The US Army Smuggles 45 Tankers of Stolen Syrian Oil into Iraq

 JUNE 4, 2023

 ARABI SOURI

The US Army continues to plunder the Syrian oil to deprive the Syrian people of their own fuel in continuing the anti-Semitic Antichrist agenda carried out by the ‘liberals’ of the ‘free world’ led by NATO, the ‘defensive’ alliance.

An additional 45 oil tankers were smuggled by the US Army and its Kurdish SDF separatist terrorists out of Syria into neighboring Iraq yesterday, Saturday 03, June 2023.

Local sources reported that the tankers loaded with stolen Syrian oil from the Syrian oil fields in Hasakah province, northeast of Syria, were smuggled by the US Army and its local Kurdish proxy forces into northern Iraq through the illegal Mahmoudiya border crossing in the Yarubiyah countryside in the same Syrian province.

The former leader of the US-led NATO ‘defensive’ alliance, US former president Trump repeated more than once that he’s ‘keeping the Syrian oil’ arrogantly stating ‘he likes oil’ in a repetition to a similar saying of the disgraced former US president and war criminal George W. Bush when he blatantly said ‘the USA is addicted to oil’ justifying the US invasion of Iraq and its occupation of that oil-rich country.

The US Army, or any other NATO armies or their allies was sent to Syria to combat ISIS or to fight terrorism, terrorism, especially that of ISIS and al Qaeda thrives wherever the US Army is deployed, without fail, terrorism is only defeated when the US Army ‘stops combating terrorism!’

Several leaders of the NATO ‘defensive’ alliance did not hide their evil agenda for stealing Syrian oil and wheat, saying they use it as leverage against the Syrian government bragging about the harm and suffering their illegal policies in Syria inflicted on the millions of the Syrian people.

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The stealing of Syrian oil is a daily practice by the US Army and its proxy terrorists in northern Syria, there are dozens of tankers carrying stolen Syrian oil and lorries carrying stolen Syrian wheat smuggled by the leader of the so-called ‘free world’ to the US military bases in northern Iraq and from it to Israel, ISIS (ISIL – Daesh), and other entities funded by the US taxpayers across the region.

We, at Syria News, do not have the resources to report on the US Army’s theft of Syrian oil every day but we try our level best to bring it to the notice of our readers whenever it’s possible hoping one day the citizens of the member states of NATO, the ‘defensive’ alliance, especially the US taxpayers and voters would hold their officials to account for these crimes committed in their names and using their hard-earned taxes which in normal countries would have been used to better their own lives instead of destroying the lives of innocent people across the globe.

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Related

• Trump Forces Smuggle 37 Stolen Syrian Oil Tankers into Iraq
• Biden Forces Smuggle Out 83 Tankers Loaded with Stolen Syrian Oil
• Biden Forces Smuggle Additional 45 Tankers of Stolen Syrian Oil into Iraq

China: The Roots of NATO’s Madness

May 6, 2023

Source

By Declan Hayes

The Chinese are not only fully awake but fully cognisant of the Anglo-Saxons’ wiles in the debt, and semiconductor sectors, as well as in honey, Hello Kitty and all others.

“Let China sleep. For when she wakes, the world will tremble”. Although The Dictionnaire Napoléon attributes this apothegm not to the great Napoleon (who loved a good bon mot almost as much as he loved a good battle) but to British actor David Niven playing the British Ambassador during the Boxer rebellion in the 1963 Hollywood blockbuster 55 days at Peking, it matters not.

China has arrived and she is shaking up the world to a degree not even her Japanese neighbour achieved during Japan’s recent years of economic glory. That being so, we must gauge the force of this Godzilla who, horror of NATO horrors, is not only brokering peace in the Middle East but, more to the heart of this essay, is honey-laundering atop a mountain of debt that has our NATO overlords sweating bricks.

First stop is honey. China has agreed to annually import some 50,000 tonnes of honey from sanctions-struck Iran, which needs every nickel and dime it can scrape together. Because the Iranian bee industry, as this informative article explains, has huge upside potential, I am happy China is helping Iran’s 140,000 beekeepers stay afloat. Whereas in Western countries, bee-keeping is generally a side product some farmers engage in, in Syria, and I imagine, in Iran, bee-keepers follow their nomadic bees about as they migrate from one locale to the other; as Iran, for example, has over four times the amount of flower species Western Europe has Iran, like Syria, is a veritable heaven on earth for bees. Although NATO’s Syrian war of extermination has severely disrupted Syria’s bees and Syria’s bee-keepers, this Sino-Iranian deal shows there is hope for the bee-keepers of Iran, Iraq and Syria and, for that, I could not be happier.

Allied to that, China, the world’s largest honey producer, is accused of dumping its own honey onto the international honey market and thereby undercutting the EU’s 60,0000 bee producers and, crucially, Ukraine, against which Western countries have no hope of competing, at least on price.

But, in China’s defence, it must be said that such activities are part and parcel of today’s international “rules based order” systems of trade. Here, for example, is a report of Irish farmers managing Saudi Arabia’s massive cattle farms. Global beef production has changed and one either goes for the quantity that Saudi Arabia and Bill Gates’ own mega farms represent or one goes for quality, for such things as Kobe beef, Irish whiskey and French luxury goods.

Irish whiskey, which is a much finer product than the cough mixtures sister Scotland palms off to an unsuspecting world, is important to our analysis as Ukraine’s rotund Ambassador to Ireland has demanded Ireland boycott its own Irish whiskey, boycotting being a tactic the Irish not only invented but excelled at. Leaving aside that ignoramus and all other considerations, if Ireland can grab back some of the market in China (and Russia) from the Scots, that would be a good thing because China, whether the CIA likes it or not, is the new Roaring 20s Japan.

That means the Chinese have a lot of money to splurge on Irish whiskey, French luxury goods and Hello Kitty. As the Japanese, during their golden years, accounted for over 70% of Louis Vuitton’s global sales, Irish whiskey producers, French luxury goods’ makers, Iranian beekeepers and the custodians of Japan’s kawaii culture cannot ignore China.

The Chinese pay for all their Hello Kitty merchandise, their Scottish cough mixtures and their French perfumes by exporting stuff, things like bullet trains that they reversed-engineered from Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Because China is growing so fast, there are opportunities galore there in everything from honey and Kobe beef to Volkswagen cars and aircraft carriers, all of which China, with its reverse-engineering hacks, can pay for with its export surpluses or by taking on some debt.

As with honey, so also is China a major agricultural producer in her own right and her farms range from the very primitive to state-of-the-art wonders that match anything the Netherlands, or even Bill Gates’ sinister mega-ranches have to offer. China’s main constraint in this respect is its waters are in the wrong place and it is not at all clear that the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, its traditional water source, will cover its future needs.

To tackle that and countless other development bottlenecks China, to accommodate the growing expectations of her countless masses, must invest heavily on a scale the world has never previously witnessed. And it must borrow heavily too as borrowing is a means of spreading investments one might not otherwise be able to afford over longer terms.

And that brings us to China: The Root of Madness, the CIA’s 1967 Cold War documentary “explaining” China through the CIA’s prism. But China must be explained through a Chinese, not an American prism and, if CIA spy Theodore H White, who produced that garbage, had bothered to read Chairman Mao, he would have come across far more references to ancient Chinese dynasties than he would to Karl Marx or Freddy Engels.

Because White’s Anglo-Saxons fret far too much about China’s debt policies rather than their own, we will now compare and contrast one with the other. Traditionally, there were two basic economic systems, the German-Japanese system where banks and borrowing were the financial engines of their sure but steady growth and the Anglo-American system where the riskier, roller-coaster stock market ruled the roost. China’s approach to debt, yet again, is best described as Japan’s on steroids.

In the United States, to coin a Napoleonic bon mot, debt has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. The vultures’ Klondyke that was payday lending, where the Anglo-Saxon poor, living from pay cheque to pay cheque, paid unsustainable loan-sharking rates to their creditors, has been replaced with predatory smart phone apps, where poor Americans are now reduced to buying their meals on credit and paying through the nose for them, as Uncle Sam catches them in micro debt traps from which there is no escape.

At the macro international level, African and other nations have long been stuck in a similarly slick debt trap they too have no means of escaping, not least because the IMF and the World Bank, their supposed saviours, were tasked ab ovo with keeping them enslaved to Uncle Sam and his Anglo-Saxon partners in crime.

Whatever one may think about the Bible, Proverbs 22:7: gets it right when it proclaims that “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is slave of the lender”. That has certainly been the case in Africa, as it is now in tiny Ireland, which was forced, almost at gunpoint, to take on over 40% of the EU’s debt, and Ukraine, which is currently fighting Russia on a maxed-out credit card.

That credit card will have to be cleared by Ukraine handing over its crown jewels to BlackRock, Vanguard and its other creditors and by paying interest on the mountains of debt it has racked up to fight its unwinnable war. Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Halliburton and Uncle Sam’s other seasoned vultures are already in advanced discussions to run Ukraine’s energy industry and the leprechaun vultures of Vichy Ireland have pledged to exploit (“rebuild”, as they call it) Ukraine’s Rivne Oblast region as part of their reward for propping up Zelensky’s rump Reich and sniggering at those tens of thousands of young Ukrainians slaughtered to make these scams possible.

Rustem Umerov, who heads Ukraine’s State Property Fund (SPF), claims there are more than 3,500 companies which are listed as state-owned, with almost 1,800 of them bankrupt and non-functional. The list for a privatisation fire-sale to Zelensky’s Western allies includes distilleries and grain elevators, which could be of interest to investors, as well as hundreds of abandoned facilities, which will be given away for nickels on the dollar. Umerov is hoping to earn over $400 million by selling an elite set of companies ranging from a fertilizer producer to utilities, smelters and an insulin maker. Ammonia maker Odessky Pryportovy Zavod, titanium producer United Mining, Zaporozhye Titanium-Magnesium Plant, insulin manufacturer Indar, and power generator Centrenergo PJSC will be among the first to be sold at knock down prices and up to $200 million of state-owned land is ear-marked to follow shortly afterwards. Because Russian speakers have no rights in Ukraine, the Demurinsky Mining and Processing Plant, which develops reserves of titanium-zirconium sands and which is owned by Russian tycoon Mikhail Shelkov, is also scheduled to be sold. Rusal’s Nikolaev alumina refinery is also scheduled for “privatisation”, as is the confiscated property of Russians Vladimir Yevtushenkov and Oleg Deripaska.

The Chinese system, with its supposed Muslim, Tibetan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Hello Kitty issues, operates a trifle differently from Zelensky’s Ukrainian gangsters and there is no real point in getting our Chinese-made knickers in a twist about any of it. All of NATO’s faux Chinese concerns are blowbacks from the growth of China‘s economy and the end of the easy money that flowed from America’s property and dot.com bubbles. Because Easy Street is over, the Yanks must now re-discover The Zen of Working Hard even though, like their European vassals, they are no longer up to the task. The Chinese, like the Japanese workers of Toyota or the Koreans of Kia Motor Works, just plod on and on, accumulating wealth, Iranian honey and other delights for their children and, given her demographics, her children’s children. And good on them.

This is not to say that every Chinese, Japanese or Korean citizen has been a winner but their systems have been designed to give the greatest possible opportunities they can to the greatest number of their citizens. Though the Chinese love gambling, they have not followed Uncle Sam’s casino capitalism model but, like the post-War Japanese, they have instead worked hard and likewise pulled themselves up by the bootstraps.

And, just as Japan was once the major player in long-term sovereign debt, so now has that poisoned chalice passed to Beijing. If Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, Zambia and Grenada wish to escape from the debt burdens Uncle Sam has saddled them with, they must look to Beijing. And while China has played hard-ball, they have been nowhere nearly as harsh as Elliott Investment Management and other American critics of China that picked Africa cleaner than might a flock of ravenous vultures.

But what of China, with its sweet tooth for Iranian honey, its Scottish cough mixtures and its Hello Kitty regalia? The Chinese government is tasked with allowing its citizens enjoy such fruits of their labour, whilst maintaining its armed forces to defend its citizens and instituting a system that allows China earn the wherewithal to pay for all such frivolities. Given China accounts for a fifth of the world’s population, that is a huge task, human resource and financial management on truly Biblical scales the world has never previously witnessed.

And, as with Japan during its golden years debt, albeit with Chinese characters, is an integral part of that process. Though personal, institutional and government debt in China are all huge, should we really be as concerned as our narcissistic Anglo-Saxon overlords are about it?

I think not. Debt, the Anglo-Saxon economists tell us, offers us more choice, the ability, for example, to get a mortgage loan on a house, rather than forever renting or living in a roadside wigwam. Debt, lots of it, allows Americans to send their kids to College which, depending on what they study, may or may not be a good investment. Of course, it also allows the Yanks to buy lots of Chinese goods from Walmart but let’s just take that as a given of Americans’ consumer fixations.

All the more so as China is also buying into the consumer craze. Chinese citizens are even hiring American women to bear their children which the CIA’s Heritage Foundation believe is a national security risk. Although it is fine and dandy for Americans to rent Ukrainian wombs, the burgeoning Chinese-American “rent-a-womb” industry, in which ageing Chinese couples draft fertile American women to give birth to offspring with U.S. citizenship is, they say, not playing to the CIA’s rules based order, whose lack of logic China’s economic ascent has placed under immense strain.

Surrogate babies are just one symptom. America is not only one gigantic debt mountain but its debt markets dwarf its stock markets, which are the world’s biggest. The Japanese (again) long saw this and that there were, for them, easy pickings to be had by lending to American states and cities on the correct presumption that the U.S. government would not allow those states and cities to go bankrupt. The Japanese who, like the Koreans and Chinese, are diligent savers, have been keeping the U.S. economy afloat for decades now with their soft loans which, like all loans, must be paid back eventually.

But what of the Chinese? U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen has acknowledged the threat China poses to U.S. hegemony (the rules’ based order as the Anglo Saxons call it) and the need to contain China by sanctions, by controlling intellectual property rights and by bad-mouthing them in NATO’s media over human rights and the plight of panda bears.

This is, again, a re-run of America’s post oil crisis attack on Japan because Japan has the art of car-making down to a tee. There is simply no way the Americans, the Germans or the Scandinavians can compete with the Japanese auto makers or, indeed, the Chinese, who are not only the new Japanese but who have entire armies of engineers improving the efficiency of cars and everything else they produce.

And that includes Taiwanese microchips, which Uncle Sam clings to as a drowning man might cling to a straw. As no country, from the Sumerians of antiquity to the Anglo-Saxons of our own era, has managed to monopolise a particular technology forever, Taiwanese microchips are, as the late Chairman Mao might have put it, a competitive paper tiger, childish Japanese origami that will vanish with a gust of divine wind.

Uncle Sam thinks differently and has ordered its Taiwanese and Korean colonies to stop selling semiconductor chips to China. America has also demanded that German companies Merck, and BASF, which supply Asian chip-makers with critical chemicals for production, follow the example of the Dutch who, on the Yanks’ orders, have severely restricted exports of their semi-conductors to the Middle Kingdom.

Though NATO, like Samson of old, hopes these export restrictions will cripple China’s ability to develop advanced technologies, as well as its capability to produce semiconductors, the tide of modern history, where competitive advantages cannot be held for long, suggest this pathetic boycotting will fail. Despite China being Berlin’s most important trading partner for the seventh year in a row now, because Germany remains a grovelling slave to America, we can assume the Pentagon will get their way here and further damage Germany (and the Netherlands). Talk about global supply chain hara kiri by those emasculated oafs!

NATO should, of course, have let China’s semiconductor industry sleep. Beijing has launched a national security review into Micron Dram, one of three dominant players in the global memory chip market alongside South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. As with Louis Vuitton, so also is it with Dram, where mainland China and Hong Kong generates 25 per cent of its $31bn annual revenue. If Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol accedes to Uncle Sam’s request to ban the sale of their microchips to China, then he is even more stupid than any Irish sniveller who boycotts Irish whiskey on the word of the obese Ukrainian grifter, who has the gig of loud-mouthed Ambassador to Vichy Ireland.

Although the Pentagon believes that their competitive edge in microchips will stave off the Chinese dragon, that is not where the true fight is. The fact of the matter is the United States and its puppet allies long ago exported the whole logistics chain to China and thereby made China the world’s logistical hub, its Middle Kingdom if you will. Not only is that almost impossible to undo but there are over a billion Chinese who have a vested interest in maintaining that emerging status quo that so upsets our Anglo-Saxon friends.

Gold, by way of illustration of that latter point, is the easiest of metals to work with and it is the first metal mentioned in the Bible (Genesis 2:11-12). And, though gold jewellery is almost universally popular, the North Italians are the world’s best at fabricating gold, simply because they have long held the logistical hubs, even from long before Romulus and Remus founded Rome.

Although American puppets like Ursula von der Leyen can threaten hell and damnation on the Chinese economy, German and French automakers are making more coin by producing cars in China than they are in Europe. Why? Because China has the logistical hubs and one part of China is not squabbling with another for the right to produce hub caps, as the various European states do with each other. Europe is an organisational mess and China, as with Japan’s Hello Kitty and auto industries, is not.

And, when we ask whether the Biden family’s control of the semiconductor industry can stop China, we have to conclude that it cannot and, again, Japan shows us why. When the Europeans first reached Japan, they brought muskets with them to The Land of the Rising Sun where such a technology was unknown but where the Europeans were amazed that Japanese steel was far superior to anything they had previously encountered in Borrell’s European garden.

The Japanese, who had never previously clapped eyes on a musket, not only solved the crucial European problem of how to stop rain destroying the gun-powder but, within six months of first clapping eyes on them, were exporting muskets throughout the rest of Eastern Asia. Following the 1904/5 Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese determined that they would have to match the German Leica company in terms of lenses. Not only did the Japanese match them but they far out-paced them in less than half of the time they had allocated to that objective. If the Americans think they can stop the Chinese semiconductor tide, they best import some more Chinese or Japanese brains because it is plain as day they have a critical shortage of grey matter, as well as a profound ignorance on how inter-connected the intermediate industries of China, Korea and Japan are.

The Chinese economy, their national pay packet if you will, continues to increase, by an impressive 4.5% in the first quarter of 2023, as it happens, meaning it is in a better position to pay off or roll over any outstanding debt and, of course, to buy more whiskey, more French perfumes and more Hello Kitty kitsch.

Yankee land, meanwhile, just prints more dollar bills and spends a staggering $500 billion annually servicing their debt, even as they imagine China would not develop a debt market of their own and thereby sink the American smoke and mirrors economy. For the fact of the matter is China’s debt is not a problem and will not be a problem as long as China can manage it. And so far, as with Japan, there is no sign of a major crisis. For the Good Ship China, it seems to be steady as she goes and to hell with Moody’s and the other partisan naysayers.

To illustrate China’s strength, let’s once again turn our eyes towards Japan, whose currency is the yen. Upon hearing that yen meant circle in English, American war lord Douglas MacArthur decreed that there would be 360 yen to the Yankee dollar. It is currently trading at 135 to the dollar, which is well within its recent trading band. The Chinese yuan is at 7 to the dollar and it too is within recent trading bands. China, however, is in a much stronger position than the U.S. or any of its satrapies to push the yuan, and therefore the dollar, any way it pleases. The boot is, in other words, increasingly on the Chinese and not the NATO foot.

Here, in conclusion, is 1900 footage of a French damsel in Saigon throwing Vietnamese children grain, like they were foraging chickens. The Anglo-Saxons should know that those days are, thanks to the armed might of South East Asians and their allies, gone and, thanks to the economic might of those countries, they are not returning. The United States, together with its German, Dutch and other vassals, best acknowledge and live with that fact or be prepared to take a turn at foraging themselves when their own stupidity collapses their own side of the global economic system. As for the Chinese, they are not only fully awake but fully cognisant of the Anglo-Saxons’ wiles in the debt, and semiconductor sectors, as well as in honey, Hello Kitty and all others.

An American Lie by Any Other Name Would Smell as Dirty

February 19, 2023

Tatiana Obrenovic

The cost of all this is not only financial but the simple math can be worked out in terms of the distrust of the U.S. general public and loss of confidence in the U.S. institutions and the President’s credibility.

Washington DC is viewed by many as sending us terribly patronizing cancel culture messages along the lines of “Don’t you dare listen to what Vladimir Putin says”, but this is where a truth bombshell by Seymore Hersh, a seasoned professional in journalism who exposed the Mỹ Lai massacre in Vietnam, comes from. The 86-year old Seymore Hersh referred to the anonymous but genuine source with all the brutal details told the world how the Nord Stream’s three pipelines out of four in total were demolished. The Collective Biden is behind it of course. All the arrangements happened on the last floor of the old building of the Executive Cabinet in Washington DC. One cannot help noticing another grim example in a long succession of examples of U.S. Machiavellianism.

One has to wonder how much their Machiavellianism-ridden political rituals of all shapes and forms have cost the U.S. and the world so far. This is the U.S. effort to plunder as many resources globally and pocket as much profit as possible along the way. Ukraine is undoubtedly one of their ‘profit and power pursuits’. The U.S. goes around brandishing their quasi declaration that this is their courageous campaign for the EU/European energy security issue. But the real truth is normally quite the opposite. The U.S. regrettably chooses to bomb sovereign countries for alleged ‘humanitarian reasons’ only to diabolically call all civilian casualties ‘collateral damage’. By the same token, the U.S. evil elite bent almost double so as to destroy European energy efficiency in order to falsely declare it as the campaign for its safety and well being. The aftermath of it all is they are now paying several times more for gas than before.

Their desperation to oust Russia out of the big picture is almost palpable. The Nord Stream is the greatest willfully malicious damage done to any peacetime engineering project for the general public use. The damage wrought is estimated at circa 30 billion euros. This was one of the most wantonly destructive terrorist attacks of all time. What is the cost of the damage done to lay the Nord Stream to waste? Shall we go back in history and try to work out how much it cost to send nukes and destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945? And one wonders why the U.S. committed that monstrous cruelty on Japan if Japan had already been on the brink of capitulation? Nuclear bombs were thrown at civilians nonetheless with the intention only to send a clear message to the then USSR in close geographical proximity. Any country ready and willing to commit such appalling atrocities, is ready to do anything at any cost. Another such thing was to spread deliberate and downright American lies about Vietnam. The Tragic Tokyo Bay Plane Crash was proven to be made up, engineered and orchestrated with all the political theatrics.

To get back to Europe geographically and more recent history, with the beginning of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the explosion and the ensuing massacre in the Vace Mickina Street in Sarajevo on 27 May, 1992 was yet another false flag brutally engineered by USA though; the American perpetrators surely knew the then militant Muslim forces were to blame for it. But the U.S. political elite back then used that U.S.-orchestrated incident to launch the most brutal sanctions on the former Yugoslavia and to strongarm the rest of their vassal countries to follow suit. They were well aware all that was a barefaced lie. The same goes for Račak in Kosovo (and Metohija) and more recently Bucha incident in Ukraine. A German documentary ‘It began with a lie’ told the real truth yet it was presented on German TV once and never again. It talked about all the U.S. and NATO lies including the ones about Račak in Kosovo on 15 January 1999, which led to the aggression against Yugoslavia. And then one cannot help but recall the late Colin Powell and his infernal misdeeds with the fake claims about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

All these colossal adverse consequences are beyond any quantifiable measure. Sadly all this seems to have ominous clang, leading to a possible world war now. And now back to the USA and all this ongoing monkey business over a balloon, which is soon to give way to the media spins about alleged aliens and UFOs and all the fear porn around it. Even Edward Snowden responded a couple of days ago that it is but a media spin to silence any questioning and/or reasonable debate on the Nord Stream blast, without the approval of the U.S. Congress, which might as well cost Biden even his presidential position.

So now besides the Nord Stream blast, we have a series of new confrontations with China. The cost of all this is not only financial but the simple math can be worked out in terms of the distrust of the U.S. general public and loss of confidence in the U.S. institutions and the President’s credibility to boot.

With hindsight, on January 17, 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower ends his presidential term by warning the nation about the increasing power of the military-industrial complex. I am not entirely convinced that the sufficient critical mass in the U.S. will take heed of it soon enough.

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They will never understand the Islamic Republic

November 03, 2022

Source

By Aram Mirzaei

As I’m writing this, I, together with many other Iranians are filled with outrage. The almost daily terrorist attacks in Iran are trouble to say the least. Today, November 3, another outrageous terrorist attack took place in the city of Karaj, northern Iran. Terrorists attacked civilians and police officers on the Qazvin-Karaj highway in the morning. In a video released on social media, one of the terrorists can clearly be seen executing a wounded police officer. This is how the tragic Syrian war began, and this is what Washington has planned for Iran.

For the past two months, Washington, the Zionists and their Western client states have launched a massive psychological operation against the Islamic Republic, with tens of thousands of online trolls and their army of “journalists” who spread fake news and disinformation every minute, every day. The amount of fake news spread during this psyop is ridiculous. Some trolls/bots even claimed that the Halloween disaster in South Korea was Tehran’s fault.

Saudi-owned “Iran International”, BBC Persian, ManotoTV and other disgraceful outlets have, from their London and Los Angeles offices been spewing lies and fake news around the clock, while also openly encouraging violence in Iran. These lies have been repeated by western media and both Iranian and non-Iranian celebrities around the world. This is a massive psychological operation that is arguably only second to the one going on against Russia concurrently.

Immediately after accusing the Islamic Republic of beating Mahsa Amini to death, the western countries announced that they’d be imposing new sanctions on Tehran, despite having announced their eagerness to revive JCPOA only a week earlier. What happened? Ostensibly the reason given for these sanctions are “repressive measures and violation of human rights and international law”.

By now, only the idiots of the world actually believe that “human rights” is the reason behind western sanctions anywhere in the world. If “human rights” or “women’s rights” were the issues they had with Iran, then how come the Saudi kingdom is spared from these sanctions, where women need Mahrams (male guardian) to go anywhere outside their home, where they chop up journalists in their embassies abroad, and behead people in public in the “chop chop square” in Riyadh?

This is about western interference in Iran and how it ended with the Islamic Revolution. It´s about a country that they had absolute control over, and then suddenly lost it all. This is what their hostility is about. It is not unique for Iran. We see the same hostility towards any independent country such as Russia and China for example. It´s not about “regimes” or ideologies either. If that was the case, then they wouldn´t have overthrown the democratically elected Mossadegh in 1953 in favour of the dictator Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

In his most recent speech, Ayatollah Khamenei correctly identified the root for the long conflict between the US and Iran: “They say the reason the Americans stood against the Iranian people was the move you made in the embassy,” he said. “That is, ‘you attacked our embassy and a dispute emerged between us [which led to] a fight and an enmity.’ They lie. This is not the case.”

“Mosaddegh’s government was a national government. His problem with the Westerners was only the issue of oil. He neither was a Hojatoleslam (top Islamic cleric) nor did he promote Islam. The issue was just related to oil, which was in the hands of the British. He said that the oil should be in our hands. This was his only crime.”

“They arrested Mosaddegh and his entourage and everyone [else],” he said. “Some were executed later, and some were imprisoned for many years.”

“Our dispute with the Americans started that day. Now, American politicians are hypocritically and shamelessly saying that ‘we support the Iranian nation,’”

To the imperialists in Washington, there´s no greater affront than a country that stands independently, securing the interests of its people and its future. This is intolerable! Even worse, when a backward and “uncivilized” country such as Iran dares to challenge US hegemony, such audacity must be met with the most vicious and cruellest animosity. Ever since the Islamic Revolution, the US has imposed “draconian sanctions”, conducted numerous terrorist attacks and assassinations, imposed an 8 year long war on the country, and launched several coup/regime change operations. They have over the past 43 years, both through direct and indirect channels offered Tehran bribes to abandon the struggle and support for the Palestinian cause, end the hostility towards Washington´s dear Zionist regime and abandon the struggle for a multi-polar world.

All of these efforts to destroy the Islamic Republic´s resolve have failed. And they will continue to fail. Why? Because they do not understand, and they won´t ever understand. Ever since the days of Jimmy Carter and his embarrassing New Year´s speech in Tehran in 1977 where he declared Iran to be “an island of stability”, meaning that Washington felt absolutely safe in their control over the country, to John Bolton´s pathetic speech in front of Iranian terrorist supporters in 2018 where he expressed his hope to “celebrate in Tehran” before the end of the year, they have failed time and time again to correctly analyse the Iranian people and nation.

In a great speech, Ayatollah Khamenei talks about these repeated miscalculations:

Today, we see the same type of miscalculation as the one that Ayatollah Khamenei speaks about in the video above. They thought that they could launch a “feminist revolution” in Iran, believing in their own lies that the Islamic Republic has no supporters, and will collapse under the pressure of riots and strikes. The Islamic Republic responded by mobilizing its supporters and this was the result:

Here are the ”liberal feminist rioters”: 

And here are the supporters of the Islamic Republic:

Clearly, the few thousand “protestors”, of which a minority of them were actual terrorists/subversives, were overwhelmed by the massive amount of people who have come out in support of the Islamic Republic. But of course, they won´t show any of this in the Western media. Instead they have dozens of “analysts” who speculate on how quickly the Islamic Republic can fall and how Ayatollah Khamenei is “already dead and has been replaced by a body double”.

Seeing how they failed to cause any trouble for the Islamic Republic through “protests”, they resorted to riots, separatism and terrorist attacks instead. Kurdish terrorists, Baluchi terrorists, Arab and Azeri terrorists, all seeking to partition Iran. ISIS seeking to genocide Iranian Shias, and monarchists seeking to “immediately re-establish ties with Israel and the United States, and take a historically correct stance against Russia´s war in Ukraine”, as the self-styled “crown prince” of Iran said last month. These are the people Washington has mobilized for a “free Iran”. If the Islamic Republic were to fall, these people would partition the country into at least five different pieces, and start killing each other in a free-for all Battle Royale. Thankfully, security forces in Iran are arresting numerous rioters and terrorists on a daily basis who often start crying on camera, confessing to their crimes and who they received money and weapons from. Not a single one of them have stood their ground and defended their despicable actions. Big surprise!

What do they know about fighting for a cause? What do they know about bravery and sacrifice? What do they know about brotherhood? Nothing! They are opportunists who, like their ex-pat friends in the West, would sell their own mothers for money and power. Just like in Syria, they have no leaders, no honour and no dignity. They are being used as tools by Washington, only to be thrown under the bus when the Americans are done with them. This is how the Americans treat their “allies”.

On the contrary, The Islamic Republic was deeply embroiled in chaos and war with Saddam when it sent the first men to Lebanon to assist in the creation of Hezbollah in response to Israel´s invasion in 1982.

IRGC Quds force personnel arrive in Lebanon 1982.

Since those days, everything Iran has achieved, it has shared with its brothers in the region. Why? Because only united, can this region kick the barbaric Anglo-Zionists out. It was in anticipation for days such as this that Iran built an impressive missile arsenal, formed, and supported multiple armed militia groups in different countries in the region and have now reached out to great powers such as Russia and China to form a strong alliance against the Empire. In their arrogance and racist view, they thought that the Islamic Republic was resting on a rotten foundation such as the ones that their allied regimes in the Persian Gulf are resting on. Did Washington expect the Islamic Republic to go down so easily? Did they think that Syria, Hezbollah, Hashd Al-Shaabi, Ansarullah and other allies in the region would just idly stand by and watch while the strongest member of the Resistance alliance is being destroyed? Did they think that the Islamic Republic built an arsenal of hundreds of thousands of missiles just to collapse under the pressure of petty thugs and crude terrorist attacks?

Like I mentioned in my previous article, Iran is not Libya or Iraq during Saddam Hussein who stood alone in face of a NATO onslaught. Iran is both powerful on its own, and has powerful allies. Tehran is not alone in facing the evil empire and today, not just regional allies but great powers such as Russia and China have major stakes in Iran. Any foreign intervention, or bombing campaign against Iran will be met with missiles raining on Israel and US bases across the entire West Asia. If they want to test the Islamic Republic´s capabilities, then they must be ready to make very big sacrifices, because the era of hit and run attacks is over.

The westerners didn’t understand why Iranians were angry at them in 1979 and why they overthrew a “modern king” in favour of a “backward Islamic theocracy”. Many westerners still cannot understand how the Islamic Republic can be so popular among the Iranian people, and often just refuse to believe it. Why would they understand? They don’t know how 200 years of humiliation and subservience to others feel. They don´t know how it feels to have elected a prime minister, only to see him overthrown by foreigners who returned an unpopular dictator to the throne. They don´t know how it feels to have their country´s natural resources plundered by foreigners for decades.

Throughout the years since the Revolution, the Islamic Republic and its allies have given a lot martyrs for the cause of liberating West Asia from the Zionist empire. From the war against Saddam´s Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of young men were martyred, to the wars against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, these martyrs were inspired and driven by Imam Hussein´s immortal struggle against oppression. This is the ideology on which the Islamic Republic was formed and still rests on. They do not fear the US and its fabled “military might”. They do not fear American “super duper” bombs and missiles. They fear only God and consider fighting against oppression a religious duty, just like Imam Hussein did 1400 years ago. This is what the westerners do not understand when they try to intimidate Iran and its allies.

43 years since the embassy takeover on November 4 1979, they still do not understand that the Islamic Republic is a result of their own cruelty and injustice against Iran, and it has come back to haunt them. If they haven´t understood by now why the Islamic Republic continues to grow stronger, despite all their attempts to destroy the country from both the outside and inside, then they will never understand.

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A footnote

13 Sep 2022 16:32

Source: Al Mayadeen English

Bouthaina Shaaban 

Because they cannot stop igniting wars in one part of the globe or another, that is the most pending danger NATO countries constitute to the welfare of human beings everywhere. 

Professor John Mearsheimer said the war in Ukraine will be a footnote in the history books written about the world changes this war has triggered. This remark may provide the best explanation of the huge noise the NATO countries have made about providing Ukraine with more sophisticated armaments and with billions of dollars in order to prevent a Russian victory. It also explains the big media campaign led by the West about the so-called advance made by the Ukrainian army against the Russians in Kharkov area. The press conference by NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, and the US Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken, has to be seen and understood in light of the dire economic crisis which is biting into Europe. 

Despite the iron fist laid on Western media, it is an open secret today that the sanctions imposed by the West against Russia have backfired on the West itself, and it has become clear that Western people are the ones suffering because of these sanctions, and not the Russian people as the western governments planned. In addition, the Eastern rapprochement between China and Russia is treading fast steps toward an alliance, and the Shanghai organization is attracting more member states, which in a short while, will become one of the most important world alliances that NATO countries do not want to see at all. Both China and Russia have announced that their future dealings and trade are going to be in Yuans and Rubles, which will start to weaken the dollar and shake its world status. 

During the week and contrary to the expectations of Western media, the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, announced that he is going to Kazakhstan for a Shanghai meeting with the aim of meeting with President Putin. Every time these two leaders meet, they add another brick to the fortified base of their alliance whose grand announced aim is to change the world system into a multipolar system after getting rid of Western hegemony once and for all.

Of course, western experts and planners know all this and dread it, but instead of mentioning it or trying to address it in the real world, these jumped to the domain that they know best; i.e. the military claiming to their audiences that “Ukrainian forces have been able to stall Moscow offensive in the Donbass strike back behind Russian lines and retake territory.” On this narrative, they built the argument that NATO countries should send more support to Ukraine, with more billions of dollars and with the most sophisticated arms. Their imagination was set free to imagine that this is a very important moment for the Ukrainian people and army, and we should support them in order to prevent a Russian victory in Ukraine, as per their illusions.

First, there is no doubt that the press conference and all the media fever that came in its aftermath hailing progress made by Ukrainian forces against Russian forces was meant to change the focus of the Western people’s attention from the horrible consequences of the war on Ukraine on their daily lives and to stop the masses from taking to the streets to forcefully object to these policies, which proved to be disastrous to most of them.

Second, NATO countries have a history of supporting wars that have nothing to do with their geography or history. They now claim that they have to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers to protect the Eastern borders of NATO. What about Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; are those also bordering NATO, or threatening its power? And what about Taiwan now; is it on the borders of NATO too?

The history of these countries proves without a shadow of a doubt that the military industry is at the core of its survival and continuity, and that is why they cannot survive and keep their hegemony over the world without this industry being well and prosperous, knowing that for this industry to be well and prosperous, it can only feed on wars. That is why they cannot stop igniting wars in one part of the globe or another, and that is the most pending danger NATO countries constitute to the welfare of human beings everywhere. 

What we have to remember is that we are dealing with two different worlds, two different systems of thinking, two different histories, and two very different objectives. The West, which has subjugated and colonized many countries across the world over centuries, has perfected the usage of media and psychological wars to keep people as its subject. Throughout history, Western colonial powers gave no thought to civilian casualties. A reminder of the answer of Madeleine Albright about millions of Iraqi children being killed; she said, “But it was worth it,” whereas Eastern powers represented by Russia in this war pay so much attention to avoiding unnecessary loss of civilian lives. They change their plans and their tactics if they can save lives in their military or on the adversary’s civilian lives. In fact, the Eastern attitude always believes in taking time. They are not in a hurry, and they do not rush to launch a media or psychological campaign because their objectives are far-reaching and by far nobler than those of the party whose main concern is to sell arms and accumulate more capital. 

For those reasons and many others unlisted here, we have to take the Hollywood postures made by the NATO Secretary-General and the US Secretary of State with a huge pinch of salt. Their major aim was to divert attention from the huge disaster they have created to their people through this uncalculated and misconceived adventure. It would have been much wiser and historically correct to review their decisions and decide whether they should continue in this futile endeavor or acknowledge the new realities on the ground born from the rise of the East and its determination, supported by the majority of people on Earth, to put an end to Western hegemony and remap the world on the basis of equal integrity and mutual respect. This may take a bit more time than what most people desire, but the train has left the station and it will undoubtedly reach its abode. The rest are insignificant details that no one will mention in the future.

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

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Are Western Spooks Backing a New ‘Ukrainian White Helmets? Al Mayadeen investigates

4 May 2022

Source: Al Mayadeen

Samir Mustafa 

A new attempt is made by Western mercenaries to fuel the fight in Ukraine further under the guise of “humanitarian assistance,” former Western soldiers and mercenaries are at the forefront of such operations.

Are Western Spooks Backing a New ‘Ukrainian White Helmets? Al Mayadeen investigates

A British mercenary with alleged ties to the US intelligence services is working to establish a version of the pseudo-humanitarian White Helmets in Ukraine. 

Macer Gifford, who has previously fought with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Syriac Military Council is crowdfunding for supplies which he says are bound for the frontline.  

“On the 27th of February, President Zelensky formally called for International Volunteers from around the world to assist his country. The people of Ukraine need our support and they need it NOW!,” his appeal page declares. 

British volunteer fighter Macer Gifford in Raqqa, Syria on August 19, 2017. Getty Images

Gifford aims to raise at least £15,000 that he says will enable him “to create a fast response medical team, staffed by international volunteers, that will deploy to the frontline within the next month.”

He plans to emulate his experiences in northern Syria where as well as fighting ISIS, he established a medical team and provided training to mercenary forces and locals there. But he is clear that this will not merely be a humanitarian mission.

“The terrain, the particular needs of the Ukrainian military, and the enemy that we’ll be fighting mean that we’ll have to bring the very best equipment with us,” he writes, indicating that he is recruiting people to take part in combat against Russia. 

His own Twitter page appears to support this, sharing posts on how to sign-up for the Ukrainian armed forces following Zelensky’s plea for international support. He made similar appeals during a BBC radio debate with one of the leaders of Britain’s Stop the War Coalition John Rees who described the call for volunteers to fight as “ludicrous” and dangerous.  

Gifford’s organization aims to join the fight against Russia under the guise of humanitarian intervention, a model that has been used before.“I want to be absolutely clear here, the ambition is to create a Ukrainian version of the White Helmets,” Gifford states, a reference to the notorious group operating in Syria.

Also known as the Syrian Civil Defence force, the White Helmets poses as a humanitarian organization, however, is linked to both jihadist groups and western military and intelligence services. Set up by former British Army officer James Le Mesurier it has received millions in funding from the US, British, and other western governments, acting as a front for regime change operations.

Predictably, criticism of the White Helmets is dismissed as propaganda and smears led by the Syrian and Russian governments. But the White Helmets operate in jihadist-held areas and have its buildings situated next to the Islamists headquarters in many Syrian cities. 

The group has been involved in a series of controversies and some of its members have been shown to be supporters of Al Qaeda and other Salafist organizations. It has been accused of staging chemical attacks, most notably in Douma, to pave the way for western military intervention in Syria. 

Fears that a White Helmets-style operation could be deployed in Ukraine for similar purposes have long been praised by critics. Gifford – whose real name is Harry –  hails from a wealthy part of rural Cambridgeshire. Prior to his military adventurism, he served as a Tory councilor and city currency trader.

He has openly boasted of meetings with the US and British intelligence services and has briefed government officials on the situation in Syria, pleading for increased military support. Using his connections he tried to drum up support for the YPG and attended meetings with financiers in Switzerland, the FBI in New York, and inside the British parliament.

“I’ve been to the Carlton Club [a private Conservative club in central London], you would not believe, so many times,” he said. 

“But it’s important to get the message across. It’s so intensely frustrating to be out there, to be on the frontline and see the success and then see politics hold back people’s hand,” he told The Guardian newspaper in a 2016 interview. 

Gifford now openly encourages British military volunteers to follow him and join “the defense of Ukraine.”

His Twitter feed sees him glorify what he describes as “a British sniper” posing with a weapon and fatigues bearing the logo of what appears to be the ultranationalist Right Sector. 

Photographs appear to show members of his organization delivering training to Ukrainian soldiers in an unknown location. In video footage, he claims that he and his partner are off to train the Ukrainian police force. 

His operation works under the name Nightingale Squadron, its flashy logo emblazoned on the side of an expensive Landrover Freelander vehicle seen loaded with aid packages. 

While to westerners the name may seem innocent enough, it has chilling connotations for those in Lviv, evoking the name of the unit that collaborated with the Nazis, sending tens of thousands of Jews to their deaths during the Holocaust. 

The Nachtigall Battalion/Nightingale Battalion was founded in 1941 and came under the control of Stepan Bandera’s Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. 

Most of its members formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, while 14 of them joined the SS Galicia Division in 1943.

The Simon Wiesensthal Centre says the Nightingale Battalion was in Lviv and collaborated with the Nazis between June 30 and July 3 of 1941 when 4,000 Jews were massacred. Its descendants can be found in the far-right forces now operating in Ukraine that have been involved in the massacre of Russian speakers and pogroms against Jews. 

Gifford shot to prominence in Britain having served in northern Syria in the fight against ISIS. 

A notorious self-publicist who seeks to further his career in politics, Gifford published an “Andy McNab-style” book, Fighting Evil in 2019 describing his experiences in the region. 

His treatment is a stark contrast to the working-class volunteers, many of whom served alongside him in Raqqa and other key battles on the frontline. 

The large majority have faced arrest, surveillance, and the threat of prison on their return to Britain while Gifford has escaped similar scrutiny.

By contrast, Gifford roams freely between parliament, TV studios, and radio stations that fall over themselves to amplify his voice. 

Many of his YPG peers have privately voiced suspicions that Gifford is a state agent.

He certainly fits the mould and has the contacts. Politically right-wing with conservative values, he can be relied on to trash the antiwar movement and opponents of the Tory government along with the political establishment.

And there are obvious similarities between Gifford and the man he seeks to emulate, White Helmets founder Le Mesurier who died in suspicious circumstances in Istanbul in 2019. 

In many ways, he is the perfect candidate to establish a “Ukrainian White Helmets” which those on the ground have long-suspected of being an international operation. 

Other former YPG fighters are also getting in on the act. Gifford’s comrade in arms, former British paratrooper and veteran of the Afghanistan war Daniel Burke, has set up a similar operation which he announced last week.

He has established what he described as an NGO named “Dark Angels of Ukraine,” although the background to this is unclear. 

Burke, who was discharged from the army for fighting, said he had set up the NGO “because other NGOs or international military units tend to go to war against each other to show who is best.”

Dark Angels of Ukraine exists to provide humanitarian relief and training to the military and is already known to be operating inside Ukraine. The activities of the unit, which appears to be made up of military veterans include “moving logistical requirements such as food, water, and medicine to refugee centers and military units.” Their vehicle rescued a couple stranded somewhere in Ukraine and enabled them to return to France.

“It was on this trip that we had christened our truck the “Dark Angel” since our backgrounds as veterans lends our expertise to the Territorial Defence Forces,” the fundraising page says.

The group is there to “protect the freedoms that we all hold so dearly from our homelands here in Ukraine,” it declares. 

Burke is in many ways the opposite of Gifford. 

A trained soldier he was motivated to join the fight against ISIS in Syria after the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing in which 22 people died following an attack on an Ariana Grande concert. 

During his time in Syria, Burke photographed and retrieved documents and hard drives that he passed onto the British counter-terror experts, and maps, which he handed to US special forces.

This led to accusations by the YPG that he was a British spy and he was interrogated for days before he eventually convinced them otherwise. 

Unlike Gifford, Burke came to the attention of security services, spending eight months in prison after he was charged with terror offenses, although his case was later dropped.  

According to social media networks, many former YPG volunteers have joined the ranks of the international mercenary fighters in Ukraine. 

It is not clear exactly how many have traveled to the country, however, Nottinghamshire care worker Aiden Aslin – also known as Cossack Gundi – surrendered to Russian forces in Mariupol last month.

He insists that he is not a foreign mercenary and, like fellow Brit Shaun Pinner, was a member of the regular Ukrainian armed forces having signed up in 2018. 

Russia claims that thousands of foreign mercenaries have entered Ukraine and accuses NATO and the west of shipping weapons and equipment via civilian rail and transport networks. 

As the war drags on, the profits of the arms companies continue to rise and western efforts to weaken Russia continue while peace looks to be further away than ever.

“It is quite conceivable for a Ukrainian White Helmets to play the same role as its Syrian counterparts; a major anti-Russian propaganda offensive, staged events, and the triggering of incidents to pave the way for NATO intervention.”

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

Testing the waters: Could Turkey’s Russian relations sink over Ukraine?

Neither friend nor foe, Turkey and Russia have backed opposing sides in several regional conflicts, yet managed to avoid direct confrontation. Now the Ukraine crisis poses a serious challenge.

March 22 2022

Caught between NATO and Russia over Ukraine, Turkey is forced to walk a thin line to avoid confrontation with either side.Photo Credit: The Cradle

By Yeghia Tashjian

The war in Ukraine has become the latest test for Turkey’s regional ambitions in confronting those of Russia, in what has clearly become a “cooperative rivalry.” This is where both sides, despite their opposite views on various regional conflicts ranging from Libya to Syria to the South Caucasus, have worked to manage these conflicts without directly challenging one another.

The current crisis has raised Turkey’s concerns of being in the firing line of Russia’s hegemonic ambitions. It is important to note that Turkey and Russia are not allies, but bitter ‘frenemies.’ Despite having robust commercial, energy, diplomatic and military ties, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned back in 2016 that NATO has to act and increase its presence in the Black Sea.

Over the past two decades, Russia has consolidated its presence in the Black Sea region by directly controlling Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008, and annexing Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014. The Black Sea Fleet is responsible for bringing supplies to Russian forces in Syria, mostly based in the port of Tartus and Khmeimim airbase, as well as for patrolling the eastern Mediterranean. Russia’s 2015 Maritime Doctrine clearly prioritizes the Black Sea as a pillar of its power projection.

Turkey’s waning power in the Black Sea

Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea tipped the balance of military power in the Black Sea in favor of Moscow. Not only has Russia significantly increased its Exclusive Economic Zone and its Black Sea coastline, it has also cancelled existing agreements with Ukraine, which limited the latter’s Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol.

Additionally, Russia has stationed new military ships and submarines and installed a dense network of advanced weapons systems across the Crimean peninsula. From Ankara’s perspective, Turkey feels surrounded by Russian military presence from the north (Crimea), east (Armenia), and south (Syria).

In response, Erdogan initiated the construction of the Istanbul Canal to put additional pressure on Russia using the 1936 Montreux Convention whereby Turkey can close the Black Sea Straits to all warships in times of war.

Indeed, following NATO’s intensified pressure, Ankara has started exercising its right under Article 19 of the Convention, and has warned all coastal and non-coastal states that it will not allow warships through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. The convention also limits the period of stay for warships belonging to non-Black Sea states in the Black Sea.

However, this action also exposed Turkey’s limitations by raising the questions: How will Turkey react if Russian naval warships seek passage through the Straits? Will Turkey prevent them? The answer is clear.

As a Black Sea state, Russia has the privileged right to transit the Turkish Straits to return its warships to their bases. The treaty states that during armed conflict, belligerent warships “shall not” pass through the Straits unless the ships belong to a state that borders the Black Sea and are returning to their home ports.

Once Turkey determined that Russia was “at war,” it had no choice under the treaty but to stop Russian warships from passing through the Straits. The only exception for passage is for Russian warships from other areas returning to their bases in the Black Sea.

For example, a Russian fleet registered in the Black Sea but currently located in the Mediterranean Sea is allowed to pass through the Turkish Straits and return to its base. The condition also applies to Russian fleets currently in the Black Sea that belong to a base in the Mediterranean or Baltic Sea. Russia is free to take them out of the Black Sea. This option provides Russia with enough space to maneuver its naval power and downplay Article 19 of the Montreux Convention.

Turkey is aware that blocking access of Russian warships through its Straits will be viewed in Moscow as a “declaration of war.” This is the last thing Erdogan wants, knowing full well that the economic and political consequences will be harsher than those Turkey tasted after it downed the Russian jet over Syria in 2015.

Turkey’s balancing act between Russia and Ukraine

While Turkey will not directly provoke Russia, it has increased its military cooperation with Ukraine. This includes the supply of Bayraktar TB2 drones to the Kiev government. The Russians, for their part, have shown their preparedness for Turkish drones. Despite the fact that the Bayraktar TB2 drones are still operating and useful to the Ukrainian side, the Russian Ministry of Defense almost daily announces that its forces are downing many drones, including TB2.

This military relationship has also involved Ukraine supplying Turkey with military engines intended to boost Turkey’s growing arms industry; in particular, the Bayraktar’s successor drone and T292 heavy attack helicopters that are currently under production.

For Russia, this poses a threat, as in the future it may shift the military balance of power towards Turkey and Ukraine in the Black Sea. It is for this reason that Russian forces destroyed most of the Ukrainian heavy military infrastructure (including its naval and air force) and arms industry.

As such, Erdogan will aim to continue cooperation with Russia in the region; but he is equally likely to step up engagement with NATO to improve his global standing and reduce international criticism of his domestic conduct. Erdogan knows that standing against Russia and directly confronting Moscow is very risky as – excluding the ongoing war in Ukraine – he would start a war on three fronts in the region: in Libya, Syria, and Nagorno-Karabakh.

In order to extract itself from the ongoing difficulty of placating both sides, in recent days Turkey has engaged in proactive diplomacy and mediation between Kiev and Moscow. Ankara announced that the two adversaries have made progress on their negotiations to halt the war and are “close to an agreement.” However, Ukraine’s president responded by saying that any consequential agreement with Russia would be put to a referendum. This signaled that there is no agreement in sight and Ankara’s mediating efforts are fruitless.

Turkey will not gamble with Ukraine against Russia

Dr Maxim Suchkov, a Moscow-based expert in the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) expresses concern that Turkey may view the crisis as an opportunity to re-establish itself in the Black Sea and strengthen its relations with the west. Ankara enjoys good ties with both Moscow and Kiev and seeks to balance itself, supplying arms to Ukraine, on the one hand, but also refraining from sanctioning Russia.

Suchkov argues that Turkey may indeed be useful to the Russian endgame here, but “Moscow should also be careful since President Erdogan is known for his penchant to fish in muddy waters.” Hence, even if the outcome of the conflict does not favor Erdogan’s interests, Turkey may try to wrest something out of this crisis.

For this reason, President Erdogan cannot antagonize Russia and risk full-scale war as, domestically, the implications of this battle will be heavy on the Turkish government. Already, on 22 February, six Turkish opposition parties, not including the Kurdish HDP, called on a unified platform for the revival of the parliamentary system in the country with the aim of establishing an alliance to topple Erdogan in the coming parliamentary and presidential elections in June 2023.

According to recent public surveys, the opposition coalition is polling ahead, and indeed may oust Erdogan, given the financial chaos Turkey is experiencing. The current crisis will worsen the economic and political situation of Turkey.

One sector that is especially vulnerable is tourism, as between four to seven million Russian tourists and around two million Ukrainian tourists visit Turkey each year. Moreover, western sanctions on Russia will make money transactions difficult between both countries.

Crucially, Turkey imports almost 50 percent of its gas from Russia, and with the increase in global gas prices, Turks find themselves in a difficult quandary. For these reasons, Ankara is unlikely to undertake any risky gambles and will continue to strike a balanced posture in the crisis.

Turkey still has an important role to play

Turkey has general elections scheduled for June 2023, hence any change in the leadership in Turkey would affect the current track of Russian-Turkish relations. In a post-Erdogan Turkey, Ankara is likely to move closer to the western camp due to the pro-western (pro-US) leanings of the Turkish military, entrepreneurs, technocrats, diplomats, and civil servants – regardless of their liberal or nationalistic personal views.

This could form a long-term challenge for Russia-Turkey relations, given the successful “cooperative rivalry” both sides managed to arrange in Libya, Syria, and Nagorno-Karabakh. It is worth mentioning that on 2 March, Meral Akşener, leader of the Turkish opposition İYİ Party, raised the alarm on whether there were any guarantees that Turkey’s eastern provinces would be safe from a similar kind of Russian aggression. She also called Russia a “security threat” for Turkey. This is another indication that the Turkish opposition is not on the same wavelength as Erdogan’s multi-vector foreign policy.

Moscow has never viewed Ankara as an equal partner, but as a junior partner that could help configure a regional order which benefits Russian interests and decreases western influence. However, if Russia becomes stuck in a Ukrainian quagmire, it may need Ankara to arrange a temporary settlement.

Will the Syrian and Nagorno-Karabakh scenario be repeated – in which both sides sidelined western influence and Russia accepted a Turkish role in the region? If Ukraine is divided into two zones, would Russia accept a Turkish ‘peacekeeping force’ in the western part of Ukraine? Would the Americans give Turkey the green light to enter such a game? What would Ankara gain in return? Is such a military adventure within Turkey’s capabilities?

According to Dr Mitat Çelikpala, Professor of International Relations and the Dean of Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences at Kadir Has University, such a scenario is beyond Turkey’s financial and military capacities – and Turkey cannot act unilaterally. Hence, for now, Turkey must continue its role of mediation between both sides to avoid any spillover effect near its borders.

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

Russian Military Operation in Ukraine is Not Slow, It’s Planned to End on 9 May, Victory Day

MARCH 22, 2022

ARABI SOURI

Victory Day for Russia and the rest of Europe commemorating the victory over Nazism 77 years later will come this year with a new victory over Nazism, the neo-Nazism regime amplified by NATO countries and directed at Russia in particular, and the rest of the world in general, this was the date set for the ‘Russian Special Military in Ukraine’ was planned to end at.

Ten weeks starting February the 24th and ending by 09 May is the time the Kremlin and its Ministry of Defense strategists planned for the Military Operation in Ukraine to take until achieving the stated goals: the de-arming of Ukraine, neutralizing the country to create a buffer zone with the NATO aggressive alliance that has expanded eastward all the way to already swallow countries bordering Russia, and the ‘de-Nazifying of Ukraine’, the date of 9 May marks the anniversary the Russians and the world, in general, celebrates the end of the first Nazism in Germany during World War 2.

Lebanese top political analyst and former MP Nasser Kandil said he has heard from sources within the top officials in Moscow that the Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine is going as planned, the time for the operation to fulfill its goals was set for 10 weeks within which the first 2 weeks will be focused on destroying the backbone of the Ukrainian military offensive capabilities including air defense, air force, seizing the Pentagon-sponsored biological warfare labs, securing the nuclear plants, and circling the main cities. Starting the 3rd week, the Russian troops will take one major city every week and will try to avoid the Ukrainian capital Kiev (Kyiv) to the end, if possible, giving the Ukrainian regime chance to declare defeat within this period and accepting the terms it refused with the backing of NATO for the past 8 years.

Jaafari Interview: NATO Ukraine Propaganda Identical to that of Syria

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• US, UK, Germany to send more weapons to Ukraine
• Russia: As gas export payments will be paid in ruble, currency recovers
• Protests erupt in Italy, Bulgaria against arms supplies to Ukraine
• US-Sponsored ISIS Terrorists Escalate their Attacks in Daraa, Syria
• Moderate Terrorists IED Explosion Murders Two More Children, in Aleppo

Briefing by Russian Defence Ministry (Kalibr sea-based cruise missiles flying)

March 20, 2022

https://t.me/mod_russia_en/288

The grouping of troops of the Donetsk People’s Republic, developing an offensive, took full control of Stepnoye and is pursuing the retreating units of the 53rd separate mechanized brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Up to 25 personnel, 2 tanks, 2 infantry fighting vehicles and 5 all-terrain vehicles were destroyed.

In Novoselovka Vtoraya direction, the units of the Donetsk Republic have advanced to a depth of 3 kilometers, crossed the Kamenka – Verkhnetoretskoye road, and are fighting with the 1st airborne battalion of the 25th separate airborne brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

During the night, most of Verkhnetoretskoye settlement was taken under control, where battles are being fought with the 2nd battalion of the same brigade. In total, up to 40 personnel, 5 armored personnel carriers and 4 all-terrain vehicles were destroyed there. Offensive actions continue.

In the evening of March 19 and in the morning of March 20, high-precision long-range weapons attacked Ukraine’s military infrastructure.

From the waters of the Black Sea, Kalibr sea-based cruise missiles destroyed workshops for repairing Ukrainian armored vehicles damaged in combat at the Nezhinsky repair plant.

A large fuel storage base of the Ukrainian Armed Forces near Konstantinovka in Nikolaev region was destroyed by Kalibr sea-based cruise missiles from the waters of the Caspian Sea, as well as by Kinzhal aviation missile systems with hypersonic aeroballistic missiles from the airspace over Crimea territory. This is the main base for supply Ukrainian armored vehicles with fuel in combat areas in the south of Ukraine.

High-precision air-launched missiles struck the training centre of the Ukrainian special operations forces near Ovruch settlement of Zhytomir region, where foreign mercenaries who arrived in Ukraine were based. More than 100 special operations forces servicemen and mercenaries were killed.

During the night, operational-tactical and army aviation hit 62 military assets of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Among them: 3 command posts, 1 multiple launch rocket system, 2 missile and artillery weapons depots and 1 fuel depot, as well as 52 areas of military equipment concentration.

Russian air defence means shot down in the air: 1 Mi-8 helicopter of the Ukrainian Air Force near Kohannoye, 6 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles, including 1 Bayraktar TB-2 near Shibennoye, as well as 1 Ukrainian Tochka-U tactical ballistic missile near Chistovodovka north of Izyum.

Russian artillery destroyed 6 Ukrainian Bukovel mobile electronic warfare systems.

In total, 207 unmanned aerial vehicles, 1,467 tanks and other armored combat vehicles, 148 multiple launch rocket systems, 573 field artillery and mortar guns, as well as 1,262 units of special military vehicles have been destroyed since the beginning of the special military operation.

Movie about the Ukraine

March 18, 2022

A friend send me 4 links to a movie about the Ukraine.  Here are these links:

I have decided to collate the four videos into one, then upload it to BitChute.  I hope that I did not mess something up (I don’t have the physical time to check). I assumed that YouTube would block the video sooner or later (they already placed a disclaimer on top of it), so making an extra copy made sense to me:

So here it is:

https://www.bitchute.com/embed/YfKpVvzyBLmA

Non-Stop Crimes against Muslims

14 March 2022

By: Hamid Reza Naghashian

For years Zionist regime has been busy with committing crimes against Muslims, mainly Palestinians, and its crime has gone unnoticed by the international bodies and recently Saudi-led coalition has joined the Zionist wagon to commit crimes against Yemenis with no concern about getting due punishments from the international bodies or countries.

TEHRAN (Iran News) –  For years Zionist regime has been busy with committing crimes against Muslims, mainly Palestinians, and its crime has gone unnoticed by the international bodies and recently Saudi-led coalition has joined the Zionist wagon to commit crimes against Yemenis with no concern about getting due punishments from the international bodies or countries.

In recent days while the world and especially the United Nations have been mobilized against Russia to punish this country regarding Ukraine war, Zionists and Saudi-led coalition forces  continue their crimes comfortably without getting any even small condemnation from the UN.

It seems crimes against Muslims will continue non-stop mostly by Zionists and by some so-called Muslim states while the world is indifferent towards Muslims’ condition in Palestine and Yemen.

On Tuesday, the secretary general of Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement sharply criticized the United States for exercising double standards on human rights, saying Washington has remained silent on decades of Israeli atrocities against Palestine as well as the horrendous criminal acts that the Saudi-led coalition is perpetrating in war-torn Yemen.

“While U.S. officials accuse Russia of committing war crimes in Ukraine, they tend to turn a blind eye to the atrocities committed against civilians in all their wars. The United States has carried out crimes worldwide, spanning from Japan to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Somalia. U.S. warplanes have bombed Afghan weddings, turning them into funerals,” Sayed Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised speech broadcast live from Beirut.

He added, “What can Americans say about the massacres being perpetrated by Zionists in Palestine and Israel’s war crimes? What can they say about the siege of the Gaza Strip? What can they say about the massacres of the Saudi-American aggression in Yemen? What can they say about the blockade of Yemen?”

The Hezbollah chief noted that thousands of trials should be held to bring American and European military officials to justice for crimes committed in Algeria, Libya and elsewhere in the world.

He also lambasted the international community’s apathy towards Friday’s attack on a Shia mosque in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar, which killed at least 61 people and injured another 196, stating that the bombers who carried out the attack were US creations and instructed to play out the scenario.

Hezbollah’s leader warns that the Russia-Ukraine conflict can lead to repercussions that would be very dangerous to the whole world.

What Nasrallah said is just a small portion of many crimes which are committed in the world which go unpunished and even unnoticed.

“Trusting Americans translates into stupidity, foolishness and ignorance,” Nasrallah said, adding, “Ukrainians have been let down by those who they counted on, and they have started to announce their readiness for discussions with Moscow,” Nasrallah said.

“The treatment of the recent wave of refugees from Ukraine exposes discrimination based on religion, race, and color. Is this the Western civilization?” he said.

The double standard approach towards different issues by the West and the international bodies hurts the nations in the world especially when it comes to the Muslim states or anti-West countries, this approach widens so that ever body can see and feel the double standard regarding the mentioned states.

The strange thing is that Muslim states help the Zionists and the West to get bolder action against Muslim states because they know that Muslim states are divided and they will not take a united action against the committed crimes.

As Nasrallah said, the U.S. and mainly the West cannot be trusted and even Ukrainian people saw it in practice that the U.S. and Europeans are not ready to fight for them when they need it. Ukraine war has taught us many lessons and especially to the Muslim countries.

One of the main lessons is that Muslim countries should not rely on assistance of other countries and they themselves should fight for success and prosperity. The second lesson is that they should fight for their cause as Ukrainians do for it because they have realized that Western countries prefer to talk rather than to act.

So it is up to Muslim nations whether to accept suppression by their enemies or to stand against it because as long as they wait for the international bodies’ reaction to crimes against Palestine and Yemen or even other Muslim country like Sudan, it will be waste of time because the non-stop crimes against them will continue without getting due reaction and punishment.

Muslim nations need leaders like Seyed Ali Khamenei and Sayed Nasrallah to stand against arrogant states otherwise they have to seat and watch crimes against them going on. Lack of the brave leadership is the missing link in Muslim states which hurts them and makes happy the hostile nations.

Three important missile strikes (UPDATED!)

March 14, 2022

First, as the entire western press is clamoring in impotent range, Russia has fire 8 Kalibr missiles at a major NATO base in western Ukraine.  The base is utterly destroyed and there are many (well over 180+) dead mercenaries and even more wounded ones.  The base was near the Polish border which, of course, triggered even more hysterics.

What is important about this strike is this: Russia has just proven to the world that she can “reach” as far as she wants and that her conventional strikes can be truly crippling.  That, of course, also means that as soon as any western mercenary crosses the Ukrainian border he will have a crosshairs painted on him.

Ever since the first Ukie civil war, the Nazis have been organizing what they called “safaris” where wealthy western Nazis could pay a lump sum to then travel to the Donbass and shoot some Snow Niggers.  Of course, the problem with this concept that sometimes you could mistakenly hit a soldier rather than a civilian and that this Snow Nigger would shoot back.

So now, instead of asking Nazis to pay to kill Snow Niggers, now the Ukies (and their US masters, of course) are willing to pay Nazis to come a fight the Snow Niggers.  And Iavorov in western Ukraine, hundreds of miles away from the LOC must have felt extremely safe and cozy.  This is now this facility is described in an interview of the Mayor of Lvov by the Israeli website Ynet:

Those who were there a week ago said that some 100,000 men, some of them are new recruits, were at the base, undergoing a fast-track army training before going into battle. It appears the Russian intelligence received a tip on the actions in the base, before deciding to bomb it.

True, in the same interview, the said mayor claimed “at least 35”!

This is what this major NATO facility looks like today, judge for yourself:

It should be noted that this base was also a huge weapons depot for weapons brought in by land, from Poland, and that all this western kit is now reduced to a gigantic Lego pieces dump.

By the way, there are many more such facilities in the Ukraine!

The base on the far left indicated as “International Center for Peacekeeping and Security”,Iaworow, Lvov oblast” (международный центр миротворчества и безопасности, Яворов, Львовская обл.) is the one the Russian destroyed!  yes, it was labeled “Peacekeeping and Security”, I kid you not!

I don’t know who taught whom to lie like that – NATO and Nazis are both specialists in that field, really – but to call a military base which was supposed to bring a full brigade (several thousand!!) of Nazi volunteers a “peacekeeping security center” is truly precious, even by the rather lax standards of the Empire of Lies.

Then there was this strike, also in the Ukraine:

What you see here is the result of a Ukie strike on the Donetsk city center today.

The Ukies fired a Tochka-U missile precisely at downtown Donetsk.

Military value from this strike?  Zero.

Feelgood value from this strike?  Immense!

And no, this is NOT a war crime!  This is how the glorious glorious armed forces of the Nazi Ukraine take just revenge against Russia and the “separs” who dare to support her.

Russia exposed to the world’s contempt

You cannot compare the innocent mercenaries to those criminal civilians, because the former act in the name of humanity civilization and progress whereas the latter are russki brutes, Mongols really, who represent a threat for the wonderful White and Christian European civilization.

In fact, when the western doubleplusgoodthinkers proclaim with indignation that the Ukrainian civil war (well, the two Ukie civil wars really) killed 14’000 people, they “forget” to mention that the vast majority of those killed where civilians from the LDNR and that for YEARS the LDNR forces did not reply to Ukie attacks, not just sniper or mortar fire, but also heavy artillery strikes and major terrorist attacks, including the President of the DNR.

But that matters nothing to the Empire of Lies.

But now that a sad and ugly group of bona fide Nazi volunteers got hit on a military base (a legitimate target under international law and the laws of war specifically!) we hear a massive “oy veh!!!” rising to the heavens and demanding that Russia be severely punished for daring to shoot at those wannabe Kulturträgers!

I think that it would be fair to summarize The Rule as follows: we get to kill as many Snow Niggers as we want, but Snow Niggers dare not kill any of our White and Christian Kulturträgers.

Speaking of niggers, here is another important missile strike.

The Iranian Sand Niggers used their (very accurate) missiles to obliterate a Mossad base in Iraqi Kurdistan.  Now that, what shall we call it? maybe a “Jewish Cultural Center” or maybe a “Iraqi Law Center against Antisemitism” has been turned into this:

Interestingly, the IRGC indicated that the operation was in response to an Israeli airstrike on the Syrian capital of Damascus last Monday, in which two IRGC officers were killed.  Apparently, the Iranian Snow Niggers do not believe that the Jewish Kulturträgers  get to kill them without retaliation.

Most interestingly, following this strike the Israelis have copied the US “counter-attack philosophy” and… …done exactly nothing about this!  The story is mostly buried deep in the Israeli media, which doesn’t deny or cover it up, it just mentions them en passant and then goes on to other topics (including lots of anti-Russian pro-Ukie coverage of the Russian’s special operation in the Ukraine).

Here is the simple truth: the Empire of Lies cannot afford a full-scale with against Russia and China:  that we already knew, but it can’t even take on Iran, in spite of that country being much smaller and comparatively weaker.  But what the Iranians do have truly formidable weapons, and I am not referring to their (actually quite formidable) missiles, but by their political will and courage to use their missiles against *any* enemy.

An often-repeated story is that the Iranian hero and martyr General Soleimani personally visited Moscow and convinced the Russians to launch their military intervention in Syria.  This inspires two hopes in me:

• I hope to see Moscow at least once more before my time down here is up and that day I hope to be able to bring flowers to a large statue of General Soleimani somewhere in Moscow, maybe in the place were the Pushkin Square McDonalds (due to close today, not a day too soon, thank you sanctions!!!) stood all these years?  Or maybe right in front of the US Embassy in Moscow which, by then, I hope to see vacated by the servants of the Empire of Lies and, maybe, replaced by a US Music Center (Jazz, Blues, Country, Gospel, Appalachian and many other kinds of beautiful US music.) or, maybe, an exhibit like the one the Iranians did with the CIA station in Tehran? Something beautiful and inspiring for sure.

A giant statue of Iran’s top commander Qassem Soleimani, who was killed last month in a US airstrike, was unveiled Saturday in southern Lebanon, near the border with Israel.

By the time I see Russia, maybe for a last time, I hope that the spirit and ethos of General Soleimani will “infect” all the Russian ruling elites and give them the morality and courage they currently so clearly lack.

God willing, God willing!

It is too early for any maps right now (dragon-first-1 was told by persons in high positions to stop making and posting his while Radovka is slow), but if I see something interesting, I will post it here.

Andrei

PS: Radovka just posted this map, so I share it with you

The “relatively civilized” people should ally themselves with the “uncivilized” ones

March 04, 2022

Source

By Aram Mirzaei

The Western psyops is truly at its full capacity right now. As the Saker has reported himself for many days now, they’ve targeted Russia everywhere and in every way possible. They’ve completely taken control of the narrative and are basically on a witch hunt for those deemed “deviant”. The Western media is rampant with “reporting” and “analyses” where all these “experts” are competing in the ‘trash-talking Russia” challenge. Some say Putin has gone mad and has “lost touch with reality”, while others claim that he has a master plan to conquer all of the former Eastern Bloc countries. But in the end they all agree that he is evil, that he should be killed and/or overthrown. The other day, I saw two journalists interviewing a man who had volunteered to travel to Ukraine to fight Russians, as they were wishing him “all the best.” You’d think this is a joke if you didn’t live through it yourself.

A friend of mine from a European country told me the other day: “I feel like a criminal these days, carrying a deep dark secret, because I’ve committed something worse than murder… I support Russia! In this extremely Russophobic country, the pharmacies have run out of iodine pills, because people have stocked up on them, expecting a nuclear strike by “big bad Putin” any day now. People are hurrying to the ATMs for cash and preparing shelters for WWIII.” This is how the West and its powerful media have created fear among the Western people.

We’re being bombarded day and night by lies, lies and more lies about the ongoing conflict. The Saker is correct in his argument that Russia has been defeated in the information war. There are probably differing opinions on why this happened and one could argue that Moscow was probably a bit surprised to see the extent of the psyop. Foreign Minister Lavrov himself said that “Russia was ready for Western sanctions but that it did not expect the West to target its athletes, journalists and representatives of the cultural sector.”

He isn’t exactly lying here. Never in my life have I seen such hatred spewed on a mass level, as if the entire world has gone crazy. Such a coordinated campaign cannot have been executed without thorough planning, which I believe they’ve been doing for months, if not years.
In any case, the Western media have been quick to proclaim that the “international community” has condemned Russia for its “invasion” of Ukraine. We all know by now that the “international community” includes only the “civilized” and perhaps some “relatively civilized” countries. I’ll come back to the term “relatively civilized” later.

So what about the average person in the West then? I can mostly speak about the country I currently reside in, but so far, judging from what I’ve seen, the “civilized” Westerners have unequivocally condemned and showed their hatred for president Putin and Russia, because, of course, they take a moral stance against “unacceptable Russian imperialism.” Such things belong to the “20th century” and “countries these days don’t just invade other countries”. The other day, I heard co-workers say that they don’t fear soaring gas and oil prices due to the sanctions, because they’d “rather go back to horse and chariot, than miss out on the chance to put those damn Russians in their place.”

This is the hatred that they have against Russia, a people they consider to be “relatively civilized”, just like they consider Ukrainians to be the same. This is why Moscow’s policy of appeasement is useless. It is Moscow that should take lessons from history and look at Munich 1938, not the Westerners, as some silly pundits claim. They should also take lesson from the Islamic Republic’s tough stance against the West, despite being a much smaller country than Russia, and vastly behind in terms of economic, military, industrial and technological advancements and achievements.

The Islamic Republic has never even had the chance to be part of SWIFT system, a tool that the Westerners have used against Russia recently, supposedly a “disaster for Russian economy” now that they have “kicked Russia out.” Iran has been forced to do trades through the black market and the use of cash in suitcases and bags for decades! This is what “maximum pressure” forced Tehran into. Why shouldn’t Russia survive this? It is after all “relatively civilized” compared to the “uncivilized” Muslim Iranians.

The phrase “relatively civilized” was, as most people know, recently used in an interview by a correspondent of one of the American media channels. Note the words “the Ukrainians are relatively civilized”, which simply means that in the eyes of the Americans, Ukrainians are still “relatively civilized” and not fully “civilized”.
This means that Iraqis are Afghans dying is not strange, because they’re not civilized anyway. The “stupid Muslims” in Iraq, Syria and Yemen whose blood don’t matter and killing them en masse is permissible because they are subhuman.

The Western people (save for a very small minority) do not give a damn about the fact that the US occupies Syria and Iraq, that it has waged illegal wars across West Asia and Afghanistan, and slaughtered millions in their path. Washington is partaking in a starvation campaign against millions of Yemenis, does anyone care about that?

Did anyone sanction the US when it invaded Iraq illegally? Even with facts about the total fabrication of evidence for Iraq’s WMD possession, facts that are acknowledged by Western governments and pundits today, and yet nobody says a thing. Did anyone cancel, let alone even condemn the US when it downed an Iranian passenger flight, killing some 300 people and then gave medals to those troops who fired the missile?

For God’s sakes, at least the Iranians had the decency to apologize when they accidentally downed the Ukrainian-bound passenger flight in 2020. They didn’t humiliate the victims by giving the troops medals, instead, they actually charged them with criminal neglect and incompetence. But Iranians are the “uncivilized” people here, of course.

In my opinion, Moscow has tried too hard the diplomatic way, over the Donbass conflict. I’m sure the people in Moscow already know this, but negotiations with the West is useless. If anything the failure of the JCPOA and Washington’s shameless withdrawal should be a lesson for Moscow, that Washington and its band of dogs are liars, they are unreliable and won’t stand by their words and promises. The West has proven time and time again that it only understands the language of force.

I believe as several other analysts have already stated, that Washington’s goals have been to draw Russia into a war, which it succeeded in doing, and the second goal has been to kick Russia out of Europe-Washington has been pretty successful with this endeavour too, for now.

So Moscow must now look to those who will not view Russia and Russians as “relatively civilized.” The “uncivilized” world, save for those affected by the brain disease that exposure to Western media results in, mostly support Moscow’s operation in Ukraine. They recognize Moscow’s legitimate security concerns over NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders. Moscow’s challenge and resistance to the US empire is important for the countries or the “uncivilized” world too, because it offers them a way out of the West’s stranglehold over them. Moscow has used its military might for fighting terrorists, first in Chechnya, then Syria and now in Ukraine, helping the people achieve freedom from Western backed terrorists. This has not just passed by the “uncivil” peoples of the world.

Many countries in the so called Global South have refused to condemn and sanction Russia. Not even NATO member Turkey, or Brazil’s anglophile president went through with the sanctions. Tehran and Beijing (both super uncivilized) have blamed the West for the crisis and  Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has personally mentioned Washington’s cancerous role in the conflict, describing Washington as “both creating crises and feeding off of them.”

So what can we learn from this conflict? Moscow, and hopefully Tehran as well as Beijing should learn that just like in Ukraine, where there are those who believe that its a privilege to be called “Westerner” and “European”, there are such people in all three of these countries as well. The governments of Russia, Iran and China must now figure out ways to block these psyops from affecting their own peoples, or elschine they’ll be facing the same threats. One such way is to counter the “Western unity” by showing “Eastern unity” in this time of crisis. They must show the world that Western sanctions don’t affect them, and that the “international community” is nothing but the US empire of lies and its vassals.

Let’s hope that this truly was Russia’s final review of relations with the West and that Moscow now fully turns to the “uncivilized” East.

America Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century: The MIC, OGAM and FIRE Sectors Conquer NATO

February 28, 2022

Source

By Michael Hudson

My old boss Herman Kahn, with whom I worked at the Hudson Institute in the 1970s, had a set speech that he would give at public meetings. He said that back in high school in Los Angeles, his teachers would say what most liberals were saying in the 1940s and 50s: “Wars never solved anything.” It was as if they never changed anything – and therefore shouldn’t be fought.

Herman disagreed, and made lists of all sorts of things that wars had solved in world history, or at least changed. He was right, and of course that is the aim of both sides in today’s New Cold War confrontation in Ukraine.

The question to ask is what today’s New Cold War is trying to change or “solve.” To answer this question, it helps to ask who initiates the war. There always are two sides – the attacker and the attacked. The attacker intends certain consequences, and the attacked looks for unintended consequences of which they can take advantage. In this case, both sides have their dueling sets of intended consequences and special interests.

The active military force and aggression since 1991 has been the United States. Rejecting mutual disarmament of the Warsaw Pact countries and NATO, there was no “peace dividend.” Instead, the U.S. policy executed by the Clinton and subsequent administrations to wage a new military expansion via NATO has paid a 30-year dividend in the form of shifting the foreign policy of Western Europe and other American allies out of their domestic political sphere into their own U.S.-oriented “national security” blob (the word for special interests that must not be named). NATO has become Europe’s foreign-policy-making body, even to the point of dominating domestic economic interests.

The recent prodding of Russia by expanding Ukrainian anti-Russian ethnic violence by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi post-2014 Maiden regime was aimed at (and has succeeded in forcing a showdown in response the fear by U.S. interests that they are losing their economic and political hold on their NATO allies and other Dollar Area satellites as these countries have seen their major opportunities for gain to lie in increasing trade and investment with China and Russia.

To understand just what U.S. aims and interests are threatened, it is necessary to understand U.S. politics and “the blob,” that is, the government central planning that cannot be explained by looking at ostensibly democratic politics. This is not the politics of U.S. senators and representatives representing their congressional voting districts or states.

America’s three oligarchies in control of U.S. foreign policy

It is more realistic to view U.S. economic and foreign policy in terms of the military-industrial complex, the oil and gas (and mining) complex, and the banking and real estate complex than in terms of the political policy of Republicans and Democrats. The key senators and congressional representatives do not represent their states and districts as much as the economic and financial interests of their major political campaign contributors. A Venn diagram would show that in today’s post-Citizens United world, U.S. politicians represent their campaign contributors, not voters. And these contributors fall basically into three main blocs.

Three main oligarchic groups that have bought control of the Senate and Congress to put their own policy makers in the State Department and Defense Department. First is the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) – arms manufacturers such as Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, have broadly diversified their factories and employment in nearly every state, and especially in the Congressional districts where key Congressional committee heads are elected. Their economic base is monopoly rent, obtained above all from their arms sales to NATO, to Near Eastern oil exporters and to other countries with a balance-of-payments surplus. Stocks for these companies soared immediately upon news of the Russian attack, leading a two-day stock-market surge as investors recognized that war in a world of cost-plus “Pentagon capitalism” (as Seymour Melman described it) will provide a guaranteed national-security umbrella for monopoly profits for war industries. Senators and Congressional representatives from California and Washington traditionally have represented the MIC, along with the solid pro-military South. The past week’s military escalation promises soaring arms sales to NATO and other U.S. allies, enriching the actual constituents of these politicians. Germany quickly agreed to raise is arms spending to over 2% of GDP.

The second major oligarchic bloc is the rent-extracting oil and gas sector, joined by mining (OGAM), riding America’s special tax favoritism granted to companies emptying natural resources out of the ground and putting them mostly into the atmosphere, oceans and water supply. Like the banking and real estate sector seeking to maximize economic rent and maximizing capital gains for housing and other assets,, the aim of this OGAM sector is to maximize the price of its energy and raw materials so as to maximize its natural-resource rent. Monopolizing the Dollar Area’s oil market and isolating it from Russian oil and gas has been a major U.S. priority for over a year now, as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline threatened to link the Western European and Russian economies more tightly together.

If oil, gas and mining operations are not situated in every U.S. voting district, at least their investors are. Senators from Texas and other Western oil-producing and mining states are the leading OGAM lobbyists, and the State Department has a heavy oil-sector influence providing a national-security umbrella for the sector’s special tax breaks. The ancillary political aim is to ignore and reject environmental drives to replace oil, gas and coal with alternative sources of energy. The Biden administration accordingly has backed the expansion of offshore drilling, supported the Canadian pipeline to the world’s dirtiest petroleum source in the Athabasca tar sands, and celebrated the revival of U.S. fracking.

The foreign-policy extension is to prevent foreign countries not leaving control of their oil, gas and mining to U.S. OGAM companies from competing in world markets with U.S. suppliers. Isolating Russia (and Iran) from Western markets will reduce the supply of oil and gas, pushing up prices and corporate profits accordingly.

The third major oligarchic group is the symbiotic Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, which is the modern finance-capitalist successor to Europe’s old post-feudal landed aristocracy living by land rents. With most housing in today’s world having become owner-occupied (although with sharply rising rates of absentee landlordship since the post-2008 wave of Obama Evictions), land rent is paid largely to the banking sector in the form of mortgage interest and debt amortization (on rising debt/equity ratios as bank lending inflates housing prices). About 80 percent of U.S. and British bank loans are to the real estate sector, inflating land prices to create capital gains – which are effectively tax-exempt for absentee owners.

This Wall Street-centered banking and real estate bloc is even more broadly based on a district-by-district basis than the MIC. Its New York senator from Wall Street, Chuck Schumer, heads the Senate, long supported by Delaware’s former Senator from the credit-card industry Joe Biden, and Connecticut’s senators from the insurance sector centered in that state. Domestically, the aim of this sector is to maximize land rent and the “capital’ gains resulting from rising land rent. Internationally, the FIRE sector’s aim is to privatize foreign economies (above all to secure the privilege of credit creation in U.S. hands), so as to turn government infrastructure and public utilities into rent-seeking monopolies to provide basic services (such as health care, education, transportation, communications and information technology) at maximum prices instead of at subsidized prices to reduce the cost of living and doing business. And Wall Street always has been closely merged with the oil and gas industry (viz. the Rockefeller-dominated Citigroup and Chase Manhattan banking conglomerates).

The FIRE, MIC and OGAM sectors are the three rentier sectors that dominate today’s post-industrial finance capitalism. Their mutual fortunes have soared as MIC and OGAM stocks have increased. And moves to exclude Russia from the Western financial system (and partially now from SWIFT), coupled with the adverse effects of isolating European economies from Russian energy, promise to spur an inflow into dollarized financial securities

As mentioned at the outset, it is more helpful to view U.S. economic and foreign policy in terms of the complexes based on these three rentier sectors than in terms of the political policy of Republicans and Democrats. The key senators and congressional representatives are not representing their states and districts as much as the economic and financial interests of their major donors. That is why neither manufacturing nor agriculture play the dominant role in U.S. foreign policy today. The convergence of the policy aims of America’s three dominant rentier groups overwhelms the interests of labor and even of industrial capital beyond the MIC. That convergence is the defining characteristic of today’s post-industrial finance capitalism. It is basically a reversion to economic rent-seeking, which is independent of the politics of labor and industrial capital.

The dynamic that needs to be traced today is why this oligarchic blob has found its interest in prodding Russia into what Russia evidently viewed as a do-or-die stance to resist the increasingly violent attacks on Ukraine’s eastern Russian-speaking provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, along with the broader Western threats against Russia.

The rentier “blob’s” expected consequences of the New Cold War

As President Biden explained, the current U.S.-orchestrated military escalation (“Prodding the Bear”) is not really about Ukraine. Biden promised at the outset that no U.S. troops would be involved. But he has been demanding for over a year that Germany prevent the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from supplying its industry and housing with low-priced gas and turn to the much higher-priced U.S. suppliers.

U.S. officials first tried to stop construction of the pipeline from being completed. Firms aiding in its construction were sanctioned, but finally Russia itself completed the pipeline. U.S. pressure then turned on the traditionally pliant German politicians, claiming that Germany and the rest of Europe faced a National Security threat from Russia turning off the gas, presumably to extract some political or economic concessions. No specific Russian demands could be thought up, and so their nature was left obscure and blob-like. Germany refused to authorize Nord Stream 2 from officially going into operation.

A major aim of today’s New Cold War is to monopolize the market for U.S. shipments of liquified natural gas (LNG). Already under Donald Trump’s administration, Angela Merkel was bullied into promising to spend $1 billion building new port facilities for U.S. tanker ships to unload natural gas for German use. The Democratic election victory in November 2020, followed by Ms. Merkel’s retirement from Germany’s political scene, led to cancellation of this port investment, leaving Germany really without much alternative to importing Russian gas to heat its homes, power its electric utilities, and to provide raw material for its fertilizer industry and hence the maintenance of its farm productivity.

So the most pressing U.S. strategic aim of NATO confrontation with Russia is soaring oil and gas prices, above all to the detriment of Germany. In addition to creating profits and stock-market gains for U.S. oil companies, higher energy prices will take much of the steam out of the German economy. That looms as the third time in a century that the United States has defeated Germany – each time increasing its control over a German economy increasingly dependent on the United States for imports and policy leadership, with NATO being the effective check against any domestic nationalist resistance.

Higher gasoline, heating and other energy prices also will hurt U.S. consumers and those of other nations (especially Global South energy-deficit economies) and leave less of the U.S. family budget for spending on domestic goods and services. This could squeeze marginalized homeowners and investors, leading to further concentration of absentee ownership of housing and commercial property in the United States, along with buyouts of distressed real estate owners in other countries faced with soaring heating and energy costs. But that is deemed collateral damage by the post-industrial blob.

Food prices also will rise, headed by wheat. (Russia and Ukraine account for 25 percent of world wheat exports.) This will squeeze many Near Eastern and Global South food-deficit countries, worsening their balance of payments and threatening foreign debt defaults.

Russian raw-materials exports may be blocked by Russia in response to the currency and SWIFT sanctions. This threatens to cause breaks in supply chains for key materials, including cobalt, palladium, nickel and aluminum (the production of which consumes much electricity as its major cost – which will make that metal more expensive). If China decides to see itself as the next nation being threatened and joins Russia in a common protest against the U.S. trade and financial warfare, the Western economies are in for a serious shock.

The long-term dream of U.S. New Cold Warriors is to break up Russia, or at least to restore its Yeltsin/Harvard Boys managerial kleptocracy, with oligarchs seeking to cash in their privatizations in Western stock markets. OGAM still dreams of buying majority control of Yukos and Gazprom. Wall Street would love to recreate a Russian stock market boom. And MIC investors are happily anticipating the prospect of selling more weapons to help bring all this about.

Russia’s intentions to benefit from America’s unintended consequences

What does Russia want? Most immediately, to remove the neo-Nazi anti-Russian core that the Maidan massacre and coup put in place in 2014. Ukraine is to be neutralized, which to Russia means basically pro-Russian, dominated by Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea. The aim is to prevent Ukraine from becoming a staging ground of U.S.-orchestrated anti-Russian moves a la Chechnya and Georgia.

Russia’s longer-term aim is to pry Europe away from NATO and U.S. dominance – and in the process, create with China a new multipolar world order centered on an economically integrated Eurasia. The aim is to dissolve NATO altogether, and then to promote the broad disarmament and denuclearization policies that Russia has been pushing for. Not only will this cut back foreign purchases of U.S. arms, but it may end up leading to sanctions against future U.S. military adventurism. That would leave America with less ability to fund its military operations as de-dollarization accelerates.

Now that it should be obvious to any informed observer that (1) NATO’s purpose is aggression, not defense, and (2) there is no further territory for it to conquer from the remains of the old Soviet Union, what does Europe get out of continued membership? It is obvious that Russia never again will invade Europe. It has nothing to gain – and had nothing to gain by fighting Ukraine, except to roll back NATO’s proxy expansion into that country and the NATO-backed attacks on Novorossiya.

Will European nationalist leaders (the left is largely pro-US) ask why their countries should pay for U.S. arms that only put them in danger, pay higher prices for U.S. LNG and energy, pay more for grain and Russian-produced raw materials, all while losing the option of making export sales and profits on peaceful investment in Russia – and perhaps losing China as well?

The U.S. confiscation of Russian monetary reserves, following the recent theft of Afghanistan’s reserves (and England’s seizure of Venezuela’s gold stocks held there) threatens every country’s adherence to the Dollar Standard, and hence the dollar’s role as the vehicle for foreign-exchange savings by the world’s central banks. This will accelerate the international de-dollarization process already started by Russia and China relying on mutual holdings of each other’s currencies.

Over the longer term, Russia is likely to join China in forming an alternative to the U.S.-dominated IMF and World Bank. Russia’s announcement that it wants to arrest the Ukrainian Nazis and hold a war crimes trial seems to imply an alternative to the Hague court will be established following Russia’s military victory in Ukraine. Only a new international court could try war criminals extending from Ukraine’s neo-Nazi leadership all the way up to U.S. officials responsible for crimes against humanity as defined by the Nuremberg laws.

Did the American blob actually think through the consequences of NATO’s war?

It is almost black humor to look at U.S. attempts to convince China that it should join the United States in denouncing Russia’s moves into Ukraine. The most enormous unintended consequence of U.S. foreign policy has been to drive Russia and China together, along with Iran, Central Asia and other countries along the Belt and Road initiative.

Russia dreamed of creating a new world order, but it was U.S. adventurism that has driven the world into an entirely new order – one that looks to be dominated by China as the default winner now that the European economy is essentially torn apart and America is left with what it has grabbed from Russia and Afghanistan, but without the ability to gain future support.

And everything that I have written above may already be obsolete as Russia and the U.S. have gone on atomic alert. My only hope is that Putin and Biden can agree that if Russia hydrogen bombs Britain and Brussels, that there will be a devil’s (not gentleman’s) agreement not to bomb each other.

With such talk I’m brought back to my discussions with Herman Kahn 50 years ago. He became quite unpopular for writing Thinking about the Unthinkable, meaning atomic war. As he was parodied in Dr. Strangelove, he did indeed say that there would indeed be survivors. But he added that for himself, he hoped to be right under the atom bomb, because it was not a world in which he wanted to survive.

Video: NATO Too Weak to Face Russia? Scott Ritter on Russian Offensive

February 28, 2022

By Scott Ritter and Richard Medhurst

Global Research,

Richard Medhurst 25 February 2022

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, discusses the military invasion of Russia in Ukraine with Richard Medhurst.

According to Ritter, this is a massive Russian operation that aims to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine which means two things. One, Ukrainian military will cease to exist. And two, Ukrainian government will be gone because President Putin says it is a Nazi government.

Watch the interview below.

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video.

Video: Freedom Convoy Solidarity in Alberta. Agreement with RCMP

The original source of this article is Richard Medhurst

Copyright © Scott Ritter and Richard Medhurst, Richard Medhurst, 2022

How the U.S. Started a Cold War with Russia and Left Ukraine to Fight It

February 28, 2022

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

Global Research,

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @globalresearch_crg.

---

Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

---

The defenders of Ukraine are bravely resisting Russian aggression, shaming the rest of the world and the UN Security Council for its failure to protect them. It is an encouraging sign that the Russians and Ukrainians are holding talks in Belarus that may lead to a ceasefire. All efforts must be made to bring an end to this war before the Russian war machine kills thousands more of Ukraine’s defenders and civilians, and forces hundreds of thousands more to flee. 

But there is a more insidious reality at work beneath the surface of this classic morality play, and that is the role of the United States and NATO in setting the stage for this crisis.

President Biden has called the Russian invasion “unprovoked,” but that is far from the truth. In the four days leading up to the invasion, ceasefire monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) documented a dangerous increase in ceasefire violations in Eastern Ukraine, with 5,667 violations and 4,093 explosions.

Most were inside the de facto borders of the Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics, consistent with incoming shell-fire by Ukraine government forces. With nearly 700 OSCE ceasefire monitors on the ground, it is not credible that these were all “false flag” incidents staged by separatist forces, as U.S. and British officials claimed.

Whether the shell-fire was just another escalation in the long-running civil war or the opening salvos of a new government offensive, it was certainly a provocation. But the Russian invasion has far exceeded any proportionate action to defend the DPR and LPR from those attacks, making it disproportionate and illegal.

In the larger context though, Ukraine has become an unwitting victim and proxy in the resurgent U.S. Cold War against Russia and China, in which the United States has surrounded both countries with military forces and offensive weapons, withdrawn from a whole series of arms control treaties, and refused to negotiate resolutions to rational security concerns raised by Russia.

In December 2021, after a summit between Presidents Biden and Putin, Russia submitted a draft proposal for a new mutual security treaty between Russia and NATO, with 9 articles to be negotiated. They represented a reasonable basis for a serious exchange. The most pertinent to the crisis in Ukraine was simply to agree that NATO would not accept Ukraine as a new member, which is not on the table in the foreseeable future in any case. But the Biden administration brushed off Russia’s entire proposal as a nonstarter, not even a basis for negotiations.

So why was negotiating a mutual security treaty so unacceptable that Biden was ready to risk thousands of Ukrainian lives, although not a single American life, rather than attempt to find common ground? What does that say about the relative value that Biden and his colleagues place on American versus Ukrainian lives? And what is this strange position that the United States occupies in today’s world that permits an American president to risk so many Ukrainian lives without asking Americans to share their pain and sacrifice?

The breakdown in U.S. relations with Russia and the failure of Biden’s inflexible brinkmanship precipitated this war, and yet Biden’s policy “externalizes” all the pain and suffering so that Americans can, as another wartime president once said, “go about their business” and keep shopping. America’s European allies, who must now house hundreds of thousands of refugees and face spiraling energy prices, should be wary of falling in line behind this kind of “leadership” before they, too, end up on the front line.

America Trashes NATO Founding Act; Rushes Weapons to Russia’s Borders

At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact, NATO’s Eastern European counterpart, was dissolved, and NATO should have been as well, since it had achieved the purpose it was built to serve. Instead, NATO has lived on as a dangerous, out-of-control military alliance dedicated mainly to expanding its sphere of operations and justifying its own existence. It has expanded from 16 countries in 1991 to a total of 30 countries today, incorporating most of Eastern Europe, at the same time as it has committed aggression, bombings of civilians and other war crimes.

In 1999, NATO launched an illegal war to militarily carve out an independent Kosovo from the remnants of Yugoslavia. NATO airstrikes during the Kosovo War killed hundreds of civilians, and its leading ally in the war, Kosovo President Hashim Thaci, is now on trial at The Hague for the appalling war crimes he committed under the cover of NATO bombing, including cold-blooded murders of hundreds of prisoners to sell their internal organs on the international transplant market.

Far from the North Atlantic, NATO joined the United States in its 20-year war in Afghanistan, and then attacked and destroyed Libya in 2011, leaving behind a failed state, a continuing refugee crisis and violence and chaos across the region.

In 1991, as part of a Soviet agreement to accept the reunification of East and West Germany, Western leaders assured their Soviet counterparts that they would not expand NATO any closer to Russia than the border of a united Germany. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker promised that NATO would not advance “one inch” beyond the German border. The West’s broken promises are spelled out for all to see in 30 declassified documents published on the National Security Archive website.

After expanding across Eastern Europe and waging wars in Afghanistan and Libya, NATO has predictably come full circle to once again view Russia as its principal enemy. U.S. nuclear weapons are now based in five NATO countries in Europe: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey, while France and the U.K. already have their own nuclear arsenals. U.S. “missile defense” systems, which could be converted to fire offensive nuclear missiles, are based in Poland and Romania, including at a base in Poland only 100 miles from the Russian border.

Another Russian request in its December proposal was for the United States to simply rejoin the 1988 INF Treaty(Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty), under which both sides agreed not to deploy short- or intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. Trump withdrew from the treaty in 2019 on the advice of his National Security Adviser, John Bolton, who also has the scalps of the 1972 ABM Treaty, the 2015 JCPOA with Iran and the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea dangling from his gun-belt.

None of this can justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the world should take Russia seriously when it says that its conditions for ending the war and returning to diplomacy are Ukrainian neutrality and disarmament. While no country can be expected to completely disarm in today’s armed-to-the-teeth world, neutrality could be a serious long-term option for Ukraine.

There are many successful precedents, like Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, Finland and Costa Rica. Or take the case of Vietnam. It has a common border and serious maritime disputes with China, but Vietnam has resisted U.S. efforts to embroil it in its Cold War with China, and remains committed to its long-standing “Four Nos” policy: no military alliances; no affiliation with one country against another; no foreign military bases; and no threats or uses of force.

The world must do whatever it takes to obtain a ceasefire in Ukraine and make it stick. Maybe UN Secretary General Guterres or a UN special representative could act as a mediator, possibly with a peacekeeping role for the UN. This will not be easy – one of the still unlearned lessons of other wars is that it is easier to prevent war through serious diplomacy and a genuine commitment to peace than to end a war once it has started.

If and when there is a ceasefire, all parties must be prepared to start afresh to negotiate lasting diplomatic solutions that will allow all the people of Donbas, Ukraine, Russia, the United States and other NATO members to live in peace. Security is not a zero-sum game, and no country or group of countries can achieve lasting security by undermining the security of others.

The United States and Russia must also finally assume the responsibility that comes with stockpiling over 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, and agree on a plan to start dismantling them, in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

Lastly, as Americans condemn Russia’s aggression, it would be the epitome of hypocrisy to forget or ignore the many recent wars in which the United States and its allies have been the aggressors: in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti,Somalia, Palestine, Pakistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

We sincerely hope that Russia will end its illegal, brutal invasion of Ukraine long before it commits a fraction of the massive killing and destruction that the United States and its allies have committed in our illegal wars.

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Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @globalresearch_crg. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. 

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

Featured image is from CODEPINK

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, Global Research, 2022

West Turned Blind Eye to War Crimes by the Kiev Regime, ’Genocide’ in Ukraine, Lavrov Says

February 25, 2022

By Staff, Agencies

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has condemned the West for their unwavering defense of the Ukrainian regime and turning a blind eye to its war crimes against civilians in the country’s east.

In a press conference on Friday, Lavrov voiced his country’s readiness to negotiate once Russian President Vladimir Putin’s conditions are applied, when Ukraine lays down its weapon and form a government that represents all of the Ukrainian society’s components.

He stressed that nations in the West covered Kiev’s back even as it decided to take the Donbass people’s republics by force, declared a resolve to join NATO, and threatened to build nuclear weapons.

“They have been turning a blind eye to war crimes against the civilian population, to the murders of women, children, the elderly, to the destruction of civilian infrastructure and silently encouraging the rapid emergence of neo-Nazism and Russophobia [in Ukraine], which ultimately plunged the country into its current tragic state,” Lavrov said.

The foreign minister went on to slam the West for “unanimously” denying the obvious fact that a “genocide” was taking place in Ukraine, where Kiev’s forces have been waging a war against and killing the residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics [DPR and LPR].

He also announced that Russia will be organizing a special photo gallery at the UN for the participants of a new session of the UN Human Rights Council. This gallery will be devoted to the situation in the Donbass region and the suffering of its residents, Lavrov said.

He further explained that Russia could not remain indifferent to the DPR and LPR’s appeal for defense against the aggressor. He noted that the Russian special operation in Donbass is being carried out to allow Ukrainians to choose their own future once they are freed from the oppression of the current regime, and stressed that the Russian military is not attacking civilian infrastructure as part of this operation.

Lavrov separately added that he does not believe Western politicians could seriously hope that Moscow would tolerate the oppression of Russians in Ukraine.

The Russian foreign minister further underscored that “nobody” plans to occupy Ukraine in the course of the special operation and added that Russia is interested in the Ukrainian people maintaining their independence.

The minister stressed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is lying when he claims that Kiev is ready to discuss Ukraine’s “neutral status.” He added that Zelensky also lied, when he said that Russia refused to engage in dialogue and that the Ukrainian president himself missed the opportunity to start negotiations on security guarantees.

“We have always stood for negotiations. The chance [to hold them] remained until the last moment,” Lavrov said.

Upon completion of Russia’s military operation, the situation in Ukraine will return to the stage of negotiations, the Russian foreign minister said.

Lavrov also addressed the NATO alliance accusing it of ruthlessly going into Ukraine in order to “subject” the country’s east. He also lambasted the bloc’s claims of allegedly caring for the desires of the Ukrainian people, noting that NATO should have done that in 2008, when it first said that Ukraine would eventually be allowed to join the alliance.

Putin on 24 February ordered the Russian armed forces to conduct a special operation in the Donbass region aimed at the defense of the DPR and LPR, and “demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine. He stressed that Russia was left with no option other than to intervene in the situation in Donbass after its republics began reporting shelling by Ukrainian forces for over a week.

Western nations and their allies condemned Russia’s decision and labelled it an “invasion.” The EU, UK, Canada, Japan, and the US have all announced new sanctions on Moscow, which affect its access to financial markets, harms its banks, airlines, and limits imports of high-tech products into the country.

Moscow has repeatedly urged Western nations to pressure Kiev to stop the shelling of the Donbass republics, which they have been reporting for over a week now. The Kremlin has also condemned the West’s failure to convince Ukrainian leaders to fulfill the Minsk agreements.

Russia Does Not Only Defend Itself, But the World and Humanity – Assad

February 25, 2022

By Staff, SANA

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made a phone call on Friday with his Russian ounterpart Vladimir Putin.

Talks dealt with the situation in Ukraine, and the special military operation carried out by the Russian Federation to protect civilians in Donbas region.

Assad stressed that what is taking place today is a correction to history and re-balance to the world that it has lost after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, adding that Western hysteria comes to keep history in the wrong place in favor of the chaos that is only sought by the outlawed.

The Syrian president considered that Russia today doesn’t only defend itself, but also defends the world and principles of justice and humanity.

Assad also said that Western countries bear responsibility for chaos and bloodshed as a result of their policies aimed at controlling peoples as these countries use their dirty methods to support terrorists in Syria and the Nazis in Ukraine and in various parts of the world.

The Syrian president further voiced his country’s support for the Russian Federation, based on its conviction of its right stance that repelling NATO expansion is Russia’s right, because it has become a global threat to the world and has turned into a tool to achieve the irresponsible policies of Western countries that seek to strike stability in the world.

President al-Assad makes a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin

Related

• Hezbollah Rejects Lebanon’s Foreign Ministry Condemnation of Russian Military Operation in Ukraine
• Lavrov: West Turned Blind Eye to War Crimes by the Kiev Regime, ‘Genocide’ in Ukraine

روسيا: نحاول منع حرب شاملة.. وبوتين: لا ننوي الإضرار بالنظام العالمي

2022 الجمعة 25 شباط
المصدر: وكالات+الميادين نت

المتحدّثة باسم الخارجية الروسية، ماريا زاخاروفا، تقول إن “العملية العسكرية الخاصة، والتي تنفذها روسيا في أوكرانيا، هي محاولة لمنع حرب شاملة”.

الكرملين: مستقبل أوكرانيا هو خيار الشعب الأوكراني

عقد الرئيس الروسي، فلاديمير بوتين، مؤتمراً صحافياً، بعد ظهر اليوم الخميس، في العاصمة موسكو، قال فيه “نحن لا ننوي الإضرار بالنظام العالمي، وعلى شركائنا فهم هذا الأمر”.

وأكَّد بوتين أنَّ “روسيا لا تزال جزءاً من الاقتصاد العالمي”، مضيفاً “نحن لا نعتزم إلحاق الضرر بالنظام الذي ننتمي إليه”. وأوضح الرئيس الروسي أنَّ “جميع المحاولات التي قمنا بها، من أجل تغيير الوضع، لم تكن مثمرةً”.

الخارجية الروسية: تلميح كييف إلى أنها تمتلك أسلحة نووية قلب الوضع برمته

من جهتها، أعلنت وزارة الخارجية الروسية، اليوم الخميس، أنه “قبل بدء العملية العسكرية، أخبرتنا واشنطن بأنها ترفض مطالبنا بشأن الضمانات الأمنية”.

وقالت المتحدثة باسم الخارجية الروسية، ماريا زاخاروفا، إن “العملية العسكرية الخاصة، والتي تنفّذها روسيا في أوكرانيا، هي محاولة لمنع حرب شاملة”.

وشدّدت زاخاروفا على أن “هذه ليست بداية حرب، بل محاولة لمنع وقوع حرب عالمية شاملة”.

وأضافت، في حديث تلفزيوني، أن “هذه ليست بداية حرب. هذا أولاً، وهذا مهم للغاية. رغبتنا هي منع التطورات التي يمكن أن تتطور إلى حرب عالمية. وثانياً، هذه نهاية الحرب”.

وأكدت المتحدثة باسم الخارجية الروسية أن “تلميح كييف إلى أنها تمتلك أسلحة نووية قلب الوضع برمته، رأساً على عقب”.

وقالت المتحدثة الرسمية باسم وزارة الخارجية الروسية إن “الولايات المتحدة بالذات، رفضت إجراء حوار مع روسيا بشأن أوكرانيا والأمن العالمي”.

وأوضحت أنه “في هذا اليوم بالذات، كان من المفترض أن يكون الوفد الروسي، الرسمي، برئاسة وزير الخارجية سيرغي لافروف، في المنصات الأوروبية نفسها، التي نسمع منها جميع أنواع الاتهامات الموجهة إلينا”.

وأضافت أنه “كان من المفترض أن يكون هناك إجراء لمفاوضات مع الوفد الأميركي، برئاسة وزير الخارجية الأميركي السيد (أنتوني) بلينكن، والجانب الأميركي بالذات هو الذي رفض إجراء مزيد من المفاوضات” .

وأشارت زاخاروفا إلى أن ذلك يشمل المفاوضات بشأن قضايا الأمن العالمي، والاستقرار الاستراتيجي والوضع الراهن.

وأضافت زاخاروفا “لكن، بالطبع، لم يكن ذلك ممكنا ًبمعزل عن أوكرانيا. أرسل الجانب الأميركي رداً رسمياً إلى الجانب الروسي في صورة رسالة من وزير الخارجية الأميركي، ذكر فيها بالتفصيل، وبطريقة فظة تماماً، عدم استعداده للتفاوض مع روسيا. كل ذلك تسلمته موسكو قبل بدء العملية الخاصة. والعالم كله يجب أن يعرف ذلك”.

روسيا ستردّ على العقوبات الغربية

وأعلنت المتحدثة الرسمية باسم وزارة الخارجية الروسية، ماريا زاخاروفا، اليوم الخميس، أن روسيا سترد على عقوبات الدول الغربية، والتي لا يمكنها أن تفعل شيئاً أكثر من التلويح بعقوبات.

وقالت زاخاروفا أنه “عندما تُخرج أوروبا مرة أخرى من الصندوق حزمةً أخرى من العقوبات وتلوّح بها، فمن الواضح أنها لا تستطيع فعل أي شيء آخر. لكن يجب أن يفكر (الأوروبيون) الآن فيما يمكن أن يؤدي إليه الوضع، إذا انفجرت دولة (أوكرانيا) من الداخل، بسبب مشاكل داخلية”، والتي يمكن أن “تتلعثم فجأة بشأن امتلاك أسلحة نووية”.

وأضافت “سوف نرد (على العقوبات) بالطريقة نفسها التي رددنا بها من قبل. سنرد بالمثل، بصورة متماثلة، أو غير متماثلة، وبحسب ما يتطلبه الموقف. سننطلق من مصالحنا الخاصة”.

لافروف: روسيا منفتحة دائماً على الحوار مع كل الدول

من جهته، رأى وزير الخارجية الروسي، سيرغي لافروف، أن “الإجراءات التي اتخذتها موسكو في أوكرانيا تهدف إلى ضمان أمن الشعب الروسي”، قائلاً إن “روسيا مستعدة للحوار مع كل الدول”.

وقال لافروف، خلال لقائه نظيرَه الباكستاني، شاه محمود قريشي، إن “الرئيس الروسي، فلاديمير بوتين، أدلى ببيان مفصَّل هذا الصباح يتعلق بإجراءات الناتو، وبأنها لم تعد مقتصرة على أراضي الدول الأعضاء، بل على نطاق واسع”، مضيفاً أن “الناتو” يدّعي أنه “مسؤول عن أمن العالم”.

وأضاف أن “الطريقة التي يروّجونها لما يسمى الاستراتيجيات في منطقتي المحيطين الهندي والهادئ هي بالتأكيد دليل على أن لديهم شهية لكوكب الأرض بأكمله”، موضحاً “أننا أجرينا مناقشات متوترة ومفصلة مع زملائنا الأميركيين وأعضاء آخرين في حلف شمال الأطلسي. ونأمل أن تظل هناك فرصة في العودة إلى القانون الدولي والالتزامات الدولية”.

وتابع لافروف “بما أننا نتخذ الإجراءات التي أعلنها الرئيس لضمان أمن البلاد والشعب الروسي، سنكون بالتأكيد مستعدين دائماً لحوار سيعيدنا إلى العدالة، ومبادئ ميثاق الأمم المتحدة”.

الكرملين: مستقبل أوكرانيا هو خيار الشعب الأوكراني

بالتزامن، أعلن الكرملين، في بيانه، أن “مستقبل أوكرانيا هو خيار الشعب الأوكراني”، لافتاً إلى أنه “لا مجال للحديث عن غزو أوكرانيا”.

وناشد مجلس الدوما الروسي أبناء أوكرانيا ألا يلبّوا نداء التعبئة “حقناً للدماء”.

يشار إلى أنّ الرئيس الروسي، فلاديمير بوتين، أعلن صباح اليوم الخميس، بدء عملية عسكرية في دونباس، قائلاً إن “المواجهة بين روسيا والقوى القومية المتطرّفة في أوكرانيا لا مفر منها”.

وقال الرئيس الروسي إنّ “مجمل تطورات الأحداث وتحليل المعلومات يُظهر أن المواجهة بين روسيا والقوى المتطرفة في أوكرانيا لا مفر منها.. إنها مسألة وقت”، مشيراً إلى أنّ “روسيا لن تسمح لأوكرانيا بامتلاك أسلحة نووية”.

وأمس الأربعاء، طلبت جمهوريتا لوغانسك ودونيتسك من الرئيس الروسي فلاديمير بوتين المساعدة على صدّ عدوان نفذته القوات المسلحة الأوكرانية، لتجنّب وقوع خسائر في صفوف المدنيين، ومنع وقوع كارثة إنسانية في دونباس.

وقال المتحدث الصحافي باسم الرئاسة الروسية، دميتري بيسكوف، إنّ بوتين “تلقى رسائل من قادة الجمهوريتين بالنيابة عن شعبيهما، يعبّرون فيها مرة أخرى عن الامتنان لرئيس روسيا على الاعتراف بدولتيهم”.

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