were hoping to meet up with.

    Our first stop in Donbass was the city of Mariupol, site of a bloody siege in March-May 2022 which saw the combined forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Russian army, including Chechen fighters, defeat thousands of Ukrainian Marines and members of the Azov Regiment, a formation of Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who openly support the ideology of Stepan Bandera, the founder of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, or OUN, which fought alongside Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The last surviving remnants of the Ukrainian garrison which had holed up in a complex of tunnels underneath the sprawling Azovstal iron and steel factory that dominated the center of the city surrendered to Russian forces on May 20, 2022, bringing the battle to an end.

    Mariupol suffered horribly because of the siege and the house-to-house fighting required to clear the city of its fanatic occupiers. The scars of war were so deep and prevalent as to leave the casual observer grasping to figure out how, or even if, the city and its population could ever recover. This was especially so when looking at the ruins of the Azovstal plant from the vantage point of the restored monument to the its workers who died during World War Two. And yet, like the patches of green that mark a charred forest after the first rainfall, Mariupol bore the evidence of a city coming back to life. The southern districts of the city had been completely razed, and new apartment complexes constructed which are populated by families whose children frolicked in playgrounds and parks nestled between the bright new buildings. Across the highway from the newly built neighborhood was a large new hospital complex. And as one drove into the center of the city, row upon row of damaged apartment buildings were undergoing reconstruction and repair work. Shops and restaurants were open, and people scurried about the sidewalks going about their business. Mariupol is very much alive, although the huge swaths of darkened neighborhoods, their buildings still uninhabitable, bear mute testimony to the work that still needs to be done.

    The city of Donetsk, the capital of its eponymous people’s republic, is a living manifestation of the stark contrasts that define a modern metropolitan center during war – shiny high-rise buildings, their glass windows reflecting the morning sunlight, beckon, while in the streets below mothers walk hand in hand with their children, unflinching as the sound of artillery fire – incoming and outgoing – echo around them. Driving through the city, I was struck by the bustling activity at one street corner as families shopped for food and the basic necessities of life in stores fully stocked with the desired goods, only to drive around the next corner to find the ruins of a similar market scene, destroyed by the random artillery and rocket fire from Ukrainian forces who still treat the citizens of Donetsk as ”terrorists.”

    I was taken to the Donbass Liberator’s monument, located in the Donetsk Culture and Leisure Park, next to the city’s arena, where we laid flowers to the memory of the fallen. Afterwards, as I was shown the monuments to the fallen heroes of the ongoing war with Ukraine, the sound of rocket fire shook the grounds. “It’s ours,” said my guide, an attractive young lady whose calm demeanor belied the reality of her current situation. “Uragan,” she said, a reference to the Russian 220-mm multiple launch rocket system. “Don’t worry.”

    That a female tour guide was serving as a walking resource for weapons identification to a former Marine intelligence officer who used to specialize in identifying Soviet arms and equipment only underscored the disparity between perception and reality which marked the city of Donetsk – a world where normalcy was randomly punctuated with the horrors of war. It would be easy to allow yourself to become shrouded in the kind of flinching paranoia that seizes you when you are convinced that every step you take could be your last. To prevent yourself from simply fleeing to a basement until the all-clear signal sounds, you can overcompensate by taking on a devil-may-care attitude of “what happens, happens.”

    But, for most, caution is the name of the game in Donetsk – while death may be randomly delivered in the form of Ukrainian artillery and rockets, you do not need to become a willing victim, especially if you know the Ukrainian enemy is actively searching for you in order to deliver a lethal blow.

    I have been labeled by the Center for Countering Disinformation, a US-funded Ukrainian government agency, as an “information terrorist” who deserves to be treated as an actual “terrorist” in terms of punishment – a not-so-veiled threat to my life. Likewise, my name is on the infamous Mirotvorets (“peacekeepers”) “kill list” promulgated by the Ukrainian intelligence service. Daria Dugina, the daughter of the famous Russian political philosopher, Aleksandr Dugin, and Maksim Fomin, a Russian military blogger who wrote under the name Vladlen Tatarsky, were both on this list and were murdered by agents of the Ukrainian intelligence services. While I would have to be an egocentric narcissist to believe that the entire Ukrainian war effort would grind to a halt in order to hunt me down during my short visit to Donbass, the fact that Ukraine has on a regular basis attacked the hotels frequented by journalists reporting on the conflict also means that one you’d have to have a callous disregard for innocent life by staying at a hotel in Donetsk as long as your name is on such lists.

    Discretion being the better part of valor, my hosts eschewed the offered room in a high-end Donetsk hotel for a more Spartan setting in a safehouse used during their frequent trips to the region. I traded the fine cuisine of Donetsk that my friend and colleague Randy Credico had bragged about during his visit to the region for the traditional soldier’s fare of fried potatoes and sausage cooked over a gas stove by Aleksandr’s friend, Denis.

    Paranoia is the name of the game, however, when it comes to the day-to-day lives of those men and women who govern Donetsk and defend it from the Ukrainian army, if for no other reason than the Ukrainians are, in fact, actively trying to hunt them down and kill them. I had the honor and privilege of meeting with Denis Pushilin, the Governor of the Donetsk People’s Republic, and Aleksandr Khodakovsky, the commander of the legendary Vostok Battalion, one of the first military formations created in the Donbass region in 2014 to fight for independence from Ukraine. On both occasions, extensive security precautions were put in place to forestall any effort by Ukrainian intelligence to discover our meeting, identify its location, and attack it with artillery.

    Pushilin and Khodakovsky both recalled their personal histories of the time of the founding of the Donetsk People’s Republic. Pushilin personally led a rally in Donetsk on April 5, 2014, calling for a referendum for the DPR to join Russia. He served as the first head of the DPR before stepping down in July 2014. In September 2018, he was brought back as the head of the DPR following the assassination of then DPR leader Aleksander Zakharchenko in a bombing of a Donetsk restaurant. He has served in that position ever since.

    Up until early 2014, Aleksandr Khodakovsky was the commander of the elite Ukrainian police commando unit known as Alpha Group. Following the February 2014 Maidan coup that ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, Khodakovsky and most of his Alpha Group commandoes defected to the Donbass resistance, where they were reformed into the Vostok Battalion. It was Khodakovsky’s Vostok Battalion which led the attack on Donetsk Airport on May 28, 2014, and which led the way into Mariupol in 2022. Today the Vostok Battalion has been expanded into a brigade-sized force operating as part of the Russian military, where it plays an active role in the ongoing battles for control of the Donbass region.

    The contrast between Pushilin and Khodakovsky is quite stark. Both men are confident in the righteousness of their cause and the path of history they are embarked on. But while Pushilin brought with him the buoyant optimism of a politician looking forward to a better future, Khodakovsky exuded the quiet resignation of a soldier who knows that the victory he is fighting for can only come at a cost which, over the course of a decade’s worth of war, had become almost unbearable. Both men exhibited a deep love for the Donetsk People’s Republic, and a genuine appreciation for the sacrifice made by the Russian army and nation in coming to their assistance, and for bringing them into the fold of the Russian Federation.

    The one thing both men had in common was a look of mental exhaustion whenever the subject of Russia’s military intervention was raised. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what caused this look until later, after our meetings had concluded and I found myself in the city of Lugansk, the capital of the Lugansk People’s Republic. The drive from Donetsk to Lugansk took us through towns and villages that had previously been on the front lines of the war with Ukraine. Some of these population centers showed signs of life. Many, however, did not. War, like a tornado, seemed to have a random character, targeting some places for destruction, while skipping over others.

    Today, the city of Lugansk is not on the front line, and its citizens enjoy a life of relative calm when contrasted with their neighbors in Donetsk. But war has visited them in the past, with all the violence and horror that currently unfolds in the regions of Donbass located to the south and west of the city. On June 27, 2017, the citizens of Lugansk unveiled a memorial dedicated to children killed because of the fighting that had been raging since 2014. On that day, 33 white doves were released into the air to symbolize the young lives lost.

    On January 17, 2024, I visited this memorial, known as the ‘Alley of Angels.’ There is another, more well-known Alley of Angels located in Donetsk. Because of the proximity of the war to that city, media coverage of the Donetsk monument, which commemorates the more than 230 children killed in the Donetsk People’s Republic by Ukraine since 2014, has been extensive, to the point that much of the world has seemed to have forgotten that the war with Ukraine has ravaged Lugansk as well. Since the unveiling of the Lugansk monument, another 35 children have been killed, raising the total to 68, with more than 190 additional children injured, all due to indiscriminate Ukrainian shelling.

    Aleksandr and I took part in a small ceremony marked by our laying flowers at the foot of the monument. By the time we had finished, a small crowd had gathered around to witness the sight of an American mourning the loss of their children. I was handed a book about the memorial and given an impromptu tour of the sculptures and plaques that were located there. A television crew asked me for a short interview.

    “What are your impressions of this memorial?” the interviewer asked.

    “It’s a touching tribute to the young lives that were so needlessly lost,” I replied. “And a constant reminder as to why this tragic war needs to be fought and won.”

    Afterwards, a lady emerged from the small crowd that had been watching the proceedings. “We thank you for coming to visit our city, and to honor the memory of our children,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.

    She held out her hand, and I took it in mine, a gesture of friendship and compassion.

    “You must be relieved now that you are part of Russia, and the Russian army is helping drive the Ukrainians back,” I said.

    “Yes,” she said, her voice cracking. “Yes, of course. But why did it take them so long? These children,” she said, gesturing toward the memorial, “did not have to die. Why did it take them so long?”

    I looked into her eyes, and immediately was struck by a sense of déjà vu. I had seen that look before, in the eyes of Denis Pushilin and Alexander Khodakovsky, a mixture of relief and exasperation, of hope and dejection, of happiness and sorrow. Yes, the leadership and people of Donbass are overjoyed by the presence of Russian troops on their territory, and the fact that the region is now legally part of Russia. Yes, Russia loves them now. But where was Russia when the children started dying in 2014? Why did it take so long for Moscow to wake up to the need to bring the Donbass into the fold of the Russian nation?

    This is the eternal question, one that Russia today struggles to find an adequate answer for.

    Russia’s path of redemption ends in Donbass. Here, the sins, errors, and evil which combined to create the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict are manifest. Questions have been asked to which there may be no adequate answer. Today, the situation on the ground increasingly points to a Russian victory over both Ukraine and its supporters in the collective West. But this victory has come at a huge physical and psychological cost. While the dead may be buried and honored, the living will always have to struggle to come to grips over the sacrifices that have been made in support of the cause they were fighting for.

    And, in the end, if they believe that the cause was a just one – and it is my firm position that they do, in fact, believe this to be the case – then the answer to the question as to why it took Russia so long to intervene on behalf of Donbass will hang there, unanswerable, if for no other reason than that the pain any honest answer will generate may be too much to bear for those who had been fighting for the liberation of Donbass these past ten years.

    The post Why Did It Take Russia So Long to Realize Donbass Was Worth Fighting for? first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Scott Ritter.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Obama’s Guilt for Ukraine’s War

    It was well-encapsulated in this 10-minute compilation video from 12 March 2014, “Ukraine Crisis – What You’re Not Being Told” (also archived here and here).

    That 10-minute documentary’s only error is at 22 seconds in, where its narrator said the year “two thousand thirteen” when he obviously meant to say “two thousand fourteen”; but, other than that, I have verified the authenticity and correctness of each one of its many sources and allegations, and find that it is the best (most comprehensive, brief, and accurate) single history of the 20-26 February 2014 coup in Ukraine, which has yet been done.

    It shows Victoria Nuland, whom Obama had selected to plan, organize, oversee, and direct, the coup in Ukraine, instructing America’s Ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, whom to get to become appointed to take over control of Ukraine’s government after the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, will be overthrown. That phone call from Nuland occurred on 27 January 2014, a month before Obama’s coup there was completed, and the person whom she selected to run Obama’s government of Ukraine was the rabidly anti-Russian Arseniy Yatsenyuk, or “Yats” as she sometimes referred to him in this video — and he did get the appointment a month later.

    Here is that complete phone-conversation, which is merely excerpted in the 10-minute documentary. And here is my transcript of it, along with my explanations of what she was referring to and why.

    This recorded phone-conversation is the most “smoking gun” evidence that I know of for any coup that has ever taken place; and for this reason and also on the basis of all of the other evidences on this coup, I agree with what the founder and head of the Stratfor ‘private CIA’ corporate advisory firm said about the matter, that it was “the most blatant coup in history”. (But then, a year later, at the Website of a former convicted Wall-Street trader, he posted an opinion-article to which he slipped in, as-if it were an aside, mention that though on “the internet and Twitter, … you will find me saying the United States staged the most blatant coup in history,” and he went on to misrepresent what he had actually said, and he then alleged that he hadn’t said that, and then he said that “It was no coup,” it was nothing more than “a systematic campaign to saturate the internet, the Russians fed the quote back into some major Russian print publications, then back onto the internet, until it resonated and fed back on itself,” and, so, he alleged that it was just a nothingburger, which “the Russians” had cooked up. He needed to retain his mega-corporate customers.)

    On 4 November 2019, I headlined “The Obama Regime’s Plan to Seize the Russian Naval Base in Crimea,” and provided my latest summary of, and links to, the evidences regarding the planning of Obama’s coup in Ukraine, and of the Obama regime’s extensive pollings of Ukrainians, and especially of Crimeans, both before the coup and after the coup, and noted the polls’ findings, which confirmed and made clear that the U.S. Government couldn’t go public with their poll-findings, because those findings were entirely consistent with the 16 March 2014 Russian-managed pebiscite in Crimea, which had found that 95.6% of Crimea’s voters had marked the option of “Join the Russia Federation as Federal subject of Russia.” Although that percentage was slightly higher than the pollings that the U.S. regime had commissioned, which were closer to 90%, any public challenging of that plebiscite on the basis of these poll-findings would have required the U.S. regime to acknowledge that both the U.S. polls and the Russian plebiscite could simultaneously be right; and, so, there was no U.S.-and-allied publicity given to those polls.

    Furthermore: any such allegation (challenging the Crimean plebiscite’s 95.6% figure) by the U.S. regime might also cause to become dredged up Obama’s plan, as part of the coup, for Russia’s main naval base, which since 1783 has been in Crimea, to become replaced by yet another U.S. naval base (the only part of Obama’s plan that had failed — perhaps because Crimeans overwhelmingly despised the U.S. Government, by a margin of 76.2% “negative” to 2.8% “positive,” which is 96.3% negative to 3.7% positive, in the U.S. regime’s April 2014 poll of Crimeans — so, it would have been a hopeless cause for Obama to continue with that part of his plan, and to challenge that 95.6% plebiscite).

    My 4 November 2019 article also documented Obama’s (Nuland’s, Yatsenyuk’s) plan to kill enough residents in the far-eastern region of Ukraine, which had voted over 90% for Yanukovych, for the population there to become either exterminated or else terrorized by the U.S.-imposed regime, so that enough of Yanukovych’s supporters would be culled from Ukraine’s electorate (around a million of them fled to Russia), so as to virtually assure that subsequently elected national leaders of Ukraine would likewise be rabidly anti-Russian, pro-U.S. regime. This ethnic cleansing by the U.S.-imposed Ukrainian regime, was likewise documented in that article.

    So: this is how the war in Ukraine actually started. It started in 2014, by Obama, not by Putin (such as the U.S. regime and its colonies allege).

    Even NATO’s leader Jens Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s leader Volodmyr Zelensky deny the U.S. Government’s lie that the war in Ukraine started on 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, and acknowledge that it started eight years before that, in 2014; Stoltenberg said, about this, “The war didn’t start in 2022. The war started in 2014.” Zelensky said about it, “I made a point that the war in Ukraine has been lasting for eight years. It’s not just some special military operation.” So, the U.S. Government’s lie, such as U.S. ‘Defense’ (Offense) Secretary Lloyd Austin expressed it, on 1 June 2024, is rabidly false, that:

    “In February of 2022, Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine shocked the world — and this region [Singapore]. And since then, Putin’s war of aggression has provided us all with a preview of a world that none of us would want. It’s a glimpse of a world where tyrants trample sovereign borders, a world where peaceful states live in fear of their neighbors, and a world where chaos and conquest replace rules and rights.

    But Russia’s lawless invasion also reminds us that free countries can rally together to help the victims of aggression.“

    That’s a baldfaced lie, which blames Putin, not Obama, for the war in Ukraine.

    Similar lies are common in U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media, such as:

    “When Russian President Vladimir Putin started the war in Ukraine, he tried to shift the blame to NATO, calling it the instigator. He argued that Russia had no choice but to defensively launch the invasion to prevent NATO from surrounding Russia from all sides. Reality, of course, was different. NATO was a defense alliance in retirement, collecting its “peace dividend” from the breakup of the Soviet Union. Most of its members maintained their defense spending below their shared commitment.” (Note that that commentator calls this “NATO … collecting its ‘peace dividend’ from the breakup of the Soviet Union” — as-if all that matters is peace for the U.S. regime, and that Russia’s authentic national-security concerns to protect Russia’s citizens against a possible U.S.-NATO invasion, should just be ignored — and that it says “NATO was a defense alliance in retirement … from the breakup of the Soviet Union,” though, in fact, that military alliance secretly continued on the American side after the USSR’s Warsaw Pact military alliance ended in 1991 — didn’t ever go into any ‘retirement’ when the Cold War on Russia’s side DID end. So: that’s not actually a “defense alliance” — it is very clearly an aggression alliance, against Russia itself.)

    and,

    “Putin started the war in Ukraine.”

    and,

    “In 2014, Putin started the war in Ukraine by annexing the Crimea.”

    and,

    “Putin started the war in Ukraine and has said negotiations have reached an impasse, without slamming the door on them. But before the war started, Putin presented the West with a list of demands including, most notably, a halt to NATO enlargement.”

    Though the second of the two sentences in that last one is true, nothing was wrong with Putin’s having presented those demands at that time, on 17 December 2021, as his requirements for a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine issue. Ukraine is the only country whose border is a mere 317 miles — five minutes of a nuclear missile’s flying-time — away from hitting The Kremlin and so decapitating Russia’s central command. That is the reason why the U.S. regime has wanted Ukraine so much as to risk WW3 over winning it (as they did) and keeping it (as they won’t): because the U.S. regime demands to ‘win’ WW3, not to merely avoid it. If they can’t be #1 over the whole world, they don’t want anything; they don’t have any “plan B,” yet, unless it’s WW3 itself. On 29 December 2016, I headlined about “America’s Secret Planned Conquest of Russia,” tracking that plan (now called “Nuclear Primacy”) back to at least 2006 as constituting the new mainstream view in the U.S. Government; and, on 19 April 2023, I headlined “U.S. Nuclear-War Strategy”, tracking even farther back, to 1981, when Nuclear Primacy, the goal of winning WW3, first was proposed to replace the pre-existing (but still dominant in Russia and China) “Mutually Assured Destruction” or “M.A.D.” view, that nuclear weapons exist only in order to prevent a WW3, not in order to win a WW3 (via attaining and using “Nuclear Primacy”).

    If Obama had not wanted the war in Ukraine, then he wouldn’t have started it. He wouldn’t have hired people such as Victoria Nuland to get it done. (Maybe he had gotten a good laugh privately when he had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 before he had achieved anything in his Presidency.) He, and not Putin, started the war in Ukraine. Under international law, “the aggressor” is supposed to be the side that STARTED the war, not the side which was mortally endangered by that aggressor and needed to respond in the way it considered existentially necessary in order to respond effectively to and divert that threat, that danger, to one’s nation’s very existence.

    In this case, it is clear that the U.S. regime’s #1 objective is to control the entire world, all countries, including Russia and China, and Iran, and Venezuela, and North Korea, and any other hold-outs. In Russia’s case, this demand by the U.S. regime is so extreme that it placed a requirement upon Finland for Finland to allow the U.S. to position its nuclear weapons in Finland in order for Finland to be allowed to become a NATO member. Finland isn’t as close to Moscow as Ukraine is (it’s 507 miles instead of Ukraine’s 317 miles away from the Kremlin); and, so, it demanded Finland to allow its nuclear missiles, and Finland said yes. That proves how psychopathic the U.S. regime actually is.

    And one should not forget the longstanding post-1991 lies by NATO about what it is: “NATO is not a threat to Russia.”  /   “NATO has tried to build a partnership with Russia, developing dialogue and practical cooperation in areas of common interest. Practical cooperation has been suspended since 2014 in response to Russia’s illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea, Ukraine, which NATO will never recognise.”  /  “NATO is not at war with Russia.”

    But the actual fact is, and has been since NATO’s very start in 1949: NATO has always been the post-WW2 U.S. regime’s main military alliance to conquer Russia. For it to have continued after the Soviet Union ended in 1991, is, and should be punished as, an immense international-war crime. It is simply WW3 pushing to happen. Why, then, are not the world’s other nations demanding that NATO end —  demanding: End NATO Now! NATO has terrorized all decent countries. They are too afraid to condemn it publicly. (Similarly, for a different example” “Israel can get away with mass-murder because the world’s super power, USA, defends and excuses them of accountability.“)

    The 14 November 2014 ARD German Government TV network broadcast interview of Putin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdlXqyZHB9k became removed by ARD when Germany’s Government decided that it wants to go to war against Russia, again (reprising Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa); and so broadcasting this interview had been a mistake. Therefore, ever since at least 12 March 2016, “This video is private.” has resulted from that URL. However, up until at least 14 September 2015, it had been public, and was therefore foertunately being archived by some of its viewers online; so, here it is, from an archived copy, of this hostile, pro-U.S. regime, anti-Russia-Government, interview of Putin, about these matters:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20150914075634/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdlXqyZHB9k

    “English: Exclusive ARD interview with Russian President Putin” | Günther Jauch | ARD. 17.Nov.2014

    10:55: JAUCH: For the West, this [Russia’s annexation of Crimea] was a clear breach of international law. PUTIN: What’s the question? JAUCH: The question is, did you underestimate the reaction of the West? … PUTIN: We find this reaction absolutely disproportionate. … When we’re confronted with the accusations that Russia has violated international law, I can hardly feel anything but astonishment. What is international law? First and foremost, it’s the charter of the United Nations. … A vivid and fresh precedent was set in Kosovo. JAUCH: You mean the judgment of the International Criminal Court, with respect to Kosovo, which said that Kosovo had the right to self-determination, and that the people of Kosovo could vote on whether they wanted to have their own state or not? PUTIN: Exactly so, but there’s more to it than that. The most important thing mentioned there was that in terms of self-determination, people populating a certain area are not obliged to ask the opinion of the central authorities of the state where they are resident. There’s no need to have permission from the central governmental authorities, in order to take the necessary steps to self-determination. This is the most crucial point, and nothing that transpired in Crimea was any different from that which happened in Kosovo. I am deeply convinced that Russia has not violated any international laws. I am very open about this. It’s a fact, and we’ve never concealed it. … Besides, what is democracy? You and I know very well, what does demos mean, it means people. Democracy means the rule by the people. In our case, it’s the people’s right to be independent.

    — earlier in it was:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20150914075634/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdlXqyZHB9k

    8:32: JAUCH: There was an agreement [between the national Government and the Maidan demonstrators, on 20 February 2014] which called for national conciliation and a national government. This agreement lasted about 24 hours and then was dead. You followed the events of the 21st of February very closely. Did you talk with President Obama or Chancellor Merkel at the time? PUTIN: Yes. Indeed, on the 21st of February, it was not only the German Minister of Foreign Affairs who came to the Ukraine, to Kiev, but also the ministers of Foreign Affairs of Poland and France. They acted as guarantors [along with the EU’s representative] for the agreement between the then President Yanukovych and the opposition. They were agreed that the process should be carried out peacefully. They signed this document, this agreement between the authorities and the opposition as guarantors, and the authorities actually thought that it would be executed accordingly. And indeed, I had a phone conversation with the President of the United States on the same evening [February 21st], and we discussed this problem in exactly this manner. However, the next day, a coup took place, despite the guarantees given by the Western powers [Obama’s Polish and French, and EU Minister of Foreign Affairs, stooges], the buildings of the Presidential Administration and the Government were taken over. In this context, I would like to stress the following: [10:00:] Either the European Minister of Foreign Affairs [Lord Catherine Ashton, recorded here in a private 26 February 2014 phone call about this matter] shouldn’t have signed the paper and guaranteed the execution of the agreement, or, having done so they should have insisted on its execution. Instead, they distanced themselves from it. Moreover, they seem to prefer not to remember the agreement, as-if it had never existed. I think it’s completely wrong; and even more so, it’s counterproductive. [10:38]

    The U.S.-and-allied line on why Yanukovych was overthrown was that he had turned down the EU’s offer on 20 November 2013. But actually, that was a set-up deal, set up to be rejected in order for Nuland’s plan then to go directly into action. As I headlined on 27 March 2015, “The $160 Billion Cost: Why Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych Spurned EU’s Offer, on 20 Nov. 2013”. Even earlier than that, Putin had explained this to the Russian people, though without mentioning the $160 billion bottom-line price tag for Ukraine to enter the EU:

    On 5 June 2014, less than a half year after Obama had grabbled Ukraine and started the war there, Putin did an interview about the Ukraine war, on Russia’s Voice of Russia channel. It was broadcast the next day, headlining “Russia never annexed Crimea, no plans to intervene in Ukraine, it’s a Western delusion – Putin”. Here are highlights:

    On what happened in Ukraine:

    Vladimir Putin: There was a conflict and that conflict arose because the former Ukrainian president refused to sign an association agreement with the EU. Russia had a certain stance on this issue. We believed it was indeed unreasonable to sign that agreement because it would have a grave impact on the economy, including the Russian economy. We have 390 economic agreements with Ukraine and Ukraine is a member of the free trade zone within the CIS. And we wouldn’t be able to continue this economic relationship with Ukraine as a member of the free trade zone [with the EU]. We discussed this with our European partners. Instead of continuing the debates by legitimate and diplomatic means, our European friends and our friends from the United States supported the anti-constitutional armed coup. This is what happened. We did not cause this crisis to happen. We were against this course of events.

    The point is no one should be brought to power through an armed anti-constitutional coup, and this is especially true in post-Soviet space where government institutions are not fully mature. When it happened, some people accepted the regime and were happy about it, while other people, say, in eastern and southern Ukraine, just won’t accept it. And it is vital to talk with the people who didn’t accept this change of power instead of sending tanks, as you said yourself, instead of firing missiles at civilians from the air and bombing non-military targets.

    On Russian troops in Ukraine:

    The interviewer told the Russian President that the United States claimed they had evidence that Russia had intervened in the conflict by sending troops and weapons.

    Vladimir Putin: Proof? Why don’t they show it? The entire world remembers the US Secretary of State demonstrating the evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, waving around some test tube with washing powder in the UN Security Council. Eventually, the US troops invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein was hanged and later it turned out there had never been any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq [ever since 1998]. You know, it’s one thing to say things and another to actually have evidence. I will tell you again: no Russian troops…

    There are no armed forces, no Russian ‘instructors’ in southeastern Ukraine, and there never were any.

    On whether Russia wanted to annex Ukraine and tried to destabilize the situation there:

    Vladimir Putin: We never did that. The Ukrainian government must now sit down and talk with their own people instead of using weapons, tanks, planes and helicopters. …

    On Crimea:

    Vladimir Putin: It’s a delusion that Russian troops annexed Crimea. Russian troops did nothing of the kind.

    Russian troops were in Crimea under an international treaty on the deployment of the Russian military base. It’s true that Russian troops helped Crimeans hold a referendum on their (a) independence and (b) desire to join the Russian Federation. No one can prevent these people from exercising a right that is stipulated in Article 1 of the UN Charter, the right of nations to self-determination.

    In accordance with the expression of the will of people who live there, Crimea is part of the Russian Federation and its constituent entity.

    I want everyone to understand this clearly. We conducted an exclusively diplomatic and peaceful dialogue – I want to stress this – with our partners in Europe and the United States. In response to our attempts to hold such a dialogue and to negotiate an acceptable solution, they supported the anti-constitutional state coup in Ukraine, and following that we could not be sure that Ukraine would not become part of the North Atlantic military bloc. In that situation, we could not allow a historical part of the Russian territory with a predominantly ethnic Russian population to be incorporated into an international military alliance, especially because Crimeans wanted to be part of Russia. I am sorry, but we couldn’t act differently. …

    There are basically no Russian troops abroad while US troops are everywhere. There are US military bases everywhere around the world and they are always involved in the fates of other countries even though they are thousands of kilometers away from US borders. …

    On the collapse of the Soviet Union:

    Vladimir Putin: We will not promote Russian nationalism [patriotism yes, nationalism no], and we do not intend to revive the Russian Empire. What did I mean when I said that the Soviet Union’s collapse was one of the largest humanitarian – above all humanitarian – disasters of the 20th century? I meant that all the citizens of the Soviet Union lived in a union state irrespective of their ethnicity, and after its collapse 25 million Russians suddenly became foreign citizens. It was a huge humanitarian disaster. Not a political or ideological disaster, but a purely humanitarian upheaval. Families were divided; people lost their jobs and means of subsistence, and had no means to communicate with each other normally. This was the problem.

    Practically everything that The West alleges about the war in Ukraine is false. It’s intentionally that way, not due to any mere negligence.

    The Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama deserves to be tried at the International Criminal Court for the international war crime of aggression. The biggest problem in this regard is that no sensible definition of “aggression” yet exists in international law. (At the end of that article linked-to there, I proposed a new definition of the term. One of my longer articles explained the history behind that immense collective failure.) For another example of that failure: How is perpetrating an international coup — which in reality is an international war-crime; and it was that against Iran in 1953, Chile in 1973, Ukraine in 2014, and so many others — being addressed in current international law? It’s not; it is instead ignored. The International Criminal Court was designed by victor countries against victim countries. It wasn’t designed to sustain peace and prevent war. It’s a bad joke. However, historians nonetheless have an obligation to 100% truth, never to falsify. In the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’), they shirk that obligation, because 100% truth can cripple their careers. This is the reality, no matter how much historians in some countries (the countries that have dominated the world for far too long) might publicly deny it. Academic scholarship is profoundly corrupted by this reality.

    The latest version of YouGov’s “World’s Most Admired” pollings around the world is the “World’s most admired 2021” version; and it is headlined: “The Obamas remain the world’s most admired man and woman”.

    The post Obama’s Guilt for Ukraine’s War first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • U.S. President Biden Now Authorizes Ukraine to Start WW3

    On May 31st, Politico headlined “Biden secretly gave Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia with US weapons: It’s a major reversal that will help Ukraine to better defend its second-largest city.” It reported:

    The Biden administration has quietly given Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia — solely near the area of Kharkiv — using U.S.-provided weapons, three U.S. officials and two other people familiar with the move said Thursday, a major reversal that will help Ukraine to better defend its second-largest city.

    “The president recently directed his team to ensure that Ukraine is able to use U.S. weapons for counter-fire purposes in Kharkiv so Ukraine can hit back at Russian forces hitting them or preparing to hit them,” one of the U.S. officials said, adding that the policy of not allowing long-range strikes inside Russia “has not changed.”

    Ukraine asked the U.S. to make this policy change only after Russia’s offensive on Kharkiv began this month, the official added. All the people were granted anonymity to discuss internal decisions that haven’t been announced. …

    In effect, Ukraine can now use American-provided weapons, such as rockets and rocket launchers, to shoot down launched Russian missiles heading toward Kharkiv, at troops massing just over the Russian border near the city, or Russian bombers launching bombs toward Ukrainian territory. But the official said Ukraine cannot use those weapons to hit civilian infrastructure or launch long-range missiles, such as the Army Tactical Missile System, to hit military targets deep inside Russia.

    It’s a stunning shift the administration initially said would escalate the war by more directly involving the U.S. in the fight. But worsening conditions for Ukraine on the battlefield –– namely Russia’s advances and improved position in Kharkiv –– led the president to change his mind. …

    What this means is that if Volodmyr Zelensky (whose legal term of office as Ukraine’s President ended on May 20) decides that Ukraine should use American weapons and bombs to hit “military targets” that are in Russia and “near the area of Kharkiv,” then the U.S. Government will not object. The article does not say how the phrase “military targets” there is being defined, nor how “near the area of Kharkiv” is being defined.

    The U.S. Government has been, to a large extent if not fully, operating or in control over the operation of those U.S.-made weapons; and, therefore, one may reasonably presume that any decision as to whether to use those weapons and bombs in any given instance will have the prior approval of both the Ukrainian and the American Governments.

    One also may reasonably assume that if ever Ukraine would violate Biden’s order in this regard, then Biden would condemn Ukraine for having done so. Whether or not Russia’s Government would take that as being sincerely an expression that only Ukraine was to blame for that U.S.-and-Ukraine attack against Russia is impossible reasonably to predict in advance. Consequently, if the limitations upon what Ukraine’s government can do with America’s weapons and bombs are not yet already over the limits of what will precipitate a nuclear attack by Russia against the United States and its colonies (‘allies’), as having “crossed over Russia’s red lines” of what Russia considers to constitute an acceptable violation of Russia’s national security, then how Russia will respond in any case if Ukraine will violate Biden’s command and Biden will condemn Ukraine for that, is likewise impossible reasonably to predict in advance. However, if Russia will in such an instance unleash its estimated 5,580 nuclear weapons against the U.S. and its colonies, then there will be a debate among the immediate survivors of WW3 regarding whether the villain here was Biden or instead Putin, or both.

    If WW3 will happen before America’s November 5 elections, then if such elections will be held, either Donald Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be the President starting in 2025. If WW3 will happen after such elections, then America’s voters today should know that on May 28, the Washington Post, headlined “Trump makes sweeping promises to donors on audacious fundraising tour”, and reported that at one fundraising event for billionaires and centi-millionaires (not for mere voters), “he suggested that he would have bombed Moscow and Beijing if Russia invaded Ukraine or China invaded Taiwan.” In other words: to him, regarding the current war in Ukraine, and regarding the long-sought-by-the-U.S.-Government war in Taiwan, those two wars and to-become wars, are not merely “other people’s wars,” but these are our wars — meaning those American billionaires’ and centi-millionaires’ wars — to which he, as the U.S. President, would respond immediately by bombing, respectively, Russia and China.

    Though the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists [blocks from linking to] sites that aren’t CIA-approved) says nothing about the former President of Ukraine Volodmyr Zelenskyy being no longer legally after 20 May 2024 Ukraine’s President, and he did announce that the 20 May 2024 elections would be cancelled, he still does serve as-if he is Ukraine’s President, and is not questioned about that in U.S.-and-allied media. No polling has been done regarding whom Ukrainians would vote for if they were allowed to vote. However, on 15 February 2024, Yahoo News headlined “New poll shows Zelenskyy’s approval dips 5 points in Ukraine after departure of General Zaluzhnyi” and buried in its news-report that the poll showed that as-of February 24, the level of “trust” in leading political figures by the Ukrainian public were: Valerii Zaluzhnyi – 94%; Kyrylo Budanov – 66%; Volodymyr Zelenskyy – 64%; Serhiy Prytula – 61%; and Oleksandr Syrskyi – 40%. Zaluzhnyi was appointed Ukraine’s Ambassador to UK on 7 March 2024, after having been fired by Zelenskyy as Ukraine’s top General. Zelenskyy replaced him with Oleksandr Syrskyi.

    In any case, Ukraine has been ruled by America’s President ever since February 2014, and Russians have long known that this is so.

    The post U.S. President Biden Now Authorizes Ukraine to Start WW3 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Escaping Putin’s War Machine

    As the war in Ukraine grinds into a third year, more Russian soldiers are attempting to escape frontline deployment, supported by an underground network of fellow Russians.

    Associated Press investigative reporter Erika Kinetz follows the dramatic journey of one Russian military officer who deserted the army and fled Russia, guided by an anti-war group that has helped thousands of people evade military service or desert. The name of the group, Idite Lesom, is a play on words in Russian – a reference to the covert nature of its work but also a popular idiom that means “Get lost.”

    With help from the group, the officer made the perilous journey to Kazakhstan, but only after he had a friend and fellow soldier shoot him in the leg.

    “You can only leave wounded or dead,” he tells Kinetz. “No one wants to leave dead.”

    His act of desperation reflects the horrific conditions troops face in Ukraine. But life in exile is not what this officer and other deserters had hoped for. Some have had criminal cases filed against them in Russia, where they face 10 years or more in prison. And many are also waiting for a welcome from European countries or the United States that has never arrived. Instead, they live in hiding, fearing deportation back to Russia and persecution of themselves and their families.

    For Western nations grappling with Russia’s vast and growing diaspora, Russian military defectors present particular concern: Are they spies? War criminals? Or heroes?

    Next, Reveal host Al Letson talks with Kinetz and fellow reporter Solomiia Hera about why these military defectors are not finding sanctuary in Western Europe or the U.S. and how demographics and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to accept enormous casualties in Ukraine could give Russia an edge in an emerging war of attrition.

    In the final segment, we follow a Ukrainian man who knows all too well what a war of attrition really looks like. Oleksii Yukov is a martial arts instructor and leader of a team of volunteers who collect the remains of fallen soldiers, both Ukrainian and Russian. Yukov is on a spiritual quest to give these souls a final resting place.

    “We are not fighting the dead,” Yukov says. “Our weapon is humanity and a shovel.”

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Terrorist Attack and Election Pave Way for Putin to Intensify Repression and War

    Russian President Vladimir Putin is already trying to use the horrific terrorist attack that took place Friday at a Moscow concert hall to stoke his broader imperialist and authoritarian aims, and Russian political theorist Ilya Budraitskis says he fears Putin may soon “compound this tragedy with repression at home and death and destruction abroad.” The terrorist group Islamic State Khorasan…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Putin Officially Declared Russia’s President-elect

    Putin officially declared Russia’s president-elect
    Russian President Vladimir Putin. ©  Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov

    Vladimir Putin has won a landslide victory in the presidential election, Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) has officially announced. The inauguration of the president-elect is scheduled for May 7.

    The CEC head, Ella Pamfilova, revealed on Thursday that more than 76.2 million Russian voters cast ballots for Putin, giving him 87.28% of the vote.

    Meanwhile, Putin’s opponents in the race, Communist Party candidate Nikolay Kharitonov, Vladislav Davankov of the New People party, and Leonid Slutsky of the Liberal Democrats, received 4.31%, 3.85%, and 3.2%, respectively, Pamfilova added.

    Russia has a total of 112 million eligible voters out of a total population of 146.2 million people, according to official data. The last figure, however, does not take into account the four former Ukrainian territories that joined Russia in the fall of 2022.

    The presidential election in Russia, held between March 15 and 17, was marked by record-high voter turnout, surpassing 77%.

    A KGB agent during the Soviet era, Putin was first elected president in 2000, remaining in office for two four-year terms until 2008. Between 2008 and 2012, he served as prime minister under President Dmitry Medvedev.

    During Medvedev’s tenure, the Russian constitution was amended to extend the presidential term from four to six years. Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 and was reelected in 2018. A constitutional reform in 2020 established a two-term limit but “nullified” Putin’s previous terms, enabling him to run once more for the highest office.

    The inauguration of the president-elect is scheduled for early May, to coincide with the resignation of the Russian government. The constitutional deadline for forming a new government is one month.

    On Thursday, Putin thanked all those who went to the polling stations regardless of what candidate they voted for, adding that the election showed that Russia is “one big and tightly-knit family.”

    He also noted that the results “demand even more commitment and efficiency” from him and his team, promising to do his best to meet public expectations.

    The post Putin Officially Declared Russia’s President-elect first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Private Profits vs. Social Prophets

    …What we see at work is not an expression of the sentiments of the American people; rather it reflects the will of a powerful minority which uses its economic power to control the organs of political life.

    — Albert Einstein, Einstein on Peace, p. 343.

    We entered the massive marketplace labeled “our democracy” as always long before any election and at this date hundreds of millions have already been spent both officially and off the books to insure that ruling power maintains control over American capitalism no matter who or what may be elected sheriff, mayor, animal control officer or president of the United States. Given that, the spending and consciousness brutality have already exceeded past experience and, as befitting a system verging on complete collapse and involving much more of humanity than American voters, the time for global as well as national focus on the status of an American empire making more people rich than ever before while making multitudes far more poor and continuing mass murders in other subject nations is not only at hand but at all parts of the international political economic organism.

    As the fading rulers of western capitalism act more like a crazed rat on a sinking ship but instead of leaping into the deeps it promotes the entire world into more warfare, mass murder, incredible profits for those who feed on bloodshed and a mental condition that might make homicidal maniacs seem critically thinking human beings, the natural and especially political environmental reality approaches the worst fantasy of religious fanatics: eternal damnation in the fires of hell. This joyful futuristic vision was born of a brilliant past that might make the present seem docile since none of the modern weapons existed in biblical times when spears, lances and demented religious leaders operated as ruling wealth as opposed to the lethally armed with weapons of mass murder political and media servants of rulers do today.

    The continuing since 1917 American imperial attacks on Russia have reached a point in the current war using Ukrainians to kill Russians while they die by the thousands with no hope of winning and American and foreign munitions makers make billions. Various of the NATO lapdog leaders sound even more crazed than Americans and urge broadening of the war to stop the eternal threat of Russia which exists in their fevered minds, said fever having been planted by America since the end of the second world war.

    Meanwhile, the center of global anti-Semitism, Israel, has exploded as never before with such bloody horror that many of the innocent and previously comatose have awakened and expressed anger and hostility about a situation that has prevailed since 1948 when Palestine was engulfed and devoured by the new nation said to have been a haven for those suffering horror during the second world war. This would be like Japan getting even for the American atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by invading Mexico, throwing the natives out when possible and making all others second class citizens once they took over, changed the language and culture to Japanese and proceeded to treat Mexicans worse than Americans ever had.

    In only one of thousands of contradictions of logic, language and morality, the European Jews who stole the land continue calling themselves Semites and screaming anti-Semitism whenever real Semites commit an act of aggression in retaliation and millions in the western world have their brains sunk deeper into an ocean of mental sewage. Like everything else in a radically changing world in which previous western dominance is nearing an end and hopefully global freedom is nearer than ever, the radical changes underway that can spell revolution for the human future can be made to seem more dismal than ever under the consciousness control of purveyors of the imperial lies now fantastically more powerful than any past relatively tin-pot dictatorial regime of later made to seem glorious royals and other past murderers.

    While it seems that the horrible choice offered voters by capital’s two parties back in 2020 will be the same in 2024 the only difference is that the divisions among Americans have grown even worse than before. But as the frustration and anger at both parties increase alternate choices, usually written off as foreign plots or national disorders, may finally have space to speak to radical change favoring democracy in substance rather than the bogus brain disease foisted on innocent people who are told it is freedom and democracy. Of course, and rape is simply an economic form of dating and hundreds of thousands of Americans living in the street are merely getting close to nature.

    While political madness depicts Putin as a menace to humanity for reacting to an American owned and operated insurrection in Ukraine and fill voters heads with alleged crimes committed by Trump which are the everyday reality of political pimps and hustlers who own and operate “our” democracy, especially Congress and the white house, Palestinians will continue to be murdered by Israelis financed by American taxpayers proving that our peace loving democracy is just what the world needs to bring on a nuclear destruction of humanity which is in the planning stages of our Mass Murder Inc. at the pentagon. This will come to pass if Americans do not rise up and create real democracy before it is too late. Among other things that will mean voting against the supposed lesser evil of the two party combo of economic cancer and political polio to bring about the end of capitalism and the beginning of a future for the human race that does not involve growing poverty for hundreds of millions while a relative handful become billionaires.

    The opening quote is from someone long admired for something called the theory of relativity, a term not even vaguely understood by billions of humans, but far more relevant, easily understandable and important is the fact that he was an anti-capitalist, a socialist and an anti-war pacifist, easily understandable by those same billions and hardly known by most. That and many other hidden facts about people, nations and political economics should become clearer while we adjust and work to transform a dreadful social reality into a hopeful future by ending warfare capitalism and bringing about a democratic world such as our pre-historic beginnings in social and communistic cooperation. And after we clear up some reality about Einstein, we’d all do well by checking out Marx in his own words and not those of his simplistic and far too often murderous detractors. He can help us learn more about what we need to understand about why our reality is crumbling and what we need to do to rebuild it.

    The post Private Profits vs. Social Prophets first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Russians form long queues at polling stations in ‘noon against Putin’ protest

    Voters in some cities answer Yulia Navalnaya’s call to turn up at midday to signal dissent against president

    Long queues formed at several polling stations in Moscow and other Russian cities as people took up a call from Alexei Navalny’s widow to head to the polls at noon on Sunday in a symbolic show of dissent against Vladimir Putin’s all but certain re-election as president.

    In the run-up to the three-day presidential elections, Yulia Navalnaya urged her supporters to protest against Putin by appearing en masse at midday on Sunday in a legal show of strength against the longtime Russian leader.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Know Your Enemy: Why the Right Loves Foreign Dictators

    Matt and Sam talk to Jacob Heilbrunn about his new book, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Is the War in Ukraine over?

    Military strategists, foreign policy experts, and Russian dissidents have analyzed the Russian invasion of Ukraine for Western audiences. How accurate are pundits who always introduce a slight slant to please a specific audience? Read between the lines, choose the best fit and two years of Putin’s “special military operation” looks like this…to me.

    Initially, Russia sought to extend its borders to the Dnipro River, a natural dividing line, that would have incorporated Kyiv, Kharkiv, and possibly Odessa into the motherland.

    The initial thrust brought a caravan of Russian tanks to the gates of Kyiv. Special forces entered Kyiv and Kharkiv to ascertain defensive strengths and civilian and military resistance to invasion. Moscow learned that the urban street-to-street fighting would be merciless. Unlike Mariupol, which is a heavily industrialized city with some Russian cultural artifacts, Kyiv and Kharkiv are associated with Russia’s cultural heritage and historical founding. Capturing the cities, as seen later from the fighting in Mariupol, would destroy the cities and inflict excessive casualties on both sides. Administrating the area would be difficult. The predicted number of casualties did not warrant the onslaught. Putin and his general staff took a step back and developed an alternative strategy — surround both cities, move in slowly, infiltrate, and hope that a starving and isolated population would eventually capitulate. Out in the open and facing deadly attacks, Russian soldiers died and began to surrender. Extending Russia to the Dnipro was not viable. The Russian forces retreated.

    Technically, the Russians did not retreat; they realized an offensive was futile and stopped it at an incipient stage. Their forces vacated and moved to a strategic position — behind the lines of the Donbas battles and close to Russian territory. With the new strategy came a new goal — liberating the entire Donbas region, uniting southeastern Ukraine from Crimea to Zaporhizhia, and incorporating the Azov Sea coast from Rostov to Crimea. Most of those objectives had been accomplished before Ukraine started a counteroffensive that regained Kherson and halted the Russian advance in the south.

    The Russian military built a defensive perimeter that allowed recapture of limited territory, stalled the Ukraine counteroffensive, caused heavy casualties to the Ukrainian military, and decisively injured the morale of Ukraine soldiers and civilian population.

    Forming a defensive line requires more cooperation from military units than does starting an offensive. A stalled offense in one area may not affect an offensive in another area. Any weakness in the defenses affects the total defense. Prigozhin’s mercenary army’s offensive move and intent to occupy ground with troops rather than with mines endangered the defense line. Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff, acted decisively and removed the mercenary army from the battlefront.

    With Ukraine weakened by its failed offense, Russia seized the offensive and made minor gains in the Donbass. Ukraine withdrew its forces from Avdivka and the Kremlin claimed control of the city. Its Defense Ministry said, “Capturing Avdivka would push the front line of the war farther from Donetsk city, making it more difficult for Ukraine to stage attempts to reclaim the regional capital.”

    Summarizing the two years after Russian forces invaded Ukraine and we have:

    (1)    Russia has almost accomplished the objectives of its secondary strategy.

    (2)    Both nations realize that huge offensives to gain large territory are no longer feasible.

    (3)    Sanctions against Russia have failed to stifle the economy or diminish Putin’s willingness to continue the war. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts Russia’s Gross domestic product to rise by 2.6 percent in 2024.

    (4)    Ukraine’s ability to mount another offensive and regain territory is doubtful.

    (5)    Civilian populations seem tired of the war and are operating as if there is no war.

    The Future

    The aggressive war with mass casualties has ended. The Russians want a little more of the Donetsk region and will extend their reach only if they know the battle will be successful and not incur excessive casualties. All is not quiet on the Eastern Front, but the war has a virtual armistice in which invisible lines are set by invisible contestants. Each side knows where it can walk without being challenged. Only the stubbornness of the leaders of the two nations prevents a formal armistice. Putin can claim victory and will remain President of Russia; not so, with President Volodymyr Zelensky. The war made Zelensky an internationally admired figure and brought attention to Ukraine. Zelensky has worn out his appearance, and without a war, he cannot lead. Expect his replacement in the near future.

    The undeclared armistice will continue until the two nations realize that an undeclared armistice allows their soldiers and civilians to remain open to attack. Better to have a formal armistice and end hostilities. Several years later, a new Ukraine government will sense it is better to bite the bullet than face the bullet. The present battle lines will become territorial lines and Ukraine will pledge neutrality.

    The nuclear threat will subside and the world will breathe easier until the next intrusion upon the free-loving people of the universe.

    The post Is the War in Ukraine over? first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Listening in on Russia’s War in Ukraine

    In this week’s episode, produced in collaboration with the Associated Press, reporters on the front lines take us inside Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and share never-before-heard recordings of Russian soldiers. 

    The day President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion, Feb. 24, 2022, Russia unleashed a brutal assault on the strategic port city of Mariupol. That same day, a team of AP reporters arrived in the city. Vasilisa Stepanenko, Evgeniy Maloletka and Mstyslav Chernov kept their cameras and tape recorders rolling throughout the onslaught. Together, they captured some of the defining images of the war in Ukraine. Stepanenko and Maloletka talk with guest host Michael Montgomery about risking their lives to document blasted buildings, enormous bomb craters and the daily life of traumatized civilians. As Russian troops advanced on Mariupol, the journalists managed to escape with hours of their own material and recordings from the body camera of a noted Ukrainian medic, Yuliia Paievska. The powerful footage went viral and showed the world the brutalities of the war, as well as remarkable acts of courage by journalists, doctors and ordinary citizens.  

    Next, we listen to audio that’s never been publicly shared before: phone calls Russian soldiers made during the first weeks of the invasion, secretly recorded by the Ukrainian government. AP reporter Erika Kinetz obtained more than 2,000 of these calls. Using social media and other tools, she explores the lives of two soldiers whose calls home capture intimate moments with friends and family. The intercepted calls reveal the fear-mongering and patriotism that led some of the men to go from living regular lives as husbands, sons and fathers to talking about killing civilians. 

    In Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, Russian soldiers left streets strewn with the bodies of civilians killed during their brief occupation. Kinetz shares her experiences visiting Bucha and speaking with survivors soon after Russian troops retreated. In the secret intercepts, Russian soldiers speak of “cleansing operations.” One soldier tells his mother: “We don’t imprison them. We kill them all.” 

    Will Russian soldiers and political leaders be prosecuted for war crimes? Montgomery talks with Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Ukrainian human rights lawyer who received a 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. She runs the Center for Civil Liberties in Kyiv, which has been gathering evidence of human rights abuses and war crimes in Ukraine since Russia’s first invasion in 2014. Matviichuk says it’s important for war crimes to be handled by Ukrainian courts, but the country’s legal system is overwhelmed and notoriously corrupt. She says there is an important role for the international community in creating a system that can bring justice for all Ukrainians.  

    Connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Truth, Love and Hope

    Broadly speaking three kinds of reactions to the recent Tucker Carlson-Vladimir Putin interviews can be detected. Aside from the official condemnations that find their echo wherever dementia and other intellectual impediments prevail, there is ecstasy, skepticism, and loyalty.

    The ecstatic present this interview as something akin to the visions of Fatima. The skeptics point out that Fatima is a fraud. The loyal include those who have held Tucker Carlson for a hero or at least a very worthy member of their national conservative side in the ongoing US political wars. Nonetheless all these groups of viewers, commentators (pod or web) and officials high and low agree that there is something extraordinary about the event, the interview or conversation recorded in Moscow on or about 9 February 2024. Is it a sign of information liberation? Has Carlson together with those who have offered him platforms to distribute the interview without charge broken the sound bite barrier in the US (NATO) war against Russia and its own middle class and working class? Has this event revealed mysteries hitherto concealed except from those whom divine powers have deigned to speak? Is this yet another psychological operation where the son of the former director of Voice of America has launched the campaign that will end so-called “alternative media”?

    The disturbing aspect of all these possibilities is that they are rooted in the fundamentally religious culture of the United States (and to the extent its missionaries have succeeded, in the various vassal states, e.g. the EU). In the first place the interview was a performance, if not a spectacle. This is not an issue of culpability. Rather it is an affirmation that the Carlson interview in Moscow by its very nature and cultural context is a show. That is just the way American culture works. If it had not been staged as a show — to the extent that Carlson and President Putin agreed on the format — it would have been incomprehensible to an American or American indoctrinated public. It is meanwhile tiresome to analyze all the speculation about “narratives” — that gratuitous contribution of literary scholarship to the lingual franca of the mass media through whatever channel. The corollary to Coolidge’s dictum is that the business of America is also show business. Religion is the ultimate show as the plethora of radio, TV and auditoria evangelists easily testifies.

    Of course Tucker Carlson, like his father, has been a part of the public-private partnership that constitutes the American propaganda system. Anyone who works at an establishment media outlet is — wittingly or unwittingly. That is how American journalism was founded by Pulitzer and Hearst at the end of the 19th century. It is superfluous to criticize Carlson for doing what every professional journalist has been trained to do, whether at one of the corporate sponsored journalism faculties, or as a well-connected freelancer. That cannot be the starting point for understanding the Moscow interview (as opposed to Oliver Stone‘s 2017 interview— which was also framed in cinematic terms rather than journalistic).

    The starting point ought to be with the facts. What did Carlson say? What questions did he ask? What answers did he receive? And what has happened since, to him and to those who watched the interview? Carlson spoke in a rather poor interview format in Dubai this week. It was apparent from his statements that whatever he may have expected from his interview, the confrontation with Russia and President Putin induced him to make statements he has not previously made. Those statements about the character of the US regime, his values as an American patriot, his confusion as he attempts to integrate the experience into his personal and professional personae, ought to be taken for what they are statements of fact — about in the first instance Tucker Carlson, American.

    Some skeptics have speculated that Carlson is the thin edge of a crowbar that will undermine through infiltration and acquisition the so-called alternative media. They point to his curriculum vitae and his career as a corporate propagandist. All that is a matter of public record. However it is necessary to recall that since the founding of the CIA (and before that the FBI) there have been innumerable people whose careers were in the “opposition” and only very late — if not posthumously— were identified as government agents or assets. Just as the public curriculum vitae creates a presumption to be rebutted. It is extremely difficult to know who among those with “spotless” opposition credentials are merely working under deep cover.

    The long-time followers are probably the least disappointed or skeptical. For this audience Tucker Carlson already enjoys a certain star status. If they are anti-Russian then their star has shown courage in the face of battle. He did not let himself be intimidated by what the Germans call the “Ivan”. They may have wondered that Carlson was unable to carry an American spy back to the homeland with him. However, they would have had no problem explaining that. Carlson sat in the Kremlin in front of the cameras and showed American strength and character. His personal meeting with the Russian president was evidence that American values can be defended even in Moscow — while the Democrats and the bizarre “Left” try to destroy their country.

    There is another way to assess the interview and Tucker Carlson‘s subsequent statements. This is where the role of the appraiser ought to be more carefully considered than that performed by the performance appraised. Carlson performed the role of an American journalist on a stage partly structured like those stages upon which American audiences are accustomed to see such performances. Although the interview was extraordinary in a limited sense, it was overdetermined as performance. Anyone who had listened to President Putin’s speeches over the past ten years would not have found anything very new in what he said. However, that is the key point. The audiences before which Carlson sought to perform had never seen this stage or this show. It was a premiere in a very real sense, even if not held at the Bolshoi or on Broadway.

    Much of the analysis and appreciation of this performance by the generous and sympathetic critics misses the point. In Dubai Carlson found himself unable to answer all the stock questions his poor, corpulent, interlocutor posed. He also was very clear about that incapacity. Anyone his age — 54 — or older ought to be able to recall the kinds of albeit naive basic principles and optimism with which his generation was still educated at home if not at school. The under-40, who have by and large been indoctrinated with the ostensible absence of positive doctrine or history, do not even understand the problem of recognizing that one‘s personal history and one‘s national history cannot explain the current conditions of the country in which one lives. They have been trained in the history of the brand, where the past is merely a “retro” design of the present. Tucker Carlson is a child of the Establishment, at least once removed. Yet there are far more people who share the history in which he was raised than our current youth fetishism recognizes.

    The question that still bears serious consideration is that of what Tucker Carlson the performer means in the overall context of political warfare? This is a fair question, but until now I have only noticed feeble expressions of this issue. If instead of applying rigid forensic dissection of Carlson’s role, like those found in those atrocities of film criticism, one distinguishes between Tucker the journalist and Tucker the man, then one can also say that Tucker the journalist is susceptible to every subterfuge and political warfare tactic to which the entire profession is open. Then one must look at the way the journalist role is played now and in future — not only by Carlson. At the same time, a humanist appreciation must distinguish between the man, Tucker Carlson and what he does and says in that role. Serious intellectual effort, cultural-historical method, is needed to detach oneself from the constant role of “show perceiver” and learn to master the role of perceiving ordinary humans as they act in their daily lives. That applies to Tucker Carlson, his wife and four children, even if he lives in a wealthy neighborhood of La Jolla, California, where smoking Cannabis at breakfast is not allowed.

    The post Truth, Love and Hope first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Truth, Love and Hope

    Broadly speaking three kinds of reactions to the recent Tucker Carlson-Vladimir Putin interviews can be detected. Aside from the official condemnations that find their echo wherever dementia and other intellectual impediments prevail, there is ecstasy, skepticism, and loyalty.

    The ecstatic present this interview as something akin to the visions of Fatima. The skeptics point out that Fatima is a fraud. The loyal include those who have held Tucker Carlson for a hero or at least a very worthy member of their national conservative side in the ongoing US political wars. Nonetheless all these groups of viewers, commentators (pod or web) and officials high and low agree that there is something extraordinary about the event, the interview or conversation recorded in Moscow on or about 9 February 2024. Is it a sign of information liberation? Has Carlson together with those who have offered him platforms to distribute the interview without charge broken the sound bite barrier in the US (NATO) war against Russia and its own middle class and working class? Has this event revealed mysteries hitherto concealed except from those whom divine powers have deigned to speak? Is this yet another psychological operation where the son of the former director of Voice of America has launched the campaign that will end so-called “alternative media”?

    The disturbing aspect of all these possibilities is that they are rooted in the fundamentally religious culture of the United States (and to the extent its missionaries have succeeded, in the various vassal states, e.g. the EU). In the first place the interview was a performance, if not a spectacle. This is not an issue of culpability. Rather it is an affirmation that the Carlson interview in Moscow by its very nature and cultural context is a show. That is just the way American culture works. If it had not been staged as a show — to the extent that Carlson and President Putin agreed on the format — it would have been incomprehensible to an American or American indoctrinated public. It is meanwhile tiresome to analyze all the speculation about “narratives” — that gratuitous contribution of literary scholarship to the lingual franca of the mass media through whatever channel. The corollary to Coolidge’s dictum is that the business of America is also show business. Religion is the ultimate show as the plethora of radio, TV and auditoria evangelists easily testifies.

    Of course Tucker Carlson, like his father, has been a part of the public-private partnership that constitutes the American propaganda system. Anyone who works at an establishment media outlet is — wittingly or unwittingly. That is how American journalism was founded by Pulitzer and Hearst at the end of the 19th century. It is superfluous to criticize Carlson for doing what every professional journalist has been trained to do, whether at one of the corporate sponsored journalism faculties, or as a well-connected freelancer. That cannot be the starting point for understanding the Moscow interview (as opposed to Oliver Stone‘s 2017 interview— which was also framed in cinematic terms rather than journalistic).

    The starting point ought to be with the facts. What did Carlson say? What questions did he ask? What answers did he receive? And what has happened since, to him and to those who watched the interview? Carlson spoke in a rather poor interview format in Dubai this week. It was apparent from his statements that whatever he may have expected from his interview, the confrontation with Russia and President Putin induced him to make statements he has not previously made. Those statements about the character of the US regime, his values as an American patriot, his confusion as he attempts to integrate the experience into his personal and professional personae, ought to be taken for what they are statements of fact — about in the first instance Tucker Carlson, American.

    Some skeptics have speculated that Carlson is the thin edge of a crowbar that will undermine through infiltration and acquisition the so-called alternative media. They point to his curriculum vitae and his career as a corporate propagandist. All that is a matter of public record. However it is necessary to recall that since the founding of the CIA (and before that the FBI) there have been innumerable people whose careers were in the “opposition” and only very late — if not posthumously— were identified as government agents or assets. Just as the public curriculum vitae creates a presumption to be rebutted. It is extremely difficult to know who among those with “spotless” opposition credentials are merely working under deep cover.

    The long-time followers are probably the least disappointed or skeptical. For this audience Tucker Carlson already enjoys a certain star status. If they are anti-Russian then their star has shown courage in the face of battle. He did not let himself be intimidated by what the Germans call the “Ivan”. They may have wondered that Carlson was unable to carry an American spy back to the homeland with him. However, they would have had no problem explaining that. Carlson sat in the Kremlin in front of the cameras and showed American strength and character. His personal meeting with the Russian president was evidence that American values can be defended even in Moscow — while the Democrats and the bizarre “Left” try to destroy their country.

    There is another way to assess the interview and Tucker Carlson‘s subsequent statements. This is where the role of the appraiser ought to be more carefully considered than that performed by the performance appraised. Carlson performed the role of an American journalist on a stage partly structured like those stages upon which American audiences are accustomed to see such performances. Although the interview was extraordinary in a limited sense, it was overdetermined as performance. Anyone who had listened to President Putin’s speeches over the past ten years would not have found anything very new in what he said. However, that is the key point. The audiences before which Carlson sought to perform had never seen this stage or this show. It was a premiere in a very real sense, even if not held at the Bolshoi or on Broadway.

    Much of the analysis and appreciation of this performance by the generous and sympathetic critics misses the point. In Dubai Carlson found himself unable to answer all the stock questions his poor, corpulent, interlocutor posed. He also was very clear about that incapacity. Anyone his age — 54 — or older ought to be able to recall the kinds of albeit naive basic principles and optimism with which his generation was still educated at home if not at school. The under-40, who have by and large been indoctrinated with the ostensible absence of positive doctrine or history, do not even understand the problem of recognizing that one‘s personal history and one‘s national history cannot explain the current conditions of the country in which one lives. They have been trained in the history of the brand, where the past is merely a “retro” design of the present. Tucker Carlson is a child of the Establishment, at least once removed. Yet there are far more people who share the history in which he was raised than our current youth fetishism recognizes.

    The question that still bears serious consideration is that of what Tucker Carlson the performer means in the overall context of political warfare? This is a fair question, but until now I have only noticed feeble expressions of this issue. If instead of applying rigid forensic dissection of Carlson’s role, like those found in those atrocities of film criticism, one distinguishes between Tucker the journalist and Tucker the man, then one can also say that Tucker the journalist is susceptible to every subterfuge and political warfare tactic to which the entire profession is open. Then one must look at the way the journalist role is played now and in future — not only by Carlson. At the same time, a humanist appreciation must distinguish between the man, Tucker Carlson and what he does and says in that role. Serious intellectual effort, cultural-historical method, is needed to detach oneself from the constant role of “show perceiver” and learn to master the role of perceiving ordinary humans as they act in their daily lives. That applies to Tucker Carlson, his wife and four children, even if he lives in a wealthy neighborhood of La Jolla, California, where smoking Cannabis at breakfast is not allowed.

    The post Truth, Love and Hope first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Alexei Navalny’s Death and Curious Well-Timed Coincidences

    There is propaganda by commission and propaganda by omission, the former often serve to conceal the latter. Timing is crucial.

    That the U.S. President Joseph Biden, his British, NATO, Israeli allies, and their corporate media mouthpieces are in need of a major propaganda victory is obvious. They are losing the war in Ukraine, have been condemned throughout the world for the genocide in Gaza, and are ruling over a disintegrating empire. Biden and Netanyahu’s political lives are at serious risk. And so they have just rolled out a full-court propaganda press effort aimed at covering their losses. It should be crystal clear to anyone who can use logic to see the timing involved.

    The great French scholar of propaganda and technology, Jacques Ellul, wrote years ago that propaganda “is not the touch of a magic wand. It is based on slow constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition.”

    However, once this groundwork has been laid over time – as it has been with the continuous anti-Russia Putin hysteria and support for Israel’s Zionist policies – it can be intensely ratcheted up in exigent circumstances when the long-serving narrative is in jeopardy, such as it is now.

    Once the death in a Russian prison of the Western backed Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was announced on Friday, February 16, 2024, it was immediately followed by a cascade of anti-Russia pronouncements whose aim was to not only continue the demonization of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin but to serve other purposes as well.

    With one fell stroke, the calm history lesson about Ukraine, Russia, and U.S./NATO that Putin had just delivered to the world via Tucker Carlson disappeared down the memory hole, as Biden, without any evidence, declared that “Putin and his thugs” and Putin’s “brutality” are responsible for Navalny’s death. This, of course, is a replay of the false charges sans evidence waged against Russia for an earlier poisoning of Navalny, the Skripals (since disappeared by the British government), Alexander Litvinenko, et al.

    Shortly after, Zelensky, performing his puppet routine while coincidently appearing at the Munich Security Conference – on Saturday, February 17, a day after Navalny’s death was announced – with Navalny’s then widow, said it was “obvious” that Putin had killed Navalny, while Biden pushed for more money for Ukraine’s doomed war against Russia, a U.S./NATO war created by the U.S. from the start with its aggressive military push to Russia’s borders and its 2015 Ukrainian coup d’état that ousted the pro-Russian leader, setting the stage for Russia’s incursion into Ukraine in February 2022. That Putin told Carlson these obvious facts, while slyly mentioning to Carlson that he understood that Carlson once tried to join the CIA, is now for most people in the West history lost behind the headlines, if it ever were anything more.

    All this happened while Russia pushed through Ukraine’s defenses and took the city of Avdeevka, which had long been contested. With each day that passes, it is obvious that Biden’s Ukraine war strategy is that of a desperate politician on the ropes and that Putin has completely outfoxed the American desperados and their NATO European stooges. The MSM prefer to suggest otherwise, that hope is just around the corner if we send billions more dollars and weapons, and if with the help of our British friends, we take the war further into Russian territory and risk a nuclear confrontation. But we are in a propaganda war for the minds of the Western public.

    Much of the rest of the world has seen through the risible MSM headlines used to delude the public that Russia is the great threat to world peace and stability. Like the previous Russia-gate lies, this ongoing one, coinciding with Navalny’s death, is timed to divert the public’s attention from key ongoing matters.

    Tomorrow and Wednesday, Julian Assange will have his final appeal in a British court to prevent his extradition to the United States. Biden wants this journalist prosecuted for doing the job that the MSM have failed to do: Exposing the facts about the ruthless U.S. killing machine. But the bruhaha about Navalny has rendered the absolute hypocrisy over the torture and imprisonment of the innocent and brave Assange secondary and “inconsequential.” As intended, this has now become an afterthought as the mainstream media’s Russia-obsessed headlines flow uninterruptedly. The New York Times, the key propaganda organ for the Biden administration and the deep-state, reports just today that “The gravity of President Putin’s threats is now dawning on Europe” and “Navalny’s Widow Promises to Carry on Opposition Leader’s Work.”  These are typical Times’ rants.  As is its Magazine article headline from yesterday “Marilyn Robinson [the writer and friend of Barack Obama] Considers Biden a Gift of God.”

    I don’t think the Palestinians would agree, but then too, their slaughter by Israel with U.S. assistance – more than 29,000 Palestinians in Gaza alone have been killed so far – and the coming IDF invasion of Rafah, have also been pushed to the back pages or to nowhere by the propaganda about Navalny and Russia.

    I won’t mention the Russian election in mid-March that might possibly factor into all this since we all will be dutifully and timely told that the evil killer Putin is a dictator, ignorant, ruthless – add your own adjectives – and is no doubt trying to rig the fair-and-square U.S. November presidential election – for someone, just as he did in 2016.

    Nor mention The NY Times article of February 17 by David Sanger and Julian Barnes that the “U.S Fears Russia Might Put a Nuclear Weapon in Space.”

    Everyone knows that the Russians are coming to get us, as they always have. They probably killed JFK, right?

    It’s easy to follow along as this propaganda eruption circles the Internet like painted ponies on a carousel. There will be no time to stop and think, to pause; to ask what the hell is going on? The ponies will dip and bob and make you dizzy.

    For more corroboration of these matters, read the political analyst Gilbert Doctorow’s astute piece on how the Turkish broadcaster TRT World refused to post the interview that they did with him. Doctorow claims British intelligence killed Navalny. For some reason this should not be broached, according to TRT.

    Whether Doctorow is right or not, only a very dimwitted person would think that Putin would have Navalny killed. He has nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing so. Yet the MSM and their government overlords consider most people very stupid and so are trying to blitz them with obvious propaganda through commission and omission. We have heard this story before.

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  • Horror and hypocrisy in the wake of Alexei Navalny’s death | Letters

    Bringing the Russian authorities to international justice over the death of the opposition leader is difficult, but not impossible, says Prof Philip Leach, while Robert Frazer wonders what gives the west the right to judge Putin

    The news of Alexei Navalny’s sudden death in an Arctic penal colony has led to numerous calls for the authorities in Russia to be held responsible (Western leaders point finger at Putin after Alexei Navalny’s death in jail, 16 February). They are certainly answerable according to human rights law, but achieving accountability against Russia has become even harder since its expulsion from the Council of Europe in 2022, as a consequence of the invasion of Ukraine. As a result, Navalny’s family cannot now petition the European court of human rights to get to the truth about his death.

    Nevertheless, UN bodies such as the human rights committee still have jurisdiction over Russia, and cases already in the European court pipeline will be heard. Just last month, the court decided that the Russian government had a case to answer in a lawsuit brought by myself and others on behalf of Navalny, his Anti-Corruption Foundation and supporters in response to the punitive steps taken against them in 2019, including absurd criminal prosecutions on charges of money laundering, their designation as “foreign agents”, raids on their homes and offices, and the freezing of bank accounts.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Hostage Nation

    In his Moscow interview, Tucker Carlson also asked the president of the Russian Federation to release a young American citizen convicted of espionage in Russia from imprisonment. Vladimir Putin replied that the man was arrested, tried and convicted by a Russian court of a crime under Russian law, espionage, by secretly receiving classified documents from someone in Russia.

    Carlson’s plea was based not on respect for Russian law — or understanding of the crime of espionage — but on a widely held prejudice in the West. Namely there is a presumption that Westerners, in particular Americans, if arrested in countries listed as enemies of the West or the US, are never incarcerated for their acts but taken as hostages. Thus Carlson’s appeal was phrased in terms of a plea for mercy to an outlaw. President Putin rejected that implication and explained both the specifics of the crime committed and the customary practice for reciprocal release of agents caught by opposing special (secret) services. While not ruling a release out, the Russian president made clear that this was not a case for executive clemency.

    Why, one might ask, did Carlson not grasp that fact? The obvious and superficial reason is that the request was gratuitous and theatrical. The “hostage release” mission is a typical form of quasi-diplomatic grandstanding. However there is a deeper level at which this segment can and ought to be understood. There is an ancient tradition — prior to 7 October — of states at war taking leaders of the opposing side as hostages to induce and guarantee negotiations to end hostilities or to enforce the conditions to which belligerents subsequently agreed. Medieval warfare is full of such incidents. Also other cultures have availed themselves of these in personam guarantees for treaties between warring parties. These guarantees have continued in the rituals of prisoner exchanges during truces.

    The late 20th century was accompanied by proliferation in the West of a new kind of hostage taking. Whereas the ancient mode usually involved the capture or surrender of belligerents (soldiers and officers) or high officials and dignitaries, modern Western warfare focussed on holding civilians, especially non-combatants, as hostage. This became a central tactic of counter-insurgency warfare. This was condemned in the treaties after World War 2 as a form of collective punishment and prohibited under the Geneva Conventions (or protocols to the Hague Convention on the Laws of Land Warfare).

    The practice of the French in Algeria was one of the most notorious post-war examples. Although almost universally condemned (at least beyond the West) it found its way into the annals of counter-insurgency doctrine through Roger Trinquier. His book Modern Warfare formed the core of CIA-US military strategy in Vietnam. The conduct of war Trinquier proposed based on his service in Indochina and Algeria was fundamentally opposed to the spirit of the Geneva Conventions. By arguing that there was no more distinction between combatants and civilians he provided the example and the theory upon which all modern wars are waged by the West. World War 2 was the first modern war in which non-combatant casualties and death exceeded those of the armed forces. That was the reason for the Geneva protocols. Triquier circumvented this essentially by claiming that the organized self-defense and armed struggle against colonial occupation was not protected by the laws of land warfare since they protected states and their regular armed forces, while colonies were not states and could therefore not field armies in terms of international law.

    While it is true that Trinquier insisted that treatment of civilians should distinguish between criminals to be tried and sentenced by the regular courts and “terrorists”, this distinction was no more than academic in the CI context. The CIA’s Phoenix Program extended to forcing the RVN legislature to criminalize political opinions and activities so that they could be punished as “civilian” crimes. As then CIA station chief William Colby explained, the Phoenix directorate in Saigon also insisted that political crimes be handled by the special branch of the national police so as to keep the military “clean” for regular warfare. However in Algeria, as in Vietnam, there was almost no contact between the regular forces of the two sides until the CI was virtually at an end. Moreover the personnel overlap between military and police in the colonies made the distinction more a question of clothes than substance.

    The use of hostages in counter-insurgency expanded throughout the era of wars against national independence movements regardless of the prohibitions under international law. There was also a major innovation in 1972.

    The conventional story is that a group of activists desiring to call attention to the ongoing occupation of Palestine by European settler-colonialists plotted to take the Olympic competition squad sent by the State of Israel to Munich hostage. Presumably this surprising move would compel the international community (as the US calls itself) to listen to the pleas of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, pleas for just treatment to resolve the conflict in compliance with international law.

    The immediate result was dramatic and has been repeatedly dramatized. A special paramilitary squad from the German national police, GSG 9, stormed the rooms where the hostages were held and killed everyone, hostages and alleged hostage-takers. After that international air travel to and from Palestine was subjected to security measures that would then be standardized for all air travel in 2001. The immediate result was not the opening of international venues to the Palestinian cause but the opposite. The PLO became a certified “terrorist organization” and its members were declared outlaws. One should recall here what the term “outlaw” actually means. The naive understanding is misleading. Since the days of the Medieval Inquisition there has been a clear legal distinction between criminal and outlaw. A criminal is someone accused and convicted of violating the law. Nonetheless he is also governed by the law and enjoys its protection. Only the authorities have the right to seize and punish a criminal. An outlaw however is deemed literally beyond the law, enjoying neither rights nor protection. Hence an act of violence, even killing, against an outlaw is no offense. Anyone is free to treat an outlaw as he likes. An outlaw has no claims whatsoever.

    One of the principles by which counter-insurgency is waged is by creating outlaws and removing them from the sight or oversight of the regular government and social infrastructure. This has also been done through what is now called “disappearing”. However hostage taking by the counter-insurgency agencies and their operatives has the perfidious effect of creating outlaws in the public perception by staging hostage incidents that appear to be perpetrated by the so-called “terrorists”. Thus the mythic propaganda of the deed is turned against those engaged in struggle — whether or not armed — to elicit the revulsion among the target population commensurate with this violation of the Geneva protocols.

    Leaving aside the plethora of staged hijackings in the 1970s, there are two high jacking-hostage incidents that bear consideration. Indeed they too relate to Palestine. The first is the Entebbe incident in which Israeli military force was applied to near universal acclaim to the recovery of a passenger liner taken there by “terrorists”.

    In June 1976, an Air France flight to Tel Aviv carrying some 248 passengers was diverted to Uganda’s capital. (Ironically Uganda had been one of Britain’s proposed sites for a future Zionist state.) Israel special forces attacked the airport and liberated the aircraft, killing some Ugandan soldiers and apparently violating Ugandan sovereignty to perform the raid. The ruler of Uganda, Idi Amin, apparently supported seizure of the airliner. In the course of the action practically all non-Israelis were released. The Israeli forces shot their way in and recovered all those passengers except for some collateral damage. Amin had been receiving and continued to receive exceptionally bad press. The review of his years in Uganda is only relevant to show that whatever domestic political struggles were underway in Britain’s former colony, Amin was one of several African leaders punished for supporting the citizens of Palestine in their armed struggle.

    The second incident involved a TWA flight from Athens to San Diego that was diverted to Beirut in June 1986. In the course of this action a US Navy diver was killed. While this death is treated as a civilian casualty, since it was not a military flight, the reported actions of a man trained in what is essentially a special forces MOS may have led to his death as combat-induced. Nonetheless the remarkable aspect of this hostage incident was not only the negotiated exchange of 19 hostages unharmed in return for fuel. Eventually all the hostages were released. In this case the Israeli government released prisoners it held while denying that the incident had forced them to do so.

    One of the hostages released was a Texas original, a businessman from that archconservative oil and ranching state. He was actually interviewed on network television just after he reached the tarmac. (The man disappeared from public view shortly thereafter.) He told assembled reporters that he was not only treated well but that they had made a case for their political objectives that he found very reasonable. He practically asked the governments concerned to listen and take his captors seriously. That was the last time he spoke in public- at least where cameras could record it.

    The case of TWA flight 847 ended with the released passengers being flown by USAF transporter to Frankfurt am Main, the center of US intelligence services in Germany, for “debriefing” before a quasi-heroic reception in the US. That Texas businessman who had spoken soberly to journalists asking why no one was listening to the people in Palestine, was declared to have incurred “Stockholm syndrome”.

    Stockholm syndrome is a pseudo-medical term invented in the early 1970s as a faux psychiatric disorder whereby captives allegedly become bonded with their captors and sympathetic to them. It has become a term of trade for discrediting anyone who by virtue of a politically motivated hostage-taking exhibits a sympathetic response to the political issue at hand, no matter how rational that sympathy may be articulated. To confuse matters the “syndrome” is sometimes compared with the established “attractions” in abusive relationships, e.g. wife-beating, child-beating, rape, etc. While there are plausible explanations for the persistence of abusive relationships the elements of time and social/ familial status are very different from those of temporary hostage situations.

    The purpose of Stockholm syndrome is to pathologize the responses of people caught in political conflict who begin to consider rationally or even humanely the terms of those conflicts in officially prohibited ways. The origin of the term “brainwashing” was similar. When US POWs were released after the Armistice in Korea, many were forced to retract statements made in captivity about war crimes they had been ordered to commit. To explain these retractions and conceal the threats made to extract them, the returning prisoners were alleged to have been victims of Korean brainwashing. This also served as convenient cover for what is now known as MKUltra, the CIA psychological warfare program which included the mass marketing of LSD.

    Throughout the so-called Cold War the Soviet Union was accused of conducting all the psychological and pharmament operations against its dissidents that the CIA was performing in the US, Canada and other countries under its control. The battlefield “mind” predates the Internet- in fact it has been the main battlespace since 1913.

    The history of modern hostage taking for political purposes could bear far more examination than this space permits. However to return to the Carlson-Putin interview and Carlson’s plea for a “hostage release” we should ask from what position Carlson’s request is actually addressed?

    That is most simply revealed in his opening questions.

    On February 22, 2022, you addressed your country in your nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started and you said that you were acting because you had come to the conclusion that the United States through NATO might initiate a quote, “surprise attack on our country”. And to American ears that sounds paranoid. Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. How did you conclude that?

    Tucker Carlson, consciously or not, was speaking with the voice of the real “hostage-taker”. The US, in NATO extended, began to take the world hostage no later than August 1945. It held for a brief period the absolute atomic monopoly, until the Soviet Union followed by China acquired a deterrent. Then until 1990 the US claimed to be the hostage of a country half its population and subjected to more than twenty years of US-supported war mainly against its civilian population. In addition it held the world hostage while it carpet-bombed Korea and Vietnam (plus Laos and Cambodia), murdering over six million people from the air. At the same time it held as much of Africa, Latin America and the Pacific archipelagos hostage through military dictatorships, with or without civilian faces. Then through brain drain and strategic immigration policy it created an international hostage pool paying ransom in return for a chance to send money to impoverished families at home. Ultimately the psychological and economic warfare to which all inhabitants of the US are subjected is calculated to create a strong emotional bond with their captors, the real but unnamed hostage-takers who rule the Anglo-American Empire.

    Vladimir Putin responded to Tucker Carlson’s plea in the manner appropriate to a traditional statesman, schooled in statecraft from an age before the US was even conceived as a place, let alone as a nation. Also that point eluded the American journalist. President Putin’s repeated injunction that Tucker Carlson should ask the actors themselves (in the US) why they act as they do? was also a polite indication that for all his curiosity, sincerity and goodwill, Carlson was himself a captive, a hostage. He remains a captive of a hostage nation.

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  • Journalism and Entertainment

    This week former Fox News commentator, now self-employed audio-visual journalist, Tucker Carlson interviewed the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. According to his own account, it was a mission opposed—secretly by the agencies of the “Vatican on the Potomac” and with it the hierarchy of the American Church. A summary of the sermons and homilies published by its national and international propaganda organs indicates concerted efforts to spin this encounter in ways that profess the faith and confirm the purported apostasy of the successor to that patriarch of the beloved if short-lived Russian-American Church, Boris Yeltsin.

    Carlson has acquired a wide and varied following not only because of the topics he began to cover but by some things conspicuously absent from the broadcasting and cable genre in which he made his career—a robust sense of humor and allowing the people to whom he talks to speak without rude interruptions. Throughout the illegal and unconstitutional mass incarcerations starting in 2020 he insisted without reservation that Americans have rights that are being violated. George Carlin would have said their temporary privileges had been suspended or revoked. As a personally wealthy individual from an establishment background, Carlson is essentially a believer in the status quo or at least the status quo of the era in which he grew up. As a media professional he is sensitive to the way the business works and the role people like him play in it. He does not pretend to identify with everyone he meets. Despite his clearly conservative position he has acquired a reputation for sincerity throughout what is called “alternative journalism”. There was an age, long forgotten by many, when a journalist of reputation or representing a major media outlet did not have to explain publicly why he chose to report on something or talk to somebody. The fact that Tucker Carlson felt compelled to give several introductory explanations for speaking to the elected leader of a major nation with whom his country has been at war (unofficially since 1917) reflects the dismal state of affairs even in a profession subject to corruption since its institutionalization by magnates like Pulitzer, Hearst, Rothermere and Beaverbrook.

    By his own admission, Carlson was surprised at among other things the history lesson he was given in the first third of the interview. One might ask if in the course of his preparation he had viewed Oliver Stone’s extensive interviews with the Russian president in 2017? Anyone who watched them would not have been surprised by Vladimir Putin’s style or substance. Stone, who had much more time, asked many of the same questions Carlson asked. In those interviews President Putin was very detailed in his answers with frequent historical explanations given as context. Perhaps that is what most surprised Carlson since the absence of context is the primary characteristic of what passes for journalism in the West. However Tucker Carlson, began no later than the 22 February 2022 Russian intervention, to add context and history to his own reporting. What is more logic acquired a greater role than dogma. So what role was Tucker Carlson performing?

    Perhaps his questions were formulated to simulate the kind of bar, living room and dinner table discussions his viewers are likely to have when the subjects of Putin or Russia are raised. If one wants to inform a notoriously isolated and ignorant population one has to start with their knowledge base and the things they are likely to ask. President Putin asked Carlson after the first question, was this a talk show or a serious conversation? By surrendering to a serious conversation he was breaching the unstated barrier of all domestic political gossip and chatter. Yet it was too late to change either his style or his pattern of questions. Without diminishing the value of the interview as a whole, it is worth considering the role model upon which Carlson explicitly drew. He has mentioned Barbara Walters. Those who can still recall her career in American television will remember how she became the first woman to co-anchor that TV slot for the nightly news. She replaced Chet Huntley after he died to share the NBC show with David Brinkley. Then she went on to conduct “star” interviews with world leaders. Those performances raised the TV presenter to a certain mutual celebrity in the penumbra of the personality interviewed. It also created a new platform for selected leaders to be displayed to a mass television audience, not unlike the 1969 broadcast of the putative moon landings. Political leaders obtained a new kind of pulpit with this precursor to the ubiquitous talk show. Performers from the news theater genre were able to enhance their credibility as conduits for official views presented in living room conversation format. David Frost was the master of this format- although even his famous Nixon interviews were just a bit too English for an average US audience (unless sedated by Masterpiece Theater episodes). Barbara Walters in contrast was the Maria Callas of the grand interview. At least Maria Callas knew she was only a performer and used her own voice. Tucker Carlson can be forgiven for avoiding the David Frost style. However had he learned something from Oliver Stone he might have transcended the living room TV style and focussed on things Americans and Westerners really need to understand.

    Repeated questions to Vladimir Putin were couched in phrases like “why do you think America does something?” From the Stone interviews he would have learned that the Russian president does not try to guess why other people act as they do. He merely describes the actions as he sees them and what he thinks they mean for Russia. Carlson’s approach indirectly reflects the absence (or impossibility) of any serious questioning by Americans as to why their government acts as it does? Vladimir Putin pointed both Stone and Carlson toward home saying essentially- Ask the people who act for their reasons. I can only tell you why we act as we do. The critical viewer will immediately recognize that Western policy is never honestly explained. Hence while the whole world (except the citizens of NATO countries) can know why the Russian Federation acts, no one has an honest answer from those in the West who drive US actions.

    Another curious aspect of the interview is Carlson’s questions about diplomacy and the implied question about the “special services”. Tucker Carlson’s father was a journalist working with the American “special services” or other government agencies. The level of passive and active cooperation between the corporate media and the CIA (or FBI) is a matter of record. Originally discrete, they even operate overtly today. As a former intelligence officer (like George H W Bush), the Russian president respects the rules by which those services operate. In contrast to the legions of CIA assets in the US and the West as a whole, Vladimir Putin neither denies this stage in his career nor does he trivialize the functions these services perform. Yet he comes just short of suggesting that the lead Western services drive policy. In contrast one hears little to indicate that the Russian president is run by his country’s covert action branch. Does Carlson appreciate this difference? Vladimir Putin answers Carlson with the rhetorical question, who is Boris Johnson? To which Carlson seemed to have no answer. Again a critical viewer could understand the insinuation. Boris Johnson, who was no longer British prime minister was in Kiev on someone’s behalf. Johnson himself, unlike a member of the Biden family, had no obvious personal interest in Ukraine. Yet his words were apparently enough to destroy the Istanbul format where Russia and Ukraine had initialed accords that according to President Putin would have ended the war. So on whose behalf was the backbencher sent? What did he offer or threaten to persuade Kiev to renounce what they had already accepted? Even if Tucker Carlson did not know the answer the question was hard to overlook.

    Already before FOX sacked him Tucker Carlson had begun to question the appearances of government in the US. However little attention has been paid to the “secret team”, the term Prouty used to describe the permanent government, and how it rules and disseminates propaganda. So little critical attention is given to covert government because it also transcends the political and social categories in which the mass and sacraments of the American Church are celebrated. Carlson ended his interview with questions couched in the language of Christian catechism. He asked the Russian president, as a Christian, if he would not act in accordance with a platitude of that same Sunday school version of Christianity characteristic of the West: “why don’t you turn the other cheek?” Sensibly Vladimir Putin responded as a head of state and not a pupil summoned to the principal’s office for fighting on the playground. He said with calm neutrality that the West was more “pragmatic” than Russia. Without demeaning the West, Vladimir Putin answered in a way deeply consistent with the Orthodox Christianity overthrown by Rome in the Fourth Crusade. His conviction was that Russians had a life and soul that were indivisible. The implication was that the West in its pragmatism could dispense with one or the other.

    Certainly the enormous viewer numbers Tucker Carlson reaches will uniquely benefit if they really listen to the conversation. Nonetheless the legacy of Walters will be hard to transcend. Carlson as the celebrity interviewer risks not just being unheard. There is still the opportunity for a new news entertainment brand to emerge by which the medium remains the message. Tucker Carlson then would join the pantheon of celebrity with surprising but increasingly superficial product. The Church has always known how to absorb divergence into entertainment (if it could not be suppressed) and its grand corporate successors, who Putin correctly identified as directly or indirectly controlling almost all the world‘s mass media, have refined those methods using both natural and artificial intelligence.

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  • Washington’s Unconditional Support for Israel Mirrors its Unconditional Support for Sectarianism

    Poor Ophelia divided from herself and her fair judgment
    Without the which we are pictures, or mere beasts….

    — Hamlet (IV.v.)

    As was the case with the British and Roman empires that preceded it, Washington has long had a fondness for the divide and conquer paradigm and has ruthlessly fomented sectarianism in the post-Cold War era. This frenetic push towards sectarianization has ushered in a new dark age of socio-economic chaos and failed states, an amenable environment for rapacious corporate entities to ravage and plunder. Furthermore, in neoliberal ideology US-backed extremists are invariably hailed as the guardians of tolerance and reason locked in an apocalyptic struggle with the forces of ignorance and bigotry which foments the pathologization, and if we are not vigilant, ultimately the criminalization of dissent.

    The unflagging support for extremism and concurrent vilification of those who attempt to resist its infernal grasp saturates every aspect of Washington’s contemporary policy-making. Domestically, neoliberal indoctrination that encourages Americans of color and immigrant youth to embrace black nationalism, Latino nationalism, and anti-white jihad has cataclysmically destabilized American society by cultivating illiteratization and through relentlessly pitting Americans against one another.

    While the neoliberal racism of today couches itself in the language of revolution and “anti-racism” minorities end up being no less dehumanized. Instead of being told point-blank that they are racially inferior, these students are taught to have contempt for everything Western and American. Once inculcated with this anti-literacy vaccine they become pawns in the hands of the oligarchs and used to destroy working class unity.

    Those who attempt to provide some context regarding the Maidan “revolution of dignity” which saw the cult of Bandera illegally seize power in a violent putsch in February of 2014 are called “Putin stooges,” “Putin apologists,” and equated with Westerners that were sympathetic to the Nazi party. This upends reality, as those who extol Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and the 14th Waffen-SS Division are portrayed as sensible defenders of the rule of law.

    During the lockdowns “anti-vaxxers” and Branch Covidians were pitted against one another, and the struggle between those who believe in informed consent and those who seek its annihilation persists with regards to the Church of Vaccinology, the Cult of Psychiatry, and the trans cult, along with other ethically dubious medical practices. Supporters of anti-white Manifest Destiny are pitted against Americans who resent the growing fragmentation, atomization, and dissolution of their society. As the concerns of marginalized natives are ignored and they are dismissed as bigots their frustration and anger grow, which can in fact fuel traditional far-right attitudes, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    In Zionism there is no such thing as a Palestinian – there are only “terrorists.” In multiculturalism there is no such thing as an American – there are only “racists.” The extent to which the latter has unleashed a war of all against all, handmaiden of unbridled corporate pillage, cannot be overstated.

    The fracturing of American Judaism is likewise emblematic of the unraveling of American society, with the ultra-Orthodox shunning Jews that aren’t ultra-Orthodox, and with the Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews filled with acrimony towards one another. When holding up a sign saying “Jews Say Ceasefire Now” at a rally in Washington DC in November, Medea Benjamin was confronted by a female Zionist who said she should be raped. In the ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist community of Mea She’arim in Jerusalem the police frequently harass and behave violently towards the locals (who are essentially Jewish Palestinians).

    The Pentagon destroyed Iraqi society by inciting Kurdish nationalism, Sunni fundamentalism, and by placing a Shiite fundamentalist government in power, knowing full well that this would cause the country to become a failed state. Attempts by Tel Aviv and Washington to maintain and capitalize on Sunni-Shia tensions by stoking fear and animosity between Riyadh and Tehran played a critical role in their strategy of attempting to dominate the region. Now that China has successfully facilitated a rapprochement between the two countries, this weakens the position of the US and Israel in the Middle East, as it fosters greater unity within the ummah allowing the Muslim populations to turn their attention to the terrible crimes being committed against the Palestinians.

    Another example where the rational have been denounced as extremists and vice versa was during Syria’s “civil war,” where the most fanatical and bloodthirsty jihadists (many of whom were not Syrian) were romanticized ad nauseam by Western presstitutes and incessantly portrayed as heroic freedom fighters.

    By opting to act militarily to defend the Donbass from ethnic cleansing, Moscow has decided to obliterate the Banderite military, and if possible, remove the Banderite junta altogether by replacing it with a Russophile government in conjunction with an anti-Maidan coup. After waiting for the greater part of a decade for Kiev to implement the Minsk Accords, the Kremlin arrived at the conclusion that if they were to continue to sit on their hands, the nationalists would eventually reach a level of military capability at which point they could no longer be removed or significantly weakened in any meaningful way. In actuality, Moscow is doing what the Zionist entity’s neighbors failed to do during the brief window of Zionist vulnerability prior to the IDF’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

    One of the problems with sectarianism is how easy it is for the elites to indoctrinate impressionable children. I grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, in the ‘80s and early ‘90s where many of my friends were indoctrinated into the cult of Zionism, and by junior high school they were already zealots. These children are taught from the earliest possible age that Jews are always the oppressed, that they can never be the oppressor, and that Zionism and Judaism are synonymous with one another.

    (In a heated exchange that recently took place on the streets of the settler colonial entity, an Israeli woman sarcastically asked a Golani Brigade soldier, “How many innocent people have you killed in this war?” To which he replied, not without irony, “Your parents failed in raising you.”)

    Jews that descend into the valley of Zionism commit the greatest possible sacrilege: they participate in the violent oppression of another people. Indeed, this is analogous to doctors betraying the informed consent ethic and the oath to do no harm. In both scenarios a primordial Rubicon is irrevocably violated. While Nazism slew Jewish bodies, Zionism slays Jewish souls.

    Education in Teaneck today is in many ways a microcosm of the multicultural society. In a town of around 40,000 there are four radically different education systems: an Islamic school system, a system of modern Orthodox yeshivas (the ultra-Orthodox have a completely different set of yeshivas); and the Teaneck public school system, which has long segregated black students, often resulting in their receiving an inferior education. Black nationalism exacerbates the education crisis facing African American youth, as these children are frequently inculcated with the idea that doing well in school would make them an “Oreo” (black on the outside, white on the inside) and an “Uncle Tom.” Just as Feminism and The Handmaid’s Tale are two sides to the same reactionary coin, so too are anti-white jihad and white supremacy.

    Without a return to a strong public school system anchored in a traditional American canon our society will continue to disintegrate, as there will be no cultural glue to hold it together. The ease with which a child can be indoctrinated into being a Banderite, a Zionist, an anti-white jihadi, or radical feminist poses many challenges, and is difficult to combat once an education system has fallen into the hands of sociopaths. As the Chinese like to say, “Children are white paper.”

    One of the most extraordinary instances of Washington cultivating extremism is its long-standing relationship with the Zionist entity, with the former never failing to provide its favorite attack dog with virtually unlimited political, military, and economic aid, and like the entity itself, labeling all criticism of Israel as “anti-Semitism.” Following a recent Jewish Voice for Peace rally that was held in New York’s Grand Central Station, New York governor Kathy Hochul issued a statement decrying what she described as an unconscionable “anti-Semitic” incident. And so a rally where hundreds of Jews protesting the barbarities of a Jewish supremacist and ethnosupremacist crusader state became transformed into an incident whereby an imaginary gang of neo-Nazis viciously attacked an imaginary group of defenseless Jews. Naturally, Hochul, who is also a fan of biofascism, proceeded to call for more internet censorship to combat “extremism” and “anti-Semitism.” (In addition to Jewish Voice for Peace, anti-Zionist Jewish organizations such as IfNotNow, B’Tselem, Shoresh and Neturei Karta continue to play a critically important role in countering the lie that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are one and the same).

    Biden’s preposterous attempts to equate Putin and Hamas (“They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy”) further exemplifies the neoliberal penchant for romanticizing extremism. Aside from the most rabid Russophobes and Islamophobes, it is principally the Western elites that regard the Banderite entity and the Zionist entity as “model democracies.”

    Always eager to march to the tune of Washington’s drum, these sentiments have been echoed by the European elites, with British MP Suella Braverman calling the Free Palestine marches “hate marches,” describing them as “sickening,” and claiming that the phrase “from the river to the sea” was “a call to arms used by terrorists.” Clearly, this language seeks to criminalize any criticism of the Zionist entity. (Braverman might consider moving to Germany where the authorities have violently suppressed anti-Zionist rallies).

    When not dropping bombs on cats, dogs, journalists, bakeries, ambulances, universities (see here and here), hotels, houses of worship and heritage sites, demolishing Palestinian homes, destroying cemeteries, uprooting olive trees, torturing Palestinians, stealing corpses of Palestinian martyrs, carrying out summary executions, depriving Gazans of food and water, butchering and traumatizing children, torturing West Bank residents and holding them in “administrative detention,” using pogromists to force West Bank residents from their land, invoking the Hannibal Directive and murdering their own citizens, using the Star of David as a fascist symbol, collapsing Gaza’s health care system and turning much of the strip into a lifeless wasteland, Zionists can say some pretty revealing things, particularly following “Israel’s 9/11.”

    Following the Hamas raids on October 7th the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, addressed the Palestinians in Gaza:

    Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.

    Writing in Yedioth Ahronoth, retired major general and former head of the Israeli National Security Council Giora Eiland, wrote that “Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf.” Elaborating, he went on to say that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist….” Appearing on Israeli television, journalist Shimon Riklin hailed the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, saying “I am unable to sleep without watching homes in Gaza being destroyed.”

    On October 11th Energy Minister Israel Katz posted on social media:

    For years, we have given Gaza electricity, water, and fuel. Instead of a thank you, they sent thousands of human animals to butcher, murder, rape and kidnap babies, women and elderly people. This is why we have decided to cut off the supply of water, electricity and fuel, and now, the local power plant has collapsed, and there is no electricity in Gaza. We will keep holding a tight siege until the Hamas threat is lifted from Israel and the world. What has been will be no more.

    Never one to shy away from violent rhetoric, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Otzma Yehudit party, tweeted on the 17th of October that “So long as Hamas does not release the hostages – the only thing that should enter Gaza is hundreds of tons of air force explosives – not an ounce of humanitarian aid.”

    Two days after the Hamas raids, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said in a press conference:

    We are imposing a complete siege on [Gaza]. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we must act accordingly.

    Tzipi Navon, office manager of Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, furiously condemned the Hamas raids, calling for those responsible to be brutally tortured. Knesset member for Likud Galit Distel-Atbaryan said that Israeli society should unite so that it could focus its energies on “erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth.” Israeli lawmaker Revital Gotliv and Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu both called for the IDF to use nuclear weapons, while Knesset member Merav Ben-Ari said that the children of Gaza brought their suffering upon themselves.

    IDF spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari has openly acknowledged that “while balancing accuracy with the scope of damage, right now we’re focused on what causes maximum damage.” Shortly after “the second Holocaust” Israeli president Isaac Herzog said of the Palestinians that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” further encouraging the Zionist army to engage in illegal acts of collective punishment.

    Minister of Agriculture and former Shin Bet director Avi Dichter said nonchalantly on television that yes, the IDF was carrying out a second Nakba in Gaza. Addressing the nation, Netanyahu’s appeal that “you must remember what Amalek has done to you” was an open messianic call to genocide.

    (Netanyahu has referred to Iran as a country ruled by “fanatics,” denouncing Tehran’s “terror tentacles” and “murderous nature.” Does the Iranian military routinely bomb their neighbors? Does Tehran persecute Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian Iranians? Do they destroy non-Shia houses of worship? Do they, like ISIS, refuse to formally declare their borders?)

    Ayelet Shaked (of fascism perfume fame) has reiterated this call for ethnic cleansing, saying that Khan Younis should be turned into a soccer field. When asked about the Netanyahu government’s response to the events of October 7th, Likud MK and Minister for the Advancement of the Status of Women May Golan, replied:

    I don’t care about Gaza. I literally don’t care. For all I care they can go out and just swim in the sea. I want to see dead bodies of terrorists around Gaza.

    Moshe Feiglin, founder of the Zehut party, demanded “complete incineration” and for Gaza to be annihilated as Dresden was during the Second World War, while Metula Mayor David Azoulai called for Gaza to be razed and turned into an open-air memorial like the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

    Eliyahu Yossian, veteran of the Military Intelligence Directorate Unit 8200, has echoed this drumbeat of Hitlerian bloodlust demanding that a war of extermination be unleashed on the people of Gaza:

    Because the woman is an enemy, the baby is an enemy, the first grader is an enemy, the Hamas militant is an enemy, and the pregnant woman is an enemy.

    American Zionists spew no less venomous rhetoric, with RFK Jr. saying that “The Palestinian people are arguably the most pampered people by international aid organizations in the history of the world,” and former State Department official Stuart Seldowitz saying to a Manhattan halal food cart vendor in November that “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, you know what? It wasn’t enough.”

    Genocidal words, if left unchecked, inevitably spawn genocidal deeds.

    All of this satanic language has trickled down to the Israeli rank and file leading to a number of extremely violent ultra-nationalist songs (see here, here, and here). In Ness and Stilla’s hit “Harbu Darbu,” an appalling display of Zionist death music, and which is currently one of the most popular songs within the settler colonial entity (the YouTube video has more views than the population of Israel), the barbarian hip hop artists refer to Hamas militants as “rats getting out of the tunnel” and Palestinians as “sons of Amalek.”

    The song, which one might categorize as “genocide drill,” and which is oozing with a glorification of the Zionist army and a total disregard for Palestinian lives, concludes with “All IDF units are coming to do Harbu Darbu on their head.” (“Harbu Darbu” comes from Arabic, translates as “swords and strikes,” and is used as slang in modern Israeli Hebrew to mean “hellfire” or “raining hell on one’s enemy.”)

    Cogitate upon this for a moment, gentle reader: do these people seem even remotely sane, let alone capable of “fighting extremism?”

    There have also been an array of despicable videos and social media posts where Zionists mock the suffering of Palestinians (see here, here, and here), further demonstrating the fascistic nature of Israeli society, how malleable people can be, and how easily the masses can be ideologically molded by their teachers, leaders, and the mass media. An eight-year-old is an innocent victim (who Ness and Stilla were not that long ago), but the elementary school student becomes a junior high school student, the junior high school student becomes a high school student, who then graduates and is not a child any more. All too often, the dogma that is instilled by ideologues who prey on the innocent and vulnerable leaves an indelible mark. As Yeats once penned in “The Second Coming:”

    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned

    Israelis often join the military at eighteen where they can be even more brainwashed. For most Americans, they go to college and have their minds warped by any number of depraved cult ideologies: Zionism, anti-white jihad, humanitarian interventionism and American exceptionalism, radical feminism (an anti-love cult contemptuous of due process), unfettered capitalism and biofascism.

    (In a feminism meets Zionism moment, Mia Schem, who was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7th and later returned to the entity in a prisoner exchange, said that a Hamas man guarding her raped her “with his eyes.” Do Israeli fighter pilots drop imaginary bombs from imaginary planes?)

    In the end, those who are promised Elysium and the coming of the Messiah meet their doom. Zionism destroys its acolytes as ethical human beings and has made Jews less safe, initially in the Muslim world, and more recently in Europe. (Israeli intelligence applauds these developments, as it fuels aliyah, or Jewish colonization of Palestine). Anti-white jihad has made millions of Americans of color and immigrant youth illiterate while rendering them ghettoized and unassimilable. Humanitarian interventionism has eviscerated the United States morally and economically while jeopardizing the rule of law. The cult of Bandera has obliterated Ukraine culturally, morally, and economically and has taught Ukrainians to feel the deepest hatred for those they once regarded as their brothers: Russian speaking Ukrainians and Ukrainians of ethnic Russian origin. Biofascism destroys the souls of doctors, nurses, and biomedical researchers; while radical feminism debases girls and young women by encouraging them to “cast off the shackles of the patriarchy” through either embracing promiscuity or shunning men altogether, and by severing the connection between sex and love. Just as the Zionist is the greatest anti-Semite, the Feminisis mujahid is the greatest misogynist.

    Unlike the gullible Western masses, the Global South is not buying NATO propaganda with regards to the Russo-Ukrainian War, and in the “third world” there is considerable awareness that Washington’s attempts to turn Ukraine into a Banderite battering ram with which to destabilize Russia is at the root of the conflict.

    Nevertheless, the outpouring of anger felt by millions in the West regarding the savagery being unleashed by the Zionist entity is emblematic of the fact that Westerners are not inherently evil, per se, and that when they are educated on an important issue a significant percentage will embrace light over darkness. With Ukraine this has not happened due to the fact that only a minuscule percentage of Westerners – especially in the United States – have any understanding of the basic chronological sequence of events that led to this terrible war in the first place. Moreover, in contrast with “the Middle East’s only democracy,” Ukrainian nationalists are kept as far as possible from the mass media, although they say similarly deranged things to their domestic audience.

    In all likelihood Washington will continue to support extremist ideologies and fuel sectarian hatreds. Indeed, as imperialism and anti-white jihad foment racism, and multiculturalism and radical feminism fan the flames of sexism, tribalism, and atomization Zionism fans the flames of anti-Semitism. This is by design.

    Support for the Banderite junta has isolated Washington and tarnished its already dubious credibility, while the unmitigated support shown for the Zionist entity’s genocidal onslaught has eradicated what little moral authority the American ruling establishment had left, especially in the Middle East. Domestically, the decision to scrap their national identity in favor of a Neronian Tower of Babel devoid of trust, tradition, a common value system, and solidarity bolsters their power in the short term, but threatens their long-term viability, underscoring the fact that at home and abroad sectarianism remains Washington’s deadliest, yet most self-destructive, weapon.

    The post Washington’s Unconditional Support for Israel Mirrors its Unconditional Support for Sectarianism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Imperialism and anti-imperialism collide in Ukraine (Part 1 of 16)

    Yeah, because investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea. You should feel the same.

    — Congressman Dan Crenshaw

    Premise

    Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell introduce their book, Hiroshima in America, with this imposing statement, “You cannot understand the twentieth century without Hiroshima.” Equally, we cannot understand the twenty-first century without knowing why Russia intervened in Ukraine.

    Introduction

    U.S. proxy war with Russia by way of Ukraine is intensifying and maybe reaching a critical mass for direct war. Despite its military intervention, Russia was not seeking confrontation with the United States—no casus belli. Nor was Russia the one who started the slide towards near-direct hostilities—the United States did. To stress a cardinal point from the onset, the conflict in Ukraine cannot be discussed cogently without addressing the two factors that propelled it: U.S. imperialist and hegemonic agendas.

    Prime Minister Victor Orban of Hungary, a NATO country, clearly understood the situation. He explicitly pinpointed to the U.S. feverish drive for a military faceoff with Russia. He said, “The United States has not given up its plan to squeeze everyone, including Hungary, into a war alliance, to go with the crowd”. Orban’s “war alliance” remark is the key to decode U.S. intentions.

    While engaging in extremist anti-Russian policies and despite all fanfare, the United States is surely worried to engage Russia in a direct war. Inducing others to sanction, isolate, or fight a proxy war before moving to the next phase is a convenient U.S. strategy to intensify anti‑Russian punitive measures. Depleting Russia’s conventional military resources, test its weapon systems, and uncover its strategic assets are just a few examples of such measures.

    So far, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and other Western vassals, have been pouring billions of dollars and advanced weapons in support of the fascist Ukrainian regime. What the United States appears to be hoping for is a direct WWII-style war pitting various European national armies against Russia. In such scenario, the United States would be the overseeing godfather of war but without directly involving its own military.

    Even so, with stakes so high and dangers so explosive, an expanded U.S. war against Russia via some European states does not come without potential perils to the hyperpower. Now, by taking into account the steady flow of weapons to Ukraine, never-ending sanctions on Russia, and the decision to avoid nuclear confrontation, the United States seems betting on long ball tactics to weaken Russia through protracted pan-European war of attrition.

    On the subject of U.S. role in Ukraine, Donald Trump externalized the inner thinking of the ruling establishment when he stated that Ukraine is “A European problem”. Trump’s assessment is not as simple as it sounds. Was he proposing that the United States should stay away from what he called European problems because Ukraine is geographically European and, therefore, Europe should be in charge of resolving the conflict? How does Russia fit in this scheme anyway since it is partially located in Europe?

    If this is a “Trumpian continental doctrine”, then one may ask, why is the United States not leaving the Taiwan issue, for example, to be resolved by Asia— or, congruently, by China and Taiwan without interference by outsiders? Because the issue that Trump raised is not about “continental responsibility”, then what hides behind his remark—especially knowing that with its 750 military bases in at least 80 countries, geography was never a barrier to its interventionist actions anywhere in the world?

    Trump is an open book. He obliquely put forward the insidious idea that NATO governments should be the ones fighting Russia on behalf of the United States. Trump, a hyper-supremacist demagogue, and a know-it-all charlatan glossed over a fundamental fact of modern wars: geographic location of an armed conflict is utterly unimportant. Proving this point, U.S. imperialist wars against Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Libya are just a few known examples whereby geography posed no appreciable logistical hindrance.

    Contrary to U.S. and European propaganda, the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine is neither a European nor an American problem. By strict logic and on technical ground, it cannot be but a bidirectional affair tying two adversaries (Russia and Ukraine) in a violent struggle to untie tangled geodemographic and territorial issues, as well as legitimate Russian security concerns relating to NATO’s planned expansion to Russia’s borders.

    Logic and technicalities could surely elucidate many things. But they cannot dialectically explain why Russia moved into Ukraine in that particular point in history. Regardless of timing, Russia’s intervention was not sudden, was not an invasion, and was not aggression. Rational thinking and pertinent analysis of the events leading to the conflict cannot support counter-arguments to the opposite. As such, the conflict cannot be reduced artificially to geodemography and inter-state contentions. Something else exceedingly larger than Donbass and Ukraine must have been smoldering under the ashes—what is it?

    The day after Russia crossed into Ukraine was a scene without equal. The United States, or by antonomasia, the top aggressor, warmongering, and interventionist power in history, mobilized its massive propaganda outlets to inveigh against Russia—dubbed as invader, criminal, and aggressor. Within just a few hours, manufactured pandemonium followed. Russia was put inside the bull’s-eye and targeted for cancellation.

    American planners took two bellicose steps to antagonize Russia and worsen confrontation. First: they embraced the Zelensky’s regime (successor to the stridently anti-Russian regime of Petro Poroshenko) in spite of its fascist stance toward Russians and Russia. U.S. propagandists called that embracement “solidarity” with Ukraine and love for its “democracy”. Second: they circulated the illusion that Ukraine, with the U.S. and NATO’s help, could defeat Russia.

    I discussed the first step below. As for the second step, because the United States well knew that Ukraine is incapable of defeating Russia, why keep selling the illusion that it could? The grandstanding plan behind the U.S. ruse is perceptible: to keep the war going by putting U.S. and NATO’s military resources at the side of Ukraine, not much as a fighting force, but as a supplier of money, weapons, and training. Considering Russia’s formidable military history, it is unlikely that heavy Western involvement has any chance of turning the tables on the predictable outcome of war.

    That did not stop U.S. war planners from adjusting aims and tactics. In no time, the Afghan model was ready for re-use: a proxy war while inundating Ukraine with empty slogans of pending victory. But that model has no chance of succeeding in Ukraine. There is a fundamental difference between the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and that of Russia in Ukraine. Leonid Brezhnev intervened in Afghanistan to support its communist government, not to alter its borders or resolve ethnical and territorial disputes. The distinction is important. It meant that Russia could have left Afghanistan at will if circumstances were to change—this is what Gorbachev did in 1989. He withdrew all Soviet forces. Conversely, Vladimir Putin intervened in Ukraine for reasons that go way beyond Donbass or the future of ethnic Russians living in Ukraine.

    As for the first step; i.e., the American embracement of the Ukrainian regime, by history and by imperialistic tradition, the United States has never been in the business of solidarity. Solidarity in the American lexicon of imperialism is a meaningless term—except when the U.S. is executing a plan but is pretending otherwise. What matters to the U.S. is the consolidation of geopolitical and strategic gains—even if their action could result in the destruction of the country they purport to help. Observation: U.S. interventions in WWI and WWII do not fit the solidarity model. They were no more than an opportunity to implement hegemonic agendas in Europe and the world. Confirming this is the fact that in both wars, the United States had joined just toward the end of hostilities.

    Are U.S. aggressive actions against Russia due to concerns for Ukraine’s territorial integrity or love for Ukrainians? Knowing the voluminous record of U.S. military interventions and rationalizations thereof, the answer is no. As it stands, Russia’s intervention offered the United States the opportunity to confront it for purposes unrelated to the Ukrainian events.

    Further, the U.S. claim of solidarity with Ukraine because of Russian “aggression” is dishonest at best. Solidarity cannot be selective. For a claim to be valid, the claimant [United States] must prove that its opposition to aggressions is: (a) rooted in its history, conduct, and ethics; and (b) based on principles thus applied universally. With regard to those elementary requirements, the United States would not only be unable to satisfy but also would fail to prove the contrary.

    U.S. propaganda is a gargantuan super-machine that U.S. doctrinaires of empire shape it according to needs.  It does not matter if one points to its duplicity, multiple standards, false claims, misinformation, accusations, mirror politics, hypocrisy, projection, and so on. Take. for example, the U.S. propagandistic usage of the aggression concept. The ideologues of U.S. hegemony routinely dub their interventions as “legitimate”, in defense of things such as “values”, “freedom”, “human rights”, fend off “dangers to the security of the hyper-imperialist state”, and all similar memorized recitations. The flip of the coin is predicable: they call interventions by others “aggressions”, “breach of international law”, and so on. All such fancy rigmaroles are manipulative tactics to subvert facts thus creating favorable conditions for intervention.

    To refute U.S. claims that it is helping Ukraine resisting “aggression”, consider the example of Palestine. Briefly, no example could ever top how the United States is treating Israeli aggressions against all Arab states—the latest of which is the genocidal assault on Gaza. Known Facts: Israel, an illegal settler state created by Britain and United States on Palestinian lands, has been attacking—with impunity—many Arab countries for decades. Yet, the “virtuous and peace-loving” Zionist-controlled United States and the hypocrite West always reacted with criminal indifference.

    It is public knowledge that U.S. imperialists not only condone Israel’s aggressions under the rubric that Israel has “the right to defend itself”, but also brag about their infatuation with the Nazi “Zionist miracle”. (The ongoing Palestinian genocide at the hands of Israel and the United States consequent to the Palestinian resistance movement of Hamas attacking Israel on October 7, 2023 goes beyond the scope of this work.).

    Other examples are significant. India and Pakistan have been having countless skirmishes and wars since 1947. One such war was India’s campaign to partition Pakistan. In 1971, India severed East Pakistan from West Pakistan to create Bangladesh. The “virtuous and peace-loving” U.S. and the West reacted by siding with India. In 1982, Margaret Thatcher sent her navy 8000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean to attack Argentina after this country tried to recover its Malvinas Islands (occupied by colonialist Britain during the 18th c.). The “virtuous and peace-loving” West remained indifferent. In that occasion, and while the United States publicly feigned neutrality, Ronald Reagan said,” Give Maggie enough to carry on…”, and Alexander Haig added, “We are not impartial.”

    Is the argument that the United States is determined to confront Russia for purposes unrelated to its intervention in Ukraine sustainable? Considering the antagonistic history of the U.S.-Russian relations, the answer confirms the premise. On the other hand, it is axiomatic that whether Donbass remains in Ukraine or goes to Russia is of no critical value to the physical survival of the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Poland, etc. Now, suppose that Russia would keep Donbass (historically a Russian territory despite its Ukrainian relative majority).

    Would that indicate in any way that Russia is seeking to expand its territory at the expense of other Soviet nations by force? My answer is no. Ponder on the following: before February 24, 2022 (the day Russian forces crossed over Ukraine’s international borders) Russia had never threatened any European country. Preponderant meaning: Russia’s problems are confined to U.S.-controlled Ukraine. The implication is self-explanatory:  when the U.S., NATO, Canada, Australia, New Zealand are behaving as if Russia was poised to invade other countries, we inescapably conclude that propaganda is preparing the ground for premeditated goals and mechanisms of execution.

    Could anyone tell us why U.S. warmongers are frothing like rabid dogs to fight Russia? Could we explain why Poland and Ukraine’s anti-Russian rhetoric goes beyond toxic hatred and far beyond all definitions given to Nazism? Equally, we want to know why the U.S. is pushing Japan to hone its horns against Russia. We also want to know why Joe Biden, speaking from Hiroshima, is promising to extend U.S. “nuclear umbrella” to Japan as if Russia is about to invade it?

    Three observations on Biden in Japan: (1) Biden’s disparagement of Japan was painted all over his face—he delivered his remarks from the same city that the United States had incinerated with a nuclear bomb on August 6, 1945. (2) He reminded Japan that the United States was the one who gutted its military power, but now it wants to be in charge of its “defense”. (3) He used the gimmicks of the nuclear umbrella to call on Japan to re-arm. The last observation can be validated by the fact that numerous American politicians are now calling for Indo-Pacific NATO that includes Japan.

    On the funny side of things, it is amusing to hear U.S. ambassador to South Africa, Reuben Brigety, saying, “The arming of Russia by South Africa…is fundamentally unacceptable… [and a] deviation from South Africa’s policy of non-alignment”. [Sic]

    Could the ambassador enlighten us as how he reached the “sharp” conclusion that arming Russia is “fundamentally unacceptable”? What is the basis for such fundamentality? Specifically, why is the arming of Ukraine acceptable but not the arming of Russia? Also, what is the story with the phrase “deviation from . . .” Are U.S. imperialists keeping logs on “deviations” by foreign governments and ways to correct them?

    Further, Brigety seems implying that Russia is a weak country that needs to be armed by others in order to fight. This is disinformation. Despite the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia is still a military superpower and a top maker and exporter of sophisticated defense systems and offensive hardware at par with that of the United States—if not more.

    Understanding U.S. praxis for imperialist control

    U.S. strategy for world domination is based on variable expediencies that change according to circumstances. Knowing all that, what is the U.S. expediency to confront Russia in Ukraine? Answer: coerce all potentially coercible countries to punish Russia—even if that could damage their national interests. But coercion thusly applied raises a question. What is the reason behind the United States pushing some countries to maintain neutrality while urging others to align with its anti-Russian campaign? Assumption: the U.S. has run out of options—its blackmail of other nations no longer works.

    For example, talking about the U.S. wanting Serbia to impose sanctions on Russia, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic complained, “Whoever comes [to Belgrade feels their] first obligation is to explain to me that I am a jerk who did not introduce sanctions”.  In a similar vein, Foreign Policy Magazine, one among many ubiquitous voices of U.S. imperialism, wonders whether “Too much pressure on African countries to condemn Russia could backfire”. Implication: the United States and allies are not leaving free breathing space for foreign governments to make up their minds independently.

    Down in the article, the writers clownishly ask, “Can the West Rally the Rest against Putin?” The psychological problem that afflicts U.S. imperialists is palpable: they invariably put themselves in a different category as in “West and Rest”. Pay attention: while the word “West” denotes geographical belonging, the word “Rest” is indistinct and can be anywhere. Meaning: the Rest is void of identity thus of value except when is being by the United States. With that, a superiority complex is established.

    Then they said, “Rally”. Rally how, one may ask? Is that through sanctions, enticement, or threats? Pay attention again: their question does not name Russia as a target for the rallying cry. Instead, it names Putin. On this subject, the United States repeatedly used this ploy (assigning culpability to specific persons) in Nicaragua, Panama, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Serbia, North Korea, China, and elsewhere. Purpose: demonize the top individuals to justify possible attack on their country.

    What does it mean when U.S. pressure on other nations does not yield results? Arguably, it is a sign that structural fatigue is fracturing the system that applies it. So, when the United States catapults all sorts of threats and sanctions against any country that deals with Russia—but no one listens except NATO vassals—, the unassailable inference is transparent: Russia’s campaign in Ukraine is finally producing irreparable fracture lines inside the American architecture for world control.

    They say history is a teacher. Among the countless things that history teaches, one is telling. At some point in their existence, marauding empires always die during their panting trek for uncontested domination. This explains why U.S. rulers always rely on lies, bribery, calls for “partnerships”, coercion, and threats as a means for obtaining consent. These contraptions cannot be other than venting mechanisms to help coping with the unstoppable weakening of the structural underpinnings of the imperialist enterprise.

    Pressure tactics aimed at forcing countries to take anti-Russian stance are so banal that they are worth mentioning. Janet Yellen, Biden’s secretary of the treasury and a vocal proponent of U.S. economic hyper-imperialism, offered a sample. She sent her Nigerian-born deputy (Wally Adeyemo) to Nigeria with the hope that a Nigerian-American might have a better chance at convincing his compatriots to “Pitch African Countries on pressuring Russia”.

    Another example is Josep Borrell, EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy. Borrell, a stiff-like-a-stone warmongering ideologue, is unquestionably confused. He suggests that the “European Union should ban Indian fuel made from Russian oil”. In other words, he is directly threatening India not to buy Russian oil or else.

    Wait a minute. We were told that in capitalism (romantically dubbed free market economy), when A sells B a commodity, then B becomes its lawful owner. Accordingly, B has every right to resell it. This is how B makes a profit: by buying and re-reselling. In effect, what Borrell wants to do is to stop the sacred totem of capitalism from working when the objective is punishing Russia. Whether capitalism works or not is not the problem. The problem is that Western officials spare no method to destabilize and inflict economic pains on countries that do not share their anti-Russian policies.

    A formula-like practice that the United States has been applying and re-applying with tenacity is contradictory dualism. Contradictory dualism, as applied to international relations, goes beyond “what I say is not what I do”, and beyond the outdated formula of “double standard”. Briefly, it is a self-given license to sell a product with counterfeit ingredients. Consider the following limited examples:

    • It defends Ukraine’s sovereignty, but it repeatedly violated the sovereignty of countless independent nations;
    • It condemns “aggressions” by others, while it is the number one aggressor in the world;
    • It prints money on cheap paper but wants the world to accept it as a universal currency;
    • It condemns so-called invasions, but it has invaded so many countries with total impunity’
    • It makes yearly lists of “state sponsor of terrorism”, while it is the top terrorist state in the history of humanity;
    • It claims that it was appalled by crimes of Nazi Germany, but it had committed unspeakable mass murders and genocides that exceeded the motives of Nazism. The near extermination of the Original Peoples, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Eisenhower’s concentration camps for German soldiers, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Libya, Serbia, and Afghanistan are indelible examples.

    Is contradictory dualism psychological projection? Hardly. Aside from being a tool for making politically motivated decisions, it is a modus operandi powered by interventionist ideology, culture of war, and by a dangerous multi-angled system with its own peculiar legislations and laws. The model has a function. It defines the U.S. in two ways: 1) it confirms the intent to dominate as in the phrase “leader of the free world”, and (2) it presents its own system as epitome of statecraft and unparalleled progress. Is the U.S. a model for an unparalleled progress?

    It is a fact that the United States is an advanced country. But U.S. claim of greatness is a matter open for debate. A country with (a) sadistic proclivity for wars and aggressions, (b) structurally flawed financial-capitalistic and political order, (c) gravitational pull toward collapse ($26.3 trillion of foreign debt on October 6, 2023—and still counting), and (d) countless mega social problems, domestic racism, international supremacism, corruption, and degraded civilian infrastructures could never claim entitlement to exceptionalism.

    Alternatively, even if the hyper-empire is credited with excellence in every sector, that does not erase the fact that we are dealing with a criminal, lawless, and genocidal entity. Above all, U.S. advancement in medicine, technology, space research, etc., is never an alibi for violent imperialism and wholesale domination, and it is not a license to rule the world. Lastly, a parasitic superpower that exists for the sake of controlling others, to suck up their resources, and to destroy their societies for the benefit of its ruling establishment, its orbiting special interest corporations and their satellite groups cannot possibly possess the accolades it loves to heap upon itself.

    In terms of the U.S. ideological doctrines— pivoting around military interventions, coercions, and world domination—a recent statement, again by Janet Yellen, is useful. After minimizing the prospects of war with China, Yellen talked about one such doctrine when she touched on the status of the Chinese economy. Showing off a standard U.S. foreign policy smugness, she said, “China’s economic growth need not be incompatible with U.S. economic leadership”. Translation: you [China] cannot or have no right to grow your economy—if this clashes with our imperialistic economic interests. Yellen’s statement was not casual. She confirmed that in order for the U.S. to consolidate its domination, it must first dominate the modes of production and assets of designated rival states.

    To summarize, if we want to evaluate the role being played by the United States in its quasi-direct war with Russia, we need to see all relevant matters in their proper contexts and dimensions. That being said, a protracted war of attrition against Russia would be a U.S. success. It implies that the United States, using others, has managed to force Russia into a corner. It also implies the de facto conversion of U.S. indirect conflict with Russia from war by proxy through Ukraine to war by proxy through most of Europe.

    It can be argued that if things go as planned, an indirect U.S. war with Russia through NATO proxies would act as a self-restraining mechanism. Said differently, the United States would protect itself by not engaging Russia face to face. As I stated earlier, a direct conventional American-Russian war could easily turn into nuclear exchange. Again, the logic of such an exchange leaves no space for doubt—destruction for all. Clue: while the United States could care less if Russia is annihilated to the finite particles, it is certainly unwilling to accept its own annihilation.

    Related to the preceding, seizing on the opportunity offered by Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, the United States swiftly dusted off decades-old anti-Russian agendas. And, just like that, in the blink of an eye, U.S. rulers turned Ukraine into a daily show and Russia into an existential threat. Seeing the magnitude of the United States involvement in Ukraine, there is no denying that it is looking for any possible way to degrade Russia’s military capabilities by prolonging the war and ruining its economy through sanctions and restrictions on foreign trade. In short, there can be no objective other than weakening Russia to the point of provoking its collapse.

    At this time, a dilemma sets in: Russia won’t collapse and the U.S. won’t give up. Is that stalemate before the conflagration? What comes next? In a tweet on X, retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor gives a straightforward answer. He stated, “We have sent almost all of our war stocks, weapons systems and ammunition to Ukraine. We don’t have a great deal left. The war in Ukraine is lost. Make Peace you fools!” Would his exhortation find recipients?

    Now, considering the objectives of all forces involved in Ukraine, the first line of enquiry should focus on making questions and trying to come up with some answers. For example,

    How Russia’s move into Donbass has changed the rules of engagement with the hyper-imperialist superpower of the United States? Was that move really about Donbass or about the fate of the Russians living in the region—or something else? Is NATO expansion a real problem for Russia? How did it happen that most of NATO countries are aligned behind the United States knowing that post-Soviet Russia never threatened them? Is Ukraine joining NATO a big deal? Why does the U.S. want to preserve NATO as an organization? Why is France (who never won a war as an empire or as a republic) waving its sword at Russia? Why is the United States instigating India against Russia and China? What is the story with Japan’s revanchism and belligerence vs. Russia? Why is the United States pushing for expanding NATO to the East Pacific? Have Russia’s post-Soviet accommodating policies with the U.S. come back to haunt it? Can Russia explain its many foreign policy blunders—especially in taking the side of U.S. imperialism on critical international issues? Are Israel and American Zionists playing any role in the conflict? Does Israel, via the power of the United States, have any specific interest in Ukraine? Where does China stand on this war? Where do the American people stand on the issue of U.S. imperialism and quest to dominate the world? Does that matter anyway? Is the culture of war and violence programmed so deep inside the collective American psyche that it is hard to eradicate?  Are fascism, militarism, Zionism, ignorance, and MAGA style political illiteracy driving U.S. hyper-imperialist foreign policy and wars? Is it true that the U.S. wants to dominate the world? Is Russia fighting to end U.S. hegemonic control of the planet, or solely interested in preserving its rights as a sovereign nation? Where do antiwar activists stand on the issue of war in Ukraine? Why is Russia kowtowing to the fascist settler state of Israel, while this effectively is supporting U.S. proxy war in Ukraine? Is the conflict in Ukraine about imperialism vs. anti‑imperialism? Is Russia an anti-imperialist state?

    Next: Part 2 of 16

    The post Imperialism and anti-imperialism collide in Ukraine (Part 1 of 16) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Putin Names Russia’s Real Enemies

    Putin names Russia’s real enemiesRussian President Vladimir Putin meets with participants in the special military operation at Vishnevsky Central Military Clinical Hospital in Moscow, Russia. ©  Sputnik/Kristina Kormilitsyna

    Ukraine is a mere tool in the hands of the collective West which is using it to fight Russia, President Vladimir Putin said on Monday. He was speaking at a military hospital in Moscow where he met servicemen wounded during the ongoing conflict.

    Asked about the enduring Western support for Kiev, the president said the elites of the collective West were actually the true enemy of Russia, rather than Ukraine itself.

    “The point is not that they are helping our enemy, but that they are our enemy. They are solving their own problems with [Ukraine’s] hands, that’s what it’s all about,” Putin stated.

    The conflict between Moscow and Kiev was orchestrated by Western elites, who seek to defeat Russia, he suggested. However, the collective West has been unable to achieve its goals, with the failure already showing in the change of its rhetoric on the conflict, the president explained.

    Those who only yesterday were talking about the need to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia are now looking for words on how to quickly end the conflict.

    “We want to end the conflict too, and as quickly as possible, but only on our terms. We have no desire to fight forever, but we are not going to give up our positions either,” Putin said.

    The battlefield situation is now changing, despite all the aid Kiev has received from the West, the president observed. Russia has been effectively outproducing the entire Western alliance militarily, he suggested, with the country’s output destined to grow even further.

    “Despite the fact that from time immemorial [the West] has had such a goal – to deal with Russia, it looks like we will deal with them first,” Putin stated.

    “You probably see it on the battlefield that they are gradually ‘deflating’. When a shell flies, it is probably difficult to tell whether they are ‘deflated’ or not, but in general you probably know: the situation on the battlefield is changing. And this is happening despite the fact that the entire so-called civilized West is fighting against us,” he told the servicemen.

    According to Russia’s latest estimates, over 380,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed or wounded during the conflict. Ukraine has also sustained heavy materiel losses, with an estimated 14,000 tanks and other armored vehicles destroyed. Nearly 160,000 troop losses were during Kiev’s botched counteroffensive, launched in early June last year, Moscow claims.

    The post Putin Names Russia’s Real Enemies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How Putin’s Explanation of Why Russia Invaded Ukraine Facilitated or Even Caused NATO to Win 2 New Members: Finland and Sweden

    NATO’s having won Finland as a member is the worst blow to Russia’s national security in decades, and it wouldn’t have happened if Putin had played his cards right. This fact will be explained here:

    No one is perfect; and, as I’ve explained elsewhere (such as here) I believe that Putin’s track-record during his now nearly 23 years of being the leader of Russia is vastly superior to that of any leader of any U.S.-and-allied country during any portion of that 23-year period. However, I shall explain here why I believe that Putin’s public-relations errors regarding his handling of Ukraine constitute a major flaw in his leadership-record and produced Finland’s becoming a NATO member — and potentially the most dangerous one to Russia in all of Europe.

    The most crucial thing to understand is why did Russia actually need to invade Ukraine? The answer is very simple (far simpler than Putin’s many and confusing statements about that). Putin’s many explanations never made clear the core reason: The U.S. Government has been planning to win a WW III by blitz-nuking The Kremlin so fast that Russia’s central command wouldn’t have enough time to press the button to launch its retaliatory missiles and bombers; and therefore immediately after that blitz-nuclear first-strike decapitation of Russia, the U.S. regime would be able entirely on its own schedule to then knock out virtually all of Russia’s retaliatory weaponry and so to win WW III with perhaps only a few million dead on its side and thus, finally, at long last, possessing (at a small enough cost in American lives so as to be attractive to the few individuals who actually control the U.S. Government) full control over Russia, which is the world’s most-natural-resources-rich country — which is why the U.S. regime was so set, for so long a time, on winning Ukraine as a NATO member. And this is also the reason why Obama finally grabbed Ukraine in 2014.

    The ideal place from which to launch that blitz attack against Russia would be Ukraine, because it has the nearest border to Russia’s central command in The Kremlin, which is only 317 miles (511 km) away from Ukraine — a mere five minutes of missile-flying time away — from Shostka in Ukraine, to Moscow in Russia. A mere five minutes away from decapitating Russia’s central command. That is the real answer to the crucial question of why did Russia actually need to invade Ukraine? Putin never clearly stated it, and never focused on it; and, so, in both Finland and Sweden (and throughout Europe), Russia’s essential defensive invasion of Ukraine was instead widely viewed as being aggressive not defensive: aggression against Ukraine, instead of defensive against America (which has controlled Ukraine ever since America’s February 2014 coup there). Thus, both Finland and Sweden (on the basis of that false impression) joined NATO, and American troops and weapons will be pouring into Finland even closer to The Kremlin than had previously been the case — almost as close as-if Ukraine DID join NATO. Maybe Ukraine will be kept out of NATO, but Finland, which is around 500 miles from The Kremlin, joined NATO largely because of Putin’s PR failure regarding his invasion of Ukraine.

    Just like in chess, the way to win the game is to capture the king, in war-strategy the way to win is to decapitate the opposite side’s leadership by capturing or disabling its Commander-in-Chief. The U.S. regime had started by no later than 2006 to plan for winning a WW III instead of to use its nuclear weapons only in order to work alongside Russia to PREVENT there being any WW III. During the George W. Bush Administration, neoconservatism became — and has remained since — bipartisan in both of America’s two political Parties. The only way that this “Nuclear Primacy” strategy can even conceivably be achieved would be via a blitz-nuclear attack beheading ’the enemy’.

    Russia has in place a “dead-hand” system to release, automatically-and-instantaneously after being beheaded, its entire arsenal against the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’), but the system can’t be tested before it’s used; and, so, whether it would function (which would require all parts of the system to function as planned) can only be a huge question-mark. Moreover: even if it would work, Russia’s central command would already have been eliminated; and, so, the dead-hand system is a dooms-day system in any case: it wouldn’t protect Russia. At best, it will result in M.A.D.: Mutually Assured Destruction. And if it fails, then Russia would lose WW III.

    America’s capturing Ukraine, which it did in 2014 by Obama’s brilliantly successful coup that he hid behind anti-corruption demonstrations on Kiev’s Maidan Square, was intended to make it possible for America to checkmate Russia by positioning a missile in or near Shostka. This was why Putin had established as being a red line that America must not cross, Ukraine’s possibly becoming a NATO member.

    On 17 December 2021, Putin buried in two proposed treaties — one delivered to Biden and the other to NATO — his demand for America and its colonies never to allow Ukraine into NATO, and he did this as quietly as possible and failed to explain to the public why Russia could never tolerate a possibility that Ukraine would join NATO. His proposed two treaties buried the entire matter of Ukraine, and mentioned “Ukraine” only once, in the propsal to NATO, by saying, “All member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commit themselves to refrain from any further enlargement of NATO, including the accession of Ukraine as well as other States.” He gave no hint of why Ukraine was the only nation that was singled-out to be named. Both of the proposed treaties were intended to be understood only by the recipients, not by any nation’s public. They weren’t written so as to make clear to the public what the motivation behind them was — though both of them could have been. Neither Biden nor NATO were willing to negotiate about anything in those two documents. There was just silence for three weeks, and neither of the two documents was published or discussed in the ‘news’-media. The Kremlin did nothing to facilitate access to the documents even to the press. Putin himself wanted it that way; he handled this as strictly a matter of private diplomacy, not at all of public relations, much less of helping the public to understand the Russian Government’s motivation behind the documents.

    Then, suddenly, and little reported or commented upon, on 7 January 2022, the AP headlined “US, NATO rule out halt to expansion, reject Russian demands” — every one of his demands. Putin now had no other option than to invade Ukraine to take it militarily so as to prevent any U.S. nuclear missile possibly becoming placed there — to do it BEFORE Ukraine would be already seriously on the road to NATO membership, because if he were to wait any longer, then it might already be too late — and there would then be zero chance once Ukraine would already be a NATO member.

    He invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

    He had done no public relations in order to help the publics in The West to understand WHY he invaded. His explanations seemed to have been intended to resonate ONLY to his fellow-Russians, NOT to any international audience.

    This was tragic because not only was Ukraine the MOST dangerous nation to be admitted into NATO, but the second-most dangerous nation to become a NATO member is Finland, which at Kotka is only 507 miles or 815 km. away from blitz-nuking Moscow (and that would be a 7-minute missile-flight-time away); and whereas Putin had done nothing in order to explain to their public that Ukraine was a unique and special case and that Russia at that time actually had no national-security worries about Finland, Finland’s public couldn’t see why he wouldn’t want to take their country too, now that Russia had invaded ‘democratic Ukraine’.

    As is normal for the U.S. regime and its agents, they had long been working upon the Finnish public in order to stir them to fear Russia; and polling is always one of the tools that it uses in order to manipulate public opinion in such a target-country. On 28 January 2022, Helsinki’s MTV News headlined (as autotranslated) “MTV Uutisten survey: Support for NATO membership has risen to 30 percent, opposition has clearly decreased – ‘It would be safer with the West’,” and reported:

    Opposition to NATO membership has decreased, while the position of more and more people is uncertain, according to a recent survey by MTV Uutisten. If Finland’s top management supported joining NATO, half of the Finns would already be on the side of NATO membership.

    Based on a survey conducted by MTV Uutisten, 30 percent of Finns support Finland’s application for NATO membership. 43 percent of those who responded to the survey oppose applying for membership, and 27 percent are unsure of their position. …

    The National Defense Information Planning Board (MTS) analyzed the support for NATO membership at the end of 2021. At that time, 24 percent of respondents supported applying for membership. More than half, or 51 percent, opposed applying for NATO membership.

    Since then, Russia has presented a list of demands to the West, which included, among other things, NATO’s commitment not to expand to the east. The concern for Europe’s security has been increased by the heavy military equipment that Russia has moved near the Ukrainian border.

    According to everyone, Russia’s actions are not yet so burdensome that they should apply to NATO. …

    In recent years, in NATO polls, support has typically been close to 20 percent and opposition over 50 percent.

    Based on the survey conducted now, the opposition is no longer as strong as before. In addition to the supporters of NATO membership, the number of undecideds has also increased. The difficulty of forming an accurate opinion is also evident in the comments. …

    In addition to the current NATO position, the respondents were asked whether Finland should apply for NATO membership if the top government was in favor of it.

    In this case, support for NATO membership rose from 30 percent to as much as  [NO — TO EXACTLY] 50 percent [saying that on this question they’d trust that the Government’s leaders would make the best decision on this matter]. 33 percent of the respondents chose not to answer, and 18 percent could not form their opinion.

    The majority of respondents would follow the government if it decided to join NATO.

    That was before Russia invaded Ukraine — a country that Finnish ‘news’-media had already long presented favorably against Russia and as being a victim of Russia’s opposing Ukraine’s ‘democratic revolution’ at the Maidan Square in February 2014. No Finnish news-medium existed that indicated this ‘democratic revolution’ to have been actually a U.S. coup. Finnish ‘news’-media had censored-out all of that actual history. When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Finns were therefore terrified, and the Finnish Government — right along with Sweden’s, which had similarly been worked on for decades by U.S. and its NATO agents — promptly requested NATO membership. On 16 September 2022, Gallup’s polling reported that 81% of Finns and 74% of Swedes approved of their country’s joining the NATO anti-Russian military alliance. Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, the figures had been almost the exact reverse.

    Presidential elections are expected to be held in Finland on Sunday, 28 January 2024, with a possible second round on Sunday, 11 February 2024. The leading candidate now is Alexander Stubb, who is one of Finland’s top CIA assets. In a 28 October 2023 campaign speech he said, “If I am elected president of the republic, I promise that Finland will support Ukraine as long as necessary. Ukraine is fighting for the whole civilized and free world – against oppression and tyranny. And that war it will win, has already won. Slava Ukraine! … Fortunately, Finland has now chosen its place. We are part of the alliance of Western democracies. The next president of the republic will literally be the international NATO president. … Our NATO path began to open with the Russian war of aggression. … I consider Russia’s attack on Ukraine to be the time of a new turning point in world politics.” (Actually, Obama’s 2014 coup in Ukraine was that.)

    But already, on 18 December 2023, Finland and the U.S. signed a Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA) enabling Washington to send troops there and store weapons and ammunition, up to and including nuclear weapons, at 15 locations in Finland. Drago Bosnik at South Front headlined “FINLAND’S NEW ‘DEFENSE’ DEAL WITH US EERILY REMINDS OF SIMILAR ONE WITH NAZI GERMANY”, and he wrote: “For Russia, this is particularly concerning, as Finland and Estonia, now both NATO members, are in close proximity to St. Petersburg, its second most important city.” However, St. Petersburgh isn’t actually a concern here any more than Miami was a concern when America in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis wouldn’t allow Soviet missiles to be posted in Cuba — Washington DC was the concern, and it was nearly a thousand miles farther away from Cuba than Moscow is from Ukraine. Similarly to JFK then, Russia’s worry now is how close Finland is to Moscow — not to St. Petersberg. And whereas Cuba was 1,131 miles away from DC, Finland is only 507 miles from Moscow. Putin never made clear that his concern regarding American nukes in Ukraine was the same as JFK’s was regarding Soviet nukes in Cuba — but twice as much so. If Putin had made that point clearly and often, then demagogues such as Stubb wouldn’t have been able to get the impact they did from phrases such as “Our NATO path began to open with the Russian war of aggression. … I consider Russia’s attack on Ukraine to be the time of a new turning point in world politics.” America has been the aggressor here — against Russia; Russia was by then forced, by America and by its NATO, to respond militarily, since all diplomatic efforts by Russia had been ignored by the aggressors. Just like JFK was not the aggressor in 1962, Putin was not the aggressor in 2022. Putin could easily have made that point, but he never did — he buried it in with a mess that in Western countries seemed like merely a blur. He handed the Russia-the-aggressor argument to America’s agents in Finland, and they ran with it and thereby easily succeeded to present Russia as the bogeyman, against which NATO represented safety. This was a major blunder by Putin — not just in Finland, but throughout The West.

    One might blame the Finnish (and Swedish) people for having fallen for what was actually the U.S. empire’s narrative on the Ukraine situation; but to do so would confuse the liars with their victims — the deceived public. For example: I personally submitted to all of Finland’s major ‘news’-media right after Finland’s Government expressed the intention to seek admission into NATO, arguing that to enter NATO would increase — NOT decrease — the danger to Finland’s national security, by causing Finland to thereby become targeted by Russia’s missiles (which had previously NOT been aimed at them); and all of those media refused even to reply — no questions or editorial suggestions, but simply refused to respond to or contemplate presenting a counter-argument. The Finnish public were never presented such an argument. Is that a ‘democracy’?

    Moreover: the same situation, of a widely deceived public falling into the grip of the U.S. empire and believing its lies, is widespread, not only within this or that nation. For example, on December 19th, the Danish peace-researcher and professor at Sweden’s Lund University, Jan Oberg, headlined at Dissident Voice, “How Much Longer Can Danes Snore While Their Security and Democracy are Being Stripped away and Danish Politics Increase the Risk of World War III?,” and he reported the very same trap being fallen-into by the Danes that Finns are falling into. Blaming this phenomenon on the victims, the public, instead of on the billionaires who have engineered and provided the trap (and who enormously profit from it), is simply more of the standard blame-the-victim morality.

    By this time, Putin ought to be well aware that it was a huge blunder. As I noted with concern on 28 October 2022, “NATO Wants To Place Nuclear Missiles On Finland’s Russian Border — Finland Says Yes”. His blunder was blatantly clear by that time. And I already had outlined, on 13 May 2022, “Russia’s Weak Response to Finland’s Joining NATO” and presented there a strategy to replace that weak response with a much stronger and entirely diplomatic strategy for Russia to terminate the NATO alliance. I am surprised that Putin still, even to the present day, has failed to initiate some such policy. His passivity in that regard is stunning.

    However, on 5 April 2023, since that proposed strategy wasn’t being even mentioned in the press by anyone but myself, I concluded that the time had come to lay out an alternative strategy, “Russia’s only safe response to Finland in NATO is to move Russia’s capital to Novosibirsk.” Whereas Finland (Kotka) is only 507 miles or 816 kilometers from Moscow, it is 2,032 miles or 3,271 kilometers from Novosibirsk.

    Furthermore: Novosibirsk is 2,716 miles or 4,372 kilometers from Japan (Hokkaido). And it is 2,371 miles or 3,815 kilometers from South Korea (Seoul). Placing Russia’s central command in Novosibirsk would eliminate the danger from the U.S. regime and its colonies.

    Obviously, if Russia’s capital city becomes relocated to Novosibirsk, then the Cold War (the danger that the U.S. empire poses to Russia) will effectively be ended. But Putin has initiated no new approach to addressing the problem that his own continuing blunder has largely assisted to cause to Russia’s national security.

    The post How Putin’s Explanation of Why Russia Invaded Ukraine Facilitated or Even Caused NATO to Win 2 New Members: Finland and Sweden first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Russia outlaws ‘international LGBT public movement’ as extremist

    Human rights activists say supreme court’s vague wording provides wide scope for persecution

    Russia’s supreme court has outlawed what it called an “international LGBT public movement” as extremist, in a landmark ruling that representatives of gay and transgender people warn will lead to arrests and prosecutions of the already repressed LGBTQ+ community.

    The ruling in effect outlaws LGBTQ+ activism in a country growing increasingly conservative since the start of the war in Ukraine. The “extremist” label could mean that gay, lesbian, transgender or queer people living in Russia could receive lengthy prison sentences if deemed by the authorities to be part of the so called “international LGBT public movement”.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Russia files lawsuit to crack down on LGBTQ+ community

    Supreme court to consider justice ministry request to outlaw ‘international LGBT public movement’ as extremist

    The Russian justice ministry on Friday said it had filed a lawsuit with the nation’s supreme court to outlaw what it called an “international LGBT public movement” as extremist, in the latest attacks against the country’s already suppressed LGBTQ+ community.

    The ministry said in an online statement that authorities had determined “signs and manifestations of extremist nature” in “the activities of the LGBT movement” in Russia, including “incitement of social and religious discord”.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Russian Jews fear Israel-Hamas war awakening sleeping antisemitism

    Dagestan riot and changing policy at Kremlin stir traumatic memories and prompt deep unease

    For Vladimir Putin’s more than two-decade rule, he has promoted himself as a friend and protector of the Jewish community, and he launched an invasion last year with the ostensible goal to “denazify” Ukraine.

    But the scenes of violence in Makhachkala, Dagestan, this week, as well as images of local people searching out Israeli passport holders in a hotel in the city of Khasavyurt, recalled darker moments in Russian history, when Cossacks rampaged through Jewish communities as local authorities looked on.

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