wsws |This is the first article in a multi-part series.
The
US and its NATO allies, Canada included, are waging war on Russia in all
but name. Their governments, corporate media and establishment parties
claim that the NATO powers are funneling tens of billions of dollars in
weaponry to Kiev in order to protect Ukraine’s “sovereignty” and save
its “democracy.” In reality, their provocative actions have brought the
world to the precipice of a global conflagration fought with nuclear
weapons.
As the World Socialist Web Site has exhaustively documented,
American imperialism long planned for and instigated war with Moscow
over Ukraine. It led NATO’s eastward expansion over the past three
decades to encircle Russia, and goaded Putin into launching his
reactionary invasion by refusing to so much as discuss Moscow’s security
concerns. Washington and Wall Street are determined to subjugate
Russia, plunder its abundant resources and tighten thereby the
military-strategic encirclement of China.
In pursuit of these
predatory geostrategic and economic objectives, the US and its allies
have aligned with Ukraine’s far-right parties and fascist militia; that
is, with forces that venerate and seek to emulate the Ukrainian fascists
who collaborated with and sought the Nazis’ patronage during World War
II. In pursuit of an ethnically “pure” Ukrainian state, the Ukrainian
fascists participated in some of the most monstrous crimes of the 20th
century, including the Holocaust.
Washington, aided and abetted by
its German and Canadian allies, used the fascist Right Sector as its
shock troops in the February 2014 coup that removed Ukraine’s elected
pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. The imperialist powers then
placed in power a government committed to harnessing Ukraine to NATO and
the European Union. Washington subsequently rearmed and reorganized
Ukraine’s armed forces, overseeing the merger of the fascist Azov
Battalion into Ukraine’s security forces. Today these fascists comprise
an important part of Ukraine’s elite troops. As Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky has himself boasted, they are pivotal frontline
fighters in the Russian-majority Donbas region.
Canadian
imperialism has long sought to pass itself off as an altruistic force in
global affairs. But Ottawa is playing an especially provocative and
belligerent role in the Ukraine war. This is a continuation of its
substantial role in the war’s preparation and instigation.
Under
both Liberal and Conservative governments, Canada has worked closely
with Washington, first in its drive to expand NATO to include former
Warsaw Pact countries and Soviet republics; and then, since 2016, to
permanently deploy NATO expeditionary forces on Russia’s borders. Canada
leads one of NATO’s four enhanced Forward Presence Battle Groups in
Poland and the Baltic states, and routinely dispatches warplanes and
warships menacingly on Russia’s doorstep. From 2015, hundreds of
Canadian Armed Forces’ trainers were deployed to Ukraine, where they
worked alongside American and British military personnel to reorganize
Ukraine’s armed forces. This included helping integrate and train the fascists of the Azov battalion.
moderndiplomacy | The Ukrainian war started when the democratically elected
President of Ukraine (an infamously corrupt country), who was committed
to keeping his country internationally neutral (not allied with either
Russia or the United States), met privately with both the U.S. President
Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
in 2010, shortly after that Ukrainian President’s election earlier in
2010; and, on both occasions, he rejected their urgings for Ukraine to
become allied with the United States against his adjoining country
Russia. This was being urged upon him so that America could position its
nuclear missiles at the Russian border with Ukraine, less than a
five-minute striking-distance away from hitting the Kremlin in Moscow.
On 1 March 2013 inside
America’s Embassy to Ukraine in Kiev, a series of “Tech Camps” started
to be held, in order to train those Ukrainian nazis for their leadership
of Ukraine’s ‘anti-corruption’ organizing. Simultaneously, under Polish
Government authorization, the CIA was training in Poland the military
Right Sector leaders how to lead the coming U.S. coup in neighboring
Ukraine. As the independent Polish investigative journalist Marek
Miszczuk headlined for the Polish magazine NIE (“meaning “NO”) (the original article being in Polish): “Maidan secret state secret: Polish training camp for Ukrainians”. The article was published 14 April 2014. Excerpts:
An informant who introduced himself as Wowa called the “NIE”
editorial office with the information that the Maidan rebels in Wrocław
are neo-fascists … [with] tattooed swastikas, swords, eagles and crosses
with unambiguous meaning. … Wowa pleadingly announced that photos of
members of the Right Sector must not appear in the press. … 86 fighters
from the then prepared Euromaidan flew over the Vistula River in
September 2013 at the invitation of the Polish Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. The pretext was to start cooperation between the Warsaw
University of Technology and the National University of Technology in
Kiev. But they were in Poland to receive special training to overthrow
Ukraine’s government. … Day 3 and 4 – theoretical classes: crowd
management, target selection, tactics and leadership. Day 5 – training
in behavior in stressful situations. Day 6 – free without leaving the
center. Day 7 – pre-medical help. Day 8 – protection against irritating
gases. Day 9 – building barricades. And so on and on for almost 25 days.
The program includes … classes at the shooting range (including three
times with sniper rifles!), tactical and practical training in the
assault on buildings. …
Excited by the importance of the information that was presented to me, I started to verify it.
The Office of the Press Spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs refused to answer the questions about the student exchange
without giving any reason. It did not want to disclose whether it had
actually invited dozens of neo-fascists to Poland to teach them how to
overthrow the legal Ukrainian authorities. …
Let us summarize: in September 2013, according to the information
presented to me, several dozen Ukrainian students of the Polytechnic
University will come to Poland, at the invitation of the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs. In fact, they are members of the Right Sector, an
extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz –
he declined to comment on his visit to Legionowo.
Poland’s ‘fact-checking’ organization is (appropriately) titled demagog dot org (Demagog Association), and it is funded by the Stefan Batory Foundation. Demagog’s article about that NIE
news-report rated it “NIEWERYFIKOWALNE” or “ NOT VERIFIABLE”. The sole
reason given was: “The Ministry [of Foreign Affairs] strongly opposes
such news, emphasizing that the weekly (magazine) has violated not only
the principles of good taste, but also raison d’etat (reasons of
state).” No facts that were alleged in Miszczuk’s article were even
mentioned, much less disproven. How can his article be “unverifiable” if
the evidence that it refers to isn’t so much as even being checked?
Fair | These “disinformation” claims also ignore the more contemporary
evidence that Western officials have an explicit agenda of weakening
Russia and even ending the Putin regime. According to Ukrainska Pravda (5/5/22; Intercept, 5/10/22),
in his recent trip to Kyiv, UK prime minister Boris Johnson told
Volodymyr Zelensky that regardless of a peace agreement being reached
between Ukraine and Russia, the United States would remain intent on
confronting Russia.
The evidence doesn’t stop there. In the past months, Joe Biden let slip
his desire that Putin “cannot remain in power,” and US officials’ have
become more open about their objectives to weaken Russia (Democracy Now!, 5/9/22; Wall Street Journal, 4/25/22).
Corporate media have cheered on these developments, running op-eds in
support of policies that go beyond a defense of Ukraine to an attack on
Russia (Foreign Policy, 5/4/22; Washington Post, 4/28/22), even expressing hope for a “palace coup” there (The Lead, 4/19/22; CNN Newsroom, 3/4/22).
As famed dissident Noam Chomsky said in a discussion with the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill (4/14/22):
We can see that our explicit policy—explicit—is rejection
of any form of negotiations. The explicit policy goes way back, but it
was given a definitive form in September 2021 in the September 1 joint policy statement that was then reiterated and expanded in the November 10 charter of agreement….
What it says is it calls for Ukraine to move towards what they called
an enhanced program for entering NATO, which kills negotiations.
When the media denies NATO’s culpability in stoking the flames of war
in Ukraine, Americans are left unaware of their most effective tool in
preventing further catastrophe: pressuring their own government to stop
undermining negotiations and to join the negotiating table. Dismissing
these realities threatens to prolong the war in Ukraine indefinitely.
Squelching dissent
As the Biden administration launches a new Disinformation Governance
Board aimed at policing online discourse, it is clear that the trend of
silencing those who speak out against official US narratives is going to
get worse.
Outlets like Russia Today, MintPress News and Consortium News have been banned or demonetized by platforms like Google and its subsidiary YouTube, or services like PayPal. MintPress News (4/25/22) reported YouTube
had “permanently banned more than a thousand channels and 15,000
videos,” on the grounds that they were “denying, minimizing or
trivializing well-documented violent events.” At the same time,
platforms are loosening the restrictions on praising Ukraine’s far right
or calling for the death of Russians (Reuters, 3/11/22). These policies of asymmetric censorship aid US propaganda and squelch dissent.
After receiving a barrage of complaints from the outlet’s supporters, PayPal seemingly reversed its ban of Consortium News’ account, only to state later on that this reversal was “mistaken,” and that Consortium was in fact permanently banned. The outlet’s editor-in-chief Joe Lauria (5/4/22) responded to PayPal’s ban:
Given the political climate it is reasonable to conclude that PayPal was reacting to Consortium News’ coverage of the war in Ukraine, which is not in line with the dominant narrative that is being increasingly enforced.
As Western outlets embrace the framing of a new Cold War, so too have
they embraced the Cold War’s McCarthyite tactics that rooted out
dissent in the United States. With great-power conflict on the rise, it
is all the more important that US audiences understand the media’s
increasing repression of debate in defense of the “dominant narrative.”
In the words of Chomsky:
There’s a long record in the United States of censorship,
not official censorship, just devices, to make sure that, what
intellectuals call the “bewildered herd,” the “rabble,” the population,
don’t get misled. You have to control them. And that’s happening right
now.
What, specifically, is the "DHS's work" when it comes to disinformation? Do they decide what is and is not disinformation? Do they use specific powers to "combat" it? It's not just the new Board itself that is unclear. DHS's entire role in all of this is unclear - and creepy. https://t.co/0PJGcTlqul
politico | President Zelensky has made ending the war in Ukraine’s eastern
Donbas region—which was instigated and is sustained by Russia and has
claimed 13,000 lives and counting—his administration’s top priority. He has made some progress toward that goal, overseeing a historic prisoner swap
with Russia that saw one of Ukraine’s most respected filmmakers as well
as 24 sailors captured last November returned home. According to
information from the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights, fewer
civilians have been killed in the conflict this year than any year
previously. A July cease-fire at the contact line seems to be holding
firmer than its previous incarnations.
For Zelensky,Trump could be the key to ending the war in the
Donbas. The American president has made his admiration for and cozy
relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin no secret. Likewise,
Trump’s views about Ukraine—ambivalence about the status of Crimea,
which Russia illegally seized in 2014, and support for ending the
sanctions placed on Russia in response to its activities in Ukraine—make
Ukrainians nervous. A cordial relationship between Trump and Zelensky
could give Trump insight into Ukraine’s perspective and give Ukraine
leverage it did not enjoy under former President Petro Poroshenko, who
struggled to connect with the U.S. leader.
Ukraine does not have the luxury to pick and choose its international
partners, something I learned when I served as an adviser to the
Ukrainian Foreign Ministry in 2016 and 2017 under the auspices of a
Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship. Ukraine relies on its larger, richer
allies as it attempts to shed its post-Soviet legacy. The United
States—its largest and richest ally—provides not only for the now-famous
military aid package, but hundreds of millions of dollars in civilian aid,
supporting projects in just about every sector. The containment of the
Chernobyl nuclear site, fighting HIV/AIDS, building cybersecurity
capabilities, and creating government bodies that are more responsive to
citizens are just a few of the projects that U.S assistance makes
possible. Continued reform, including the pursuit of energy independence
from Russia and the cleanup of the court system, the biggest obstacle
to Ukrainian anti-corruption efforts, would be imperiled without this
assistance. The United States also plays a key role in corralling
European partners to uphold their own sanctions on Russia and to
continue to support Ukraine as it walks the long and often bumpy road of
democratic reform.
There are reasons to believe Zelensky’s slippery answers to President
Trump’s repeated requests that he investigate former Vice President Joe
Biden and his son Hunter were deliberate. According to congressional
staff who recently visited Ukraine and spoke with senior Ukrainian
officials, the Zelensky administration was upset at feeling that it was
being used and didn’t want to be a pawn in America’s domestic political
machinations. In the phone call and at the meeting of the two presidents
Wednesday at the U.N. General Assembly, Zelensky was careful not to let
the name Biden cross his lips. Instead, Zelensky says he will “look
into the situation” related to Burisma, the company on whose board
Hunter Biden sat, more generally. At the U.N., Zelensky also mentioned a
few of the other important cases he hoped his new prosecutor would
investigate in addition to Burisma, and maintained that he didn’t want
to be dragged into American politics.
Nina Jankowicz, who served as a Fulbright fellow, works in a press room
at Volodymyr Zelensky's campaign headquarters in 2019 in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Jankowicz was recently named the head of the Department of Homeland
Security's Disinformation Governance Board.
WaPo | On
the morning of April 27, the Department of Homeland Security announced
the creation of the first Disinformation Governance Board with the
stated goal to “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland
security.” The Biden administration tapped Nina Jankowicz, a well-known
figure in the field of fighting disinformation and extremism, as the
board’s executive director.
In
naming the 33-year-old Jankowicz to run the newly created board, the
administration chose someone with extensive experience in the field of
disinformation, which has emerged as an urgent and important issue. The
author of the books “How to Be a Woman Online” and “How to Lose the Information War,”
her career also featured stints at multiple nonpartisan think tanks and
nonprofits and included work that focused on strengthening democratic
institutions. Within the small community of disinformation researchers,
her work was well-regarded.
But
within hours of news of her appointment, Jankowicz was thrust into the
spotlight by the very forces she dedicated her career to combating. The
board itself and DHS received criticism for both its somewhat ominous
name and scant details of specific mission (Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said
it “could have done a better job of communicating what it is and what
it isn’t”), but Jankowicz was on the receiving end of the harshest
attacks, with her role mischaracterized as she became a primary target
on the right-wing Internet. She has been subject to an unrelenting
barrage of harassment and abuse while unchecked misrepresentations of
her work continue to go viral.
theintercept |Before he walked into the Tops
Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York, on a mission to murder as many
innocent Black shoppers as he could, 18-year-old Payton Gendron posted a
rambling manifesto online outlining his motives.
His reasoning was familiar from other far-right shooters:
This country isn’t going to be resource-rich enough for everyone in the
future, so a race war over what is left is necessary today. However
heinous, this vision of a bleak, impoverished future, in which there is
not enough wealth to go around and the environment is near collapse, is
motivating an ever-growing number of young men like him to carry out
racist massacres across the West.
People who commit acts of terrorism tend to
act for more than one reason. The racist hatred of Gendron toward Black
Americans, Jews, and immigrants was ultimately what made his murders
possible. For that, many are to blame, including far-right politicians
and talking heads who have continued to wink at the “great replacement”
as being the true source of white Westerners’ troubles.
Addressing this violence, though, also requires considering the role
of scarcity — not a conspiracy theory, but a very real system of extreme
inequality and ecological destruction. It is a system in which the most
wealthy and powerful continue to see their wealth and power grow — at
the expense of the masses. Faced with actual strained resources and
environmental calamity, some of these forsaken people are turning to
dark fantasies like the “great replacement theory” to make sense of it
all.
This is not just about a toxic media ecosystem, but the larger way we
have organized our lives in the West. This organizational structure
could go by many names — neoliberalism, consumer capitalism,
exploitation — but there can be little doubt that the pessimism it
engenders is leading many young people into nihilism.
Payton Gendron, 18, allegedly was recording with a camera affixed to
his helmet and broadcasting to Twitch when he killed 10 people in a
racially-motivated attack at a Tops Friendly Market, police and reports
said.
Hochul said social media outlets need to crack down on content
concerning white supremacy and other dangerous ideologies and found it
inexcusable that Gendron’s graphic stream wasn’t taken down “within a
second.”
“These outlets must be more vigilant in monitoring social media
content. And certainly, the fact that this act of barbarism, this
execution of innocent human beings could be livestreamed on social media
platforms and not taken down within a second, says to me that there is a
responsibility out there,” Hochul, a Buffalo native, told reporters at a press conference Saturday night.
“And we’re going to continue to work on this and make sure that those
who provide these platforms have a moral and ethical, and I hope to
have a legal responsibility to ensure that such hate cannot populate
these sites, because this is the result,” she said.
Law enforcement officials said that Gendron drove three and a half
hours from his home in Conklin in Broome County to the Buffalo
supermarket — which is located in a predominantly black neighborhood.
Reportedly armed with multiple weapons and tactical body armor, Gendron opened fire in the grocery store parking lot before shooting more victims inside. Of the 13 people he shot, 11 were black and two were white.
A Twitch spokesperson told The Post the streaming service “has a
zero-tolerance policy against violence of any kind and works swiftly to
respond to all incidents.”
The thing to remember about ANY/EVERY single person who leaves Azovstal previously, presently or in the future is this:
1. The Russians are not stupid or sloppy.
2. First they are taken under guard to a processing place. Wounded are
under guard during treatment until fit for normal processing.
3. They are scrupulously checked for real identity by their papers and
every civil database the Russians have access to. Local Mariupol LDPR
investigators are also there to use their local knowledge to verify all
claims of civilian neutrality.
4. They are stripped to look for any fascist sympathetic tattoos, men
and women alike, it has been reported by one woman evacuee.
5. They are FINGERPRINTED AND PHOTOGRAPHED and their future intended
residential address documented as they may be called as witnesses to war
crimes in future criminal trials. The LDPR and Russians are fkn serious
about legal retributions for the 8 year war and about making sure that
not a single nazi sympathiser ever gets back into social circulation.
6. They are interrogated about all personal matters and all knowledge
about what is going in inside Azovstal. Obviously, anyone NOT completely
forthcoming is held for future interrogation.
7. Only after all the above tests, they are sorted into:
* free civilians to go home, their choice of Uk or LD or RF territory or to refugee camps;
* harmless Ukrainian Regular soldiers who go to LDPR POW camps awaiting
exchange for Regular Russian POWs as per Geneva Convention;
* foreign low level mercenary fighters who go to LDPR POW camps awaiting criminal prosecution;
* high level foreigner (eg NATO staff), who most probably go to FSB
Headquarters in Moscow for future intel and political purposes;
* Azov fighters who will all get kept as non-swapable POWs to be
prosecuted by the LDPF for war crimes. The LDPR Public Prosecutors have
publically clearly stated their guilty punishments may be as high as the
death penalty.
So that's the strict filtering regime. So have no fear that any of
the "Rats of Azovstal" will escape their rightful fates. Even after
another 1000-2000 surrenders, the exact same processing will be done to
each and every one. The LDPR and Russian military jails are gunna be
real full, real soon.
thecradle | Strategic primacy, for Byzantium, more than diplomatic or military, was a psychological affair. The word Strategia itself is derived from the Greek strategos
– which does not mean “General” in military terms, as the west
believes, but historically corresponds to a managerial politico-military
function.
It all starts with si vis pacem para bellum: “If you want
peace prepare for war.” Confrontation must develop simultaneously on
multiple levels: grand strategy, military strategy, operative, tactical.
But brilliant tactics, excellent operative intel and even massive
victories in a larger war theater cannot compensate for a lethal mistake
in terms of grand strategy. Just look at the Nazis in WWII.
Those who built up an empire such as the Romans, or maintained one
for centuries like the Byzantines, never succeeded without following
this logic.
Those clueless Pentagon and CIA ‘experts’
On Operation Z, the Russians revel in total strategic ambiguity,
which has the collective west completely discombobulated. The Pentagon
does not have the necessary intellectual firepower to out-smart the
Russian General Staff. Only a few outliers understand that this is not a
war – since the Ukraine Armed Forces have been irretrievably routed –
but actually what Russian military and naval expert Andrei Martyanov
calls a “combined arms police operation,” a work-in-progress on
demilitarization and denazification.
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is even more abysmal in
terms of getting everything wrong, as recently demonstrated by its chief
Avril Haines during her questioning on Capitol Hill. History shows that
the CIA strategically blew it all the way from Vietnam to Afghanistan
and Iraq. Ukraine is no different.
Ukraine was never about a military win. What is being accomplished is
the slow, painful destruction of the European Union (EU) economy,
coupled with extraordinary weapons profits for the western
military-industrial complex and creeping security rule by those nations’
political elites.
The latter, in turn, have been totally baffled by Russia’s C4ISR
(Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance
and Reconnaissance) capabilities, coupled with the stunning
inefficiency of their own constellation of Javelins, NLAWs, Stingers and
Turkish Bayraktar drones.
This ignorance reaches way beyond tactics and the operational and
strategic realm. As Martyanov delightfully points out, they “wouldn’t
know what hit them on the modern battlefield with near-peer, forget
about peer.”
thesaker | Make no mistake about it: The tragic war that is currently taking
place on Ukrainian battlefields is not between the Russian Federation
and the Ukraine, but between the Russian Federation and the
US-controlled NATO. The latter, also called ‘the collective West’,
promotes an aggressive ideology of organised violence, a politically-
economically- and militarily-enforced doctrine euphemistically known as
‘Globalism’. This means hegemony by the Western world, which arrogantly
calls itself ‘the international community’, over the whole planet. NATO
is losing that war, which uses NATO-trained Ukrainians as its proxy
cannon fodder, in three spheres, political, economic and military.
Firstly,
politically, the West has finally understood that it cannot execute
regime change in Moscow. Its pipedream of replacing the highly popular
President Putin with is CIA stooge Navalny is not going to happen. As
for the West’s puppet-president in Kiev, he is only a creature of
Washington and its oligarchs. A professional actor, he is unable to
speak for himself, but is a spokesman for the NATO which he loves.
Secondly,
economically, the West faces serious resistance to the 6,000 sanctions
it has imposed on Russia and Russians. Those sanctions have
backfired. In the West, we can testify to this every time we buy fuel or
food. The combination of high inflation (10% +) and even higher energy
prices, caused almost solely by these illegal anti-Russian sanctions,
are threatening the collapse of Western economies, much more than
threatening Russia or China. As a result of this reverse effect of
sanctions against Russia, the rouble is at a three-year high, standing
at about 64 to the US dollar and rising, though immediately after the
sanctions it had briefly gone down to 150 to the dollar.
After
strenuously denying that they would do it, already most countries in
Europe (at least 17 for now), including Germany and Italy, have agreed
to open accounts with Gazprombank, as Russia advised them to do and to
pay for oil and gas in roubles. And this number is growing by the week.
The problems will be even greater with food shortages, as the world food
chain is highly integrated and the agricultural production of Russia
and the Ukraine (now controlled by Russia) is at least 40% of the
world’s grain production. Just days ago it was announced that Russia
expects record grain production this year (130 million tonnes). Russia
may yet demand payment in roubles for all this as well.
The sanctions against Russia have divided Europe and are threatening to divide NATO. President
Erdogan of Turkey, a NATO member, has announced that he would veto the
entry to NATO of Finland and Sweden into NATO. At the same time, Russia
has announced that it will cut off Finland’s natural gas supply. Swedish
leaders are re-thinking their entry to NATO.
Thirdly, militarily,
it is clear that the Ukraine, with huge numbers of desertions and
surrenders, has no chance of winning the war against Russia. Most of its
military equipment has already been wiped out and newly-delivered and
often antiquated Western equipment will make little difference, even if
it is not destroyed by Russian missiles as soon as it reaches the
Ukraine. The conflict could now be over within weeks, rather than
months. The US ‘Defense Secretary’ (= Minister for Offense), Lloyd
Austin, has desperately called the Russian Defence Minister Sergey
Shoigu to beg for a ceasefire. Would you agree to a ceasefire when in
less than three months and with only 10% of your military forces you
have already occupied an area greater than England inside the Ukraine,
an area that produces 75% of Ukrainian GDP?
The panic of financial
disaster in the West has begun to set in. As a result, the French
President Macron has told President Zelensky (that is, told Washington)
to give up part of Ukraine’s sovereignty and at last start serious
negotiations with Russia. Macron is also trying to free French
mercenaries from Azovstal in Mariupol, but the problem is much bigger
than this, as the whole of Europe is facing economic meltdown. And the
Italian Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, has asked President Biden to
contact President Putin and ‘give peace a chance’. Note that Mario
Draghi is a former president of the European Central Bank and a Goldman
Sachs puppet – just as Macron is a Rothschild puppet.
There have
always been empires and invasions throughout history. However, they have
always been local and not been justified as the only possible global
ideology, a ‘New World Order’, to be imposed by violence all over the
planet. After the NATO war is over, lost by ‘the collective West’, NATO
Centralism, the ideology of a ‘Unipolar World’, controlled from
Washington, must end. However, Centralism must also come to an end
everywhere else, like that under Soviet-period Moscow (1).
ria.ru |MOSCOW, May 17 - RIA Novosti.More than 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers and mercenaries ended up in a cauldron near Severodonetsk and Lisichansk in the Luhansk People's Republic, Vitaly Kiselyov, Assistant Minister of the Interior of the LPR,saidon Channel One.
"There will be 15-16 thousand in full," he said, answering the host's question whether "a huge group of nationalists from the Armed Forces of Ukraine" really turned out to be in the cauldron in the areas of these cities.
WaPo | Ending
one of the most dramatic battles of the Ukraine war, hundreds of
Ukrainian fighters, many seriously wounded, gave up their weeks-long defense
of a besieged steel plant in the strategic port city of Mariupol on
Monday and were taken to Russian-controlled territory, while hundreds
more remained trapped in the plant Tuesday as delicate negotiations
continued.
“Ukraine
needs Ukrainian heroes alive,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his
nightly address, as the delicate operation took place. “We hope that we
will be able to save the lives of our guys. Among them are the
seriously wounded. They are being provided with medical aid.”
Russia’s
Defense Ministry portrayed the exit of 264 Ukrainian soldiers from the
Azovstal steel plant as a surrender and a Russian victory. To Ukrainian
officials, the fighters were heroes whose desperate last stand changed
the course of the war, by tying up Russian forces for weeks in the
battle for Mariupol, preventing them from sweeping across southern
Ukraine.
Russia
won effective control of Mariupol weeks ago, securing a crucial land
bridge from Russia to Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula it annexed in
2014. But fate of fighters trapped in tunnels under the steel plant
became a desperate symbol of Ukrainians’ will to fight and die for their
land, a key factor in Ukraine’s military successes against Russia’s
larger, more powerful army.
Mariupol’s Azovstal Iron and Steel Works and its network of underground tunnels served as a shelter and final foothold for hundreds of Ukrainian fighters, including many from the controversial far-right Azov Regiment, as well as trapped civilians.
They
were holed up in the facility for weeks under an intense Russian
assault, before all women, children and elderly people were evacuated
under an agreement earlier this month. Those who made it to safety described a brutal siege in cold and fetid bunkers, where they lived without sunlight as food and water supplies dwindled.
natyliesbaldwin |This is the second part of a three-part series on ‘the Blob’ that runs American foreign policy. Read part one here.
WASHINGTON – The Russian war on Ukraine has seen ‘the Blob’ reassert
itself with a vengeance in the 11 weeks since Russia announced the
commencement of hostilities on February 24.
This article will examine the forces shaping President Joe Biden’s
approach to the Ukraine crisis, and then move on to explore the state of
foreign policy debate, or lack thereof, within Biden’s Democratic
Party.
Former high-ranking military officials, intelligence analysts and
diplomats who served at various points during the Clinton, Bush, Obama
and Trump administrations paint a picture in recent conversations with
Asia Times of the likely policy options being presented to President
Biden as he faces the gravest crisis on the European continent since the
Second World War.
The past month has seen the Biden administration, by fits and starts
and then seemingly all at once, adopt a militarized, hardline approach
toward Russia, declaring Ukraine’s “victory” over Russia as the only
acceptable outcome.
While Biden remains steadfast in assuring the public that there will
be no “boots on the ground,” in point of fact, current and former
officials have suggested that US paramilitaries are indeed on the
ground, with military assistance being coordinated by the new appointee
to the Biden National Security Council, retired US Army Lieutenant
General Terry Wolff.
According to retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served
as secretary of state Colin Powell’s chief of staff, the
administration is planning for a protracted conflict in Ukraine.
Wilkerson says “they are extremely desirous of a protracted conflict
because they want to effect regime change in Moscow, destabilize Russia
and then take on China. That is their long-term geopolitical strategy.”
It is helpful here to take a moment to describe the prevailing mindset of the top national security officials closest to Biden.
At the very beginning of Biden’s term, a message was sent loud and
clear to both supporters and critics in Washington that it would
not tolerate any deviations from the establishment orthodoxy and that
the perspective and expertise of outsiders were not welcome.
No fierce challenger of the establishment, Rojansky had been a
fixture in track-two level talks between American and Russian political
scientists and former government officials.Russia expert Matthew
Rojansky’s views are unwanted by the Biden administration. Image:
Twitter / Bucknell University
Yet when news leaked that Rojansky was under consideration for an
appointment to Biden’s National Security Council (NSC), the knives came
out and the Democratic hawks made Rojansky their prey. The appointment
was torpedoed – and quickly.
Rojansky is now head of a US-Russia-focused non-profit, far from the
corridors of power. That’s worrying because, outside of Central
Intelligence Agency director William Burns, deep expertise on Russia is
thin on the ground in the Biden administration, according to former and
current officials who spoke to Asia Times.
But if Russia expertise is lacking, what the vast majority of Biden’s foreign policy appointments do have are deep connections to
the reflexively hawkish and dominant wing of the Democratic foreign
policy establishment, and that, in part, explains the trajectory of the
administration’s policy in Ukraine.
The evolution of Biden’s policy was described to this correspondent
by former ambassador Chas Freeman, now a senior fellow at the Watson
Institute at Brown University who remains deeply engaged in the foreign
policy debate in Washington. Freeman said: “It took about eight weeks
for the administration, in the person of NSC Advisor [Jake] Sullivan, to
enunciate war aims for the proxy war.
“At the outset of its response to the Russian invasion, the
administration was careful to limit possible provocation of the
Russians. But, not having seen direct retaliation from Moscow, it has
become progressively less cautious.
“This lack of caution is aided by the fact that it is Ukrainians, not
Americans, who are dying and by the success of pro-Ukrainian propaganda
and the effective Western ban on contradictory information from
non-Ukrainian sources. There is a risk that the administration will
inhale its own propaganda and underestimate the risks it is taking,”
said Freeman.
George Beebe, former head of Russia analysis at the CIA and a senior
member of the intelligence service who served on the national security
staff of vice president Dick Cheney, agrees.
“It seems to me that the United States and NATO are experiencing the
phenomenon of the appetite growing with eating. We didn’t expect the
Ukrainians to be as successful as they proved to be,” Beebe said.
Beebe, now the director of the grand strategy program at the Quincy
Institute, continued: “A good part of the credit goes to the Ukrainians
themselves, their leadership, their courage and fighting against the
Russians. A good part of it comes from our own support for them, the
intelligence and military assistance that we’ve provided that they’ve
used very effectively.
“But I think that has produced battlefield successes that go well
beyond anything that the US government expected when Putin launched this
invasion. As a result, we started to think, ‘Hey, maybe we can win
this.’”Ukrainian soldiers use a launcher with US-made Javelin missiles
during military exercises in Donetsk region, Ukraine, on December 23,
2021. Photo: Ukrainian Defense Ministry Press Service
“Our eyes, “ says Beebe, “have grown bigger. You walk around here in
Washington and there are very few people that are worried that we might
get into an escalation spiral that we can’t control. Seems to me that
much of Congress is worried that they might be accused of not doing enough to
support Ukraine, not of doing too much that tips us over the edge here
into a very dangerous situation. So I think it is fair to say that we
are in a much more dangerous situation right now from the point of view
of escalation than we’ve been in my lifetime.”
Freeman observes that as a result of the war fever enveloping
Washington, “It is now taboo in the United States to inquire into the
origins of the war, to suggest that Western policy had any role in
provoking it, or that there has been or is any basis for Russia’s
security concerns.”
unz | Scott Ritter(5:20 mark)– “The idea that the Ukrainian military
has been eliminated as an effective fighting force is a flawed concept,
and unless Russia broadens its special military operation– probably to
the point of changing it form a special military operation to a war
which includes the totality of Ukrainian battle-space–(then) this is a
conflict that is dangerously close to becoming unwinnable by Russia
which means that while they can complete their objectives in the east
with 200,000 troops, they aren’t able to prevent Ukraine from rearming
and reequipping when Ukraine is being provided with tens of billions of
dollars of equipment by NATO —Whenever you provide your enemy with “safe space” to rebuild military capability, you’re never going to win. …
Yes,
Russia is winning in the east which is what they said their objective
was all along. And they are accomplishing that. That is the special
Military Operation. But now we’re talking about “war”, and I don’t think Russia has made that transition yet. This
is a defacto proxy war between the west and Russia using Ukrainian
forces as NATO’s sword. The object of this is to “bleed Russia dry”. And
if Russia doesn’t change the dynamic, Russia will be bled dry.”
Zelensky has indicated that he’s willing to mobilize a million people,
at a time when the west is ready to provide the funding and equipment to
turn those million men into a real military threat.
So, I see what has been happening in the last few weeks as being decisive.
The
military aid the west is providing is changing the dynamic and if
Russia doesn’t find a way to address this meaningfully, and to eliminate
it as a military capability… then the conflict will never end.” (“Saturday Morning Live with Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern, You Tube)
consortiumnews |It
was — literally — a made-for-television moment. A former U.S. Navy
chief petty officer turned cable news pundit, dressed in a fresh
out-of-the-box camouflage uniform replete with body armor and magazine
pouches, wearing matching camouflage helmet and gloves, and cradling an
automatic rifle, stared into the camera and announced “I am here to help this country [Ukraine] fight what is essentially a war of extermination.”
With
a Ukrainian flag on his left shoulder, and a U.S. flag emblazoned on
his body armor, the man, Malcolm Nance, declared that “This is an
existential war, and Russia has brought it to these people and is mass
murdering civilians.”
A day before, Nance had tweeted a black-and-white photograph of himself, similarly clad, announcing “I’m DONE talking.”
Nance spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy as a cryptologic technician, interpretive (CTI),
specializing in the Arabic language, and has turned his career into a
thing of legend, so much so that when he speaks of his journey from news
desk to Ukraine, it almost sounds convincing.
“Ukraine announced that there was an international force on Feb. 27,” Nance told one reporter,
“and
I started looking into it on Feb. 28 … I called the Ukrainian embassy
in Washington, and I said: ‘Hey, I want an appointment.’ They were a
little slow, so I just went down there and put in my application. The
guy asked if I had combat experience and I said ‘Yep.’ Then he looked at
my application and said, ‘You’re on the team.’”
Just like that.
But
the hype doesn’t match the reality. Although he sports a combat action
ribbon on the lapel of his coat jacket (when not attired in full combat regalia), Nance has never actually participated in ground combat operations, according to a serviceman who served with him. His “combat” experience was limited to providing linguistic support onboard a U.S. Navy ship off the coast of Beirut in 1983. Important work, but not combat.
Despite
this resume enhancement, Nance was — according to Nance — a natural for
recruitment by Ukraine. In the days before the Russian invasion, Nance
was in Ukraine, reporting for MSNBC.
But being Malcolm Nance, he claimed to be doing so much more. “I spent a month in Ukraine,” Nance recalled,
“driving around, mapping out the Russian order of battle, driving up
and down the highways and analyzing where the invasion routes would come
and go. So I knew the country backward and forwards by the time of the
invasion.”
(It
might be time to remind the reader that Nance’s Navy specialism in
Arabic gave him neither the training nor the experience to conduct the
kind of battlefield intelligence preparation that he described.)
The
Ukrainians know this. So why would they take on a 61-year old Arabic
linguist whose physical presence on any battlefield would be seen as a
detriment?
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