The question is inevitable: what’s the point of this phone call? Very simple: just business.
The Beijing leadership is fully aware the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is the un-dissociable double of an American direct war against the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Until recently, and since 2019, Beijing was the top trade partner for Kiev (14.4% of imports, 15.3% of exports). China essentially exported machinery, equipment, cars and chemical products, importing food products, metals and also some machinery.
Very few in the West know that Ukraine joined BRI way back in 2014, and a BRI trade and investment center was operating in Kiev since 2018. BRI projects include a 2017 drive to build the fourth line of the Kiev metro system as well as 4G installed by Huawei. Everything is stalled since 2022.
Noble Agri, a subsidiary of COFCO (China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corporation), invested in a sunflower seed processing complex in Mariupol and the recently built Mykolaiv grain port terminal. The next step will necessarily feature cooperation between Donbass authorities and the Chinese when it comes to rebuilding their assets that may have been damaged during the war.
Beijing also tried to become heavily involved in the Ukraine defense sector and even buy Motor Sich; that was blocked by Kiev.
Watch that neon
So what we have in Ukraine, from the Chinese point of view, is a trade/investment cocktail of BRI, railways, military supplies, 4G and construction jobs. And then, the key vector: neon.
Roughly half of neon used in the production of semiconductors was supplied, until recently, by two Ukrainian companies; Ingas in Mariupol, and Cryoin, in Odessa. There’s no business going on since the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO). That directly affects the Chinese production of semiconductors. Bets can be made that the Hegemon is not exactly losing sleep over this predicament.
Ukraine does represent value for China as a BRI crossroads. The war is interrupting not only business but, in the bigger picture, one of the trade and connectivity corridors linking Western China to Eastern Europe. BRI conditions all key decisions in Beijing – as it is the overarching concept of Chinese foreign policy way into mid-century.
And that explains Xi’s phone call, debunking any NATOstan nonsense on China finally paying attention to the warmongering actor.
As relevant as BRI is the overarching bilateral relationship dictating Beijing’s geopolitics: the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership.
So let’s transition to the meeting of Defense Ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) earlier this week in Delhi.
The key meeting in India was between Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and his Chinese colleague Li Shangfu. Li was recently in Moscow, and was received by Putin in person for a special conversation. This time he invited Shoigu to visit Beijing, and that was promptly accepted.
Needless to add that every single player in the SCO and beyond, including nations that are for the moment just observers or dialogue partners as well as others itching to become full members, such as Saudi Arabia, paid very close attention to the Shoigu-Shangfu camaraderie.
When it comes to the profoundly strategic Central Asian “stans”, that represents the six feet under treatment for the Hegemon wishful thinking of using them in a Divide and Rule scheme pitting Russia against China.
Shoigu-Shangfu also sent a subtle message to SCO members India and Pakistan – stop bickering and in the case of Delhi, hedging your bets – and to full member (in 2023) Iran and near future member Saudi Arabia: here’s where’s it at, this the table that matters.
All of the above also points to the increasing interconnection between BRI and SCO, both under Russia-China leadership.
BRICS is essentially an economic club – complete with its own bank, the NDB – and focused on trade. It’s mostly about soft power. The SCO is focused on security. It’s about hard power. Together, these are the two key organizations that will be paving the multilateral way.
As for what will be left of Ukraine, it is already being bought by Western mega-players such as BlackRock, Cargill and Monsanto. Yet Beijing certainly does not count on being left high and dry. Stranger things have happened than a future rump Ukraine positioned as a functioning trade and connectivity BRI partner.
Hegemon hacks are spinning that the North Atlantic has relocated to South China. Goodnight, and good luck.
The collective cognitive dissonance displayed by the pack of hyenas with polished faces driving U.S. foreign policy should never be underestimated.
And yet those Straussian neo-con psychos have been able to pull off a tactical success. Europe is a ship of fools heading for Scylla and Charybdis – with quislings such as France’s Le Petit Roi and Germany’s Liver Sausage Chancellor cooperating in the debacle, complete with the galleries drowning in a maelstrom of hysterical moralism.
It’s those driving the Hegemon that are destroying Europe. Not Russia.
But then there’s The Big Picture of The New Great Game 2.0.
Two Russian analysts, by different means, have come up with an astonishing, quite complementary, and quite realistic road map.
General Andrei Gurulyov, retired, is now a member of the Duma. He considers that the NATO vs. Russia war on Ukrainian soil will end only by 2030 – when Ukraine would basically have ceased to exist.
His deadline is 2027-2030 – something that no one so far has dared to predict. And “ceasing to exist”, per Gurulyov, means actually disappearing from any map. Implied is the logical conclusion of the Special Military Operation – reiterated over and over again by the Kremlin and the Security Council: the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine; neutral status; no NATO membership; and “indivisibility of security”, equally, for Europe and the post-Soviet space.
So until we have these facts on the ground, Gurulyov is essentially saying that the Kremlin and the Russian General Staff will make no concessions. No Beltway-imposed “frozen conflict” or fake ceasefire, which everyone knows will not be respected, just like the Minsk agreements were never respected.
And yet Moscow, we got a problem. As much as the Kremlin may always insist this is not a war against the Slavic Ukrainian brothers and cousins – which translates into no American-style Shock’n Awe pulverizing everything in sight – Gurulyov’s verdict implies the destruction of the current, cancerous, corrupt Ukrainian state is a must.
A comprehensive sitrep of the crucial crossroads, as it stands, correctly argues that if Russia was in Afghanistan for 10 years, and in Chechnya, all periods combined, for another 10 years, the current SMO – otherwise described by some very powerful people in Moscow as an “almost war” – and on top of it against the full force of NATO, could well last another 7 years.
The sitrep also correctly argues that for Russia the kinetic aspect of the “almost war” is not even the most relevant.
In what for all practical purposes is a war to the death against Western neoliberalism, what really matters is a Russian Great Awakening – already in effect: “Russia’s goal is to emerge in 2027-2030 not as a mere ‘victor’ standing over the ruins of some already-forgotten country, but as a state that has re-connected with its historic arc, has found itself, re-established its principles, its courage in defending its vision of the world.”
Yes, this is a civilizational war, as Alexander Dugin has masterfully argued. And this is about a civilizational rebirth. And yet, for the Straussian neo-con psychos, that’s just another racket towards plunging Russia into chaos, installing a puppet and stealing its natural resources.
Fire in the hole
The analysis by Andrei Bezrukov neatly complements Gurulyov’s (here, in Russian). Bezrukov is a former colonel in the SVR (Russian foreign intel) and now a Professor of the Chair of Applied Analysis of International Problems at MGIMO and the chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy think tank.
Bezrukov knows that the Empire will not take the incoming, massive NATO humiliation in Ukraine lying down. And even before the possible 2027-2030 timeline proposed by Gurulyov, he argues, it is bound to set fire to southern Eurasia – from Turkey to China.
President Xi Jinping, in his memorable visit to the Kremlin last month, told President Putin the world is now undergoing changes “not seen in 100 years”.
Bezrukov, appropriately, reminds us of the state of things then: “In the years from 1914 to 1945, the world was in the same intermediate state that it is in now. Those thirty years changed the world completely: from empires and horses to the emergence of two nuclear powers, the UN, and transatlantic flight. We are entering a similar period, which this time will last about twenty years.”
Europe, predictably, will “whither away”, as “it is no longer the absolute center of the universe.” Amidst this redistribution of power, Bezrukov goes back to one of the key points of a seminal analysis developed in the recent past by Andre Gunder Frank: “200-250 years ago, 70 percent of manufacturing was in China and India. We are going back to about there, which will also correspond to population size.”
So it’s no wonder that the fastest-developing region – which Bezrukov characterizes as “southern Eurasia” – may become a “risk zone”, potentially converted by the Hegemon into a massive power keg.
He outlines how southern Eurasia is peppered by conflicting borders – as in Kashmir, Armenia-Azerbaijan, Tajikistan-Kyrgyzstan. The Hegemon is bound to invest in a flare-up of military conflicts over disputed borders as well as separatist tendencies (for instance in Balochistan). CIA black ops galore.
Still Russia will be able to get by, according to Bezrukov: “Russia has very big advantages, because we are the biggest producer of food and supplier of energy. And without cheap energy there will be no progress and digitalization. Also, we are the link between East and West, without which the continent cannot live, because the continent has to trade. And if the South burns, the main routes will not be through the oceans in the South, but in the North, mainly overland.”
The biggest challenge for Russia will be to keep internal stability: “All states will divide into two groups at this historic turning point: those that can maintain internal stability and move reasonably, bloodlessly into the next technological cycle – and then those that are unable to do so, that slip off the path, that bloom a bloody internal showdown like we had a hundred years ago. The latter will be set back ten to twenty years, will subsequently lick their wounds and try to catch up with everyone else. So our job is to maintain internal stability.”
And that’s where the Great Awakening hinted at by Gurulyov, or Russia reconnecting with its true civilizational ethos, as Dugin would argue, will play its unifying role.
There’s still a long way to go – and a war against NATO to win. Meanwhile, in other news, Hegemon hacks are spinning that the North Atlantic has relocated to South China. Goodnight, and good luck.
إنّ التاريخ يأخذ وقته في حياكة الأحداث إلى أن تكتمل شروط التحوّل الكبير، والذي سوف يشهده ويعاصره ويعيشه العالم لحقب، وربما لقرون.
في تناول الأحداث الصغيرة منها والكبيرة، وتحليل أسبابها واستشراف نتائجها، يُثبت الإنسان في كلّ مرّة أنّه “خُلِقَ عجولا”، وأنّه رغم هذا التاريخ الطويل نسبياً للبشرية، فهو ما زال قليل الصبر والحكمة في تفكّره واستقراءاته. وإذا بدأنا هنا من الحرب الإرهابية، التي شنّتها الدول الاستعمارية الغربية وأتباعها، على سوريا عام 2011، وقام أحدنا بالعمل المضني في استعراض تيّار الإعلام الغربي والعربي بخصوص هذه الحرب، نجد أنّ التحليلات والاستقراءات التي نُشرت بصددها، والتي ساهمت في تضليل الكثيرين تفتقر إلى الاستفادة من التاريخ، كما تفتقر إلى نعمتي الحكمة والصبر. وإذا تناولنا الحرب على اليمن بعُجالة، نجد أنّ معظم ما قيل ونُشر عن الحرب على اليمن لا علاقة له بتاريخ اليمن، ولا بصفات الشعب اليمني الأصيلة والمثبتة، ولا بالحقائق الوجودية اليوم التي يعيشها هذا الشعب، بل تنطلق بمعظمها من استهداف عزيمة وثقة هذا الشعب بنفسه، ومحاولة إلحاق الهزيمة النفسية به من خلال التهويل الإعلامي الذي هو في الحقيقة أداة من أدوات هذه الحرب على هذا الشعب الشجاع والصابر والمؤمن بالله والوطن.
بعد سنة فقط من بدء هذه العملية في أوكرانيا، يجتمع الرئيسان الروسي والصيني ليناقشا مجالات التعاون
ولكنّ المثال الأكبر، والذي أودّ أن أتوقّف عنده وأقلّبه من كلّ زواياه وجوانبه، وذلك للأثر الشديد له على مصيرنا جميعاً، ومصير البشرية للعقود القادمة، هو العملية العسكرية الروسية في أوكرانيا، والتي رغم انطلاقها من نقطة نزاع بين روسيا والغرب إلا أنّ ارتداداتها ونتائجها ذات أثر بالغ على مستقبل وشؤون الدول، وعلى مستقبل العلاقات الدولية، وعلى مستقبل الإنسان في كلّ مكان، ولن تستكمل هذه الارتدادات دورتها ونتائجها إلا بعد عقود من الآن، وسيعيش أبناؤنا وربما أحفادنا التغيرات التي أطلقتها شرارة هذه الحرب فقط لإطلاق مسار تشعّب بعد ذلك وتطوّر في الميادين المختلفة وتطوّرت أهدافه وأصبح مثل كرة الثلج لا يمكن إيقافه بمكان ولا تحديده بموضوع أو مجال معين.
بعد سنة فقط من بدء هذه العملية في أوكرانيا، يجتمع الرئيسان الروسي والصيني ليناقشا مجالات التعاون بين بلديهما في الطاقة والصناعة وتبادل السلع بالعملات المحلية، والاستثمار في مجالات لم تخطر لهم على بال قبل عام فقط، دون أن يركّزوا على العملية العسكرية الروسية في أوكرانيا، والتي ربما تشكّل اليوم هامشاً صغيراً في إطار هذه العلاقات. وبعد عام من هذه العملية توقّع الهند مع الاتحاد الروسي اتفاقاً هاماً لتصدير الطاقة من روسيا إلى الهند بأسعار تفضيلية، (الأمر ذاته تمّ توقيعه مع الصين وبالعملة المحلية؛ أي استبعاد متزايد للدولار)، الأمر الذي سينجم عنه نهوضاً ملحوظاً في السنوات القادمة للصناعة الهندية والصينية، وتعزيز قدرتهما على منافسة المنتجات الأوروبية والأميركية.
وبعد عام من هذه العملية قامت الصين وروسيا وإيران بإجراء مناورات عسكرية بحرية مشتركة لضمان سلامة وأمن الممرات المائية، الأمر الذي لم يكن يخطر لأحد على بال قبل بدء العملية العسكرية الروسية في أوكرانيا. وبعد عام من هذه العملية قامت الصين برعاية أهمّ اتفاق في هذا القرن، وبالتأكيد أهمّ اتفاق لمصير منطقة غرب أسيا والوطن العربي، وهو الاتفاق الإيراني السعودي، والذي كان مجرّد الحديث عنه قبل عامين يُعتبر ضرباً من الخيال. وبعد عام من العملية أصبحت إيران عضواً في منظمة شنغهاي، وقد قدّمت السعودية مؤخراً طلباً للانتساب إلى منظمة شنغهاي، مما يجعل هذه المنظمة أهمّ منظمة لمنتجي الطاقة: روسيا وإيران والسعودية، وسوف يكون لها رأي هام في أسعار وتوريد الطاقة عالمياً، وتتعامل دول هذه المنظمة بالعملات المحلية، مرسلةً دولار الهيمنة الأميركية إلى حتفه.
وبعد عام من هذه العملية بقي الاقتصاد الروسي منتعشاً، بل ازداد تصديره للنفط والغاز لأنه سارع إلى إيجاد أسواق بديلة عن السوق الأوروبية، وازداد الدخل الروسي من تصدير النفط والغاز عمّا كان عليه قبل العملية العسكرية في أوكرانيا، رغم كلّ العقوبات التي يُمنّي الغرب نفسه بالحديث عنها، وتضخيم آثارها المأمولة بالنسبة لهم، بينما هي فاقدة الأثر والأهمية، بل أكثر من ذلك، لقد دفعت هذه العقوبات الظالمة على الشعوب والدول تجمع دول آسيان لاتخاذ قرارات جريئة بتبادل السلع بعملاتهم المحلية كي لا يتمكّن الغرب من التلاعب بأقدارهم حين يحلو له وللأسباب التي يرتأيها. أي إنّ هذه العقوبات قد ارتدّت على الذين أصدروها بأنها أفقدت ثقة العالم بهم وبعملتهم وبنظام المدفوعات الـ “سويفت”، ودفعت الدول للتفكير ببدائل متحرّرة تماماً من التأثير الغربي. الأمر الذي ينعكس حكماً على مكانة الدولار الأسطورية، كعملة دولية، والتي كانت سبباً أساسياً لهيمنة الغرب الاستعماري على العالم وسطوته على موارده ونجاح عقوباته.
هذا في الشرق، أمّا في الغرب، فقد أرغمت الولايات المتحدة الدول الأوروبية على بتر علاقاتها مع روسيا، رغم أنّ هذه العلاقة كانت تصبّ في صالح الدول الأوروبية من خلال توفير الطاقة الرخيصة لاستخداماتها ولزراعتها ولصناعاتها. وماذا كان البديل؟ كان البديل هو أن تبيع الولايات المتحدة هذه الطاقة للدول الأوروبية بأربعة أضعاف السعر الذي كانت تكلفه هذه الطاقة من روسيا، الأمر الذي سينعكس إفقاراً لهذه الدول الأوروبية، وتخلّفاً في صناعتها وزراعتها، وعجزاً عن منافسة المنتجات الصينية والهندية والإندونيسية والبرازيلية في المستقبل القريب، الأمر الذي سيكفل خروج أوروبا من لائحة الدول المتقدّمة صناعياً، والمنافسة اقتصادياً لدول الشرق التي تمارس الحكمة والصبر في علاقاتها أولاً، وببناء عالم جديد من الإنتاج والعلاقات يزيح بحكم وجوده وقدرته على المنافسة العالم الغربي الذي تصرّف بصلف واستكبار، فوقع في شرّ ما قدّمت يداه.
هذا على الصعيد الاقتصادي والإنتاجي والمالي، أمّا على الصعيد الأخلاقي والإنساني، فقد سقط الغرب سقوطاً مدوّياً في براثن الليبرالية الحديثة سيئة الصيت، وأخذت الإنسانية تعمل على حماية نفسها من تأثيرات الغرب القميئة على مستقبل أجيالها. ولكلّ هذا أقول لمن ما زال يؤمن بقوّة الغرب وحكمته، وأنه لا يُقهر وأنه الأنموذج والمثل، إنّ التاريخ يتشكّل ليبرهن عكس ذلك تماماً، ولكنّ التاريخ ليس عجولاً، بل يأخذ وقته في حياكة الأحداث إلى أن تكتمل شروط التحوّل الكبير، والذي سوف يشهده ويعاصره ويعيشه العالم لحقب، وربما لقرون بعد الإيذان بهذا التحوّل من خلال شرارة أطلقت في مكان ما ثمّ أخذت الأحداث مسارها ومجالاتها وتوقيتها بغضّ النظر عن مصير تلك الشرارة، وبشكل أكبر وأهمّ وأدهى مما يتخيّله كثيرون.
إن الآراء المذكورة في هذه المقالة لا تعبّر بالضرورة عن رأي الميادين وإنما تعبّر عن رأي صاحبها حصراً
Scott Ritter is back after a year as we build a chronology of the events of the Russia-Ukraine War so far.
What were Russia’s goals? Did they succeed or fail? What were NATO’s goals?
Why did Russia’s initial offensive not bring a negotiation? Why did sanctions on Russia fail?
How can we determine who is winning or losing when war propaganda is this thick? We even have a little debate about the issues around which an antiwar movement could try to reconstitute itself. Negotiations to end this war?
Scott thinks no. Arms control? Scott thinks maybe.
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends an expanded board meeting of the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office in Moscow on March 15, 2023. (Photo by AFP)
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin on war crime accusations, while the Kremlin rejected the warrant and said the court has no jurisdiction and the decision is “null and void”.
The Hague-based court said in a statement on Friday the arrest warrant was issued over Putin’s alleged involvement in the unlawful deportation and transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia.
“There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Putin bears individual criminal responsibility” for the alleged child abductions “for having committed the acts directly, jointly with others and/or through others [and] for his failure to exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts,” the statement added.
The international court has also issued a warrant for Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, the commissioner for children’s rights in the office of the Russian president, on the same charges.
The ICC has no powers to enforce its own warrants as ICC member states can make the arrests and hand over the individuals to the Huge.
Russia has repeatedly rejected accusations of committing war crimes by its forces during the year-long war in Ukraine.
Reacting to the development, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Moscow did not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC. Describing the questions raised by the court as “outrageous and unacceptable”, he stressed that any decisions of the court were “null and void” with respect to Russia.
Furthermore, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the warrant is meaningless.
“The decisions of the International Criminal Court have no meaning for our country, including from a legal point of view,” she said on her Telegram channel, adding, “Russia is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and bears no obligations under it.”
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin lauded ICC’s decision as “a historic decision for Ukraine and the entire international law system” and said that “it is only the beginning of the long road to restore justice.”
The ICC decision was also welcomed by European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who described it as “an important decision of international justice and for the people of Ukraine.”
The move was just the start of “holding Russia accountable” for its alleged crimes in Ukraine, he said.
Russia launched the military operation in Ukraine in late February 2022, following Kiev administration’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements and Moscow’s recognition of the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
At the time, Russian President Vladimir Putin said one of the goals of what he called a “special military operation” was to “de-Nazify” Ukraine.
Over the past year, Western countries, led by the United States, have shipped billions of dollars worth of weaponry to Kiev while slapping unprecedented economic sanctions on Moscow to force it into submission.
Amid the Western support for Ukraine, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan opened an investigation into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity and genocide in Ukraine a year ago. He made four trips to Ukraine, noting that he was looking at alleged crimes against children and the targeting of civilian infrastructure.
In a statement on Friday, Khan claimed that hundreds of Ukrainian children have been taken from orphanages and children’s homes to Russia. “Many of these children, we allege, have since been given up for adoption in the Russian Federation,” he added.
According to Khan, Moscow has changed laws to facilitate the adoption of children by Russian families while Ukrainian children at the time of deportation are protected individuals under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Today’s arrest warrants were “a first concrete step”, he said, noting that other investigations into the Ukraine war are still ongoing.
Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:
1.Developing a decision-making system is part of the war
The Russian operation in Ukraine was an additional evidence that major countries possess highly specialized institutions and agencies with substantial resources in security, intelligence, politics and research, could engage in uncalculated adventures. The most recent examples are associated with the United States in its wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq. These mistakes occur as a result of an inherent flaw in the decision-making process, resulting from pressure from the domestic sphere (severe divisions and major crises), or due to flaws in decision-making rules or relationships between the decision-makers. This flaw results in distortion in conclusions, assessments, and expectations, which push these countries towards choices based on incorrect assumptions. In addition, major powers sometimes suffer from excessive confidence or excessive fears linked to their history, glory, image, pride, belief in their material capabilities, broad definitions of their interests, and permanent readiness to seize the imagined opportunities.
The US policy in Ukraine was based on the concept of aggressive realism to achieve dominance and use Ukraine to contain Russia in its vital and historical sphere. This is seen by Russia as an ideal recipe for eliminating the Russian nation and its message. Therefore, Moscow had no choice but to stop the American project in Ukraine, which became active in 2014. However, the Russian strategy to achieve this was built on wrong assumptions, including underestimating the American incentive to stop the deterioration of the Western alliance and its institutional capabilities in defense and diplomacy, the lack of accurate knowledge of the development of the Ukrainian military force and the firmness of Ukrainian nationalism, which was reshaped on the basis of hatred for Russia through a Western-sponsored comprehensive and systematic process. And thus, Putin estimated that he would launch a special limited operation against a weak and isolated system, but he found himself in a wide-scale war against NATO as a whole.
The lesson learned here is that in a highly complex and intertwined world, those who want to engage in complex conflicts and competitions must improve their decision-making system to ensure sufficient information knowledge and the ability to process it systematically and comprehensively, to learn rapidly, and to recognize the ideological limits. Only then, taking the risk at the appropriate time is ok. Problems that affect the domestic policy or the structure of the political player may be reflected in the efficiency of managing conflicts and competitions, making it easier for opponents to practice deception and enticement. Maintaining, developing, and improving your system requires costly or sometimes risky measures [such as stimulating competitions within the political system], but it is part of the confrontation strategy.
2.The US is waking up, but at noon!
In the first year of the war, American performance was significantly efficient, whether in marshalling the West or strengthening the Ukrainian confrontational capabilities, restricting Russia’s options or managing the international arena. The United States, though in a historical decline, still has differential features in several fields. However, the focal point here is that Washington is making every possible effort to try to launch a historical awakening in which all its power drivers are mobilized, due to the consensus of the US elite that the country’s position in the global system is facing an exceptional test that feeds on the high levels of domestic turmoil. Washington experienced this awakening at the end of the 1960s when it realized the extent of the Soviet technological progress and the catastrophic possibilities it could have on the struggle of the two nuclear powers. Therefore, Washington had no choice but to avoid losing the Ukrainian war, as it was at the beginning of a long-term fierce competition with China in an updated version of the Cold War.
The governing establishment in Washington is struggling to achieve a comprehensive US amplification in foreign policy in the next few years, which includes accelerating the building of deterrent military capabilities, enhancing international partnerships and integration, attempting to infiltrate the Southern countries, mobilizing the elements of internal power, and restoring and maintaining the institutions of the current international system. This is a difficult task, as the escalating internal divisions in the US, if not controlled by the US establishment, are most evident in the turmoil of the US foreign policy, and the international arena is witnessing structural shifts that are difficult to contain.
From what can be gained from this, is a precise understanding of the current American situation in its historical moment. We should not exaggerate the rapidness of its decline or estimate that it is losing the initiative, nor should we be driven by its apparent momentum to ignore its structural problems. In our region, Washington wants to avoid major wars, but with intense efforts to harness the Axis of Resistance and the swinging countries within its grand strategy to confront the Chinese challenge.
However, it wants the factor of time to be in its favor by building a system of allies and undermining the resistance system through: (1) military deterrence so that it can practice (2) suffocation and (3) infiltration while reducing the possibility of a wide-scale escalation as a result. Based on this estimation, the forces of resistance continue to build unparalleled and precise military capabilities enhanced by technology, while raising the combat spirit, cultural mobilization, and developing margins of maneuver and field risk-taking. However, the US remains in urgent need of a major awakening in the areas of compound/gray zone warfare, i.e., information campaigns, soft power, economy, cyber, and political warfare. This awakening requires flexibility and boldness in looking at the structure of the Axis of Resistance system in terms of institutional efficiency, rules of operating, inter-agency cooperation, decision-making mechanisms, production of elites and ideas, maintenance of popular legitimacy, networking of interests, and strengthening common identity elements…etc.
3.The rebellion of the southern countries: a divided world
While Washington succeeded in mobilizing the Western camp, it was surprised that the so-called Global South countries, including the emerging powers, defied following the US policy and kept their relationships with Russia, although they expressed an initial rejection of the war in Ukraine. Countries such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, India, Iran, Pakistan, and the UAE continued to cooperate with Russia in vital issues of mutual interests (armament, energy, and evading sanctions). Similarly, global opinion polls showed high support for both China and Russia in the vast majority of the Global South countries. The Ukrainian war revealed the concentration of raw materials, energy, food sources, and precious metals in the southern countries and the dependence of a large part of the global supply chains on them. This was one of the motives of the recent American rush towards Africa and the reaffirmation of its security commitment in the Gulf region.
Cambridge University recently addressed a large number of surveys [covering 137 countries] to conclude that the world is sharply divided between a majority that strongly supports Russia and China in “non-liberal” countries [6.3 billion people] and a majority that strongly opposes them in liberal democracies [1.2 billion people]. The effects of this emerged during the Munich Security Conference [February 2023], where Western powers showed concern over the positions of the Global South countries, which seem to be frustrated with the international system that ignores their interests and is characterized by double standards and the pursuit of hegemony. Russia and China take advantage of this position to network economically and spread their political narratives. Therefore, recommendations were issued to listen to the concerns of the Global South countries and enhance cooperation with them in face of the economic, developmental, and health challenges, as well as reforming international institutions to grant some of these countries consolation prizes.
The increasing numbers of “swinging” countries that are seeking economic benefits, reclaiming their vital areas, or stabilizing their political systems in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, generate opportunities for the anti-US system forces [especially those who possess natural resources or important geostrategic positions or large markets] for regional cooperation, joint projects, and evading the sanctions systems [through local currency exchange, bartering, or selling at discounted prices]. The continuation of this trend of detaching interests between the Western system and the rising and developing world countries enables the emergence of alternative sharing systems [economic, financial, developmental, and political] that will accelerate, if successful, the transformation of the international environment to create an alternative to the post-Cold War system.
4.Washington is unable to divide its rivals.
Perhaps one of the incentives behind the Russian decision to assume that the issue would not require more than a special military operation, is that Moscow believed that Washington would find a major interest in the limited objection to the Russian operation to keep Moscow away from China. In any case, it appears that Washington preferred to strike rather than satisfy Moscow based on the principle of starting with the weakest opponent when facing two adversaries. Similarly, in the case of Iran, the American approach reduced the space for negotiation and settlement, pushing Tehran towards deeper alignment with the East. What is driving Washington in this direction is that the incentives for the opposing forces to confront it are high and all of them sense that they are facing a historical turning point that they will not give up on and will not be tempted by “the poisoned carrots.”
This is a debatable point in the US, where some criticize the Biden administration’s approach for ignoring that, apart from the common position of hostility towards Washington, the interests of the three powers are not homogeneous and that it is better to neutralize the weakest and isolate China. While the approach of the US administration believes that none of the three powers should be tolerated so that Washington can regain its credibility with its allies in Europe, the Pacific, and the Middle East and be able to enhance a binary narrative of the world, dictatorship/democracy or pro-/against- international system, as a necessary condition for rebuilding its world alliances that began to disintegrate after the war on Iraq in 2003. In this context, Washington is making efforts to isolate opponents from supply chains, especially in sensitive sectors, and is accelerating the energy isolation of Europe from Russia, to erase any form of Western dependence on the rising powers in all possible fields.
However, Washington is working hard to weaken the ties between these countries. It is exerting concentrated efforts and pressures [deterrence through intimidation, warning, and information campaigns] to prevent China from providing Russia with a clear aid. Then, it can use this to weaken China’s image as a rising international power that can be relied upon. From this viewpoint, the amount of Western anger over Russia’s use of Iranian drones, apart from its tactical impact, is related to concerns about the success of tests of networking and partnership between these forces.
Likewise, pressure is mounting to keep Chinese companies away from the markets of swinging countries through smear campaigns [unjust Chinese debts], threatening with sanctions, questioning the feasibility, and tempting with alternatives. Strengthening cooperation between countries and forces hostile to Washington should be built on an understanding of the limits of common interests, developing what can be mutual benefits, enhancing forms of communication and dialogue through bilateral and multilateral frameworks and institutions, especially regarding political, economic, financial, and technological alternatives, making the necessary compromises, and accumulating success stories.
The Western alliance’s ferocity in imposing sanctions on Russia may have pushed other forces to be cautious, but it has also revealed to them that rising from within the structure of the existing international system is doomed to fail.
5.The militarization of the Western alliance
The Ukrainian war represented a golden opportunity for Washington to push its allies around the world towards rebuilding their military capabilities and allowing it to redeploy and expand within their own countries as it sees fit. A comprehensive militarization process was launched near China for the Pacific region, including Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan. In Europe, Germany returned to arming itself, and many European countries increased the scopes allocated to military spending from their national budgets, while Washington strengthened its military presence in Eastern Europe. In the Middle East, Washington launched a series of initiatives for military and security networking and integration, especially in the naval and missile fields, coinciding with the inclusion of the ‘Israeli’ entity in the US Central Command. Whatever the outcome of the war, Washington will be keen to rebuild Ukraine – or what is left of it – especially militarily, security, and economically, to become a sustainable vital challenge for Russia, making it just a regional power unable to initiate internationally. There are also calls for the establishment of a new Warsaw Pact that includes Poland and the Baltic States in addition to Ukraine.
This path aims to enhance the US deterrence against international competitors to prevent them from developing their interests and influence and restrict their ability to respond to the US attempts of tightening and infiltration. It also aims to militarily align with allies and reestablish stability in the swinging countries. The war has revealed a significant decline in the West’s capabilities in the military industry, which is finally evident in the decrease in ammunition supplies to the Ukrainian forces. This has prompted Washington and Moscow to redirect a portion of civilian manufacturing efforts towards the military field. This direction will impose severe pressures on the economies of the countries of the Western alliance that may trigger internal divisions, as well as revive historical fears among these countries, especially with the prevailing waves of nationalism.
Although the war emphasized the significant advantages of technology in the military field, especially in intelligence gathering and analysis, precision ammunition [missiles, shells, and drones], efficient networking of operational arms and their integration, and strategic management, it also reaffirmed the vital importance of the efficiency and capabilities of fighters [especially field officers] and their skills in innovating field solutions and independent thinking when necessary. It also highlighted the need to deal with the enemy’s technological superiority [through intense dispersion, constant movement, expert concealment, and effective use of available asymmetrical technology at a reasonable cost] and fight within highly flexible, decentralized formations, in addition to high morale and spiritual incentives.
6.Nationalism is the last resort
The Ukrainian war confirmed the high advantages of mobilizing and investing the nationalist sentiment in geopolitical competitions. The new Ukrainian nationalism, which has emerged since 2014 under Western sponsorship, has enabled the rapid and cohesive construction of a socially solid military force, while at the same time the Russian nationalist sentiment is being fueled by the idea that there is a civilizational war that aims to uproot the Russian nation, which is still popularly fortified by President Putin despite his military forces’ modest performance. In the end, nationalism is portrayed as meaning the national sovereignty, popular will, and cultural and religious particularities, in contrast to a renewed Western colonial project that seeks to infiltrate countries, seize their decisions, and destroy their cultural and civilizational elements, in order to subjugate them and seize their wealth. By the way, many Western newspapers in recent years have criticized the rising Nazi trend in Ukraine against people of Russian origin and Russian symbols, while the official Western discourse insists that the war in Ukraine is against a democratic government.
The global neoliberal trend diagnoses the nationalist wave as a serious threat, claiming that it is being exploited as a crane for anti-democratic, anti-individual freedom, closed-market, and irrational ideas. Therefore, there have been liberal discussions in recent years on how to withdraw the issue of nationalism from the hands of non-liberal entities and reconcile liberalism and nationalism. What worries the US establishment is that the triumph of nationalist models around the world enhances the power of the new right-wing trend in the United States, while the current US administration tries to convince Americans that the globalized US foreign policy is necessary for the American middle class. Increasing numbers of political actors adopt investment in nationalist symbols as a solid basis for building a strong and cohesive identity that makes them more capable of mobilizing and controlling society [or part of it] in the context of a specific political project. As for forces outside the Western camp specifically, they find in nationalism a fortress that achieves a kind of asymmetrical balance against the US hostility, with a tendency to integrate nationalism with another source of legitimacy of a religious or ideological nature.
This nationalist practice has been expanding in our region in recent years, either due to the US pressure to create rooted contradictions between the peoples of the region, or due to the need for ruling regimes to seek refuge behind a solid identity to overcome internal and external challenges. Often, there is a debate about the relationship between the national, nationalistic, and religious identity, and attempts are made to reconcile these identities or some of them, as in Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The violent pressures of the globalized liberal cultural symbols on our societies create a need to combine a greater number of common symbols that can reduce the possibilities of cultural infiltration. Here, there are calls to revive Asian symbols in the identities of peoples in the West Asia region as an additional defense line and a bridge towards deeper relations with the emerging Asian powers.
Conclusion
The biggest dilemma in Ukraine is that the defeat will be catastrophic whether for Washington or Moscow, and existential for Ukraine. This generates the inclination that the Ukrainian war will not end with a decisive victory for either side, but will instead transform into a low-intensity conflict in the near future, with Russian forces controlling most of the territories in the four provinces or just in Donbass [i.e. without Kherson and Zaporozhye]. Then the parties will regroup, draw lessons, accumulate strength, and wait for a favorable political moment to resume fighting on a larger scale.
It is said that strategies are built on optimistic aspirations for the future and harsh tragedies of the past. Undoubtedly, the Ukrainian war, whose results are still open to all possibilities, will have a significant impact on decision-making processes, the understanding of modern warfare, the building of military power, and the trajectory of great power conflict during the current century. Without a decisive victory, each side can present their own narrative of victory in Moscow, Kiev, and Washington, while the victory for the others lies in improving their chances of winning when their turn comes.
عندما يحتفل الغرب بمرور سنة على حرب أوكرانيا تحت عنوان أن أوكرانيا صمدت وأن روسيا تعاني العزلة، وأن السنة الثانية للحرب هي سنة التراجعات الروسية العسكرية والسياسية والاقتصادية، فهل علينا أن نصدّق؟
عندما بدأت روسيا ما وصفته العملية العسكرية الخاصة، وضعت حربها بين سقفين، الأول أن يقابل الأوروبيون الموقف الروسيّ بعقلانية، فلا ينضمّون إلى منطق العقوبات العدائية التي تنادي بها أميركا وتستدرجهم إلى ساحتها لتجعلهم رهائن للسياسات الأميركية في مجال الطاقة، وبالتالي تحولهم الى دول هشة ضعيفة عاجزة عن الاستقلال. وفي هذه الحالة تكتفي روسيا بالسقف الأوكراني للحرب، أي ترتيب مريح لذوي الأصول الروسية في أوكرانيا الجديدة، ضمن صيغة اتحادية لعدة دول مستقلة، يجمعها الحياد. وسقف آخر يرتبط باستجابة أوروبا لنداء العداء لروسيا الذي تقوده واشنطن. وفي هذه الحالة تتحوّل الحرب الى سقف عنوانه إعادة صياغة العلاقات الدولية على المسرح الأوروبيّ بصورة خاصة.
في الحالة الأولى كانت حلقة الهيمنة الأميركية ستضعف في أوروبا وتتحوّل أوروبا الى شريك أمني اقتصادي لروسيا في بناء نظام عالمي متعدّد الأقطاب تحفظ فيه أوروبا مقعدها المستقل، أما في الحالة الثانية فتسقط العناوين الأوكرانية المباشرة للحرب وتحلّ مكانها العناوين الدولية، وتتحول أوكرانيا الى ساحة منازلة مع حلف الناتو، كما هو الحال، وفي حرب استنزاف تتقن روسيا أصولها تزيد أهمية القدرة على تلبية الميدان بالقدرات البشرية والعتاد والسلاح والذخائر على أهمية الجغرافيا، وعندما سلكت الأمور هذا الاتجاه أظهرت روسيا براعة فائقة في تحمّل التخلي المؤقت عن الجغرافيا لتحقيق أهداف حرب الاستنزاف، وأوصلت الناتو إلى استنزاف مخزونات ذخائره، وأوكرانيا إلى استنزاف مقدراتها البشرية، واحتوت بنجاح العقوبات الغربية المالية ونجحت بحماية الروبل من الضغوط المفترضة بذكاء رغم مصادرة مئات مليارات الدولارات من أصولها.
الآن تدخل الحرب مرحلة جديدة لا ينفع فيها التغني الغربي بتصويت الأمم المتحدة على مبدأ الانسحاب الروسي من أوكرانيا، وهو مبدأ يبدو طبيعياً أن تؤيده غالبية دولية، هي ليست متوافرة للعقوبات المفروضة على روسيا وهي الأهم، حيث يتمرد أقرب حلفاء أميركا عليها في الاستجابة لنداء العقوبات، كحال تركيا التي تمسك بمداخل البحر الأسود، والسعودية التي تمسك بعصب سوق الطاقة. والواضح أن المرحلة الجديدة التي يدخلها العالم ليست مرحلة عزلة روسيا، بل مرحلة فقدان اميركا لسطوة قبضتها على أقرب الحلفاء.
في الميدان سيكشف الربيع ومن بعده الصيف حجم التحولات التي تتراكم لصالح روسيا في الجغرافيا، ومحدودية القدرة الغربية على مجاراة الروس في تأمين المزيد من السلاح الفعال وسلاسل توريد الذخائر، ويبدأ الاقتصاد الروسي بدورته الجديدة التي أسست لها إجراءات احتواء العقوبات، والتي يتوقع الخبراء أن تتيح نمواً في ظل الحرب يتجاوز الـ 5% سنوياً.
In his Federal Assembly address, President Putin emphasized that Russia is not only an independent nation-state but also a distinct civilization with its own identity, which is in conflict and actively opposes the values of ‘western civilization.’
The address, significantly, marked the first anniversary of Russia’s official recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, only a few hours before 22 February, 2022. In myriad ways, what happened a year ago also marked the birth of the real, 21st century multipolar world
Then two days later, Moscow launched the Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine to defend said republics.
Cool, calm, collected, without a hint of aggression, Putin’s speech painted Russia as an ancient, independent, and quite distinct civilization – sometimes following a path in concert with other civilizations, sometimes in divergence.
Ukraine, part of Russian civilization, now happens to be occupied by western civilization, which Putin said “became hostile to us,” like in a few instances in the past. So the acute phase of what is essentially a war by proxy of the west against Russia takes place over the body of Russian civilization.
That explains Putin’s clarification that “Russia is an open country, but an independent civilization – we do not consider ourselves superior but we inherited our civilization from our ancestors and we must pass it on.”
A war dilacerating the body of Russian civilization is a serious existential business. Putin also made clear that “Ukraine is being used as a tool and testing ground by the west against Russia.” Thus the inevitable follow-up: “The more long-range weapons are sent to Ukraine, the longer we have to push the threat away from our borders.”
Translation: this war will be long – and painful. There will be no swift victory with minimal loss of blood. The next moves around the Dnieper may take years to solidify. Depending on whether US policy continues to cleave to neo-con and neoliberal objectives, the frontline may be displaced to Lviv. Then German politics may change. Normal trade with France and Germany may be recovered only by the end of the next decade.
Kremlin exasperation: START is finished
All that brings us to the games played by the Empire of Lies. Says Putin: “The promises…of western rulers turned into forgery and cruel lies. The west supplied weapons, trained nationalist battalions. Even before the start of the SMO, there were negotiations…on the supply of air defense systems… We remember Kyiv’s attempts to obtain nuclear weapons.”
Putin made it clear, once again, that the element of trust between Russia and the west, especially the US, is gone. So it’s a natural decision for Russia to “withdraw from the treaty on strategic offensive weapons, but we don’t do it officially. For now we are only halting our participation to the START treaty. No US inspections in our nuclear sites can be allowed.”
As an aside, of the three main US-Russian weapons treaties, Washington abandoned two of these: The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty was dumped by the administration of former president George W. Bush in 2002, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was nixed by former president Donald Trump in 2019.
This shows the Kremlin’s degree of exasperation. Putin is even prepared to order the Ministry of Defense and Rosatom to get ready to test Russian nuclear weapons if the US goes first along the same road.
If that’s the case, Russia will be forced to completely break parity in the nuclear sphere, and abandon the moratorium on nuclear testing and cooperation with other nations when it comes to the production of nuclear weapons. So far, the US and NATO game consisted in opening a little window allowing them to inspect Russian nuclear sites.
With his judo move, Putin returns the pressure onto the White House.
The US and NATO will not be exactly thrilled when Russia starts testing its new strategic weapons, especially the post-doomsday Poseidon – the largest nuclear-powered torpedo ever deployed, capable of triggering terrifying radioactive ocean swells.
On the economic front: Bypassing the US dollar is the essential play towards multipolarity. During his speech, Putin made a point to extol the resilience of the Russian economy: “Russian GDP in 2022 decreased only by 2.1 percent, estimates of the opposing side did not become reality, they said 15, 20 percent.” That resilience gives Russia enough room to “work with partners to make the system of international settlements independent of the US dollar and other western currencies. The dollar will lose its universal role.”
On geoeconomics: Putin went all out in praise of economic corridors, from West Asia to South Asia: “New corridors, transport routes will be built towards the East, this is the region where we will focus our development, new highways to Kazakhstan and China, new North-South corridor to Pakistan, Iran.”
And those will connect to Russia developing “the ports of the Black and Azov Seas, it’s necessary to build logistics corridors within the country.” The result will be a progressive interconnection with the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) whose principals include Iran and India, and eventually China’s mega-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
China’s plan for global security
It’s inevitable that apart from sketching several state policies geared towards Russia’s internal development – one might even compare them to socialist policies – a great deal of Putin’s address had to focus on the NATO vs. Russia war till-the-last-Ukrainian.
Putin remarked on how “our relations with the west have degraded, and this is entirely the fault of the United States;” how NATO’s goal is to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia; and how the warmongering frenzy had forced him, a week ago, to sign a decree “putting new ground-based strategic complexes on combat duty.”
So it’s no accident that the US ambassador was immediately summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs right after Putin’s address.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Ambassador Lynne Tracey in no uncertain terms that Washington must take concrete measures: among them, to remove all US and NATO military forces and equipment away from Ukraine. In a stunning move, he demanded a detailed explanation of the destruction of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, as well as a halt to US interference in an independent inquiry to identify the responsible parties.
Keeping the momentum in Moscow, top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi met with secretary of Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, before talking to Lavrov and Putin. Patrushev remarked, “the course towards developing a strategic partnership with China is an absolute priority for Russia’s foreign policy.” Wang Yi, not so cryptically, added, “Moscow and Beijing need to synchronize their watches.”
The Americans are doing everything to try and pre-empt the Chinese proposal for a de-escalation in Ukraine. China’s plan should be presented this Friday, and there’s a serious risk Beijing may fall into a trap set by the western plutocracy.
Too many Chinese “concessions” to Russia, and not as many to Ukraine, may be spun to drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing (Divide and Rule, which is always the US Plan A. There’s no Plan B).
The problem is Beijing still attributes too much clout to a toothless UN, when they refer to“formulating a New Agenda for Peace and other proposals put forth in Our Common Agenda by the UN Secretary-General.”
Same when Beijing upholds the consensus that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Try to explain that to the Straussian neo-con psychos in the Beltway, who know nothing about war, much less nuclear ones.
The Chinese affirm the necessity to “comply with the joint statement on preventing nuclear war and avoiding arms races issued by leaders of the five nuclear-weapon states in January 2022.” And to “strengthen dialogue and cooperation among nuclear-weapon states to reduce the risk of nuclear war.”
Bets can be made that Patrushev explained in detail to Wang Yi how that is just wishful thinking. The “logic “of the current collective western “leadership” has been expressed, among others, by irredeemable mediocrity Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general: even nuclear war is preferable to a Russian victory in Ukraine.
Putin’s measured but firm address has made it clear that the stakes keep getting higher. And it all revolves on how deep Russia’s – and China’s – “strategic ambiguity” are able to petrify a paranoid west flirting with mushroom clouds.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Media and personal freedom in Serbia have hit a new low over the last several days.
On February 15, a large citizens’ protest rally took place in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, around the statue of Czar Nicholas II. The assembled citizens were protesting against the ultimatum recently presented to the Serbian government by France and Germany to officially recognize and legally accept the secession of the NATO occupied southern Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija. They were using their constitutional right to voice their views and were urging the government to reject the ultimatum. The Serbian public believes that the ultimatum was conceived and written by the Biden Administration and that Britain and France were merely used as delivery boys.
A collateral issue is Serbia joining anti-Russia sanctions, which Western government have been pressuring and cajoling its government to do since the start of the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine a year ago. The Serbian government has been delaying compliance with these demands, but there are increasing signs that it is preparing to give in to US and EU pressure in the near future. On both issues, opinion polls show that the Serbian public are opposed to both recognizing Kosovo and joining anti-Russia sanctions by overwhelming majorities of between 85 to 90%.
The February 15 protest was covered by our media service, Srbin Info. Our editor, Dejan Petar Zlatanović also spoke at the rally to express his personal opposition to both the Kosovo ultimatum and the plan to introduce sanctions against Russia. In his remarks he stated that “whoever signs off on giving up Kosovo is a dead man.” The police, which monitored the rally, interpreted his remarks as a direct threat to assassinate Serbia’s President Alexander Vučić and promptly arrested Zlatanović. The violent arrest of our editor, who is 60 and also happens to be a person with a congenital disability, has been filmed and posted on Twitter. Take a listen to his screams as the regime police are taking him away:
Послушајте како је ухапшен новинар Дејан Златановић после протесте за Косово и Метохију. Ово нема ни у Северној Кореји. pic.twitter.com/5QuqYBlkBo
Serbian law provides for detention of no more than 48 hours, unless the prosecutor’s office can satisfy a judge that the detained person constitutes a danger to society, in which case the court can order a longer detention. As the 48 hour period was expiring and the authorities were facing a legal obligation to release Mr. Zlatanović, the prosecutor charged him with planning to violently overthrow the “constitutional order” and requested that the court approve detention of at least 30 days, pending an investigation. Our editor Zlatanović announced that he would begin a hunger strike if the prosecutor’s extended detention request were granted.
Along with Zlatanović the police also arrested human rights activist Damnjan Knežević. During the arrest, Knežević was beaten so badly that he had to be transferred from prison to a hospital to receive medical treatment.
The Serbian regime has managed to deceive a part of the Western public with the narrative that it would never knuckle under to Western pressure to recognize NATO occupied Kosovo as an independent state separate from Serbia and would not impose sanctions on Russia. It was lying on both counts. Now that the farce is falling apart and under Western threats and blackmail it is preparing to do both, it is trying to silence all truth tellers, as evidenced by the repression of opposition media and illegal detention of our editor, Dejan Petar Zlatanović. We ask all who believe in freedom of expression to write to the office of Serbia’s President Alexander Vučić to demand the immediate release of Mr. Zlatanović and Mr. Knežević and the dropping of all charges for legal and non-threatening speech that is protected by Serbia’s constitution and the European Declarations on Human Rights.
A week after Sy Hersh’s expose on the Nord Stream pipeline explosions, there is still no word that pretend President Biden who denies any knowledge or involvement in causing an Act of War in the Baltic Sea has yet to offer an explanation to the American public or reach out to Russian President Vladimir Putin – but what possible explanation could be offered when the Biden co-conspirators, millions of Americans and Putin’s Security Council all know the truth.
Even though the balloon distraction consumes the American mainstream media with the anonymous buoyant inflatable nonsense of a psyop as if to avoid the inescapable moment of truth – which will come inevitably. In any case, a good guess is that the Russians are not amused by whatever game the Biden Administration has conjured up to deflect attention from the reality of a world level Act of War crisis.
While the media remains aflutter with the guessing-game possibilities, TPTB appear confident that because Russia has been restrained and prudent in its reactions during its special military operation; including the unrelenting NATO lies but especially to the inhumanity of the Ukraine Nazi’s. There is a general refusal on the part of the Americans to believe that The Bear would ever retaliate, that they could never be pushed so far until there was nowhere else to go.
Perhaps as the European mainland flounders in an energy and economic crisis of its own making, they are experiencing a resurgence of lost sovereignty and awareness of their loss of independence at the hands of the US.
As the US and rest of the world await Russia’s response to the Biden Administration’s denial, legendary professor, historian, philosopher and political analyst emeritus Noam Chomsky has reminded us of the reckless and provocative impact of the US withdrawal of arms control agreements on Russia’s well-defined borders and legitimate security interests.
***
The Intercontinental ABM Treaty was signed by President Richard Nixon in 1972 in Moscow with each participant limited to a small portion of their territory. The Russians chose to protect its capitol at Moscow while the US chose to protect an ICBM site at Grand Fork, North Dakota – what does that tell you?
Three days after the 911 attack, President GW Bush with vice President Dick Cheney at his side, decided that the ABM was a ‘relic’ of the Cold War that had outlived its usefulness; announcing the withdrawal citing the Treaty’s hindrance of the US protecting itself as if it might be subject to a ballistic missile attack from ‘terrorists’ or ‘rouge states’ with access to comparable nuclear weapons. Despite its original intent of “unlimited duration,” the ABM included a withdrawal option in case of ‘extraordinary events” that jeopardized the parties’ “supreme interests.” The US then notified Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan of its intent. It was the first time the US withdrew from a nuclear arms agreement but not the last.
Withdrawal of the ABM allowed offensive weapon facilities to be located close to the Russian border as Putin described the Treaty as a “cornerstone” of Russia’s security system. In his 2018 Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, Putin spoke of the US unilateral withdrawal:
“We did our best to dissuade the Americans from withdrawing from the treaty. All in vain. The US pulled out of the treaty in 2002. Even after that we tried to develop constructive dialogue with the Americans. All our proposals, absolutely all of them, were rejected.”
“All these years, the entire fifteen years since the withdrawal of the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, we have consistently tried to reengage the American side in serious discussions.”
***
By the mid 1990’s President Bill Clinton abandoned Secretary of State James Baker’s “categorical assurance” to Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev that “there would be no extension” of NATO’s jurisdiction “one inch to the east.” As Gorbachev put it in 2008:
“the Americans had promised that NATO wouldn’t move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and Eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted.”
As a result of the Malta Summit in December, 1989 between President GWH Bush and President Gorbachev, former Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock said that
“..if Bush had been re-elected and Gorbachev had remained as president of the USSR there would have been no NATO expansion during their terms in office. There was no way either could commit successors” and that “I personally opposed the way NATO was extended to Eastern Europe, greater effort should have been made to create a “Europe whole and free,” by developing a new security structure including Russia”.
In addition, Robert Gates, then deputy national security advisor believed that “Gorbachev…” had been “led to believe” that the “expansion of NATO eastward” would not happen.
***
The Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was signed by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan in 1987 in Reykjavik, Iceland eliminating thousands of missiles that would potentially have carried nuclear warheads. To Gorbachev and Reagan’s credit, the INF abolished an entire category of nuclear weapons while allowing first-hand observers of missile destruction and on-site verification as part of Reagan’s ‘trust but verify’ motto.
By 2019, President Donald Trump announced that he was suspending compliance with the Treaty and cited development of a prohibited missile by Russia while Putin countered that the US anti ballistic system in Europe which was within striking distance of Moscow could be used for offensive purposes. The Treaty ended a superpower build up in Europe as it banned ground launched missiles with a range of up to 3400 miles.
In October, 2018, US national security advisor John Bolton arrived for two days of talks with Russian officials who called the INF withdrawal as “dangerous” and “showing a lack of wisdom” as a “mistake.” Known to be belligerent to the Russians and arms control agreements, Bolton was also to meet with Russian Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov and Secretary to the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev as well as Russian President Vladimir Putin who was looking for ‘clarification’ on US intentions.
In response, Putin denied any violation of the INF and announced suspension of Russian involvement in the Cold-war era INF Treaty to pursue a new generation of hypersonic missiles.
Renee Parsons served on the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, staff in the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC.
As the Ukraine war enters its second year, RAND Corporation entered the ring with two punches. The first was the January issuance of a study entitled Avoiding a Long War. The second was a February article by a RAND researcher entitled What Russia Got Wrong, which was published in Foreign Affairs. The latter article was sent by email on February 10, 2023, as part of an advertisement to subscribe to Foreign Affairs. It is an advance copy of the print edition for March/April 2023. That issue was not out yet and did not appear on the magazine website when this paper was written.
The January report, Avoiding a Long War, received wide publicity and comment because it seemed to overturn a previous RAND study done in 2022 that had suggested a long war in Ukraine would benefit the US. It was widely noted that RAND receives most of its funding from the US Defense Department, and that the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff had suggested in late 2022 that it was a good time for Ukraine to negotiate a cease fire. His opinion was that Ukraine had achieved the maximum territory possible in the war and that things would go worse for Ukraine if the war continued. The Chairman’s opinion was outside the official narrative at the time and did not get much traction in public. Thus the RAND report in January was viewed as another attempt by the generals to educate the rest of the government and public that, in all likelihood, the Ukraine war would turn for the worse come the new year. The RAND report did serve to help open up space for a competing narrative that the Ukraine War was using up resources that would be better used in the competition with China, the real peer country. Thus one could argue that NATO was not giving up or losing a small war in Ukraine, but was simply reorienting efforts in preparation for the big war with China. One US general conveniently announced that he expected war with China to begin in 2025.
The February article from RAND, What Russia Got Wrong, is also a lengthy and well-written attempt at getting the new narrative in place. It serves in two ways: It explains the mainstream reported success of Ukraine in 2022 as being in large part due to mistakes by Russia and extensive support by NATO, and also warns that Russia is learning from its mistakes and will be much improved in 2023. In addition, the NATO supply of ammunition and rockets is running out and it is doubtful that NATO support will be enough in the future. While the article does not specifically call for negotiations now, it points out at the end that war is unpredictable and that Russia could win after all. The importance of the article is that it was published in Foreign Affairs magazine, the organ of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
What Russia Got Wrong shows an extensive knowledge and expertise on the part of the author. The beginning of the article lays out the author’s case: “Before the invasion, Russia’s military was larger and better equipped than Ukraine’s….Why Russia did not prevail—why it was instead stopped in its tracks, routed outside major cities, and put on the defensive—has become one of the most important questions in both U.S. foreign policy and international security more broadly.” The author then goes on for a major portion of the article explaining and answering the question. The answer included “excessive internal secrecy… an invasion plan that was riddled with faulty assumptions, arbitrary political guidance, and planning errors that departed from key Russian military principles.” Additionally, Russia underestimated both Ukrainian resistance and Western support for Ukraine. The article goes on for many pages listing Russian military capabilities and a long list of deficiencies.
The article continues to follow the official narrative through most of the many words, only to waffle at the end. One point is the emphasis on the initial thrust of the Special Military Operation (SMO) by Russia. It was very weak compared to the size of the Russian army, and the author notes it as a failure. There is a brief reference to Russian desire to avoid casualties and damage, but the author is basically looking at the situation as a military issue and assuming that major war strategy and tactics should have been followed.
Instead, Russia is berated for following a political strategy, without the article going into sufficient depth analyzing the war as a political issue. For example, one factor might have been that Russia was trying to keep the action as a small SMO in order to limit the scare it would give the European countries. Russia tried to portray the SMO as more of a police action to protect the separatist areas from Ukrainian army activities. Furthermore, it has not been clear to observers the reasons for Russian troops to venture into hostile territory so early in the invasion. There was some thought early on that the ventures may have had to do with the biological laboratories and the locations of nuclear materials, but this lacked clarification in the media.
In other words, perhaps Russia did not conduct the invasion of Ukraine according to Russian war doctrine because Russia was not intending it to be a war in the beginning. It appears that it was to demilitarize and remove any Nazi-type influence in Ukraine and to keep NATO out of Ukraine, but the methods were as much political as military. The military was to be kept to the minimum possible. The Russian plan almost succeeded: There were negotiations in Istanbul almost immediately between Russia and Ukraine, and some sort of partial deal was worked out. It is hard to find the exact terms agreed to, but presumably they were to have Ukraine become neutral, not join NATO, and recognize the local elections in areas to join Russia. These hopes were shattered when the prime minister of Britain flew to Kiev and reportedly convinced the Ukrainian government to trash the negotiated agreement. One of the members of the Ukraine team was assassinated when he returned to Kiev, with some talk that he was a traitor. This was murky enough, but got even more strange when, months later, he was declared a hero of Ukraine. In addition, the prime minister of Israel and the foreign minister of Turkey were very busy serving as mediators for ongoing negotiations among Ukraine, Russia and NATO powers to stop the war.
Russia could also be viewed as not wanting to start a war, but rather as issuing a wake-up-call to bring the various parties to the negotiating table. In this regard, Russia was successful. The fact that the negotiations failed can mean that Russia made a mistake, but if Russia had not gone the political route first, it also would have been later viewed as a mistake. In other words, Russia was “damned if it did and damned if it didn’t,” and many words can be spilled arguing each side and every point. Another instance where it appears that Russia tried to save the Ukrainian army and the people of Ukraine from destruction was when Moscow openly called on the Ukrainian army generals to carry out a coup and stop the war. This also failed, but even now some in the Western mainstream press suggest that factions would like to have the top military man in Ukraine take over the presidency with an eye to changing the situation.
Regardless of whether one views the first phases of the battle in Ukraine as an example of gross Russian ineptitude, or as the initial Russian moves in a game of three-dimensional chess, even the Foreign Affairs article admits that Russia improved a lot during the later stages of the battle. Among other things, the Russians have learned to use obsolete missiles and drones, instead of aircraft, to overcome Ukraine air defenses, and how to jam Ukrainian communications without jamming their own.
The conclusion of the article is that “there are reasons to think the shift will not salvage the war for Russia, partly because so many things need to change, no single factor explains why the war has gone so poorly for Russia thus far.” However, it goes on to hedge as follows:
“But analysts should be careful about forecasting outcomes. The classic adage still holds: in war, the first reports are often wrong or fragmentary. Only time will tell whether Russia can salvage its invasion or whether Ukrainian forces will prevail. The conflict has already followed an unpredictable course, and so the West should avoid making hasty judgments about what went wrong with Russia’s campaign, lest it learn the wrong lessons, devise incorrect strategies, or acquire the wrong types of weapons. Just as the West overestimated Russia’s capabilities before the invasion, it could now underestimate them.”
So, while the first punch from RAND warned that a long war in Ukraine is not in the US’s interest, this second punch from RAND warned that the US should be careful because it is possible that Russia might win the Ukraine war. Many analysts assume that these two RAND initiatives have occurred now because Russia really is winning and the “powers that be” want to break the news very gently to the public and the politicians.
A well-written article by a retired British diplomat, Alastair Crooke, does an excellent job of elucidating further on the topic of Ukraine:
“Olexii Arestovich, Zelensky’s former ‘spin doctor’ and adviser, has described the circumstance of the Russian SMO first entry into Ukraine: It was conceived as a bloodless mission and should have passed without casualties, he says. “They tried to wage a smart war… Such an elegant, beautiful, lightning-fast special operation, where polite people, without causing any damage to either a kitten or a child, eliminated the few who resisted. They didn’t want to kill anyone: Just sign the renunciation”.
The point here is that what occurred was political miscalculation by Moscow – and not military failure. The initial aim of the SMO didn’t work. No negotiations resulted. Yet from it flowed two major consequences: NATO controllers pounced on this interpretation to trumpet their pre-conceived bias that Russia was militarily weak, backward and stumbling. That misreading underlay how NATO perceived Russia would prosecute the war.
It was wholly incorrect. Russia is strong and has military predominance.
On the presumption of weakness, however, NATO switched plans from a planned guerrilla insurgency, to conventional war along the ‘Zelensky Defence Lines’ – thus opening the path for Russia’s artillery domination to attrit Ukraine’s forces to the point of entropy. It is an error that cannot be rectified. And to try it might just lead to WW3.”
Note that the author states that “No negotiations resulted.” He claims that it was a political miscalculation by Russia. Another opinion could be that it was a political gamble by Russia that did not pay off. In any event, it seems strange to claim that no negotiations resulted, when the news was full of reporting the mediation efforts by the foreign minister of Turkey and the prime minister of Israel. The foreign ministers of Russia and Ukraine met in Antalya, Turkey, in early March 2022, but the discussions did not yield concrete results according to Reuters. Russia-Ukraine peace talks began later in March in Istanbul. The Turkish foreign minister attended the talks and worked as a mediator. He announced that the two sides were close to agreement. However, no actual final result was obtained.
Mr. Crooke does know how to turn a phrase, so this article will borrow one of his paper’s final paragraphs to help wrap up this analysis:
“However, the reality is that the Ukraine ‘Balloon’ is popped. Military and civilian circles in Washington know it. The ‘elephant in the room’ of inevitable Russian success is acknowledged (albeit, with the compulsion to avoid seeming ‘defeatist’ – that persists in certain quarters). They know too that the NATO (as ‘formidable force’) ‘balloon’ has popped. They know that the balloon of western industrial capacity to manufacture weapons – in sufficient quantity and over a long duration – has popped also.”
The official narrative about the Ukraine war is changing. The word “narrative” has replaced the older term “party line” that was used in the days of the Soviet Union. But the meaning is similar. The articles by the RAND researchers are an illustration of how the new narrative is broadcast to everyone concerned. The update in the party line is taking effect as the headlines in the mainstream media reflect the bursting of many dreams and delusions about Russia and Ukraine.
References:
Avoiding a Long War: U.S. Policy and the Trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict, Samuel Charap and Miranda Priebe, RAND Corporation, January 2023
What Russia Got Wrong: Can Moscow Learn From Its Failures in Ukraine?, Dara Massicot, Senior Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2023
Endgame for Ukraine: America vs America, Alastair Crooke, Strategic Culture Foundation, February 13, 2023
Except, of course, in the parallel bubble of U.S. mainstream media, which has totally ignored it, or in a few select cases, decided to shoot the messenger, dismissing Hersh as a “discredited” journalist, a “blogger”, and a “conspiracy theorist”.
I have offered an initial approach, focused on the plentiful merits of a seemingly thorough report, but also noting some serious inconsistencies.
Old school Moscow-based foreign correspondent John Helmer has gone even further; and what he uncovered may be as incandescent as Sy Hersh’s own narrative.
The heart of the matter in Hersh’s report concerns attribution of responsibility for a de facto industrial terror attack. Surprisingly, no CIA; that falls straight on the toxic planning trio of Sullivan, Blinken and Nuland – neoliberal-cons part of the “Biden” combo. And the final green light comes from the Ultimate Decider: the senile, teleprompt-reading President himself. The Norwegians feature as minor helpers.
That poses the first serious problem: nowhere in his narrative Hersh refers to MI6, the Poles (government, Navy), the Danes, and even the German government.
There’s a mention that on January 2022, “after some wobbling”, Chancellor Scholz “was now firmly on the American team”. Well, by now the plan had been under discussion, according to Hersh’s source, for at least a few months. That also means that Scholz remained “on the American team” all the way to the terror attack, on September 2022.
As for the Brits, the Poles and all NATO games being played off Bornhom Island more than a year before the attack, that had been extensively reported by Russian media – from Kommersant to RIA Novosti.
The Special Military Operation (SMO) was launched on February 24, almost a year ago. The Nord Stream 1 and 2 blow up happened on September 26. Hersh assures there were “more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to ‘sabotage the pipelines’”.
So that confirms that the terror attack planning preceded, by months, not only the SMO but, crucially, the letters sent by Moscow to Washington on December 2022, requesting a serious discussion on “indivisibility of security” involving NATO, Russia and the post-Soviet space. The request was met by a dismissive American non-response response.
While he was writing the story of a terror response to a serious geopolitical issue, it does raise eyebrows that a first-rate pro like Hersh does not even bother to examine the complex geopolitical background.
In a nutshell: the ultimate Mackinderian anathema for the U.S. ruling classes – and that’s bipartisan – is a Germany-Russia alliance, extended to China: that would mean the U.S. expelled from Eurasia, and that conditions everything any American government thinks and does in terms of NATO and Russia.
Hersh should also have noticed that the timing of the preparation to “sabotage the pipelines” completely blows apart the official United States government narrative, according to which this a collective West effort to help Ukraine against “unprovoked Russian aggression”.
That elusive source
The narrative leaves no doubt that Hersh’s source – if not the journalist himself – supports what is considered a lawful U.S. policy: to fight Russia’s “threat to Western dominance [in Europe].”
So what seems a U.S. Navy covert op, according to the narrative, may have been misguided not because of serious geopolitical reasons; but because the attack planning intentionally evaded U.S. law “requiring Congress to be informed”. That’s an extremely parochial interpretation of international relations. Or, to be blunt: that’s an apology of Exceptionalism.
And that brings us to what may be the Rosebud in this Orson Welles-worthy saga. Hersh refers to a “secure room on the top floor of the Old Executive Office Building …that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board”.
This was supposedly the place where the terror attack planning was being discussed.
Hersh’s source, according to his narrative, asserts, without a shadow of a doubt, that “Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine” and that “alarm was growing in Washington”. It’s beggars belief that this supposedly well informed lot didn’t know about the massing of NATO-led Ukrainian troops across the line of contact, getting ready to launch a blitzkrieg against Donbass.
What everyone already knew by then – as the record shows even on YouTube – is that the combo behind “Biden” were dead set on terminating the Nord Streams by whatever means necessary. After the start of the SMO, the only thing missing was to find a mechanism for plausible deniability.
For all its meticulous reporting, the inescapable feeling remains that what Hersh’s narrative indicts is the Biden combo terror gambit, and never the overall U.S. plan to provoke Russia into a proxy war with NATO using Ukraine as cannon fodder.
Moreover, Hersh’s source may be eminently flawed. He – or she – said, according to Hersh, that Russia “failed to respond” to the pipeline terror attack because “maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did”.
In itself, this may prove that the source was not even a member of PIAB, and did not receive the classified PIAB report assessing Putin’s crucial speech of September 30, which identifies the “responsible” party. If that’s the case, the source is just connected (italics mine) to some PIAB member; was not invited to the months-long situation-room planning; and certainly is not aware of the finer details of this administration’s war in Ukraine.
Considering Sy Hersh’s stellar track record in investigative journalism, it would be quite refreshing for him to elucidate these inconsistencies. That would get rid of the fog of rumors depicting the report as a mere limited hangout.
Considering there are several “silos” of intel within the U.S. oligarchy, with their corresponding apparatuses, and Hersh has cultivated his contacts among nearly all of them for decades, there’s no question the allegedly privileged information on the Nord Stream saga came from a very precise address – with a very precise agenda.
So we should see who the story really indicts: certainly the Straussian neo-con/neoliberal-con combo behind “Biden”, and the wobbly President himself. As I pointed out in my initial analysis, the CIA gets away with flying colors.
And we should not forget that the Big Narrative is changing fast: the RAND report, the looming NATO humiliation in Ukraine, Balloon Hysteria, UFO psy op. The real “threat” is – who else – China. What’s left for all of us is to swim in a swamp crammed with derelict patsies, dodgy cover stories and intel debris. Knowing that those who really run the show never show their hand.
Note: reading these moronic questions+statements only confirms to me my conviction that Europe is sub-pathetic and deserves what will come its way. This is sad, of course, but indisputable. As for Roger Waters, his willingness to reconsider his views only inspires even more admiration in me. Andrei
Against the backdrop of the outrageous and despicable smear campaign by the ISRAELI LOBBY to denounce me as an ANTI-SEMITE, WHICH I AM NOT, NEVER HAVE BEEN and NEVER WILL BE. Against he backdrop of them trying to silence me because I lend my voice to the seventy five year old fight for equal human rights for all my brothers and sisters in Palestine/Israel, irrespective of their ethnicity, religion or nationality. Against the backdrop, of the ISRAELI LOBBY trying to cancel my 85% SOLD OUT series of concerts in Germany, the National Newspaper BERLINER ZEITUNG, has today, courageously, published an in depth interview with me in their Saturday Magazine. Thank you so much gentlemen.
And to MY FANS who have purchased tickets for my forthcoming shows in Europe,
FEAR NOT! I AM DEFINITELY COMING.
WILD HORSES COULDN’T KEEP ME AWAY
AND NEITHER CAN THIS APARTHEID RABBLE
THE TRUTH WILL SET US FREE.
LOVE
R.
Interview translated into English from German:
Roger Waters can rightly claim to be the mastermind behind Pink Floyd. He came up with the concept of and wrote all the lyrics for the masterpiece “The Dark Side of the Moon”. He wrote the albums “Animals”, “The Wall” and “The Final Cut” single-handedly. On his current tour “This Is Not A Drill”, which comes to Germany in May, he therefore wants to express that legacy to a large extent and play songs from Pink Floyd’s classic phase. The problem: Because of controversial statements he has made about the war in Ukraine and the politics of the state of Israel, one of his concerts in Poland has already been cancelled, and in Germany Jewish and Christian organizations are demanding the same. Time to talk to the 79-year-old musician: What does he mean by all this? Is he simply misunderstood – should his concerts be cancelled? Is it justifiable to exclude him from the conversation? Or does society have a problem banning dissenters like Waters from the conversation?
The musician receives his visitors in his residence in southern England, friendly, open, unpretentious, but determined – that’s how he will remain throughout the conversation. First, however, he wants to demonstrate something special: In the studio of his house, he plays three tracks from a brand new re-recording of “The Dark Side of the Moon”, which celebrates its 50th birthday in March. “The new concept is meant to reflect on the meaning of the work, to bring out the heart and soul of the album,” he says, “musically and spiritually. I’m the only one singing my songs on these new recordings, and there are no rock and roll guitar solos.”
The spoken words, superimposed on instrumental pieces like “On The Run” or “The Great Gig in the Sky” and over “Speak To Me”, “Brain Damage” “Any Colour You Like and Money” are meant to clarify his “mantra”, the message he considers central to all his work: “It’s about the voice of reason. And it says: what is important is not the power of our kings and leaders or their so-called connection with God. What is really important is the connection between us as human beings, the whole human community. We, human beings, are scattered all over the globe – but we are all related because we all come from Africa. We are all brothers and sisters, or at the very least distant cousins, but the way we treat each other is destroying our home, planet earth – faster than we can imagine.” For instance, right now, suddenly here we are in 2023 involved in a year old proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Why? Ok, a bit of history, in 2004 Russian President Vladimir Putin extended his hand to the West in an attempt to build an architecture of peace in Europe. It’s all there in the record. He explained that western plans to invite the post Maidan coup Ukraine into NATO posed a completely unacceptable existential threat to The Russian Federation and would cross a final red line that could end in war, so could we all get round the table and negotiate a peaceful future. His advances were brushed off by the US and its NATO allies. From then on he consistently maintained his position and NATO consistently maintained theirs: “F… you”. And here we are.
Mr Waters, you speak of the voice of reason, of the deep connection of all people. But when it comes to the war in Ukraine, you talk a lot about the mistakes of the US and the West, not about Russia’s war and the Russian aggression. Why don’t you protest against the acts committed by Russia? I know that you supported Pussy Riot and other human rights organizations in Russia. Why don’t you attack Putin?
First of all, if you read my letter to Putin and my writings around the start of the war in February….
…you called him a “gangster”…
…exactly, I did. But I may have changed my mind a little bit in the last year. There is a podcast from Cyprus called “The Duran”. The hosts speak Russian and can read Putin’s speeches in the original. Their comments on it make sense to me. The most important reason for supplying arms to Ukraine is surely profit for the arms industry. And I wonder: is Putin a bigger gangster than Joe Biden and all those in charge of American politics since World War II? I am not so sure. Putin didn’t invade Vietnam or Iraq? Did he?
The most important reason for arms deliveries is the following: It is to support Ukraine, to win the war and to stop Russia’s aggression. You seem to see it differently.
Yes. Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I am now more open to listen what Putin actually says. According to independent voices I listen to he governs carefully, making decisions on the grounds of a consensus in the Russian Federation government. There are also critical intellectuals in Russia, who have been arguing against American imperialism since the 1950s. And a central phrase has always been: Ukraine is a red line. It must remain a neutral buffer state. If it doesn’t remain so, we don’t know where it will lead. We still don’t know, but it could end in a Third World War.
In February last year, it was Putin who decided to attack.
He launched what he still calls a “special military operation”. He launched it on the basis of reasons that if I have understood them well are: 1. We want to stop the potential genocide of the Russian-speaking population of the Donbas. 2. We want to fight Nazism in Ukraine. There is a teenage Ukrainian girl, Alina, with whom I exchanged long letters: “I hear you. I understand your pain.” She answered me, thanked me, but stressed, I‘m sure you’re wrong about one thing though, “I am 200% certain there are no Nazis in Ukraine.” I replied again, “I’m sorry Alina, but you are wrong about that. How can you live in Ukraine and not know?”
There is no evidence that there has been genocide in Ukraine. At the same time, Putin has repeatedly emphasised that he wants to bring Ukraine back into his empire. Putin told former German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the saddest day in his life was in 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Isn’t the word origin of “Ukraine” the Russian word for “Borderland”? It was part of Russia and the Soviet Union for a long time. It’s a difficult history. During the Second World War, I believe there was a large part of the population of western Ukraine that decided to collaborate with the Nazis. They killed Jews, Roma, communists, and anyone else the Third Reich wanted dead. To this day there is the conflict between Western Ukraine (With or without Nazis Alina) and Eastern The Donbas) and Southern (Crimea) Ukraine and there are many Russian speaking Ukrainians because it was part of Russia for hundreds of years. How can you solve such a problem? It can’t be done by either the Kiev government or the Russians winning. Putin has always stressed that he has no interest in taking over western Ukraine – or invading Poland or any other country across the border. What he is saying is: he wants to protect the Russian-speaking populations in those parts of Ukraine where the Russian speaking populations feel under threat from the far right influenced post Maidan Coup Governments in Kiev. A coup that is widely accepted as having been orchestrated by the US.
We have spoken to many Ukrainians who can prove otherwise. The US may have helped support the 2014 protests. But overall, reputable sources and eyewitness accounts suggest that the protests arose from within – through the will of the Ukrainian people.
I wonder which Ukrainians you have spoken to? I can imagine that some claim that. On the other side of the coin a huge majority of Ukrainians in the Crimea and the Donbass have voted in referenda to rejoin The Russian Federation.
In February, you were surprised that Putin attacked Ukraine. How can you be so sure that he will not go further? Your trust in Russia does not seem to have been shattered, despite the bloody Russian war of aggression.
How can I be sure that the US will not risk starting a nuclear war with China? They are already provoking The Chinese by interfering in Taiwan. They would love to destroy Russia first. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature understands that, when they read the news, and the Americans admit it.
You irritate a lot of people because it always sounds like you are defending Putin.
Compared to Biden, I am. The US/NATO provocations before February 2022 were extreme and very damaging to the interests of all the ordinary people of Europe.
You would not boycott Russia?
I think it is counterproductive. You live in Europe: How much does the US charge for gas deliveries? Five times as much as its own citizens pay. In England, people are now saying “eat or heat” – because the poorer sections of the population can hardly afford to heat their homes. Western governments should realize that we are all brothers and sisters. In the Second World War they saw what happens when they try to wage war against Russia. They will unite and fight to the last ruble and the last square meter of ground to defend their motherland. Just like anyone would. I think if the US can convince its own citizens and you and many other people, that Russia is the real enemy, and that Putin is the new Hitler they will have an easier time stealing from the poor to give to the rich and also starting and promoting more wars, like this proxy war in Ukraine. Maybe that seems like an extreme political stance to you, but maybe the history I read and the news I garner is just different from you. You can’t believe everything you see on TV or read in the papers. All I am trying to achieve with my new recordings, my statements and performances is that our brothers and sisters in power stop the war – and that people understand that our brothers and sisters in Russia do not live under a repressive dictatorship, any more than you do in Germany or I do in the US. I mean would we choose to continue to slaughter young Ukrainians and Russians if we had the power to stop it?
We can do this interview, in Russia this would not be so easy… But back to Ukraine: What would be your political counter-proposal for a meaningful Ukraine policy of the West?
We need to get all our leaders around the table and force them to say: “No more war!”. That would be the point where dialogue can start.
Could you imagine living in Russia?
Yes, of course, why not? It would be the same as with my neighbours here in the south of England. We could go to the pub and talk openly – as long as they don’t go to war and kill Americans or Ukrainians. All right? As long as we can trade with each other, sell each other gas, make sure we’re warm in the winter, we’re fine. Russians are no different from you and me: there are good people and there are idiots – like everywhere else.
Then why don’t you play shows in Russia?
Not for ideological reasons. It is simply not possible at the moment. I’m not boycotting Russia, that would be ridiculous. I play 38 shows in the USA. If I were to boycott any country for political reasons, it would be the US. They are the main aggressor.
If one looks at the conflict neutrally, one can see Putin as the aggressor. Do you think we are all brainwashed?
Yes, I do indeed, definitely. Brainwashed, you said it.
Because we consume western media?
Exactly. What everyone in the West is being told is the “unprovoked invasion” narrative. Huh? Anyone with half a brain can see that the conflict in Ukraine was provoked beyond all measure. It is probably the most provoked invasion ever.
When concerts in Poland were cancelled because of your statements on the war in Ukraine, did you just feel misunderstood?
Yes. This is a big step backwards. It is an expression of Russophobia. People in Poland are obviously just as susceptible to Western propaganda. I would want to say to them: You are brothers and sisters, get your leaders to stop the war so that we can stop for a moment and think: “What is this war about?”. It is about making the rich in the Western countries even richer and the poor everywhere even poorer. The opposite of Robin Hood. Jeff Bezos has a fortune of around 200 billion dollars, while thousands of people in Washington D.C. alone live in cardboard boxes on the street.
Ukrainians are standing up to defend their country. Most people in Germany see it that way, which is why your statements cause consternation, even anger. Your perspectives on Israel meet with similar criticism here. That is also why there is now a discussion about whether your concerts in Germany should be cancelled. How do you react to that?
Oh, you know, it’s Israeli Lobby activists like Malca Goldstein-Wolf who demand that. That’s idiotic. They already tried to cancel my concert in Cologne in 2017 and even got the local radio stations to join in.
Isn’t it a bit easy to label these people as idiots?
Of course, they are not all idiots. But they probably read the Bible and probably believe that anyone who speaks out against Israeli fascism in the Holy Land is an anti-Semite. That’s really not a smart position to take, because to do so you have to deny that people lived in Palestine before the Israelis settled there. You have to follow the legend that says, “A land without a people for a people without a land.” What nonsense. The history here is quite clear. To this day, the indigenous, Jewish population is a minority. The Jewish Israelis all immigrated from Eastern Europe or the United States.
You once compared the state of Israel to Nazi Germany. Do you still stand by this comparison?
Yes, of course. The Israelis are committing genocide. Just like Great Britain did during our colonial period, by the way. The British committed genocide against the indigenous people of North America, for example. So did the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese even the Germans in their colonies. All were part of the injustice of the colonial era. And we, the British also murdered and pillaged in India, Southeast Asia, China…. We believed ourselves to be inherently superior to the indigenous people, just as the Israelis do in Palestine. Well, we weren’t and neither are the Israeli Jews.
As an English man, you have a very different perspective on the history of the State of Israel than we Germans do. In Germany, criticism of Israel is handled with caution for good reasons; Germany has a historical debt that the country must live up to.
I understand that very well and I have been trying to deal with it for 20 years. But for me, your debt, as you put it, your national sense of guilt for what the Nazis did between 1933 and 1945, shouldn’t require your whole society to walk around with blinkers on about Israel. Would it not be better if it rather spurred you to throw away all the blinkers and support equal human rights for all your brothers and sisters all over the world irrespective of ethnicity religion or nationality?
Are you questioning Israel’s right to exist?
In my opinion, Israel has a right to exist as long as it is a true democracy, as long as no group, religious or ethnic, enjoys more human rights than any other. But unfortunately that is exactly what is happening in Israel and Palestine. The government says that only Jewish people should enjoy certain rights. So it can’t be described as democratic. They are very open about it, it’s enshrined in Israeli law. There are now many people in Germany, and of course many Jewish people in Israel, who are open to a different narrative about Israel. Twenty years ago, we could not have had a conversation about the State of Israel in which the terms genocide and apartheid were mentioned. Now I would say you can’t have that conversation without using those terms, because they accurately describe the reality in the occupied territory. I see that more and more clearly since I’ve been part of the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, ed.).
Do you think they would agree with you here in England?
I can’t say for sure because I’ve hardly lived here for the last 20 years. I would have to go down to the pub and talk to people. But I suspect more and more would agree with me every day. I have many Jewish friends – by the way – who whole heartedly agree with me, which is one reason why it’s so crazy to try to discredit me as a Jew-hater. I have one close friend in New York, who happens to be Jewish, who said to me the other day, “A few years ago, I thought you were crazy, I thought you had completely lost it. Now I see you were right in your position on the policies of the state of Israel – and we, the Jewish community in the US, were wrong.” My friend in NY was clearly distressed making this remark, he is a good man.
BDS positions are sanctioned by the German Bundestag. A success of the BDS movement could ultimately mean an end to the state of Israel. Do you see it differently?
Yes, Israel could change its laws. They could say: We have changed our mind, people are allowed to have rights even if they are not Jewish. That would be it, then we wouldn’t need BDS any more.
Have you lost friends because you are active for BDS?
It’s interesting that you ask that. I don’t know exactly, but I very much doubt it. A friendship is a powerful thing. I would say I’ve had about ten real friends in my life. I couldn’t lose a friend because of my political views, because friends love each other – and friendship begets talk, and talk begets understanding. If a friend were to say, “Roger, I saw you flew an inflatable pig with a Star of David on it during your Wall concerts!”, I explain to them the context and that there was nothing anti-Semitic either intended or expressed.
What is the context then?
That was during the song “Goodbye Blue Sky” in “The Wall” show. And to explain the context, you see B-52 bombers, on a circular screen behind the band, but they don’t drop bombs, they drop symbols: Dollar signs, Crucifixes, Hammer and Sickles, Star and Crescents, the McDonalds sign – and Star of Davids. This is theatrical satire, an expression of my belief that unleashing these ideologies, or products onto the people on the ground, is an act of aggression, the opposite of humane, the opposite of creating love and peace among us brothers and sisters. I’m saying in the wrong hands all the ideologies these symbols represent can be evil.
What is your ideology? Are you an anarchist – against any kind of power that people exercise over each other?
I call myself a humanist, a citizen of the world. And my loyalty and respect belong to all people, regardless of their origin, nationality or religion.
Would you still perform in Israel today if they let you?
No, of course not. That would be crossing the picket line. I have for years written letters to colleagues in the music industry to try to convince them not to perform in Israel. Sometimes they disagree, they say, “But this is a way to make peace, we should go there and try to convince them to make peace” Well we are all entitled to our opinion, but in 2005 the whole of Palestinian Civil Society asked me to observe a cultural boycott, and who am I to tell a whole society living under a brutal occupation that I know better than they.
It is very provocative to say that you would play in Moscow but not in Israel.
Interesting that you say that given that Moscow does not run an apartheid state based on the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants.
In Russia, ethnic minorities are heavily discriminated against. Among other things, more ethnic non-Russians are sent to war than ethnic Russians.
You seem to be asking me to see Russia from the current Russo phobic perspective. I choose to see it differently, though as I have said I don’t speak Russian or live in Russia so I’m on foreign ground.
How do you like the fact that Pink Floyd have recorded a new piece for the first time in 30 years – with the Ukrainian musician Andrij Chlywnjuk?
I have seen the video and I am not surprised, but I find it really, really sad. It’s so alien to me, this action is so lacking in humanity. It encourages the continuation of the war. Pink Floyd is a name I used to be associated with. That was a huge time in my life, a very big deal. To associate that name now with something like this… proxy war makes me sad. I mean, they haven’t made the point of demanding, “Stop the war, stop the slaughter, bring our leaders together to talk!” It’s just this content-less waving of the blue and yellow flag. I wrote in one of my letters to the Ukrainian teenager Alina: I will not raise a flag in this conflict, not a Ukrainian flag, not a Russian flag, not a US flag.
After the fall of the Wall, you performed “The Wall” in reunified Berlin, certainly with optimistic expectations for the future. Did you think you could also contribute to this future with your own art, make a difference?
Of course, I believe that to this day. If you have political principles and are an artist, then the two areas are inextricably intertwined. That’s one reason why I left Pink Floyd, by the way: I had those principles, the others either did not or had different ones.
Do you now see yourself as equal parts musician and political activist?
Yes, sometimes I lean towards one, sometimes the other.
Will your current tour really be your last tour?
(Chuckles) I have no idea. The tour is subtitled “The First Farewell Tour” and that’s an obvious joke because old rock stars routinely use Farewell Tour as a selling tool. Then they sometimes retire and sometimes go on another Final Farewell Tour, it’s all good.
You want to keep sending something out to the world, make a difference?
I love good music, I love good literature – especially English and Russian, also German. That’s why I like the idea of people noticing and understanding what I do.
Then why don’t you hold back with political statements?
Because I am who I am. If I wasn’t this person who has strong political convictions, I wouldn’t have written “The Dark Side of the Moon”, “The Wall”, “Wish You Were Here”, “Amused to Death” and all the other stuff.
Thank you very much for the interview.
***
This is what Dave Gilmour, speaking through his wife (!), had to say:
Needless to say, I now see Gilmour as a (very talented) sad piece of shit. Andrei
The Ukrainian government has laid down a list of demands it wants to be fulfilled by Israel ahead of an expected visit by Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen to Kiev this week.
These include a public condemnation of the Russian military invasion and the approval of a $500 million loan, according to Israeli and Ukrainian officials who spoke with Axios.
Israeli officials say Cohen is expected to offer a $50 million loan instead, as the previous government already rejected the request.
Cohen’s planned visit to the Ukrainian capital will be the highest-level visit by an Israeli official to the European nation since the start of the war one year ago.
According to the report, Kiev sees the visit as an opportunity to test the new government in Tel Aviv on its intentions and policy towards the war.
Ukraine’s shopping list also includes “a public statement of support by Israel for the peace plan that Zelensky presented last November, which includes a full Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.”
On top of this, Ukrainian officials want Tel Aviv to receive hundreds of wounded civilians and soldiers and to “recommit” to a joint project to build an early-warning system that could boost Kiev’s air defense capabilities.
Since the start of the war, Kiev has repeatedly demanded that Israel provide it with Iron Dome anti-missile batteries. However, Tel Aviv has balked at these demands out of fear of Russian repercussions.
A Ukrainian official quoted by Israel’s Walla news outlet said a potential meeting between Cohen and President Volodymyr Zelensky depended on “Israel’s willingness to take steps in Kiev’s favor.”
One of Cohen’s first acts after being appointed to his role last month was to hold talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, which set off alarms across the west.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his government would revise the country’s foreign policy to “move away from giving in to dictates from the international community.”
However, in recent interviews, Netanyahu avoided questions on whether Israel would provide any military aid to Kiev, saying he would “look into” everything as part of a policy review.
Since the historic Special Military Operation to liberate the peoples of the Ukraine from their US puppet tyrants in Kiev began on 24 February 2022, the post-1945 settlement has been over. In fact, it should have been over with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or, at latest, at the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. However, the USA was blinded by its exceptionalist hubris as ‘the only Superpower’ and engaged in its latest fantasy of destroying Islam, which it mistakenly saw as a serious rival, arrogantly dismissing Russia, China and India as minor players. So, as a sectarian rogue-state, the USA began its war of terror on all who thought differently, which it so humiliatingly lost. This can be seen in the dramatic pictures of the last flights out of Kabul in 2021.
In other words, after the end of the Soviet Union, which had been born directly out of World War One and formally founded in 1922, the end of the American Union (= NATO) should have followed, and with it the end of the worldwide American Empire. Thus, today NATO is an anachronism, well past its best before date, which is why has begun meddling all over the world, from the foothills of the Himalaya to the Pacific Ocean. NATO is just like the alphabet soup of other US organisations and fronts, IMF, EU, WTO, OECD, G7, G20 and UN, with its mere five Security Council members, including minor Great Britain and France. What might await us as a result of the liberation of the Ukraine on the centenary of the 1945 settlement, in 2045?
1. After the Ukraine
First of all, probably within the next fifteen months, we shall see the full liberation of the Ukraine. With the eastern Novorossija half of the Ukraine returning to Russia, the remaining half, Central and Western Ukraine, perhaps minus Zakarpattia (returning to Hungary as an autonomous region under the Balogh brothers) and Chernivtsy (returning to Romania), will return to being Malorossija, its capital in Kiev. Thus, the way will at last be open to form the Confederation of Rus’. The at last freed East Slav lands and peoples, Eurasian Russia and the Eastern European Belarus and Malorossija, could together form such a Confederation of Rus’, with a total population of just under 200 million.
2. The Reconfiguration of Eurasia
After the Ukrainian question has been solved and the USA has lost its political, military and, above all, economic power to bully the rest of the world, all of us in Eurasia will be able to start living in our new-found Freedom and building Justice and Prosperity for all. We foresee first of all the expansion of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU).
a. The Eurasian Economic Union (EEU)
At present consisting of the Russian Federation, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the EEU will surely be joined by a host of other countries, including firstly China, by now reunited with Taiwan, and Mongolia, then India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Cambodia. They will be followed by the rest of Asia (60% of world population). Thus, the EEU will largely replace the present SCO (Shanghai Co-operation Organisation). However, true to its Eurasian name, the Economic Union will also receive and grant applications from a new organisation in North-Western Eurasia. This could be called the European Economic Alliance (EEA). This could be formed through the economic co-operation of all forty-four countries in the extreme western tip of Eurasia, to be known simply as ‘Europe’. This will include what was once known as Western, Central, Northern and Southern Europe, representing nearly 7% of world population.
b. The European Economic Alliance (EEA)
This Confederation could be formed as EU coercion collapses, with Brussels disarmed as the American Union of NATO dissolves. This will follow the long-overdue withdrawal of US occupying forces from Europe and the closure of their bases. All there will find freedom again. The founding member of the EEA would perhaps be Hungary and its Capital could be fixed in Budapest in honour of Hungarian courage and its geographical closeness to the resource-rich Confederation of Rus’, the gateway to Eurasia, on which the EEA will be so dependent. The Budapest Parliament building would make a fine administrative headquarters for the EEA. Other countries would follow Hungary like dominos, possibly in the following ten phases, after rebellions in each European country, one after another overthrowing their corrupt US-installed puppet-elites. This would resemble the rebellions that took place with a domino effect in the then Soviet Eastern bloc between 1989 and 1991.
i. The Western Balkan Four
After the European Economic Alliance has been founded by Hungary, it would next be joined by Serbia. No longer held under the heel of the US bully, the ancestrally Serbian province of Kosovo would return to Serbia. However, this would only be possible if its Albanian inhabitants, like those also in Montenegro and North Macedonia, first moved to Albania. For this to happen they would have to be attracted by a huge package of investment and development to pull Albania out of grinding poverty and chronic corruption and into prosperity, to make int into a magnet for Albanians. We suggest that China could invest in the massive rebuilding, and building, of infrastructure in Albania, as China already has a history of links with Albania. With such a just solution, all Albanians could at last live decently and work in decent jobs in their own country and not be forced to live like cuckoos in the countries of others. On this Albania could join the EEA. At this point Montenegro, (North) Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina could also join the EEA. These countries would perhaps form together with Serbia a Trade and Cultural Federation, perhaps to be called Yuzhnoslavia, though each would absolutely retain its political independence. Investment in Yuzhnoslavia could come from the Confederation of Rus’.
ii. The Eastern Balkan Three
After their example, Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria would almost immediately join the EEA, attracted by links with Eurasia and the resources and linked culture of the Confederation of Rus’.
iii. The Greek World
They would naturally be followed by Greece and Cyprus, in the latter of which Russian investment is already huge. These three phases, i, ii and iii, of linking up with the Confederation of Rus, but remaining as sovereign nations within the EEA, would complete the reconstitution and restoration of the Orthosphere. This is the Orthodox Christian Commonwealth, whose natural centre has for 500 years been Russia.
iv.The Former Habsburgs
Next would come Croatia, Slovenia,Slovakia, the Czech Lands and Austria.
v. Italia
They would naturally be followed by Italy, San Marino and Malta.
vi. Germania
The real turning-point would come if these countries were followed by the central domino of Germany. Germany, fixed between Western and Eastern Europe, knows that it cannot live without Russia and countries and markets to its east. It would immediately be followed by Germany-dependent Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium.
vii. Nordia
Closely linked to Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and finally Finland would follow almost at once.
viii. Gallia
After Germany, France, which is so dependent on Germany, with Monaco and then Switzerland and Liechtenstein, would also be obliged to join the EEA in fairly quick succession.
ix.Iberia
Spain, with newly-independent Catalonia, and then Andorra and Portugal would swiftly follow France.
x. The Isolationists, East and West
Now we come to the end of this game of dominoes. The last mohicans, the once irreductibly isolationist Russophobes, the Johnson fantasy, would realise that they could no longer remain alone. The people would revolt against their elite-imposed poverty and depopulation and the absurd propaganda down the generations. First, Estonia, under pressure from Finland, and then in a chain, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland could join the EEA. However, the first three would have to throw off their US puppet-elites and at once grant human rights to their Russian minorities.
Then, under economic pressure from Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, the British Isles and Ireland, would at last follow. Thus, now separated into their four natural components, there would appear an independent England, freed after a millennium of the delusional yoke of the invented ‘Great Britain’ (an invention on a similar scale of delusion to the old ‘Ukraine’) and of the British Establishment. Immediately would follow newly-independent Scotland and Wales and a united Ireland. After the collapse of the oppressive British Establishment elite and their London-run institutions, the people and the pragmatists would proclaim that there is no alternative to co-operating with Eurasia through joining the EEA. All the more so, given the debt crisis, chaos, division and poverty in the USA, the former British colony which had become Britain’s colonial and ideological master. Step by step, opened archives would reveal the MI5 and MI6 manipulations like Litvinenko, MH 17, the Skripals, the Kerch Bridge explosion and the Nordstream destruction and how the tabloid media (the whole British media, including the State-run mouthpiece of the BBC) were used to perpetrate these lies.
3. Outside Eurasia: Continental Councils, the Inter-Continental G30 and The World Alliance
Thus, a united Eurasia (some 70% of world population) will stand together with Africa (17% of world population), Latin America (South America, Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean – 8% of world population), and the small Northern America (under 5% of world population) and even smaller Oceania (a tiny 0.5% share of world population, with its economies increasingly dominated by China. This would only be natural justice, as the Pacific islanders originated from Taiwan). Each Continent could elect a Council, creating a Eurasian Council, an African Council, a Latin American Council, a Northern America Council (basically, the USA, or whatever it will break up into, with Canada and Greenland) and an Oceanian Council (Australia, New Zealand, Western New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia). Each Council would be made up of all the nations in its Continent.
On an Inter-Continental level, there could also be formed the G30. This would be composed of all 30 nations of the world which each have a population of over 50 million + Australia, representing all Oceania, and would replace BRICS, the G7 and the G20. These nations in order of size at present are: China, India, USA, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Confederation of Rus, Bangladesh, Mexico, Japan, Ethiopia, Philippines, Egypt, Vietnam, DR Congo, Turkey, Iran, Germany, Korea, Thailand, France, Italy, Tanzania, South Africa, England, Myanmar, Kenya, Colombia and Australia. 18 are in Eurasia (13 in Asia and 5 Europe-based), 7 in Africa, 3 in Latin America and 1 each in Northern America and Oceania). The composition could change as the populations of new countries grow to more than 50 million or alternatively some contract to fewer than 50 million.
On a global level, the 235 nations of the world, including the 143 with populations of under ten million and the 75 with under one million, could assemble in a World Alliance, replacing the old New-York UN. The Capital of the Alliance could be fixed in a central position, not in an off-centre position like New York, but in the Eurasian heartland, for example, in Yalta in the Crimea. Its Security Council could be composed of the ten most populous nations, essentially all regional powers in the new multipolar world: China (also speaking for Oceania), India, USA, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, the Confederation of Rus’ (the only country with the vast majority of its population in Europe, which it would therefore represent), Bangladesh and Mexico. Six are in Eurasia, two in Latin America, one in Africa and one in Northern America.
Afterword: Towards the Future
Fantasy? Fiction? Faction? Frankly, if only 10% of the above came to pass, that in itself would be world-transforming. And if you dismiss the above out of hand, just think for a moment of how all would have mocked predictions of the generational chain of World War I (1914), World War II (1939), the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and in quick succession the fall of the Soviet bloc, and, on the centenary of World War I, in 2014, the US-orchestrated coup in Kiev which has led directly to the world-changing events which began in the Ukraine in 2022, the centenary of the USSR. Yet it all happened. In 2021 nobody had predicted the events in the Ukraine either, for nobody could have imagined the Mariana Trench depth of the suicidal stupidity of the Anglozionist elite.
A generation ago, as a Russian Orthodox priest stranded in Western Europe, the Northern Sahara, as so much of it seems to be, I did not dream of any of this. Would I live to see the revival of corruption-bound, post-Soviet Russia, enslaved to and humiliated by the West and all its vices? My impression then was that the whole world was living on borrowed time. Then came the miracle of the events of August 2000 in Russia and the appearance of President Putin. After the shamefulness and shamelessness of the CIA’s useful idiot, the drunkard Yeltsin, Putin was a miracle. And I began to think that I would live to see the future. And since 24 February 2022 I have been living it. The English Shakespeare once wrote in his Twelfth Night: What’s to come is still unsure’. I will agree, but I will still try to pierce the darkness to glimpse the light.
Does US Secretary of State Antony Blinken think a Washington Post op-ed will move Russian Armed Forces Chief Valery Gerasimov to postpone his planned military offensive on Ukraine?
Realizing NATO’s war with Russia will likely end unfavorably, the US is test-driving an exit offer. But why should Moscow take indirect proposals seriously, especially on the eve of its new military advance and while it is in the winning seat?
Those behind the Throne are never more dangerous than when they have their backs against the wall.
Their power is slipping away, fast: Militarily, via NATO’s progressive humiliation in Ukraine; Financially, sooner rather than later, most of the Global South will want nothing to do with the currency of a bankrupt rogue giant; Politically, the global majority is taking decisive steps to stop obeying a rapacious, discredited, de facto minority.
So now those behind the Throne are plotting to at least try to stall the incoming disaster on the military front.
As confirmed by a high-level US establishment source, a new directive on NATO vs. Russia in Ukraine was relayed to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Blinken, in terms of actual power, is nothing but a messenger boy for the Straussian neocons and neoliberals who actually run US foreign policy.
The secretary of state was instructed to relay the new directive – a sort of message to the Kremlin – via mainstream print media, which was promptly published by the Washington Post.
In the elite US mainstream media division of labor, the New York Times is very close to the State Department. and the Washington Post to the CIA. In this case though the directive was too important, and needed to be relayed by the paper of record in the imperial capital. It was published as an Op-Ed (behind paywall).
The novelty here is that for the first time since the start of Russia’s February 2022 Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine, the Americans are actually proposing a variation of the “offer you can’t refuse” classic, including some concessions which may satisfy Russia’s security imperatives.
Crucially, the US offer totally bypasses Kiev, once again certifying that this is a war against Russia conducted by Empire and its NATO minions – with the Ukrainians as mere expandable proxies.
‘Please don’t go on the offensive’
The Washington Post’s old school Moscow-based correspondent John Helmer has provided an important service, offering the full text of Blinken’s offer, of course extensively edited to include fantasist notions such as “US weapons help pulverize Putin’s invasion force” and a cringe-worthy explanation: “In other words, Russia should not be ready to rest, regroup and attack.”
The message from Washington may, at first glance, give the impression that the US would admit Russian control over Crimea, Donbass, Zaporozhye, and Kherson – “the land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia” – as a fait accompli.
Ukraine would have a demilitarized status, and the deployment of HIMARS missiles and Leopard and Abrams tanks would be confined to western Ukraine, kept as a “deterrent against further Russian attacks.”
What may have been offered, in quite hazy terms, is in fact a partition of Ukraine, demilitarized zone included, in exchange for the Russian General Staff cancelling its yet-unknown 2023 offensive, which may be as devastating as cutting off Kiev’s access to the Black Sea and/or cutting off the supply of NATO weapons across the Polish border.
The US offer defines itself as the path towards a “just and durable peace that upholds Ukraine’s territorial integrity.” Well, not really. It just won’t be a rump Ukraine, and Kiev might even retain those western lands that Poland is dying to gobble up.
The possibility of a direct Washington-Moscow deal on “an eventual postwar military balance” is also evoked, including no Ukraine membership of NATO. As for Ukraine itself, the Americans seem to believe it will be a “strong, non-corrupt economy with membership in the European Union.”
Whatever remains of value in Ukraine has already been swallowed not only by its monumentally corrupt oligarchy, but most of all, investors and speculators of the BlackRock variety. Assorted corporate vultures simply cannot afford to lose Ukraine’s grain export ports, as well as the trade deal terms agreed with the EU before the war. And they’re terrified that the Russian offensive may capture Odessa, the major seaport and transportation hub on the Black Sea – which would leave Ukraine landlocked.
There’s no evidence whatsoever that Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the entire Russian Security Council – including its Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev – have reason to believe anything coming from the US establishment, especially via mere minions such as Blinken and the Washington Post. After all the stavka – a moniker for the high command of the Russian armed forces – regard the Americans as “non-agreement capable,” even when an offer is in writing.
This walks and talks like a desperate US gambit to stall and present some carrots to Moscow in the hope of delaying or even cancelling the planned offensive of the next few months.
Even old school, dissident Washington operatives – not beholden to the Straussian neocon galaxy – bet that the gambit will be a nothing burger: in classic “strategic ambiguity” mode, the Russians will continue on their stated drive of demilitarization, denazification and de-electrification, and will “stop” anytime and anywhere they see fit east of the Dnieper. Or beyond.
What the Deep State really wants
Washington’s ambitions in this essentially NATO vs. Russia war go well beyond Ukraine. And we’re not even talking about preventing a Russia-China-Germany Eurasian union or a peer competitor nightmare; let’s stick with prosaic issues on the Ukrainian battleground.
The key “recommendations” – military, economic, political, diplomatic – were detailed in an Atlantic Council strategy paper late last year.
And in another one, under “War scenario 1: The war continues in its current tempo,” we find the Straussian neocon policy fully spelled out.
It’s all here: from “marshaling support and military-assistance transfers to Kyiv sufficient to enable it to win” to “increase the lethality of military assistance transferred to include fighter aircraft that would enable Ukraine to control its airspace and attack Russian forces therein; and missile technology with range sufficient to reach into Russian territory.”
From training the Ukrainian military “to use Western weapons, electronic warfare, and offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, and to seamlessly integrate new recruits in the service” to buttressing “defenses on the front lines, near the Donbass region,” including “combat training focusing on irregular warfare.”
Added to “imposing secondary sanctions on all entities doing business with the Kremlin,” we reach of course the Mother of All Plunders: “Confiscate the $300 billion that the Russian state holds in overseas accounts in the United States and EU and use seized monies to fund reconstruction.”
The reorganization of the SMO, with Putin, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, and General Armageddon in their new, enhanced roles is derailing all these elaborate plans.
The Straussians are now in deep panic. Even Blinken’s number two, Russophobic warmonger Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland, has admitted to the US Senate there will be no Abrams tanks on the battlefield before Spring (realistically, only in 2024). She also promised to “ease sanctions” if Moscow “returns to negotiations.” Those negotiations were scotched by the Americans themselves in Istanbul in the Spring of 2022.
Nuland also called the Russians to “withdraw their troops.” Well, that at least offers some comic relief compared with the panic oozing from Blinken’s “offer you can’t refuse.” Stay tuned for Russia’s non-response response.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
An aerial view of the helicopter crash in Ukraine’s Brovary (Wednesday, January 18, 2023).
Ukrainian interior minister and at least seventeen other people were killed in a helicopter crash near Kiev on Wednesday.
At least 29 people were injured in the incident on Wednesday in a residential area in the city of Brovary, on the outskirts of Ukraine’s capital, according to Oleksiy Kuleba, head of the Kyiv Regional Military Administration.
Kuleba wrote on Telegram that three children were among the victims. The helicopter crashed near a kindergarten and an apartment block in Brovary, a town of around 110,000 people, located about eight kilometers northeast of Kiev.
The remains of the helicopter were visible outside a residential building in Brovary.
After the crash a fire broke out close to the kindergarten and children and staff were moved from the building. Wreckage from the helicopter was visible outside a burning building.
Highest Profile Ukrainian Casualty
Interior Minister Denis Monastyrsky, First Deputy Minister Yevheniy Yenin and Secretary of State Yuriy Lubkovychis died in the crash, Anton Geraschenko, an adviser to the ministry, confirmed on social media.
Nine of those killed were aboard the helicopter, according to the head of Ukraine’s National Police Igor Klimenko. The ill-fated aircraft belonged to the Ukrainian Emergencies Ministry, he added.
The Interior Ministry said it’s looking into several possible reasons for the crash, including malfunction of equipment, violation of security rules and sabotage.
Monastyrsky, the 42-year-old interior minister, was a prominent member of President Volodymy Zelensky’s cabinet and played a key role in updating the public on casualties caused by Russian missile strikes since Ukraine was invaded in February 2022.
Monastyrsky is the highest profile Ukrainian casualty since Russia’s operation began, although there is no indication that the crash was anything more than an accident.
The deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said the minister had been en route to a war “hot spot” when his helicopter went down.
Some are only “more of the same” (like the Ukronazis making the Aussies ban Russian flags at the Open), some are rather disgusting (like the Ukronazi blogger who wants to exterminate the Russian people), some are revolting (like the French warning 5000 Russian graves that “their concession is expiring”!), some are hilarious (like the idea of bust of “Ze” at the Capitol building), some are outright crazy (like the idea of a “Ukraine peace summit” without Russian participation). Some are weird but encouraging (like the Kentucky gubernatorial candidate, a Democrat, calling for an impeachment of Biden for war crimes). But some are very, very serious indeed (like the increase of the size of the Russian military to 1.5M or the fact that both the General Milley and Defense Minister Shoigu visiting their troops at the same time.
One could certainly say that these headlines are “signs of the time” (“but can ye not discern the signs of the times?” Matt 16:2-3), but what does this all mean?
First, these headlines are like a snapshot of the West’s collective insanity. Please keep in mind that the past week was no more and no less rich in crazy ideas and statements than previous weeks. This snapshot is what one could call the “West’s homeostasis” or, in other words, that is the norm, the stable mental condition in which the West operates. Future historians, assuming the AngloZionists freaks in power allow us to have a future other than a nuclear apocalypse, will marvel at the collective insanity which overcame an entire continent.
The obvious danger here is that frustrated, hate-filled people are typically not capable of rational decision-making. Let’s, for example, take the “clever” idea of sending the Ukronazis (well, NATO, really) more tanks or aircraft. If you look at the numbers discussed, they are so small as to make no difference. But once you sent them to the Ukraine and they get destroyed by Russian missiles, what do you do next? Send more?
It took the Russians about one month to basically destroy the (original) Ukrainian armed forces.
Then it has taken Russia about 9 months to destroy most of the hardware former Warsaw Treaty Organization (no, it is *not* called a “Pact” – that is pure propaganda and why not call NATO the Atlantic Pact by the same logic?). The sad part here is that in the process of destroying all that WTO kit, Russia had not choice but to inflict horrendous casualties with Ukrainian KIA/MIA going well into the several hundred of thousands. “Ze” sent wave after wave after wave of mobilized men straight into the Russian meat-grinder with no chance of prevail and very little chance of survival.
It might take Russia a year or more to fully destroy all the hardware (and “volunteers”) sent by NATO. Russia is certainly making plans for a long and major war, hence the re-creation of the Moscow and Leningrad Military Districts (you can think of them as “fronts” once a war starts) or the massive increase in weapons procurement up to and including strategic deterrence forces (nuclear and conventional).
Right now, Russia seems to be focusing on destroying the (comparatively) better trained units of the mixed NATO-Ukronazi forces in the eastern Ukraine. The Russian strategy is very simple: Russia can kill NATO soldiers and hardware faster than NATO can provide reinforcements. Obviously, this is only a temporary situation, and there are three groupings of Russian forces (North, East, South) all along the frontlines which can intervene at any time and give Russia something she never had since the initiation of the SMO: a full combined arms offensive and a numerical superiority over the other side.
Most knowledgeable observers, such as Col Maggregor, believe that a Russian offensive is all but certain. Wars can be very unpredictable, and Putin does have a genius ability to act in unpredictable ways, so I would not say that this offensive is absolutely certain, but I agree that it is highly likely. However, such an offensive is not risk free.
In purely military terms, there is no force on the European continent which could take on the Russian forces currently aligned along the Ukrainian border. In political terms, there is a major issue for Russia: any terrain that she liberates will have to be protected.
During the first phase of the SMO, the Russians sent in a comparatively small force, which did great in combat against the Ukronazis, but which did not hold ground (which you never do in economy of force and maneuver warfare), resulting into absolutely awful optics including:
The perception that Russia promises to come and protect the people she liberated only to then abandon them.
The perception that the Russian retreated because of Ukronazi military successes.
The fact that neither of these statements is quite true does not help as they are “close enough” to the truth to sound convincing. As a result, the Russian side completely lost control of the narrative, for a while even inside Russia! It took the appointment of Surovikin to reassure the Russian public that while mistakes were made (including in the early phase of the war or during the mobilization), those mistakes would be addressed and corrected. Now with the Russian Chief of General Staff in final and personal control of the war, nobody doubts that the Kremlin does mean business.
There is also a small, but noticeable change, in the western propaganda with more and more voices dissenting from the official AngloZionist party line. Of course, the economic disaster facing the EU is most helpful in sobering up the Europeans: now that more and more EU citizens have to say “bye bye” to the comforts and jobs they used to enjoy (including first and foremost, dirt cheap energy costs), we can count on an increasingly loud rumble of protests. Maybe not “pro-Russian” ones, no – most Europeans, especially northern Europeans, *do* hate Russia – but at least anti-Establishment ones. Having silenced your conscience does not keep you warm or, for that matter, employed. The EU will now discover the very real costs of rabid russophobia. And sending tanks to the Ukraine obviously won’t help. Hence the current strikes and protests in several EU countries.
So when the promised offensive materializes, there will be only two options left: ditch the Ukronazi regime “Kabul style” or full commit NATO (or a subset of NATO states) to invade the western Ukraine. My money is on the latter option.
Actually, this is not one option, but two very different ones.
In the first case, NATO (or a subset) will move in unilaterally hoping that Russia will not strike the occupation force.
In the second case, the US and Russia could strike a deal and jointly agree to partition the rump-Ukraine.
Obviously, the second solution in infinitely safer and preferable, but just like Hitler and his goons did not want to negotiate with Russian subhumans, neither do the AngloZionists.
Still, here is a truism which must be always kept in mind:
==>>There is nothing in the Ukraine Russia wants or needs<<==
This was true of the Ukraine before the SMO, and it is even more true today. Country 404 is basically deindustrialized and a prototypical failed state, while the population has been so brainwashed that it will take years to deprogram them. Russia only wants two things:
Protect the Russian speaking population from genocide
Deny NATO the use the Ukraine territory to attack Russia
Notice that neither of these options necessarily requires making major territorial gains. I would even argue that, with one exception (see below), it would be ideal for Russia to achieve these objectives by liberating as little as possible of the currently Nazi occupied land. As I have said it many times, the Ukrainians need to clear their own house and not expect Russia to do it for them. Alas, it will take another generation of Ukrainians to do that, assuming they ever will. But as long as country 404 is sufficiently demilitarized, Russia can wait for the denazification to seep into the minds of millions of brainwashed Ukrainians.
The first consequence of this, is that the Russians are more than happy not to move forward and have the US push NATO forces into the Russian meat grinder. True, it is unlikely that Russia will be able to demilitarize and denazify the Ukraine without a major offensive to finish up the Nazi forces. However, the seizure of land is not the Russian goal, only the means to achieve it.
Then there is the issue of the Nikolaev-Odessa-PMR (Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic).
While the Kremlin might have other plans, I personally don’t see any other option than to open a land corridor to PMR. This would also have the immense benefit of cutting the rump-Banderastan from the Black Sea. For NATO, however, the loss of Odessa and the Black Sea Coast would be a major setback, both politically and militarily. There were some really dumb ideas circulated about this in the West,including sending in the 101st as a “tripwire” force. Why is that dumb? Simply because *IF* the Russians have concluded that the liberation of the entire Ukrainian coast is vital to the security of Russia, then no “tripwire” force will stop them. And what will the US do if that tripwire force is attacked? Launch a fullscale nuclear attack on Russia?
Are the US Neocons willing to lose Washington DC, New York, Miami or Los Angeles over Odessa? I don’t know, but if they are the typical self-worshiping Nazis (which they are), then a nuclear holocaust might seem preferable to these hate-filled freaks. Can somebody sane stop them? I don’t know that either.
The headlines above suggest to me that no real decision has been made and that right now there is a tug of war inside the western ruling elites about what to do when the (almost certainly) inevitable Russian offensive happens. By the way, this fact by itself might be a good reason for the Russians not to move in too soon. Yes, it is unlikely that saner voices will prevail, but being a nuclear superpower Russian must act with utmost caution and not listen to the Russian turbopatriots and the western “friends of Russia” would have been advocating for total war for months, if not years.
Maybe the “Georgian model” is what might save the day?
Remember how during the three day war in 08.08.08 Russian forces were closing on Tbilissi with nobody left to defend the Georgian capital? The Russians decided to call back their forces (no, Russia has no need for either the land or the people of Georgia. Sounds familiar?) but Saakashvili reinterpreted this withdrawal as “our heroic and invincible forces stopped the Russians”. And two years before that, Dubya who declared with a straight face that Israel defeated Hezbollah the “Divine Victory” war. So maybe the AngloZionist can save face by declaring that they “prevented Russian from seizing Lvov or Ivano-Frankovsk”? And if the Russians decide not to try to liberate Kiev, then NATO will be able to declared that “we stopped Russia from seizing Kiev”. Yes, that would be a rather transparent lie, at least for those few still capable of critical thought, but I personally much prefer a lie, however, silly, to a fullscale war.
So maybe Russia needs to have a third, unspoken, objective: give the crazies in the West a face-saving “out”, no matter how thin or ridiculous. In fact, I am pretty confident that there are folks in Russia working on this right now.
It has been said often over the past year, most recently by Emmanuel Todd, that the conflict in Ukraine is “existential” for Russia.
Certainly, the Great Bear cannot abide a NATO ballistic missile launchpad just 300 miles from Moscow in a country run my rabidly-Russophobic Nazis — not neo-Nazi skinhead cosplayers but the literal descendants of the real deal.
But others have argued that the Special Military Operation (SMO) is also a make-or-break roll of the dice for NATO and the US which dominates it. How else can we explain the latest mania for arming the regime in Kiev just as its ‘Siegfried Line’ in the Donbass starts to crumble?
How else can one explain cry-bully US National Security Spokesman John Kirby’s response to news that Russian Wagner ‘private military company’ had liberated the town of Soledar, a keystone of the Ukrainian defences? He simultaneously tried to cast doubt on the facts while claiming the town’s capture was strategically insignificant.
“We don’t know his it’s gonna go, so I’m not going to predict failure or success here,” Kirby said as Wagner were mopping up stranded Ukrainian conscripts. “But even if both Bakhmut and Soledar fall to the Russians, it’s not going to have a strategic impact on the war itself, and it certainly isn’t going to stop the Ukrainians or slow them down in terms of their efforts to regain their territory.”
To the contrary, reports indicate that several Ukrainian brigades being concentrated for a southward push on Melitopol, near the narrow isthmus to the Crimea, were redeployed to Donbass in a vain attempt to hold Soledar and Bakhmut, where they suffered huge casualties. Taking Bakhmut could allow the Russian forces to ‘roll up’ the Ukrainian line to the north and south and advance on Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last two major cities Ukraine holds in Donetsk.
Moscow has repeatedly said there can be no peace while the West keeps pumping arms into Ukraine. The most obvious interpretation of those statements is that NATO is only prolonging the suffering of the Ukrainian and Donbass peoples with its cornucopia of death. But another is, as blogger Andrei Martyanov said recently, that the ultimate end of the SMO is not just to de-militarise (and de-Nazify) the Ukraine, but all of NATO too.
Indeed, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in a January 6 TV interview that his country was already a “de facto” member of NATO, and that he had been thanked by unnamed Western politicians for fighting Russia on their behalf to defend their imperialist idea of exclusive “civilisation”.
Western aid to the Ukraine since the start of the SMO — arms supplies and payments for fighting the war on NATO’s behalf — has long since exceeded Russia’s 2022 defence budget of around $75 billion, and even its projected 2023 spend of $84 billion. It’s widely recognised that the Russian arms industry gives you more ‘bang for your buck’, but the disparity has become stark.
On December 22, 2022, Russian Chief of the General Staff, Army General Valery Gerasimov said: “Since the beginning of the special military operation, the West has delivered to Kiev a total of four aircraft, more than 30 helicopters, over 350 tanks, about 1,000 armoured combat vehicles, at least 800 armoured vehicles, up to 700 artillery systems, 100 MLRS [multiple-launch rocket systems], 130,000 anti-tank weapons, more than 5,300 MANPADs, and at least 5,000 UAVs for various purposes.”
Russia’s initial estimate of Ukrainian military strength included 2,416 armoured fighting vehicles — probably about 800 main battle tanks (MBTs) along with 1,600 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) and armoured personnel carriers (APCs) — 152 fixed-wing combat aircraft and 149 helicopters, 180 medium- and long-rang surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems, 1,509 artillery guns and 535 MLRS.
Various Western ‘military analysis’ sources say Ukraine had a lot more tanks and artillery to begin with, although those figures includes mothballed vehicles and guns that would have to be overhauled — while Russia continues to hit repair workshops with its long-range missiles.
In mid-June 2022, Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Denys Sharapov admitted that his army had lost around half its heavy equipment: 400 tanks, 1,300 IFVs and 700 artillery.
At the end of August, the Ukrainian army launched its counter-offensive in the Kherson region. Just three weeks in, on September 21, Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu said his forces on that front had destroyed “208 tanks and 245 infantry fighting vehicles, 186 other armoured vehicles, 15 aircraft and 4 helicopters.” Those losses continued to mount until Russia pulled back across the Dnieper river from the city of Kherson in November 2022. The final tally was around 1,200 armoured vehicles of all types, 40 artillery pieces, 38 aeroplanes and a dozen helicopters.
As of January 14 2023, the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) claims to have destroyed more than 7,500 armoured fighting vehicles of all types, 372 planes and 200 helicopters, 400 SAM systems, 982 MLRS, more than 3,800 self-propelled and towed artillery and 8,000 soft-skinned military vehicles, which include civilian-model trucks and cars.
More specifically, Russia says it has hit at least 31 of the 38 M142 HIMARS MLRS launchers pledged by the US, plus six of the 13 M270 tracked MLRS, of the same nine-inch calibre, donated by the UK, Norway, Germany and France. Also on the clobber list are 122 of the 152 US-made M777 howitzers supplied — 80 per cent of them.
The MoD claims may be exaggerated. But, as The Saker blog points out, even if you halve those numbers then the Ukrainian armed forces are still on the verge of being completely ‘de-militarised’.
The arsenals of NATO’s eastern and southern European members have been scoured for Soviet-made arms and vehicles that the Ukrainian forces already operate and for which they have ammunition and spare parts.
As it turns out, Poland has one of the biggest armies in Europe. It has already supplied, among other things, at least 230 MBTs to Kiev, all variants of the T-72. Warsaw has also sent about 40 IFVs, 72 self-propelled 155mm howitzers, 20 122mm SP howitzers and 20 MLRS.
If, as some suspect, the defence ministry in Warsaw actively encouraged the thousands of serving soldiers to have gone to fight in the Ukrainian ‘Foreign Legion’, Poland has lent its very flesh and blood to the Kiev government.
But the cherry on the cake, announced by Polish President Andrzej Duda on a visit to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky in Lvov, the western Ukrainian city Warsaw still covets, was “a company of Leopard tanks” — 10 to 14 in layman’s terms — which he hoped would be just the start of a new wave of largesse from the “international coalition.”
British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace confirmed on Monday January 16 that the UK was adding a squadron (company) of 14 Challenger 2 MBTs, 24 AS90 155mm SP guns plus an unspecified number of Bulldog APCs and “proected” (i.e. not really armoured) vehicles to the pile of chips on the Ukraine-shaped card table. Rumours of four AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships to follow had been swiftly denied over the weekend.
These tanks have been out of production since 2002 and the British army has just 227 of them. 148 of those are earmarked to be upgraded to the proposed ‘Challenger 3’ standard, although Wallace said that number could be increased — with the implication that there would be fewer to spare. The UK only had 117 AS90s in service as of 2015 and its replacement is still in development, so that pledge represents a fifth of the army’s tracked artillery.
In a leaked internal memo, British Chief of General Staff Sir Patrick Sanders admitted that “giving away these capabilities will leave us temporarily weaker as an army, there is no denying it.”
France has volunteered an unclear number (reportedly 30) of its AMX 10 RC wheeled, turreted vehicles. These have been variously described as “light tanks”, “tank destroyers” or “armoured recce vehicles”, he last reflecting how the French army actually use them. They’re certainly no match for a real MBT.
Marder, She Wrote
The Polish, British and French pledges of token numbers of tanks are explicitly a political move to pressure other countries, especially Germany, to hand over some — or many — of their own. US President Joe Biden already managed to twist German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ arm in the first week of January to give up 40 Marder IFVs by pledging 50 US M2 Bradley IFVs as well.
The ultimate humiliation for Berlin was that the White House announced the move before the German government did. Meanwhile, the new Puma IFV (named after a WWII Nazi armoured car) that is meant to replace the Marder has turned out to be a complete disaster that constantly breaks down. The German defence minister Christine Lambrecht resigned on January 16 — ostensibly for failing to fix the equipment shortage, but also, paradoxically, amid criticism that she has not handed over enough arms to Kiev.
Germany is the biggest European importer of Russian gas and has been reticent to antagonise Moscow too much. It is not lost on the Germans that the last time their tanks were in Ukraine was when the Wehrmacht was perpetrating the genocide of 21 million Soviets.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki was in Berlin on Monday in a bid to unlock that Pandora’s box, arguing NATO should not let tanks “rust away in the warehouses.” Of course, Russia’s approach since WWII of stockpiling old equipment, rather than scrapping or selling it, has been key to its ability to sustain high-intensity combat operations this long.
London also pressed Berlin to grant other countries permission to re-export the tanks it has sold them in the past.
“It is hoped that the example set by the French and us will allow those countries holding Leopard tanks to donate as well. I would urge my German colleagues to do that,” Wallace said, then claimed: “These tanks are not offensive when they are used for defensive methods.”
The Leopard 2 also massively out-sells the much-vaunted US M1 Abrams and the Challenger 2 on the export market. 21 countries have bought the German tank, compared to just eight for the Abrams and only one, Oman, for the Challenger 2. Social media videos of burnt-out and turret-less Leopards strewn across the Ukrainian steppes will really mess up German heavy industry’s bottom line. After the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and the US ‘Inflation Reduction Act’, this would be the third time Berlin has been screwed by its so-called allies.
German tank-maker Rheinmetall’s CEO Armin Papperger tried to head off that outcome on Sunday. He told reporters that Germany could only spare 22 Leopard 2s for Ukraine, and no earlier than 2024. “The vehicles must be completely dismantled and rebuilt,” Papperger stated. The fighting could very well be over by the time they’re fixed.
Scholtz tried to put the ball back in Washington’s court on January 17. “We are never going alone, because this is necessary in a very difficult situation like this,” he said, reiterating that he was anxious to avoid “escalating” the conflict to “a war between Russia and NATO.” Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck more explicit, telling a journalist at the World Economic Forum in Davos the same day: “If America will decide that they will bring battle tanks to Ukraine, that will make it easier for Germany.”
The Pentagon’s excuse for not giving some of its stock of more than 6,000 M1 tanks (compared to Germany’s 300-odd Leopards) to the Ukraine is that they are high-maintenance, voracious gas-guzzlers, even by tank standards, and are fitted with technology that they can’t afford to let fall into Russian hands. But the US has previously exported ‘Nerfed’ versions of the Abrams to several Middle-Eastern countries without the depleted uranium armour inserts and other top-tier systems. The problem is that they turned out to be quite vulnerable.
Many announcements of arms deliveries to the Kiev regime so far have been short on specific numbers. One might speculate that is either because they are embarrassingly small, or because they mean disarming the donor country. Both can be true at once.
For example, Italy’s latest mooted donation is a SAMP-T surface-to-air missile (SAM) battery. Given that the Ukraine started the conflict with 250 long-range S-300 SAMs systems and hundreds of other types, one more is not going to make any difference to the outcome — nor the two Patriot SAM batteries prmised by the US and Germany. But the Italian army only has five SAMP-T systems, and two of those have already been deployed abroad in Kuwait and Slovakia.
Sweden and Finland are not even in NATO yet, and may never be while they both continue to harbour hundreds of Kurdish separatist terrorists wanted in Turkey, which as an existing member has a veto on their entry. But Stockholm may send up to 12 of its 48 Archer self-propelled howitzers to the Ukraine, while Helsinki has already supplied ‘classified’ numbers of APCs, heavy mortars and anti-aircraft guns.
Little Slovakia made headlines last summer when promised Kiev 11 MiG-29 fighters, its entire combat jet fleet. It turns out they still haven’t been delivered, however, and in the meantime Russia has claimed far more aircraft shot down leaving the Ukrainian Air Force at a net loss.
Slovakia’s neighbour the Czech Republic has supplied up to 40 T-72 tanks, 60 IFVs, 50 to 70 SP guns, 20 to 30 MLRS and at least 10 Mi-24 attack helicopters — which have been replaced by either gifts or sales of old AH-1 Cobra choppers from the US.
Latvia donated four helicopters — half its fleet — and six M109 155mm tracked howitzers, which was one in nine of its stocks. Lithuania sent 52 M113 APCs, which is a quarter of its armoured infantry transports, and 10 of its 32 120mm self-propelled mortars based in the same vehicle. Estonia gave nine of its 42 122mm howitzers and what appears to be all seven of its Alvis Mamba light armoured cars. It is these three Baltic micro-states, along with their neighbour Poland, who shout the loudest about the threat of ‘Russian aggression’, yet they are disarming themselves for the sake of the lost cause in the Ukraine.
Logistics? Fiddlesticks!
Mark F. Cancian of the Centre for Strategic and international Studies (a Washington think-tank) has been warning those who will listen about the US military’s logistics problems almost since the start of the SMO.
His latest article, published on January 9, contains a helpful infographic of how many years it will take to replace the arms sent to Ukraine.
Even at the “surge rate” of accelerated production, it will take five years for the US to replenish its stocks of 155mm artillery shells after sending more than 1 million to the Maidan regime. Replacing the 38 HIMARS MLRS launchers sent will take two-and-a-half to three years, while for the Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger shoulder-launched SAMs the time frame could be as long as eight and 18 years respectively.
US Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro appears to agree. Asked this week if the US Navy had reached the point of having to choose between arming itself and Ukraine, he said it was not their yet, but “if the conflict does go on for another six months, for another year, it certainly continues to stress the supply chain in ways that are challenging.”
This betrays a criminally-negligent lack of planning by NATO military staff. Why did the collective west start a fight it couldn’t finish? Did they really think they could bluff Russia into backing down with a few M777s and HIMARS launchers?
Too Little, Too Late
Retired German brigadier general Erich Vad warned last week that the latest round of arms was a “military escalation” even if the 40-plus-year-old Marders were “not a silver bullet.”
“We’re going down a slide. This could develop a momentum of its own that we can no longer control,” Vad said, questioning whether the NATO had a strategy at all. “Do you want to achieve a willingness to negotiate with the deliveries of the tanks? Do you want to reconquer Donbass or Crimea? Or do you want to defeat Russia completely? There is no realistic end state definition. And without an overall political and strategic concept, arms deliveries are pure militarism.”
Brian Berletic of The New Atlas has broken down the latest headline-grabbing pledges of heavy armour to Ukraine. He has explained cogently that nothing is indestructible, and most of the immensely-heavy Western MBTs have proven vulnerable in recent years by man-portable weapons.
Islamic State/DAESH wiped out about 10 Turkish army Leopard 2s when Ankara sent troops into northern Syrian four years ago, and destroyed or captured around Iraqi army 100 M1 Abrams during its sudden seizure of northern Iraq in 2014.
The US Bradley and German Marder IFVs are far more vulnerable. Both are about a third taller and half as heavy again as the Russian equivalent BMP series of vehicles, making them fat targets with the bonus of huge propaganda value when they are destroyed. Armour-wise, the Bradley is only fully protected against Russian 14.5mm heavy machine guns and the Marder against 20mm and 25 mm automatic cannon. The Russian BMPs and the newer wheeled BTRs carry a 30mm cannon, but more importantly anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs), both quite capable of destroying any other IFV in service.
Berletic also puts the numbers to be supplied in context. Along with the 90 refurbished Czech T-72 tanks paid for by the US and Netherlands in the autumn, the new deliveries will only be enough to equip one armoured brigade with its attached mechanised infantry battalions.
Ukraine is now claiming that it will form up three whole new army corps of troops this year, each numbering 75,000 men, for a total of 225,000. That’s as large as the standing army Kiev commanded on February 24 last year. What will they be armed with and transported on, slingshots and bicycles?
Martyanov simply points to the commonly-used algebraic equations for force requirements and battle outcomes as proof that the latest ‘packages’ will make no difference.
General Lord Richard Dannatt agrees with Martyanov and Berletic that a dozen or so tanks is not going to be enough. While still claiming the Challenger is a wonder-weapon, he wrote for the Daily Mail that 50 would be needed to make a difference.
Kiev’s ambassador to the UK, Vadym Prystaiko, combines NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s killer android stare with Zelensky’s shameless passive-aggressive panhandling.
He took the whole argument to its logical conclusion by demanding “hundreds” of tanks in an interview with LBC radio, then upped the stakes to “thousands” when he went on Sky News — in the process admitting that Russia was able to field that many itself despite Western claims it is running out of everything.
Prystaiko probably realises that he is talking about the entire arsenals of the European NATO members, and probably a large part of US military stocks.
Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said simply: “These tanks will burn like the rest. The goals of the special operation will be achieved.”
The whole world has been on tenterhooks for almost a year now, wondering whether the conflict between NATO’s proxy Ukraine and Russia will escalate into full-blown World War Three or just end up as World War Two-and-a-Half: the sequel only the psycho fans wanted.
But instead of weakening Russia militarily and economically, as US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has stated is Washington’s goal, the conflict is destroying NATO’s ability to fight and only making Russia richer and stronger. Moscow may in no hurry to finish it.
In the mean time, let’s hope the West doesn’t throw a tantrum when Russia breaks its best war toys and drop the big one.
And, just to clarify, NATO uses Serbia as a defenseless victim to show Russia what it can do to its allies, the message being, as Stoble Talbott said, “after Serbia, you are next”, so the link here is strong.
NATO did not stop at that, it also continued its policy of persecutions, see these headlines:
Speaking of issues of freedom of religion, NATO is planning to completely ban the parishes which used to have an autonomous status under the Moscow Patriarchate, which then turned against Moscow and condemned the SMO. But that was not enough, so, just like in NATO occupied Kosovo, the persecution of Orthodox clergy and faithful is both a “feel good” operation for Orthodoxy-haters and a “message” to Moscow.
NATO did not stop at that, it also announced yet another military aid package for Banderastan: (no translation needed I suppose)
None of that will be enough to make a difference, but there are many more such “aid” programs being discussed, so NATO wants to continue to draw out this war for as long as possible and fight the Russians down to the last Ukrainian.
Not that any of this did any good to “Ze” and his gang: having rejected the Russian truce, the Ukronazis are now loosing the towns of Soledar and Artemovsk (see here for details), which are not only tactical victories for the Russians, but this now threatens the operational defenses of the Ukronazis which will have to fall back on what we could call a “third line of defense” if they want to restabilize the front.
Russia has also continued with her strikes, including an absolutely huge explosion at the NATO base in Ochakovo and a retaliatory attack following the HIMARS strike which killed nearly 100 Russian soldiers. The retaliatory attack was aimed at two barracks in Kramatorsk and, according to the Russian, it killed 600 Ukronazis soldiers. Finally, it appears that 40% of the Ukrainian electrical grid is down forever, since nobody (except Russia) can replace the extremely heavy (and costly) transformers needed to reconnect that grid (now all electrical power is local, with no means to distribute it through the grid).
Feel the hatred
I think that it would be fair to say that what we are witnessing is possibly the most intense demonization of a political leader – Putin – and a country – Russia – in history. And it is absolutely *not* only something coming from the West’s ruling class. A few days ago my daughter and I were laughing because she accompanied some kids to an comics/action figures store and, to her dismay, most customers were adults (lots of infantiles in the USA). Then I asked her, just for fun, “was there any Putin action figure on sale”? There were none, obviously, but we decided to check on the Internet, again, just for fun and, we saw what was on offer on Etsy. Here is the link, see for yourself: https://www.etsy.com/market/putin_action_figure
Now Etsy is not a front for the CIA, and items sold there are mostly made by individuals. I suggest you go through a couple of page of items in the link above and see for yourself: Putin-hatred is certainly a very “popular” thing in the West.
Another example, check out this website: https://fightforua.org/. This is about a worldwide recruitment operation to send mercenaries to the Ukraine. The traffic on that site is modest, but the effort directly linked to the Ukie military “intelligence” service (it goes through their military attaches) and that means that it is run by NATO.
And then there are all the mantric statements from Western politicians expressing their total love and support of “Ze”, his policies and Banderastan.
Which begs the question:
What would it take for the West to see the true (Nazi) face of Banderastan?
So far, the narrative has not changed: Putin is a megalomaniacal dictator who wants to restore the Soviet Union (or the Russian Empire), Russia attacked the Ukraine because that is what Russians do – they attack others for no good reason. Banderastan is a de facto NATO member state who fight in a “NATO operation” (as per the Ukie Minister of “Defense”) and it now protects all of Europe from the Russian hordes. And since the heroic Ukrainian soldiers are shedding their blood, the very least NATO and the EU can do is to supply infinite amount of money and weapons to this freedom-loving beautiful and heroic country. Listening to that nonsense one could be forgiven for assuming that Country 404 is as democratic as Iceland or San Marino.
It is even more amazing, at least at the first glance, to see how strong the Israeli and Jewish support for a clearly Nazi regime has been. Of course, the Israelis/Jews have no love for the Nazis, but they hate Russia even more than they hate the Nazis (which is quite ironic, since all the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire happened in the Ukraine and not in what is Russia today). This is also true of all the doubleplusgoodthinking western politicians who ban Nazi symbols or “revisionist” books in their own countries, but who fully support the Nazis in NATO and Kiev.
[The topics of “Israel” deserves a separate article, as that country leaders go from bad, to worse to completely insane. Their latest “brilliant idea”: call the Palestinian flag as a “terror flag” and then to ban its public display. In Palestine. Does that not sound Ukie to you? It is not exactly the kind of batshit crazy action which both Banderastan and “Israel” are known for and which the freedom loving and doubleplusgoodthinking western politicans and media will never see, as their hate-filled eyes are only directed as Moscow. In fact, I would argue that “Israel” is something of a precedent and even an “older brother” to Banderastan – infinitely ugly, infinitely evil, yet enthusiastically supported by the entire West.]
The Ukronazis can burn people alive, torture all their POWs, completely suppress the freedom of information, murder civilians by the many thousands, try to deprive entire regions of water and electricity (they never realized that karma can be a bitch!), persecute people for having the wrong photo on their cellphones, “disappear” many thousands of supposed political opponents, ban languages, close down churches, freely use a unambiguously racist terminology dehumanizing their own citizens, etc. etc. etc. And for all that, they get a standing ovation (in Congress, literally), billions of dollars of “aid”, tons of weapons and thousands of “volunteers”.
And yet, far from being reviled, “Ze” and his gang are lionized by the West while “Ze’s” victims are demonized and Russia, as a civilization, “canceled” (and not only by authorities, most of that “canceling” is done spontaneously and quite voluntarily).
What is being ignored here is this: what does the West’s total support for the Albanian terrorists in Kosovo, the Israeli terrorists in Palestine and the Ukronazis in Banderastan say about the West itself?
Yes, I know, the Neocons who run the US don’t give a damn about what any “deplorables” might think about them as they see themselves as fundamentally superior and entitled to rule the world. What they are completely missing in their narcissistic self-worship is that much of Zone B is absolutely disgusted with the AngloZionist Empire. Just one example:
Are you aware that most of Latin America is taking an increasingly strong anti-US stance? Following the attempted coup against President Lula in Brazil, all of the following countries immediately condemned that (obviously CIA run) coup including: Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador and even Colombia (which is a tectonic change in Colombian politics)! I got that list from this article, but I am confident that we can add Bolivia and Nicaragua to that list. In fact, I wonder if there is any Latin American country who backed the coup (if yes, please post it in the comments). Yes, even Colombia, which used to be Uncle Shmuel’s bitch for decades, now elected its first President who is not a US puppet.
Much of the same is happening in Africa where more and more countries are openly (and covertly) supporting Russia and ditching their colonial oppressors – like France in Mali – see here for details.
And, again, we observe the same in the Middle-East were countries such as the KSA, which used to be joined at the hip with the USA, are now seeking Russian support and through the Russians, a channel of communications with Iran. Again, these are immense geostrategic shifts which the western free and democratic media tries very hard to ignore.
There is a well-known saying which goes “tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are“. Clearly, racist freaks like Bibi Netanyahu or “Ze” are not only the “friends” of the West, they are the West’s heroes, which deserve infinite support not matter what evil actions they commit, it all goes away under the “our son of a bitch” doctrine which makes is possible to support both Zionists in Palestine and Nazis in Banderastan. As I wrote many times, both Zionism and National-Socialism are twin brothers, born from the same European nationalistic womb; and while they claim to hate each other, they mostly work together as we have seen in the example of, say, South Africa. So yes, these two monsters do hate each other, but they hate Russia even more, hence their current alliance in Banderastan.
Conclusion: the true (Nazi) face of Banderastan is the true face of the West
The Ukronazis used to have a slogan “Україна – це Європа” (Ukraine is Europe). The past eight years have shown us that the opposite is true – Europe is the Ukraine. And since the original Ukie slogan very much includes the USA as part of being “European” (which I would very much dispute), we can basically conclude that “the West is the Ukraine”.
It would be stupid to expect Nazis to condemn other Nazis. That is just not going to happen. Not until Russia defeats NATO, at which point the European “great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies” (BoJo) will have to quickly rebrand themselves as peace loving “good neighbors” of Russia or live in terror (and poverty!), and not because Russia will attack any EU country, but because they will have lost even the illusion of US “protection” (aka colonization) of the EU. And there will be A LOT of finger pointing, especially at the rabid Hyena of Europe and the UK (nobody will even notice the quite irrelevant Baltic statelets which nobody needs, including Russia).
It goes without saying that the West’s support for Banderastan and “Israel” is a wholesale and very public repudiation of the values which the West claimed to stand for. I would argue that one of the biggest achievements of the SMO was to force the West to show it’s true (Nazi and Zionist) face. Ironically, this is not unlike what happened in the Soviet Union where Marxist-Leninist propaganda was everywhere, but absolutely *nobody* took it seriously. And here is the crucial factor to always keep in mind: every regime in history, no matter how brutal and oppressive, needs at least some degree of public support. As Talleyrand, Bonaparte’s Foreign Minister, once said “My Lord, you can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them“, and this is quite true. Furthermore, history shows that there is a critical moment when the rulers of a regime are seen has hypocrites the regime inevitably collapses. Right now the ruling class which runs the West looks like a gang of meat-eating carnivores claiming to stand for “vegan values”, something nobody can take seriously (except maybe those truly too dull to be able to understand anything).
And then there is this: Russia is arguably the last Christian country in Europe (the other one would be Serbia). The rest of the continent has now comprehensively caved to the “Woke” ideology, yet another reason for their hatred for Russia: compared to Russia, the post-Christian West looks idolatrous and even openly demonic! Remove Russia, and that would be far less obvious (without any point of comparison). Considering this state of affairs, I think that it is quite safe to assume that in the future it will be Islam, brought in by millions of emigrants, which play a much bigger role in European affairs than any remnants of pseudo-Christianity. From a Russian point of view, this would be much preferable than to deal with Orthodoxy-hating pseudo-Christians.
But all that will only happen once NATO is defeated and the EU denazified and demilitarized. Until then, the coven of witches which run NATO will continue to fully support Ukrainian Nazis and Israeli Zionists.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 