Ukraine Russia War – What’s Next with Scott Ritter

Feb 25, 2023

A panicked Empire tries to make Russia an ‘offer it can’t refuse’

January 30 2023

Photo Credit: The Cradle

Does US Secretary of State Antony Blinken think a Washington Post op-ed will move Russian Armed Forces Chief Valery Gerasimov to postpone his planned military offensive on Ukraine?

Realizing NATO’s war with Russia will likely end unfavorably, the US is test-driving an exit offer. But why should Moscow take indirect proposals seriously, especially on the eve of its new military advance and while it is in the winning seat?

By Pepe Escobar

Those behind the Throne are never more dangerous than when they have their backs against the wall.

Their power is slipping away, fast: Militarily, via NATO’s progressive humiliation in Ukraine; Financially, sooner rather than later, most of the Global South will want nothing to do with the currency of a bankrupt rogue giant; Politically, the global majority is taking decisive steps to stop obeying a rapacious, discredited, de facto minority.

So now those behind the Throne are plotting to at least try to stall the incoming disaster on the military front.

As confirmed by a high-level US establishment source, a new directive on NATO vs. Russia in Ukraine was relayed to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Blinken, in terms of actual power, is nothing but a messenger boy for the Straussian neocons and neoliberals who actually run US foreign policy.

The secretary of state was instructed to relay the new directive – a sort of message to the Kremlin – via mainstream print media, which was promptly published by the Washington Post.

In the elite US mainstream media division of labor, the New York Times is very close to the State Department. and the Washington Post to the CIA. In this case though the directive was too important, and needed to be relayed by the paper of record in the imperial capital. It was published as an Op-Ed (behind paywall).

The novelty here is that for the first time since the start of Russia’s February 2022 Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine, the Americans are actually proposing a variation of the “offer you can’t refuse” classic, including some concessions which may satisfy Russia’s security imperatives.

Crucially, the US offer totally bypasses Kiev, once again certifying that this is a war against Russia conducted by Empire and its NATO minions – with the Ukrainians as mere expandable proxies.

‘Please don’t go on the offensive’

The Washington Post’s old school Moscow-based correspondent John Helmer has provided an important service, offering the full text of Blinken’s offer, of course extensively edited to include fantasist notions such as “US weapons help pulverize Putin’s invasion force” and a cringe-worthy explanation: “In other words, Russia should not be ready to rest, regroup and attack.”

The message from Washington may, at first glance, give the impression that the US would admit Russian control over Crimea, Donbass, Zaporozhye, and Kherson – “the land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia” – as a fait accompli.

Ukraine would have a demilitarized status, and the deployment of HIMARS missiles and Leopard and Abrams tanks would be confined to western Ukraine, kept as a “deterrent against further Russian attacks.”

What may have been offered, in quite hazy terms, is in fact a partition of Ukraine, demilitarized zone included, in exchange for the Russian General Staff cancelling its yet-unknown 2023 offensive, which may be as devastating as cutting off Kiev’s access to the Black Sea and/or cutting off the supply of NATO weapons across the Polish border.

The US offer defines itself as the path towards a “just and durable peace that upholds Ukraine’s territorial integrity.” Well, not really. It just won’t be a rump Ukraine, and Kiev might even retain those western lands that Poland is dying to gobble up.

The possibility of a direct Washington-Moscow deal on “an eventual postwar military balance” is also evoked, including no Ukraine membership of NATO. As for Ukraine itself, the Americans seem to believe it will be a “strong, non-corrupt economy with membership in the European Union.”

Whatever remains of value in Ukraine has already been swallowed not only by its monumentally corrupt oligarchy, but most of all, investors and speculators of the BlackRock variety. Assorted corporate vultures simply cannot afford to lose Ukraine’s grain export ports, as well as the trade deal terms agreed with the EU before the war. And they’re terrified that the Russian offensive may capture Odessa, the major seaport and transportation hub on the Black Sea – which would leave Ukraine landlocked.

There’s no evidence whatsoever that Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the entire Russian Security Council – including its Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev – have reason to believe anything coming from the US establishment, especially via mere minions such as Blinken and the Washington Post. After all the stavka – a moniker for the high command of the Russian armed forces – regard the Americans as “non-agreement capable,” even when an offer is in writing.

This walks and talks like a desperate US gambit to stall and present some carrots to Moscow in the hope of delaying or even cancelling the planned offensive of the next few months.

Even old school, dissident Washington operatives – not beholden to the Straussian neocon galaxy – bet that the gambit will be a nothing burger: in classic “strategic ambiguity” mode, the Russians will continue on their stated drive of demilitarization, denazification and de-electrification, and will “stop” anytime and anywhere they see fit east of the Dnieper. Or beyond.

What the Deep State really wants

Washington’s ambitions in this essentially NATO vs. Russia war go well beyond Ukraine. And we’re not even talking about preventing a Russia-China-Germany Eurasian union or a peer competitor nightmare; let’s stick with prosaic issues on the Ukrainian battleground.

The key “recommendations” – military, economic, political, diplomatic – were detailed in an Atlantic Council strategy paper late last year.

And in another one, under “War scenario 1: The war continues in its current tempo,” we find the Straussian neocon policy fully spelled out.

It’s all here: from “marshaling support and military-assistance transfers to Kyiv sufficient to enable it to win” to “increase the lethality of military assistance transferred to include fighter aircraft that would enable Ukraine to control its airspace and attack Russian forces therein; and missile technology with range sufficient to reach into Russian territory.”

From training the Ukrainian military “to use Western weapons, electronic warfare, and offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, and to seamlessly integrate new recruits in the service” to buttressing “defenses on the front lines, near the Donbass region,” including “combat training focusing on irregular warfare.”

Added to “imposing secondary sanctions on all entities doing business with the Kremlin,” we reach of course the Mother of All Plunders: “Confiscate the $300 billion that the Russian state holds in overseas accounts in the United States and EU and use seized monies to fund reconstruction.”

The reorganization of the SMO, with Putin, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, and General Armageddon in their new, enhanced roles is derailing all these elaborate plans.

The Straussians are now in deep panic. Even Blinken’s number two, Russophobic warmonger Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland, has admitted to the US Senate there will be no Abrams tanks on the battlefield before Spring (realistically, only in 2024). She also promised to “ease sanctions” if Moscow “returns to negotiations.” Those negotiations were scotched by the Americans themselves in Istanbul in the Spring of 2022.

Nuland also called the Russians to “withdraw their troops.” Well, that at least offers some comic relief compared with the panic oozing from Blinken’s “offer you can’t refuse.” Stay tuned for Russia’s non-response response.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

Russia, now the South and East’s counterpoint to Israel

January 25, 2023

Source

by Ramin Mazaheri

There is no doubt that were Israel threatened with the forced implementation of even something as fundamentally just and decent as a two-state solution they would resort to using nuclear bombs. They are dead-set on waging war until they get all the Palestinians’ lands, and they have made it clear that there is no place for non-Jews (non-White Jews, actually) inside this land they have stolen as if human mores had not changed since the 19th century.

In the blink of a post-corona eye, Russia has become something quite similar.

As former Russian ex-president Dmitry Medvedev just reiterated, if the Russian nation is seriously threatened with defeat nuclear weapons will be used in self-defence. Other than North Korea, only Israel feels the need to use such language.

Russia and North Korea are genuine nations, ones whose existence was not entirely contrived by and for Western imperialism, but in many ways Russia has become a new Israel. To be more accurate – Russia is now the counterpoint and antithesis of Israel.

Just as Israel, the poisoned blade of Western capitalism and imperialism, faces and constantly thrusts east and south, now Russia is the South and East’s defensive rampart facing West.

Russia has gone from post-1991 kowtowing to Western liberal democracy – earnestly trying to join them – to realising that the West has declared total war against them. How can there be a reconciliation? War in the Donbass has been going on for nearly a decade – that’s not the blink of an eye. Anyway, the West simply does not remove sanctions once in place – look at decades of Western policy towards Iran, Cuba, North Korea, etc. – barring total capitulation. The West only removed sanctions on China because they absurdly thought that China had gone capitalist and that it had all just been Mao’s doing. Sanctions are now back in force, as Xi has reflected the broad persistence of socialism in China.

The alleged end of history was based on the idea that only one type of civilisation existed any more, but it’s clear that there is a false idolatry of a West which exists in only in theoretical words and not in practical deeds, and there is a tolerant and truly diverse non-West which insists on national sovereignty and the right to cultural differences.

The West’s outpost in Asia is well-known – Israel – and it is not just a rich colonialist’s whim and folly. Israel serves as an imperialist foothold to destabilise the entire Muslim world and Africa – training, funding and supporting all types of awful monarchies and puppet governments – and for these crimes they suffer internally from the awful, unstable Apartheid they have created.

The surprising development is that non-Western bloc’s frontier has shifted West: from 1979 onwards it was clearly Iran. Forty years of war on and around Iran failed to topple the revolution, and drained the West of vital tangible and moral resources. The non-Western frontier has now been pushed back to Russia.

Russia is the country that – for reasons which are diametrically and morally the opposite for the reasons of Israel’s existence – will now serve as the non-Western bloc’s frontier, a frontier which will be in long-term combat and instability.

This top Russian talk show just discussed this same idea, essentially: without a Cuban Missile Crisis 2.0 – something that scares the West into backing down – this war has no end in sight. Russia will not be allowed to sue for peace – they are looking at a much longer war than in the Muslim World, as Russia is on the true frontier of the West and not merely surrounding a colonial outpost.

But it’s a new type of world: Russia is the frontier in a war which will accelerate the legal and practical formation of a new world order – that of West versus non-West; of NATO versus BRICS; of corporate domination versus the sovereignty of a nation united, and more.

This war is total – not in terms of forces used but in what it encompasses:

Economically, Russians – with all their history of state control of assets to direct them towards the people’s good – simply could not accept the idea that corporate CEOs should be above the people’s elected representatives. This, of course, is what Western liberal democracy is based upon: markets, prices, supplies, wages, jobs and stocks are exclusively controlled by billionaire elite – and they insist that this is the only political advance needed following the end of bloodline monarchy.

Politically, whereas the West looks at itself and sees the victory of liberal democracy, Russia and others look at places like the European Union and see a continent which has been roiled by constant turmoil since that project went fully online in 2009. And the EU is supposed to be the sophisticated one in the Western bloc! Russia has ended the one claim the EU could plausibly make – that the EU prevents war: Brussels did all it could to subvert the 2014 Minsk Accords and to reject peace efforts over the past year.

Monetarily, the idea that the dollar is as good as gold is no longer tenable, and this was true before record inflation. That the daily users of the once-mighty euro don’t grasp this only shows their lack of intelligence and the obvious subversion of their own leaders. Petroyuans, gold-backed rubles, Iranian state-backed cryptocurrency – these are the answers and the certain future.

Culturally, the West is fighting for things which the majority of their own people do not even want – some sort of open-air Amsterdam brothel or dreadful, drug-ravaged San Francisco commune. It has been written that this non-West/West debate is actually anthropological because the West is redefining what “man”, “woman” and “family” is. I prefer not to waste time on this, as it is so absurd and so obviously led by and for a tiny minority, but certainly for many Westerners upending “conservative” definitions seems to be their raison d’être – the class struggle, anti-imperialism, internationalism, the mass deaths of the Western war machine all apparently bore them. It’s also clear that the average Westerner is greatly shocked and often affected by this useless “war” and worries over its effects for future generations, but in the West such persons are silenced or self-censor.

Just as Israel is on the wrong side of all these issues, so Russia has become – justified or not – the standard-bearer of the other side. It is a good thing, because the West could never follow or accept a Muslim to carry this standard, like Iran has done. Unlike with Iran, when Western propagandists criticise the allegedly “arch-conservative” Russia they can’t resort to “anti-Brown” scaremongering, stereotypes and absurdities, because Westerners are far more familiar with and similar to Russian Slavs.

It is now a two-world world, and the frontier is the Eurasian borderlands – i.e. the definition of “Ukraine”.

There is no chance that Russia can be defeated and dismembered – not only do they have nukes of course, but their friends (China, Iran probably India and maybe even Turkey and Egypt) wouldn’t allow it. The same probably goes for Israel – their Western allies would force their own peoples to suffer anything to keep Israelis from sharing one olive farm, much less dividing the land in two. Anyway, as that talk show discussed, there’s just no way the West would personally engage in the WWII-sized conflict which it would take to achieve their desire of a dismembered Russia.

The conscience of Israelis surely allows them no true peace – they are always in an unwinnable settler war (the Anglosphere has combined genocide with isolation (reservations) for their indigenous peoples, but the isolation tactic cannot work long-term on Palestinians) – but Russians must grapple with the fact that they will be much like the Muslim World for the past 20 years: the focus of Western imperialist aggression, monstrosities and lies.

In this sense the world today is very much like it was from WWII until 1991, when Russians led the only empire where the center was bled for the benefit of the periphery.

Despite the fighting going on in eastern Ukraine it’s not World War III but clearly Cold War II, with Israel and Russia the unstable frontiers facing each other in ideological, philosophical, political and economic war.

Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His latest book is ‘France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values’. He is also the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’.

Bye bye 1991-2022

January 10, 2023

by Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and widely cross-posted

2023 starts with collective NATO in Absolutely Freak Out Mode as Russian Defense Minister Shoigu announces that Russian Navy frigate Admiral Gorshkov is now on tour – complete with a set of Mr. Zircon’s hypersonic business cards.

The business tour will encompass the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, and of course include the Mediterranean, the Roman Empire’s former Mare Nostrum. Mr. Zircon on the prowl has absolutely nothing to do with the war in Ukraine: it’s a sign of what happens next when it comes to frying much bigger fishes than a bunch of Kiev psychos.

The end of 2022 did seal the frying of the Big Ukraine Negotiation Fish. It has now been served on a hot plate – and fully digested. Moscow has made it painfully clear there’s no reason whatsoever to trust the “non-agreement capable” declining superpower.

So even taxi drivers in Dacca are now betting on when the much- vaunted “winter offensive” starts, and how far will it go. General Armageddon’s path ahead is clear: all-out demilitarization and de-electrification on steroids, complete with grinding up masses of Ukrainians at the lowest possible cost to the Russian Armed Forces in Donbass until Kiev psychos beg for mercy. Or not.

Another big fried fish on a hot plate at the end of 2022 was the 2014 Minsk Agreement. The cook was no other than former chancellor Merkel (“an attempt to buy time for Ukraine”). Implied is the not exactly smokin’ gun: the strategy of the Straussian/neo-con and neoliberal-con combo in charge of US foreign policy, from the beginning, was to unleash a Forever War, by proxy, against Russia.

Merkel may have been up to something telling the Russians, in their face, that she lied like crypto-Soprano Mike Pompeo, then she lied again and again, for years. That’s not embarrassing for Moscow, but for Berlin: yet another graphic demonstration of total vassalage to the Empire.

The response by the contemporary embodiment of Mercury, Russian Foreign Ministry’s Maria Zakharova, was equally intriguing: Merkel’s confession could be used as a specific reason – and evidence – for a tribunal judging Western politicians responsible for provoking the Russia-Ukraine proxy war.

No one will obviously confirm it on the record. But all this could be part of an evolving, secret Russia-Germany deal in the making, leading to Germany restoring at least some of its sovereignty.

Time to fry NATO fish

Meanwhile, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev, visibly relishing his totally unplugged incarnation, expanded on the Fried Negotiation Fish saga. “Last warning to all nations”, as he framed it: “there can be no business with the Anglo-Saxon world [because] it is a thief, a swindler, a card-sharp that could do anything….From now on we will do without them until a new generation of sensible politicians comes to power… There is nobody in the West we could deal with about anything for any reason.”

Medvedev, significantly, recited more or less the same script, in person, to Xi Jinping in Beijing, days before the zoom to end all zooms – between Xi and Putin – that worked as a sort of informal closure of 2022, with the Russia-China strategic partnership perfectly in synch.

On the war front, General Armageddon’s new – offensive – groove is bound to lead in the next few months to an undisputable fact on the ground: a partition between a dysfunctional black hole or rump Ukraine on the west, and Novorossiya in the east.

Even the IMF is now reluctant to throw extra funds into the black hole. Kiev’s 2023 budget has an – unrealistic – $36 billion deficit. Half of the budget is military-related. The real deficit in 2022 was running at about $5 billion a month – and will inevitably balloon.

Tymofiy Mylovanov, a professor at the Kiev School of Economics, came up with a howler: the IMF is worried about Ukraine’s “debt sustainability”. He added, “if even the IMF is worried, imagine what private investors are thinking”. There will be no “investment” in rump Ukraine. Multinational vultures will grab land for nothing and whatever puny productive assets may remain.

Arguably the biggest fish to be fried in 2023 is the myth of NATO. Every serious military analyst, few Americans included, knows that the Russian Army and military industrial complex represents a superior system than what existed at the end of the USSR, and far superior to that of the US and the rest of NATO today.

The Mackinder-style final blow to a possible alliance between Germany (EU), Russia and China – which is what is really behind the US proxy war in Ukraine – is not proceeding according to the Straussian wet dream.

Saddam Hussein, former imperial vassal, was regime-changed because he wanted to bypass the petrodollar. Now we have the inevitable rise of the petroyuan – “in three to five years”, as Xi Jinping announced in Riyadh: you just can’t prevent it with Shock’n Awe on Beijing.

In 2008, Russia embarked on a massive rebuilding of missile forces and a 14-year plan to modernize land-based armed forces. Mr. Zircon presenting his hypersonic business card across the Mare Nostrum is just a small part of the Big Picture.

The myth of US power

The CIA abandoned Afghanistan in a humiliating retreat – even ditching the heroin ratline – just to relocate to Ukraine and continue playing the same old broken records. The CIA is behind the ongoing sabotage of Russian infrastructure – in tandem with MI6 and others. Sooner or later there will be blowback.

Few people – including CIA operatives – may know that New York City, for instance, may be destroyed with a single move: blowing up the George Washington bridge. The city can’t be supplied with food and most of its requirements without the bridge. The New York City electrical grid can be destroyed by knocking out the central controls; putting it back together could take a year.

Even trespassed by infinite layers of fog of war, the current situation in Ukraine is still a skirmish. The real war has not even started yet. It might – soon.

Apart from Ukraine and Poland there is no NATO force worth mentioning. Germany has a risible two-day supply of ammunition. Turkey will not send a single soldier to fight Russians in Ukraine.

Out of 80,000 US troops stationed in Europe, only 10% are weaponized. Recently 20,000 were added, not a big deal. If the Americans activated their troops in Europe – something rather ridiculous in itself – they would not have any place to land supplies or reinforcements. All airports and seaports would be destroyed by Russian hypersonic missiles in a matter of minutes – in continental Europe as well as the UK.

In addition, all fuel centers such as Rotterdam for oil and natural gas would be destroyed, as well as all military installations, including top American bases in Europe: Grafenwoehr, Hohenfels, Ramstein, Baumholder, Vilseck, Spangdahlem, and Wiesbaden in Germany (for the Army and Air Force); Aviano Air Base in Italy; Lajes Air Base in Portugal’s Azores islands; Naval Station Rota in Spain; Incirlik Air Base in Turkey; and Royal Air Force stations Lakenheath and Mildenhall in the UK.

All fighter jets and bombers would be destroyed – after they land or while landed: there would be no place to land except on the autobahn, where they would be sitting ducks.

Patriot missiles are worthless – as the whole Global South saw in Saudi Arabia when they tried to knock out Houthi missiles coming from Yemen. Israel’s Iron Dome can’t even knock out all primitive missiles coming from Gaza.

US military power is the supreme myth of the fish to be fried variety. Essentially they hide behind proxies – as the Ukraine Armed Forces. US forces are worthless except in turkey shoots as in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, against a disabled opponent in the middle of the desert with no air cover. And never forget how NATO was completely humiliated by the Taliban.

The final breaking point

2022 ended an era: the final breaking point of the “rules-based international order” established after the fall of the USSR.

The Empire entered Desperation Row, throwing everything and the kitchen sink – proxy war on Ukraine, AUKUS, Taiwan hysteria – to dismantle the set-up they created way back in 1991.

Globalization’s rollback is being implemented by the Empire itself. That ranges from stealing the EU energy market from Russia so the hapless vassals buy ultra-expensive US energy to smashing the entire semiconductor supply chain, forcibly rebuilding it around itself to “isolate” China.

The NATO vs. Russia war in Ukraine is just a cog in the wheel of the New Great Game. For the Global South, what really matters is how Eurasia – and beyond – are coordinating their integration process, from BRI to the BRICS+ expansion, from the SCO to the INSTC, from Opec+ to the Greater Eurasia Partnership.

We’re back to what the world looked like in 1914, or before 1939, only in a limited sense. There’s a plethora of nations struggling to expand their influence, but all of them are betting on multipolarity, or “peaceful modernization”, as Xi Jinping coined it, and not Forever Wars: China, Russia, India, Iran, Indonesia and others.

So bye bye 1991-2022. The hard work starts now. Welcome to the New Great Game on crack.

The most important question

December 27, 2022

Looks like we will make it to Dec 31, 2022. Will we make it to December 31, 2023?

This question is not hyperbole.  I would even argue that this is the single most important question for at least the entire northern hemisphere.

I have been warning that Russia is preparing for a fullscale war since at least 2014.  Putin basically said just that in his recent speech before the Russian Defense Ministry Board.  If you have not seen this video, you really should watch it, it it will give you a direct insight into how the Kremlin thinks and what it is preparing for.  Here is that video again:

I will assume that you have watched that video and that I don’t need to prove to you that Russia is gearing out for a massive war, including a nuclear one.

Foreign Minister Lavrov has publicly declared that “unnamed officials from the Pentagon actually threatened to conduct a ‘decapitation strike’ on the Kremlin…What we are talking about is the threat of the physical elimination of the head of the Russian state, (…)  If such ideas are actually being nourished by someone, this someone should think very carefully about the possible consequences of such plans.”

So, we have the following situation:

• For Russia this war is clearly, undeniably and officially an existential one.  To dismiss this reality would be the height of folly.  When the strongest nuclear power on the planet declares, repeatedly, that this is an existential war everybody ought to really take it seriously and not go into deep denial.
• For the US Neocons this is also an existential war: if Russia wins, then NATO loses and, therefore, the US loses too.  Which means that all those SOBs who for months fed everybody nonsense about Russia loosing the war to the general public will be held responsible for the inevitable disaster.

So much will depend on whether US Americans, especially those in power, are willing to die in solidarity with the “crazies in the basement” or not.  Right now it sure looks like they are.  Don’t count on the EU, they have long given up any agency.  Talking to them simply makes no sense.

Which might explain Medvedev’s recent words “Alas, there is nobody in the West we could deal with about anything for any reason (..) is the last warning to all nations: there can be no business with the Anglo-Saxon world because it is a thief, a swindler, a card-sharp that could do anything.”

Russia can do many things, but it cannot liberate the USA from the grip of the Neocons.  That is something which only US Americans can do.

And here we hit a vicious circle:

The US political system is most unlikely to be effectively challenged from within, big money runs everything, including the most advanced propaganda system in history (aka the “free media”) and the population is kept uninformed and brainwashed.  And yes, of course, a major defeat in a war against Russia would shake this system so hard that it would be impossible to conceal the magnitude of the disaster (think “Kabul on steroids”).  And that is precisely why the Neocons cannot allow that to happen because this defeat would trigger a domino effect which would quickly involve the truth about 9/11 and, after that, all the myths and lies the US society has been based on for decades (JFK anybody?).

There are, of course, plenty of US Americans who fully understand that.   But how many of them are in a real position of power to influence US decision-making and outcomes? The real question is whether there still are enough patriotic forces in the Pentagon, or the letter soup agencies, to send the Neocons back down into the basement they crawled out of after the 9/11 false flag or not?

Right now it sure looks like all the positions of power in the US are held by Neolibs, Neocons, RINOs and other ugly creatures, yet it is also undeniable that people like, say, Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard are reaching a lot of people who “get it”.  This *has* to include REAL liberals and REAL conservatives whose loyalty is not to a gang of international thugs but to their own country and their own people.

I am also pretty sure that there are many US military commanders who listen to what Col. Macgregor has to say.

Will that be that enough to break through the wall of lies and propaganda?

I hope so, but I am not very optimistic.

First, Andrei Martyanov is absolutely spot on when he constantly decries the crass incompetence and ignorance of the US ruling class.  And I very much share his frustration.  We both see where this is all headed and all we can do is warn, warn and warn again.  I realize that is is hard to believe in the idea that a nuclear superpower like the US is run by a gang of incompetent and ignorant thugs, but that IS the reality and simply denying it won’t make it go away.

Second, at least so far, the US general public has not (yet) felt the full effects of the collapse of the US-controlled financial and economic system.  So flag-waving “morans” can still hope that a war against Russia will look like the turkey shoot “Desert Storm” was.

It won’t.

The real question here is whether the only way to wake up the brainwashed flag-waving “morans” is by means of a nuclear explosion over their heads or not?

“Go USA” is a mental condition which has been injected into the minds of millions of US Americans for many decades and it will take either a lot of time, or some truly dramatic events, to bring these folks back to reality.

Third, the US ruling elites are clearly going into deep denial.  All this silly talk about US Patriot missiles or F-16s changing the course of the war in infantile and naive.  Frankly this would all be rather comical if it was not so dangerous in its potential consequences.  What will happen once the single Patriot missile battery is destroyed and the F-16s shot down?

How soon will the West run out of Wunderwaffen?

On a conceptual “escalation scale” what would be the next step up from Patriots and F-16s?

Tactical nukes?

Considering the rather idiotic notion that a “tactical” nuke is somehow fundamentally different from a “strategic” nuke irrespective of how it is used and where it is used is extremely dangerous.

I submit that the fact that the US ruling class is seriously contemplating both a “limited” use of “tactical” nukes and “decapitating strikes” is a very good indicator of the fact that the US is running out of Wunderwaffen and that the Neocons are desperate.

And to those who might be tempted to accuse me of hyperbole or paranoid delusions I will say the following:

This war is NOT, repeat, NOT about the Ukraine (or Poland or the three Baltic statelets).  At its absolute minimum this is a war about the future of Europe.  Fundamentally it is a war about the complete reorganization of our planet’s international order.  I would even argue that the outcome of this war will have a bigger impact that either WWI or WWII.  The Russians clearly understand this (see video above if you doubt that).

And so do the Neocons, even if they don’t speak about it.

The current situation is much more dangerous than even the Cuban missile crisis or the standoff in Berlin.  At least then both sides openly admitted that the situation was really dangerous.  This time around, however, the ruling elites of the West are using their formidable PSYOP/propaganda capability to conceal the true scope what is really going on.  If every citizen of the US (and EU) understood that there is a nuclear and conventional cross-hairs painted on his/her head things might be different.  Alas, this is clearly not the case, hence the non-existent peace movement and the quasi consensus about pouring tens of BILLIONS of dollars into the Ukrainian black hole.

Right now, the crazies are playing around with all sorts of silly ideas, including booting Russia off the UNSC (not gonna happen, since both Russia and China have veto power) or even creating a “peace conference” about the Ukraine without Russia’s participation (in a remake of the “friends of Syria” and “friends of Venezuela” thingie).  Well, good luck with that!  Apparently Guaido and Tikhanovskaia are not enough to discourage the Neocons and they are now repeating the exact same nonsense with “Ze”.

So, will we make it to December 31, 2023?

Maybe, but this is by no means sure.  Clearly, this is not an assumption the Kremlin makes, hence the truly immense strengthening of all of Russia’s strategic deterrence capabilities (both nuclear and conventional).

God willing, the old adage “si vis pacem, para bellum” will save the day, as Russia is very clearly prepared for any time of conflict, including a nuclear one.  China will also get there soon, but it is likely that 2023 will see some kind of end to the Ukrainian war: either a Russian victory in the Ukraine or a full-scale continental war which Russia will also win, (albeit at a much higher cost!).  So by the time the Chinese will be truly ready (they probably need another 2-5 years) the world will be a very different place.

For all these reasons I submit that 2023 might well be one of the most important years in human history.  How many of us will actually survive it is an open question.

Andrei

Russia warns “Israel” against sending weapons to Ukraine

17 Oct 2022 15:32 

Source: Agencies

By Al Mayadeen English 

“Tel Aviv” risks its ties with Russia by sending weapons to Ukraine.

Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president. 

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned “Israel” Monday against providing weapons to Ukraine, stressing that any move to boost Kiev’s arsenal will severely damage bilateral relations. 

“Israel appears to be getting ready to supply weapons to the Kiev regime. A very reckless move. It would destroy all bilateral relations between our countries,” said Medvedev on Telegram. 

“Israel” has sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine, including helmets. However, in September, Israeli media reported that an Israeli arms manufacturer is supplying anti-UAV systems to Ukraine via Poland, with “Israel” attempting to avert tensions with Russia by sending them through a transit. 

“Tel Aviv” has been attempting to strike a balance in relations between Moscow and Kiev. Many Israeli settlers emigrated from Russia and Ukraine through Zionist agencies since the establishment of the so-called “state.”

Yair Lapid, the current Israeli prime minister, told AFP that his office won’t be responding to Medvedev’s remarks. 

In July, Moscow threatened to close down the Jewish Agency, which was established in 1929, and played a key role in the colonization of Palestine and then the creation of the Israeli occupation regime in 1948. 

Some interpreted the threat as a warning against Lapid, who has taken a stricter approach to the Ukraine war than the former PM, Naftali Bennett. Last April, Lapid condemned Russia’s practices in Ukraine, describing them as “war crimes”, after which the Russian Foreign Ministry summoned the Israeli ambassador to Russia, Alexander Ben Zvi. 

Israeli occupation calls on dual citizens to leave Russia immediately

Israeli media said that “the Israeli army called on its soldiers and officers, who hold Russian citizenship and are in Russia, to immediately leave and return to Israel”.

“The Israeli army fears that its soldiers and officers, who hold Russian citizenship, will be recruited in Russia, in implementation of the partial mobilization decision.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on September 21 a partial mobilization in Russia, stressing that this decision aims to protect Russia, its sovereignty, and its safety.

Following the President’s announcement, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu stated that 300,000 reservists will be called to serve in the Ukrainian war.

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Realization Sets In (Andrei Martyanov)

October 17, 2022

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Strategic Psychobabble (Andrei Martyanov)

OCTOBER 14, 2022

Please visit Andrei’s website: https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/ and support him here: https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=60459185

The thin red line: NATO can’t afford to lose Kabul and Kiev

October 13, 2022

by Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and widely cross-posted

Let’s start with Pipelineistan. Nearly seven years ago, I showed how Syria was the ultimate Pipelineistan war.

Damascus had rejected the – American – plan for a Qatar-Turkey gas pipeline, to the benefit of Iran-Iraq-Syria (for which a memorandum of understanding was signed).

What followed was a vicious, concerted “Assad must go” campaign: proxy war as the road to regime change. The toxic dial went exponentially up with the instrumentalization of ISIS – yet another chapter of the war of terror (italics mine). Russia blocked ISIS, thus preventing regime change in Damascus. The Empire of Chaos-favored pipeline bit the dust.

Now the Empire finally exacted payback, blowing up existing pipelines – Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Steam 2 (NS2) – carrying or about to carry Russian gas to a key imperial economic competitor: the EU.

We all know by now that Line B of NS2 has not been bombed, or even punctured, and it’s ready to go. Repairing the other three – punctured – lines would not be a problem: a matter of two months, according to naval engineers. Steel on the Nord Streams is thicker than on modern ships. Gazprom has offered to repair them – as long as Europeans behave like grown-ups and accept strict security conditions.

We all know that’s not going to happen. None of the above is discussed across NATOsan media. That means that Plan A by the usual suspects remains in place: creating a contrived natural gas shortage, leading to the de-industrialization of Europe, all part of the Great Reset, rebranded “The Great Narrative”.

Meanwhile, the EU Muppet Show is discussing the ninth sanction package against Russia. Sweden refuses to share with Russia the results of the dodgy intra-NATO “investigation” of itself on who blew up the Nord Streams.

At Russian Energy Week, President Putin summarized the stark facts.

Europe blames Russia for the reliability of its energy supplies even though it was receiving the entire volume it bought under fixed contracts.

The “orchestrators of the Nord Stream terrorist attacks are those who profit from them”.

Repairing Nord Stream strings “would only make sense in the event of continued operation and security”.

Buying gas on the spot market will cause a €300 billion loss for Europe.

The rise in energy prices is not due to the Special Military Operation (SMO), but to the West’s own policies.

Yet the Dead Can Dance show must go on. As the EU forbids itself to buy Russian energy, the Brussels Eurocracy skyrockets their debt to the financial casino. The imperial masters laugh all the way to the bank with this form of collectivism – as they continue to profit from using financial markets to pillage and plunder whole nations.

Which bring us to the clincher: the Straussian/neo-con psychos controlling Washington’s foreign policy eventually might – and the operative word is “might” – stop weaponizing Kiev and start negotiations with Moscow only after their main industrial competitors in Europe go bankrupt.

But even that would not be enough – because one of NATO’s key “invisible” mandates is to capitalize, whatever means necessary, on food resources across the Pontic-Caspian steppe: we’re talking about 1 million km2 of food production from Bulgaria all the way to Russia.

Judo in Kharkov

The SMO has swiftly transitioned into a “soft” CTO (Counter-Terrorist Operation) even without an official announcement. The no-nonsense approach of the new overall commander with full carte blanche from the Kremlin, General Surovikin, a.k.a. “Armageddon”, speaks for itself.

There are absolutely no indicators whatsoever pointing to a Russian defeat anywhere along the over 1,000 km-long frontline. The spun-to-death withdrawal from Kharkov may have been a masterstroke: the first stage of a judo move that, cloaked in legality, fully developed after the terrorist bombing of Krymskiy Most – the Crimea Bridge.

Let’s look at the retreat from Kharkov as a trap – as in Moscow graphically demonstrating “weakness”. That led the Kiev forces – actually their NATO handlers – to gloat about Russia “fleeing”, abandon all caution, and go for broke, even embarking on a terror spiral, from the assassination of Darya Dugina to the attempted destruction of Krymskiy Most.

In terms of Global South public opinion, it’s already established that General Armageddon’s Daily Morning Missile Show is a legal (italics mine) response to a terrorist state. Putin may have sacrificed, for a while, a piece on the chessboard – Kharkov: after all, the SMO mandate is not to hold terrain, but to demilitarize Ukraine.

Moscow even won post-Kharkov: all the Ukrainian military equipment accumulated in the area was thrown into offensives, just for the Russian Army to merrily engage in non-stop target practice.

And then there’s the real clincher: Kharkov set in motion a series of moves that allowed Putin to eventually go for checkmate, via the missile-heavy “soft” CTO, reducing the collective West to a bunch of headless chickens.

In parallel, the usual suspects continue to relentlessly spin their new nuclear “narrative”. Foreign Minister Lavrov has been forced to repeat ad nauseam that according to Russian nuclear doctrine, a strike may only happen in response to an attack “which endangers the entire existence of the Russian Federation.”

The aim of the D.C. psycho killers – in their wild wet dreams – is to provoke Moscow into using tactical nuclear weapons in the battlefield. That was another vector in rushing the timing of the Crimea Bridge terror attack: after all British intel plans had been swirling for months. That all came to nought.

The hysterical Straussian/neocon propaganda machine is frantically, pre-emptively, blaming Putin: he’s “cornered”, he’s “losing”, he’s “getting desperate” so he’ll launch a nuclear strike.

It’s no wonder the Doomsday Clock set up by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 is now placed at only 100 seconds from midnight. Right on “Doom’s doorstep”.

This is where a bunch of American psychos is leading us.

Life at Doom’s doorstep

As the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder is petrified by the startling Double Fail of a massive economic/military attack, Moscow is systematically preparing for the next military offensive. As it stands, it’s clear that the Anglo-American axis will not negotiate. It has not even tried for the past 8 years, and it’s not about to change course, even incited by an angelic chorus ranging from Elon Musk to Pope Francis.

Instead of going Full Timur, accumulating a pyramid of Ukrainian skulls, Putin has summoned eons of Taoist patience to avoid military solutions. Terror on the Crimea Bridge may have been a game-changer. But the velvet gloves are not totally off: General Armageddon’s daily aerial routine may still be seen as a – relatively polite – warning. Even in his latest landmark speech, which contained a savage indictment of the West, Putin made clear he’s always open for negotiations.

Yet by now, Putin and the Security Council know why the Americans simply can’t negotiate. Ukraine may be just a pawn in their game, but it’s still one of Eurasia’s key geopolitical nodes: whoever controls it, enjoys extra strategic depth.

The Russians are very much aware that the usual suspects are obsessed with blowing up the complex process of Eurasia integration – starting with China’s BRI. No wonder important instances of power in Beijing are “uneasy” with the war. Because that’s very bad for business between China and Europe via several trans-Eurasian corridors.

Putin and the Russian Security Council also know that NATO abandoned Afghanistan – an absolutely miserable failure – to place all their chips on Ukraine. So losing both Kabul and Kiev will be the ultimate mortal blow: that means abandoning the 21^st Eurasian Century to the Russia-China-Iran strategic partnership.

Sabotage – from the Nord Streams to Krymskiy Most – gives away the desperation game. NATO’s arsenals are virtually empty. What’s left is a war of terror: the Syrianization, actually ISIS-zation of the battlefield. Managed by braindead NATO, acted on the terrain by a cannon fodder horde sprinkled with mercenaries from at least 34 nations.

So Moscow may be forced to go all the way – as the Totally Unplugged Dmitry Medvedev revealed: now this is about eliminating a terrorist regime, totally dismantle its politico-security apparatus and then facilitate the emergence of a different entity. And if NATO still blocks it, direct clash will be inevitable.

NATO’s thin red line is they can’t afford to lose both Kabul and Kiev. Yet it took two acts of terror – on Pipelineistan and on Crimea – to imprint a much starker, burning red line: Russia will not allow the Empire to control Ukraine, whatever it takes. That’s intrinsically linked to the future of the Greater Eurasia Partnership. Welcome to life at Doom’s doorstep.

Medvedev Warns West That Russia’s Nuclear Threat ’Is Not A Bluff’

September 27, 2022

By Staff, Agencies

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday that Moscow has the right to defend itself with nuclear weapons if it is pushed beyond its limits and that this is “certainly not a bluff.”

Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, also warned that Moscow has the right to respond “without much consultation,” as tensions rise with the West over referendums held in large swathes of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory.

“We will make efforts to prevent the emergence of nuclear weapons with our hostile neighbors such as the NATO-controlled Ukraine,” Medvedev underlined, adding that “The security of Washington, London, and Brussels is way important for NATO than the fate of the diminishing Ukraine which nobody wants.”

Medvedev has regularly issued warning statements to the West and Ukraine in recent months, underlining his transformation from an apparently Western-minded liberalizer as president from 2008-2012 to strident geopolitical hawk.

Russia dmitry medvedev

All the way to Odessa

August 27, 2022

by Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and widely cross-posted

Dmitry Medvedev, relishing his unplugged self, has laid down the law on the Special Military Operation (SMO). Bluntly, he affirmed there is a “one and a half” scenario: either to go all the way, or a military coup d’Etat in Ukraine followed by admitting the inevitable. No tertium applies.

That’s as stark as it gets: the leadership in Moscow is making it very clear, to internal and international audiences, the new deal consists in slow cooking the Kiev racket inside a massive cauldron while polishing its status of financial black hole for the collective West. Until we reach boiling point – which will be a revolution or a putsch.

In parallel, The Lords of (Proxy) War will continue with their own strategy, which is to pillage an enfeebled, fearful, Europe, then dressing it up as a perfumed colony to be ruthlessly exploited ad nauseam by the imperial oligarchy.

Europe is now a runaway TGV – minus the requisite Hollywood production values. Assuming it does not veer off track – a dicey proposition – it may eventually arrive at a railway station called Agenda 2030, The Great Narrative, or some other NATO/Davos denomination du jour.

As it stands, what’s remarkable is how the “marginal” Russian economy hardly broke a sweat to “end the abundance” of the wealthiest region on the planet.

Moscow does not even entertain the notion of negotiating with Brussels because there’s nothing to negotiate – considering puny Eurocrats will only be hurled away from their zombified state when the dire socio-economic consequences of “the end of abundance” will finally translate into peasants with pitchforks roaming the continent.

It may be eons away, but inevitably the average Italian, German or Frenchman will connect the dots and realize it is their own “leaders” – national nullities and mostly unelected Eurocrats – who are paving their road to poverty.

You will be poor. And you will like it. Because we are all supporting freedom for Ukrainian neo-nazis. That brings the concept of “multicultural Europe” to a whole new level.

The runaway train, of course, may veer off track and plunge into an Alpine abyss. In this case something might be saved from the wreckage – and “reconstruction” might be on the cards. But reconstruct what?

Europe could always reconstruct a new Reich (collapsed with a bang in 1945); a soft Reich (erected at the end of WWII); or break with its past failures, sing “I’m Free” – and connect with Eurasia. Don’t bet on it.

Get back those Taurian lands

The SMO may be about to radically change – something that will drive the already clueless denizens of US Think Tankland and their Euro vassals even more berserk.

President Putin and Defense Minister Shoigu have been giving serious hints the only way for the pain dial is up – considering the mounting evidence of terrorism inside Russian territory; the vile assassination of Darya Dugina; non-stop shelling of civilians in border regions; attacks on Crimea; the use of chemical weapons; and the shelling of Zaporizhzhya power plant raising the risk of a nuclear catastrophe.

This past Tuesday, one day before the SMO completing six months, Crimea’s permanent representative to the Kremlin, Georgy Muradov, all but spelled it out.

He stressed the necessity to “reintegrate all the Taurian lands” – Crimea, the Northern Black Sea and the Azov Sea – into a single entity as soon as “in the next few months”. He defined this process as “objective and demanded by the population of these regions.”

Muradov added, “given not only the strikes on Crimea, but also the continuous shelling of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, the dam of the Kakhovka reservoir, peaceful facilities on the territory of Russia, the DNR and LNR, there are all preconditions to qualify the actions of the Banderite regime as terrorist.”

The conclusion is inevitable: “the political issue of changing the format of the special military operation” enters the agenda. After all, Washington and Brussels “have already prepared new anti-Crimean provocations of the NATO-Bandera alliance”.

So when we examine what the “restoration of the Taurian lands” implies, we see not only the contours of Novorossiya but most of all that there won’t be any security for Crimea – and thus Russia – in the Black Sea without Odessa becoming Russian again. And that, on top of it, will solve the Transnistria dilemma.

Add to it Kharkov – the capital and top industrial center of Greater Donbass. And of course Dnipropetrovsk. They are all SMO objectives, the whole combo to be later protected by buffer zones in Chernihiv and Sumy oblasts.

Only then the “tasks” – as Shoigu calls them – of the SMO would be declared fulfilled. The timeline could be eight to ten months – after a lull under General Winter.

As the turbo-charged SMO rolls on, it’s a given the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder will continue to prop up and weaponize the Kiev racket till Kingdom Come – and that will apply especially after the Return of Odessa. What’s unclear is who and what gang will be left in Kiev posing as the ruling party and doing specials for Vogue while duly fulfilling the mass of imperial diktats.

It’s also a given the CIA/MI6 combo will be refining non-stop the contours of a massive guerrilla war against Russia in multiple fronts – crammed with terror attacks and all sorts of provocations.

Yet in the Bigger Picture it’s the inevitable Russian military victory in Donbass and then “all the Taurian lands” that will hit the collective West like a lethal asteroid. The geopolitical humiliation will be unbearable; not to mention the geoeconomic humiliation for vassalized Europe.

As Eurasian integration will become an even stronger vector, Russian diplomacy will be solidifying the new normal. Never forget that Moscow had no trouble normalizing relations, for instance, with China, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Israel. All these actors, in different ways, directly contributed to the fall of the USSR. Now – with one exception – they are all focused on The Dawn of the Eurasian Century.

Will the Ukraine be partitioned next and, if so, how?

August 16, 2022

Interesting info today.  First, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service has, through the statement of a Colonel General, made the following statement (translated by my friend Andrei Martyanov on his blog): (emphasis added)

Translation: MOSCOW, August 16 – RIA Novosti. Western curators have practically written off the Kyiv regime and are already planning the partition of Ukraine, Foreign Intelligence Service spokesman Colonel-General Volodymyr Matveev said at the Moscow Conference on International Security. “Obviously, the West is not concerned about the fate of the Kyiv regime. As can be seen from the information received by the SVR, Western curators have almost written it off and are in full swing developing plans for the division and occupation of at least part of the Ukrainian lands,” he said. However, according to the general, much more is at stake than Ukraine: for Washington and its allies, it is about the fate of the colonial system of world domination.

Just to clarify, the SVR rarely makes public statements and when they do, you can take them to the bank as the SVR is not in the business of “leaks” from “informed sources” and all the rest of the PR nonsense produced by the so-called western “intelligence” agencies (which have now been fully converted to highly politicized propaganda outlets).

The same day I see this article on the RT website: “Western countries waiting for ‘fall of Ukraine’ – Kiev” in which an interesting statement the Ukronazi Foreign Minister is mentioned:

Several countries in the West are waiting for Kiev to surrender and think their problems will immediately solve themselves, said Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba in an interview published on Tuesday.  “I often get asked in interviews and while speaking to other foreign ministers: how long will you last? That’s instead of asking what else could be done to help us defeat Putin in the shortest time possible,” Kuleba said, noting that such questions suggest that everyone “is waiting for us to fall and for their problems to disappear on their own.”

Finally, a while ago, Dmitri Medvedev post this “future map of the Ukraine after the war” on his Telegram account.  This maps shows a Ukraine partitioned between her neighbors and a tiny rump Ukraine left in the center.

Now, full disclosure, I have been a proponent of the breakup of the Ukraine into several successor states for a long while now: I gave my reasons for this in my article “The case for the breakup of the Ukraine” written in faraway 2016.

Now, six years later, what are the chances of this happening?

Without making predictions, which is close to impossible right now as there are way too many variables which can dramatically influence the outcome, I want to list a few arguments for and against the likelihood (as opposed to desirability) of such an outcome.

Arguments for the likelihood of this outcome:

• First, most of the neighbors of the Ukraine would benefit from such an outcome.  Poland would not get the “intermarium” it always dreams about, but it would get back lands which historically belong to Poland and are populated by many Poles.  In this map, Romania would also get a good deal, albeit Moldavia would lose Transnistria, which it had no real chance to ever truly control anyway.  Romania might, therefore, even absorb all of Moldavia.  True, on this map, Hungary gets (almost) nothing, but that is an issue which Hungary must tackle with Poland and Romania, not Russia.
• Russia might not even oppose such a development, simply because it makes the Ukronazi problem somebody else’s issue.  As long as what is the current Ukraine is fully demilitarized and denazified, Russia will be fine with such an outcome.
• The rump ex-Banderastan would be so much reduced in size, population and ressources that it would present little to no threat to anybody.  Crucially, the Russians will never allow it to have anything more than a minimal police and internal security force (for at least as long as there remains even *traces* of the Ukronazi Banderista ideology anywhere near Russia).  The actual chances of this rump Banderastan to become a threat to anybody would be close to zero.  Not to mention that even if that rump Banderastan could become some kind of threat, it would be much easier to deal with it than the threat Russia faced in early 2022.
• Objectively, the European countries would get the best possible “out” for them, as being in a constant state of total war by proxy is absolutely unsustainable for countries of Europe.
• As for “Biden”, assuming he is still alive and in power (?), it would make it possible for “him” to remove the topic of this latest war lost (again!) by the USA from the headlines and deal with other issues.
• The Ukraine has been such a waste of money, billions and billions, that it is essentially a black hole with an event horizon which lets nothing come back out and beyond which anything, money, equipment or men, simply disappear.  That is clearly an unsustainable drain on the economies of the West.
• Yet, in theory, if a deal is made and all parties agree, then the EU could remove maybe not all, but at least the worst, self-damaging, sanctions it so stupidly implemented and which are now destroying the EU’s economy.
• For the USA the biggest benefit from such an outcome could be, in theory, that it would “close” the “Russian front” and allow the US to focus its hatred and aggression against China.

There are, however, also many arguments against such an outcome.

• First, the western ruling classes, drunk on total russophobia, would have to accept that Russia won this war (again) and defeated the combined powers of the West (again).  This would mean an immense loss of face and political credibility for all those involved in the political war against Russia.
• Second, for NATO this would be a disaster.  Remember that NATO’s real goal is to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down“.  In this case, how would an even expanded NATO accept that it could do absolutely nothing to stop the Russians from achieving all their goals?
• Next, while the people of the EU are suffering from the devastating economic policies of their rulers, the ruling elites (the EU 1%) are doing just fine, thank you, and don’t give a damn about the people they rule over.
• Such an outcome would also directly challenge the US desire for a unipolar world, run by Uncle Shmuel as the World Hegemon.  The risk here is a political domino effect in which more and more countries would struggle to achieve true sovereignty, which would be a direct threat to the US economic model.
• Such an outcome is almost certain to be unachievable while the Neocons run the USA.  And since there are NO signs of the weakening of the Neocons’ iron grip on all the levers of political powers in the USA, such an outcome could only happen if the Neocon crazies are sent back to the basement they crawled out from and where they belong.  Not likely in the foreseeable future.
• This focus on the partition of the Ukraine overlooks the fact that the Ukraine is not the real enemy of Russia.  In fact, the Ukraine lost the war to Russia in the first 7-10 days after the beginning of the SMO.  Ever since, it is not the Ukraine per se which Russia has been fighting, but the consolidated West.  If the real enemy is the consolidated West, the it could be argued that *any* outcome limited to the Ukraine would not fix or solve anything.  At best, it might be an intermediate stage of a much larger and longer war in which Russia will have to demilitarize and denazify not just Banderastan but, at the very least, all of the EU/NATO countries.
• While for some the Ukrainian war has been an economic disaster, it has been a fantastic windfall for the (terminally corrupt) US MIC.  And I won’t even go into the obvious corruption ties the Biden family has in Kiev.  If this “Medvedev solution” is ever realized, then all that easy money would disappear.
• Furthermore, while amongst the argument for such an outcome I listed the ability of the USA to “close the Russian front” and focus on China, in reality such an arguments makes a very far-fetched assumption: that it is still possible to separate Russia and China and that Russia would allow the US to strike at China.  Simply put, Russia cannot allow China to be defeated any more than China can allow for a Russian defeat.  Thus the entire notion of “closing the Russian front” is illusory, in reality things have gone way too far for that and neither Russia nor China will allow the US to take them down one by one.
• The EU is run by a comprador ruling class which is totally subservient to the interests of the US Neocons.  There are, already, many internal tensions inside the EU and such an outcome would be a disaster for those all those EU politicians who painted themselves into the corner of a total war against Russia, and even if, say, the Poles, Romanians or even Hungarians get some benefit from such an outcome, it would be unacceptable to the thugs currently running Germany, the UK or even France.

The arguments for and against such an outcome I listed above are just some examples, in reality there are many more arguments on both sides of this issue.  Besides, what made sense 6 years ago might not make sense today.

For example, this discussion focuses on the “what” but not on the “how”.  Let me explain.

I think that I was the first person in the West who noticed and translated a key Russian expression: “non agreement capable” (недоговороспособны).  This expression has been increasingly used by many Russian decision-makers, politicians, political commentators and others.  Eventually, even the folks in the West picked up on this.  So let’s revisit this issue again, keeping in mind that the Russians are now fully convinced that the West is simply “non agreement capable”.  I would argue that up until the Russian ultimatum to the USA and NATO, the Russians still left open the door to some kind of negotiations.  However, and as I predicted BEFORE the Russian ultimatum, Russia made the only possibly conclusion from the West’s stance: if our “partners” (sarcasm) are not agreement capable, then the time has come for Russian unilateralism.

True, ever since 2013, or even 2008, there were already signs that Russian decision making is gradually moving towards unilateralism.  But the Russian ultimatum and SMO are now the “pure” signs of the adoption by Russia of unilateralism, at least towards the consolidated West.

If that is correct, then I would suggest that most arguments above, on both sides of the issue, are have basically become obsolete and irrelevant.

Furthermore, I would like to add a small reminder here: most of the combat operations in the Ukraine are not even conducted by Russian forces, but by LDNR forces supported by Russian C4ISR and firepower.  But in terms of her real military potential, Russia has used less than 10% of her military and Putin was quite candid about this when he said “we have not even begun to act seriously“.

What do you think this war will look like if Russia decides to really unleash her full military power, that is the 90% of forces which are currently not participating in the SMO?

Here is a simple truth which most folks in the West cannot even imagine: Russia does not fear NATO at all.

If anything, the Russians have already understood that they have the means to impose whatever outcome they chose to unilaterally impose on their enemies.  The notion of a US/NATO attack on Russia is simply laughable.  Yes, the USA has a very powerful submarine force which can fire lots of Tomahawk and Harpoon missiles at Russian targets.  And yes, the US has a still robust nuclear triad.  But neither of these will help the USA win a land war against the Russian armed forces.

And no, sending a few thousands US soldiers to this or that NATO country to “reinforce NATO’s eastern flank” is pure PR, militarily, it is not even irrelevant, it’s laughable.  I won’t even comment on the sending of F-35s which is so utterly ridiculous and useless against the Russian Aerospace Forces and air defenses that I won’t even bother arguing with those who don’t understand how bad both the F-35s (and even the F-22s!) really are.

I won’t dignify the EU’s military capabilities with any comment other than this: countries who now seriously advocate taking less frequent showers to “show Putin!” have sunk to such a level of irrelevance and degeneracy that they cannot be taken seriously, most definitely not in Russia.

So where do we go from here?

As I said, I don’t know, there are too many variables.  But a few things seem clear to me:

• Russia has decided to full unilateralism in her policies towards the Ukraine and the West.  Oh sure, if and when needed, Russians will still agree to talk to their western “partners”, but that is due to the long standing Russian policy of always talking to everybody and anybody, even Russia’s worst enemies.  Why?  Because neither warfare not political unilateralism are an end by themselves, they are only means to achieve a specific political goal.  Thus, it is always good to sit down with your enemy, especially if you have been gently but steadily increasing the pain dial on them for a few months!  The Europeans being the “great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies” (to quite BoJo) they are might cave in quickly and suddenly or, at the very least, they will try to improve their lot by trying to bypass their own sanctions (Uncle Shmuel permitting, however reluctantly).
• The only party with any real agency left with which Russia could seriously negotiate is the USA, of course.  However, as long as the USA under the total control of the Neocons, this is a futile exercise.
• Should there ever be any kind of deal made, it would only be one which would be fully and totally verifiable.  Contrary to popular beliefs, a great many treaties and agreements can be crafted to be fully verifiable, that is not a technical problem by itself.  However, with the current ruling classes of the West, no such deal is likely to be hammered out and agreed by all parties involved.

So what is left?

There is a Russian saying which my grandmother taught me as a kid: “the borders of Russia are found at the end of a Cossack’s spear“.  This saying, born from 1000 years of existential warfare with no natural borders simply expresses a basic reality: the Russian armed forces are the ones who decide where Russia ends.  Or you can flip it this way: “the only natural border of Russia are the capabilities of the Russian armed forces”.  You can think of it has pre-1917 Russian unilateralism 🙂

Still, this begs the question of the moral and ethical foundation for such a stance.  After all, does it not suggest that Russia gives herself the right to invade any country it can just because she can?

Not at all!

While there were imperialist and expansionist wars in Russian history, compared to the West’s 1000 years of wall to wall imperialism, Russia is but a meek and gentle lamb!  Not that this excuses anything, it is simply a fact.  The rest of the Russian wars were, almost all, existential wars, for the survival and freedom of the Russian nation.  I cannot think of a more “just war” than one which 1) was imposed upon you and 2) one in which your sole goal is to survive as a free and sovereign nation, especially a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation as the Russian one has always been, in sharp contrast to the enemies of Russia which were always driven by religious, nationalist and even overtly racist fervor (which is what we can all observe again today, long after the end of WWII).

Is this just propaganda?  If you think so, then you can study Russian history or, better, study the current military doctrine of Russia and you will see that Russia’s force planning is entirely defensive, especially at the strategic level.  The best proof of that is that Russia put up with all the ugly racist and russophobic policies of the Ukraine or the three Baltic statelets for decades without taking any action.  But when the Ukraine became a de facto NATO proxy and directly threatened not only the Donbass, but Russia herself (does anybody still remember that days before the SMO, “Ze” declared that the Ukraine should get nuclear weapons?!), then Russia took action.  You have to be either blind or fantastically dishonest not to admit that self-evident fact.

[Sidebar: by the way, the three Baltic statelets, for which Russia has not use at all, are constantly trying to become a military threat to Russia, not only by hosting NATO forces, but also by truly idiotic plans to “lock” the Baltic with Finland.  Combine this was the Nazi anti-Russian Apartheid policies towards the Russian minorities and you would be forgiven for thinking that the Balts really want to be the next ones to be denazified and demilitarized.  But… but… – you will say  – “since they are members of NATO, they cannot be attacked!”.  Well, if you believe that 1) anybody in NATO will fight Russia over these statelets or 2) that NATO has the military means to protect them, then I have got plenty of great bridges to sell you.  Still, the most effective way to deal with the Balts is to let them commit economic suicide, which they basically have already done, and then promise them a few “economic carrots” for a change to a more civilized attitude.  A Russian saying says that “the refrigerator wins against the TV” (победа холодильника над телевизором) which means that when your refrigerator is empty, the propaganda on TV loses its power.  I think that the future of the 3 Baltic statelets will be defined by that aphorism]

So will the Ukraine be partitioned?

Yes, absolutely, it has already lost huge parts of its territory and it will only lose more.

Might the western neighbors decide to take a bite out off the western Ukraine?  Sure!  That is a real possibility.

But these will all be either unilateral actions or very unofficially coordinated understandings wrapped in plausible deniability (like the deployment Polish “peacekeepers” to “protect” the western Ukraine).  But mostly I predict two things will happen: 1) Russia will achieve all of her goals unilaterally without making any deals with anybody and 2) Russia will only allow the Ukraine’s western neighbors to bite off some chucks of the Ukraine if, and only if, those chunks to not represent any military threat to Russia.

Remember what Putin said about Finland and Sweden and Finland joining NATO?  He said that by itself, this is not a problem for Russia.  But he warned that should these countries host US/NATO forces and weapons systems threatening Russia, than Russia will have to take counter-measures.  I think that this is also the Kremlin’s position about the future of any rump-Banderastan and any moves by NATO countries (including Poland, Romania and Hungary) to reacquire territories which historically belonged to them or which have substantial Polish, Romanian and Hungarian minorities.

Right now, we are only in the second phase of the SMO (which centers of the Donbass) and Russia has not even initiated any operations to move deeper into the Ukraine.  As for the real war, the war between Russia and the combined West, it has been going on for no less than decade, or even more, and this war will last much longer than the SMO in the Ukraine.  Finally, the outcome of this war will see  tectonic and profound changes at least as damatic as the changes resulting from the outcomes of WWI and WWII.

The Russians understand that what they now really must do is to truly finish WWII and that the formal end of WWII in 1945 only marked the transition to a different type of warfare still imposed by a united, consolidated West, but now not by German Nazis but by (mostly) US Neocons (which, of course, are typical racist Nazis, except their racism is Anglo and Judaic/Zionist).

I will conclude with a short quote by Bertold Brecht which, I think, is deeply understood by Russia today:

“Therefore learn how to see and not to gape.
To act instead of talking all day long.
The world was almost won by such an ape!
The nations put him where his kind belong.
But don’t rejoice too soon at your escape –
The womb he crawled from is still going strong.”

― Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

Russia slaughtered a lot of western apes in her history, now is the time to finally deal with the womb from which they crawled out from.

Andrei

PS: FYI – the Russian investigation has declared that the explosions in the airfield in Crimea was an act of sabotage/diversion.  Which was the most likely explanation to begin with.

A quick update from Andrei, with a few additional notes

June 23, 2022

Dear friends,

It has now been a month since my last update, so I have decided to post this note to share a few thoughts with you.

First, the boring stuff: my health is definitely doing better and, while I very much regret having had to take that time off, I now am sure that it was the right decision, both for me and the blog.  I hope to come back to full-time blogging by the end of July.  Again, I apologize to you all for my absence, and I ask for your understanding.

Second, and as I had predicted, the situation in the world and in the Ukraine has changed a great deal over the past couple of months.  I will just mention a few bullet-points of what I see as the highlights:

• The “the glorious Ukrainians are winning” narrative has now quasi-officially faceplanted (heck, even the NYT changed its tune) and nobody sane is spewing this nonsense anymore.  The reality is that the Ukrainians are, on average, losing about one battalion per day, and this is why they are now sending barely trained civilians to the East: most of the (often very well-trained and courageous) Ukrainian combat units are even dead, prisoners, MIA or in “cauldrons” (actual or by firepower) with no chance to escape.
• It is now also undeniable that what began as a special military operation (SMO) has now turned into a open and full-scale war between the consolidated West (aka the Anglo-Zionist Empire) and Russia: the Empire has now “hit” Russia with everything it had short of a direct military attack.  The (originally 200’000+ strong) Ukrainian military, arguably the strongest NATO military force (which is otherwise mostly composed of small and thoroughly woked-out “parade militaries”!), especially with the full support of the West (intelligence, weapons, money, political, etc. etc. etc.) is being “demilitarized” and “denazified” by a vastly superior Russian military force (but not one bigger in size: Russia has used only a fraction of her full military power).  The outcome here is not in doubt.
• This reality has now been fully accepted by the Russian society which now stands behind the Kremlin (at 80%+) which has made no secret that it is now locked into an existential war against the West.  This has been the case since at least 2013, but now the original ratios (roughly 80% informational, 15% economic and 5% military) have shifted to what I would call “total war by proxy“.
• The hardcore crazies in the West (US Neocons, UK, Poland and the 3B) are trying hard to trigger a fullscale war between NATO and Russia and, so far, the spineless Eurolemmings have let them set the agenda, however suicidal it might be for the EU and NATO.  Frankly, my disgust with western Europe is total – I never had any illusions about the “new” Europeans – and all I can say is that they all richly deserve each other and what is coming their way.  All I can say is this: continue to act like Nazis and you shall be denazified.  It is really that simple.
• The leaders of the Empire know that they lost yet again, and they are seeking refuge in their usual coping mechanisms: ideological self-gratification and deep, deep denial.  While the EU is committing a straightforward economic, political and social suicide, the Biden Administration has gone “full woke”, as did corporate “America”(meaning the USA, of course, not the American continent): the so-called “minorities” are now shoved down the collective throats of the US people now, no matter how small, or freaky, the said “minorities” are.  This is especially striking in the kind of advertisements the US corporations are now unanimously producing.   I think, for example, of the morbidly obese black women in diapers (!!!) taking “ballerina poses” YouTube is now regularly showing.  Watching these ads, one would think that blacks in the USA occupy all positions of authority and prestige, that most US women are lesbians, and millions of US kids (and even infants!) urgently need a sex change (watch the excellent “What is a Woman?” documentary to see how insane this has all become).  When I see this collective woke insanity, I cannot help but wonder whether corporate “America” is not deliberately trying to really piss off the vast majority of US Americans and trigger some kind of major and violent internal crisis.
• The Russians, in the meantime, are passing new laws against the propaganda of homosexuality: while in the past, such propaganda was only banned if directed at children, now this expanded to the entire population of Russia.  Just to clarify: Russia is not banning homosexuals and their sexual practices, however pathological, remain fully legal.  But what Russia IS doing is refusing to consider homosexuality as a “normal and natural variation in human sexuality” (Wikipedia).  In other words, the Russians still consider homosexuality as a psychological disorder which might deserve compassion, but not affirmation (nevermind encouragement).  Since “inclusiveness” and “positivity” are now key western “values” this is also a message from Russia: keep your woke-freaks and their ideology to yourselves, we want none of it!
• In the meantime the Euroukrainians are now planning to ban and destroy over 100’000’000 copies of Russian language books.  Hitler would be proud.  The Eurolemmings have nothing to say.  You know, “#cancelRussia” thingie (meaning both Russians themselves and the Russian culture in all its forms) and all that “it’s okay when we do it” or “our SOBs” stuff.
• The Western economic Blitzkrieg against Russia has totally failed and the joke in Russia is that while McCain famously once said that “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country” with contempt, “Biden” is now saying the same thing, but with deep envy 🙂

Translation: for our Fatherland

I could go on and on, but the bottom line is this: the West has declared total war on Russia (and, de facto, to all of Zone B) and Russia has accepted this.  For a decade and more the West has tried hard to wake up and provoke the proverbial Russian bear and these efforts have finally been successful: the bear is now out, and he is very, very angry.  To clarify, by this I am not referring to former Atlantic Integrationists like Medvedev now “coming out” as a Eurasian Sovereignist hardliner (he is clearly setting himself up for a future Presidential election and says all the “right things”), but about the Russian people which are now in what I call a full “WWII” mode (“Rise up immense country” and all that).  To the right is the kind of images now circulating on the Russian Internet and which expresses the awareness that Europe was never truly denazifed, at least not in the US occupied countries.

Russia is now determined to finish this ugly job, once and forever.  You want to “cancel Russia”?  In your dreams only, but Russia can, and will, “cancel Nazism” once and or all.  1000 years of that crap is enough!

From the first Crusades to the invasion of the USSR by the united Europe under Hitler’s command, the West has always has some kind of ideology to justify its wars of imperialist aggression.  The interesting thing is that now this is over and rather than justify is acts of aggression in the name of some putatively universal religion or ideology, the western elites (and, alas, much of its population) have now finally shown their true face which is:

• Virulent anti-Russian racism in its purest form (again, Hitler would be proud)
• Pure and overt Satanism under the label of “Woke” ideology (the last western ideology it appears) with its focus on the destruction of the family and, especially, children (Satanists know that they cannot do anything against the Creator of all, hence they try to take out their hatred and revenge against His creatures, especially children)
• Overt and even “in your face” hatred to any and all who oppose that agenda (as the French revolutionary Louis Antoine de Saint-Just famously declared “No freedom for the enemies of freedom“, right?!)

The truth is that the real West, the one born from the Middle-Ages (and *not* from the Roman or Greek civilizations!) has always been ruled by cynical, evil, thugs.  In the past, these thugs always concealed their real worldview and agenda under all sorts of pious pretexts, now its only “ideology” left is pure hatred and wokism (same thing, really).

I submit that it is impossible to predict what will happen in the coming months and years – there are simply too many variables which can dramatically affect our future.  What began as a special military operation (as opposed to a combined arms operation) has now morphed into what one could call WWIII or even WWIV (depending on your definitions).  This war will last for several years unless, of course, the Neocons and their associated crazies in the EU get their way and trigger a nuclear conflict: in the latter case it will be short and very final.

Right now the focus is on the Donbass and the southern Ukraine, but we have to understand two things about this:

• The Ukronazis and their NATO bosses have already long lost that war, and all the West and its Nazi puppets in Kiev are doing is trying to prolong this unwinnable war for as long as possible to get a maximum number of Ukrainians killed or maimed and to destroy as much of the Ukraine as possible and make Russia “pay the highest price” for her (quite inevitable) victory on the battlefield.  What a paradox!  The Russian “aggressors” are trying as hard as they can to save as many Ukrainians as possible (even at the cost of their own lives!) along with whatever is left of the Ukrainian infrastructure after 30 years of “independence”, while the western “defenders” and even “allies” of the Ukraine want to turn it into a desolate moonscape covered with corpses.
• This is not a war about the Ukraine, at least not anymore, this is now a war for the future of the European continent and even the future international order.  As I have said many times already, the Russians fully intend to denazify at least all of the European continent, preferably by economic and political means but, if needed, by military means too.  Why?  Because the West has left Russia no other choice.  For Russia and, I would argue, all of Zone B the choice is both stark and simple: true and full sovereignty (economic, of course, but also cultural, spiritual and civilizational) or subjugation.

In other words, this is not a war Russia can afford to lose and the Russian people know it.

Last time around, Russia lost about 27 million people while China lost about 35 millions.  That a total of 62 million people, about two thirds of which were civilians.  Keep these figures in mind when you look at the quick and quite radical modernization of the Russian and Chinese armed forces (btw – the Chinese people also “get it” and they fully support Russia, as does the Chinese leadership, even if they try to keep a low profile for the time being and let Russia carry the burden of being on the frontline of this war: simply put, the Chinese are buying time which, frankly, they still need to achieve parity, or better, against the US and its protectorates in Asia such as Taiwan, Japan, ROK or Australia.  The Russians also understand that as they themselves were in a similar position between 2000 and 2018.  But they know that the Chinese Dragon will have to fully “wake up” sooner rather than later.

Yeah, I know, most folks in the West don’t know that, or don’t care, but the point is now what the folks in the West do not know, but rather it is what the people of Russia and China know and understand quite well.  Only an utter fool would doubt or disregard the kind of determination which sits deep inside the souls of the Russian and Chinese people to never allow the West to subjugate them again.  Ever.

[Sidebar: yes, I know, the Japanese Empire which attacked China was not part of the West (yet), but that is an extremely superficial argument which fails to understand that it was precisely western imperialism which created the conditions, in both China and Japan, which resulted in the Japanese imperialist attacks against the entire Asian-Pacific region!]

The above does not even begin to cover all the amazing developments which have taken place in the last few months.  Not only have there been truly huge changes INSIDE Russia (and they are only accelerating), but also in Latin America, Africa and the Middle-East.  And I will revisit all these topics in about a month or so, when I will come back to full-time blogging.  Besides, in a month or so many of the things I mentioned above will become even more obvious for all to see so rather than trying to establish “fact X” we will be able to actually discuss and analyze it, its reality having been quite established.

[Sidebar: please remember who told you the truth and who lied to you over the past months.  There were many, many such liars, ranging from the official propaganda machine (aka the “free press”) to the “Putin has lost it all” emo-Marxists and assorted 6th columnists who, whether they understood it or not, served the purpose of the Empire’s PSYOPs.  Also please remember that Andrei Martynov, Bernard and Gonzalo Lira not only spoke truthfully, but they were right and their detractors totally wrong.  We all owe them an immense debt of gratitude!]

Frankly, before my forced break, I was getting really frustrated trying to prove to misinformed or even fully brainwashed commentators that the official narrative (produced by the biggest strategic PSYOP in history) was a load of bull, based on lies and/or on a total “misunderstanding” (and I am being kind here!) of the real world outside the “mental Zone A”.  Now most of that narrative has collapsed.

I am also confident that a month from today, things will be even more obvious than they are today.

So, my friends and readers, I leave you in the (very competent) hands of Amarynth, Herb and the rest of the Saker team and I very much look forward to my full return, God willing, in a month or so.

Kind regards to all, and many thanks for your support!

Andrei

PS: yesterday I was re-watching the superb movie by Costa Gavras “Z” which, at the end, lists all the works of art, literature, music, etc. which the (US CIA backed) Greek “colonels” banned and I thought to myself: “what leftist director would make such a movie today about how the entire West is now doing the same with all things Russian?“.  None, of course.  I also noticed the sweet irony of Costa Gavras’ movie being called “Z” (which in Greek stands for “Ζει” or “he lives”) and I wondered if the copyright owners of the movie will now have to rename it since the letter “Z” is now banned amongst doubleplusgoodthinking russophobes.  Finally, there are some in the West who want to create two categories: “good Russians”, who are expected to publicly denounce their country and President, and “bad Russians” who refuse to do so.  Hitler wanted Jews to wear a star of David, so could we see a day when “bad Russians” in Zone A will be told to wear a “Z”.  Right now, no T-shirt or mugs printing companies in Zone A will accept to print a “Z” on their items (I know, I tried and failed!), but considering the collective rage and insanity of the western ruling elites, maybe the letter “Z” will become obligatory for “bad Russians” in Zone A?  Just kidding, of course, but rewatching the movie “Z” felt quite eerie anyway.

Pro-Ukrainian, but Anti-Nazi

June 17, 2022

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By Batiushka

I have noticed that there are a few reviewers of the Special Operation in the Ukraine who seem to support it only because they are racist, anti-Ukrainian. Let it be made clear that this is not the case of the overwhelming majority of its supporters. And it is certainly not the case of the vast majority of the Russian forces involved in the Operation. For example, if you watch videos of captured or active Ukrainian troops, they virtually all express themselves only in Russian. True, the former Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, did make some ambiguous remarks about certain Ukrainians, but he was not referring to all Ukrainians, as we explain below.

The fact is that Russians and Ukrainians are ethnically one, they are brothers and sisters, all East Slavs and also virtually all Orthodox Christians by culture. This is particularly why Russian forces are doing their utmost not to harm civilians or damage civilian infrastructure. That is why when Kiev troops are killed in action, Russians refer to them not as ‘Ukrainians’, but as ‘nationalists’, who are those to whom Dmitry Medvedev was referring in his remarks that the nationalists are ‘bastards and scum’. The Ukrainians are not the enemy, the enemy is the puppet regime in Kiev, its NATO string-pullers and its brainwashed nationalist/Nazi supporters.

President Putin explained from the very outset and very clearly that the US-created puppet regime in Kiev, with its Nazi/NATO/Zionist backers, is an Anti-Russia. It does not represent the mass of the Ukrainian people, so many of whom have close family in Russia, or now live in Russia, or are married to Russians, or who only speak Russian and not Ukrainian, or who are Russian by culture. The Kiev regime represents only the corrupted elite who choose its politicians and the brainwashed who supported them. We, on the other hand, are pro-Ukrainian, precisely because we are anti-Nazi/anti-NATO/anti-Zionist. We are pro-Ukrainian, life-affirming, not life-denying. We affirm Ukrainian families, not the Nazi-imposed LGBT. Similarly, we are pro-American, but anti-American elite. We want the American people and soul to be liberated from their brainwashing elite.

In the same way Russian soldiers in the First World War were not anti-German, but anti-Kaiser, and in the Second World War were not anti-German, but anti-Nazi. Accounts from the First War tell how Russian soldiers who had wounded advancing German troops in self-defence would crawl out of their trenches at risk to their own lives to pick the wounded up and carry them back for medical care. Many eyewitnesses from the Second War used to tell us how captured German soldiers were given crusts of bread by Russians, who themselves were virtually starving. On the Western side we can something similar portrayed in the well-known novel by Erich Maria Remarque, ‘Im Westen Nichts Neues’, ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, or in poems by the English soldier Siegfried Sassoon.

We are very far from the racist mocking of other races by, for example, white US soldiers, who called their enemies ‘savages’, ‘redskins’ (the very word ‘redskin’ denotes the essential superficiality of the Nazi obsession with skin colour as a defining trait), ‘niggers’, ‘chinks’, ‘dagos’, ‘nips’, ‘gooks’ or mocked them as subhuman (a translation of the Nazi ‘Untermensch’), or monkeys. Who can forget how only a few years ago the American Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, called the French ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’, had French champagne poured into the New York sewers and launched a ‘Cancel France’ campaign. All this merely displays the utter ignorance and primitive arrogance of the users of such words.

‘Cancel everyone who does not agree with us’, or in the words of the remarkably limited Bush Junior: ‘You are either are with us or against us’. It reminds us that some of the first WASPS to arrive in North America were people who were so intolerant that they could no longer live in England side by side with others who had different views. So they chose to emigrate. Later they proved their intolerance by engaging in witch-hunts and burning innocent women to death. And most of them took part in the genocide of the native people whose land they had stolen and used black slaves. And this intolerance is what their descendants are still displaying today on their Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. ‘We cancel and exclude you and your account because you refuse to agree with us and our ‘superior’ (= Nazi) ‘intelligence’ (= stupidity).

The problem has never been one of Ukrainians. The problem has always been that of the spiritual disease of Nazism. And that is what it is – a spiritual disease. Once the soul of the Ukraine has been liberated from this disease, in other words, once it has been denazified, a New Ukraine will be born. It may well take the form of a Protectorate centred around Kiev and speak a mixture of Ukrainian with Russian and Surzhyk (Ukrainian Russian). It will have secure borders and its people will be patriotic Ukrainians, not in some racist way that denigrates others, but in a positive way that respects others. Once freed of parasitic oligarchs and corruption, the naturally rich New Ukraine could have a brilliant future and take a positive part in the Concert of the Nations.

Once it has been understood that there is no problem with the Ukraine or Ukrainians, but only with Nazism, there may take place other Special Operations in other parts of the world. China may soon launch an Operation in Taiwan to free the ethnic Chinese there from the Nazism of its US-appointed elite. As for Russia, it has not yet finished the job in the Ukraine, where the task is constantly being extended because the Nazi West keeps sending long-range missiles and artillery to Kiev. As long as these weapons are in use, firing on Donetsk or anywhere else in liberated territory, the war will be extended and continue. Russia may physically have to liberate the whole country, mobilising more forces beyond the small expeditionary force it originally sent.

And then if Western aggression continues, it may have to launch other operations in Moldova and the Baltics in order to liberate those peoples too from NATO Nazism, from their corrupt US-appointed elites and EU exploitation. It may have to rebuild them, so that their peoples, economic refugees from corruption living now in Western Europe, can gratefully come home. Beyond that, as regards Western Europe in general, it too will surely one day find itself liberated one way or another from transatlantic tyranny and threats, safe under the Russian security and nuclear umbrella. Someone must defend Western Europe from the threats which for the moment are still coming from outside Afro-Eurasia, which is 86% of the world. Only Russia can do that. Russian troops once liberated Berlin and Paris. Will it have to happen again and maybe this time be extended to include Rome, Madrid and London?

The Special Operation has never been only about the Ukraine. It has always been a proxy conflict on the territory claimed by the Kiev regime. In reality, it is an Operation to defeat Global Nazism – euphemistically called ‘Globalism’. This means defeating Nazism militarily, by destroying the Western-created Kiev regime forces and all the extra NATO weapons foolishly sent to the Ukraine; territorially, by liberating lands and peoples from the Nazi yoke; economically, by creating an alliance of friends among the huge populations of the new G8, of Russia, China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Iran, Turkey, Mexico, approaching 50% of the world’s population. This is called to replace the old, tired, narrow, US-manipulated G7, which represents scarcely 10% of the world’s population. And even the new G8 may yet be doubled to become a G16 to include other vital large countries, like Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Egypt, Vietnam and DR Congo. This would include 60% of the world’s population.

The great task before us is to rebalance the world to take account of its real peoples. As an example of the need to rebalance, over a century ago the Russian Prime Minister Count Piotr Stolypin, speaking of Tsar Nicholas’ ‘Great Asian Programme’ and its partial sabotage by the Western Powers through their Japanese puppet, said the following: ‘Our eagle is a legacy of New Rome…a two-headed eagle. Of course, our eagle is strong and powerful, but if you cut off one of our eagle’s heads, the one facing east, you will not turn him into a one-headed eagle facing west: It will only make him bleed to death’. However, NATO/Nazism has been doing precisely the opposite, trying to remake Russia in its own provincial image and so bleed it to death by cutting off one of its heads.

This is not going to happen, whatever the illusions that were fostered within the West during the treacherous Yeltsin regime in the distant and disastrous 1990s. We have moved on a generation, we are now well into the 21^st century. Russia is now a restored Eurasian Superpower, its double-headed eagle looking East and West, and the Eurasian Heartland, with 70% of the world’s population and so many living ancient civilisations, is the present and the future of the whole world. Russia’s task is to bring the Non-Russian part of Europe, in the Western part of the European Peninsula, back into the Eurasian orbit, liberating that Western Peninsula from its colonial vassal status to the USA, denazifying and demilitarising it too.

For eight long years Western countries, dominated by the Nazi ideology of the ‘The West is Best’, together with US-backed separatists in Kiev, have been terrorising and murdering thousands of Ukrainians in the war in the Donbass. They have taunted the largest nation in the world, the Russian bear. For 23 years before that, they humiliated the Russian bear. Did they really think they could continue doing this to the restored bicontinental Superpower, with its profound cultural tradition and vast natural resources, without which Europe cannot live? It is so very sad to see how irresponsible Western leaders grasp so little of the consequences of their actions. Have they never heard the word ‘boomerang’?

At great cost Russia’s highly-professional, world-class-equipped and brilliantly-trained armies already liberated and saved Europe from forms of Nazism twice in the past, in 1814 and in 1945. This is the third time that the West has poked the bear. As soon as possible, you Western politicians had better stop sending lethal NATO arms to Nazis in the Ukraine, sue for peace and grant all that the Russian Federation and the Non-Nazi population of the Ukraine wishes. We are pro-Ukrainian, but we are anti-Nazi. You have been warned.

Sitrep Operation Z: Messy Grind again and more Great Walkback

June 15, 2022

Source

By Amarynth

We start with the broader environment:

It is Zelensky’s decision, says the Chorus of the Great Walkback.

“The people and the government of Ukraine, led by President Zelensky, must decide on their own the issue of the possibility of territorial concessions.” – US Secretary of State Blinken. According to the head of the State Department, the United States does not intend to impose its position.

(You have lost, and you don’t want to say it Blinken!)

We see more and more western statements that Ukraine can end the war, via loss of territories. This is sheer desperation to avoid even an iota of responsibility for the loss of lives that they caused. They don’t know how to get out, they have to get out, they have to save face for their domestic audiences in the face of a spectacular loss of prestige, so again, Zelensky is being thrown under the bus and the Ukraine is an orphan.

Russia in any event says nyet! It will be on our terms, not yours.

A moment of skewed brilliance struck the former commander of NATO forces in Europe, Wesley Clark. He says that without the direct intervention of the Alliance, it will not be possible to end the war in the Ukraine. He is of course wrong, but his calculus is interesting:

“Moreover, if NATO does not intervene in Ukraine, it may dissolve itself. “The idea that Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is now advocating, and which finds support among other members of the alliance – that NATO can not actively intervene unless it is directly attacked – this idea has remained in the 90s.”

So, he wants to order the Russians to cease fire.

“It’s time to learn the lessons “NATO must intervene. Let’s officially recognize this and order the Russians to cease fire.”

According to this retired US Army general, the alliance must either “go beyond the outlined framework, or stop its activities.”  (But .. but, all this time, you said NATO was only a defensive alliance.)

Maybe, at last, he got it! The idea here is to push NATO back to its own borders and if it won’t go, the Russians will make it go!

Maria Zakharova, perfectly on time and topic during the St Petersburg Economic Forum:

“If you’re looking for media objectivity, best not focus on the West’s portrayal of Ukraine.”

Meanwhile in China, Xi Jinping signed a legal framework as to how China’s military forces will operate in a war, that is not a war. Like, as an example, a special military operation. And then, Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation today. “China is ready to continue to support each other with Russia on issues of sovereignty and security” – Xi Jinping in a conversation with Putin. Your guess here is as good as mine, but it looks like the two leaders are expecting more Special Military Operations, or military/technical work.

From there, we again follow Dmitry Medvedev: “I saw a message that Ukraine wants to receive LNG from its overseas owners under Lend-Lease with payment for delivery in 2 years. Otherwise, next winter it will simply freeze.
Just a question.

And who said that in two years Ukraine will even exist on the world map? Although the Americans don’t care anymore – they have invested so much in the “anti-Russia” project that everything else is a trifle for them.”

The Great Walkback is visible to all who care to look!

And he did not stop there and spoke on sanctions: It turned out that the specially gifted characters I wrote about began to realize that Russia is our beloved Motherland. And it also dawned on them that without our country they could not survive.
After all, otherwise they will not receive:
– food for their citizens;
– fertilizers to produce food for their citizens;
– sources of energy for the production of food and heating of their citizens;
– metals and other products for the production of machines and mechanisms for their citizens;
– fuel for European and American nuclear power plants, which provide 20-40% of electricity to their citizens.
The list goes on.
Now we are looking forward to the next package of European sanctions and Grandfather Joe’s great sanctions decisions, about which the authors of these same sanctions immediately begin to come up with circumvention schemes.
I will not remind you about inflation, prices for all types of fuel and forecasts for the fall of economies. All data is publicly available.
And this is only the first month of summer.
We are waiting for autumn… when we will have to collect the main sanctions harvest.
In the meantime, the locomotive of their economy of services and digital currencies is flying into the wall at full steam. Smile, gentlemen, smile!”
https://t.me/medvedev_telegram/110

On the battlefield, it is mostly a replay now.

The work of the humanitarian corridor from the Azot plant in Severodonetsk was disrupted by the Ukrainian side on its first day, 1 person came out, the DPR military reported.

Latest Russian Mod Statement:  https://t.me/mod_russia_en/2197

And Military Summary from Rumble is as detailed as possible during another Grind phase. https://rumble.com/v18fye1-ukraine.-military-summary-and-analysis-14.06.2022.html

Some comments say that they still do not understand the small Ukrainian environment vis a vis the SMO and even less of the broader environment viz a viz a move to a multipolar world. Here is a Ukrainian map of the oblasts, and then, we follow with a Readovka map. Simply eyeball the two maps, and you will see the progress.

Traitors and Patriots

June 10, 2022

Source

By Batiushka

The prolific Russian nationalist author of 91 books, Oleg Platonov (born 1950), relates in his work on the fall of the Soviet Union how in the 1980s, on the eve of the country’s collapse, Westerners, whom The Saker rightly calls ‘Euro-Atlanticists’, betrayed the USSR. These ‘Euro-Atlanticists’ were the ‘Communists’ who in the 1990s overnight became super Capitalists, bought shares for almost nothing in valuable, about-to-be privatised national companies and so became ‘oligarchs’. Their shameful acts, in fact thefts of national property by those with insider knowledge, created an underclass of homeless. They reveal how these money-launderers sold out their own country and people and souls, often then going to live in Tel Aviv, New York, London, Nice, Marbella, Nicosia etc.

The Traitors were opposed by the Patriots, some of whom worked in the national intelligence services, where some of the best brains met. One of these Patriots, the future President Putin, was then a lowly colonel in Dresden in East Germany, working in the Soviet intelligence services (not a head of it, like so many US Presidents, heads of the CIA). When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, his office sought answers from Moscow as to what to do. And there was no answer. ‘Moscow is silent’. I believe the story is related in many places, among them in ‘The Putin Interviews’ by Oliver Stone. It was that paralysis and silence of the Centre in Moscow that was among the most decisive events in the future President’s life. He realised that Moscow was betraying the Soviet Union, that it had been taken over by the Traitors, the ‘Nomenklatura’. They believed in nothing, except in their own disgraceful gain. They were anti-Patriots.

Since coming to power in 2000, V. V. Putin has very slowly and very cautiously, but incrementally, been remedying the situation. It is his life’s work – to reverse treachery. In 19^th century Russian history people like him were known as ‘Slavophiles’ and they were opposed by ‘Westerners’. These are very vague and rather crude terms, for there are many types of Slavophiles, from primitive and bigoted nationalists to genuine Patriots, who are well-educated realists and seek only the well-being of their people. Similarly, the term ‘Westerners’ can describe outright Traitors and murderers, like Litvinenko and Skripal, but also those who realise that if Russia is to defend itself against the West, it must fight obscurantism and make use of, and then improve on, Western technology. President Putin would probably not identify with either of these historical tags, but rather perhaps with aspects of both of them.

History

The Slavophile and Westerner tendencies go back far beyond the invention of the terms in the 19^th century. Western influence, but not domination, is already there in the late 15^th century, in the Italian-built Moscow Kremlin and in the Italian manufacture of cannon under Ivan III, the Great (died 1505). This was positive. However, during the reign of Ivan IV (died 1584), called ‘the Threatening’ in Russian, which is deliberately mistranslated into English as ‘The Terrible’, Prince Andrei Kurbsky became the first Russian political émigré. Today we would call him an oligarch, or a Traitor, for in his correspondence he clearly betrays his Homeland, fleeing to the enemy in Lithuania. He was the first of the Traitors, a stereotypical ‘Westerner’.

In the second half of the 17^th century the protest against State-imposed ritual religious changes led to the nationalistic Old Ritualist reaction, popular among merchants and ‘boyars’, in the 19^th century called ‘aristocrats’, today called ‘oligarchs’. They were ‘ultra-Slavophiles’, some would say obscurantist nationalists. Then, conversely, came the Westerner Tsar Peter I, called ‘the Great’ (died 1725) who imposed by force Western technology and a Western way of life wholesale, even cutting off beards. This 18^th century later saw the reign of the enserfer Catherine II, called ‘the Great’ (died 1796), who in reality was the German Princess Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg, who did not stop persecuting Russian traditions. Westerners and Slavophiles, Traitors and Patriots.

In the 19th and 20th centuries three Romanov Tsars were assassinated by Westerners. The first of these was Paul I in 1801, with close British support because Paul wanted to free India from the yoke of British imperialism. In 1825 a revolt of Westerner aristocrats led to the Decembrist plot straight after the mysterious disappearance of Tsar Alexander I, Paul I’s son. In 1881 Alexander II, the Liberator from the enserfment of the people by the aristocrats, was assassinated by a Westerner terrorist. In 1918 his grandson, Nicholas II, hated by the aristocrats for providing virtually free education and health care and giving away land to the people, was also assassinated, again with close Western support. After the British-orchestrated coup d’etat of 1917 (absurdly called a ‘Revolution’), Westerner upper and middle classes had taken over over, but they were ousted a few months later by Westerner Bolsheviks. The vast majority of these were not Russian, and indeed their idol Karl Marx was not Russian either. Thus, they felt free to genocide the Slav population of the USSR.

Make Russia Great Again

Since the failure of the 1917-imposed Communist experiment of the USSR after three generations, the West has finally had to face a new reality. This was one which the Russophobic Brzezinski had feared so much that in the 1990s he urged the destruction and dismemberment of Russia and her Church. As Samuel Huntingdon put it so well: ‘As the Russians stopped behaving like Marxists and began behaving like Russians, the gap between Russia and the West broadened. The conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism was between ideologies which, despite their major differences, were both modern and secular…A Western democrat could carry on a debate with a Soviet Marxist. It would be impossible for him to do that with a Russian Orthodox nationalist’ (1). In other words, the Brzezinskis of this world feared that the Patriots would return to power after rejecting Western secular ideologies, as they mostly did temporarily between 1941 and 1945 in the ‘Great Patriotic War’.

This is also what happened in 2000, when V. V. Putin came to power. Since then he has been very patient, putting up with all sorts of insults and humiliations from the Western world, from one US President after another. Many of the opposite extreme criticised him in those years, those whom The Saker rightly calls ‘sixth columnists’. Similarly, many also criticised Dmitry Medvedev as a ‘Westerner’. Perhaps he was a Westerner then, but now the chips are down and the Collective West has shown its Nazi hand, there is no mistaking whom he supports. And maybe he never was a Westerner anyway. Maybe he was emollient at the time, simply because Russia was so weak and he had to court popularity in the West. We cannot say, but whatever his past, his present is clear.

Now that Russia is strong, President Putin, with his Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and all the Russia that counts behind him, is in no mood for weakling Westerners and their compromises. The Special Operation is all or nothing, and the West is losing fast. All has been carefully prepared. For over twenty years the Russian Federation has been gathering allies in a coalition all over the world, wisely using its international diplomatic skills. There will never be a repeat of Yeltsin’s betrayal of Serbia again. There will never be a repeat of the betrayal of Libya again. Technologically and economically, Russia has become independent. And militarily Russia has become stronger than the combined NATO West. The Patriots are in power and the cack-handed West and its sanctions are making Russia great again.

The Great Cleansing

The Great Cleansing has been under way since 24 February 2022. Many internal traitors in Russia soon fled – one of the first was the notorious economist and privatiser Anatoly Chubais. Millions of other traitors also soon fled from the Ukraine westwards, much to Russian satisfaction. Russia will not welcome so many of them back. Only those who left from mistaken or brainwashed panic, or because they did not want to be enlisted in the suicidal Kiev Army, will return. Let the others stay in Poland and elsewhere, living off Western ideological stupidity and humanist naivety. Other internal traitors who infiltrated positions of responsibility over the last 30 years have also been removed in Russia, as they have been found out. We know some of their names. There are still a few left to clear out. The Great Cleansing is here. Dewesternisation is being delivered.

The Special Operation has revealed who is who. The Traitors have been revealed. As also the Patriots. Those who only in fair weather supported have disappeared. Those who in foul weather still support have been revealed. The multilateral world, led by Russia, China, India and Iran, is taking shape; the unilateral world is over, as Russian sanctions bite. Forget the US vassal and client-state called ‘Ukraine’ – it is over; instead, there will be a smallish Russian Protectorate centred around Kiev. Never again will traitors in Kiev threaten Russians with NATO, nuclear weapons, bioweapons or ban the Russian language and culture, forbidding ‘War and Peace’, but allowing ‘Mein Kampf’. Never again will Kiev promote the Western Nazi ideology of ‘Cancel Russia’. It is over. This is the Great Cleansing.

But let it be said that, just as in Russia, so in the West too there are Traitors and Patriots, the elite and those among the people who have retained some integrity. They have always been there, suppressed and repressed, but still alive. The English historian Robert Bartlett put it very well in his study of Western Europe in the period from 950 to 1350, devoting a whole chapter to ‘The Europeanisation of Europe’. This relates how the West was ‘Westernised’ from the 11^th century on (2). In other words, if even after all this time the underclass of Patriots, people of integrity, were to come to power in Europe as a result of the present catastrophic situation there, as decided by the elite, and replace the treacherous Establishment traitors, then the West too could begin a process of Dewesternisation. This would be the even Greater Cleansing.

9 June 2022

Notes:

1. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Chapter 6, Torn Countries, Samuel Phillips Huntingdon, 1997

2. The Making of Europe, Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Change 950-1350, Chapter 11, Robert Bartlett, 1993

Andrei Martyanov: US Ambassador to Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, US-Russian relations, Soviet “Coast Guard”

June 07, 2022

Please visit Andrei’s website: https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/
and support him here: https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=60459185

Gonzalo Lira: There Will Be No Peace Agreement

June 05, 2022

Sitrep Operation Z: + consequences = petty Tabaquis howling

May 26, 2022

by Saker Staff

After the Russian forces took POPASNA, the pace increased. There are still battles, but the Russians are now rolling over everything else in the Donbas. The Ukrainians are being annihilated, more and more soldiers are refusing to fight, reports of mass surrenders pour in, and the Russian strategy of cauldrons and partial cauldrons is proving incredibly effective. It is a bloody war in that area exacerbated by the Ukrainian leaders because orders for a sensible retreat are not forthcoming.

Two videos today – both quite detailed:

This first video from Military Summary on Rumble, describes the logjam against sensible retreat.

This second video describes some of the very recent battles and how these brought the Ukraine to this point.  Very detailed and he draws his maps on the fly as he talks.

A few hours ago reports started filtering in of huge forces of the Russian Aerospace Forces passing over Lugansk towards the front, and powerful explosions thundered everywhere. The correspondent of “Russian Spring” rusvesna.su from the capital of the LPR reports that he sees this for the first time, a lot of combat aircraft and helicopters swept over the city in several waves. Of course we do not know yet the what, why and where of this, excepting the Russian MoD report of this morning tells the story of the increased pace.

Take a look at the numbers:

💥High-precision air-based missiles have hit 48 areas of AFU manpower and military equipment concentration, 2 artillery batteries, and 2 ammunition depots near Nikolaevka and Berestovoe in Donetsk People’s Republic during the day.

▫️1 Ukrainian electronic reconnaissance centre near Dneprovskoe, Nikolaev Region, has been destroyed, including 11 servicemen from the combat unit, as well as 15 foreign engineering specialists who arrived with security guards.

▫️In addition, 1 Osa-AKM anti-aircraft missile system launcher has been destroyed near Nikolaevka in Donetsk People’s Republic, and 1 radar of the Ukrainian S-300 anti-aircraft missile system near Chuhuev in Kharkov region.

✈️💥Operational-tactical and army aviation have hit 49 areas of AFU manpower and military equipment concentration, 2 mortar crews, as well as 1 depot of missile and artillery weapons and ammunition.

▫️The attacks have resulted in the elimination of more than 350 nationalists and up to 96 armoured and motor vehicles.

💥Russian air defence means have shot down 1 Ukrainian Mi-24 helicopter over Husarovka, Kharkov Region. 1 Ukrainian Air Force military transport aircraft delivering ammunition and weapons has been also shot down in mid-air near Kremidovka, Odessa Region.

▫️In addition, 13 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles have been shot down near Zelenyi Gai in Kherson Region, Bolshie and Malye Prokhody, Gavrilovka, Veseloe in Kharkov Region, and Epifanovka and Kirovsk in Lugansk People’s Republic, including 2 Soviet-made Tu-143 Reis jets near Melovatka in Lugansk People’s Republic.

💥Missile troops and artillery have hit 62 command posts, 407 areas of AFU manpower and military equipment concentration, 47 artillery and mortar units at firing positions, as well as 3 ammunition depots.

▫️Units and military equipment of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ 10th Mountain Assault Brigade, which arrived to reinforce the Ukrainian grouping in Donbass, have been destroyed during unloading near Pokrovsk railway station in Donetsk People’s Republic.

……………

Ukrainian General Staff says “The invaders are actively advancing in several directions at once.” — Specifically, the Russians are advancing simultaneously in Severodonetsk, Bakhmut, Avdeevsky, Novopavlovsk and Liman directions.

……………

We also had a short explanation of why the perceived slow down in the Russian operation. The slowdown of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine is intentional with a view to evacuating the population and avoiding casualties among civilians, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said.  Russia’s Armed Forces are creating humanitarian corridors and announcing ceasefires to ensure the safe evacuation of residents from encircled settlements, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu explained, despite this approach stalling the progress of the country’s forces.  “Of course, this slows down the pace of the offensive, but it is being done deliberately to avoid civilian casualties,” he explained at a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) Council of Defense Ministers.

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev spoke on the Ukraine specifically and geopolitics:

▪️All the goals set by the President of the Russian Federation during the special military operation will be achieved, it cannot be otherwise. Russia is not chasing deadlines in the course of a special military operation in Ukraine.

The ideal scenario for US-led NATO is an endlessly smoldering conflict in Ukraine.

▪️Nazism must either be eradicated by 100%, or it will raise its head in a few years, and in an even uglier form.

▪️Ukraine, if it had remained an independent country, and not controlled from outside, “would have long ago expelled all Nazi evil spirits from its land.”

▪️Moscow will be obliged to respond to the entry of Sweden and Finland into NATO, which is a direct security threat to Russia. Finland and Sweden will be accepted into NATO, despite the objections of Turkey and Croatia, “because Washington decided so.”

▪️The West is today obscuring Russia’s contribution to the preservation of other states in different historical periods with all its might.

……………

The political and geopolitical situation is heating up and at the same time becoming more surreal.

They’re even dusting off Kissinger at Davos.  (Note Pepe Escobar’s ascerbic entry to his telegram channel at the end.)**

There is a small window of opportunity to wind down the armed conflict in Ukraine and find a peace settlement, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger has told a gathering of Western elites in Davos, Switzerland. Beyond that, Russia may break from, the rest of, Europe for good and become a permanent ally of China, he said on Monday during a speech at the World Economic Forum.

“Negotiations on peace need to begin in the next two months or so, [before the conflict] creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome,” the 98-year-old veteran diplomat said of the crisis. The outcome will determine the rest of Europe’s relationships with Russia and Ukraine alike, he said. “Ideally, the dividing line should return to the status quo ante,” he said.

“I believe pursuing the war beyond that point would turn it not into a war about the freedom of Ukraine, which had been undertaken with great cohesion by NATO, but into a war against Russia itself,” he added.

There are more voices from Europe asking for a peace process to start but first, the Ukrainian response:

Ukrainian presidential advisor Alexey Arestovich resorted to obscene language to criticize those in the West urging Kiev to cede part of the country’s territory to Russia for the sake of peace.

“Go f**k yourselves with such proposals, you dumb f**ks, to trade Ukrainian territory a little bit! Are you f**king crazy? Our children are dying, soldiers are stopping shells with their own bodies, and they are telling us how to sacrifice our territories. This will never happen,” Arestovich said in an interview on Wednesday.

Soros calls for Putin’s defeat:  George Soros told the World Economic Forum in Davos the West needs a quick victory over Russia in Ukraine so it can focus on climate change

The process of ‘disowning’ the Ukraine has started.

Gen. Milley notes that the US has reopened military-to-military level talks with the Russians. His call to his Russian counterpart last week was “important” and it was “purposeful”

Of course, the talk of another peace plan is not born of care for people or human rights or democracy or deep held care for the Ukrainian people.  It is driven by desperation and is a desperate grasp at avoiding a psychological defeat bigger than Afghanistan.

TASS/ Russia’s State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin took to his Telegram channel to highlight that the US and its partners do not plan to provide real assistance to Ukraine.

• Ukraine will only get 15% of the $40 billion promised by the US, he said.
• “Washington and Brussels do not really intend to help Ukraine, or solve its economic and social issues. They only need Ukraine to fight Russia till the last Ukrainian,” Volodin said.
• According to the recent aid to Ukraine legislation signed by President Joe Biden, 35% of the $40 billion is going to finance the US Armed Forces, he explained. Meanwhile, 45.2% of that amount is set to be spent on other countries, not Ukraine, while another 4.8% will be earmarked to support refugees, and restore the US diplomatic mission in Ukraine. “Ukraine will only receive 15% of the allotted sum,” the speaker revealed.
• But Ukrainians will have to pay off the whole sum, he said. The US is aware that Kiev will not be able to service the debt in the future. “That is why they are seizing Ukraine’s last reserves, including grain, which is what we are seeing right now”.

Quo Vadis Ukraine?

A list of those that want a piece of the pie is shaping up. Of course, Poland is not suddenly in love with the Ukraine without a reason.  They want their piece of the land pie. I suspect Hungary is also not innocent in this matter. Will the Ukraine be apportioned? Or will it lose its nation-state status completely, and cease to exist? Nobody knows because nobody knows the Russian plan. In Europe and the US/NATO, fear is taking hold. Nobody knows where Russia plans to stop after liberating the two new Republics, Donesk and Luhansk. Is this the moment that they will choose to push NATO back to its agreed borders?

Maria Zakharova noted that these peace proposals that are appearing (talking about the Italian one specifically) could show that Rome is perhaps “beginning to think about the depressing consequences of the military psychosis that was caused by the reaction of the West to the special military operation of Russia in Ukraine” – and the supposed plan could be an attempt “to offer some alternatives to the current escalation, which threatens to develop into a full-scale military conflict between Russia and NATO.”

The deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, said that “any peace proposal built purely in the interest of NATO and the Western world order should simply be ignored.”

“Or rather, their authors should be told to go in a certain direction,” Medvedev said.

Russia is ‘building back better’ and major reconstruction is starting as well as President Putin signed a decree relaxing rules for granting Russian citizenship to residents of Ukraine’s Zaporozhye and Kherson Region.

The amendments are added to the decree that previously introduced a similar procedure for residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR).

Russia continues to do business.  Delegations from over 90 countries have confirmed their participation in the 25th edition of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) scheduled for June.  Russia and Iran also agreed to implement the MIR payment card system in Iran.

That is it for today. Enjoy your discussion and careful on the Ukie propaganda. It is still everywhere.

**Escobar Telegram Channel:

THE PLIGHT OF DR. K – IN ONE MINUTE

War criminal Kissinger’s performance at Davos should be summed up as yet another massive failure of his master’s trademark Divide and Rule.

Ukraine/404 has always been a sort of Rubicon in terms of downsizing Russia (think Brzezinski).

It consumed A LOT of capital – physical and political. It was THE red line – success or failure – setting the stage for the triumph of the NWO and its top secretion, The Great Reset.

Kissinger – even as a mere Rockefeller messenger boy – was at the center of this racket for DECADES. It was Kissinger, under Rockefeller’s orders, that groomed cypto Dr. Evil Klaus Schwab to build the WEF and the Davos ethos.

Even if Davos is a mere outlet for the people who really run the show, the WEF remains the premier Influence Scoundrels club on the planet bent on forcing their agenda all across the spectrum. Still toxic after all these years. Yet now even Kissinger knows it’s bound to fail.

The health of the sick, Europe’s hot summer and even colder winter

23 Apr 2022

Source: Al Mayadeen Net

Piermaria Costa 

There is a small break in the clouds of the western end of Eurasia with discerning eyes gazing east, eager to revive civilized dialogue along the routes where globalization started.

The Health of the Sick, Europe’s Hot Summer and even Colder Winter

“It’s West Europeans that want to distinguish themselves from us, they don’t have a monopoly on “Europeanness”… We are even more European than they are.”

-Former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev

Growing up in the 90s in Italy, we were taught from the 5th grade on about WWII. The Holocaust, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the valiant partisans, and of course “the liberation”. Photographic and moving images from the archives are constantly played, repeated every year, perhaps dangerously, to the point of banality. The moral of course was that this was the war against wars and therefore the last. A strong “West” united against barbarity would make sure that history would not repeat itself; the raison d’être of the modern European project.

Today, images of civilians executed by Nazis for accepting provisions from the Russian military, and blatant war crimes against prisoners of war are promptly labeled as “Russian disinformation”.  Nothing discovered on the ground in Ukraine could be as dark as what the West could manufacture from their media rooms armed with “satellite images” demonstrating Russia’s innate appetite for expansion and violence. 

All great reasons to attempt to destabilize Russia through sanctions. The second-rate European ruling classes obediently dragged their economy, kicking and screaming, toward “The End of History”. In total denial of the disintegration of the Atlantic hegemon, while ignoring the integration unfolding on the very continent on which they live, Eurasia.

It is possible that the fatal concoction of hyper-globalization, digital reality, woke cancel culture and biomedical security has caused unprecedented amnesia of modern history on the Western masses. The crucial eight decades after World War II and its resulting rules-based world order relegated to the darkest annals of memory.

The second of May 1945, as such, is a conveniently neglected historic fact. It is the day Berlin fell to the Red Army, finishing Nazi Germany. More than one month before the arrival of American and British forces. Equally important is that every move after the Potsdam Berlin conference in 1945 by the Western winners of the war was targeted specifically at isolating the USSR, trashing previous agreements.

Shortly after, in February 1946, on the propaganda front George Keenan’s “Long Telegram”- hit piece on the Slavic soul, cold and incapable of modernizing with Western civilizations – was instrumental in creating the rhetoric to “other” Russia, and facilitated the creation of consent around what would become the Western bloc’s “containment” strategy toward the Soviet Union.

If one simply examines the dates of key events such as: 

1. The Deutsch Mark reform on 17th June 1948 and the Blockade of West Berlin on 24th June 1948; 

2. Proclamation of the Federal Republic of Germany on 23 May 1949 and the proclamation of the German Democratic Republic 7th October 1949;

3. Proposal for a free, demilitarised West Berlin refused on 27th November 1958, and the Berlin Wall construction beginning on 13th August 1961.

The West made every move first, for which there was a Soviet response, not the other way around. Ignoring the Yalta agreements that occupied Germany would be controlled under mutual agreement under unified command of the three winning powers, and Potsdam conference article 14: “during the occupation period Germany will be treated as a single economic entity.”

But still, in the years connecting the Potsdam Berlin conference and the construction of the Berlin Wall, Moscow continued to ask for negotiations, proposing several maneuvers that could end in a peace treaty for all Germany. It was reported that crickets could be heard on the western front. 

The German reparations promised to Europe (including of course to the USSR) under the auspices of Yalta and Potsdam would be replaced with the American credit scheme Marshall Plan, keeping the USA war-time economic boom moving, through the reconstruction of battered Europe- its economy now under direct control of the international monetary institutions created at Bretton Woods in 1944; namely, the IMF and World Bank. The Marshall Plan (which was offered to USSR, but was quickly rejected) through its various industrial and economic re-incarnations, such as the ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community), and the ACUE (American Committee for the united Europa) evolved into the European Union. 

No wonder Russians have always seen Europe as a total colony. They shouldered the reconstruction of their territory, sacrificing abundance for independence while watching NATO/American bases swallow Europe from their front yard. 

So what is the trouble with Europe today? The European project in reality is very transparent, with a hierarchy designed specifically to have a single center of power within Europe securing the hegemonic interests of its master abroad, while still living in the intoxicating fumes of the fantasy surrounding the Berlin Wall.

Coming out of the 1929 market crash, the United States revitalized its economy weaponizing the allied war effort in the old continent. The cost of their help was 120 NATO/USA bases and 40 American nuclear bombs in Italy alone, the homogenization of “European identity”, and the territory’s transformation into America’s missile launching pad and buffer zone. 

Turning its back on institutionalized Nazism in Ukraine for America’s imperialistic goals, West Europe is becoming the moral sick-man of the world. While quickly descending into economic and cultural chaos it is irreparably losing the trust of the neighbors that count. If “European values” mean only speaking and never listening as in the past 500 years, then one can only hope that if anything at all is left of Homer and Cicero that they will be preserved in that land lost in the translation of Dostoyevsky and Gagarin. 

There is a small break in the clouds of the Western end of Eurasia with discerning eyes gazing east, eager to revive civilized dialogue along the routes where globalization started. 

But first, a remedy is required, only time will tell the prescription.

The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.

Andrei Martyanov: Mariupol, Dmitry Medvedev, West’s suicide, incompetence as a virtue. Narcissism of the West.

April 21, 2022