Note from Michael Rossi Poli Sci who subtitled that video:
Dear Patreon Supporters,
First off, thank you once again for your pledged support and votes of confidence on my work.
Unfortunately, YouTube decided to remove the latest video I uploaded today (Sunday November 27) of Sergey Lavrov giving an interview on political extremism in Europe AS “hate speech”. How they came to that conclusion is beyond me, but I suppose it had to do with the video title having the word “extremism” in it, and “nazism” in the description.
Either way, YouTube removed the video and I have received my first Community Guideline strike, preventing me from upload, commenting, or interacting in any way on my channel for a week. I have appealed the strike, but I don’t know when I will hear back.
In the meantime, I have uploaded the video here and made it publicly accessible. Please feel free to share with those whom you think would benefit from it. For the next week, you’re my “ambassadors” of sorts 🙂
I hope to get this straightened out ASAP, because YouTube offers no prior warning or review of content before something gets flagged, and videos with direct “hate speech” get published all the time.
I may start moving more of the translated videos over here and making it Patrons Only.
Yesterday I received an email from a Ukrainian friend of mine. By “Ukrainian” I mean that his culture and self-identity is Ukrainian, he loves his heritage, speaks the language and loves his country. In fact, he is what I would call a “real Ukrainian” as opposed to the Ukronazis in power in Kiev. We correspond regularly and exchange opinions on what is taking place. Here is and excerpt of what I wrote to him yesterday:
“I am also heartbroken with the evolution of the war to liberate the Ukraine from NATO: while I have no doubts about the outcome, I am horrified at the thought of what this does to the civilian population. My sadness is even made deeper by the realization that to a large degree the people of the Ukraine did it to themselves. Russia tried REALLY HARD to not have a war, then she tried REALLY HARD to save the civilians and the civilian infrastructure. But the people under Nazi occupation believed all the propaganda coming out of the regime in Kiev and the West and now there will be hell to pay. For 6 months these naive people thought the Ukraine was winning because they could not even fathom that Russia was only using about 10% of her forces and trying really hard to save as many Ukrainians. But no, they were celebrating the murder of Dugina, the attack on the Crimean Bridge, the attacks on the ZNPP and now they are going to pay a horrible price for these delusions and, frankly, lack of decency/morality. As Douglas MacGregor said “the Russians are about to bring a sledge-hammer” to vaporize the NATO forces in the Ukraine. We did not want that. It was imposed on us. What else can I say? The Nazis will be crushed, but the costs of doing so will be needlessly high. Millions of refugees will be added to the millions who already fled. I feel utterly disgusted, sad and angry about this outcome As one Rock song I know (“Gates of Babylon” by Rainbow – see below) says: “sleep with the devil, and then you must pay, sleep with the devil and the devil will take you away“. I am sad to say that I believe that the people of the Ukraine did “sleep with the devil” (the West) and now comes the inevitable.
After sending my email, I kept thinking about utter insanity of the Ukrainian actions. An outside observer could be forgiven for thinking that the Ukrainian people have some kind of death wish, and if maybe not most people, then at least the leaders of the Ukraine. And then it hit me.
The Ukraine is doing what is known in the USA as “suicide by cop” which Wikipedia defines as “Suicide by cop or suicide by police is a suicide method in which a suicidal individual deliberately behaves in a threatening manner, with intent to provoke a lethal response from a public safety or law enforcement officer“.
This is what the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin has to say about such a situation: (emphasis added)
Suicide by cop situations are more intense than other suicide calls. All parties are armed, or the victim appears to be armed. The individual is active, rather than passive, and aggressive toward police or others. Despite its unique features, SBC fits the template of suicidal behavior as a planned outcome to an unfolding psychological process. Prevention and intervention are possible at the same points as in suicide by other means. Theoretically, suicides are preventable; however, realistically they may not be avoidable because of the nature of the plan or the point where first responders encounter the suicidal individual. SBC often is unpreventable. This must be considered in the aftermath regarding the officers who were coerced to be the unwilling means.
And, just to clarify, I do NOT consider that Russia is some kind of “cop” who has to enforce the law on anybody else. Not at all. But I do see a moral parallel between the cop who does not want to kill the suicidal person with a gun, but might have no choice, and the fact that Russia simply had no other choice other than to take action when the Donbass was threatened with imminent invasion and Russia was threatened by Ukronazi plans to acquire a nuclear weapon.
Sometimes the only way to disarm a person is to use your own gun. That is exactly what happened here.
What makes this all even worse is that the dark forces in the West which created the Ukraine in the first place joined with the Nazis and Neocons (the two ugly twins who fight each other but look so much alike!) to push the Ukrainian people into a war which they never had any chance to win. The Ukrainian military was defeated by mid-March but that was not enough for the Hegemony, so they ordered waves of mobilizations and sent in THOUSANDS of “advisors” and “volunteers”. By mid-summer what had been a Ukronazi military was basically replaced by a de facto NATO force which is now also being “demilitarized”.
The AngloZionist Empire promised the Ukrainian people peace, prosperity and all the riches of the western propaganda (which is quite different from the West’s reality) and the ignorant people of the Ukraine (brainwashed first by Soviet, then Western propaganda) bought it all, “hook, line and sinker”. This is similar to two vicious adults promising a 5 year old some super tasty candy and telling that 5 year old that “all he has to do” in exchange for the candy was to throw a few stones at a sleeping bear and “don’t worry, if the bear wakes up we will protect you!“.
Now that bear is awake, and mighty angry at that: the 5 year old is getting eviscerated while the vicious adults who promised him “a land flowing with milk and honey” are watching (from what they – mistakenly – believe is safe distance) and laughing at it all.
This is truly demonic evil.
There are still those out there who cannot, or don’t want, to understand what is taking place.
So here I will share a video with you which has been circulating on the Internet which shows you exactly what this all looks like in reality.
See for yourself: (no need for translation other than “ВСУ” meaning “armed forces of the Ukraine”).
What this video shows are two attempts by the Ukrainian forces to attack: first LDNR forces and then the Wagner PMCs. What happens next is predictable: first, you see a small-arms exchange of fire, then the Russians use mortars. Russian very precise artillery strikes come next. Then full-scale MLRS attacks followed by even more strikes by a pair of Su-25 and one single Su-34. According to Russian sources, in this (very small) attack, all (most?) Ukrainians were killed while the Russians did not suffer any casualties. Notice that the Ukrainian soldiers, while definitely brave, have absolutely no support. Notice also the tiny size of the attacking force: the Ukrainians used to attack with several “brigades” (well, kind of), now they are down to squad/platoon level engagements!
And that kind of needless butchery happens every day, day after day after day after day.
My Ukrainian friend also asked me why Russia does not take out “Ze” and his gang.
I think that this is the crux of the problem: I believe that it should be the Ukrainian people themselves who should overthrow “Ze”, not the Russians. Just as it was infantile to believe that the EU would turn the Ukraine into a new Germany overnight, it is equally infantile to believe that “Putin will come and restore order”. Putin is the President of Russia, not the Ukraine, and it is not his job to rescue the Ukraine from the pit it fell into.
There are also three practical for not decapitating the Kiev regime (yet):
The regime has no agency anyway, do all which such a decapitating strike would achieve is cutting off an already quite dead head.
The Hegemony could quickly replace the old gang with a new one.
“Ze” & Co. are so fantastically incompetent that Russia could not hope to have a weaker, dumber and more incompetent adversary anyway.
It is, however, Putin’s job to protect Russia and the people of Russia. By pushing the Ukrainians towards more and more dangerous provocations the Neocons were fully aware that they were pushing the Ukrainians into a type of “suicide by bear” folly.
The sad truth is that Russia was given no other option than to do that which the Ukrainian people could not (or would not) do: denazify the Ukraine. And since the Ukraine could not be denazified, it had to be disarmed.
[Sidebar: oh and please don’t give me “but the Ukrainians could not do anything to resist” argument. Resistance is always possible, even under the harshest and most evil regimes. And when that resistance appears to be futile, then it remains a question of honor, of personal choice, of a moral obligation to resist as best one can. Resistance to evil is what defines our humanity. And if one really cannot, then, at the very least, every person has the option to “live not by lies“! Again, resistance, however humble and small, is always possible, and the people of the Donbass have proven it!]
This latest Neocon-originated bloodbath is already well into the hundred of thousands of people needlessly killed, maimed or displaced. This winter it will only get worse.
And what do you think the Ukronazis do to somehow mitigate this catastrophe?
This would all be quite hilarious if this was not also so horrible and if millions did not have to suffer from the actions of the shaitans ruling the West!
The FBI is quite correct. Suicide by cop is mostly unpreventable.
Was it right for Russia to try so hard to avoid a fullscale war? Yes.
Was it right for Russian to try to minimize the damage to the civilians and the Ukraine’s infrastructure? Yes again, absolutely!
Think about it: if Russia had attacked the Ukraine à la “shock and awe” from Day 1 and turned Kiev, Kharkov or Lvov into “Ukrainian Fallujahs” then it would have been much more credible to blame Russia for the massive “collateral damage” such an attack would inevitably entail.
Does anybody blame the cop for a “suicide by cop” death?
Of course not!
Yes, that policy of trying to spare the Ukraine did cost Russia a lot, not only in political terms but also in lost Russia lives.
But, at least, we tried.
Maybe that is the biggest difference between Russians and Ukrainians?
Andrei
***
The week-end is coming up and I normally share a few musical videos with you. Today I am going to post only one: the video of Rainbow I mentioned above. I would just note that according to the guitarist, Richie Blackmore, his solo on “Gates of Babylon” is his best solo ever. I very much agree. In terms of structure, the beginning of the song is based on a double harmonic major scale/mode, but then the solo switches to a sequence of chords/harmonies which are much more reminiscent of baroque music, specifically J.S. Bach (something which Richie Blackmore had already explored with Deep Purple, but which he truly mastered with this superb song). The singer is the late Ronnie James Dio, the best voice in all of Rock music in my humble opinion. Enjoy!
All nationalities have contemptuous or humorous words for their neighbours. Often these words come from the differences between them, especially as regards diet or dress. For example, the Americans call Germans ‘krauts’ (because they eat sauerkraut – pickled cabbage) and the British ‘limeys’ (from British sailors who ate limes), the French call the English ‘rosbifs’ (roast beefs) and the English call the French ‘frogs’. However, behind these terms there lie all kinds of unpleasant associations and stereotypes, which define all the worst characteristics of a particular people, but certainly do not apply to the mass or majority of that people. Thus, krauts are also square-headed fools, limeys are the lowest of the lowest criminal class (such were 18th century British sailors), rosbifs are beer-swilling (football) hooligans (the sort who buy, but do not read, British tabloids (1)) and frogs are people who will eat anything without distinction, as they are obsessed by their stomachs.
Khokhly
As for the Ukrainians, they call Russians ‘moskali’ (Muscovites) and the Russians call Ukrainians ‘khokhly’. A ‘moskal’ is also a bigoted Great Russian chauvinist with a superiority complex, who despises provincials in the Ukraine who used to have a certain hairstyle called a ‘khokhol’ (literally a forelock, a style revived by some hair-conscious Ukrainian nationalists today). However, as a very good half-Polish, half-Ukrainian friend explained to me years ago: ‘Ukrainians live in the Ukraine, khokhly (plural of khokhol) live anywhere they can’. What he meant by this is that the lowest sort of Ukrainians are not patriots at all, but have no principles and will take advantage of anything they can get, as they do not have any responsibilities or respect for others and do not have to work. In a word, khokhly swim with the tide and will sell you their grandmothers, if they think they can make a bit of money out of it, at the same time despising the buyer as an idiot.
For example, you may have heard of the expression ‘Russian brides’. The term has rightly become a synonym for ‘gold-digger’. Well, most of them are Ukrainians. I remember about ten years ago a man in his 60s coming to me to complain about his gold-digger Ukrainian ex-wife, a so-called ‘Russian bride’. The usual story: she was 30 years younger than him, had flattered his male vanity and then fleeced him (plumer in French, literally, to pluck the feathers off) for everything she could get her greedy, gold-digging hands on. As they say, no fool like an old fool. Of course, I could not help him. His reason for coming to me was that she had told him she was an Orthodox Christian. Of course, she was not at all, neither Orthodox, nor a Christian. I had never seen her in my life. This is a story among thousands of others. She was not a typical Ukrainian, but she was a typical ‘khokhol’.
The Sense of Entitlement
Since last March Europe has been flooded by Ukrainian ‘refugees’. And they keep coming, nearly four million of them now, and rising daily. Of course, very, very few of them are actually refugees. Until this October very, very few Ukrainians had been affected by the war which their government (a majority of them had voted for it) began in the Donbass in 2014. Those who were refugees had mainly fled to Russia – in their millions since 2014. There they were made welcome. (I have one such woman in my parish, who got married here last year). In Europe they were told that there was no war in the Donbass and they were illegal immigrants (I have such a family in my parish). The ‘refugees’ are mostly, typical for the lowest layer, ‘khokhly’, who take advantage of Western politicians and the racist naivety and anti-Russian prejudices of ignorant Western people. The khokhly are simply on an extended vacation, with a chance to travel in Western Europe, expenses paid – something they, visa-less, had been dreaming of for years back in the Ukraine.
Khokhly do not want to, or intend to, work, and are heartily despised by the real Ukrainians, who have been here for years, have learned the native language, and do work – very hard. I remember introducing one of the ‘refugees’ to longstanding Ukrainian parishioners. The conversation lasted two minutes. As my parishioner said to me afterwards: ‘As soon as he got out his latest model of Iphone, I walked away. I knew exactly what his game was’. He confirmed what I had thought. Fraudsters. Many of the ‘refugees’ do float around European towns and cities in their UA-registered expensive German cars, much better cars than those of their naïve Western hosts. The sense of entitlement is: ‘I am Ukrainian, you owe me everything’. ‘You are not a Ukrainian, you are a khokhol’, is my answer to them.
The khokhly take free food and clothes, elbowing the local poor people out of the way. They do not make themselves liked – at all. Some register themselves in several Western countries and receive benefit money from several countries. Meanwhile they have rented out their flats in the Ukraine to fellow-Ukrainians, often real refugees. Even more money coming in. Fraud is in their nature. In the Ukraine itself, the khokhly are now stealing gas which Russia sends to the desperately poor Moldovans. What else would you expect from khokhly? The same with Western arms, which (mainly Jewish) Ukrainian arms merchants are selling on the black market to all and sundry, including to Russians. A friend in Switzerland described their antics in church. You can recognise them easily, he said, as their children behave so badly. Why? Because they have never been to church in their lives. Their parents go to church, to meet others, to do business, to plan their next moneymaking moves and see if church people are stupid enough to give them something for free.
How naïve can Western people be? They are taking into their homes complete strangers who speak another language, have another culture and are often very picky with their food, and allowing them everything. It is political hypocrisy – real refugees are not allowed. Europe is awash with genuine refugees, Afghans and Syrians, victims of other NATO wars. But in what is open racism, they get nothing from Western countries, except life behind barbed wire in deportation camps because they are ‘brown’. But khokhly? They are allowed everything. However, after eight months, at least some Western Europeans have seen through them. Ordinary Polish people, and now already 1 in 25 people in not very prosperous and very hard-working Poland is a khokhol, are getting fed up with them. In France and England, many khokhly have been turned out onto the street by disillusioned sponsors. Their behaviour has been so appalling. Some are now turning up in the prison system.
Several million of them have already returned to the Ukraine. They pumped Western naivety for all it was worth and when they understood there was nothing more to take, they went back home, suitably enriched and with huge contempt for their former hosts. A Russian parishioner told me about her stupid acquaintance, a Russian called Marina who is married to a Frenchman. From the liberal chattering classes of Saint Petersburg, burdened by the guilt of political correctness, she had taken in a ‘poor Ukrainian woman’ (‘how they suffer because of that terrible Putin’). Marina came home early one day and found the naked young Ukrainian woman lying on the bed next to her equally naked French husband. It took her exactly ten minutes to turn the ‘poor Ukrainian woman’ out on to the street. As for her husband, he said he was ‘just having a rest and had no idea that a naked young woman was lying next to him’. As I understand it, this Marina believed him (2). Plus ca change….
Dekhokhlification
The fact is that most of the best Ukrainians, the real and honourable Ukrainians, have stayed in the Ukraine. Of all the ‘refugees’ I have met so far (and that must be over 100), I have not yet met one who is authentic. Whether by unintended consequence or by design, the Russian Federation is very successfully ‘dekhohklifying’ the Ukraine. Russia is successfully emptying the Ukraine of the lowest and most unprincipled layer of parasites, the khokhly. The population of the Ukraine is already down to fewer than 30 million – so far. More are leaving every day, streaming into Poland The khokhly go westwards. Let Western Europe take them, the rubbish. The good ones will stay. A few months ago I still thought that Russia would just free the Donbass, as it announced last February and also take the land-bridge of Zaporozhie and Kherson to protect the Crimea from the Nazis, who were turning off the water supply from there. Then I realised that Russia would have to go further, simply because the West was supplying the Kiev regime with shells and missiles that were falling not just on the liberated areas, but even in southern Russia.
Today it seems to me that Russia will have to liberate the whole of the Ukraine, even as far as Lvov and the border with Poland. Why not, if the trouble-making khokhly have gone and are bankrupting Western social security systems with their parasitic sponging? Why should the treacherous Poles get anything out of this? The Poles rejoiced when the UK blew up Nordstream and then tried to start World War III, blaming a murderous Ukrainian missile on Russians. Let them pay for the consequences. If the Nazis are either all dead or living in the EU, there is no reason for Russia to stop in the Donbass, or Kiev, or even Lvov. Liberate right up to the Polish border, freeing freezing Non-NATO Moldova on the way and stopping only there, at the Romanian border. Maybe let the Romanians have back North Bukovina (Chernivtsy) and the nice Hungarians have (the to-be-renamed) Zakarpattia. As for the rest: Winner takes all. Russia may now take all of the Ukraine because all the Nazi khokhly will have left for stupid Western Europe. It will have a nice straight border then. It is not a question of how many Ukrainian ‘refugees’ will go back. It is a question of how many of them Russia will allow back. The answer is very few.
Conclusion
On 24 November President Lukashenko stated that the Ukraine is now threatened with total annihilation: https://news.mail.ru/politics/54019554/?frommail=1. That is the result of forbidding your people human rights for eight years, massacring them, and refusing to love your Russian neighbour. As Russia bombards the Ukrainian electricity infrastructure, east, centre and west, from Kharkov to Odessa, from Kiev to Lvov, affecting heating, light and water supply, the stream of khokhly heading for the EU will increase pressure on the West to make the Kiev regime return to the negotiating table, from which the selfsame West forced the selfsame Kiev regime to leave last March. And if Zelensky refuses, he may well find himself eating polonium or novichok. MI6 are experts at that. Meanwhile, Finland is intending to build a wall between itself and Russia. We hope that Poland and others will do the same. This will save Russia the expense of doing it. The old Berlin Wall and watchtowers and mines along the East German border were to prevent people going westwards. The new one will be about preventing depraved LGBT Westerners going eastwards.
25 November 2022
Notes:
1. Some 20 years ago, a poll ‘discovered’ that 30% of ‘readers’ of the notorious British tabloid ‘The Sun’ are illiterate. As the Americans say: Go figure.
2. This is a case I know of personally. Other such equally absurd cases have been reported in the European media. One senses that the Establishment-inspired adoration of Ukrainians is fast fading in Western Europe. Reality is dawning, even among tabloid readers.
*The author with Pyatnashka commanders at outpost near Avdeevka, Donetsk People’s Republic. [Source: Photo courtesy of Eva Bartlett]
Published Nov 19, 2022, Covert Action[See the comments section, some apologists for the West’s war on Syria have resurfaced…]
Smeared, stigmatized, and lied about in Western media propaganda, the mostly Russian-speaking people of the Donbass region were being slaughtered by the thousands in a brutal war of “ethnic cleansing” launched against them by the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv, which the U.S. installed after the CIA overthrew Ukraine’s legally elected president in a 2014 coup.
Although the Donbass people had been pleading for Russian military aid to defend them against the increasingly murderous military assaults by the Ukraine government forces, which killed more than 14,000 of their people, Russian President Vladimir Putin declined to intervene. Instead, he tried to broker a peace agreement between the warring parties.
But the U.S. and Britain secretly colluded to sabotage peace negotiations, persuading president Zelenksy to ignore the Minsk III peace agreement that the Ukraine government had previously signed, and which had been countersigned by Russia, France and Germany.
Realizing that the U.S. and its NATO allies would never permit peace negotiations to succeed, Putin finally sent troops into Ukraine on February 24. Russian troops went in to support and reinforce the outnumbered and outgunned Donbass Forces who had been defending their land against attacks by the Kyiv government for nearly eight years.
Voices From the Frontlines of Former Eastern UkraineRepublics
In the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in October, I went to a frontline outpost 70 meters from Ukrainian forces in Avdeevka (north and west of Donetsk), according to the Donbas commanders I spoke with there. [Watch our interview here]
To reach that position, I went with two other journalists to a meeting point with two commanders of Pyatnashka—volunteer fighters, including Abkhazi, Slovak, Russian, Ossetian and other nationalities, including locals from Donbas.
From there, they drove us to a point as far as they could drive before walking the rest of the way, several minutes through brush and trenches, eventually coming to their sandbagged wood and cement fortified outpost.
It has changed hands over the years, Ukrainian forces sometimes occupying it, Donbas forces now controlling it.
*“Vydra,” a unit commander of the Pyatnashka fighters. [Source: Photo courtesy of Eva Bartlett]
One soldier, a unit commander who goes by the call sign “Vydra” (Otter), was formerly a miner from the DPR who had been living in Russia with his family. In 2014, he returned to the Donbas to defend his mother and relatives still there. He spoke of the outpost.
“We dug and built this with our hands. Several times over the years, the Ukrainians have taken these positions. We pushed them back, they stormed us…Well, we have been fighting each other for eight years.”
There, artillery fire is the biggest danger they face. “You can hide from a sniper, but not from artillery, and they’re using large caliber.”
His living quarters is a dank, cramped, room with a tiny improvised bed, with another small room and bed for others at the outpost.
A sign reads: “If shelling occurs, go to the shelter.” The kind of sign you see all over Donetsk and cities of the Donbas, due to Ukraine’s incessant shelling of civilian, residential areas. In a frontline outpost where incoming artillery is the norm, the sign is slightly absurd, clearly a joke.
An Orthodox icon sits atop the sign. Ukrainian nationalists hang and spray Nazi graffiti and slogans of death; these fighters revere their faith.
A poster, with the DPR flag, reads: “We have never known defeat, and it’s clear that this has been decided from above. Donbas has never been forced to its knees, and no one will ever be allowed to.”
The only things decorating the space are tins of tuna and canned meat, instant noodles, and washing powder. Their existence is bare minimum, nothing glamorous about it; they volunteer because, as they told me, this is their land and they will protect it.
Perhaps surprising to some, when Vydra was asked whether he hates Ukrainians, he replied emphatically no, he has friends and relatives in Ukraine.
“We have no hatred for Ukraine. We hate those nationalists who came to power. But ordinary Ukrainians? Why? Many of us speak Ukrainian. We understand them, they understand us. Many of them speak Russian.
I’ve been involved in sports a lot of time, wrestling. So, I’ve got a lot of friends in Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Kirovograd, Odessa, Lvov, Ivano-Frankivsk, Transcarpathia.
I have relatives in western Ukraine, and we still communicate. Yes, they say one thing on the street, but when we talk to each other, they say, ‘Well, you have to, because the SBU is listening.’
Ukraine shouts about democracy, then puts people in handcuffs for no reason. My aunt got in trouble because they found my photo on her Skype.
And I’m on the Myrotvorets [kill list] website.” [As is the author, see this article.]
He spoke of Ukraine’s shelling from 2014, when the people of the Donbass were unarmed and not expecting to be bombed by their own country.
“When the artillery hit the city of Yenakievo, east of Gorlovka, we were defenseless. We went with hunting rifles and torches to fight them. Most of the weapons we had later were captured from them. We had to go to the battlefield without weapons in order to get the weapons.”
When asked if he was concerned that Ukrainian forces might take Donetsk he replied no, of course not, they didn’t succeed in 2014, they won’t now.
When asked whether he had a message for soldiers of the Ukrainian army, Vydra replied without hesitating, “Go home! We’ve been saying that since 2014: Go home. Unequivocally, we don’t want them here, but we don’t want to kill them. I’m not speaking about nationalists, I’m speaking about Ukrainian soldiers, who are drafted or forcefully employed in the Ukrainian army. Guys, go home, either surrender or go. This is our land. We’re not leaving, we’re not going anywhere.”
I asked how he felt to be treated and described as sub-human, to be called dehumanizing names, a part of the Ukrainian nationalists’ brainwashing propaganda. As I wrote previously:
“Ukrainian nationalists openly declare they view Russians as sub-human. School books teach this warped ideology. Videos show the extent of this mentality: Teaching children not only to also hate Russians and see them as not humans, but also brainwashing them to believe killing Donbas residents is acceptable. The Ukrainian government itself funds neo-Nazi-run indoctrination camps for youths.”
“It’s offensive,” Vydra said, “We are saddened: There are sick people. We need to heal them, slowly.”
I asked whether he thought friendship between Ukrainians and Russians would be possible.
“It will take years for any friendship. Take Chechnya, one region of Russia, it was at war. But slowly, slowly…We must all live together. We are one people.” Indeed, now Chechen fighters are one of the most effective forces fighting alongside Donbas and Russian soldiers to liberate Donbas areas from Ukrainian forces.
He opened a zippered trousers pocket and proudly brandished a small plastic sleeve containing children’s drawings, also containing icons of saints and Christ, and prayers…
“This is very personal, it’s like my guardian angel. I put it in plastic, I don’t even keep my ID in plastic. I’ve been carrying this one in my pocket since February. I’ve been in all sorts of hot spots. A child drew this, we receive letters from children. It’s very nice to look at them when it’s hard and we are under fire.”
He read one letter:
“We are waiting for you. Thank you for risking your lives to defend Donbas. Yulia and Ira.”
“I don’t even know who are Yulia and Ira,” he said smiling.
Showing the icons, he said, “This is Saint Ushakov, our great commander. This is Jesus Christ, our Heavenly Protector. This Abkhazi icon was given to me by the guys. This is a prayer book. And here is a prayer,” he said of one page prayer.
“These words are to support when times are very hard. When there is heavy shelling, it can go on for hours. So, while you’re sitting there, you can read this.
Especially for the younger guys, 22, 23 years old, just finished college. This is new to them.”
Commanders Speak of Geopolitical Reasons for Ukraine’s War
Outside, sitting in front of an Orthodox banner and a collection of collected munitions—including Western ones—two platoon commanders, “Kabar” and “Kamaz,” spoke of the bigger geopolitical picture. [See video]
“America is running the show here,” Kabar said. “It builds foreign policy on the basis of how its domestic policy is built, which is through conflicts with external countries. They are accustomed to proving their power to their people through terrorism around the world, inciting fires in Syria, in the east. They played the card of radical Islam there.
And now they are playing the card of fascism. They do not see themselves on the other side of good. They need wars, blood, cruelty, and they signed Europe up for this.
However, they’ve missed one point: Russia, since the days of the Soviet Union, has never retreated in large scale wars. They took Europe and pushed it to slaughter Russia, and they put Russia in such a position that it must secure its national interests. Europe needs to understand this, to pay attention to history, to stop being led by the United States.”
“Kabar,” a commander of the Pyatnashka fighters. [Source: Photo courtesy of Eva Bartlett]
When asked about his feeling regarding Ukrainians, “Kabar” replied similarly to Vydra.
“We don’t blame the whole Ukrainian people. Ukrainians are our friends, they are our relatives. They’ve been struck by evil, and it’s not their fault, ordinary people are not to blame for this. We will liberate them from fascism, we’ll show them brotherhood, and we’ll make friends.
This is a good opportunity for us to defeat evil. God has honored us with this right to fight evil.”
Kamaz, when asked why he is fighting, replied that this is his homeland, he was born here, and that he has a son who he doesn’t want to inherit Ukraine’s war on the Donbas.
“I myself am Greek by nationality. Ukrainians are Slavs, they are our brothers, their grandfathers fought together shoulder to shoulder with our grandfathers against Nazism and fascism. We are here to finish it, so that our children live a normal happy life. We are fighting for the future.”
He spoke of America’s continuous need for war.
“We’ve seen it in Syria and Yugoslavia, where they destroyed everything and then set everything up their own way, so the people must submit, almost like slaves.”
I asked whether he thought peace between Ukraine and Russia is possible.
“Yes, possibly, why not? But at the moment, the President of Ukraine said there will be no negotiations.
Negotiations are possible, but I think not with this president. When he comes to his senses, he will not be able to negotiate, because he took a lot of money.”
Before leaving the outpost, we chatted a bit with the commanders. A puppy sought the attention of a young soldier. Another puppy ran around our feet. The outpost commanders and soldiers take care of the dogs. Their presence added a somewhat surreal touch to the scene: an outpost which is routinely shelled, where life can cease to exist at any moment, and these happy, well-cared for puppies running around like dogs anywhere.
Western Media Inverted Reality, Lauding Nazis and Demonizing Defenders
While many in the West think that this conflict started in February 2022, those following events since 2014 are aware that, following the Maidan coup and Odessa massacre, and the rise of fascism in Ukraine against the Ukrainian people, the Donbas republics wanted to distance themselves from Ukraine’s Nazis and fascism.
The sacrifices which the people of the Donbas republics have endured, particularly those fighting to protect their families and loved ones, have been and continue to be immense.
Just as the heroes of the Syrian Arab Army were maligned, so too have Donbas forces have been maligned by Western media, though both are defending their homelands from terrorist forces trained and funded by the West. Terrorists given the freedom to commit endless atrocities against Donbas civilians.
These defenders, many living in dank trench conditions didn’t choose war, they responded to it, to protect their loved ones and their future. In spite of more than eight years of being warred upon by Ukraine, they retain their humanity.
by Oleg Burunov – originally published by Sputnik News – All Links to Gospa News articles have been added after
In an address to the nation on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin focused on a number of pressing issues related to the West’s stance on Russia and Moscow’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine.
“The purpose of this West is to weaken, divide and ultimately destroy our country. They are already directly saying that in 1991 they were able to split the Soviet Union, and now the time has come for Russia itself, and that it should disintegrate into many mortally warring regions and regions,” the Russian president stressed.
According to him, such plans have been hatched in the West for a long time, as they encouraged gangs of international terrorists in the Caucasus, promoted the installation of NATO’s offensive infrastructure close to Russia’s borders and made total Russophobia their weapon.
Putin said that the Western elites are targeting Russia with their aggressive policy in order to maintain their dominance.
“[We talk] about the aggressive policy of a number of the Western elites, who are striving with all their might to maintain their dominance, and for this purpose they are trying to block or suppress any sovereign independent centers of development in order to further brutally impose their will on other countries and nations, to plant their fake values,” according to the Russian president.
West ‘Crossed Every Line’ in Its Anti-Russian Policy
Putin also said that the West “has crossed every line in its aggressive anti-Russian policy,” adding that “we constantly hear threats against our country and our people.”
“Some irresponsible politicians in the West talk about plans to organize the supply of long-range offensive weapons to Ukraine, systems that are capable of launching strikes against Crimea and other regions of Russia”.
According to the Russian president, such terrorist strikes, including those using Western weapons, are already being carried out on settlements in Russia’s Belgorod and Kursk regions.
“In real time, NATO conducts reconnaissance throughout Russia’s southern areas, using modern systems, aircraft, ships, satellites, and strategic drones,” Putin said.
Partial Mobilization in Russia
Putin announced that in light of the latest developments in Donbass, he had signed a decree on partial mobilization in Russia.
“In this situation, I consider it necessary to take the following decisions, they are fully adequate to the threats we face. Namely: to protect our Motherland, its sovereignty and territorial integrity, to ensure the security of our people and people in the liberated territories, I consider it necessary to support the proposal of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff on conducting partial mobilization in Russia,” the Russian president said.
He added that mobilization will begin on Wednesday, noting that only reservists will be subject to conscription, first of all those who have relevant experience and military professions.
Russia to Help Maintain Security at Referendums in Donbass
The Russian president also said that Russia will do everything to ensure security at the upcoming self-determination referendums in Donbass and other Ukrainian regions which have appealed to Moscow, seeking its support.
“The parliaments of the people’s republics in Donbass as well as civil-military administrations of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions have decided to hold the referendums on the destiny of these territories and appealed to Russia, asking to support this step. I stress that we will do everything to ensure security at the referendums for people to express their will,” Putin underscored.
Putin also referred to “the policy of intimidation, terror, and violence” pursued by Kiev with respect to Donbass residents, a policy that Putin said becomes “more massive, terrible and barbaric.”He noted that Kiev’s regime of repressions against its own citizens established shortly after the 2014 armed coup had been strengthened across Ukraine.Putin emphasized that he knows that “the majority of people living in the territories liberated from neo-Nazis, including first of all the historical lands of Novorossiya, do not want to be under the yoke of the neo-Nazi regime.”
“In Zaporozhye, the Kherson region, as well as Lugansk and Donetsk, people have seen and are seeing the atrocities that neo-Nazis conduct in the occupied areas of the Kharkov region. The heirs of Bandera and Nazi punishers kill people, torture, throw them in prison, settle scores, crack down, abuse civilians”, the Russian president said.
He added that up to 7.5 million people lived in the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR) and (LPR) as well as the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions before the outbreak of hostilities.
“Many of them were forced to become refugees and leave their homes. Those who remained – about 5 million people – today are subjected to constant artillery and rocket fire from neo-Nazi militants, who hit hospitals and schools and organize terrorist attacks against civilians. We have no moral right to hand over people close to us to be torn to pieces by executioners, and we cannot but respond to their sincere desire to determine their own fate,” Putin underlined.
Russian Forces Act ‘Competently’ in Ukraine
Touching upon Russia’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine, Putin said that Russian forces are acting competently, liberating the territory step by step.He noted that the Lugansk People’s Republic had already been almost completely cleared of neo-Nazis, and that fighting in in the Donetsk People’s Republic is underway.
“The Kiev occupation regime has created a deeply echeloned line of long-term fortifications. Directly assaulting them would have resulted in heavy losses, which is why our units, as well as those of the Donbass republics, act competently and use the military in order to protect personnel. They, step by step, are liberating Donetsk land, clearing cities and towns from neo-Nazis, and helping people whom the Kiev regime has turned into hostages and a human shield,” Putin said.
Disclosure: Sputnik is a Russian state-owned news agency, news website platform, and radio broadcast service. It was established by the Russian government-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya on 10 November 2014.
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Eliot Higgins, the leader of the BellingCat organization, an information dump overseen by Western intelligence agencies and known for its incompetent provocations against Russia, Russian citizens and organizations, spoke quite ambiguously about the materials of the July investigation of the Foundation to Battle Injustice. This investigation was devoted to the Ukrainian nationalist website “Myrotvorets” and the involvement of the BellingCat.
Higgins, in a manner peculiar only to British street thugs, attacked the Foundation to Battle Injustice and honest journalists who help our duty. The ridiculous accusation in propaganda is regarded by us as an attempt by Higgins to evade responsibility for the activities of BellingCat and the “Myrotvorets”. The statement that the article published by the journalists of the Monthly Review based on the materials of the Foundation to Battle Injustice was written on facts that were allegedly not verified does not relieve the responsibility of the head and employees of BellingCat for training and financing of the Ukrainian nationalist website “Myrotvorets”. If Higgins really is not involved in the creation of the “Myrotvorets” and wants to prove it, he should join the Foundation’s to Battle Injustice fight against the criminal website, and not engage in empty chatter and harassment of independent journalists.
I would like to mention that Mr. Higgins verbal incontinence on Twitter is the result of fear and panic. Many Russian investigative reporters, including recently killed Daria Dugina, began to find extremely successful evidence of the criminal activities of BellingCat and bring this group of international provocateurs to the surface. It remains to be hoped that sooner or later Eliot Higgins will come to his senses and show prudence, stop supporting nationalists and executioners and stand on the side of truth.
The hysterical reaction of the BellingCat creator about our investigation and the recent Conferences of the Foundation exposing the “Myrotvorets” website is the highest assessment of our work and evidence that we have hit the nail on the head.
An attempt to cover up and justify your activities with a three-year-old publication from Aric Toler, a BellingCat employee engaged in training Ukrainian nationalists, looks inappropriate and absurd, and does not prove your non-involvement in the activities of the “Myrotvorets”.
Mr. Higgins, the next time you decide to write a selective concentration of nonsense on your Twitter account, it would be much better to admit that you’ve just poop your pants.
Mira Terada is the head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice
The murder of Dariia Dugina triggered the now quite predictable reaction from the collective West: total indifference. This is hardly something new. The West not only put a Nazi regime in power in Kiev, it supported it by all means possible while that regime did all of the following:
Used its armed forces in an internal civil war, which is (was?) banned under the Ukrainian constitution which resulted in about 14’000 dead over eight years.
“Ze” has crushed any and all internal opposition, not only putatively “pro-Russian” parties and politicians (many of them members of the Ukrainian Rada), but also clearly pro-Ukrainian parties (say the “Party of Sharii”).
“Ze” also banned any alternative/free media inside the Ukraine. Western journos did not notice or object.
The Ukrainian armed forces have now shelled/bombed the civilian infrastructure of the LDNR for years (and tried to cut off water from the Crimean Peninsula). Latest example here.
The Ukronazis have repeatedly tried attack nuclear and chemical plants.
The Kiev regime has also repeatedly attacked the civilian power grid.
Nazi special forces have conducted numerous assassinations in the LDNR and they even tried to do so in Crimea and Russia (as the case of Dugina proves).
Thousands of people in the Ukraine have been disappeared in CIA-style torture centers.
Torture is now a regular practice of the Ukronazi military and security services.
Most Russian POW have been systematically tortured and murdered.
Russian military personnel has been the object of chemical attacks (see here and here)
The Ukronazis have also killed hundreds (if not more) Ukrainian soldiers who refused to be used as cannon fodder and fight the Russians in hopeless, suicidal, attacks.
The Ukrainian forces systematically hid behind civilians in schools, shopping malls, hospitals and even kindergartens.
Ukrainian politicians have repeatedly referred to the Russian people as “subhumans” “pigdogs” “biomaterial” and they have openly called for the killing of as many Russians (including non combatants) as possible (latest example here).
The Nazis have made massive use of forbidden cluster munition, including cluster munition containing illegal anti-personnel mines which have maimed scores of civilians.
And I could go on and on. But I think the image is rather clear. It shows that:
The West will support absolutely any atrocity committed by its Ukronazi proxies.
The West hates Russia deeply and viscerally: against the accursed and hated russkies anything, absolutely anything goes.
The West will not only speak up against Ukronazi atrocities, it will conduct an open and quite unapologetic campaigns to silence any disagreeing voices (latest example here). Amnesty International now apologized for its report about human rights violations in the Ukraine.
In fact, and in one of the most hypocritical statements in world history, the US Senate declared that Russia was a sponsor of terrorism which is rather ironic considering that the US is, by far, the main sponsor of terrorism worldwide and domestically!
Western state actors have also organized and financed PSYOP/Cyberwarfare centers which have attacked even personal blogs (like the Saker blog) to try to shut down any dissenting voice.
I submit that two things are really essential here: the pattern described above has been unchanging since at least the Crusades and this pattern is unanimously shared by all western governments today. This is no fluke, no mistake, but the core of a worldview shared by all the western ruling elites, especially northern Europeans (the reality of southern Europe and the Mediterranean cultural real to which southern Europe used to belong is more nuanced and complex).
Dariia Dugina was murdered by a single Ukronazi terrorist, directed by the SBU which, in turn, is just a proxy for the CIA/MI6. But Dariia Dugina’s innocent blood, like the blood of MILLIONS of other innocent people throughout the history is on the hands of the ruling class which pretends to see nothing while being directly involved in it all. As for the people of the West, they have to decide whether they will continue meekly accept to be ruled my murderous, racist, thugs or whether they will resit them (or, at least, not support them and, at the very least, have the decency to decide to never knowingly support any lie)
So far, I have to sadly admit that I am not very impressed. I see a post-truth society in which the very concept of truth has lost any meaning. That utter and total indifference to the very notion of truth is the only true “western value” left.
It is impossible for such a site to exist, and its owners are not responsible for their actions. Journalist Daria Dugina was killed in Russia on Saturday night. I would hardly have known who she was if my friends hadn’t told me that she and her father, Alexander Dugin, were included on the Mirotvorets website, and everyone knew their details. Of course, you don’t have to listen to me, because I’m a child. But for the third year I have been trying to reach out to all world leaders and organizations. All this time I hear jokes that it’s honorable and great to be in the database of this site. But yesterday there was another murder. It’s not for me to figure out who is to blame for this and how it happened. Now I’m just really sorry for Daria’s parents.
But I will say something else: even if we accept the version that the Mirotvorets is fighting the enemies of Ukraine in this way, the main thing remains – they can no longer control the use of information and guarantee that not only nationalists, but also murderers and other criminals will not use the data they post. Tomorrow, someone will not like Roger Waters or Hungarian President Orban, and criminals can fulfill their plans, in which the owners of the Mirotvorets are always happy to help them. I’ve always said that the Mirotvorets are scoundrels and scammers, but now they just kill people with their help. And if such famous people are killed without fear of punishment, then what about me, an ordinary child from Lugansk? About other children whose data is on the site?
You are allowed not to love Russia – this is a personal matter for everyone – but you can not break the laws. You can’t just sentence those you don’t like to death. The Mirotvorets website has not been responsible for what it puts out for a long time. No one knows who will be next. And it doesn’t matter who will kill – Ukrainian nationalists, ISIS or just crazy. I would really like everyone who is on the Mirotvorets to finally start talking and start doing something. It is impossible for such a site to exist, and its owners are not responsible for their actions.
Another attack from Kiev has hit central Donetsk, targeting a funeral and a hotel where numerous reporters stay and work
Photo: Eva K Bartlett
Aug 4, 2022, RT.com (*blog version longer than originally published at RT)
-Eva K Bartlett
At 10:13 am Thursday, Ukraine began shelling central Donetsk. There were five powerful blasts in the space of ten minutes. The last explosion blew out my hotel’s ground-floor glass, including a sitting room – where journalists often congregate before and after going out to do field reporting, and where until less than ten minutes prior, I’d been sitting working on my laptop – and the lobby, which I had passed through a minute earlier. A cameraman’s assistant who was there at the time of that fifth explosion suffered a concussion from the force of the blast.
A woman walking outside the building was killed, as were at least four others, including an 11 year old rising-star ballerina, her grandmother, and her teacher (a world-renowned former ballerina).
Donetsk Telegram channels are filled with videos locals have taken, of the dead, the injured and the damage, and of grief-stricken people. One such hard-to-watch Telegram post (warning: graphic footage) features a man in shock at the gruesome sight of the bodies of his murdered wife and grandchild on a street two blocks from the hotel.
There were another 4 or 5 close blasts 1.5 hours after the first 5.
First estimates placed the number at at least ten, among them two ambulance workers: a paramedic and a doctor.
Reading the news, you have the luxury of graphic image warnings and the choice not to look at the pictures and videos of the carnage that occurred on Thursday, as well as over the past eight years of Ukraine’s war on Donbass. The people here on the ground don’t get a warning, or a choice as to whether they will see the mutilated remains of a loved-one or stranger. As uncomfortable as it is to see such footage, it does need to be shown if the world is to know the truth of what’s going on in Donbass, to give voice to the locals, killed and terrorized by Ukrainian forces as Western corporate media looks elsewhere or covers up these crimes.
Chronology of the bomb strikes
When the shelling started, I was in my room editing footage from the previous day – from the aftermath of another Ukrainian shelling of a Donetsk district.
While in Kirovskiy, Donetsk, this morning at a site of a Ukrainian bombing yesterday, we learned of a nearby area that just shelled by Ukraine, a woman killed.
While in Kirovskiy, Donetsk, this morning at a site of a Ukrainian bombing yesterday, we learned of a nearby area that just shelled by Ukraine, a woman killed.
You wouldn’t know it from most Western media coverage but explosions are so common here that I didn’t think much of the blast other than it was louder than usual and the car alarms were going off.
Seven minutes later, another explosion, much louder and much closer. From the window, smoke could be seen rising to the north, probably 200 meters away. This would have been right near the Donetsk Opera and Ballet Theatre, where the funeral ceremony for Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) Colonel Olga Kachura, killed yesterday, was commencing.
A minute later, another loud blast sent me running from the room, which faced the direction of incoming artillery. Luckily, the only damage ended up being a broken window.
Downstairs, journalists who had been in the hotel and others who had been outside ready to go out reporting, took shelter in the hallway for the time being, ready to run to the basement if things escalated, telling me that the last shelling hit 50 metres from the hotel.
One told me he had been preparing to go film and was about 10 meters away from where the last shell struck. “I believe they were trying to target the funeral. And journalists also,” he said. He also said there was a woman outside who had lost a leg, and that she was probably dead by now.
I left the lobby briefly and during that time, the fifth strike hit, blowing out the windows and killing a woman just outside the hotel. Journalists in the lobby suffered from the pressure of the blast. A cameraman’s assistant got a concussion from it. It was by pure luck that I was not in the lobby.
I was back inside the hotel, sitting in a hallway, beginning to stitch together my footage, to publish it, when the shelling resumed. Journalists still outside ran back in. After another four blasts, the shelling died down. Meanwhile, Telegram was filled with videos people had sent from Donetsk streets. A man slumped dead near a bus stop. Three civilians slaughtered on a sidewalk just two streets from the hotel, a man shrieking his grief at the horrific site of his wife and granddaughter in pieces.
After the dust had settled and it seemed Ukraine had stopped its shelling, we went outside to document the damage, and the carnage. The poor women killed by the shelling was by this point covered with a hotel curtain, blood stains around her body.
It’s safe to assume that Kiev’s forces’ intended target was the funeral service for Colonel Kachura, aiming perhaps to send a message to the DPR military and the civilians who support it. While that would be egregious by itself, it is likely that a hotel housing journalists was not just ‘collateral damage,’ either.
It is common for aggressors like Ukraine or Israel or terrorists in Syria to target journalists. In 2009, as it waged war on the civilians of Gaza, Israel repeatedly shelled a media building I was in.
It was bad enough that Israel closed border crossing and wouldn't allow journalists into Gaza (I was already there), but then went on to target media, to silence any honest reporting on its war crimes against Palestinians. https://t.co/7VbkWiLDKV
— Eva Karene Bartlett (@EvaKBartlett) May 12, 2021
It was bad enough that Israel closed border crossing and wouldn’t allow journalists into Gaza (I was already there), but then went on to target media, to silence any honest reporting on its war crimes against Palestinians. https://t.co/7VbkWiLDKV— Eva Karene Bartlett (@EvaKBartlett) May 12, 2021
In May 2021, as it resumed intensely bombing Gaza, Israel destroyed two Gaza media buildings housing 20 media outlets.
Kiev’s forces know a lot of journalists stay at this hotel for its central location and strong wifi. Many frequently do their live reports from outside the hotel. And those staying there, as well as in other central Donetsk neighbourhoods, have been loudly reporting on Ukraine’s showering of Donetsk with the insidious, internationally-prohibited ‘butterfly’ anti-personnel mines of late – the latest, until today, in the list of Kiev’s war crimes. These explosives are designed to rip off feet and legs, and Ukraine has repeatedly fired rockets containing them, intentionally dropping them on civilian areas in Donetsk and other Donbass cities.
After the explosions rang out in central Donetsk Thursday, Emergency Services arrived at the scene and, following a period of calm, journalists went out to document the damage and the dead. The woman I’d been told about lay in a pool of blood, covered with what appeared to be a curtain from one of the blown-out windows.
The calm didn’t last long. Ukraine soon resumed shelling, and journalists outside ran back inside as we received another four attacks. “It’s like a common thing, they shoot one place and shoot it again. So we’re in the middle of that process right now,” a Serbian guy near me said. The chief of a local Emergency Services headquarters told me Kiev also makes triple strikes, not only double.
It is said that Ukraine used NATO-standard 155mm caliber weapons in today’s attack. If that is true, this is another instance of Ukraine using Western-supplied weapons to slaughter and maim civilians in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.
If by bombing a hotel full of journalists Kiev wanted to intimidate them away from reporting on Ukraine’s war crimes, it won’t work. Most journalists reporting from on the ground here do so because, unlike the crocodile tears of the West for conflicts they create, we actually care about the lives of people here.
I expanded my short August 4 clip on Ukraine's bombing of central Donetsk.
The attacks slaughtered 6 people, leaving the horrific sight of their mangled corpses on streets.
Another of Ukraine's war crimes, in its 8+ years of war on the Donbass people.https://t.co/R8yWugBiyI
Hmm @TwitterSupport took down @FiorellaIsabelM’s tweet exposing @LouiseMensch’s call for a hit on journalist Eva Bartlett & is preventing Fiorella from accessing her account until she deletes the tweet, but it won’t remove Mensch’s call for death? Is Twitter protecting fascists? pic.twitter.com/yVPNqHryKk
Press TV correspondent in Ukraine Johnny Miller says he has been placed on a “kill list” by Ukrainian ultranationalists following his revelations about Ukrainian atrocities against pro-Russian children and other civilians in the Donbas region.
Reporting from the war-torn country on Friday, Miller said that the neo-Nazi group wants him dead following his repeated reports about Ukrainian forces’ violence in the east of the country.
In an interview with Press TV, Miller said that he was placed on the kill list after he sent a journalistic inquiry to the website that had published a kill list of hundreds of people.
“Actually I contacted the website for a statement, which is normal in journalistic standards, but they didn’t reply to my statement… rather, they put me on the list,” the correspondent said.
“It’s clear that some parts of Ukrainian society [are] witnessing some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare, when a journalist does a legitimate story about a kill list and they put him on the same list,” he added.
He warned that most of the people on the list, including a 13-year-old teenager who was interviewed by Miller, “have already been receiving threats of physical violence.”
“There is no doubt that this list does promote violence, and the killing of anybody on that list,” he noted, adding that there are “over 300 children” on that kill list right now.
Miller called on international organizations such as the UN to take down this list and said that it’s so shocking that there is no pressure from such organizations.
“There should be more pressure from western countries to take down this list, [which is] promoting violence against children and journalists through an extremist behavior and ideology.”
“The Ukrainian government has the power to take down this list; NATO countries have a huge influence over Ukraine, but it doesn’t seem to be any pressure to take down this list at the moment,” Miller said.
He said that in spite of Western media’s supposition, there is a considerable degree of “extremism” in Ukraine, which he has been trying to highlight through the years.
The question went out .. what are the most important actions over the last week, and how do we present those?
Mr Shoigu was number one, and this is how we present that by a machine translation from cont.ws:
ON ANY HIMARS THERE IS A POSEIDON. THE US QUICKLY UNDERSTOOD SHOIGU’S STATEMENT
The tactical pause that the Russian military took a little over a week ago is coming to an end, according to the American Institute for the Study of War. And here they were not mistaken: the head of the Russian Defense Ministry, Sergei Shoigu, ordered to step up efforts in all sectors of the front.
The key task is to prevent the Armed Forces of Ukraine and Ukrainian neo-Nazis from continuing to launch rockets and conduct massive attacks on residential areas and peaceful infrastructure of the People’s Republics of Donbass and other regions.
And then the question arises about the use by the Ukrainian side of the” intimidating ” American multiple launch rocket system HIMARS. Who manages these MLRS?
The Ukrainian military is only engaged in the protection of HIMARS. And they are controlled and attacked, including by objects in the liberated territories of Ukraine, by US and British military personnel. The Russian Foreign Ministry announced this officially. Captain of the first rank of the reserve Vladimir Yeranosyan also has no doubts about this. Most likely, the Russians in Ukraine are opposed by the Marine corps, which in Iraq received good shooting skills with HIMARS, the captain claims.
America uses HIMARS to kill civilians
For some reason, we don’t focus on this publicly. However, Russia responded very simply to the supply of American HIMARS-we launched the Belgorod submarine with Poseidon unmanned torpedoes. By the way, she has already taken up combat duty, said Sergey Lipovoy, chairman of the presidium of the public organization “Officers of Russia”, in an interview with Tsargrad. This news was not advertised on all world channels, but those who need it already understand everything.
And after that, the rhetoric of Europe, Canada and America began to change. We were allowed to transport cargo to Kaliningrad, and Sweden lifted the ban on entering the ports of our ships that deliver fuel and food to Svalbard. They said, ” Guys, we’re overreacting. And this is only because our submarine, equipped with weapons that have no analogues in the world, has gone into the depths and no one knows where it is now,
– said Sergey Lipovoy. If we talk about MLRS, then HIMARS can be launched by the APU calculations, but under the supervision of American instructors. In this situation, we just need to find an “antidote”, the expert stressed.
It’s no secret that HIMARS have increased range and increased accuracy, ” Lipovoy continued. – The American assurances that HIMARS will be used exclusively for military purposes, and not for civilian objects, do not stand up to any criticism. We can see that in fact these MLRS are used specifically for the civilian population and for civilian objects. That is, America kills civilians and does everything to ensure that there is as much destruction as possible. And the death of civilians is at the hands and on the conscience of American politicians – first of all, President Joe Biden.
Of course, history will charge them for every civilian death. Because this is a war crime, a genocide against the peaceful Russian-speaking population. America is no longer even shy and actually says that it is waging war not with a mythical enemy, but with Russia. But this is done by the hands of NATO.
And here Ukraine turned out to be a bargaining chip, a pawn that was allowed to be slaughtered as soon as a special military operation began,
– Linden is convinced.
The Americans and NATO have stated that they will not participate in this matter in any way, but will do everything to ensure that the war continues as long as possible, so that there is as much destruction as possible. So that the war goes “for the happiness of the Ukrainian people to the last Ukrainian”.
PHOTO: CPL. COLTON GARRETT/GLOBALLOOKPRESS.
Americans are trying to control the fate of their weapons
Military expert Alexey Leonkov also commented on the information about the presence of foreigners in Ukraine at the HIMARS consoles in an interview with Tsargrad. According to him, there is indeed such operational information that along with HIMARS, American officers appeared in Ukraine, who manage MLRS.
In addition, there is also evidence that a certain number of US military personnel are engaged in escorting M777 howitzers and counter-battery stations.
That is, America, first of all, by handing over such equipment and weapons, is trying to control its fate in order to avoid the sad fate of some types of weapons that fall to us as trophies. And secondly, such officers can control the shooting. When receiving certain data, the Americans most likely do not share it with the Ukrainians, so as not to leak it,
– the expert believes. It turns out that the Americans secretly manage all these processes.
British officers can also be present there, but only if British air defense systems appear in Ukraine, because no matter how much the Ukrainian press screams that they are easier to control than a game console, this is not true.
It remains only to add that our opponents, represented by the collective West, perfectly heard the warning of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu about increasing efforts on all sectors of the front. The United States has already issued an urgent statement to all Americans on the territory of Ukraine: they say, leave, do not push your luck. Diplomats are also ordered to leave Odessa and Kiev. The stakes are rising, and Russia will not be deterred.
……………
Regulars will immediately see the increase in impact from the Russian MoD and other reporters. Here is a summary from the Russian MoD
🔹 Russian precision strikes destroyed base of Ukrainian Kostyantynivka (DPR territory), eliminating around 250 foreign mercenaries, 7 armor units, 12 special vehicles; 🔹 Around 60 Nazi troops eliminated in Vitove (Cherkassy Oblast), 2 MLRS, 4 artillery pieces; 🔹 More than 10 Grad launchers destroyed in Udachne railway station; 🔹 2 Uragan MLRS and 17 Grad MRLS, Hyacinth-B and D-30 howitzers destroyed in artillery duels; 🔹 2 Mi-8 helicopters destroyed and 2 more damaged in airfield in Novy Donbas (DPR territory); 🔹 Army air force, missile forces and artillery landed strikes on 286 personnel and armor groupings and 14 operation rooms; 🔹 Buk-M1 SAM launcher destroyed in Kramatorsk (DPR territory), 3 weapons depots and fuel depot destroyed in Novooleksandrivka (Dniepr Oblast); 🔹 Air Defense shot down 6 UAVs and 2 Uragan missiles.
……………
The second place was taken by this piece by Andrey Martyanov and we take a quote from there but do read the full piece.
“Now, in a more important news, after the meeting with State Duma leaders on July 7, which officially was primarily about upcoming elections, Putin reiterated now well known position:
It is more than position, it is Russia’s MO for the last 15 years and it is the one in which every next offer from Russia will always be much worse for those who didn’t accept the previous one.”
Andrei, (The Saker) calls this phenomenon The Pain Dial. On the front, the Russian forces are double-timing it. Take a look at the report – https://t.me/mod_russia_en/2803.
Then, we looked at many various commentators, and we still stand by Military Summary, flaws and all.
Enjoy your discussion and as always commentators are welcome to add fine detail.
With cities and villages falling, here is a good rule of thumb to follow. You can only take it seriously when you a) see the flag go up, i.e., pictures, and b) the MoD or reliable local authorities report.
Drips of information from Iran is coming through but let’s wait until there is some formal information. Already fascinating is a comment from Peskov this morning: Russia, Iran to shift away from estimating trade volume in dollars, says Kremlin
Western Europe and North America are now in dire economic straits. Four EU leaders, from Germany, France, Italy and Romania, have just been to Kiev to plead with Zelensky to start negotiating again and make territorial concessions. The Western media did not much report on the fourth Romanian/German leader, Klaus Iohannis, and showed few photograph of him; possibly because the racists who work in the Western media despise Romania (https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=Romanian+Leader+In+Kiev&qpvt=romanian+leader+in+kiev&FORM=EWRE). What they all forgot to mention is that Russia has no need to negotiate and, given the way that it has been treated since 2014 (indeed, since 1991), it is not going to make concessions.
The EU leaders once more made the illusory promise that the Ukraine might soon become a candidate for EU membership (despite the Dutch veto), if it restarts negotiations. This old carrot dangled before the Ukrainian donkey is irrelevant. The EU has more than four countries and four leaders, whatever promise that the Ukraine may become an EU member in 20 years time. Long before that, there will be no Ukraine and probably no EU. The day after their visit, the Johnson clown went to Kiev too, though we do not know what he spoke of. Presumably, he just wanted to show that the UK is a ‘Great Power’ – like the EU?
It is all too late. Negotiations on the Donbass failed for eight years because the West forbade them. They failed again last March in Belarus and Istanbul, for the same reason. The West in its arrogance believed that it could crush Russia using its Ukrainian cannonfodder. This has been displayed for nearly four months now by the reports of State propaganda mouthpieces like CNN, the BBC etc. with their nonsense that President Putin is dying and that Russia is running out of fuel and ammunition! Wishful thinking all the time. Originally Russia just wanted to liberate the Donbass. However, pig-headedness in Kiev means that they will now be forced to take control of the whole country – and perhaps more, if aggression from outside the Ukraine continues. It was all so unnecessary…
The West cannot go on with its suicidal and illegal sanctions against Russia – or rather against itself. The lack of oil, gas, fertilisers and essential raw materials is biting. Inflation is taking off all over the West. In the UK a wave of strikes is threatened. The incredibly unpopular Johnson’s days are numbered. The only problem for Russia is that the rouble keeps rising. Despite interest rate cuts from 15% to 8.5%, the rouble is again at 56 to the dollar. Clearly, further Russian interest rate cuts are, forgive the pun, in the pipeline. Meanwhile, African and Asian leaders have told Zelensky to stop fighting. They want grain (https://news.mail.ru/politics/ 51814770/ ?frommail=1).
Of course, it is true that many of the West’s woes began well before this year, not least with the absurd and totalitarian ‘covid’ restrictions from 2020 on, which bankrupted many companies and led to it printing ever more money and to ever higher and unpayable debts. The West is desperate for the conflict in the Ukraine to end before the autumn cold sets in. Otherwise there are going to be popular revolts in Western countries, with scenes of looting on the streets.
Western arms, usually third-rate from stocks anyway, are making hardly any difference in the Ukraine. Most, together with munitions, get destroyed before they can be used. Much that has been promised cannot be used because it will take months to instruct Ukrainians on how to use them. The rate of attrition of the Kiev Army, up to 1,000 a day according to Kuleba, the Kiev Interior Minister, is simply unsustainable. Once the fortifications in the Donbass, built by Kiev and NATO over the last eight years, have been overwhelmed, there will be a clear run to Odessa, Transdnestria, Kharkov and Kiev or indeed anywhere that Russia wants. This could happen soon.
Yesterday, the Russian Ministry of Defence released figures on mercenaries (https://news.mail.ru/incident/51803470/?frommail=1). The picture is dismal for the Ukraine. Of some 6,000 mercenaries in the Ukraine from 64 different countries, some 2,000 have been killed and some 2,000 have fled. Perhaps they thought that they were going to fight in a Third World country, where the enemy just had Kalashnikovs and not world-beating hypersonic missiles? How long the remaining 2,000 or so will remain alive remains to be seen.
Poland supplied the greatest number of mercenaries, with 1,831. Presumably as with other countries like Canada (601 mercenaries), USA (530), Romania (504), Germany and France, the majority of these were actually Ukrainians who have lived outside the Ukraine for some years, rather than native people. In third place for mercenaries from Europe comes the UK with 422, of whom 102 have been killed and 98 have fled. According to General Konashenkov who released the figures, the number of mercenaries coming has stopped and indeed been reversed. It is too dangerous to stay and get killed in the Ukraine.
This leaves the two foolish British mercenaries, not killed in action with the 102 others, but taken prisoner. And also it leaves two captured US mercenaries. There is speculation that the British might plea for their release in exchange for Julian Assange. That would upset the Americans. On the other hand, the British mercenaries, Eslin and Pinner, have already been sentenced to death. If that sentenced is carried out, it is going to make Johnson even more unpopular than he already is. Perhaps that is why Johnson went to Kiev to plead.
Thus, the first or military stage is coming to an end and should be over later this summer. However, this is only the start. The New Ukraine has to be formed. Then there is the demilitarisation and denazification of the rest of Eastern Europe. And there is the economic war, declared by the West, to be finished. On 17June at the International Economic Forum in his native Saint Petersburg, President Putin said:
‘After the Cold War the USA declared itself to be the emissaries of God on Earth, without any responsibility, only with interests….Today’s changes in economics and in international politics are tectonic and revolutionary. The Western elites are in a state of delusion, clinging on to the shadow of the past and denying changing reality…Nothing will be as before…The EU has definitively lost its political sovereignty. The current situation in Europe will lead to an outburst of radicalism and in the probable future a change of elites’.
I have noticed that there are a few reviewers of the Special Operation in the Ukraine who seem to support it only because they are racist, anti-Ukrainian. Let it be made clear that this is not the case of the overwhelming majority of its supporters. And it is certainly not the case of the vast majority of the Russian forces involved in the Operation. For example, if you watch videos of captured or active Ukrainian troops, they virtually all express themselves only in Russian. True, the former Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, did make some ambiguous remarks about certain Ukrainians, but he was not referring to all Ukrainians, as we explain below.
The fact is that Russians and Ukrainians are ethnically one, they are brothers and sisters, all East Slavs and also virtually all Orthodox Christians by culture. This is particularly why Russian forces are doing their utmost not to harm civilians or damage civilian infrastructure. That is why when Kiev troops are killed in action, Russians refer to them not as ‘Ukrainians’, but as ‘nationalists’, who are those to whom Dmitry Medvedev was referring in his remarks that the nationalists are ‘bastards and scum’. The Ukrainians are not the enemy, the enemy is the puppet regime in Kiev, its NATO string-pullers and its brainwashed nationalist/Nazi supporters.
President Putin explained from the very outset and very clearly that the US-created puppet regime in Kiev, with its Nazi/NATO/Zionist backers, is an Anti-Russia. It does not represent the mass of the Ukrainian people, so many of whom have close family in Russia, or now live in Russia, or are married to Russians, or who only speak Russian and not Ukrainian, or who are Russian by culture. The Kiev regime represents only the corrupted elite who choose its politicians and the brainwashed who supported them. We, on the other hand, are pro-Ukrainian, precisely because we are anti-Nazi/anti-NATO/anti-Zionist. We are pro-Ukrainian, life-affirming, not life-denying. We affirm Ukrainian families, not the Nazi-imposed LGBT. Similarly, we are pro-American, but anti-American elite. We want the American people and soul to be liberated from their brainwashing elite.
In the same way Russian soldiers in the First World War were not anti-German, but anti-Kaiser, and in the Second World War were not anti-German, but anti-Nazi. Accounts from the First War tell how Russian soldiers who had wounded advancing German troops in self-defence would crawl out of their trenches at risk to their own lives to pick the wounded up and carry them back for medical care. Many eyewitnesses from the Second War used to tell us how captured German soldiers were given crusts of bread by Russians, who themselves were virtually starving. On the Western side we can something similar portrayed in the well-known novel by Erich Maria Remarque, ‘Im Westen Nichts Neues’, ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, or in poems by the English soldier Siegfried Sassoon.
We are very far from the racist mocking of other races by, for example, white US soldiers, who called their enemies ‘savages’, ‘redskins’ (the very word ‘redskin’ denotes the essential superficiality of the Nazi obsession with skin colour as a defining trait), ‘niggers’, ‘chinks’, ‘dagos’, ‘nips’, ‘gooks’ or mocked them as subhuman (a translation of the Nazi ‘Untermensch’), or monkeys. Who can forget how only a few years ago the American Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, called the French ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’, had French champagne poured into the New York sewers and launched a ‘Cancel France’ campaign. All this merely displays the utter ignorance and primitive arrogance of the users of such words.
‘Cancel everyone who does not agree with us’, or in the words of the remarkably limited Bush Junior: ‘You are either are with us or against us’. It reminds us that some of the first WASPS to arrive in North America were people who were so intolerant that they could no longer live in England side by side with others who had different views. So they chose to emigrate. Later they proved their intolerance by engaging in witch-hunts and burning innocent women to death. And most of them took part in the genocide of the native people whose land they had stolen and used black slaves. And this intolerance is what their descendants are still displaying today on their Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. ‘We cancel and exclude you and your account because you refuse to agree with us and our ‘superior’ (= Nazi) ‘intelligence’ (= stupidity).
The problem has never been one of Ukrainians. The problem has always been that of the spiritual disease of Nazism. And that is what it is – a spiritual disease. Once the soul of the Ukraine has been liberated from this disease, in other words, once it has been denazified, a New Ukraine will be born. It may well take the form of a Protectorate centred around Kiev and speak a mixture of Ukrainian with Russian and Surzhyk (Ukrainian Russian). It will have secure borders and its people will be patriotic Ukrainians, not in some racist way that denigrates others, but in a positive way that respects others. Once freed of parasitic oligarchs and corruption, the naturally rich New Ukraine could have a brilliant future and take a positive part in the Concert of the Nations.
Once it has been understood that there is no problem with the Ukraine or Ukrainians, but only with Nazism, there may take place other Special Operations in other parts of the world. China may soon launch an Operation in Taiwan to free the ethnic Chinese there from the Nazism of its US-appointed elite. As for Russia, it has not yet finished the job in the Ukraine, where the task is constantly being extended because the Nazi West keeps sending long-range missiles and artillery to Kiev. As long as these weapons are in use, firing on Donetsk or anywhere else in liberated territory, the war will be extended and continue. Russia may physically have to liberate the whole country, mobilising more forces beyond the small expeditionary force it originally sent.
And then if Western aggression continues, it may have to launch other operations in Moldova and the Baltics in order to liberate those peoples too from NATO Nazism, from their corrupt US-appointed elites and EU exploitation. It may have to rebuild them, so that their peoples, economic refugees from corruption living now in Western Europe, can gratefully come home. Beyond that, as regards Western Europe in general, it too will surely one day find itself liberated one way or another from transatlantic tyranny and threats, safe under the Russian security and nuclear umbrella. Someone must defend Western Europe from the threats which for the moment are still coming from outside Afro-Eurasia, which is 86% of the world. Only Russia can do that. Russian troops once liberated Berlin and Paris. Will it have to happen again and maybe this time be extended to include Rome, Madrid and London?
The Special Operation has never been only about the Ukraine. It has always been a proxy conflict on the territory claimed by the Kiev regime. In reality, it is an Operation to defeat Global Nazism – euphemistically called ‘Globalism’. This means defeating Nazism militarily, by destroying the Western-created Kiev regime forces and all the extra NATO weapons foolishly sent to the Ukraine; territorially, by liberating lands and peoples from the Nazi yoke; economically, by creating an alliance of friends among the huge populations of the new G8, of Russia, China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Iran, Turkey, Mexico, approaching 50% of the world’s population. This is called to replace the old, tired, narrow, US-manipulated G7, which represents scarcely 10% of the world’s population. And even the new G8 may yet be doubled to become a G16 to include other vital large countries, like Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Egypt, Vietnam and DR Congo. This would include 60% of the world’s population.
The great task before us is to rebalance the world to take account of its real peoples. As an example of the need to rebalance, over a century ago the Russian Prime Minister Count Piotr Stolypin, speaking of Tsar Nicholas’ ‘Great Asian Programme’ and its partial sabotage by the Western Powers through their Japanese puppet, said the following: ‘Our eagle is a legacy of New Rome…a two-headed eagle. Of course, our eagle is strong and powerful, but if you cut off one of our eagle’s heads, the one facing east, you will not turn him into a one-headed eagle facing west: It will only make him bleed to death’. However, NATO/Nazism has been doing precisely the opposite, trying to remake Russia in its own provincial image and so bleed it to death by cutting off one of its heads.
This is not going to happen, whatever the illusions that were fostered within the West during the treacherous Yeltsin regime in the distant and disastrous 1990s. We have moved on a generation, we are now well into the 21st century. Russia is now a restored Eurasian Superpower, its double-headed eagle looking East and West, and the Eurasian Heartland, with 70% of the world’s population and so many living ancient civilisations, is the present and the future of the whole world. Russia’s task is to bring the Non-Russian part of Europe, in the Western part of the European Peninsula, back into the Eurasian orbit, liberating that Western Peninsula from its colonial vassal status to the USA, denazifying and demilitarising it too.
For eight long years Western countries, dominated by the Nazi ideology of the ‘The West is Best’, together with US-backed separatists in Kiev, have been terrorising and murdering thousands of Ukrainians in the war in the Donbass. They have taunted the largest nation in the world, the Russian bear. For 23 years before that, they humiliated the Russian bear. Did they really think they could continue doing this to the restored bicontinental Superpower, with its profound cultural tradition and vast natural resources, without which Europe cannot live? It is so very sad to see how irresponsible Western leaders grasp so little of the consequences of their actions. Have they never heard the word ‘boomerang’?
At great cost Russia’s highly-professional, world-class-equipped and brilliantly-trained armies already liberated and saved Europe from forms of Nazism twice in the past, in 1814 and in 1945. This is the third time that the West has poked the bear. As soon as possible, you Western politicians had better stop sending lethal NATO arms to Nazis in the Ukraine, sue for peace and grant all that the Russian Federation and the Non-Nazi population of the Ukraine wishes. We are pro-Ukrainian, but we are anti-Nazi. You have been warned.
Russian T62 tanks (old models being brought in and why?)
As a result of joint action by People’s Militia of Donetsk People’s Republic and the Russian Armed Forces, Krasnyi Liman has been completely liberated from Ukrainian nationalists.
Consolidating success and a granular look at the various areas, fronts and cauldrons, retreats and routs, areas under fire control
Operational actions and patterns – future front line (if there is one!)
As a result of joint action by People’s Militia of Donetsk People’s Republic and the Russian Armed Forces, Krasnyi Liman has been completely liberated from Ukrainian nationalists.
And we can see from that very same report:
Operational-tactical and army aviation have hit 6 command posts, 1 communications centre, 4 ammunition depots, 2 Grad MLRS batteries, as well as 50 areas of manpower and Ukrainian military equipment concentration.
▫️The attacks have resulted in the elimination of more than 260 nationalists.
▫️In addition, fighter aircraft have shot down 2 Su-25s of the Ukrainian Air Force over Zagradovka, Kherson Region, and Barvenkoe, Kharkov Region.
This is then only the Operational-tactical and army aviation operations. Take a look at the report to begin to understand the massive carnage over the past day.
When can we say that this is now a rout and the Ukrainian forces are being fed into a meatball machine by their own commanders?
From Intel Slava, we have this:
Ukrainian guys do not want to become officers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Kyiv completely failed the recruitment campaign for cadets in higher military educational institutions. By the end of May, military universities received a document from only 5% of previously selected candidates.
The Ukrainian domestic political situation is deteriorating fast. Gonzalo Lira in two videos, comments on that and the possibilities. Much ‘eating their own’ will become apparent as we’ve just seen from Poroshenko’s arrest/detainment? on the Polish border. https://t.me/EurasianChoice/14279
The geopolitical situation is a cartoon as the message is now clear that the Ukraine is falling. The Eurocrats are also falling, over their own feet, and some sector of the Biden Administration emits a stream of announcements on how many weapons they are sending to the Ukraine, only to be overruled by another sector minutes later. In addition, reports are beginning to become a stream that the Ukrainians that fled to Europe are not welcome and in more and more cases service to them is being refused.
Starlink? Satellite systems have ground stations. The Russians are taking trophies of these ground stations, or just kicking them around a bit, so, how long will that network last?
New information is out on the biolabs with an accusation that the US colonized developing countries to place their biolabs. Here is a separate report.
The news cycle is extremely busy with mostly hot air out of the west. With the recognition that they’ve lost slowly sinking in, the sailing term is ‘in irons’, i.e., they’ve sailed too close to the wind and cannot maneuver. The chess term is ‘zugzwang’. The ‘Icarus’ term is that their wings are melting.
In the meanwhile, the Russians are providing the real fire and testing new weapons. There is a stream of this and Intel Slava comments. Go to that channel and scroll through to see the extent. The Russian Armed Forces have used a new version of the Solntsepek heavy flamethrower system, TOS-2, during an offensive in the Kharkiv direction. It is based on TOS-1A, but has significant advantages. The platform truck has an increased cross-country capability, increased engagement range and fully automated firing process. The complex is protected by an electronic jamming system.
The day before, the Ukrainian Defence Ministry published a hysterical post on its official Twitter account saying that the Russian Armed Forces were using “the world’s most powerful non-nuclear weapons” on Ukrainian territory and posted a video of the TOS-1A in action in Donbass. This simply breaks the psyche of Ukrainian servicemen.
We’ve had some new Iskander action as well: The launch of the R-500 cruise missile by the Iskander complex against targets in Ukraine. https://t.me/intelslava/30164
This then summarizes the main ebbs and flows of the past 48 hours. That is it for today. Enjoy your discussion and careful with the Ukie propaganda. It is still everywhere but slowly changing to ludicrousness with overtones of sheer panic. Do take a mental note of the discussion on Military Summary at the start – the explanation of Ukrainian methods which can always result in another false flag. There are reports/rumors that the Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kuleba says he has been told to negotiate. We have to wait for Russian confirmation of this.
After the Russian forces took POPASNA, the pace increased. There are still battles, but the Russians are now rolling over everything else in the Donbas. The Ukrainians are being annihilated, more and more soldiers are refusing to fight, reports of mass surrenders pour in, and the Russian strategy of cauldrons and partial cauldrons is proving incredibly effective. It is a bloody war in that area exacerbated by the Ukrainian leaders because orders for a sensible retreat are not forthcoming.
Two videos today – both quite detailed:
This first video from Military Summary on Rumble, describes the logjam against sensible retreat.
This second video describes some of the very recent battles and how these brought the Ukraine to this point. Very detailed and he draws his maps on the fly as he talks.
A few hours ago reports started filtering in of huge forces of the Russian Aerospace Forces passing over Lugansk towards the front, and powerful explosions thundered everywhere. The correspondent of “Russian Spring” rusvesna.su from the capital of the LPR reports that he sees this for the first time, a lot of combat aircraft and helicopters swept over the city in several waves. Of course we do not know yet the what, why and where of this, excepting the Russian MoD report of this morning tells the story of the increased pace.
Take a look at the numbers:
💥High-precision air-based missiles have hit 48 areas of AFU manpower and military equipment concentration, 2 artillery batteries, and 2 ammunition depots near Nikolaevka and Berestovoe in Donetsk People’s Republic during the day.
▫️1 Ukrainian electronic reconnaissance centre near Dneprovskoe, Nikolaev Region, has been destroyed, including 11 servicemen from the combat unit, as well as 15 foreign engineering specialists who arrived with security guards.
▫️In addition, 1 Osa-AKM anti-aircraft missile system launcher has been destroyed near Nikolaevka in Donetsk People’s Republic, and 1 radar of the Ukrainian S-300 anti-aircraft missile system near Chuhuev in Kharkov region.
✈️💥Operational-tactical and army aviation have hit 49 areas of AFU manpower and military equipment concentration, 2 mortar crews, as well as 1 depot of missile and artillery weapons and ammunition.
▫️The attacks have resulted in the elimination of more than 350 nationalists and up to 96 armoured and motor vehicles.
💥Russian air defence means have shot down 1 Ukrainian Mi-24 helicopter over Husarovka, Kharkov Region. 1 Ukrainian Air Force military transport aircraft delivering ammunition and weapons has been also shot down in mid-air near Kremidovka, Odessa Region.
▫️In addition, 13 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles have been shot down near Zelenyi Gai in Kherson Region, Bolshie and Malye Prokhody, Gavrilovka, Veseloe in Kharkov Region, and Epifanovka and Kirovsk in Lugansk People’s Republic, including 2 Soviet-made Tu-143 Reis jets near Melovatka in Lugansk People’s Republic.
💥Missile troops and artillery have hit 62 command posts, 407 areas of AFU manpower and military equipment concentration, 47 artillery and mortar units at firing positions, as well as 3 ammunition depots.
▫️Units and military equipment of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ 10th Mountain Assault Brigade, which arrived to reinforce the Ukrainian grouping in Donbass, have been destroyed during unloading near Pokrovsk railway station in Donetsk People’s Republic.
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Ukrainian General Staff says “The invaders are actively advancing in several directions at once.” — Specifically, the Russians are advancing simultaneously in Severodonetsk, Bakhmut, Avdeevsky, Novopavlovsk and Liman directions.
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We also had a short explanation of why the perceived slow down in the Russian operation. The slowdown of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine is intentional with a view to evacuating the population and avoiding casualties among civilians, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said. Russia’s Armed Forces are creating humanitarian corridors and announcing ceasefires to ensure the safe evacuation of residents from encircled settlements, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu explained, despite this approach stalling the progress of the country’s forces. “Of course, this slows down the pace of the offensive, but it is being done deliberately to avoid civilian casualties,” he explained at a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) Council of Defense Ministers.
Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev spoke on the Ukraine specifically and geopolitics:
▪️All the goals set by the President of the Russian Federation during the special military operation will be achieved, it cannot be otherwise. Russia is not chasing deadlines in the course of a special military operation in Ukraine.
The ideal scenario for US-led NATO is an endlessly smoldering conflict in Ukraine.
▪️Nazism must either be eradicated by 100%, or it will raise its head in a few years, and in an even uglier form.
▪️Ukraine, if it had remained an independent country, and not controlled from outside, “would have long ago expelled all Nazi evil spirits from its land.”
▪️Moscow will be obliged to respond to the entry of Sweden and Finland into NATO, which is a direct security threat to Russia. Finland and Sweden will be accepted into NATO, despite the objections of Turkey and Croatia, “because Washington decided so.”
▪️The West is today obscuring Russia’s contribution to the preservation of other states in different historical periods with all its might.
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The political and geopolitical situation is heating up and at the same time becoming more surreal.
They’re even dusting off Kissinger at Davos. (Note Pepe Escobar’s ascerbic entry to his telegram channel at the end.)**
There is a small window of opportunity to wind down the armed conflict in Ukraine and find a peace settlement, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger has told a gathering of Western elites in Davos, Switzerland. Beyond that, Russia may break from, the rest of, Europe for good and become a permanent ally of China, he said on Monday during a speech at the World Economic Forum.
“Negotiations on peace need to begin in the next two months or so, [before the conflict] creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome,” the 98-year-old veteran diplomat said of the crisis. The outcome will determine the rest of Europe’s relationships with Russia and Ukraine alike, he said. “Ideally, the dividing line should return to the status quo ante,” he said.
“I believe pursuing the war beyond that point would turn it not into a war about the freedom of Ukraine, which had been undertaken with great cohesion by NATO, but into a war against Russia itself,” he added.
There are more voices from Europe asking for a peace process to start but first, the Ukrainian response:
Ukrainian presidential advisor Alexey Arestovich resorted to obscene language to criticize those in the West urging Kiev to cede part of the country’s territory to Russia for the sake of peace.
“Go f**k yourselves with such proposals, you dumb f**ks, to trade Ukrainian territory a little bit! Are you f**king crazy? Our children are dying, soldiers are stopping shells with their own bodies, and they are telling us how to sacrifice our territories. This will never happen,” Arestovich said in an interview on Wednesday.
Soros calls for Putin’s defeat: George Soros told the World Economic Forum in Davos the West needs a quick victory over Russia in Ukraine so it can focus on climate change
The process of ‘disowning’ the Ukraine has started.
Gen. Milley notes that the US has reopened military-to-military level talks with the Russians. His call to his Russian counterpart last week was “important” and it was “purposeful”
Of course, the talk of another peace plan is not born of care for people or human rights or democracy or deep held care for the Ukrainian people. It is driven by desperation and is a desperate grasp at avoiding a psychological defeat bigger than Afghanistan.
TASS/ Russia’s State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin took to his Telegram channel to highlight that the US and its partners do not plan to provide real assistance to Ukraine.
Ukraine will only get 15% of the $40 billion promised by the US, he said.
“Washington and Brussels do not really intend to help Ukraine, or solve its economic and social issues. They only need Ukraine to fight Russia till the last Ukrainian,” Volodin said.
According to the recent aid to Ukraine legislation signed by President Joe Biden, 35% of the $40 billion is going to finance the US Armed Forces, he explained. Meanwhile, 45.2% of that amount is set to be spent on other countries, not Ukraine, while another 4.8% will be earmarked to support refugees, and restore the US diplomatic mission in Ukraine. “Ukraine will only receive 15% of the allotted sum,” the speaker revealed.
But Ukrainians will have to pay off the whole sum, he said. The US is aware that Kiev will not be able to service the debt in the future. “That is why they are seizing Ukraine’s last reserves, including grain, which is what we are seeing right now”.
Quo Vadis Ukraine?
A list of those that want a piece of the pie is shaping up. Of course, Poland is not suddenly in love with the Ukraine without a reason. They want their piece of the land pie. I suspect Hungary is also not innocent in this matter. Will the Ukraine be apportioned? Or will it lose its nation-state status completely, and cease to exist? Nobody knows because nobody knows the Russian plan. In Europe and the US/NATO, fear is taking hold. Nobody knows where Russia plans to stop after liberating the two new Republics, Donesk and Luhansk. Is this the moment that they will choose to push NATO back to its agreed borders?
Maria Zakharova noted that these peace proposals that are appearing (talking about the Italian one specifically) could show that Rome is perhaps “beginning to think about the depressing consequences of the military psychosis that was caused by the reaction of the West to the special military operation of Russia in Ukraine” – and the supposed plan could be an attempt “to offer some alternatives to the current escalation, which threatens to develop into a full-scale military conflict between Russia and NATO.”
The deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, said that “any peace proposal built purely in the interest of NATO and the Western world order should simply be ignored.”
“Or rather, their authors should be told to go in a certain direction,” Medvedev said.
Russia is ‘building back better’ and major reconstruction is starting as well as President Putin signed a decree relaxing rules for granting Russian citizenship to residents of Ukraine’s Zaporozhye and Kherson Region.
The amendments are added to the decree that previously introduced a similar procedure for residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR).
Russia continues to do business. Delegations from over 90 countries have confirmed their participation in the 25th edition of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) scheduled for June. Russia and Iran also agreed to implement the MIR payment card system in Iran.
That is it for today. Enjoy your discussion and careful on the Ukie propaganda. It is still everywhere.
**Escobar Telegram Channel:
THE PLIGHT OF DR. K – IN ONE MINUTE
War criminal Kissinger’s performance at Davos should be summed up as yet another massive failure of his master’s trademark Divide and Rule.
Ukraine/404 has always been a sort of Rubicon in terms of downsizing Russia (think Brzezinski).
It consumed A LOT of capital – physical and political. It was THE red line – success or failure – setting the stage for the triumph of the NWO and its top secretion, The Great Reset.
Kissinger – even as a mere Rockefeller messenger boy – was at the center of this racket for DECADES. It was Kissinger, under Rockefeller’s orders, that groomed cypto Dr. Evil Klaus Schwab to build the WEF and the Davos ethos.
Even if Davos is a mere outlet for the people who really run the show, the WEF remains the premier Influence Scoundrels club on the planet bent on forcing their agenda all across the spectrum. Still toxic after all these years. Yet now even Kissinger knows it’s bound to fail.
Andrei Martyanov talks about a very important issue almost buried in the other issues. That is the Global Conflict which he describes as the west against the global community coalescing around Russia and China now.
On the Saker Blog, Andrei Raevski called it Zone A and Zone B, we can simply call it the west against the rest.
Looking back at the bigger picture, i.e., Russia is too slow, and other canards:
February 21 president of Russia Vladimir Putin signed a decree to recognize the independence of the DPR and LPR and promised to support the republics. On February 24, President Putin announced a special military operation in Ukraine in response to the appeal of the leaders of the republics of Donbass with a request for help.
The President stressed that Moscow’s plans do not include the occupation of Ukrainian territories. Since that time, an operation has been underway on the territory of Ukraine to denazify the country and liberate the civilian population from the Kiev regime.
So that is a refresher on what the focus and objectives are of Russia’s SMO. Keep this in mind in your commenting.
“Reach Out and Touch Someone”
Highly recommended by Andrei Martynov, Larry Johnson tells us exactly what this means:
A common theme marshaled to “prove” that Russia is failing in its war with Ukraine is that Russia failed to quickly take Kiev and, in fact, was forced to retreat from Kiev. In addition, the military analysts that populate the cable news channels in the United States insist that the Russians are bogged down and not making the rapid progress they (the Russians) expected.
This is nonsense. I defy anyone to show me one statement by Putin or the Russian General Staff where a specific timeline was established or identified. This is a construct of western military analysts who do not have access to Russia’s military plan and are projecting their own wishful thinking as “evidence” of a flailing Russian military.
Russia is not sitting on its haunches licking its wounds. Rather than send troops against fortified positions, Russia continues to hit targets throughout Ukraine with precision missiles. Here is the activity reported on May 4:
Russia attacked railway substation in Pyatihatki with a high-precision missile;
Russia attacked railway substation in Tymkove with a high-precision missile;
Russia attacked railway substation in Volovets with a high-precision missile;
Russia attacked railway substation in Lviv with a high-precision missile;
Russia attacked railway substation in Pidbirtsi with a high-precision missile;
Russia attacked military assets of the AFU near Protopopovka with a high-precision missile;
Russia attacked military assets of the AFU near Novaya Dmitrovka with a high-precision missile;
Russia attacked military assets of the AFU near Sandjeika with a high-precision missile;
Russia attacked military assets of the AFU near Krysino with a high-precision missile;
Russia attacked military assets of the AFU near Volnyansk with a high-precision missile;
Russia attacked military assets of the AFU near Novoalexandrovka with a high-precision missile.
Larry goes further with a video of a bombardment of Mykolaev aka Nikolaev explaining the “reach out and touch someone” strategy and explaining that if you think that enduring this kind of shelling is inconsequential, then you have no appreciation of the limits of human endurance to such a sustained barrage.
Russia is reaching out and touching someone with each of their actions!
Read the whole thing and seriously revise the canard of ‘Russia is moving too slow’. Take a note of The Ukrainian supply lines (just about non-existent), the economy, and the nature of the Russian ground strategy. He says:
“… I am offering an alternative explanation for Russia’s ground strategy. They are under no deadline. They are not going to send their military units into head-on assaults and risk unnecessary casualties.
And they are going to bomb Ukrainian units relentlessly until they surrender or are destroyed. Time is on Putin’s side.”
Then we will look at another westerner commenting on the Russian strategy. Brian Berletic is a marine and he has published for many years from the east. He explains what Russia is doing now on the ground by saying they are raining a curtain of steel.
A summary:
The US and its allies spent 8 years building up the military the Ukraine had at the beginning of Russian military operations in February 2022. This Ukrainin military failed to prevent Russian forces now from shaping the battlefield in Donbas creating the conditions for Ukrainian forces there to be cut off, encircled, and systematically destroyed.
After 8 years – this was the best the US and its allies could do to prepare Ukraine. Despite the urgent (reported) flood of weapons and money into Ukraine now along with remedial training programs – nothing now can be done better or quicker than over the past 8 years – Russia is removing Ukrainian combat capabilities off the battlefield faster than the Ukraine and its allies can replace or regenerate it.
There is much FUD being spread about the Red Babushka. Please be very careful what you read and watch, as the last video is a propaganda of the Ukies. We wait!
Ukrainian fighting forces are fierce but they have some help:
One of the fighters of the nationalist battalion who laid down arms told about combat drugs used by Ukrainian fighters to suppress fear and lower the threshold for pain. These drugs were supplied to them by volunteers.
💬 “…I can tell you about some medication called Ephedrine, supplied by volunteers to our unit. We used this drug just before the fight, after that we lost the feeling of fear, we could calmly go into battle, being afraid of absolutely nothing…”
Another canard needs some debunking. RT (bless their socks!) had a headline that Putin apologized for Mr.Lavrov’s comments on Jewishness. And this is being passed around (by our own FUD delivering colleagues) as how bad Mr. Putin is. Well, here is the readout. Confirm for yourselves, there is no apology there. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/68356
And it would be a good thing to question all the various announcements and pronouncements on new weapons being supplied to the Ukraine. Frequently the announcement and the presser are done to the applause of the collective west, but the weapons never make it. Ukraine is not getting the 40-year old Gepard tanks as it was promised. Reason, no ammo. Switzerland makes ammo for these, but they cannot supply to conflict zones. (Or perhaps, they have none?).
Note by Andrei: if Gonzalo has been seized by the local Gestapo, his only chance of survival is either being freed by a Russian special operation (assuming the Russians can find out where he is held) or an exchange. To be honest, both options are highly unlikely. Please keep him in your prayers!
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 