Will "Classified Documents" Be The Pretence Used To Flush The Pantloader Out Of The Whitehouse?

MoA  |  On Monday CBS launched a story about classified papers found in a former office of president Biden. I am curious why the story came out and why it came out now.

U.S. attorney reviewing documents marked classified from Joe Biden's vice presidency found at Biden think tank

Attorney General Merrick Garland has assigned the U.S. attorney in Chicago to review documents marked classified that were found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, two sources with knowledge of the inquiry told CBS News. The roughly 10 documents are from President Biden's vice-presidential office at the center, the sources said. CBS News has learned the FBI is also involved in the U.S. attorney's inquiry.

The material was identified by personal attorneys for Mr. Biden on Nov. 2, just before the midterm elections, Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president confirmed. The documents were discovered when Mr. Biden's personal attorneys "were packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.," Sauber said in a statement to CBS News.

The story was kept under the wraps for more than two month. Biden's lawyers, who allegedly found the documents, informed the National Archive which took possession them the next day. It then informed the Attorney General who assigned a U.S. attorney and involved the FBI.

That is at least how the story is told.

But I am curious on how much back and forth there was between Biden's lawyers and the White House after the find. That the lawyers did not ask Biden or his handlers how to proceed with the documents before informing the National Archive can be excluded. The alleged find was easy to hide. The National Archive is said to not have known anything about the documents. The lawyers were bound by their attorney client privilege that would have prohibited them from talking about the issue.

By informing the National Archive, which then involved others, it was made inevitable that someone would let the media know about this.

So why weren't those documents just burned up? Why not avoid the scandal that has now been reinforced by a second find of such documents, this time in a garage at Biden's home in Wilmington? Who made these decisions?

Biden is not an honest man when it comes to political issues. He is not a stranger to covering things up.

The decision to let this out, to not cover it up, is so far unexplained. The whole thing can only hurt Biden. It also disables the Democrats of using Trump's withholding of classified papers as a weapon against him.

Was it the very special content of the classified documents that made this move necessary? Or is there something else that we do not yet know about? Something that led to the judgment that the current limit hangout of some dirty linen is better than to have a real scandal come to the public's knowledge.

The whole thing is puzzling.

The Arctic Is Russian

politico  | Since the end of the Cold War, the Arctic has largely been free of visible geopolitical conflict. In 1996, the eight countries with Arctic territory formed the Arctic Council, where they agreed to environmental protection standards and pooled technology and money for joint natural resources extraction in the region. Svalbard, Europe’s northernmost inhabited settlement, just 700 miles south of the North Pole, perfectly represents this spirit of cooperation. While a territory of Norway, it is also a kind of international Arctic station. It hosts the KSAT Satellite Station, relied on by everyone from the U.S. to China; a constellation of some dozen nations’ research laboratories; and the world’s doomsday Seed Vault (where seeds from around the world are stored in case of a global loss in crop diversity, whether due to climate change or nuclear fallout). Svalbard, where polar bears outnumber people, is considered a demilitarized, visa-free zone by 42 nations.

But today, this Arctic desert is rapidly becoming the center of a new conflict. The vast sea ice that covers the Arctic Ocean is melting rapidly due to climate change, losing 13 percent per decade — a rate that experts say could make the Arctic ice-free in the summer as soon as 2035. Already, the thaw has created new shipping lanes, opened existing seasonal lanes for more of the year and provided more opportunities for natural resource extraction. Nations are now vying for military and commercial control over this newly accessible territory — competition that has only gotten more intense since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

An antenna within the KSAT Satellite Station, the world's largest ground station for polar orbiting satellites relied on from the U.S. to China. | Ola Lewitschnik for POLITICO

For the past two decades, Russia has been dominating this fight for the Arctic, building up its fleet of nuclear-capable icebreakers, ships and submarines, developing more mining and oil well operations along its 15,000 miles of Arctic coastline, racing to capture control of the new “Northern Sea Route” or “Transpolar Sea Route” which could begin to open up by 2035, and courting non-Arctic nations to help fund those endeavors.

At the same time, America is playing catch-up in a climate where it has little experience and capabilities. The U.S. government and military seems to be awakening to the threats of climate change and Russian dominance of the Arctic — recently issuing a National Strategy for the Arctic Region and a report on how climate change impacts American military bases, opening a consulate in Nuuk, Greenland, and appointing this year an ambassador-at-large for the Arctic region within the State Department and a deputy assistant secretary of defense for Arctic and Global Resilience. America’s European allies, too, have been rethinking homeland security, increasing national defense budgets and security around critical energy infrastructure in the Arctic as they aim to boost their defense capabilities and rely less on American assistance.

But 17 Arctic watchers — including Norwegian diplomats, State Department analysts and national security experts focusing on the Arctic — said they fear that the U.S. and Europe won’t be able to maintain a grip on the region’s energy resources and diplomacy as Russia places more civilian and military infrastructure across the Arctic, threatening the economic development and national security of the seven other nations whose sovereign land sits within the Arctic Circle.

Even as the U.S. says it has developed stronger Arctic policies, five prominent Arctic watchers I spoke with say that the U.S. government and military are taking too narrow a view, seeing the Arctic as primarily Alaska and an area for natural resource extraction, but not as a key geopolitical and national security battleground beyond U.S. borders. They say the U.S. is both poorly resourced in the Arctic and unprepared to deal with the rising climate threat, which will require new kinds of technology, training and infrastructure the U.S. has little experience with. Several U.S. government officials involved in Arctic planning told me in private they also fear a nuclear escalation in the Arctic, which would threaten to engulf Europe and its allies in a larger conflict.

“We’re committed to expanding our engagement across the region,” one of those officials, granted anonymity to speak candidly about a tense geopolitical region, told me, “but we’re not there yet.”

“The [Defense] Department views the Arctic as a potential avenue of approach to the homeland, and as a potential venue for great power competition,” America’s new deputy assistant secretary of defense for Arctic and Global Resilience, Iris A. Ferguson, wrote me in an email. Ferguson described Russia as an “acute threat” and also outlined fears that China, a “pacing threat” was seeking “to normalize its presence and pursue a larger role in shaping Arctic regional governance and security affairs.” (China has contributed to liquid natural gas projects and funded a biodiesel plant in Finland as part of its Belt and Road Initiative now reaching the Arctic.)

Sweden And Finland Joining NATO Has Nothing Whatsoever To Do With Ukraine

indianpunchline |  Sweden’s (or Finland’s) NATO membership isn’t exactly round the corner. Sweden is either unable or unwilling to fulfil Turkiye’s demands. Besides, there are variables at work here. 

Most important, the trajectory of the current Russian-brokered rapprochement between Ankara and Damascus will profoundly impact the fate of the Kurdish groups in the region — and the Kurdish-US axis in Syria. Washington has warned Erdogan against seeking rapprochement with President Bashar Al-Assad. 

What complicates matters further is that presidential and parliamentary elections are due in Turkiye in June and Erdogan’s political compass is set. Any change in his calculus can only happen  in the second half of 2023 at the earliest.

Now, 6 months is a long time in West Asian politics. Meanwhile, the Ukraine war will also have phenomenally changed by summer. 

Finland is ready to wait till summer, but Sweden (and the US) cannot. The heart of the matter is that Sweden’s NATO membership is not really about the war in Ukraine but is about containing the Russian presence and strategy in the Arctic and North Pole. There is a massive economic dimension to it, too. 

Thanks to climate change, the Arctic is increasingly becoming a navigable sea route. The expert opinion is that nations bordering the Arctic (eg., Sweden) will have an enormous stake in who has access to and control of the resources of this energy- and mineral-rich region as well as the new sea routes for global commerce the melt-off is creating. 

It is estimated that forty-three of the nearly 60 large oil and natural-gas fields that have been discovered in the Arctic are in Russian territory, while eleven are in Canada, six in Alaska [US] and one in Norway. Simply put, the spectre that is haunting the US is: “The Arctic is Russian.”

Moscow Warns Of Future Energy Wars (REDUX Originally Posted 5/19/09)

War games show that the capacity to wage war effectively will be constrained by resource depletion. Because of this fact, some state will seek the "advantage" of carrying out sooner and pre-emptively what's inevitably beyond that signpost up ahead. Al Jazeera | Russia has warned that military conflicts over energy resources could erupt along its borders in the near future, as the race to secure oil and gas reserves gains momentum. A Kremlin policy paper, which maps out Russia's main challenges to national security for the next decade, said "problems that involve the use of military force cannot be excluded" in competition for resources. The National Security Strategy's release coincides with a deadline for countries around the world to submit sea bed ownership claims to a United Nations commission, including for the resource-rich Arctic. The paper, signed off by Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, says international relations in the next 10 years will be shaped by battles over energy reserves. "The attention of international politics in the long-term perspective will be concentrated on the acquisition of energy resources," it said. "Amid competitive struggle for resources, attempts to use military force to solve emerging problems can't be excluded. "The existing balance of forces near the borders of the Russian Federation and its allies can be violated," it added. The document said regions including the Middle East, the Barents Sea, the Arctic, the Caspian Sea and Central Asia could all be at the centre of competing claims for resources. Russia, the world's biggest natural gas producer, has already accused the United States, with which it shares a small sea border, of coveting its mineral wealth. But Moscow is also finding its control over natural gas exports under threat, as the European Union seeks alternative supply routes that would bypass Russia and the Ukraine. The country is also embroiled in a territorial dispute with Norway over claims to the Arctic sea bed, where around 25 per cent of the world's untapped reserves are believed to lie underneath the ice.

 

Russia and 580 Billion Arctic Barrels..., (REDUX Originally Posted 9/26/08)

In Pravda;

Russia is determined to make decisive and successive decisions to anchor its rights for the oil and gas-rich water area of the Arctic Ocean. The secretary of the Russian Security Council, the former director of the Federal Security Bureau, Nikolai Patrushev, said yesterday that President Dmitry Medvedev ordered the government to develop a detailed plan of Russia’s state policy in the Arctic region before December 1, 2008. “We must ensure Russia’s national interests in the Arctic region for a long-term perspective,” Medvedev said at the meeting of the council. “Our first and fundamental goal is to turn the Arctic into Russia’s resource base of the 21st century. “We must defend our interests, although we realize that Arctic states – Canada , Norway, Denmark and the USA – will also be defending their interests,” Mr. Patrushev said. “First and foremost, Russia must designate the borderline in the Arctic south. We name the number of 18 percent of our territory and say that 20,000 kilometers is the state border in this region,” the Secretary of the Security Council said. “There are many problems here. It is not about coming to the Arctic to find natural resources there only,” the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Yuri Osipov said. “All these resources will be very hard to extract. The traditions of Russia ’s presence in the Arctic zone were formed long ago, so the future development of the territory must have the scientific platform involved,” he added. Russian polar explorers give the government credit for its interest in the problems of the northern region. However, many of them have serious questions to ask. “Judging upon the experience of our expeditions, I know that the protection of the Russian state borders leaves much to be desired,” the chief of the Marine Arctic Complex Expedition, Pyotr Boyarsky told The Vremya Novostei newspaper. The scientist and his colleagues believe that Russia should create a ring of specially protected territories in the Arctic, which will help Russia defend its rights on the Arctic . “The international community treats the status of such territories with great respect. Their appearance in the Russian Arctic sector will be a much more important argument than political or economic claims, Mr. Boyarsky said. German daily Die Zeit wrote that the struggle for the Arctic may become the zone, where world’s leading superpowers will collide.

 

The Bear Stretches..., (REDUX Originally Posted 5/19/08)

Russia accused of annexing the Arctic for oil reserves by Canada The battle for "ownership" of the polar oil reserves has accelerated with the disclosure that Russia has sent a fleet of nuclear-powered ice breakers into the Arctic. It has reinforced fears that Moscow intends to annex "unlawfully" a vast portion of the ice-covered Arctic, beneath which scientists believe up to 10 billion tons of gas and oil could be buried. Russian ambition for control of the Arctic has provoked Canada to double to $40 million (£20.5 million) funding for work to map the Arctic seabed in support its claim over the territory. The Russian ice breakers patrol huge areas of the frozen ocean for months on end, cutting through ice up to 8ft thick. There are thought to be eight in the region, dwarfing the British and American fleets, neither of which includes nuclear-powered ships. Canada also plans to open an army training centre for cold-weather fighting at Resolute Bay and a deep-water port on the northern tip of Baffin Island, both of which are close to the disputed region. The country's defence ministry intends to build a special fleet of patrol boats to guard the North West Passage. "The message from Vladimir Putin is that Russia will no longer be shackled to treaties signed by Yeltsin when he was half drunk or when Russia was on its knees," Russia rivals Saudi Arabia as the world's largest oil producer and is estimated to have the largest natural gas supplies. Energy earnings are funding a $189 billion (£97 billion) overhaul of its armed forces.

Why Did France And Germany Participate In U.S. Deception And Aggression Against Russia?

scheerpost  |  The U.S., having no need of or gift for statecraft, has long practiced what I’ve taken to calling the diplomacy of no diplomacy. You can’t expect much from bimbos such as Antony Blinken or Wendy Sherman, Blinken’s No. 2 at the State Department. All they can do is roar, even if they are mice next to any serious diplomat. 

But have the European powers now followed along? I fear to ask because I fear the answer. But I must, given recent events.

Early last year, when Petro Poroshenko stated publicly that the post-coup regime in Kyiv had no intention of abiding by diplomatic commitments it made in 2014-15 to a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis, a few eyebrows arched, but not over many. Who was the former Ukrainian president, anyway? I had him down from the first as a self-interested dummkopf who did what Washington told him to do and nothing more, no shred of statesmanship about him. 

It was another matter when, in early December, Angela Merkel admitted in back-to-back interviews that the European powers were up to the same thing. The objective of diplomatic talks in late 2014 and early 2015, the former German chancellor told Der Spiegel and Die Zeit, was not, as they had pretended, a framework for a federalized Ukraine in the cause of a lasting peace between its hostile halves: It was to deceive the Russians to give Kyiv time to prepare for a military assault on the Russian-speaking provinces in the east, whose people had refused to accept the U.S.–orchestrated coup that brought compulsively Russophobic Nazi-inflected nationalists to power in February 2014. 

Merkel’s revelations came as a shock, of course. But I contrived to mark down her comments as an inadvertent indiscretion in the autumn of a long-serving leader’s years. Merkel made her remarks more or less in passing. There was no boasting in them. She did not seem proud of her duplicity. 

Now François Hollande weighs in. A few days before the year ended, the former French president gave a lengthy interview to The Kyiv Independent. In it he made the Franco–German position perfectly clear: Yes, Merkel and I lied to the Russians when we negotiated the Minsk I and Minsk II Protocols in September 2014 and February 2015. No, we never had any intention of making Kyiv observe them or otherwise enforcing them. It was a charade from the first and—the part of this interview that truly galls—Hollande advanced this as wise, sound statesmanship.

Let us count the betrayals we must assign to the hapless Hollande and the inconstant Merkel. 

The betrayal of Russia and its president will go without saying. It is a matter of record that Vladimir Putin, who participated directly in the Minsk talks, worked long, long hours in the cause of a settlement that would leave Ukraine stable and unified, a freestanding post–Soviet republic on the Russian Federation’s southwestern order.  

Here I will remind readers of the animosity Putin expressed in his New Year’s address, three days after Hollande described the Franco–German sting operation in detail:

The West lied to us about peace while preparing for aggression, and today, they no longer hesitate to openly admit it and to cynically use Ukraine and its people as a means to weaken and divide Russia.

What Is The U.S. Strategic Objective For It's War On Russia?

strategic-culture |  But was the destruction of Russia always the main strategic U.S. aim? Is the objective not – rather – to ensure the survival of the financial and associated military structures, both U.S. and international, that permit huge profits and the transfer of global savings to accrue to the western security ‘Borg”? Or, simply put, the preservation of the dominance of U.S. financial hegemony.

As Oleg Nesterenko writes “this survival is simply impossible without military-economic, or more precisely, military-financial world domination. The concept of survival at the expense of world domination was clearly articulated at the end of the Cold War by Paul Wolfowitz, the U.S. Under Secretary of Defence, in his so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine, which viewed the United States as the only remaining superpower in the world and whose main goal was to maintain that status: “to prevent the reappearance of a new rival either in the former Soviet Union or elsewhere that would be a threat to the order previously represented by the Soviet Union””.

The point here is that though the logic of the situation would seem to demand an U.S. pivot from an unwinnable Ukraine war to a ‘move’ to another ‘threat’, in practice the calculus is likely more complicated.

The celebrated military strategist Clausewitz, made a clear distinction between what we now call ‘wars of choice’ and what the latter termed ‘wars of decision’ – the latter being existential conflicts, by his definition.

The Ukraine war generally is assumed to fall into the first category of ‘a war of choice’. But is this right? Events have unfolded far from as expected in the White House. The Russian economy has not collapsed – as smugly predicted. President Putin’s support stands high at 81%; and collective Russia has consolidated around Russia’s wider strategic objectives. Furthermore, Russia is not isolated globally.

Essentially, Team Biden may have indulged in jaundiced thinking – projecting onto today’s very different, culturally Orthodox Russia, opinions that they formed during the earlier era of the Soviet Union.

May it be that Team Biden’s calculus then, has had to shift with the dawning understanding of these unforeseen outcomes. And especially, the exposure of the American and NATO military challenge as being inferior to its reputation?

This was a fear Biden actually exposed in his White House meeting during the Zelensky visit before Christmas. Would NATO survive such candour? Would the EU remain intact? Grave considerations. Biden said he had spent hundreds of hours speaking with EU leaders to mitigate these risks.

More to the point, would western markets survive such candour? What happens if Russia, over the winter months, brings Ukraine to the verge of system collapse? Will Biden and his strongly anti-Russian administration simply throw up their hands and concede victory to Russia? Based on their maximalist rhetoric and commitment to Ukrainian victory, that appears unlikely.

The point here is that markets remain highly volatile as the West stands at the cusp of a recessionary contraction that the IMF has warned likely will cause fundamental damage to the global economy. That is to say, the U.S. economy resides poised at the most sensitive of moments – at the edge of a possible financial abyss.

Might not Biden ‘going explicit’ that sanctions on Russia are not likely to be reversed; that supply-line disruption will persist; and that inflation and interest rates will be heading higher, be sufficient to push markets ‘over the edge’?

These are unknowns. But the anxiety touches on U.S. ‘survival’ – that is to say, the survival of the dollar hegemony.

La CucaRacha And The UkroNazis Expect France To Self-Immolate In Order To Punish Russia

Reuters |  Kyiv expects the European Union to include Russian state nuclear energy company Rosatom in its next round of sanctions over the war in Ukraine, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Monday.

Shmyhal said after talks in Kyiv with Frans Timmermans, a vice-president of the European Union's executive European Commission, that Russia's nuclear energy industry should be punished over the invasion of Ukraine more than 10 months ago.

Russia has occupied the Zaporizhzia nuclear power station in southeastern Ukraine since last March and President Vladimir Putin issued a decree last October transferring control of the plant from Ukrainian nuclear energy company Energoatom to a subsidiary of Rosatom. Kyiv says the move amounts to theft.

"We are actively working with our European partners on providing support in four areas: demilitarisation of the Zaporizhzhia NPP, supply of electrical equipment, opportunities to import electricity from the EU, and sanctions against Russia," Shmyhal wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

"We expect that the 10th package (of EU sanctions) will contain restrictions against Russia's nuclear industry, in particular Rosatom. The aggressor must be punished for attacks on Ukraine's energy industry and crimes against ecology."

Although the EU has progressively tightened sanctions against Russia over the war in Ukraine, it has not imposed sanctions directly on Rosatom.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations' nuclear power watchdog, has repeatedly expressed concern over shelling of the Zaporizhzhia plant, which each side blames on the other.

The IAEA has also proposed the establishment of a nuclear safety and security protection zone around what is Europe's largest nuclear power plant.

Shmyhal also said he and Timmermans, the EU's climate policy chief, had agreed that Ukraine's post-war reconstruction should be based on green principles.

He thanked Timmermans for an initiative to start a strategic partnership between Ukraine and the EU "in the field of renewable gases" but gave no details.

 

 

 

France Facing A Catastrophic Nuclear Energy Crisis

express.co.uk  |  French President Emmanuel Macron is said to be in a "panic" as the issues with France's ageing nuclear reactors have laid bare the flaws in the country's energy plans, an expert has told Express.co.uk. Sixteen out France's 56 nuclear reactors are currently offline due to corrosion and maintenance issues, sending its normal power output levels plummeting in recent months. Prior to these problems, France's nuclear fleet generated 70 percent of the country's electricity. 

According to Dr Paul Dorfman, a nuclear expert from the University of Sussex, France's "chickens are coming home to roost" as the decision to rely so heavily on nuclear is appearing to backfire, with further delays to repairs also announced this week. 

He said: "France was nuclear power excellence, post-war all buffed up with power - it said it was going to be the top dogs. So it had a vast quantity of nuclear reactors dotted all around France. But what is happening now is that its chickens are coming home to roost. 

"EDF (owned by the French state) is 43billion euros in debt, it faces a 100billion euro bill for mandatory safety upgrades, and a significant number of its reactors continue to be offline due to ageing corrosion problems. It also faces a huge decommissioning and waste management bill that is uncosted - they are just beginning to say 'oh my god'. 

"Around a quarter of their reactors are still offline at winter when they really need it. They are even importing power from Germany after being a net exporter. France is panicking about what to do about renewables and insulation."

But all this could be of concern for Britain, which does rely on some French imports that are sent across the Channel via interconnectors. National Grid has previously warned that if the UK fails to shore up enough energy imports from Europe this winter, it may have to roll out organised blackouts in the "deepest, darkest" nights of the coldest months of the year. 

However, while France's nuclear power issues have sparked concern, Dr Dorfman said the UK is luckier than France in that it is one of the leading players in offshore wind, which could provide a vital lifeline this winter. 

He said: "The UK has seriously thought about renewables in the last few years, without any question. But there have been problems with onshore wind and legislation issues. There also problems with the legislation for solar, but offshore wind has helped enormously. But the UK hasn't really considered about the lowest hanging through which is energy efficiency and insulation."

When asked whether the UK is lucky that it has not copied the French model, Dr Dorfman responded: "We are hugely lucky. France is in a catastrophic situation in terms of the vast debt that it owes in nuclear and the existential waste and decommissioning problem that it is facing...The UK is certainly in a better position in terms of offshore windpower, but it needs to get its act together in terms of allowing much greater onshore wind and much greater solar...and all the things that make up a balanced energy portfolio.

 

 

Western MSM Not Covering Massive Genets Jaune Cost Of Living Protests In France

why aren’t US media covering massive protests in France over inflation and cost of living? pic.twitter.com/CWO3z0ntPt

— dilan (@dilanpcook) January 8, 2023

Mediocrity Is A Non-Negotiable Prerequisite For Status In The New World Order

Indianpunchline |  “From an overall strategic perspective, it is hard to emphasise enough the devastating consequences if Putin were to be successful in achieving his objective of taking over Ukraine. This would rewrite international boundaries in a way that we have not seen since World War II. And our ability to reverse these gains and to support and stand by the sovereignty of a nation, is something that resonates not just in Europe, but all around the world.” 

The cat is out of the bag, finally — the US is fighting in Ukraine to preserve its global hegemony. Coincidence or not, in a sensational interview in Kiev, Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov also blurted out in the weekend that Kiev has consciously allowed itself to be used by NATO in the bloc’s wider conflict with Moscow! 

To quote him, “At the NATO Summit in Madrid (in June 2022), it was clearly delineated that over the coming decade, the main threat to the alliance would be the Russian Federation. Today Ukraine is eliminating this threat. We are carrying out NATO’s mission today. They aren’t shedding their blood. We’re shedding ours. That’s why they’re required to supply us with weapons.” 

Reznikov, an ex-Soviet army officer,  claimed that he personally received holiday greeting cards and text messages from Western defense ministers to this effect.The stakes couldn’t be higher, with Reznikov also asserting that Ukraine’s NATO membership is a done thing.

Indeed, on Saturday, Pentagon announced the Biden Administration’s single biggest security assistance package for Ukraine so far from the Presidential Drawdown.Evidently, the Biden Administration is pulling out all the stops. Another UN Security Council meeting has been scheduled for Jan. 13.

But Putin has made it clear that “Russia is open to a serious dialogue – under the condition that the Kiev authorities meet the clear demands that have been repeatedly laid out, and recognise the new territorial realities.”

As for the war, the tidings from Donbass are extremely worrisome. Soledar is in Russian hands and the Wagner fighters are tightening the noose around Bakhmut, a strategic communication hub and lynchpin of Ukrainian deployments in Donbass. 

On the other hand, contrary to expectations, Moscow is unperturbed about sporadic theatrical Ukrainian drone strikes inside Russia. The Russian public opinion remains firmly supportive of Putin.

The commander of the Russian forces, Gen. Sergey Surovikin has prioritised the fortification of the so-called ‘contact line,’ which is proving effective against Ukrainian counterattacks.

Pentagon is unsure of Surovikin’s future strategy. From what they know of his brilliant success in evicting NATO officers from Syria’s Aleppo in 2016, siege and attrition war are Surovikin’s forte. But one never knows. A steady Russian build-up in Belarus is underway. The S-400 and Iskander missile systems have been deployed there. A NATO (Polish) attack on Belarus is no longer realistic.

On January 4, Putin hailed the New Year with the formidable frigate Admiral Gorshkov carrying “cutting-edge Zircon hypersonic missile system, which has no analogue,” embarking on “a long-distance naval mission across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean Sea.”

To Be Smart, Charismatic, And Effective Makes You An Automatic Enemy Of The Empire

presstv  |  Gen. Soleimani did see the Big Picture all across West Asia, from Cairo to Tehran and from the Bosphorus to the Bab-al-Mandeb. He certainly foresaw the inevitable “normalization” of Syria in the Arab world – and even with Turkey, now a work in progress.

He arguably had imprinted in his brain the possible timeline followed by the Empire of Chaos to completely ditch Afghanistan – though certainly not the extent of the humiliating retreat – and how that would reconfigure all bets from West Asia to Central Asia.

What he certainly didn’t know was that the Empire left Afghanistan to concentrate all its Divide and Rule/strategy of chaos bets on Ukraine, in a lethal proxy war against Russia.

It’s easy to see Gen.Soleimani foreseeing Abu Dhabi’s Mohammad bin Zayed (MbZ), MbS’s mentor, placing his bets simultaneously on an Israel-Emirates free trade deal and a détente with Iran.

He could have been part of the diplomatic team when MbZ’ssecurity advisor Sheikh Tahnoonmet with President Raisi in Tehran over a year ago, even discussing the war in Yemen.

He could also have foreseen what took place this past weekend in Brasilia, on the sidelines of the dramatic return of Lula to the Brazilian presidency: Saudi and Iranian officials, in neutral territory, discussing their possible détente.

As the whole chessboard across West Asia is being reconfigured at breakneck speed, perhaps the only developmentGen.Soleimani would not have foreseen is the petro-yuan displacing the petrodollar “in the space of three to five years”, as suggested by Chinese President Xi Jinping in his recent landmark summit with the GCC.

I have a dream

The profound reverence towards Gen. Soleimani expressed by every layer of Iranian society – from the grassroots to the leadership – has certainly translated into honoring his life’s work by finding Iran’s deserved place in multipolarity.

Iran is now solidified as one of the key nodes of the New Silk Roads in Southwest Asia. The Iran-China strategic partnership, boosted by Tehran’s accession to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)in 2002, is as strong geoeconomically and geopolitically as the interlocking partnerships with two other BRICS members, Russia and India. In 2023, Iran is set to become a member of BRICS+.

In parallel, the Iran/Russia/China triad will be deeply involved in the reconstruction of Syria – complete with BRI projects ranging from the Iran-Iraq-Syria-Eastern Mediterranean railway to, in the near future, the Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline, arguably the key factor that provoked the American proxy war against Damascus.

Soleimaniis today revered at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, at the al-Aqsa mosque in Palestine, at the dazzling late baroque Duomo in Ragusa in southeast Sicily, at a stupa high in the Himalayas, or a mural in a street in Caracas.

All across the Global South, there’s a feeling in the air: the new world being born – hopefully, more equal and fair - was somehow dreamed of by the victim of the murder that unleashed the Raging Twenties.

As The Ukro-Nazis Get Eradicated Militarily They Will Take It Out On The Most Vulnerable

strategic-culture |  The Kiev Nazi junta is taking decisive steps to eradicate every vestige of Russian Orthodox heritage on the territory it still controls. Besides the already outlawed Russian language, religious institutions are also a principal target. Over the last two months, as the regime’s prospects have turned increasingly precarious and survival uncertain, it has been conducting probably the last but also the most painful of its pogroms. Numerous churches and facilities of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church in communion with the Moscow Patriarchy have been stormed by the secret police and priests, monks, and laypeople arrested and harassed. Without even a pretence of legal procedure, parishes belonging to the legitimate Church have been handed over to the unrecognised church entity set up in 2018 for the express purpose of supplanting it, with the connivance of the corrupt and renegade Ecumenical Patriarchy of Constantinople. Quite naturally, one of the main targets of this persecution is the symbolic Kiev Pechersk Monastery overlooking the capital. It is under the jurisdiction of the canonical church.

In November, it was searched by the secret police and its abbot, archimandrite Paul, and the monastics were aggressively mistreated on the pretext of looking for evidence of political activity hostile to the regime. The junta then proceeded to draft a law that would ban church entities suspected of having ties with foreign ecclesiastical centres, a measure clearly aimed at the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is in communion with the Patriarchy of Moscow and commands the loyalty of the majority of the population.

🇺🇦 Today in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, a man entered the Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God and cut the priest’s throat. Father Anthony is in intensive care now. pic.twitter.com/1BvKJDKpAE

— 🅰pocalypsis 🅰pocalypseos 🇷🇺 🇨🇳 🅉 (@apocalypseos) January 3, 2023

Hesitant to overplay its hand and seize at once Ukraine’s holiest religious shrine, the junta has perfidiously adopted a gradualist approach, choosing instead an intermediate solution that should not alarm unduly the war- and terror-weary public. Arbitrarily and without explanation it has closed off the Monastery’s upper floors, decreeing that December 31, 2022, would be the last day that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church would be allowed to conduct religious services there. 

Needless to say, none of these outrages have been noted or condemned by the human rights and rule of law watchdogs of the collective West. And how could they possibly have been, given that the perpetrators are their own Ukrainian puppets? Public admission of such foul deeds would demolish the mendacious narrative fabricated to misrepresent those thugs as champions of freedom and democracy.

There is a compelling argument that the persecution of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine is not just a local project but part of a broader scheme, executed in every instance on instructions by the same external decision-making centres. The giveaway is the ultimatum of the Baltic statelets to their local Orthodox churches, which also are in communion with the Moscow Patriarchy, to either sever ties or face repercussions. Such concerted assaults on the freedom of conscience had not been seen even at the height of the cold war. Nor had it occurred to any of the Western governments which were at war with Germany to demand of their local Roman Catholic hierarchies to either sever ties with the Vatican, which was located in the territory of Axis belligerent Italy, or be placed outside the law. But that is exactly what did occur to them now.

 

La CucaRacha's Intensive Pogrom Against Orthodox Christianity

marksleboda  |  In religious terms, Ukraine is largely an Eastern Orthodox nation, just like Russia. Close to 70% of the population currently identifies as Orthodox Christian.

For over a thousand years a common Orthodox Christian religion and Church united the peoples of what are today the separate states of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus in faith and culture. Since the 14th century the nominal ecclesiastic Patriarch of that common Orthodox faith was located in Moscow. For most of that time the peoples were united politically as well. 

And endless sea of Western “expert” articles and media reports rant on about the threat of the Church and how the Russian government “weaponizes” it as instrument of soft power, much as Hollywood serves as a weaponized instrument of US soft power.

However there has always been a general understanding that due to the basic right to “freedom of religion” that this soft power is not something that should be politically challenged or restricted.
I mean how often do you hear in the media about the state of Israel weaponizing the “Jewish faith” or Saudi Arabia weaponizing Sunni Islam?

But whether it is “freedom of the press”,” freedom of speech, or “Freedom of religion” is there any single thing that has made the West cast off the thin veneer of their supposed values and show their true authoritarian colors like Russia?

A decision was made following the US-backed Maidan Putsch in 2014 that in order to permanently geopolitically divide Ukraine from Russia that the cultural and religious bonds uniting the two peoples must be severed as well. 

 
The creation of a new “Orthodox Church of Ukraine” (OCU) with a new Patriarch in Kiev was pushed by the Kiev Putsch regime and manufactured into being in 2018.

The Kiev Patriarch Filaret even gave CIA ops chief, Jack Devine, an award for his support in the creation of the new ecclesiastically- independent Ukrainian Orthodox church. Incidentally he gave an award to US neocon John McCain as well. That should tell you everything you need to know.

Since seizing power 2014 and accelerating dramatically in the last year, the US-backed Putsch regime in Kiev has been carrying out a very real pogrom against the Orthodox churches and parishioners across Ukraine who do not accept the rule and strictures of its new ly manufactured Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) , this after the older and still largest Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) officially suspended its nominal ecclesiastical ties with the Orthodox Patriarch in Moscow after the start of the Russian intervention in the Ukrainian civil conflict in February 2014.

They even made very public statements against the Russian intervention, including a procession by its priests against the Russian and Donbass siege of the NeoNazi Azov-held Azovstal Steel Plant in Mariupol.

But that isn’t good enough for the Zelenskiy regime in Kiev. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, its priests, and its parishioners are still regarded with hostility and decried as “fifth columnists” that need to be cleansed from Ukraine.

 It is believed that whatever they proclaim, deep inside they do not hold absolute loyalty to the US-backed Putsch regime in Kiev and don’t truly hate Russia and Russians enough.

   

La CucaRacha Didn't Start Nazi Persecution Of The Orthodox But He Exponentially Accelerated It

orthochristian |  Despite the fact that many churches of the war-torn districts of Donbass are destroyed, the faithful keep praying and are continuing the liturgical life on ruins of their shrines. 

On the feast of the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos the parish of the Church of St. John of Kronstadt in Kirovskoye gathered for the first Divine Liturgy after the August’s shelling. The service was celebrated in the open air near ruins of the church which cannot be restored, reports the Horlivka and Sloviansk Diocese’s website.

On August 23, during artillery shelling of the town one shell broke through the roof in the center of the church and brought down the ceiling onto the city residents who were praying at the evening service. Three people were killed and several more people severely injured. Among those injured was the second priest of the church, Archpriest Sergy Piven. During the same shelling, one shell hit a hospital where two people were killed and many injured. 

The shelling is continuing in the town even now. According to the church Rector, Archpriest George Tsyganov, even in these days of the truce declared not long ago, the war is going on. Nearly every day there are new victims among the civilian residents and their houses are being damaged. Now, with coming of cold weather, many families are returning to the town in spite of the shelling.

It was decided to resume celebration of services near the ruined church because the parish of St. John of Kronstadt is the only church in the town. And many believers of Kirovskoye cannot imagine their lives without Liturgy. At the present time, Divine Liturgies are served every Sunday: during warm weather—in the church courtyard in front of the temple, during bad weather—in the summer kitchen building near it. 

Despite the lack of financial assets, the congregation members are not losing heart and are continuously helping the people who have remained in the town. There is a humanitarian aid collection center on the territory of the parish—warm clothes and other things for homeless fire victims and families in need are brought here from all over the town.

Until recently, the parish has on a voluntary basis helped rescue families from under the shelling and taken them to other Ukrainian towns or to the border with the Russian Federation. A parish driver, assistant churchwarden Vyacheslav Gusakovsky, was killed during one of such journeys while he was driving back from the Russian border. Later the Ukrainian media accused the slain driver of transporting weapons and explosives.

 

 

 

 

The West Is Weak Where It Matters And In Ways That It Cannot Fix

aurelian |   These problems are coming together, to some extent, with the widespread diffusion of automatic weapons, and the spread of ethnic organised crime groups in the suburbs of major European cities. Together with the increasing hold of organised Islamic fundamentalism on the local communities, this has created a series of areas where governments no longer wish to send the security forces, because of the fear of violent confrontation, and where these groups exert an effective monopoly of violence themselves. Again, it’s not clear what current military or paramilitary capabilities would be of any real use in dealing with such situations, and there is the risk of other, non-state, actors intervening instead.  (It’s worth adding that we are not talking about “civil war” here, which is a quite different issue)

So the existing force-structures of western states are going to have problems coping with the likely domestic security threats of the near future. Most western militaries are simply too small, too highly specialised and too technological to deal with situations where the basic tool of military force is required: large numbers of trained and disciplined personnel, able to provide and maintain a secure environment, and enforce the monopoly of legitimate violence. Paramilitary forces can only help to a certain extent. The potential political consequences of that failure could be enormous. The most basic political question, after all, is not Carl Schmitt’s infamous “who is my enemy?” but rather “who will protect me?” If modern states, themselves lacking capability, but also with security forces that are too small and poorly adapted, cannot protect the population, what then? Experience elsewhere suggests that, if the only people who can protect you are Islamic extremists and drug traffickers, you are pretty much obliged to give your loyalty to them, or if not, to some equally strong non-state force that opposes them.

In a perverse kind of way, the same issues of respect and capability also arise at the international level. I’ve already written several times about the parlous state of conventional western forces today, and the impossibility of restoring them to something like Cold War levels. Here, I just want to finish by talking about some of the less obvious political consequences of that weakness.

At its simplest, relative military effectiveness influences how you view your neighbours and how they view you. This can involve threats and fear, but it doesn’t have to. It means, for example, that the perception of what regional security problems are, and how to deal with them, is going to be disproportionately influenced by the concerns of more capable states. (Thus the influential position enjoyed by Nigeria in West Africa, for example). This isn’t necessarily from a crude measure of size of forces either: in the old NATO, the Netherlands probably had more influence than Turkey, though its forces were much smaller. Within international groupings—formal alliances or not—some states tend to lead and others to follow, depending on perceptions of experience and capability.

Internationally—in the UN for example—countries like Britain and France, together with Sweden, Canada, Australia, India, and a few others, were influential because they had capable militaries, effective government systems and, most importantly, experience of conducting operations away from home. So if you were the Secretary-General of the UN, and you were putting together a small group to look at the possibilities for a peace mission in Myanmar, who would you invite? The Argentinians? The Congolese? The Algerians? The Mexicans? You would invite some nations from the region, certainly, but you would mainly focus on capable nations with a proven track record. But in quite complex and subtle ways, patterns of influence, both at the practical and conceptual level, are changing. The current vision even of what security is, and how it should be pursued, is currently western-dominated. That will be much less the case in the future.

This decline in influence will also apply to the United States. Its most powerful and expensive weapons—nuclear missiles, nuclear submarines, carrier battle groups, high performance air-superiority fighters — are either not usable, or simply not relevant, to most of the security problems of today. We do not know the precise numbers and effectiveness of Chinese land-based anti-shipping missiles for example, but it’s clear that sending US surface ships anywhere within their range is going to be too great a risk for any US government to take. And since the Chinese know this, the subtle nuances of power relations between the two countries are altered. Again, the US has found itself unable to actually influence the outcome of a major war in Europe, because it does not have the forces to intervene directly, and the weapons it has been able to send are too few and in many cases of the wrong kind. The Russians are obviously aware of this, but it is the kind of thing that other states notice as well, and then has consequences.

Finally, there is the question of the future relationship between weak European states in a continent where the US has ceased to be an important player. As I’ve pointed out before, NATO has continued as long as it has because it has all sorts of unacknowledged practical advantages for different nations, even if some of these advantages are actually mutually exclusive. But it’s not obvious that such a state of affairs will continue. No European nation, nor any reasonable coalition of them, is going to have the military power to match that of Russia, and the US has long been incapable of making up the difference. On the other hand, this is not the Cold War, where Soviet troops were stationed a few hundred kilometres from major western capitals. There will actually be nothing really to fight about, and no obvious place to do the fighting. What there will be is a relationship of dominance and inferiority such as Europe has never really known before, and the end of such shaky consensus as remains on what the military, and security forces in general, are actually for. I suspect, but it’s no more than that, that we are going to see a turning inward, as states try to deal with problems within their borders and on them. Ironically, the greatest protection against major conflicts may be the inability of most European states, these days, to conduct them. Weakness can also have its virtues.

Russians = Backwardness = Savages = Orcs

Jamestown |   Since 2008, Russia has consistently sought to adopt and introduce command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities to the Armed Forces as part of its conventional military modernization plans. At their core, those efforts are rooted in developing a Russian variant of network-centric warfare, reflecting changes in the international strategic environment as well as accompanying transformation in the means and methods of conducting warfare.

After many years of analysis, discussion and planning, the Russian military is now well on the path toward the fuller formation of a network-centric capability that will present challenges for any potential adversary. Thus, Russia’s Armed Forces, together with their numerous technological advances, are confidently entering the high-tech battlespace.

• Military science and military forecasting;
• The character of future conflict;
• Rooting future warfare in the lessons of the past;
• Strategic deterrence and strategic foresight;
• Network-centric warfare;
• War in space;
• Deep defense in information warfare;
• Asymmetric warfare;
• Psychotronic weapons;
• Climate weapons;
• Reflexive control;
• Nanotechnologies.[60]

The concept of network-centric warfare is closely tied to the RMA, with the advances and practical application unfolding through complex processes in the enhancement of US military combat power, particularly in the 1990s. According to Russian military specialists, this meant new means and methods of conducting warfare, integrating “technical reconnaissance, automation and control of fire damage by means of information and telecommunication networks and data transmission to enhance the effectiveness of combat operations through harmonization and coordination of available forces and means based on a common information space.”

The upsurge in interest in network-centric concepts among Russian military scientists since 2008 reflects a clear influence from the senior military and defense leadership. In 2010, Russia’s General Staff Academy published an extensive collection of open-source materials dealing with the concept of network-centric warfare: Setetsentricheskaya voyna: Daydzhest po materialam otkrytykh izdaniy i SMI (Network-Centric Warfare: Digest on Materials of Open Publications and Mass Media).[67] Moreover, the Russian military scientific community continues to maintain considerable focus on network-centric warfare, especially following and analyzing its evolution within the United States military. In 2018, for example S. I. Makarenko and M. S. Ivanov published a 901-page study: Setetsentricheskaya voyna—printsipy, tekhnologii, primery i perspektivy (Network-Centric Warfare—Principals, Technologies, Examples and Perspectives).[68]

It is clear, therefore, that within the existing body of professional Russian science, there is persistent interest in network-centric warfare. But the emerging view of the capability in the Russian context is cautious, and many specialists warn against the state investing too heavily in this area, fearing wastage of resources. As such, these experts tend to counsel against seeing its adoption as a panacea. It is also vital to understand that Russian theorists see network-centric warfare capability as an offensive rather than defensive capability, and they envisage it serving as a tool against other high-technology adversaries.^[69]

In the published writings of Russian military scientists, a deep understanding and body of knowledge exists concerning Western military approaches to network-centric warfare; they tend to analyze the operational experience of such operations and draw conclusions concerning the relative strengths and weaknesses of such approaches. Additionally, Russian specialists have sought to study and draw lessons from examples of Western militaries, such as Sweden’s, that tried and later abandoned efforts to introduce network-centric warfare—in order to avoid these pitfalls in Russia. Russian analyses of US/NATO network-centric capability are also closely linked to how Main Intelligence Directorate (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye—GRU) specialist officers follow, assess and understand the concept and the key trends involved. An outstanding example is Colonel Aleksandr Kondratyev.

 

 

 

Biden And Team Go To Mexico

This will be hard for Joe. He's going to Mexico -- along with clown advisors Blinken and Sullivan, Kamala was not invited in spite of her skin color and border expertise.

AMLO is similar to Putin: stoic, polite, nerves of steel, long memory, well informed, able to control agendas and conversations. He and his able staff have been preparing for this meeting with Biden and Trudeau/Freeland. They will be polite and likely maintain a focus on border issues along with trade but the reception already looks set up to be chilly. AMLO just informed Biden that he will need to land at an airport way outside the city which means he'll need to endure a 60 minute ride through traffic to get to the meeting. Same for Trudeau.

Mexican media reporting that President Joe Biden and Air Force One will NOT land next week at Mexico's new Felipe Ángeles Airport, rejecting AMLO's public request to do so.

The reason is security concerns about the drive to the city, according to Mileniohttps://t.co/GbO79Tq4Qv

— Eric Martin (@EMPosts) January 4, 2023

"The new airport is about 30 miles north of Mexico City’s National Palace, where the summit of North American leaders will take place, and traffic can mean the drive can take more than an hour. The more convenient Mexico City International Airport, which has serviced the capital since 1931, is about five miles from the Mexican version of the White House.

Biden will visit Mexico for his first international trip in the Western Hemisphere since taking office last year amid a record-breaking wave of illegal immigration across the border between the two countries. AMLO last year blamed Biden for inspiring the border rush, saying, “Expectations were created that with the government of President Biden there would be a better treatment of migrants. And this has caused Central American migrants, and also from our country, wanting to cross the border thinking that it is easier to do so.”

NYPost |  This takes air traffic control to a whole new level.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is asking President Biden to land Air Force One at a new airport farther from the center of Mexico City when he visits next month — describing it as a favor to quell domestic criticism of the project.

The unusual request sets up a potentially awkward start to the visit and would require Biden’s motorcade to add time to its commute when the president arrives Jan. 9 for talks with López Obrador and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“I am taking the opportunity to tell [Biden] that out of friendship, out of diplomacy, we ask him that his plane land at the Felipe Ángeles International Airport,” the 69-year-old Mexican president, known by his initials, AMLO, said Wednesday at a press conference.

AMLO said Trudeau had already agreed to land at the more distant airport, which opened in March, and said he was presenting his request for Biden to the US Embassy, according to Mexico City’s Excélsior newspaper.

Biden previously visited Mexico as vice president in February 2016, when he brought his son Hunter with him aboard Air Force Two after hosting his Mexican business associates at the official vice presidential residence in Washington.

Hunter Biden is under federal investigation for potential crimes including tax fraud and unregistered foreign lobbying linked to an array of influence-peddling operations while his father was vice president and held sway in countries such as Mexico, China and Ukraine. House Republicans, who retake power next week, are vowing to determine Joe Biden’s role in his family’s overseas consulting work.

Joe Biden in 2015 posed for a group photo with his son and Mexican billionaires Carlos Slim and Miguel Alemán Velasco in DC. In 2016, Hunter Biden emailed Alemán’s son, apparently from Air Force Two en route to Mexico, complaining that he hadn’t received reciprocal business favors after “I have brought every single person you have ever asked me to bring to the F’ing White House and the Vice President’s house and the inauguration.”

 

Cartel de Sinaloa Gives AMLO 72 Hours To Free Ovidio - Or Else!!!

intelslava |  There has been some speculation that Mexican authorities did this at the behest of the United States in the lead-up to the meeting of North American leaders next week in Mexico City. There is, however, reason to be skeptical of such; such a violent response by CDS was to be expected after the Battle of Culiacán in 2019. If Sinaloa's demands aren't met and they do follow through with their threats, the deterioration in the security situation could place the meeting in jeopardy.

Such would be a blow to U.S. interests, given Washington's foreign policy of late has increasingly placed an emphasis on the role of Mexico within American strategy. Likewise, Chinese reach in Latin America is growing, so the more the U.S. has to focus resources on Mexico, the more it is constrained in operating elsewhere in the region to combat this trend.

Finally, there are more immediate political considerations at play. Mexico in 2021 was the 2nd largest trading partner of the United States, with total value of this commerce estimated at $661 Billion. This is important, as Mexican national authorities have previously identified CDS (and CJNG) as a serious threat to cross border trading relations, given their influence in the Mexican borderlands. Disruptions to this trade would affect not just important states like Texas and California, but the national economy at large.