Putin’s “War” to Re-shape the American Zeitgeist – by Alastair Crooke – 24 June 2024

 • 1,600 WORDS • 

It is only by understanding and taking the Russian nuclear warnings seriously that we may exclude the risk of nuclear weapons coming into play.

The G7 and the subsequent Swiss ‘Bürgenstock Conference’ can – in retrospect – be understood as preparation for a prolonged Ukraine war. The three centrepiece announcements emerging from the G7 – the 10 year Ukraine security pact; the $50 ‘billion Ukraine loan’; and the seizing of interest on Russian frozen funds – make the point. The war is about to escalate.

These stances were intended as preparation of the western public ahead of events. And in case of any doubts, the blistering belligerency towards Russia emerging from the European election leaders was plain enough: They sought to convey a clear impression of Europe preparing for war.

What then lies ahead? According to White House Spokesman John Kirby:

“Washington’s position on Kiev is “absolutely clear”:

“First, they’ve got to win this war”.

“They gotta win the war first. So, number one: We’re doing everything we can to make sure they can do that. Then when the war’s over … Washington will assist in building up Ukraine’s military industrial base”.

If that was not plain, the U.S. intent to prolong and take the war deep into Russia was underlined by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan: “Authorization for Ukrainian use of American weapons for cross-border attacks extends to anywhere [from which] Russian forces are coming across the border”. He affirmed, too, that Ukraine can use F-16s to attack Russia and use U.S. supplied air defence systems “to take down Russian planes – even if in Russian airspace – if they’re about to fire into Ukrainian airspace”.

Ukrainian pilots have the latitude to judge ‘the intent’ of Russian fighter aircraft? Expect the parameters of this ‘authorisation’ to widen quickly – deeper to air bases from which Russian fighter bombers launch.

Understanding that the war is about to transform radically – and extremely dangerously – President Putin (in his speech to the Foreign Ministry Board) detailed just how the world had arrived at this pivotal juncture – one which could extend to nuclear exchanges.

The gravity of the situation itself demanded the making of one ‘last chance’ offer to the West, which Putin emphatically said was “no temporary ceasefire for Kiev to prepare a new offensive; nor was it about freezing the conflict”; but rather, his proposals were about the war’s final completion.

“If, as before, Kiev and western capitals refuse it – then at the end, that’s their business”, Putin said.

Just to be clear, Putin almost certainly never expected the proposals to be received in the West other than by the scorn and derision with which they, in fact, were met. Nor would Putin trust – for a moment – the West not to renege on an agreement, were some arrangement to be reached on these lines.

If so, why then did President Putin make such a proposal last weekend, if the West cannot be trusted and its reaction was so predictable?

Well, maybe we need to search for the nesting inner Matryoshka doll, rather than fix on the outer casing: Putin’s ‘final completion’ likely will not credibly be achieved through some itinerant peace broker. In his Foreign Ministry address, Putin dismisses devices such as ‘ceasefires’ or ‘freezes’. He is seeking something permanent: An arrangement that has ‘solid legs’; one that has durability.

Such a solution – as Putin before has hinted – requires a new world security architecture to come into being; and were that to happen, then a complete solution for Ukraine would flow as an implicit part to a new world order. That is to say, with the microcosm of a Ukraine solution flowing implicitly from the macrocosm agreement between the U.S. and the ‘Heartland’ powers – settling the borders to their respective security interests.

This clearly is impossible now, with the U.S. in its psychological mindset stuck in the Cold War era of the 1970s and 1980s. The end to that war – the seeming U.S. victory – set the foundation to the 1992 Wolfowitz Doctrine which underscored American supremacy at all costs in a post-Soviet world, together with “stamping out rivals, wherever they may emerge”.

“In conjunction with this, the Wolfowitz Doctrine stipulated that the U.S. would … [inaugurate] a U.S.-led system of collective security and the creation of a democratic zone of peace”. Russia, on the other hand, was dealt with differently—the country fell off the radar. It became insignificant as a geopolitical competitor in the eyes of the West, as its gestures of peaceful offerings were rebuffed – and guarantees given to it regarding NATO’s expansion forfeited”.

“Moscow could do nothing to prevent such an endeavour. The successor state of the mighty Soviet Union was not its equal, and thus not considered important enough to be involved in global decision-making. Yet, despite its reduced size and sphere of influence, Russia has persisted in being considered a key player in international affairs”.

Russia today is a preeminent global actor in both the economic and political spheres. Yet for the Ruling Strata in the U.S., equal status between Moscow and Washington is out of the question. The Cold War mentality still infuses the Beltway with the unwarranted confidence that the Ukraine conflict might somehow result in Russian collapse and dismemberment.

Putin in his address, by contrast, looked ahead to the collapse of the Euro-Atlantic security system – and of a new architecture emerging. “The world will never be the same again”, Putin said.

Implicitly, he hints that such a radical shift would be the only way credibly to end the Ukraine war. An agreement emerging from the wider framework of consensus on the division of interests between the Rimland and the Heartland (in Mackinder-esque language) would reflect the security interests of each party – and not be achieved at the expense of others’ security.

And to be clear: If this analysis is correct, Russia may not be in such a hurry to conclude matters in Ukraine. The prospect of such a ‘global’ negotiation between Russia-China and the U.S. is still far off.

The point here is that the collective western psyche has not been transformed sufficiently. Treating Moscow with equal esteem remains out of the question for Washington.

The new American narrative is no negotiations with Moscow now, but maybe it will become possible sometime early in the new year – after the U.S. elections.

Well, Putin might surprise again – by not jumping at the prospect, but rebuffing it; assessing that the Americans still are not ready for negotiations for a ‘complete end’ to the war – especially as this latest narrative runs concurrently with talk of a new Ukraine offensive shaping up for 2025. Of course, much is likely to change over the coming year.

The documents outlining a putative new security order however, were already drafted by Russia in 2021 – and duly ignored in the West. Russia perhaps can afford to wait out military events in Ukraine, in Israel, and in the financial sphere.

They are all, in any event, trending Putin’s way. They are all inter-connected and have the potential for wide metamorphosis.

Put plainly: Putin is waiting on the shaping of the American Zeitgeist. He seemed very confident both at St Petersburg and last week at the Foreign Ministry.

The backdrop to the G7’s Ukraine preoccupation seemed to be more U.S. elections-related, than real: This implies that the priority in Italy was election optics, rather than a desire to start a full-blown hot war. But this may be wrong.

Russian speakers during these recent gatherings – notably Sergei Lavrov – hinted broadly that the order already had come down for war with Russia. Europe seems, however improbably, to be gearing up for war – with much chatter about military conscription.

Will it all blow away with the passing of a hot summer of elections? Maybe.

The coming phase seems likely to entail western escalation, with provocations occurring inside Russia. The latter will react strongly to any crossing of (real) red lines by NATO, or any false flag provocation (now widely expected by Russiam military bloggers).

And herein lies the greatest danger: In the context of escalation, American disdain for Russia poses the greatest danger. The West now says it treats notions of putative nuclear exchange as Putin’s ‘bluff’. The Financial Times tells us that Russia’s nuclear warnings are ‘wearing thin’ in the West.

If this is true, western officials utterly misconceive the reality. It is only by understanding and taking the Russian nuclear warnings seriously that we may exclude the risk of nuclear weapons coming into play, as we move up the escalatory ladder with tit-for-tat measures.

Even though they say they believe them to be bluff, U.S. figures nonetheless hype the risk of a nuclear exchange. If they think it to be a bluff, it appears to be based on the presumption that Russia has few other options.

This would be wrong: There are several escalatory steps that Russia can take up the ladder, before reaching the tactical nuclear weapon stage: Trade and financial counter-attack; symmetrical provision of advanced weaponry to western adversaries (corresponding to U.S. supplies to Ukraine); cutting the electricity branch distribution coming from Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania; strikes on border munition crossings; and taking a leaf from the Houthis who have knocked down several sophisticated and costly U.S. drones, disabling America’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) infrastructure.

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(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

Hegemon Orders Europe: Bet on War and Steal Russia’s Money – by Pepe Escobar – 18 June 2024

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The Swiss “peace” kabuki came and went – and the winner was Vladimir Putin. He didn’t even have to show up.

None of the Big Players did. Or in case they sent their emissaries, there was significant refusal to sign the vacuous final declaration – as in BRICS members Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, UAE and South Africa.

Without BRICS, there’s absolutely nothing the collective West – as in The Hegemon and assorted vassals – can do to alter the proxy war chessboard in Ukraine.

In his carefully calibrated speech to diplomats and the leadership of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Putin delineated an incredibly restrained and strategic approach to solve the Ukraine problem. In the context of the Hegemon’s escalatory green light – actually in practice for several months now – for Kiev to attack deeper into the Russian Federation, Putin’s offer was extremely generous.

That is a direct offer to the Hegemon and the collective West – as the sweaty T-shirt actor in Kiev, apart from illegitimate, is beyond irrelevant.

Predictably, NATO – via that epileptic slab of Norwegian wood – already proclaimed its refusal to negotiate, even as some relatively awake members of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine’s parliament) started discussing the offer, according to Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin.

Moscow sees the Verkhovna Rada as the only legitimate entity in Ukraine – and the only one with which would be possible to reach an agreement.

Russian UN representative Vasily Nebenzya cut to the chase – diplomatically: if the generous proposal is refused, next time conditions for starting negotiations will be “different”. And “far more unfavorable”, according to Duma Defense Committee head Andrei Kartapolov.

As Nebenzya stressed that in case of a refusal the collective West will bear full responsibility for further bloodshed, Kartapolov elaborated on the Big Picture: Russia’s real target is to create a whole new security system for the Eurasian space.

And that, of course, is anathema to the Hegemon’s elites.

Putin’s security vision for Eurasia harks back to this legendary speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Now, with the steady advance of an irreversible multi-nodal (italics mine) and multi-centric new system of international relations, the Kremlin is pressing for an urgent solution – considering the extremely dangerous escalation of these past few months.

Putin once again had to remind the deaf, dumb and blind of the obvious:

“Calls to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, which has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, demonstrate the extreme adventurism of Western politicians. They either do not understand the scale of the threat they themselves create, or they are simply obsessed with the belief in their own immunity and their own exclusivity. Both can turn into a tragedy”.

They remain deaf, dumb and blind.

A proposal that does not solve anything?

A fiery debate is raging in informed circles in Russia about Putin’s proposal. Critics blast it as a capitulation – forced by selected oligarchs and influential business circles, adverse to an “almost war” (the preferred motto) that keeps postponing the inevitable decapitation strike.

Critics argue that the military strategy is totally subordinated to a political strategy. And that would explain the serious problems in the Black Sea and in Transnistria: the political center of power refuses to conquer the number one economic/military target, which is Odessa.

Additionally, Ukraine’s weapon supply chains are not being properly interrupted.

The key critical point is “this is taking too long”. One just needs to look at the example of Mariupol.

In 2014, Mariupol was left in the control of nazi-banderista gangs as part of a financial deal with Rinat Akhmetov, the owner of the Azovstal works. That’s a classic case of oligarchs and financiers prevailing over military objectives.

Putin’s generosity, visible in this latest peace offer, also elicits a parallel with what happened in Dara’a in Syria: Russia also negotiated what looked at first like a peace deal. Yet Dara’a remains a mess, extremely violent, with Syrian and Russian soldiers at risk.

It gets really tricky when the current proposal only asks NATO not to be encroached in Kiev; but at the same time Kiev will be allowed to have an army, based on the (aborted) April 2022 negotiations in Istanbul.

Critics also argue that Putin seems to believe that this proposal will solve the war. Not really. A real de-nazification campaign is an affair of decades – involving everything from full demilitarization to eradicating focuses of extremist ideology. A real cultural revolution.

The current escalation already is in tune with the orders given by the rarefied plutocracy who really runs the show to messengers – and operatives: nazi-banderista gangs will unleash a War of Terror inside Russia for years. From Ukraine territory. Just like Idlib in Syria remains a terror-friendly environment.

The Odessa file

Putin’s strategy may be on to something that escapes his critics. His wish for a return of peace and the re-establishment of sound relations with Kiev and the West has got to be a ruse – as he’s the first to know that’s not gonna happen.

It’s clear that Kiev will not willingly cede territory: these will have to be conquered in the battlefield. Moreover NATO simply cannot sign its cosmic humiliation on the dotted line, accepting that Russia will get what it is demanding since February 2022.

Putin’s first – diplomatic – objective though has already been met. He has clearly demonstrated to the Global Majority he’s open to solve the dilemma in a serene atmosphere, while discombobulated NATO keeps shrieking “War!” every other minute.

The Hegemon wants war? So war it will be – to the last Ukrainian.

And that brings us to the Odessa file.

Putin, crucially, did not say anything about Odessa. This is Kiev’s last chance saloon to keep Odessa. If the peace proposal is rejected for good, Odessa will feature in the next list of non-negotiables.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, once again, nailed it: “Putin is patient. Those with ears will hear, those with brains will understand”.

No one should expect working brains popping up across the West. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has confirmed how NATO is planning massive installations in Poland, Romania and Slovakia to “coordinate transfer of weapons to Ukraine”.

Add to it the epileptic slab of Norwegian wood stating that NATO is “discussing” bringing their nuclear weapons to a state of combat readiness “in the face of the growing threat from Russia and China”.

Once again Old Stolty gives away the game: note this is all about the Hegemon’s paranoia with the top two “existential threats”, the

Russia-China strategic partnership. That is, the leaders of BRICS coordinating the drive towards a multipolar, multi-nodal (italics mine), “harmonic” (Putin’s terminology) world.

Stealing Russian money is legal

Then there’s the blatant theft of Russian financial assets.

At their sorry spectacle in Puglia, in southern Italy, the G7 – in the presence of the illegitimate sweaty T-shirt actor – agreed to shove an extra $50 billion in loans to Ukraine, funded by the interest on Russia’s frozen and for all practical purposes stolen assets.

With impeccably twisted logic, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni – whose hairdressing and wardrobe revamp conclusively did not apply to her brains – said that the G7 “will not confiscate frozen assets of the Russian Federation”; “we are talking about the interest that they accumulate over time.”

As financial scams go, this one is a thing of beauty.

Essentially, the main customer (the Hegemon) and its instrument (the EU) are trying to mask the actual theft of those “frozen” Russian sovereign assets as if this was a legal transaction.

The EU will transfer the “frozen” assets – something around $260 billion – to the status of collateral for the American loan. That’s the whole thing – because only the income deriving from the assets would not be enough as collateral to secure the loan.

It gets even dicier. These funds will not leave Washington for Kiev; they will remain in town to the benefit of the industrial-military complex churning out more weapons.

So the EU steals the assets, under a flimsy legalese pretext (Janet Yellen already said it’s OK) and transfers them to the U.S. Washington is immune if everything goes wrong – as it will.

Only a fool would believe that the Americans would give a sizable loan to a de facto country 404 with a sovereign debt rating in the abyss. The dirty job is assigned to the Europeans: it’s up to the EU to change the status of Russia’s stolen/”frozen” assets to collateral.

And wait for the ultimate dicey gambit. The whole scheme concerns Euroclear, in Belgium – where the largest amount of Russian funds is parked. Yet the decision on this money-laundering scam was not taken by Belgium, and not even by the EUrocrats.

This was a Hegemon-imposed G7 decision. Belgium is not even part of the G7. Yet in the end, it will be the EU’s “credibility” as a whole that will go down the drain across the whole Global Majority.

And the deaf, dumb and blind, predictably, are not even aware of it.

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(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

Two European Thorns in the Empire’s Side – by Eve Ottenberg – 14 June 2024

Two European Thorns in the Empire’s Side: Rightist Orban and Leftist Fico (and Look What Happened to Him)

Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban may be a far-right politician, but he also opposes the west’s proxy war in Ukraine and that, much more than his extreme conservatism, is what infuriates imperial henchmen. The European Union is in a constant snit over Orban, because every time that organization turns around, he blocks funds or weapons to Kiev. Another war opponent is leftwing Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico – and we all know what happened to him. On May 15, he was shot five times. The attempted assassination failed, but he’s still recovering; and his fate was used by an EU official, Oliver Varhelyi, who warned the Georgian prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, that if Georgia approved a foreign agents’ bill, something Washington and Brussels vehemently oppose – since it interferes with a Georgian color revolution and opening a second front against Russia – he should bear in mind what happened to Fico. Varhelyi claims his remark was taken out of context. Ho, ho!

 This alleged attempted intimidation of the Georgian prime minister comes at a time of great tensions between the EU and Georgia. So no surprise that Kobakhidze would charge that what Politico May 23 predictably tarred as “his increasingly authoritarian government,” was basically receiving EU threats and faces “abusive blackmail” from the west. Indeed, the U.S. has already imposed sanctions on dozens of Georgian officials. “In my conversation,” Kobakhidze wrote on Facebook, “the European Commissioner listed a number of measures Western politicians can take after [Georgia passes] the transparency law and…[the Commissioner] said ‘look what happened to Fico, you should be very careful.’” If that doesn’t sound like a threat to you, you need to doublecheck your grip on reality.

In this context of western war-on-Moscow insanity, Washington regards countries like Georgia, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and Moldova as chess pieces it must either eliminate or bring to its side via color revolutions, lawfare, sanctions, other financial extortion, electoral chicanery or outright meddling in those nations’ internal affairs. Perhaps not chess pieces, because Washington doesn’t play a strategic game like chess. Let’s just say, the imperial view is that these countries are weaklings to be bullied.

  Such bullying comes in a bleak landscape of ever more dangerous escalation between two superpowers, the U.S. and Russia, escalation that could lead to nuclear war. Perceiving this mad peril, the third superpower, Beijing, recently weighed in, announcing that it would support Moscow militarily. So much for the Beltway hallucination about driving a wedge between China and Russia, in order first to defeat the latter then the former, a delusion the hubristically over-confident United States never bothered to conceal but instead shouted from the rooftops early on in the Ukraine War. You’d think this Sino-Russian publicly proclaimed defense pact would convince Washington’s rulers that their hyper-aggressive belligerent approach has failed, so it’s time for diplomacy. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong.

The 40- and 50-somethings ruling the roost at the state department and who form a despotic cadre of neocon government advisors have little experience of the terrors of the cold war and evidently less realistic grasp of what a hot one would mean – 90 million dead Americans in the first few minutes and tens of millions more shortly thereafter. These so-called leaders are a lethal, planetary menace. And don’t look to Donald “Fire and Fury” Trump for salvation: He recently proclaimed he’d bomb Beijing and Moscow. If one of these two presidential candidates, Trump or Biden, doesn’t come to his senses fast, humanity’s ranks could soon be thinned to those who had the foresight and money to build bomb shelters.

The Biden gang’s insane journey toward Atomic Armageddon is all the loonier, because these hacks seem to forget that in a nuclear war there are no winners. Even if the fanatics at, say, the neocon Institute for the Study of War convince the white house to attempt to destroy all Russian nuclear command and control centers, it is pointless, as Moscow knows. That’s because Russia has a “dead hand” nuclear launch system. In the very unlikely event that the west decapitates the Kremlin, the nukes launch automatically at Europe and the United States, even if Russian leadership is all dead.

That the psychopaths in supposed institutes and think tanks in Washington might advocate such a move is simply an argument to end their influence. But Biden has assembled a globally lethal bunch of neocons to run foreign policy, no surprise from the president who greenlit the bombing of the Nordstream pipeline. However, they now play a terrifying game, pushing as close as possible to Moscow’s red lines. A no-fly zone in western Ukraine? F-16s for Kiev? Western boots on the ground in Ukraine? Any of these would be an end-times disaster. Yet feckless, reckless Biden has shown repeatedly that what he swears never to do one month, he implements a few months later. In short, given the war-mongers he packed the white house with, he’s not to be trusted with humanity’s fate.

Leaders like Fico and Orban come right out and say the west is crazy for war. But such honesty is not allowed. Nor is it permitted to utter the truth that Moscow was massively, deliberately provoked into invading Ukraine, a provocation that the west cultivated for nearly a decade, starting with a 2014 CIA-backed neo-Nazi putsch in Kiev. And Biden was one of the most gung-ho Ukraine-in-NATO boosters. Now, as Kiev (with American satellite surveillance and targeting) damages the Russian early warning nuclear defense umbrella, what will Washington say if this leads – as enough such damage could – to an atomic holocaust? That Moscow’s launch was unprovoked? If so, Beltway survivors, if there are any, will be shouting into the wind: because hundreds of millions of humans will already be dead and five billion others will soon follow them into the grave, via nuclear winter.

Meanwhile, the west’s provocations never cease, be they immense or small. The latest less gigantic one involves Serbia, a country bullied by NATO for its perceived pro-Russian stance. This latest insult was the Germany- and Rwanda-backed UN designation of Serbia as having committed a genocide, when in fact many others (Croats, for instance) committed mass atrocities during the 1990s Balkans fighting. But the most egregious bullying of Serbia dates back to 1999, when NATO bombed Yugoslavia – a country that, in its previous communist incarnation, was much hated by covert fascists in the west.

Why? Because Yugoslavia was long led by former WWII partisan Josip Tito, a wily and seriously far-left ruler; and not only did western crypto-fascists despise leftists, they also detested their own erstwhile allies – the anti-Nazi partisans. How else to explain Allen Dulles’ first post-war act as OSS head, namely hunting down partisans in the forests of Europe, partisans who had fought alongside the west against Hitler? Those communist or Jewish or anti-fascist partisans were simply too unbowed to be trusted. Instead, the U.S. preferred to deal with and protect former Nazis, like the 1500 Nazi scientists that it imported to NASA in the U.S. in Operation Paperclip.

Back in the present, here and there glimmer faint signs of rationality from Washington, namely Biden’s recent remark that Ukraine won’t join NATO or his comments to ABC News June 6 that American weapons must not be used against the Kremlin. The former has been obvious to the realists who heard Moscow’s furious retort to the 2008 western vow to put Kiev in NATO – nyet means nyet. But the U.S. Empire is not led by realists. It’s led by a very unfortunate combo of neo-con fanatics and wishful thinkers, whose grip on the nation’s steering wheel must be shaken, because they ignore those faint common sense road signs and thus speed us all toward a crash.

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https://archive.ph/0hlae

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Busybody. She can be reached at her website.

The Summer of Living Dangerously – by Pepe Escobar – 12 June 2024

• 1,300 WORDS • 

The plutocracy believes that afterwards they can buy the whole thing for a pittance while flies are still laying eggs in European carcasses.

So Le Petit Roi in Paris was predictably crushed in the European polls. He has called parliamentary snap elections, dissolving the Assemblée Nationale in an act of blind, puerile revenge on French citizens, de facto attacking French institutional democracy.

That doesn’t mean much anyway, because the lineaments of “liberty, equality, fraternity” have long been usurped by a crass oligarchy.

The second round of these fresh French elections will be on July 7 – nearly coinciding with the British snap elections on July 11, and only a few days before the slow-burning urban catastrophe which will be the Olympics in Paris.

Paris salons are ablaze with intrigue on why the little Rothschild stooge with a Napoleon complex is throwing all his toys out of the pram now because he’s not getting what he wants.

After all what he really craves is to become a “War President” – together with the Cadaver in the White House, Starmer in the UK, Rutte in the Netherlands, the Toxic Medusa von der Lugen in Brussels, Tusk in Poland, without having to answer to the French people.

It’s nearly certain that Le Petit Roi will be facing the real prospect of becoming a lame duck President who needs to obey a right-wing parliament; Elysée Palace chatter already joined the circus, conveying the impression he might resign (that was later denied). Still, if Le Petit Roi runs off to war on Russia no French citizen will follow him, least of all the – pitiful – French army.

Bigger things though are in play. Following the – auspicious – game-changing messages to the Global Majority coming out of the St. Petersburg forum last week, anchored on openness and inclusiveness, the BRICS 10 meeting of Foreign Ministers in Nizhny Novgorod carried the baton early this week.

Foreign Minister Lavrov stressed three key points:

1. “The countries of the Global South no longer want to be dependent on the double standards of the West and its whims.”
2. “Everyone knows that the BRICS countries already serve as the locomotive of the world economy.”
3. “We [at the BRICS FMs meeting] stressed the need for consistent efforts to create a new world order, where the equality of independent states will be the key.”

Now compare it with the shrinking G7 meeting later this week in Puglia in southern Italy: the same old song, from a “tough new warning” to Chinese banks (“Don’t do business with Russia or else!”) to vociferous threats against the China-Russia strategic partnership.

And last but not least, extra plotting to skim interest from the massive, frozen/stolen Russian assets with the intent of sending them to country 404; the Toxic Medusa itself announced that country 404 will receive €1.5 billion of the income from stolen Russian assets from the EU in July, 90% of it to buy weapons.

As for U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell – the man who invented the defunct “pivot to Asia” during Harpy Hillary Clinton’s tenure in the early 2010s – he had already advanced that Washington will sanction Chinese companies and banks over Beijing’s relations with Russia’s military-industrial complex.

False flags and perfect symmetry

By several metrics, Europe is about to implode/explode not with a bang but an agonizing whimper anytime within the next few months. It’s crucial to remember that the snap elections in France and Britain will also coincide with the NATO summit on July 11 – where Russophobia-fueled warmongering will reach paroxysm.

Among possible scenarios, some kind of false flag to be squarely blamed on Russia should be expected. It could be a Franz Ferdinand moment; a Gulf of Tonkin moment; or even a USS Maine before the American-Spanish war moment.

The fact remains that the only way these “leaders” across NATOstan plus their lowly MI6 agent in a green sweaty T-shirt in Kiev will survive is by manufacturing a casus belli.

If indeed that happens, a date can be advanced: between the second week of July and the end of August; and certainly no later than the second week of September.

October will be too late: too close to the U.S. elections.

So be prepared for the Summer of Living Dangerously.

Meanwhile, The Bear is not exactly hibernating. President Putin, before and during the St. Petersburg forum, elaborated on how “symmetric” Moscow’s response will be to attacks by Kiev using NATOstan missiles – already ongoing.

There are three NATOstan members which are supplying missiles with a range of 350 km and more: U.S., UK and France.

So a “symmetric” response would imply Russia providing Global South nations with advanced weaponry – capable of causing serious damage to nodes of the Empire of Bases.

And here are the top candidates to receive these weapons – as extensively debated not only on Russian TV channels but also in the St. Petersburg forum corridors.

West Asia: Iran (which already has them); Syria (badly needs them); Yemen; Iraq (would be very helpful to Hashd al-Shaabi) and Libya.

Central, Northeast, Southeast Asia: Afghanistan, Myanmar (these two were present in St. Petersburg) and North Korea.

Latin America: Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua (just look at the current Russian foray in the Caribbean).

Africa: Central African Republic, Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Southern Sudan and Zimbabwe (just look at Lavrov’s recent African tour).

Mr. Zircon says hello

And that brings us the jolly matter of a Russian naval force hangin’ out in the Caribbean, headed by the hypersonic missile-armed frigate Admiral Gorshkov and the Kazan nuclear submarine.

The indispensable Andrei Martyanov has noted how the Gorshkov “carries 32 Onyx, Zircon, Kalibrs and Otvet. These are the most advanced and deadly cruise missiles in history, with a serious combat pedigree. Kazan, which is Yasen-class SSGN carries also 32 VLS and, in addition, has 10 torpedo tubes which can shoot not just torpedoes.”

Well, this naval force is obviously not there to launch WWIII. Martyanov explains that “while both can strike all of the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Canada, they are there not for that reason. God forbid if it comes to real WWIII there are plenty of Bulavas, Avangards, Sarmats and Yarses to deal with this horrifying business. No, both Gorshkov and Kazan are there to show that they can reach any combat ship or strategic sea lift vessel carrying any military combat set from North America to Europe in case of some nutjob deciding to try to survive a conventional war with Russia in 404.”

What’s even more intriguing is that after spending time in Havana, the naval force will remain in the Caribbean for a series of exercises – and will be joined by other Russian Navy vessels. They will remain in these waters until the end of The Summer of Living Dangerously. Just in case some nutjob has fancy ideas.

Meanwhile, the possible escalation towards Hot War in Europe proceeds unabated, with NATO via its epileptic slab of Norwegian wood radically changing the established rules of proxy wars with one nonsense outburst after another.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) are already capable, via NATO, to destroy both military and civilian Russian assets – oil storage, airports, energy facilities, railway junctions, even concentration of troops.

Everyone and his neighbor will be waiting for the “symmetric” responses.

For all practical purposes the crucial decision has been made by the rarified plutocracy which really runs the show: force Europe into war on Russia. That’s the rationale behind all the rhetorical kabuki about a “military Schengen” and a New Iron Curtain from the Arctic through the Baltic chihuahuas all the way to rabid Poland.

The plutocracy actually believes that afterwards they can buy the whole thing for a pittance while flies are still laying eggs in radioactive European carcasses.

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(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

Every Escalation Brings Washington Closer to Defeat in Ukraine – by Mike Whitney – 4 June 2024

• 2,700 WORDS • 

There is a vast difference between “not winning” and “losing” a war. In the case of Ukraine, “not winning” means that President Zelensky and his handlers in Washington choose to pursue a negotiated settlement that would allow Russia to keep the territory it captured during the war while addressing Moscow’s modest security demands. (Note—Ukraine must reject any intention of joining NATO)

On the other hand, “losing” the war means that the US and NATO continue on the same path they are today—pumping lethal weapons, trainers and long-range missiles systems into Ukraine—hoping that the Russian offensive is progressively weakened so Ukraine can prevail on the battlefield. This alternate path—which amounts to ‘wishful thinking’—is the path to “losing” the war.

Unlike the “not winning” the war scenario, “losing” the war will have a catastrophic effect on the United States and its future. It would mean that Washington had been unable to prevent a Russian military incursion into Europe which is NATO’s primary raison d’etre. It would challenge the idea that the US is capable of acting as the guarantor of regional security which is the role the US has enjoyed since the end of WW2. The perception of a US defeat at the hands of Russia would unavoidably trigger a re-evaluation of current security relations leading to the dissolution of NATO and, very possibly, the EU as well. Simply put, losing the war would be a disaster. Here’s how Colonel Daniel Davis summed it up just last week:

“We can’t let Russia win.”

I’ve heard that throughout the entire 2-plus years of the war. But here’s what I’m saying: If you keep going down this path—ignoring all the realities we keep talking about—not only will Russia win, we’ll lose. And I assure you if you thought it was bad to ‘let Putin win’—which means having a negotiated settlement in which Putin ends up with territory he didn’t start the war with—…But if you say that—because I don’t want that to happen, I’m going to keep fighting—that implies you think you can win. But if you can’t win, then the likely outcome is that you lose even more, and that’s what’s really going to hurt our credibility because, imagine if the whole force of NATO was shown to be unable to stop Russia from winning? Now our credibility is damaged far worse than having a negotiated settlement Colonel Daniel Davis, You Tube

So, while “not winning” is not the perfect outcome, it is vastly superior to “losing” which would severely undermine the Alliance’s credibility, greatly erode Washington’s power in Europe, and force the US to rethink its plans for projecting power into Central Asia. (pivot to Asia) In short, a US defeat by Russia in Ukraine would be a serious body-blow to the “rules-based order” and the denouement of the American Century.

So, there’s a lot at stake for the United States. Unfortunately, there is no real debate in elite power circles about the best way forward. And, that’s because the decision has already been made, and that decision hews closely to the maximalist views articulated in an article at the Atlantic Council titled “NATO at 75: The Alliance’s future lies in Ukraine’s victory against Russia”

NATO will mark its seventy-fifth anniversary on April 4 as history’s most successful military alliance. However, i ts future as a credible deterrent to aggression now lies in the success or failure of Russia’s unjust and brutal invasion of Ukraine…..

Allied leaders have unambiguously bound NATO’s security to this war. NATO summits have repeatedly condemned the invasion and demanded that Russia “completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its forces and equipment from the territory of Ukraine.”

And the rhetoric has escalated. French President Emmanuel Macron recently described the war as “existential” for Europe. “If Russia wins this war, Europe’s credibility would be reduced to zero,” Macron said…

If the upcoming Washington summit is to inspire continued confidence in NATO’s credibility, and thus its future, then t he Alliance must take action to place Ukraine onto a clear path to victory…

Allied leaders must unambiguously endorse Ukraine’s war objectives—that is, total territorial reconstitution back to the nation’s 1991 borders. Anything short of that is a disillusioning signal to Ukraine and encouragement to Putin to sustain his invasion. NATO at 75: The Alliance’s future lies in Ukraine’s victory against Russia, atlanticcouncil.org

Repeat: Allied leaders must unambiguously endorse Ukraine’s war objectives—that is, total territorial reconstitution back to the nation’s 1991 borders. Anything short of that is a disillusioning signal to Ukraine and encouragement to Putin to sustain his invasion.

As we said earlier, this maximalist view of NATO’s objectives is nothing more than wishful thinking. The anemic UAF is not going to drive the Russian Army out of Ukraine nor are they going to win the war. Even so, the views above are shared by the vast majority of foreign policy elites who have not adjusted their thinking so that it corresponds to Ukraine’s bloody battlefield losses. Here’s more from a Foreign Affairs op-ed:

The Biden administration and its European counterparts have failed to articulate their endgame for this war. Three years into the conflict, Western planning continues to be strategically backwards—aiding Kiev has become an end in itself, divorced from a coherent strategy for bringing the war to a close.

But the “theory of victory” presented by Zagorodnyuk and Cohen to replace the strategic malaise in which the west finds itself is, remarkably, even more dangerous and ill-conceived than the status quo. The authors call on the White House to come out in full-throated support of Kiev’s war aims: namely, ejecting all Russian forces from Ukraine’s 1991 borders including Crimea, subjecting Russian officials to war crimes tribunals, extracting reparations from Moscow, and providing Ukraine with “long-term security arrangements.” Put differently, the West must commit itself to nothing short of Russia’s total and unconditional battlefield defeat.

How is Ukraine, with its battered military, collapsing demography, and an economy entirely reliant on Western cash infusions, to accomplish this lofty task? By doing more of the same, but on a larger scale. The New Theory of Ukrainian Victory Is the Same as the Old, The American Conservative

The point we’re trying to make is that this type of delusional thinking is virtually universal among US foreign policy elites none of whom are prepared to accept the fundamental reality on the ground. As a result, there is no chance that the Biden administration will make a course-correction or make any attempt to prevent a direct clash between the two nuclear-armed adversaries, NATO and Russia.

So, how would a reasonable person approach the current conflict in Ukraine?

They’d look for a way to end it ASAP while inflicting as little damage as possible on the losing side. Here’s what Marymount Professor Mark Episkopos had to say in the same article above:

Western leaders are long overdue in articulating a coherent theory of victory—one that grapples with the trade-offs and limitations confronting Kiev and its backers rather than sweeping them aside in pursuit of maximalist battlefield objectives that are increasingly detached from realities on the ground. This does not mean resigning oneself to Ukraine’s unconditional surrender. Yet it will require policymakers to acknowledge that there is no viable pathway to Russia’s unconditional defeat and to shape their thinking around war termination accordingly. It is not too late to end the war on terms that guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty while advancing U.S. interests. The West still has substantial leverage on and off the battlefield, but the key to wielding this influence effectively is to finally abandon a zero-sum framing of victory that has prevented leaders from repairing to a more pragmatic, strategically nimble approach. The New Theory of Ukrainian Victory Is the Same as the Old, The American Conservative

Bottom line: A deal can be made that will minimize the overall damage to the United States and Ukraine, but it’s up to US diplomats and foreign policy elites to identify areas of common ground so an agreement can be reached that will avoid an even bigger catastrophe.

The problem with Professor Episkopos recommendation, is that it is an imminently reasonable suggestion which means it will be dismissed out-of-hand by the warhawks who set policy. Even now, US powerbrokers are certain that the war can be won if they just throw caution-to-the-wind and apply more raw, military force. That ought to do it. (they think)

This is the kind of flawed reasoning that drives the US war machine. Policy elites honestly believe that if they fully embrace a ridiculous platitude like “We can’t lose”, that somehow the reality of superior Russian firepower, manpower, logistical support and industrial capability will vanish into thin air and the “exceptional” nation will prevail once again. But that’s not going to happen.

Okay. So, what will happen?

For that, we turn to military analyst Will Schryver and a recent post on Twitter:

It… must be understood that the US/NATO could not assemble, equip, send, and sustain even a dozen competent combat brigades to engage the Russians in Ukraine.

Do you realize what would happen to 50k NATO combat troops — none of whom have EVER experienced high-intensity warfare — if they were suddenly thrust, with necessarily deficient leadership and coordination, into the Ukraine battlefield?

They would be mercilessly slaughtered. Bleeding the Beast, Will Schryver, Twitter

“Mercilessly slaughtered”? That doesn’t sound very hopeful.

Even so, France has already announced that it will send military trainers to Ukraine, and others will certainly follow. At the same time more lethal weaponry, particularly long-range missiles and F-16s are already en route and will likely be used sometime in the near future. But, will it matter? Will the provision of new weapons and combat troops turn the tide and prevent the collapse of the Ukrainian army? Here’s Schryver again:

Why should the Russians object if the US/NATO sends more of its scant stockpiles of short-range ballistic and longer-range cruise missiles? The success rates for ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles has been abysmal, and steadily decreases with the passage of time. They are strategically meaningless. And there is effectively zero replenishment capacity!

Why should the Russians object if the US/NATO sends a squadron — or even five — of antiquated F-16s to Ukraine. Yes, of course, they would be piloted by NATO “volunteers”, and they might even achieve a handful of overhyped and fleeting “successes” in the early going. But if they actually attempt to mount serious sorties over the Ukraine battlefield, old F-16s with inadequate logistics and sustainment are going to have a life span numbered in mere HOURS. Bleeding the Beast, Will Schryver, Twitter

Is Schryver right? Will these prospective long-range missile strikes on targets inside Russia merely be pinprick attacks that Putin will ignore while his troops continue to crush Ukrainian forces along the 800-mile Line of Contact? And should Putin welcome the introduction of US/NATO “ground troops” into Ukraine to face the Russian army? Will that actually bring the war to a swifter end? Here’s Schryver one more time:

At the rate this whole Ukraine debacle is going, essentially all European-based military power… is going to be attrited to “combat-ineffective” for at least a decade, and probably more. If I were the Russians, I would view that objective as the summum bonum (“The highest good”) to be achieved as a result of this war, and I would be loath to interrupt the Masters of Empire while in the process of handing it to me on a silver platter….

So, if I’m Gerasimov, I would say, “Bring ’em on! Bleeding the Beast, Will Schryver, Twitter

The furor over the use of NATO-provided long-range missiles (and deployment of F-16s and French trainers) only diverts attention from the inescapable fact that NATO is going to be defeated by the Russia Armed Forces if they enter the war. So, a wise man would pursue a negotiated settlement now before things get out of hand. But that is not what our leaders are doing, in fact, they are doing the exact opposite and escalating at every turn.

So, let’s examine the facts a bit more thoroughly. Check out this summary analysis by the pros at War on the Rocks:

When asked two weeks ago in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee whether the Army was “outranged” by any adversary, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley said: “Yes … the ones in Europe, really Russia. We don’t like it, we don’t want it, but yes, technically [we are] outranged, outgunned on the ground.”

Given Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, this is sobering testimony. But is it accurate? Unfortunately, yes: Nearly two years of extensive wargaming and analysis shows that if Russia were to conduct a short-warning attack against the Baltic States, Moscow’s forces could roll to the outskirts of the Estonian capital of Tallinn and the Latvian capital of Riga in 36 to 60 hours. In such a scenario, the United States and its allies would not only be outranged and outgunned, but also outnumbered….

Outgunned? (The Russians) have much more advanced armor, weapons, and sensors, and in some areas — such as active protection systems to defend against anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) — are superior to their Western counterparts….

Beyond the disadvantages of being outnumbered, outranged, and outgunned, a slew of other issues compounds the problem. First, NATO allies and the U.S. military would be of limited immediate help offsetting these disadvantages. European allies followed the American lead by cutting armor and optimizing their remaining forces for “out-of-area” missions like Afghanistan. Thus, Great Britain is continuing with plans to withdraw its last troops from Germany, while Germany has reduced its army from a Cold War level of 10 heavy divisions to the equivalent of two.

But it’s not just the numbers here that matter. The United States and its partners have also steadily reduced the infrastructure necessary to support any kind of substantial deterrent or defensive effort in Europe. Today, there are no U.S. division or corps headquarters forward-based on the continent, nor any Army aviation, engineer, and associated logistics brigades….

Russia fields perhaps the most formidable array of surface-to-air missile (SAM) defenses in the world. Operating from locations within Russian territory, these SAMs far outrange existing defense-suppression weapons and present a credible threat to U.S. and allied airpower that would be costly and time-consuming to counter….

Today NATO is indeed outnumbered, outranged, and outgunned by Russia in Europe and beset by a number of compounding factors that make the situation worse….

A war with Russia would be fraught with escalatory potential from the moment the first shot was fired; and generations born outside the shadow of nuclear Armageddon would suddenly be reintroduced to fears thought long dead and buried. Outnumbered, Outranged, and Outgunned: How Russia Defeats NATO, War On The Rocks

What does this analysis show?

It shows that—despite the delusional fulminations of armchair generals on cable TV braying about inflicting a “strategic defeat” on Russia—it’s not going to happen. Russia has the edge in virtually every area of firepower, manpower, combat-readiness and material. They also have the industrial capability that is unmatched in the West. Here’s how Schryver summed it up:

There has been no meaningful increase in armaments production in the collective west, and there won’t be anytime soon. Europe has been effectively demilitarized, and the US is severely depleted and effectively deindustrialized….

Outside of the hopelessly propagandized populace of the so-called “western democracies”, no one in the world believes Russia looks “meek” at this point in time. Instead, they realize the Russians have completely defeated the empire’s plans and exposed its weakness….

The west has no advantage whatsoever. NATO is an empty shell…. I am utterly convinced a NATO expeditionary force in Ukraine would be massacred AT LEAST as comprehensively as the AFU has been, and quite likely MUCH WORSE, and MUCH MORE RAPIDLY…. Will Schryver, Twitter

There it is in black and white: The “deindustrialized” West is an empty shell that has no chance of prevailing in a combined-arms ground war with Russia. Even so, Washington is determined to proceed with its lunatic plan pushing the world closer to Armageddon while bringing ruin on the American people.

Why Russians Still Support the War – by John P. Ruehl – June 2024

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Beijing for a two-day trip on May 15, 2024, and was greeted with a red-carpet welcome by Chinese President Xi Jinping. The two leaders pledged a “new era” for the Russia-China relationship, building on their “no limits partnership” struck just before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. As Putin’s first foreign trip since winning reelection in March, the visit showcased his and Russia’s enduring stature amid the war in Ukraine.

Despite Russia’s 2024 election being marked by systemic repression of serious alternative parties and candidates and decades of brazen statements about Russia’s “managed” democracy, Putin captured 87 percent of the vote from a record-high voter turnout. Even with some self-censorship and a slight drop in approval, the Russian public still largely backs the war, despite a largely static frontline, the severance of ties with Europe, declines in living standards, and the deaths and injuries of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers. The staggering number of casualties is mirrored in Ukraine, a nation that Putin and many Russians consider a brotherly nation and the mother culture of Russia.

In contrast, U.S. domestic support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraqbegan to decline markedly a couple of years after the conflicts began, and predictions of a collapse in Russian public support for the war emerged soon after it began. Yet although the costs of Russia’s war in Ukraine continue to escalate and it appears far from conclusion, several reasons have compelled Russian citizens to continue supporting the war and the President who initiated it.

Opposition to war in Russia faces unique challenges not encountered in the U.S., but convincing a population that war is unavoidable is essential for any government to sustain a war effort. The Kremlin has framed the nation’s military actions as a noble fight to save ethnic Russians and Russian speakersin Ukraine from a fascist regime in Kyiv—a narrative that resonates with many Russians and the country’s history in World War II. Highlighting growing restrictions on the Russian language in Ukraine furthers this message, while Russia’s excuse that they were answering cries for help in Ukraine echoes their 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Russian media also portrays their forces as minimizing civilian casualties, as Ukraine is accused of targeting civilians in Russia, and Ukraine’s failure to hold scheduled elections in 2024 has been used to question President Zelensky’s legitimacy.

By portraying Ukraine as the mother culture of Russia, Putin has cast the invasion through a historical and patriotic lens. The conflict is framed as an internal matter of reasserting Russian dominance over the ancestral homeland that birthed Russian language, religion, and political origins, against an illegitimate Ukrainian government that currently occupies the country. Russian nationalism can be rallied by invoking ethnic unity, territorial patrimony, and the need to rectify Ukraine’s separation from Moscow, making it easier to dismiss Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Russia has also deflected its violations of the UN Charter against non-aggression by depicting itself as an aggrieved party, forced into war by the U.S.-led West and its vassal states, sentiment reflected in national polls, and supported by notable figures like Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico, who in January 2024 stated that Ukraine was under the complete control of Washington. On May 1, 2024, an exhibition of captured Western weapons, vehicles, and equipment since the start of the war opened in Moscow—much like Kyiv’s in May 2022 which showed captured Russian equipment. The Kremlin connects everything to the war—including the recent attack by ISIS in Moscow. In contrast, the American public increasingly began to believe that U.S. leaders had misled them into the War on Terror, particularly the War in Iraq, which it felt could have been avoided.

Russians’ support for the war has manifested as the culmination of decades of “patriotic mobilization” that has taken place since Putin’s first term. The cultivation of nationalist sentiment, pervasive across media, culture, and politics, has intensified significantly since the invasion. The Russian identity is increasingly intertwined with the existential need to protect Russians abroad, shield Russia from NATO, and bolster Russia’s status as a great power.

Preparing and instilling confidence in the Russian armed forces’ ability to sustain a major conflict has been ongoing for decades. Russian forces engaged in counterinsurgency operations in Russia’s restive region of Chechnya in the 2000s and supported a limited conflict in support of two restive regions in neighboring Georgia in 2008. Subsequently, Russian forces seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and supported a limited conflict in support of Ukraine’s restive border region with Russia. In 2015, they launched a major military operation to rescue Syrian President Assad in 2015. With relative success in Syria, the significant escalation of Russia’s conflict in Ukraine in 2022 did not come as a surprise. This contrasts with the perceived failures of Western military interventions in the 21st Century, causing domestic confidence in the U.S. military to decline as well as the scale of the military’s operations.

To alleviate domestic concern stemming from severing Russia’s historical connections with Europe, as well as distancing by other countries to comply with Western sanctions, Putin has embarked on a series of foreign trips to show Russia’s resiliency. Visits to Belarus and other former Soviet states in Central Asia and the Caucasus have helped stabilize its regional influence. Visits to Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have served to demonstrate Russia’s enduring influence in the Middle East, while Russia has also hosted dozens of foreign leaders from the Global South, as well as those of Hungary and Austria.

However, Russia’s ties with China form its most crucial bilateral relationship. Despite the power imbalance, Putin’s May visit to China reaffirmed Moscow’s strategic relationship with Beijing. Russia’s capacity to confront the U.S. and collaborate with other major powers offers reassurance that has erased much of the pain of the geopolitical decline that accompanied the Soviet collapse.

Moscow has also aimed to counter any moral superiority by the West in Ukraine by highlighting Washington’s and Kyiv’s support for Israel since October 7. Framing it as part of Russia’s confrontation with the West for a new multipolar world order, the Kremlin hopes to legitimize its policies and broaden Russia’s appeal to the Global South. Following the Nigerien government’s expulsion of U.S. troops in May 2024 and the invitation of Russian forces, images of Russian troops entering the same airbase where U.S. military personnel were stationed further underscored Russia’s assertive struggle with the West and wider geopolitical ambitions.

Furthermore, Russian citizens have been shielded from the economic repercussions of the war through subsidized fuel, food, and other essential resources. Russia’s substantial gold and foreign reserves have helped fund the war and prevented extended currency volatility, while the imposition of hefty penalties on foreign companies considering leaving Russia has deterred many Western firms from exiting or compelled them to pay significant costs.

Russia’s major economic partners, most importantly China and India, have helped maintain stability in Russia’s exports and imports. Western sanctions have also by design not crippled the Russian economy, as preventing Russian resources from reaching global markets would cause prices to spike.

Moreover, the Russian public has also been largely spared from devastation. Ukrainian attacks within Russia have mostly been limited to small flareups in border regions and attacks on energy and transport facilities, and Ukrainian forces are still restricted from using Western weapons. Sabotage attacks in Russia have also risen, but the situation is manageable.

In contrast to Ukrainian citizens, no Russian civilians have been forcefully committed to fight. The 2022 partial mobilization called up reservists, while recent changes to laws have meant Russia has been more easily able to offer generous contracts to annual conscripts soon after their training has concluded. Compared to the forced conscription videos in Ukraine, Russian media can claim it only uses volunteers and those already part of the armed forces.

Russian soldiers who are injured, as well as the families of Russian soldiers who died in service, receive substantial compensation. Though payment is often delayed, the modest backgrounds of most Russian soldiers mean that these funds can be life-changing. The use of prisoners in particularly perilous military operations has also shielded regular Russian soldiers, with Ukraine only considering this practice earlier this year.

Nevertheless, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed and hundreds of thousands more seriously wounded. This tests the casualties hypothesis, which states that the public’s willingness to remain engaged in a military intervention declines as casualties mount. The Soviet Union’s 10-year war in Afghanistan saw 15,000 Soviet troops killed and eventually helped lead to the downfall of the country, while the deeply unpopular Iraq War saw 4,500 U.S. soldier deaths and saw the Bush administration’s popularity decline considerably.

Undoubtedly, the Russian government distorts official casualty figures. Yet it is crucial to contextualize Russia’s losses in Ukraine within the context of recent history. The COVID-19 pandemic claimed more than 400,000 Russian lives, far surpassing the casualties in Ukraine.

Furthermore, the Russian public’s stomach in the face of such significant losses may be influenced by the large number of deaths of prominent Russians since the beginning of the war. Across Russian media, the war and its repercussions have shown that even the country’s most influential individuals can be killed and have their assets stripped, contributing to a sense of collective sacrifice amid the conflict.

Amid the chaos of the war, dozens of Russian oligarchs and political figureshave been killed in suspicious circumstances both in Russia and overseas, in a public settling of scores, opportunism, and punishment from the Kremlin for disobedience. A day after Russian forces entered Ukraine, the body of Alexander Tyulyakov, a senior executive of Gazprom’s corporate security, was found hanging in his garage. Ravil Maganov, chairman of the board of Russia’s oil giant Lukoil, allegedly fell out of a Moscow hospital window in September 2022. In December, businessman Vladimir Bidenov died of heart problems at the Hotel Sai International in India—two days later his business associate and deputy in the Legislative Assembly of Vladimir Oblast, Pavel Antov, fell out of a window at the same hotel.

While the deaths of oligarchs and politicians may offer some solace to ordinary Russian soldiers serving in Ukraine, there has also been a significant loss of high-ranking military officials. Some, like Lieutenant General Vladimir Sviridov, were also killed in suspicious circumstances. However, the necessity for high-ranking Russian military officials to remain near the frontlines, owing to a more top-down decision-making military structure and the risk of electronic eavesdropping by Ukrainian and Western advisors, contributes to their higher casualty rate.

Alongside hundreds of other high-profile deaths, Russia has confirmed that seven general officers had been killed in Ukraine by 2024, with Ukraine claiming more than 14 had been killed by early 2023. The last time a U.S. general was killed in combat was in 2014 when an Afghan serviceman opened fire on NATO personnel in Kabul; prior to that, no American general had lost their life in combat since the Vietnam War. With this backdrop of sacrifice and solidarity among Russian elites, Russia’s “rally-‘round-the-flag” effect may sustain itself longer than expected.

Russians appear to believe time and demographics are on their side. According to a March 2024 poll by Russia’s Levada Center, after decades of emigration, the share of Russians expressing a desire to move abroad hit a record low, partly in response to many of those wanting to leave having already done so. Nevertheless, Finion, a Moscow-based relocation firm, stated that 40 to 45 percent of Russians who fled abroad had since returned, driven by factors such as cracking down on remote work, visa issues, reduced fears of conscription, and a general desire to return.

And while tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have perished, along with thousands more ethnic Russians in occupied parts of Ukraine, millions of those living in those occupied territories have already been incorporated into the Russian Federation’s pre-existing 144 million citizens. Conversely, Ukraine, with 37 million people before the war, has faced a population exodus compounding already challenging demographics.

By early 2024, the prevailing sentiment was that Russia had gained a fragile upper hand. Victory, though potentially pyrrhic, appears increasingly likely, if loosely defined, in Russia. Yet, as the conflict drags on, sustained by a Russian economy increasingly geared toward the war, the pursuit of victory may wane as casualties and other costs mount. The Kremlin’s anxieties are now focused on Western nations, led by the UK, France, and Poland, allowing Ukraine to use Western weapons in Russia, which would further bring the war home to Russian civilians and internal infrastructure.

While projecting an image of composure to the public, tensions are unquestionably simmering in the Kremlin. Estimates regarding Russia’s capacity to sustain the war in its current state typically hover around two to three years. Yet unwavering support for Putin, coupled with the absence of viable alternatives, may extend his strong personal commitment to the war indefinitely. While Russia appears capable of and determined to continue the war, its uncertain future will continue to test the Russian public’s tacit enthusiasm for it.

Putin’s willingness to continue the war is seen as something to exploit in the West. Western policymakers have witnessed Russia increasingly commit its domestic resources to the conflict, as well as recently shift from calling it a “special military operation” to a war. Steadily increasing Ukraine’s technical capacity to fight a war of attrition will continue to wear down Russia’s Soviet arsenal and deployment of arms abroad, demonstrating the feebleness of Russia’s production and advanced weapons systems. By provoking a Russian defeat, it is hoped a second major convulsion across the former Soviet Union will further reduce Moscow’s geopolitical influence. Russia’s protracted military campaign and the West’s strategy of prolonging the conflict through escalation management will keep exacting a catastrophic toll on Ukrainian lives and infrastructure.

………………………………….

One Hour of Russian Post Soviet Communist Music (1:00:00 min) Audio Mp3

Distributed by the Independent Media Institute

John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C. He is a contributing editor to Strategic Policy and a contributor to several other foreign affairs publications.

https://archive.ph/DsWqZ

The West Is Hell-Bent on Provoking Russia Into Hot War – by Pepe Escobar – 30 May 2024

 • 1,000 WORDS • 

The warning by President Putin could not be starker: “In the event of the use of long-range weapons, the Russian Armed Forces will again have to make decisions about expanding the sanitary zone further (…) Do they want global conflict? It seemed they wanted to negotiate [with us], but we don’t see much desire to do this.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov then came up with the appropriate metaphor to designate NATO’s ramped-up military outbursts: not only NATO is raising the degree of escalation but delving into a warlike “ecstasy”.

It does not get more serious than that. “They”, as Putin alluded to, do seem to want “global conflict”. That’s at the heart of NATO’s new suicidal “ecstasy” strategy.

For all their circumlocutions, NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have effectively greenlighted Kiev using Western weapons for attacks deep inside the Russian Federation. The alleged debate, still ongoing, is just a “smokescreen” for the real objective: a pretext that could lead to WWIII.

NATO dragging EU into WWIII, it is no longer defensive alliance – French politician

NATO is dragging the European Union into World War III with statements about strikes on Russian territory and is no longer a “defensive alliance,” Florian Philippot, the leader of French… pic.twitter.com/0UGYMpPV0P

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt)

There’s no reason to think Kiev will stick to “limited” strikes against relatively unimportant targets. Instead, it is likely to target critical security infrastructure in hopes of provoking an unrelenting Russian response, which in turn would pave the way for NATO to invoke Article 5 and de facto engage in a Hot War.

Already on the Edge of Doom

The escalation “ecstasy” defined by Peskov went out of control since a – secret – new batch of ATACMS was dispatched to Kiev earlier this year, complemented with longer-range ATACMS. Kiev has been using them for serious hits on Russian air bases and key air defense nodes. These ATACMS fire missiles at Mach 3 speed: a serious challenge even for the best Russian air defense systems.

All that seems to point to a crucial decision enveloped in several layers of fog: as the incoming, cosmic NATO humiliation in the black soil of Novorossiya becomes self-evident day after day, the Western elites who really run the show are betting on provoking a full Hot War against Russia.

Richard H. Black, a former US senator from Virginia, offers a sobering analysis:

“This is a continuation of the pattern in which the NATO forces recognize they are losing the war in Ukraine, with the fragile lines of defense breaking, and the NATO response is to escalate. This is not accidental, but very deliberate. It is not the first attack on the Russian nuclear triad. The ideological folks are seeing their world crumbling, after flying the rainbow flag over conservative countries and [waging] perpetual wars. They are frantic and could escalate to nuclear war to get out of the bind. They are taking a series of baby steps, and respond that ‘they don’t do anything in response,’ and so they keep taking baby steps until one of them lands on a land mine and we are into World War III. (…) Putin is very aware of the disconnect in the West, who keep saying he is just saber rattling, but he is not—he is informing the West of the dangerous reality.”

In Russia, Senator Dmitry Rogozin, a former head of Roscosmos, directly warned Washington: “We are not just on the threshold, but already on the edge, beyond which, if the enemy is not stopped in such actions, an irreversible collapse of the strategic security of the nuclear powers will begin.”

General Evgeny Buzhinky advanced an ominous scenario: “I am sure that if the strikes of Taurus of ATACMS are very harmful for Russia, then I presume we will at least strike the logistical hub in the territory of Poland in Rzeszów” where the missiles are staged for delivery to Ukraine.

The connection in this case would be irreversible: Russia hits Poland; NATO invokes Article 5; WW3.

Be Careful What You Wish For

NATO warlike “ecstasy” is predictably cloaked in cowardice. For all the rhetorical garbage 24/7 about “we don’t want a war with Russia”, the facts point to NATO using Kiev to attack and try to destroy a wide range of Russian military assets. There’s also no denying the US Deep State’s role in enabling Kiev’s terror attacks against Russian civilians in the Donbass, Belgorod, and elsewhere.

Considering the serious debate finally on across several Russian platforms, all of that might constitute a reasonable pretext for a tactical nuclear drop on the – legally illegitimate – Kiev gang. At least that would finish a war that is dragging for too long.

US has not encouraged Ukrainian strikes outside of Ukraine, but Kiev has to make it’s own decisions about how to defend itself, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has claimed

Earlier, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg proposed that Western countries must allow the use…

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt)

Yet that would be totally out of character when it comes to legalistic Putin – who deals with Armageddon-laden issues with the patience of a Taoist monk. Yet Russia has an entire arsenal of asymmetric tools – both conventional and nuclear — that can deliver a painful blow to NATO in places where the alliance least expects.

We’re not there yet – even as we get ominously closer day after day. Dmitri Medvedev has issued the umpteenth red line: a US strike on Russian targets, or the US letting Kiev hit targets within Russia using American missiles and drones would be the ‘start of World War’.

And Foreign Minister Lavrov, once again displaying his trademark Taoist patience, had to come up with another serious reminder: Russia will regard the deployment of nuclear-capable F-16s in Ukraine – which de facto can only be operated by NATO pilots – as “a deliberate signal from NATO in the nuclear field to Russia”.

And still the gaggle of armchair Dr. Strangeloves – lavishly rewarded by the rarified Atlanticist plutocracy holding real power, funds, influence and mass media control – is not listening.

………………………….

(Republished from Sputnik )

The Popski Syndrome – Allied Defeat Turns Into Battlefield Fantasies – by John Helmer – 29 May 2024

• 2,000 WORDS • 

In war, exaggeration is a killer. In the media, exaggeration is a bestseller. In the current war there is a dearth of military and political analysts who for truth or money will tell the difference.

Instead, when the mentality of the war fighters is a combination of racial superiority and spetsnaz derring-do, what you get is the conviction that with one more brilliant operation and one more super-weapon, victory can be snatched from every indicator of defeat because the adversary will be persuaded to accept negotiations as he loses his nerve.

This is the meaning of the Anglo-American publicity which burst over the long Bank Holiday and Memorial Day weekend, as summer campaigning began in earnest for the July and November elections in the UK and US — with the incumbent in the former running 21 points behind, and the incumbent in the latter trailing on an approval margin of minus-16 points.

The Reuters propaganda agency, based in New York, is claiming to have found four Russians from “a senior level in the political and business worlds” to be talkative about what they say they know of the Kremlin’s end-of-war plans. “[President Vladimir] Putin can fight for as long as it takes, but Putin is also ready for a ceasefire – to freeze the war… Putin would, however, be ready to settle for what land he has now and freeze the conflict at the current front lines, four of the sources said. ‘Putin will say that we won, that NATO attacked us and we kept our sovereignty, that we have a land corridor to Crimea, which is true,’ one of them said, giving their own analysis.”

With just one more successful push from the Ukrainian side, Reuters and its four Russians believe, Putin will agree to give up his war. This push, which the western media have been amplifying this week, is the drone attacks on Russian radar stations for early warning of nuclear missile attack at Armavir, Krasnodar, and Orsk, Orenburg.

Although Russian military sources claim these attacks were pinpricks, and the second of them was shot out of the sky before detonation, western media are reporting that it is now the battle strategy of the US, the British, and the Ukrainians to provoke Putin into retaliation, crossing the red line of tactical nuclear warfare. That’s a red line, the allies are calculating, which Putin would rather negotiate end-of-war terms than cross.

A retired Moscow military analyst warns against the exaggeration, not of the attacks themselves, but of Putin’s power to decide end-of-war terms over the opposition of the General Staff and the new Defense Ministry. “It is obvious the Ukrainians have had a string of successful breakthroughs,” the source acknowledges, “– against ships, airfields, refineries, and now this radar site. We also understand it is not the Ukrainians: all target selection, identification, guidance, and the hardware are American or European. Where the command control of these launch sites is, we do not know but it might well not be in Ukraine.”

“But the Russian response will not be nuclear. That is impossible. There are a thousand options between doing nothing and going nuclear, and we can be sure the General Staff are working on all of them. So when people say this is provocation for a nuclear strike and that [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky is provoking it, we understand that, first, NATO planners know Putin will not go nuclear because he and his generals are too rational and sane. And second, Zelensky is not the one making the provocations. So the real red line now is not the nuclear arms provocations from the NATO side. That’s a fantasy of theirs. Just so, in response, I think it’s time Putin stops making threats and strikes at the source of these operations.”

When desperate weakness triggers battlefield fantasies, call this the Popski Syndrome.

Popski was the call sign and unit nickname assigned by the British Army headquarters in Cairo to a tiny unit of behind-the-lines special forces operating against the Italian and German armies in the Libyan deserts from late in 1941 until September 1943, when the war moved on to Italy, taking Popski with it. Popski’s unit numbered 24 men to start in Libya; in Italy, by the war’s end, it had reached 80.

Vladimir Peniakoff was Popski, born to wealthy Jewish Russians who fled the Revolution to install their aluminium business and themselves in Belgium, then the UK. With London publisher Jonathan Cape, Peniakoff imagined he could turn his small guerrilla war in the Libyan and Tunisian deserts into something approaching the bestsellerdom of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E.Lawrence’s story of the war of the Arabian peninsula tribes against the Turks between 1916 and 1918; first published in 1926.

Only Peniakoff’s wisdom turned out to be a combination of cynical racism towards his Arab allies; fondness for his German enemies; and exaggerated self-importance in commando or special forces operations, whose strategic rationale Peniakoff accepted enthusiastically without a second thought. But that thought does appear in the very last lines of the book after “Popski’s Private Army” — as it was called at the time, and on the book jacket — had manipulated, then betrayed the Libyan Arab and Berber tribes; promoted General Bernard Montgomery’s reputation for military genius; and drew the tender ministrations of New Zealand and Canadian girls working in the rear casualty hospitals where Peniakoff lost first a finger and then his left hand.

Left. Vladimir Peniakoff’s book; Right: Peniakoff (front) in action. At first establishment in March 1942 Peniakoff’s Popski’s Private Army (PPA) comprised 24 men, including Peniakoff. Most of the troops were Libyan Arabs. According to Peniakoff, he told a conference of sheikhs of the Obaidi tribe: “My Government wants your help, and they want to help you…I told them that my Government had solemnly undertaken never to let their country come again under Italian rule after the victorious conclusion of the war.” This was a cynical lie. At the Potsdam Conference of the US, UK, and Soviet leaders in July 1945, the British and Americans were so nervous at the rise of the Communist Party in Italy, and of the parallel rise of Arab nationalism in Libya, Tunisia and Algeria, they offered to restore Italy’s colonial administration in Libya until Stalin insisted on a Soviet trusteeship of the territory to prepare the Libyans for independence. This story has been told in The Jackals’ Wedding, American Power, Arab Revolt – Chapter 7. A new history of Libya based on the records of the Obaidi tribe is being prepared. Popski’s betrayal of the Obaidi was the common Anglo-American policy in Libya until Muammar Qaddafi’s revolution of September 1, 1969.

Peniakoff’s last lines describe himself in his jeep in the train of a British cavalry unit on an Austrian alpine road crowded with German troops begging to surrender before the Russian Army, advancing a few kilometres away, caught up with them. Peniakoff, who could also speak fluent Russian, Arabic, French, Italian, and German, was stopped in the road by “the mass of a tank ahead of me, covered with a red Soviet flag.” According to Peniakoff, the tank commander “delivered a speech. He ended: ‘There is nothing that can destroy our solidarity’.”

Peniakoff doesn’t report what he told the Russian in reply at the time. Instead, he concludes his book with this rumination and threat. “‘The war was over’, I thought, ‘I might now well see to that’.” This was Peniakoff’s personal fantasy of continuing his war-fighting. But there was no role for him, or the 80 men his unit had grown to in Italy, to play as lightly armed demolition raiders against the Red Army.

It didn’t occur to him that in his three years of fighting in Arab North Africa, then Italy, he had betrayed, not only the Obaidi tribesmen of Libya, but also the Italian Communist and Socialist partisans who had fought with him, also on his post-war promises. Turning his back on them, Peniakoff was ready to go to war with Moscow until a brain tumour stopped him in 1951, the year after he had published his story.

But the Anglo-American idea of war with Russia is alive and kicking this week, as it’s the Ukrainian troops who are running away from the advance of the Russian Army.

The idea of Popski’s Private Army against Russia which Peniakoff was gung-ho to fight is now on the edge of nuclear attacks – first by Ukrainian artillery on the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, and since that has failed to generate a radioactive explosion, drone attacks on Russian radar stations at Armavir and Orsk whose job it is to detect nuclear armed missile launches and trigger Russian nuclear retaliation.

Post-attack pictures of the damage at the Armavir radar station in Krasnodar. Russian military assessment of the drone attack is in marked contrast to the hype of western reporting. “We may be talking about partial shrapnel damage to the high-voltage power lines of the transceiver modules. At the same time, the blocks of transceiver modules themselves (together with amplifiers, phase shifters and cooling circuits) could receive minimal damage, as indicated by the absence of traces of direct hits from drones into active antenna arrays. Considering the modular design of Voronezh-DM (and all stations of this type), we can expect a prompt restoration of the complex and its return to combat duty… The station serves as a means of monitoring ballistic missile launches at a distance of 6 thousand km and also detects high-altitude hypersonic aerodynamic means of aerospace attack. What kind of drone could be used to attack the radar? Initially, it was believed that for the strike on Voronezh-DM, the Main Intelligence Directorate simulated a complex low-altitude flight route for drones of the Lyuty or UJ-26 Beaver type, skirting the radar viewing sectors of the Russian Aerospace Forces anti-aircraft missile systems. However, later information appeared that British-Portuguese Tekever AR3 drones were used for the strike. Interestingly, this drone is designed using VTOL (vertical take-off) technology and could be deployed near the radar, probably several kilometres away. However, launch from the territory of Ukraine is not excluded. To build routes bypassing air defence systems, reconnaissance information from the US Air Force RQ-4 Global Hawk drone could be used. Let us recall that for several months now the focus of attention of the US Air Force RQ-4B data has been shifted specifically to the Krasnodar Territory, as can be seen from the flight route. What conclusion can be drawn? The strike on the Armavir station (and a likely attempt to hit another Voronezh-type radar 25 km from Orsk) may be part of a single operation to inflict painful media attacks. The use of British-Portuguese drones in this case may be the fundamental point since it is the British who are considered the ‘architects’ of many GUR [Ukrainian military intelligence] actions: attempts to land in Crimea and other campaigns in which the planned result was never achieved.”

A veteran US military observer is not sanguine about the rationality of the US and British officers directing Ukrainian operations. He warns that the British, and also the CIA, have an inordinate faith in special operations to turn the tide, and in their own cleverness to think them up. “What we’re seeing — with Israel, too,” according to this source, “is years of impunity resulting in an epic, murderous tantrum that’s having the opposite of its intended effect. It’s certainly not beyond either of them to play nuclear chicken. Most people would say that if you do that, you’re insane. But they think a special operation playing nuclear chicken with the Russians is clever, potentially effective.”

“And so I think there’s going to be a nuclear war. The people who run things in the West have made up their minds that if they can’t rule, there will be nothing to rule. I guess we must figure now whether British and Ukrainian madness will prevail over US cowardice.”

…………………………………….

(Republished from Dances with Bears)

Ukraine Will Return to Neutrality or Face Partition or Annihilation – by Mike Whitney – 29 May 2024

Zelensky’s Cockamamie Peace Conference

 • 2,000 WORDS • 

China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning has agreed to attend next month’s Ukrainian peace conference in Switzerland with one proviso, that Russia be invited. Mao said that Beijing supports the “timely convening of an international peace conference that is recognized by both the Russian and Ukrainian sides.”

That sounds reasonable, after all, one would expect that peace negotiations would include the representatives of the warring parties. But that is not the case here. And while more than 90 countries have confirmed that they will attend the upcoming meetings, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has excluded the one nation whose presence might make a difference. Russia.

Naturally, many analysts are puzzled by Zelensky’s omission which precludes any possible settlement or end to the hostilities. Simply put, the fighting will continue until Russia and Ukraine conduct bilateral negotiations and reach an agreement.

So, what is going on here?

What’s going on is that Zelensky is perpetrating a fraud. Clearly, there is no intention to strike a deal with Russia or to end the fighting. How could there be, after all, Russia wasn’t invited. So, we must assume that the peace conference will be used for some other purpose, like demonizing Putin or drumming up more support for the war.

What that tells us is that neither Zelensky nor his handlers in Washington have abandoned the idea of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia. They’re not throwing in the towel and they’re certainly not looking for areas of mutual compromise. No. They’re merely exploring more creative ways of garnering support for their failed crusade. That’s what the so-called ‘peace conference’ is all about, luring more recruits to the Ukraine bandwagon.

We should mention, however, that Russia knows exactly what Zelensky is up-to and has no illusions about where all this is headed. Check out this short clip from an interview with Russian FM Sergey Lavrov:

The Swiss conference is being convened with the sole purpose of addressing Zelensky’s peace formula in the form of an ultimatum. It is not accidental that the Swiss themselves, including Swiss diplomats, are saying that the conference will focus not on “building bridges” for peace, but on supporting Ukraine.

Josep Borrel said the peace formula was the only initiative under discussion. (Note: Other peace initiatives by China, Brazil, and the Arab League are all being ignored.)

We have access to information that is not normally intended for public use. In late April, discussing the Swiss conference with foreign ambassadors in Kiev… Zelensky spent most of the time rambling almost hysterically and incoherently, and pleading for support for his peace formula as a means of forcing Russia on its knees. Whenever a person does not feel the need to control themselves, they tend to speak the truth. Those who are now being courted and pressed into coming to Switzerland, creating a crowd, and posing for a “family photo” in order to be able to then bloviate about broad-based support for Zelensky’s peace formula, should be aware of the place they are being lured into. They are expected to support an ultimatum that will then be presented to Russia. This is ridiculous.

President Vladimir Putin spoke about this quite recently. These games, just like other foreign policy moves by our Western partners who have lost their diplomatic skills, have nothing to do with diplomacy. Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister Press Conference, ru

So, the Russians aren’t taken in by this nonsense, they know it’s a scam. They also know that the whole thing was probably concocted by the Intel agencies in concert with their media consultants. Just like they know the meetings will probably be used to shore up Zelensky’s tattered image while, once again, dragging Russia through the mud. We’ve seen it all before. But the reality is that the more time that’s wasted on these public relations fiascos, the more the carnage piles up on battlefields in the East. And that’s the real tragedy, that Zelensky continues to play these stupid games while his countrymen are slaughtered in droves for no apparent reason. Maybe he should stop the performance art long enough to fix the problem? Maybe he should think seriously about peace?

Is that possible?

It is possible.

Imagine for a minute, if Zelensky was sincere in wanting to end the war. How much effort and sacrifice would it really take?

Not much. Yes, he would be opposed by Washington and by the far-right uber-nationalists in his government, but the actual price he would pay in terms of blood and treasure would be negligible. True, he’ll never recapture Crimea or the Donbas (roughly 20% of Ukraine’s former landmass) but that’s the price of waging a two year-long war with Russia. Putin can’t be blamed for that. (Remember, Zelensky was prepared to sign a peace agreement with Putin one month into the war, but Boris Johnson scotched the deal.) In any event, those territories are gone forever. The point is to salvage what is left of Ukraine before its borders shrink even more. This is what Zelensky should be focused on; preserving what’s left of his country while he still can. The longer the war drags on, the more likely Ukraine will either be partitioned or transformed into an uninhabitable wasteland. The time to act is now.

The good news is that Putin is ready to deal. Despite the misinformation in the West, he wants to put this mess behind him. He wants to end the war.

And Putin’s demands are not unreasonable. He just wants assurances about Russia’s security, which means he won’t allow NATO missile-sites on his western border. That is a demand that Zelensky can meet at no cost to himself.

What else does Putin want?

This may surprise you, but the deal Putin seeks with Zelensky can be reduced to just one word: Neutrality. Ukraine must be a neutral state which means that it must not become a member of a major military bloc like NATO, because NATO is a hostile, anti-Russian, military alliance that has prosecuted wars of aggression in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya. It is a menace that must be prevented from putting its bases, combat troops or weapons systems on Russia’s border. Period. Just as the United States would never allow China to place missile systems on Mexico’s northern border, NATO cannot be allowed to place Washington’s missiles on Russia’s border. It’s the same thing.

Zelensky believes that Ukraine ‘has the right’ to make whatever security arrangements it thinks best serve its national interests. That sounds like a reasonable proposition, but it’s not. Because in practical terms, Ukraine’s determination to join NATO has made Ukraine less safe, in fact, the probability of Ukraine’s membership in NATO has brought the country to the brink of annihilation. So, if Zelensky’s intention was to increase Ukraine’s national security, then he has compelling proof that he made the wrong decision.

Here’s a good rule of thumb for any smaller and less powerful nation that shares a border with a nuclear superpower: Don’t do things that scare your neighbor. Do not do things that make your neighbor feel threatened. And—most of all—do not threaten to join hostile anti-Russian alliances that regularly express their deeply-felt contempt and loathing for Russia. That is the fast-track to annihilation. If Zelensky did not know that before, he should certainly know it by now. Check out this excerpt from an article at Geopolitical Monitor:

Ukraine is not exactly a stranger when it comes to the notion of neutrality. In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, the country expressed an intention in its declaration of state sovereignty of 1 July 1990 to become a permanently neutral state that would shun participation in military blocs and show a commitment to denuclearization. This largely nonaligned status resulted in a vacillating foreign policy, which nonetheless appeared to be conducive to the pursuit of amicable relations with both the European Union (EU) and Russia, before being ultimately abandoned in December 2014 in the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the start of the Donbas war. In February 2019, with the overwhelming approval of the Verkhovna Rada (the Parliament of Ukraine), the Ukrainian constitution was amended, setting the country on a course toward full membership in the EU and NATO. Nonetheless, in late March 2022 Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy was still prepared to discuss the possibility of Ukraine taking a neutral position as part of a potential peace deal with Russia to halt the invasion. A Neutral Ukraine Is Not the Answer, Geopolitical Monitor

Let’s review: When Ukraine made its declaration of state sovereignty in July 1990, it pledged to be “a permanently neutral state.” And while it remained committed to that neutral status there was no hostility between Moscow and Kiev. But as soon as the United States toppled Ukraine’s government in the 2014 coup, Ukraine moved to renounce its neutrality, which is when all their problems began. What’s clear is that independent Ukrainian leaders did not choose to abandon neutrality. That decision was made in Washington by neocons who wanted to move their globalist army closer to Russia’s border. This isn’t speculation, this is what happened. NATO lied about ‘not moving one inch east” after the reunification of Germany and continued to push eastward until they were right on Russia ‘s doorstep. Finally—after being shoved into a corner—Russia pursued the only option available and pushed back. Russia launched its Special Military Operation (SMO) on February 24, 2022.

Of course, many people still think that Putin wants to rebuild the Soviet empire and that Ukraine is just the first step in a long march across Europe. Fortunately, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg dispelled that fiction in a press conference in September, 2023. Here’s what he said:

“President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.

“The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.

“So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite. He has got more NATO presence in eastern part of the Alliance and he has also seen that Finland has already joined the Alliance and Sweden will soon be a full member.

“This is this is good for the Nordic countries. It’s good for Finland and Sweden. And it’s also good for NATO. And it demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he’s getting the exact opposite.” Putin invaded Ukraine to stop NATO, says NATO chief, YouTube

So, Putin did not go to war to rebuild the Soviet empire. He went to war to prevent a hostile, anti-Russia, military coalition from plopping itself on his border where their missiles could strike Moscow in less than 7 minutes.

Was that unreasonable of him?

Of course, not. He was simply acting is his country’s best interests on a matter of critical (existential) importance. Check out this short 1-minute video of John Mearsheimer who makes the same point:

“… Let me put it differently, Ukraine—according to its Constitution and its Declaration of Sovereignty in 1990—was a neutral country. It abandoned neutrality in December 2014. Just think about that. So, if we had left it alone, Ukraine would be intact today including Crimea. (And) all these dead people would not be dead.” John Mearsheimer, Would Neutrality Have Prevented the War, You Tube

For Zelensky, the choice could not be clearer. Ukraine is either going to be neutral or it’s going to be obliterated. The choice is his to make. But one thing is certain, Russia is not going to live with a gun to its head. We know that now.

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The Brink of Dissolution: Neurosis in the West as the Levee Breaks – by Alastair Crooke – 27 May 2024

 

The discourse of military escalation is in fashion in Europe, but both in the Middle East and Ukraine, western policy is in deep trouble.

The paradox is that Team Biden – wholly inadvertently – is midwifing the birth of a ‘new world’. It is doing so by dint of its crude opposition to parturition. The more the western élites push against the birthing – through ‘saving Zionism’; ‘saving European Ukraine’ and by crushing dissent – perversely they accelerate the foundering of Leviathan.

President Xi’s double farewell hug for President Putin following their 16-17 May summit nonetheless sealed the birth – even the New York Times, with customary self-absorption, termed the warm embrace by Xi as ‘defiance of the West’.

The root of the coming dissolution stems precisely from the shortcoming that the NY Times headline encapsulates in its disdainful labelling of the seismic shift as base anti-westernism.

It reflects the myopia of not wanting to see or hear that which stands so plainly in clear sight before one: If it were simply “anti-West” – nothing more than negation of negation – then the criticism would have some justification. Yet, it is not mere antithesis.

Rather, the near 8,000-word joint China-Russia statement evokes the very elemental laws of nature itself in sketching the West’s usurpation of the fundamental principles of humanity, reality, and order – a critique which maddens the collective West.

David Brooks, the U.S. author who coined the term BoBos (Bohemian Bourgeoisie i.e. the metro-élites) to chart the rise of wokeism, now asserts that ‘liberalism’ (whatever that means today) “is ailing” and in retreat. The classic ‘liberal’ zeitgeist lay upon a foundation of commitments and moral obligations that precede choice – our obligations to our families, to our communities and nations, to our ancestors and descendants, to God or some set of transcendent truths.

It tends to the tepid and uninspiring, Brooks says;

“It avoids the big questions like: Why are we here? What is the meaning to it all? It nurtures rather, the gentle bourgeois virtues like kindness and decency – but not, as Lefebvre allows some of the loftier virtues, like bravery, loyalty, piety and self-sacrificial love”.

To be clear, Brooks, in a separate piece, argues that by putting so much emphasis on individual choice, pure liberalism attenuates social bonds: In a purely liberal ethos, an invisible question lurks behind every relationship: Is this person good for me? Every social connection becomes temporary and contingent. When societies become liberal all the way down, they neglect (as quoted by Brooks) Victor Frankl’s core truth that “Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life”.

The joint Xi-Putin statement therefore is not just a detailed work-plan for a BRICS future (though it is indeed a very comprehensive work plan for the BRICS summit in October). Russia and China rather have put forward a dynamic vision of concrete principles as pillars for a new society in the post-Western future.

By playing straight into the primordial sources of meaning that are deeper than individual preference – faith, family, soil and flag – Russia and China have picked up the pieces and born-up the mantle of the Bandung Non-Aligned Movement through promoting the right of national self-determination and an end to centuries old systems of exploitation.

Yet how and why can the West be said to be accelerating its own dissolution?

The NY Times gives the clue to the ‘why’: The old ‘Anglo’ obsession with a defiant Russia that the West has never been able to bend to their will. And now, Russia and China have signed a joint statement somewhat similar to the ‘no limits’ friendship declared in February 2022 but reaching further.

It portrays their relationship as

“superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation … ”.

Put starkly, this breaches the long-standing western rule of triangulation: the U.S. must stand with either the one, Russia or China, against the other; but never should China and Russia be permitted to band together versus the U.S.! – a doctrine sanctified in western ‘canon law’ since Mackinder’s time in the 19^th Century.

Yet, that ‘two versus one’ is precisely what Team Biden inadvertently have ‘done’.

What then, constitutes the ‘how’?

The problem with the western solutions to any geo-political problem is that they invariably comprise more of the same.

The combination of this deep disdain for Russia – subsumed into the undercurrent fear of Russia as a putative geo-strategic competitor – invites a western recourse to repeating the same triangulation approach, without due reflection on whether circumstances have changed, or not. This is the case here and now – making for a ‘clear and present’ risk of unintended and damaging escalation: A prospect that might midwife the very thing that the West most fears – a loss of control, spiralling the system down into freefall.

The Mistake:

Ray McGovern, a former U.S. Presidential briefer, has chronicled how as

“Biden took office in 2021, his advisers assured him that he could play on Russia’s fear (sic) of China – and drive a wedge between them. This represents the ‘mother of all errors’ of judgement, because it brings about the circumstances in which the western ‘Order’ may dissolve”.

“This [presumption of Russian weakness] became embarrassingly clear when Biden said to Putin during their Geneva summit … let me ask a rhetorical question: ‘You got a multi-thousand-mile border with China. China is seeking to be the most powerful economy in the world and the largest and the most powerful military in the world’.”

McGovern observes that this meeting gave Putin clear confirmation that Biden and his advisers were stuck in a woefully outdated appraisal of Russia-China relations.

Here is the bizarre way Biden described his approach to Putin on China: At the airport after the summit, Biden’s aides did their best to whisk him onto the plane but failed to stop him from sharing more ‘wisdom’ on China: “Russia is in a very, very difficult spot right now. They are being squeezed by China”.

‘Yes’: More of the same! Biden was trying, on the advice of his experts, to insert the ubiquitous western ‘wedge’ between Russia and an ‘BIG’ China.

After these remarks, Putin and Xi spent the rest of 2021 trying to disabuse Biden of the “China squeeze” meme: This mutual effort culminated in the Xi-Putin ‘no limits’ friendship summit of that year. If the advisers had been paying attention however, they would have threaded a long history of Russo-Chinese rapprochement. But no, they were ideologically frozen in the view that the two were destined to be eternal enemies.

Doubling Down on the Mistake. It gets worse:

Then, in a 30 December 2021 telephone conversation, Biden assured Putin that “Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine”. However, Foreign Minister Lavrov has revealed that when he met Blinken in Geneva in January 2022, the U.S. Secretary of State pretended he had not heard of Biden’s undertaking to Putin on 30 December 2021. Rather, Blinken insisted that U.S. medium-range missiles could be deployed in Ukraine, and that the U.S. might be willing to consider limiting their number.

Making An Egregious Mistake Worse

In August 2019, when the U.S. withdrew from the treaty banning intermediate-range missiles in Europe, the U.S. had already deployed missiles in Romania and Poland (saying their purpose was ostensibly ‘to defend against Iran’). However, the tubes installed are deliberately configured to accommodate nuclear warhead equipped, cruise and ballistic missiles; but here is the rub: it is not possible to determine which missile is loaded, as the tubes have lids to them. The time for these missiles to reach Moscow would be 9 minutes from Poland, and 10 from Romania.

But if, as Blinken threatened, missiles might be installed in Ukraine, it would drop to only 7 minutes (and were it to be a hypersonic missile, which the U.S. does not yet possess, it would be a mere 2-3 minutes)

Just for clarity, this (i.e. Ukraine) is Russia’s existential war which it will fight, no matter what it takes. Beijing is fully aware of the high stakes involved for Russia (and ultimately for China, too)

The Consequences to relying on the ‘Same Tactics Again, and Again’ Threats and Pressure).

On 18 May in Moscow, in the wake of the latest Xi-Putin summit – as MK Bhadrakumar notes – Lavrov predicted an escalation in western weapon supplies to Ukraine, reflecting not only the Biden’s election need to be seen ‘facing down Russia, but also the reality that “the acute phase of the military-political confrontation with the West” will continue, in “full swing”.

The western thought processes, Lavrov said, are veering round dangerously to “the contours of the formation of a European military alliance – with a nuclear component”. Lavrov lamented that “they have made a choice in favour of a showdown on the battlefield: We are ready for this”. “The agenda to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia militarily and otherwise – is pure fantasy and it will be resolutely countered”.

European military inadequacy explains, presumably, the mooted notion to add a nuclear component.

Put plainly, with the U.S. unable to exit or to moderate its determination to preserve its hegemony, Lavrov sees the prospect for increased western weapons provision for Ukraine. The discourse of military escalation is in fashion in Europe (of that there is no doubt); but both in the Middle East and Ukraine, western policy is in deep trouble. There must be doubts whether the West has either the political will, or the internal unity, to pursue this aggressive course. Dragging wars are not traditionally thought to be ‘voter friendly’ when campaigning reaches its peak.

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation )

Putin’s Strategic Blunder – by Paul Graig Roberts – 20 May 2024

• 700 WORDS

The blunder began years before February 2022. Putin failed to realize that the US was preparing the overthrow of the Ukraine government. When the overthrow began, Putin took no action to prevent the overthrow. Instead, Russia permitted Washington to take over the former province of the Russian state.

A hostile Ukraine is an existential threat to Russia. Why did Russia stand aside and permit Washington’s takeover? Why did Russia sit for the next 8 years on its hands, rejecting the votes of the independent Donbas republics to be reunited with Russia from which they were torn by Soviet leaders and stuck in Ukraine? The culprit in these strategic blunders was the Kremlin’s lack of realism. Putin relied on diplomacy despite the fact that Washington relies on threats, bribes, and coercion. The Kremlin simply did not understand that with the Minsk Agreement it was saddling a dead horse that could go nowhere.

When Putin was finally forced to intervene by the prospect that the inhabitants of Russian Donbas were about to be slaughtered like Palestinians in Gaza today, Putin failed to respond decisively. Still playing all by himself a diplomatic game, he insisted that there be no Russian invasion of Ukraine, only a “special military operation” to clear hostile Ukrainian forces from Donbas. Lost in a diplomatic world that no longer exists, Putin failed to realize that regardless of what he said or did, Western propaganda would present the intervention as a reconstruction of the Soviet Empire that would extend to all of Europe.

It was immediately obvious that the limited and slow-paced “special military operation” would provide Washington and its NATO puppets abundant time to become involved in the conflict, thus endlessly widening the conflict until the conflict became an existential issue for Russia. This is what has occurred.

Still the Kremlin thinks unrealistically. Putin is on the verge of succeeding with his purpose of driving Ukrainian forces out of, and away from, the Russian populated areas, and the assumption is that the war will be over and Russia’s success will be acknowledged in a negotiated settlement.

This delusion persists despite Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov’s acknowledgement that Washington intends Russia’s destruction. Both Lavrov and Putin continue to stress that they are willing to negotiate with Washington Washington’s intention to destroy Russia. It would be hilarious if were not so deadly.

Listen to Lavrov’s speech. He understands the threat to Russia but is incapable of matching a Russian response to the threat. https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2024/05/19/the-west-has-decided-to-sort-things-out-on-the-battlefield-russia-is-ready-lavrov/13/

Thinking Russia’s intervention to be limited, Putin was unprepared for war. He has done very little to hamper the Ukrainian government’s ability to conduct war. Rather than shutting down Ukraine, Putin chose a long drawn-out village by village conquest. The West interpreted this as limited Russian military capability, and this provided both encouragement and time for the West to involve itself in the conflict.

The West is so involved now and the Western political leaders are so certain that Russia intends more aggression that they are preparing for war against Russia. Still, Putin and Lavrov speak of negotiation. After a decade of the West’s rejection of negotiation, how can the Kremlin still see negotiation as a solution?

What needed to be done was to knock Kiev out of the war, install a Russian friendly government in place of the American puppet regime, and present the West with a fait accompli before the West had time to get involved. It is Western involvement that presents the danger of the conflict widening into a war between Russia and the West.

Possibly the solution is still viable. It would leave a neutral Ukrainian state west of the Dnieper River with no Black Sea access. It is highly unlikely that such an outcome can be achieved by negotiation. It can only be imposed by force.

By restraining Russia’s use of force, Putin has opened the road to nuclear Armageddon.

…………………..

(Republished from paulcraigroberts)

Russia & China – Two Against One – by Ray McGovern – 18 May 2024

 • 1,200 WORDS • 

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping and their teams meeting in Beijing on Thursday. (Konstantin Zavrazhin, Kremlin)

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s extremely warm reception of President Vladimir Putin yesterday in Beijing sealed the increasingly formidable Russia-China strategic relationship. It amounts to a tectonic shift in the world balance of power.

The Russia-China entente also sounds the death knell for attempts by U.S. foreign policy neophytes to drive a wedge between the two countries. The triangular relationship has become two-against-one, with serious implications, particularly for the war in Ukraine. If U.S. President Joe Biden’s foreign policy geniuses remain in denial, escalation is almost certain.

In a pre-visit interview with Xinhua, Putin noted the “unprecedented level of strategic partnership between our countries.” He and Xi have met more than 40 times in person or virtually. In June 2018, Xi described Putin as “an old friend of the Chinese people” and, personally, his “best friend.”

For his part, Putin noted Thursday that he and Xi are “in constant contact to keep personal control over all pressing issues on the Russian-Chinese and international agenda.” Putin brought along Defense Minister Andrey Belousov as well as veterans like Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and key business leaders.

Joint Statements Matter

Xi and Putin signed a strong joint statement Thursday, similar to the extraordinary one the two issued on Feb. 4, 2022, in Beijing. It portrayed their relationship as “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation …”

The full import of that statement did not hit home until Putin launched the Special Military Operation into the Donbass three weeks later. China’s muted reaction shocked most analysts, who had dismissed the possibility that Xi would give “best friend” Putin, in effect, a waiver on China’s bedrock policy of non-interference abroad.

In the following weeks, official Chinese statements made clear that the principles of Westphalia had taken a back seat to “the need for every country to defend its core interests” and to judge each situation “on its own merits.”

Nuclear War

Thursday’s statement expressed concern over “increased strategic risks between nuclear powers” — referring to continued escalation of the war between NATO-supported Ukraine and Russia. It condemns “the expansion of military alliances and creation of military bridgeheads close to the borders of other nuclear powers, particularly with the advanced deployment of nuclear weapons and their means of delivery, as well as other items.”

Putin has undoubtedly briefed Xi on the U.S. missile sites already in Romania and Poland that can launch what Russians call “offensive strike missiles” with flight time to Moscow of less than 10 minutes. Putin surely has told Xi about the inconsistencies in U.S. statements regarding intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

For example, Xi is aware — just as surely as consumers of Western media are unaware — that during a Dec. 30, 2021, telephone conversation, Biden assured Putin that “Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine.”

There was rejoicing in the Kremlin that New Years’ Eve, since Biden’s assurance was the first sign that Washington might acknowledge Russia’s security concerns. Indeed, Biden addressed a key issue in at least five of the eight articles of the Russian draft treaty given to the U.S. on Dec. 17, 2021. Russian rejoicing, however, was short-lived.

Foreign Minister Lavrov revealed last month that when he met Antony Blinken in Geneva in January 2022, the U.S. secretary of state pretended he’d not heard of Biden’s undertaking to Putin on Dec. 30, 2021. Rather, Blinken insisted that U.S. medium-range missiles could be deployed in Ukraine, and only that the U.S. might be willing to limit their number, Lavrov said.

The Mother of All Miscalculations

When Biden took office in 2021, his advisers assured him that he could play on Russia’s fear (sic) of China and drive a wedge between them. This became embarrassingly clear when Biden indicated what he had told Putin during their Geneva summit on June 16, 2021.

That meeting gave Putin confirmation that Biden and his advisers were stuck in a woefully outdated appraisal of Russia-China relations.

Here is the bizarre way Biden described his approach to Putin on China:

“Without quoting him [Putin] — which I don’t think is appropriate — let me ask a rhetorical question: You got a multi-thousand-mile border with China. China is seeking to be the most powerful economy in the world and the largest and the most powerful military in the world.”

The ‘Squeeze’

At the airport after the summit, Biden’s aides did their best to whisk him onto the plane, but failed to stop him from sharing more wisdom on China:

“Russia is in a very, very difficult spot right now. They are being squeezed by China.”

After these remarks Putin and Xi spent the rest of 2021 trying to disabuse Biden of the “China squeeze” on Russia: it was not a squeeze, but a fraternal embrace. This mutual effort culminated in a Xi-Putin virtual summit on Dec. 15 of that year.

The video of the first minute of their conversation was picked up by The New York Times, as well as others. Still, most commentators seemed to miss its significance:

Putin:

“Dear friend, dear President Xi Jinping.

Next February I expect we can finally meet in person in Beijing as we agreed. We will hold talks and then participate in the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games. I am grateful for your invitation to attend this landmark event.”

Xi:

“Dear President Putin, my old friend. It’s my pleasure to meet you at the end of this year by video, the second time this year, our 37th meeting since 2013. You have hailed … China-Russia relations as a model in international collaboration in the 21st Century, strongly supporting China’s position on safeguarding its core interests, and firmly opposed to attempts to drive a wedge between our two countries. I highly appreciate it.”

Is Biden still unaware of this? Have his advisers told him that Russia and China have never been closer, with what amounts to a virtual military alliance?

The Election

Putin has said he is aware that Washington’s policy toward Russia “is primarily impacted by domestic political processes.” Russia and China certainly assess that Biden’s policy on Ukraine will be influenced by the political imperative to be seen as facing Russia down.

If NATO country hotheads send “trainers” to Ukraine, the prospect of a military dust-up is ever present. What Biden needs to know is that, if it comes to open hostilities between Russia and the West, he is likely to face more than just saber rattling in the South China Sea — and the specter of a two-front war.

The Chinese know they are next in line for the ministrations of NATO/East. Indeed, it is no secret that the Pentagon sees China as enemy No. 1. According to the DOD’s National Defense Strategy, “defense priorities are first, defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the People’s Republic of China.”

The Pentagon will be the last to sing a requiem for the dearly departed unipolar world. May sanity prevail.

Ray McGovern’s first portfolio as a C.I.A. analyst was Sino-Soviet relations. In 1963, their total trade was $220 MILLION; in 2023, $227 BILLION. Do the math.

…………………………………

(Republished from Consortium News)

A Tale of Two Sovereigns, a Lackey and a Nanny – by Pepe Escobar – 8 May 2024

• 1,400 WORDS • 

The NATOstan lackeys will remain dazed and confused. So what; lackeys lack strategic depth, they just wallow in the shallow waters of irrelevancy.

Startling mirror images swirl around two major developments this week directly inbuilt in the Grand Narrative that shapes my latest book, Eurasia v. NATOstan, recently published in the U.S.: Xi Jinping’s visit to Paris and the inauguration of Vladimir Putin’s new term in Moscow.

Inevitably, this is a contrasting tale of Sovereigns – the comprehensive Russia-China strategic partnership – and lackeys: the NATOstan/EU vassals.

Xi, the quintessential hermetic guest, is quite sharp at reading a table – and we’re not talking about Gallic gastronomic finesse. The minute he sat at the Paris table he got the Big Picture. This was not a tete-a-tete with Le Petit Roi, Emmanuel Macron. This was a threesome because Toxic Medusa Ursula von der Leyen, more appropriately defined as Pustula von der Lugen, had inserted herself in the plot.

Nothing was lost in translation for Xi: this was graphic illustration that Le Petit Roi, the leader of a third-rate former Western colonial power, enjoys zero “strategic autonomy”. The decisions that matter come from the Kafkaesque Eurocracy of the European Commission (EC), led by his Nanny, the Medusa, and directly relayed by the Hegemon.

Le Petit Roi spent the whole of Xi’s Gallic time babbling like an infant on Putin’s “destabilizations” and trying to “engage China, which objectively enjoys sufficient levers to change Moscow’s calculus in its war in Ukraine”.

Obviously no pubescent adviser at the Elysee Palace – and there’s quite a crowd – dared to break the news to Le Petit Roi about the strength, depth and reach of the Russia-China strategic partnership.

So it was up to his Nanny to volunteer out loud the fine print on the “Monsieur Xi comes to France” adventure.

Faithfully parroting Treasure Secretary Janet Yellen in her recent, disastrous Beijing incursion, the Nanny directly threatened the superpowered hermetic guest: you are exceeding in “over-capacity”, you are over-producing; and if you don’t stop it, we will sanction you to death.

So much for European “strategic autonomy”. Moreover, it’s idle to dwell on what can only be described as suicidal stupidity.

Steadfastly defending a debacle

Now let’s switch to what really matters: the chain of events leading to Putin’s lavish fifth inauguration at the Kremlin.

We start with the chief of GRU (main intelligence department) of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Admiral Igor Kostyukov.

Kostyukov, on the record, actually re-confirmed that right on the eve of the Special Military Operation (SMO), in February 2022, the West was ready to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia in Donbass, just as before the Great Patriotic War (Victory Day, incidentally, is celebrated this Thursday not only in Russia but also across the post-Soviet space).

Then the ambassadors of Britain and France were called at the Russian Foreign Ministry. They spent roughly half an hour each, separately, and left without addressing the media. There were no leaks about the reasons for both visits.

Yet that was more than obvious. The Foreign Ministry handed the Brits a serious note in response to David “of Arabia” Cameron’s babbling about using British long-range missiles to attack the territory of the Russian Federation. And to the French, another serious note on Le Petit Roi’s babbling about sending French troops to Ukraine.

Immediately after this compounded NATO babbling, the Russian Federation started drills on the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

So what started as a NATO verbal escalation was counterpunched not only with stern messages but also an extra, clear, stern warning: Moscow will regard any F-16 entering Ukraine as a potential carrier of nuclear weapons – regardless of its specific design. F-16s in Ukraine will be treated as a clear and present danger.

And there’s more: Moscow will respond with symmetric measures if Washington deploys any ground-based intermediate-range nuclear missiles (INF) in Ukraine – or elsewhere. There will be a counterpunch.

All that happened within the framework of astonishing Ukrainian losses in the battlefield over the past two months or so. The only parallels are with the 1980s Iran-Iraq war and the first Gulf War. Kiev, between dead, wounded and missing, may be losing as many as 10,000 soldiers a week: the equivalent of three divisions, 9 brigades or 30 battalions.

No compulsory mobilization, whatever its reach, can counter such debacle. And the much-advertised Russian offensive has not even started yet.

There’s no way the current U.S. administration led by a cadaver in the White House, in an electoral year, is going to send troops to a war that from the beginning was scripted to be fought to the last Ukrainian. And there’s no way NATO will officially send troops to this proxy war, because they will be minced into steak tartare in a matter of hours.

Any serious military analyst knows NATO has less than zero capability to transfer significant forces and assets to Ukraine – no matter the current, grandiloquent Steadfast Defender “exercises” coupled with Macron’s mini-Napoleon rhetoric.

So it’s Ouroboros all over again, the snake biting its own sorry tail: there was never a Plan B to the proxy war. And at the current configuration in the battlefield, plus possible outcomes, we’re back to what everyone from Putin to Nebenzya at the UN have been saying: it’s over only when we say it’s over. The only thing to negotiate is the modality of surrendering.

And of course there will be no sniffin’ sweaty sweatshirt cabal in place in Kiev: Zelensky is already a “Wanted” entity in Russia, and in a few days, from a legal standpoint, his government will be totally illegitimate.

Russia aligns with the world majority

Moscow has to be fully aware that serious threats remain: what NATOstan wants is to test the strategic capability of hitting Russian military, manufacturing or energy installations deep within the Russian Federation. This could be easily interpreted as a last shot of bourbon at the counter before the 404 saloon goes down in flames.

After all, Moscow’s response will have to be devastating, as already communicated by Medvedev Unplugged: “None of them will be able to hide either on Capitol Hill, or in the Elysee Palace, or on Downing Street 10. A world catastrophe will happen.”

Putin, at the inauguration, was cool, calm and collected, unfazed by all the hysterical incandescence across the NATOstan sphere.

These are his main takeaways:

Russia and only Russia will determine its own fate.

Russia will pass through this difficult, milestone period with dignity and become even stronger, it must be self-sufficient and competitive.

The key priority for Russia is safeguarding the people, preserving its age-old values and traditions.

Russia is ready to strengthen good relations with all countries, and with the world majority.

Russia will continue to work with its partners on the formation of a multipolar world order.

Russia does not reject dialog with the West, it is ready for dialog on security and strategic stability, but only on an equal footing.

All that is supremely rational. The problem is the other side is supremely irrational.

Still, a new Russian government will be in place in a matter of days. The new Prime Minister will be appointed by the President after the Duma approves the candidacy.

The new head of the Cabinet must propose to the President and the Duma candidates for deputy prime ministers and ministers – except for the heads of the security bloc and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The heads of the Ministry of Defense, FSB, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Emergency Situations and Ministry of Foreign Affairs will be appointed by the President after consultations with the Federation Council.

All ministerial candidacies will be submitted and considered before May 15.

And all that will happen before the key meeting: Putin and Xi face to face in Beijing on May 17. Everything will be in play – and on the table. Then a new era starts – outlining the path towards the BRICS+ summit next October in Kazan, and the subsequent multipolar moves.

The NATOstan lackeys will remain dazed, confused – and hysterical. So what; lackeys lack strategic depth, they just wallow in the shallow waters of irrelevancy.

……………………………

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

Ukraine War Funding and Failed Russian Sanctions – by Jack Rasmus – 26 April 2024

This past weekend, April 20, 2024 the US House of Representatives passed a bill to provide Ukraine with another $61 billion in aid. Then the meassure  quickly passed the Senate and was signed into law by Biden within days.

The funds, however, will make little difference to the outcome of the war on the ground as it appears most of the military hardware funded by the $61 billion has already been produced and much of it already shipped. Perhaps no more than $10 billion in additional new weapons and equipment will result from the latest $61 billion passed by Congress .

Subject to revision, initial reports of the composition of the $61 billion indicate $23.2 billion of it will go to pay US arms producers for weapons that have already been produced and delivered to Ukraine. Another $13.8 billion is earmarked to replace weapons from US military stocks that have been produced and are in the process of being shipped—but haven’t as yet—or are additional weapons still to be produced. The breakdown of this latter $13.8 amount is not yet clear in the initial reports. One might generously guess perhaps $10 billion at most represents weapons not yet produced, while $25-$30 billion represents weapons already shipped to Ukraine or in the current shipment pipeline.

In total, therefore, weapons already delivered to Ukraine, awaiting shipment, or yet to be produced amount to approximately $37 billion.

The remainder of the $61 billion includes $7.8 billion for financial assistance to Ukraine to pay for salaries of government employees through 2024. An additional $11.3 billion to finance current Pentagon operations in Ukraine—which sounds suspiciously like pay for US advisors, mercenaries, special ops, and US forces operating equipment like radars, advanced Patriot missile systems, etc. on the ground. Another $4.7 billion is for miscellaneous expenses, whatever that is.

In other words, only $13.8 billion of the $61 billion is for weapons Ukraine doesn’t already have!

And that $13.8 billion is all Ukraine will likely get in new weapons funding for the rest of 2024! Like the $23 billion already in theater, that will likely be burned up in a couple of weeks this summer once Russia’s coming major offensive—its largest of the war—is launched in late May or early June. So what does the US do in order to continue to fund Ukraine’s economy, government and military efforts this fall and thereafter?

In other words, what’s the Biden/NATO strategy for aiding Ukraine, militarily and economically, after the $37 billion is expended by late this summer? Where’s the money to come from?

To understand how the US/NATO plan to fund subsequent weapons production for Ukraine in late 2024 and early 2025, one must consider not only the $61 billion bill but a second bill also passed by Congress this past weekend that hasn’t been given much attention in the mainstream media.

That second bill may potentially provide up to $300 billion for Ukraine from USA and its G7 allies, especially NATO allies in Europe where reportedly $260 of the $300 billion resides in Eurozone banks.

Biden/US Short-Term Strategy 2024

The $61 billion is clearly only a stopgap measure to try to get the Ukraine army and government funded through the summer. Beyond that, the broader Biden strategy is to keep Ukraine afloat until after the US November elections. In addition to the $61 billion—which the US hopes will get Ukraine through the US November election (but likely won’t)—US strategy includes getting the Russians to agree to begin some kind of negotiations. The US will then use the discussions to raise a demand to freeze military operations on both sides while negotiations are underway. But Biden’s ‘freeze and negotiate’ strategy is dead on arrival, since it is abundantly clear to the Russians it is basically about US and NATO ‘buying time’ and Russia has already been played by that one. As the popular US saying goes: “fool me once shame on you; fool me twice shame on me”.

The Russians already fell for that ‘let’s suspend fighting and negotiation ploy’ with the Minsk II treaty back in 2015-16. It agreed to halt military operations in the Donbass back then but NATO and the Ukraine government used the Minsk agreement as cover to re-build Ukraine’s military force which it thereafter used to attack the Donbass provinces. European leaders Angela Merkel of Germany and Francois Holland of France thereafter publicly admitted in 2022 that Minsk II was just to ‘buy time’.

The Russian’s were again similarly snookered at the Istanbul peace discussions held in April 2022. They were asked by NATO to show good faith in negotiations by withdrawing their forces from around Kiev, which they did. Negotiations were then broken off by Zelensky, on NATO’s strong recommendation, and Ukraine launched an offensive chasing the withdrawing Russians all the way back to the Donbass borders.

Russia is therefore extremely unlikely to fall a third time for a Biden/NATO request to ‘freeze’ military operations and negotiate again.

Biden may want to ‘buy time’ once more, but that hand’s been played twice already and the West will be (is being) told by Russia they aren’t interested in buying anything from the West and its ‘money’ no longer has any value.

Speaker Johnson’s Volte Face

The passage of the stop-gap $61 billion for Ukraine by the US House of Representatives was the result of House Speaker, Johnson, doing an about-face and allowing the vote on the House floor after saying he wouldn’t for weeks. There’s been much speculation in the US mainstream media as to why Johnson reversed his position and allowed the Ukraine aid bill to the House floor for a vote.  However, it’s not difficult to understand why he did reverse his view.

In recent weeks there was intense lobbying behind the scenes by US weapons companies with key Republican committee chairmen in the House. After all, at least $37 billion in payments for weapons—both already delivered and to be delivered—was involved. Not a minor sum even for super-profitable companies like Lockheed, Raytheon and the like. Rumors are that corporate lobbying had its desired effect on Republican committee chairs in the House, who then in turn pressured Johnson to allow the vote on the floor. The final vote in the House was 310 to 111 with 210 Democrats joining 100 Republicans to pass the measure—revealing that the core support for the US Military Industrial Complex in the House of Representatives is at least three-fourths (the US Senate likely even higher).

So the vote was the result of a ‘parliamentary maneuver’ in which all the Democrats crossed over to support the Republican Speaker of the House (who de factor switched parties for the moment). A minority of Republicans joined him. A slim majority of Republicans opposed the measure. Their opposition remains. Thus it is highly unlikely Congress will appropriate more funding for Ukraine for the rest of this year—even when the $61 billion for weapons and Ukraine’s government run out by this late summer.

So what happens if and when the $61 billion is exhausted well before the November elections?

A possible answer to that question lies in the passage of a second Ukraine funding measure this past weekend. The $61 billion was not the most important legislative action in the US House. While most of the media commentary has been on that Ukraine aid bill, hardly anything has been said in the mainstream media about another bill that the US House also passed over the weekend. This second measure has greater strategic implications for US global interests than the $37 billion in actual weapons shipments for Ukraine. This second measure is HR 8038, a 184-page bill misnamed the ‘21^st Century Peace Through Strength Act’  which amounted to yet another package (the 16^th?) of US sanctions.

Transferring Russia’s $300 Billion Assets to Ukraine

The first section of the bill arranges a procedure for the US to force the sale of the China company, Tik Tok, to a consortium of US financial investors, reportedly led by former US Treasury Secretary under Trump, Steve Mnuchin. This is part of the expanding list of sanctions on China. Also sanctioned are China’s purchases of Iranian oil, as well as a host of additional sanctions on Iran itself. However, the most significant measure related to sanctions on Russia.

The 21^st Century Peace Through Strength Act calls for the US to transfer its $5 billion share of Russia’s $300 billion of seized assets in Western banks that were frozen in 2022 at the outset of the Ukraine war. It provides a procedure to hand over the $5 billion to Ukraine to further finance its war efforts!  This move has been rumored and debated in the USA and Europe since the assets were seized two years ago. But now the process of actually transferring the seized funds to Ukraine has begun with the passage of this second bill by the US House.

The USA’s $5 billion share in US banks is just a drop in the bucket of the $300 billion. Russia could probably care less about it, i.e. a mere ‘rounding error’ in its total revenue from the sale of oil, gas and other commodities. But Europe holds $260 of the $300 billion, according to European Central Bank chair, Christine Lagarde.  A tidy sum which Russia has threatened to retaliate against Europe should the EU follow the US/Biden lead and also begin to transfer its $260 billion to Ukraine.

The US bill is very clear that the transfer of the US’s $5 billion is imminent. The bill requires the Biden administration to establish a ‘Ukraine Defense Fund’ into which the US’s $5 billion will be deposited. If parts of the $5 billion are not in liquid asset form, the US president is further authorized by the bill to liquidate those assets and deposit the proceeds in the fund as well. So the seizure and transfer of the $5 billion to Ukraine is a done deal. And when it happens a legal precedent will be made that Europe may use to follow and transfer its $260 billion.

One can expect the US to pressure Europe strongly to do so. Biden is further authorized by the bill to ‘negotiate’ with Europe and other G7 partners to convince them to do the same—i.e. seize their share of the $300 billion, liquidate and then transfer the cash assets into the US ‘Ukraine Defense Fund’. And to date the US has been able to ‘convince’ Europe—via its control of NATO and influence over Europe’s economy and its umbrella political elites in the European Commission and European Parliament—to follow US policy without too much resistance. Europe is fast becoming an economic satrapy and political dependency of the USA in recent decades, more than willing to bend in whatever policy direction the USA wants.

It is clear the seizure & redistribution to Ukraine of the $300 billion via the Ukraine Defense Fund is the means by which the US/NATO plan longer term to continue to finance the Ukraine war after the $61 billion runs out sometime in 2024; and certainly in 2025 and beyond. For the US has no intention of ending its NATO-led proxy war in Ukraine anytime soon. It is just seeking to ‘buy time’ in the interim before its November elections.

For a majority of both parties in the US—Democrat and Republican—are united on continuing the war. It will matter little who wins the presidency or which party has majorities in Congress after November.  Political elites on both sides of the aisle in Congress are united in pursuing the war in Ukraine—just as they are united in continuing to fund Israel as well as to continue the US’s steadily expanding economic war with China. In just the past week it is obvious more US sanctions on China are also coming soon, including possibly an announcement of financial sanctions on China for the first time after US Secretary of State, Blinken’s, most recent visit.

Failed Russian Sanctions: Past and Future

The geopolitical objectives of the US and its commitment to continuing its three wars are resulting in unintended, negative effects on the economies of the US and its G7 allies, especially Germany. But those same sanctions have had little to no negative impact on Russia’s economy.

The recently passed US transfer of its $5 billion share of Russia’s $300 billion will accelerate the negative consequences, especially for Europe should the latter follow the US lead and distribute its $260 billion share to Ukraine, which it eventually will.

As EBC chairperson, Lagarde, put it referring to the US plan and legislation: “It needs to be carefully considered”.  UK political leaders are already on record advocating the confiscation and transfer of Europe’s $260 billion holdings of Russian assets to Ukraine.  Europe in recent years has a strong history of capitulating to US economic policies and demands. It will be no different this time.

Should Europe join the USA in transferring its $260 billion share of Russian assets in European banks (most of which is in Belgium), it’s almost certain that Russia will reply similarly and seize at least an equal amount of European assets still in Russia.  The Russian Parliament has officially recently said as much.

Part of the G7/NATO sanctions to date included forcing Western businesses in Russia to liquidate and leave Russia. Some have done so. But many have not. Russia’s response has been to arrange the transfer of those EU companies’ assets that have left to Russian companies. This has actually stimulated the Russian economy. It resulted in Russian government subsidies—and thus government spending—to Russian companies assuming the assets, as well as additional investment by those companies after their acquisition of the departed EU companies’ assets.

In short, the Western sanctions measure pressuring Western companies to leave Russia has backfired in its predicted result of reducing Russian government spending and business investment.

In contrast, the US/NATO’s fifteen or so sanctions packages to date have had little, if any, impact on Russia’s economy since the commencing of the war in February 2022. To cite just a few of the performance of Russia’s key economic indicators under the sanctions regime: (Note: all following data is from the US global research source https://tradingeconomics.com):

Russia’s GDP in the latest six months has risen between 4.9% (3^rd quarter 2023) to 5.5% (4^th quarter). Russia’s PMI statistics show robust expansion for both manufacturing and services during the same period while in most of the major European economies, both PMI indicators are contracting. Wage growth in Russia over the six months has averaged 8.5% for both quarters (whereas in the US is it less than half that and in Germany less than 1%). Russian government revenues rose from roughly 5 trillion rubles in the third quarter to 8.7 trillion in the 4^th. Military expenditures are up from $69.5 billion (dollars) to $86.3 billion. Consumer spending is at record levels in the latest quarter. Russian household debt as a percent of GDP remains steady at around 22% (whereas in the USA it is 62.5%). Crude oil production and general exports continue to steadily rise. Gasoline remains at 60 cents a liter (whereas in US five to six times that and in Europe more than ten times). And the unemployment rate in Russia remains steady at 2.9% (whereas in the US and Europe it’s a quarter to a half higher). Interest rates and inflation are higher in Russia but that represents an economy firing on all economic cylinders and is not necessarily a negative.

In short, it’s hard to find a single statistic that shows the Russian economy has been negatively impacted by the US/NATO sanctions regime over the past two years. Indeed, an argument can even be made the sanctions have stimulated the Russian economy not undermined it.

The latest sanction in the form of the US and G7 transfer of the $300 billion in seized Russian assets in Western banks will almost for certain have a similar effect on Russia’s economy. Namely, distributing the $300 billion will result in the Russian government’s seizure of at least an equivalent of European companies’ assets still in Russia. And that will provide funding for still further government subsidy spending benefiting Russian companies followed by more private investment.

Is the US Empire Shooting Itself in the Foot?

But there is an even greater consequence to follow the US and Europe’s desperate act of transferring Russia’s $300 billion in assets in western banks to Ukraine.

Western bankers, economic policymakers, and many economists alike have warned against the seizure and transfer of the $300 billion.  Heads of US and other central banks, CEOs of large commercial banks, and even mainstream economists like Shiller at Yale have continually warned publicly that transferring the assets will seriously undermine faith in the US dollar system which is the lynchpin of the US global economic empire.

What countries in the global South will now want to put (or leave) their assets in western banks, especially in Europe, if they think the assets could be seized should they disagree on policies promoted by the empire?  It’s clear the US has now begun to impose ‘secondary’ sanctions on countries that don’t abide by its primary sanctions on Russia. Will the US also seize the assets of these ‘secondary’ countries now in western banks if they don’t go along with refusing to trade with Russia? And what about China, as the US has now begun to expand its sanctions—primary and secondary—on that country as well? Watch for unprecedented financial sanctions on China that may be forthcoming following Blinken’s visit to China this week.

The US does not realize this is not the 1980s. The global south has developed massively in recent decades. They are insisting on more independence and more say in the rules of the empire—without which they will simply leave now that an alternative is beginning to appear in the expansion of the BRICS countries.

Recently expanded to 10 members (all of which in the Middle East and heavily oil producers), no fewer than 34 more countries have now petitioned to join the BRICS. Furthermore, it is reported that at the BRICS next conference in late 2024 an ‘alternative global financial framework’ will be announced! That will likely include some alternative currency arrangement as well as an alternative international payments system to replace the US SWIFT system (by which the USA via its banks can see who is violating its sanctions). Likely forthcoming will be something to replace the US-run IMF in order to ensure currency stability and an expansion of China’s Belt & Road as an alternative to the US-run World Bank. (Perhaps that is the real topic of Blinken’s forthcoming China visit?)

In short, the US global economic empire is entering its most unstable period. And yet US policy is to accelerate alternatives to it by seizing and transferring funds to Ukraine to continue the war! The blowback from the seizure and transfer will prove significant, both to US and European interests. It will render past resistance to US sanctions pale in comparison.

How to Crash an Empire!

History will show that US geopolitical objectives and strategies in the 21^st century were the single greatest cause of the decline of US global economic hegemony over the last quarter century. Much of those objectives and strategies have been the work of the most economically ignorant foreign policy team in US history, who are generally referred to as the Neocons.

The seizure and transfer of the $300 billion may provide a way to continue funding Ukraine in the US/NATO proxy war against Russia through 2024 and beyond. But the timing could not be worse for US/Europe imperial interests, coming on the eve of the historic BRICS conference later this year. The desperate act of seizure and transfer will only convince more countries of the global South to seek another more independent alternative by joining the BRICS, or increasingly trade with that bloc.

History shows empires rest ultimately on economic foundations. And they collapse when those underlying economic foundations fracture and then crumble.

The longer run consequence of the $300 billion transfer and the exiting of the global South from the US empire can only be the decline in the use of the US dollar in global transactions and as a reserve currency. That sets in motion a series of events that in turn undermine the US domestic economy in turn: Less demand for the dollar results in a fall in the dollar’s value. That means less recycling of dollars back to the US, resulting in less purchases of US Treasuries from the Federal Reserve, which in turn will require the Fed to raise long term interest rates for years to come in order to cover rising US budget deficits. All this will happen to an intensifying fiscal crisis of the US state rapidly deteriorating already

In other words, blowback on the US economy from declining US global hegemony—exacerbated by sanctions in general and seizure of countries like Russia’s assets in particular—is almost certain in the longer run, just as it will be for Europe’s economy in the even more immediate term.

But such is the economic myopia of the US neocons and the incompetent political elite leadership in both parties in the USA in recent years. As that other American saying goes: ‘We have found the enemy and they are us!’

Jack Rasmus is author of  ’The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump, Clarity Press, January 2020. He blogs at jackrasmus.com and hosts the weekly radio show, Alternative Visions on the Progressive Radio Network on Fridays at 2pm est. His twitter handle is @drjackrasmus.

Donetsk, Avdeyevka, Mariupol – on the Road in Electoral Donbass – by Pepe Escobar – 20 March 2024

• 1,600 WORDS • 

They have waited 10 long, suffering years to vote in this election. And vote they did, in massive numbers, certifying a landslide reelection for the political leader who brought them back to Mother Russia. VVP may now be widely referred to as Mr. 87%. In Donetsk, turnout was even higher: 88,17%. And no less than 95% voted for him.

To follow the Russian electoral process at work in Donbass was a humbling – and illuminating – experience. Graphically, in front of us, the full weight of the collective West’s relentless denigration campaign was instantly gobbled up by the rich black soil of Novorossiya. The impeccable organization, the full transparency of the voting, the enthusiasm by polling station workers and voters alike punctuated the historical gravity of the political moment: at the same time everything was enveloped in an impalpable feeling of silent jubilation.

This was of course a referendum. Donbass represents a microcosm of the solid internal cohesion of Russian citizens around the policies of Team Putin – while at the same time sharing a feeling experienced by the overwhelming majority of the Global South. VVP’s victory was a victory of the Global Majority.

And that’s what’s making the puny Global Minority even more apoplectic. With their highest turnout since 1991, Russian voters inflicted a massive strategic defeat to the intellectual pigmies who pass for Western “leadership” – arguably the most mediocre political class of the past 100 years. They voted for a fairer, stable system of international relations; for multipolarity; and for true leadership by civilization-states such as Russia.

VVP’s 87% score was followed, by a long shot, by the Communists, with 3.9%. That is quite significant, because these 91% represent a total rejection of the globalist Davos/Great Reset plutocratic “future” envisioned by the 0.001%.

Avdeyevka: Voting Under Total Devastation

On Election Day Two, at section 198 in downtown Donetsk, not far from Government House, it was possible to fully measure the fluidity and transparency of the system – even as Donetsk was not spared from shelling, in the late afternoon and early evening in the final day of voting.

Afterwards, a strategic pit stop in a neighborhood mini-market. Yuri, an activist, was buying a full load of fresh eggs to be transported to the nearly starving civilians who still remain in Avdeyevka. Ten eggs cost the equivalent of a dollar and forty cents.

Electoral Donbass © Sputnik

At Yasinovata, very close to Avdeyevka, we visit the MBOU, or school number 7, impeccably rebuilt after non-stop shelling. The director, Ludmilla Leonova, an extraordinary strong woman, takes me on a guide tour of the school and its brand new classrooms for chemistry and biology, a quaint Soviet alphabet decorating the classroom for Russian language. Classes, hopefully, will resume in the Fall.

Close to the school a refugee center for those who have been brought from Avdeyevka has been set up. Everything is spotlessly clean. People are processed, entered into the system, then wait for proper papers. Everyone wants to obtain a Russian passport as soon as possible.

For the moment, they stay in dormitories, around 10 people in each room. Some came from Avdeyevka, miraculously, in their own cars: there are a few Ukrainian license plates around. Invariably, the overall expectation is to return to Avdeyevka, when reconstruction starts, to rebuild their lives in their own town.

Then, it’s on the road to Avdeyevka. Nothing, absolutely nothing prepares us to confront total devastation. In my nearly 40 years as a foreign correspondent, I’ve never seen anything like it – even Iraq. At the unofficial entry to Avdeyevka, beside the skeleton of a bombed building and the remains of a tank turret, the flags of all military batallions which took part in the liberation flutter in the wind.

Each building in every street is at least partially destroyed. A few remaining residents congregate in a flat to organize the distribution of essential supplies. I find a miraculously preserved icon behind the window of a bombed-out ground floor apartment.

FPVs loiter overheard – detected by a handheld device, and our military escort is on full alert. We find out that as we enter a ground floor apartment which is being kept as a sort of mini food depot – housing donations from Yasinovata or from the military – that very same room, in the morning, had been converted into a polling station. That’s where the very few remaining Avdeyevka residents actually voted.

A nearly blind man with his dog explains why he can’t leave: he lives in the same street, and his apartment is still functional – even though he has no water or electricity. He explains how the Ukrainians were occupying each apartment block – with residents turned into refugees or hostages in the basements – and then, pressed by the Russians, relocated to nearby schools and hospitals until finally fleeing.

The basements are a nightmare. Virtually no light. The temperature is at least 10 degrees Celsius lower than at street level. It’s impossible to imagine how they survived. Another resident nonchalantly strolls by in his bicycle, surrounded by derelict concrete skeletons. The loud booms – mostly outgoing – are incessant.

Then, standing amidst total devastation, a vision: the elegant silhouette of the Church of Mary Magdalen, immaculately preserved. Dmitry, the caretaker, takes me around; it’s a beautiful church, the paintings on the roof still gleaming under the pale sunlight, a gorgeous chandelier and the inner chamber virtually intact.

The Mariupol Renaissance

The final election day is spent in Mariupol – which is being rebuilt at nearly breakneck speed: the new railway station has just been finished. Voting is seamless at school number 53, housing district 711. A beautiful mural behind the ballot box depicts the sister cities St. Petersburg and Mariupol, with the legendary Scarlet Sails from the Alexander Green story right in the middle.

I revisit the port: international cargo is still not moving, only ships coming from the Russian mainland. But the first deal has been reached with Cameroon – fruits in exchange with metals and manufactured products. Several other deals with African nations are on the horizon.

in Electoral Donbass © Sputnik

The Pakrovska church, a Mariupol landmark, is being carefully restored. We are welcomed by Father Viktor, who hosts lunch for a group of people from the parish, and a fine conversation ensues ranging from Christian Orthodoxy to the Decline of the West and the LGBT agenda.

We go to the roof and walk around a balustrade offering a spectacular 360-degree view of Mariupol, with the port, the destroyed Azovstal iron works and the Russian Sea of Azov in the deep background. The massive church bells ring – as in a metaphor for the resurrection of a beautiful city which has the potential to become a sort of Nice in the Sea of Azov.

Back in Donetsk, going to a “secret” school/museum only 2 km away from the line of fire – which I first visited last month – has to be canceled: Donetsk continues to be shelled.

With Avdeyevka in mind, as well as the shelling that refuses to go away, a few questions on numbers pop up on the long 20-hour drive back to Moscow.

In Chechnya, led by uber-patriot Kadyrov, turnout was 97%. And no less than 99% voted for VVP. So, unlike in the past, forget about any ulterior attempt at a color revolution in Chechnya.

Same pattern in the Caucasus, in the region of Kabardino: turnout was 96%. No less than 94% voted for VVP.

Between Kazakhstan and Mongolia, in Tuva, turnout was 96%. And 95% voted for VVP. In the autonomous Yamal-Nenets, turnout was 94%. But VVP got “only” 79% of the votes. In lake Baikal, Buryatia had 74% turnout and 88% of votes for VVP.

The key, once again, remains Moscow. Turnout, compared to other regions, was relatively low: 67%. Well, Moscow is still largely Westernized and in several aspects ideologically globalist – thus more critical than other parts of Russia when it comes to the patriotic emphasis.

And that brings us to the clincher. Even with the resounding success of Mr. 87%, they will never give up. If there ever is a minor chance of a successful Hybrid War strategy provoking a color revolution, the stage will be Moscow. Quite pathetic, actually, when compared to the images of Mr. 87% saluted by a packed Red Square on Sunday like the ultimate rock star.

The Kremlin is taking no chances. Putin addressed the FSB and went straight to the point: attempts to sow interethnic trouble – as a prelude to color revolutions – must be strictly suppressed. The FSB will go for the next level: traitors will be identified by name and targeted without a statute of limitations.

After the electoral euphoria, no one really knows what happens next. It has to be something hugely significant, honoring the historical VVP electoral landslide. He has carte blanche now to do anything. Priority number one: to finish once and for all with the Hegemon-built terror mongrel that has been attacking Novorossiya for 10 long years.

……………………….

(Republished from Sputnik International)

The Decline and Fall of It All? American Empire in Crisis – by Alfred W. McCoy – 14 March 2024

Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French, and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America.

Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran, and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in Czechoslovakia, Egypt, and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan.

America’s post-Cold War victory lap suffered its own crisis early in this century with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, looming just over history’s horizon are three more imperial crises in Gaza, Taiwan, and Ukraine that could cumulatively turn a slow imperial recessional into an all-too-rapid decline, if not collapse.

As a start, let’s put the very idea of an imperial crisis in perspective. The history of every empire, ancient or modern, has always involved a succession of crises — usually mastered in the empire’s earlier years, only to be ever more disastrously mishandled in its era of decline. Right after World War II, when the United States became history’s most powerful empire, Washington’s leaders skillfully handled just such crises in Greece, Berlin, Italy, and France, and somewhat less skillfully but not disastrously in a Korean War that never quite officially ended. Even after the dual disasters of a bungled covert invasion of Cuba in 1961 and a conventional war in Vietnam that went all too disastrously awry in the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington proved capable of recalibrating effectively enough to outlast the Soviet Union, “win” the Cold War, and become the “lone superpower” on this planet.

In both success and failure, crisis management usually entails a delicate balance between domestic politics and global geopolitics. President John F. Kennedy’s White House, manipulated by the CIA into the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, managed to recover its political balance sufficiently to check the Pentagon and achieve a diplomatic resolution of the dangerous 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union.

America’s current plight, however, can be traced at least in part to a growing imbalance between a domestic politics that appears to be coming apart at the seams and a series of challenging global upheavals. Whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or even Taiwan, the Washington of President Joe Biden is clearly failing to align domestic political constituencies with the empire’s international interests. And in each case, crisis mismanagement has only been compounded by errors that have accumulated in the decades since the Cold War’s end, turning each crisis into a conundrum without an easy resolution or perhaps any resolution at all. Both individually and collectively, then, the mishandling of these crises is likely to prove a significant marker of America’s ultimate decline as a global power, both at home and abroad.

Creeping Disaster in Ukraine

Since the closing months of the Cold War, mismanaging relations with Ukraine has been a curiously bipartisan project. As the Soviet Union began breaking up in 1991, Washington focused on ensuring that Moscow’s arsenal of possibly 45,000 nuclear warheads was secure, particularly the 5,000 atomic weapons then stored in Ukraine, which also had the largest Soviet nuclear weapons plant at Dnipropetrovsk.

During an August 1991 visit, President George H.W. Bush told Ukrainian Prime Minister Leonid Kravchuk that he could not support Ukraine’s future independence and gave what became known as his “chicken Kiev” speech, saying: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” He would, however, soon recognize Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as independent states since they didn’t have nuclear weapons.

When the Soviet Union finally imploded in December 1991, Ukraine instantly became the world’s third-largest nuclear power, though it had no way to actually deliver most of those atomic weapons. To persuade Ukraine to transfer its nuclear warheads to Moscow, Washington launched three years of multilateral negotiations, while giving Kyiv “assurances” (but not “guarantees”) of its future security — the diplomatic equivalent of a personal check drawn on a bank account with a zero balance.

Under the Budapest Memorandum on Security in December 1994, three former Soviet republics — Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine — signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and started transferring their atomic weapons to Russia. Simultaneously, Russia, the U.S., and Great Britain agreed to respect the sovereignty of the three signatories and refrain from using such weaponry against them. Everyone present, however, seemed to understand that the agreement was, at best, tenuous. (One Ukrainian diplomat told the Americans that he had “no illusions that the Russians would live up to the agreements they signed.”)

Meanwhile — and this should sound familiar today — Russian President Boris Yeltsin raged against Washington’s plans to expand NATO further, accusing President Bill Clinton of moving from a Cold War to a “cold peace.” Right after that conference, Defense Secretary William Perry warned Clinton, point blank, that “a wounded Moscow would lash out in response to NATO expansion.”

Nonetheless, once those former Soviet republics were safely disarmed of their nuclear weapons, Clinton agreed to begin admitting new members to NATO, launching a relentless eastward march toward Russia that continued under his successor George W. Bush. It came to include three former Soviet satellites, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999); three one-time Soviet Republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (2004); and three more former satellites, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004). At the Bucharest summit in 2008, moreover, the alliance’s 26 members unanimously agreed that, at some unspecified point, Ukraine and Georgia, too, would “become members of NATO.” In other words, having pushed NATO right up to the Ukrainian border, Washington seemed oblivious to the possibility that Russia might feel in any way threatened and react by annexing that nation to create its own security corridor.

In those years, Washington also came to believe that it could transform Russia into a functioning democracy to be fully integrated into a still-developing American world order. Yet for more than 200 years, Russia’s governance had been autocratic and every ruler from Catherine the Great to Leonid Brezhnev had achieved domestic stability through incessant foreign expansion. So, it should hardly have been surprising when the seemingly endless expansion of NATO led Russia’s latest autocrat, Vladimir Putin, to invade the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, only weeks after hosting the Winter Olympics.

In an interview soon after Moscow annexed that area of Ukraine, President Obama recognized the geopolitical reality that could yet consign all of that land to Russia’s orbit, saying: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”

Then, in February 2022, after years of low-intensity fighting in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, Putin sent 200,000 mechanized troops to capture the country’s capital, Kyiv, and establish that very “military domination.” At first, as the Ukrainians surprisingly fought off the Russians, Washington and the West reacted with a striking resolve — cutting Europe’s energy imports from Russia, imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, expanding NATO to all of Scandinavia, and dispatching an impressive arsenal of armaments to Ukraine.

After two years of never-ending war, however, cracks have appeared in the anti-Russian coalition, indicating that Washington’s global clout has declined markedly since its Cold War glory days. After 30 years of free-market growth, Russia’s resilient economy has weathered sanctions, its oil exports have found new markets, and its gross domestic product is projected to grow a healthy 2.6% this year. In last spring and summer’s fighting season, a Ukrainian “counteroffensive” failed and the war is, in the view of both Russian and Ukrainian commanders, at least “stalemated,” if not now beginning to turn in Russia’s favor.

Most critically, U.S. support for Ukraine is faltering. After successfully rallying the NATO alliance to stand with Ukraine, the Biden White House opened the American arsenal to provide Kyiv with a stunning array of weaponry, totaling $46 billion, that gave its smaller army a technological edge on the battlefield. But now, in a move with historic implications, part of the Republican (or rather Trumpublican) Party has broken with the bipartisan foreign policy that sustained American global power since the Cold War began. For weeks, the Republican-led House has even repeatedly refused to consider President Biden’s latest $60 billion aid package for Ukraine, contributing to Kyiv’s recent reverses on the battlefield.

The Republican Party’s rupture starts with its leader. In the view of former White House adviser Fiona Hill, Donald Trump was so painfully deferential to Vladimir Putin during “the now legendarily disastrous press conference” at Helsinki in 2018 that critics were convinced “the Kremlin held sway over the American president.” But the problem goes so much deeper. As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted recently, the Republican Party’s historic “isolationism is still on the march.” Indeed, between March 2022 and December 2023, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans who think the U.S. gives “too much support” to Ukraine climbed from just 9% to a whopping 48%. Asked to explain the trend, Brooks feels that “Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach… [and] the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.”

Since Trump represents this deeper trend, his hostility toward NATO has taken on an added significance. His recent remarks that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay its fair share sent shockwaves across Europe, forcing key allies to consider what such an alliance would be like without the United States (even as Russian President Vladimir Putin, undoubtedly sensing a weakening of U.S. resolve, threatened Europe with nuclear war). All of this is certainly signaling to the world that Washington’s global leadership is now anything but a certainty.

Crisis in Gaza

Just as in Ukraine, decades of diffident American leadership, compounded by increasingly chaotic domestic politics, let the Gaza crisis spin out of control. At the close of the Cold War, when the Middle East was momentarily disentangled from great-power politics, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the 1993 Oslo Accord. In it, they agreed to create the Palestinian Authority as the first step toward a two-state solution. For the next two decades, however, Washington’s ineffectual initiatives failed to break the deadlock between that Authority and successive Israeli governments that prevented any progress toward such a solution.

In 2005, Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw his defense forces and 25 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip with the aim of improving “Israel’s security and international status.” Within two years, however, Hamas militants had seized power in Gaza, ousting the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas. In 2009, the controversial Benjamin Netanyahu started his nearly continuous 15-year stretch as Israel’s prime minister and soon discovered the utility of supporting Hamas as a political foil to block the two-state solution he so abhorred.

Not surprisingly then, the day after last year’s tragic October 7th Hamas attack, theTimes of Israel published this headline: “For Years Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas. Now It’s Blown Up in Our Faces.” In her lead piece, senior political correspondent Tal Schneider reported: “For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.”

On October 18th, with the Israeli bombing of Gaza already inflicting severe casualties on Palestinian civilians, President Biden flew to Tel Aviv for a meeting with Netanyahu that would prove eerily reminiscent of Trump’s Helsinki press conference with Putin. After Netanyahu praised the president for drawing “a clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism,” Biden endorsed that Manichean view by condemning Hamas for “evils and atrocities that make ISIS look somewhat more rational” and promised to provide the weaponry Israel needed “as they respond to these attacks.” Biden said nothing about Netanyahu’s previous arm’s length alliance with Hamas or the two-state solution. Instead, the Biden White House began vetoing ceasefire proposals at the U.N. while air-freighting, among other weaponry, 15,000 bombs to Israel, including the behemoth 2,000-pound “bunker busters” that were soon flattening Gaza’s high-rise buildings with increasingly heavy civilian casualties.

After five months of arms shipments to Israel, three U.N. ceasefire vetoes, and nothing to stop Netanyahu’s plan for an endless occupation of Gaza instead of a two-state solution, Biden has damaged American diplomatic leadership in the Middle East and much of the world. In November and again in February, massive crowds calling for peace in Gaza marched in Berlin, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Istanbul, and Dakar, among other places.

Moreover, the relentless rise in civilian deaths well past 30,000 in Gaza, striking numbers of them children, has already weakened Biden’s domestic support in constituencies that were critical for his win in 2020 — including Arab-Americans in the key swing state of Michigan, African-Americans nationwide, and younger voters more generally. To heal the breach, Biden is now becoming desperate for a negotiated cease-fire. In an inept intertwining of international and domestic politics, the president has given Netanyahu, a natural ally of Donald Trump, the opportunity for an October surprise of more devastation in Gaza that could rip the Democratic coalition apart and thereby increase the chances of a Trump win in November — with fatal consequences for U.S. global power.

Trouble in the Taiwan Straits

While Washington is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, it may also be at the threshold of a serious crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Beijing’s relentless pressure on the island of Taiwan continues unabated. Following the incremental strategy that it’s used since 2014 to secure a half-dozen military bases in the South China Sea, Beijing is moving to slowly strangle Taiwan’s sovereignty. Its breaches of the island’s airspace have increased from 400 in 2020 to 1,700 in 2023. Similarly, Chinese warships have crossed the median line in the Taiwan Straits 300 times since August 2022, effectively erasing it. As commentator Ben Lewis warned, “There soon may be no lines left for China to cross.”

After recognizing Beijing as “the sole legal Government of China” in 1979, Washington agreed to “acknowledge” that Taiwan was part of China. At the same time, however, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, requiring “that the United States maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force… that would jeopardize the security… of the people on Taiwan.”

Such all-American ambiguity seemed manageable until October 2022 when Chinese President Xi Jinping told the 20th Communist Party Congress that “reunification must be realized” and refused “to renounce the use of force” against Taiwan. In a fateful counterpoint, President Biden stated, as recently as September 2022, that the US would defend Taiwan “if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.”

But Beijing could cripple Taiwan several steps short of that “unprecedented attack” by turning those air and sea transgressions into a customs quarantine that would peacefully divert all Taiwan-bound cargo to mainland China. With the island’s major ports at Taipei and Kaohsiung facing the Taiwan Straits, any American warships trying to break that embargo would face a lethal swarm of nuclear submarines, jet aircraft, and ship-killing missiles.

Given the near-certain loss of two or three aircraft carriers, the U.S. Navy would likely back off and Taiwan would be forced to negotiate the terms of its reunification with Beijing. Such a humiliating reversal would send a clear signal that, after 80 years, American dominion over the Pacific had finally ended, inflicting another major blow to U.S. global hegemony.

The Sum of Three Crises

Washington now finds itself facing three complex global crises, each demanding its undivided attention. Any one of them would challenge the skills of even the most seasoned diplomat. Their simultaneity places the U.S. in the unenviable position of potential reverses in all three at once, even as its politics at home threaten to head into an era of chaos. Playing upon American domestic divisions, the protagonists in Beijing, Moscow, and Tel Aviv are all holding a long hand (or at least a potentially longer one than Washington’s) and hoping to win by default when the U.S. tires of the game. As the incumbent, President Biden must bear the burden of any reversal, with the consequent political damage this November.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump may try to escape such foreign entanglements and their political cost by reverting to the Republican Party’s historic isolationism, even as he ensures that the former lone superpower of Planet Earth could come apart at the seams in the wake of election 2024. If so, in such a distinctly quagmire world, American global hegemony would fade with surprising speed, soon becoming little more than a distant memory.

………………………………..

This column is distributed by Tom Dispatch.

US Fatal Flaws Undermine America’s Defense Industrial Base – by Brian Berletic – 15 Feb 2024

The first-ever US Department of Defense National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS) confirms what many analysts have concluded in regard to the unsustainable nature of Washington’s global-spanning foreign policy objectives and its defense industrial base’s (DIB) inability to achieve them.

The report lays out a multitude of problems plaguing the US DIB including a lack of surge capacity, inadequate workforce, off-shore downstream suppliers, as well as insufficient “demand signals” to motivate private industry partners to produce what’s needed, in the quantities needed, when it is needed.

In fact, the majority of the problems identified by the report involved private industry and its unwillingness to meet national security requirements because they were not profitable.

For example, the report attempts to explain why many companies across the US DIB lack advanced manufacturing capabilities, claiming:

Many elements of the traditional DIB have yet to adopt advanced manufacturing technologies, as they struggle to develop business cases for needed capital investment.

In other words, while adopting advanced manufacturing technologies would fulfill the purpose of the US Department of Defense, it is not profitable for private industry to do so.

Despite virtually all the problems the report identifies stemming from private industry’s disproportionate influence over the US DIB, the report never identifies private industry itself as a problem.

If private industry and its prioritization of profits is the central problem inhibiting the DIB from fulfilling its purpose, the obvious solution is nationalizing the DIB by replacing private industry with state-owned enterprises. This allows the government to prioritize purpose over profits. Yet in the United States and across Europe, the so-called “military industrial complex” has grown to such proportions that it is no longer subordinated to the government and national interests, but rather the government and national interests are subordinated to it.

US Defense Industrial Strategy Built on a Flawed Premise 

Beyond private industry’s hold on the US DIB, the very premise the NDIS is built on is fundamentally flawed, deeply rooted in private industry’s profit-driven prioritization.

The report claims:

The purpose of this National Defense Industrial Strategy is to drive development of an industrial ecosystem that provides a sustained competitive advantage to the United States over its adversaries.

The notion of the United States perpetually expanding its wealth and power across the globe, unrivaled by its so-called “adversaries” is unrealistic.

China alone has a population 4-5 times greater than the US. China’s population is, in fact, larger than that of the G7 combined. China has a larger industrial base, economy, and education system than the US. China’s education system not only produces millions more graduates each year in essential fields like science, technology, and engineering than the US, the proportion of such graduates is higher in China than in the US.

China alone possesses the means to maintain a competitive advantage over the United States now and well into the foreseeable future. The US, attempting to draw up a strategy to maintain an advantage over China (not to mention over the rest of the world) regardless of these realities, borders on delusion.

Yet for 60 pages, US policymakers attempt to lay out a strategy to do just that.

Not Just China, But Also Russia 

While China is repeatedly mentioned as America’s “pacing challenge,” the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is perhaps the most acute example of a shifting balance of global power.

Despite a combined population, GDP, and military budget many times greater than Russia’s, the collective West is incapable of matching Russian production of even relatively simple munitions like artillery shells, let alone more complex systems like tanks, aircraft, and precision-guided missiles.

While the US and its allies appear to have every conceivable advantage over Russia on paper, the collective West has organized itself as a profit-driven rather than purpose-driven society.

In Russia, the defense industry exists to serve national security. While one might believe this goes without saying, across the collective West, the defense industry, like all other industries in the West, exists solely to maximize profits.

To best serve national security, the defense industry is required to maintain substantial surge capacity – meaning additional, unused factory space, machines, and labor on standby if and when large surges in production are required in relatively short periods of time. Across the West, in order to maximize profits, surge capacity has been ruthlessly slashed, deemed economically inefficient. Only rare exceptions exist, such as US 155 mm artillery shell production.

While the West’s defense industry remains the most profitable on Earth, its ability to actually churn out arms and ammunition in the quantities and quality required for large-scale conflict is clearly compromised by its maximization of profits.

The result is evident today as the West struggles to expand production of arms and ammunition for its Ukrainian proxies.

The NDIS report would note:

Prior to the invasion, weapon procurements for some of the in-demand systems were driven by annual training requirements and ongoing combat operations. This modest demand, along with recent market dynamics, drove companies to divest excess capacity due to cost. This meant that any increased production requirements would require an increase in workforce hours in existing facilities—commonly referred to as “surge” capacity. These, in turn, were limited further by similar down-stream considerations of workforce, facility, and supply chain limitations.

Costs are most certainly a consideration across any defense industry, but costs cannot be the primary consideration.

A central element of Russia’s defense industry is Rostec, a massive state-owned enterprise under which hundreds of companies related to national industrial needs including defense are organized. Rostec is profitable. However, the industrial concerns organized under Rostec serve purposes related to Russia’s national interests first and foremost, be it national health, infrastructure or security.

Because Russia’s defense industry is purpose-driven, it produced military equipment because it was necessary, not because it was profitable. As a result, Russia possessed huge stockpiles of ammunition and equipment ahead of the Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022. In addition to this, Russia maintained large amounts of surge capacity enabling production rates of everything from artillery shells to armored vehicles to expand quickly over the past 2 years.

Only relatively recently have Western analysts acknowledged this.

The New York Times in its September 2023 article, “Russia Overcomes Sanctions to Expand Missile Production, Officials Say,” admits Russian arms production of not only missiles, but also armored vehicles and artillery shells have exceeded prewar levels. The article estimates that Russia is producing at least seven times more ammunition than the US and its Western allies combined.

Despite this, Western analysts now claim Russian production will “plateau” as the limits of surge capacity are reached and new facilities and sources of raw materials are required.

The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in a February 2024 article titled, “Russian Military Objectives and Capacity in Ukraine Through 2024,” regarding ammunition production would claim:

…the Russian MoD does not believe it can significantly raise production in subsequent years, unless new factories are set up and raw material extraction is invested in with a lead time beyond five years.

But because Russia’s industrial base is purpose-driven rather than profit-driven, additional facilities are already being built despite the longer-term economic inefficiency of doing so.

US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in a November 2023 article titled, “Satellite Images Suggest Russia Is Ramping Up Production Capacity For Its War Against Ukraine,” reported that Russia was not only expanding production at existing facilities but was also developing new factories producing warplanes, combat helicopters, military drones, and guided munitions.

US “Solutions” Fall Far Short

The 2023 NDIS cites the expansion of 155 mm artillery shell production as a demonstration of the US DIB’s ability to “scale rapidly.”

The report claims:

In response, the DoD has invested in expanding existing production facilities in Scranton, Pennsylvania and broke ground on a new production facility in Mesquite, Texas to respond to the higher demand signal. In addition to these investments made in December 2022, the U.S. Army awarded contracts worth $1.5 billion in September 2023* to meet its goal of delivering more than 80,000 projectiles per month by the end of FY2025.

However, this was only possible because the US Army owns the facilities producing artillery shells. Increased rates of shell production were made possible through existing surge capacity deliberately set up by the US Army years before the Russian SMO began. This foresight in planning, unfortunately for the United States, is a rare exception to the rule and cannot be applied across the rest of US and European arms production.

The West’s profit-driven policies have created problems for the US DIB well downstream of production lines for arms and ammunition. This includes America’s decades of off-shoring production to maximize profits by taking advantage of cheaper labor overseas. Many raw materials and components used across the US DIB today come from overseas including from “adversarial” nations.

The NDIS report lamented:

Over the last decade, the DoD has struggled to curtail adversarial sourcing and burnish the integrity of defense supply chains. Despite these efforts, dependence on adversarial sources of supply has grown. DoD continues to lack a comprehensive effort for mitigating supply chain risk. 

Profit-driven policies have also hurt the workforce. Decades of off-shoring US manufacturing saw America transition to a primarily service-based economy. This was reflected across education as well, where vocational skills were not only neglected, they were stigmatized.

The NDIS report would explain that:

The labor market lacks the required number of skilled workers to meet defense production demand while driving innovation at all levels. This shortfall is becoming exacerbated as baby boomers retire, and younger generations show less interest in manufacturing and engineering careers.

Beyond this problem, profit-driven policies have made education in the United States inaccessible. The desire to profit from providing education has usurped the actual purpose of providing education in the first place – the creation of human resources required to run a functioning, prosperous society. Degrees and training courses in the United States require loans that can take a lifetime to pay off.

A lack of interest in skilled labor and the inaccessibility of education in the United States has resulted in a skewed workforce relative to the rest of the world. The number of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates in the US, for example, is comparable to Russia despite Russia having less than half the total population of the US. In 2016 there were 568,000 STEM graduates in the US for Russia’s 561,000, according to Forbes. China produced over 4.7 million graduates that same year.

US economic fundamentals altogether have created a skewed society and correspondingly skewed DIB that is struggling to match that of nations smaller in terms of population and GDP. But even if the US did address these fundamental problems, the fact remains that China alone, saying nothing of the BRIC alliance it is a part of, has both solid fundamentals and simply possesses a larger population, economy, and industrial base.

The premise upon which US foreign policy is based is unrealistic. The fundamentals of US economic power are fatally flawed.

The very notion of the US maintaining a competitive edge over the rest of the world is only realistic if the rest of the world is suffering from significant internal and/or regional instability.

This is precisely why the US has invested so heavily over the decades in political interference, political capture, and even regional conflict around the globe. However, the disparity between the US and the rest of the world in terms of economic power, industrial strength, and military might be diminishing faster than the US can impose its “international order” upon it.

A reemerging Russia alone has exceeded the US in terms of military industrial production. China is surpassing the United States across a much wider multitude of metrics. As long as the US pursues unsustainable policies based on an unrealistic premise, it will not only find itself surpassed by a growing number of nations, it will find itself isolated and unstable.

The difference between nations the US calls “adversaries” and the US itself, is the difference between a farmer who cultivates his land in a sustainable, purposeful way, and a predator who mindlessly consumes all in its path until there is nothing left to consume, thus jeopardizing its own self-preservation.

At a time between now and then, more rational circles of interest may displace those currently driving US economic and foreign policies, and transform the US into a nation pursuing power proportional to its means and invested in working together with the other nations of the world, rather than attempting to impose itself upon them.

…………………

Source

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Tags: China, Defense industry, International politics, Military defense, Russia, USA

Life During Wartime – On the Road in Donbass – by Pepe Escobar – 13 Feb 2024

• 2,700 WORDS • 

Pepe Escobar embarked on a journey across Donbass to share his thoughts on the many first-hand encounters with the locals, who show unbreakable resilience.

You are given a name by the War:/it’s a call sign, not nickname – much more./Lack of fancy cars here and iPads,/But you have APC and MANPADS./Social media long left behind,/Children’s drawings with “Z” stick to mind./’Likes” and “thumbs up” are valued as dust,/But the prayers from people you trust./Hold On, Soldier, my brother, my friend,/The hostility comes to an end./War’s unable to stop its decease,/Grief and suffering will turn into peace./Life returns to the placid format,/With your callsign, inscribed in your heart./ From the war, as a small souvenir:/Far away, but eternally near.

Inna Kucherova, Call Sign, in A Letter to a Soldier, published December 2022

It’s a cold, rainy, damp morning in the deep Donbass countryside, at a secret location close to the Urozhaynoye direction; a nondescript country house, crucially under the fog, which prevents the work of enemy drones.

Father Igor, a military priest, is blessing a group of local contract-signed volunteers to the Archangel Gabriel battalion, ready to go to the front lines of the US vs. Russia proxy war. The man in charge of the battalion is one of the top-ranking officers of Orthodox Christian units in the DPR.

A small shrine is set up in the corner of a small, cramped room, decorated with icons. Candles are lit, and three soldiers hold the red flag with the icon of Jesus in the center. After prayers and a small homily, Father Igor blesses each soldier.

Paying my respects to the children victims of Ukrainian shelling at a DIY memorial off the ‘Road of Life’.

Quite an honor. This pic is now on the wall of the HQ of the Dmitry Donskoy Orthodox Christian battalion in Donbass.

With the kamikaze drone and DIY mine-landing rover specialists at an undisclosed location in Donetsk.

This is yet another stop in a sort of itinerant icon road show, started in Kherson, then Zaporozhye and all the way to the myriad DPR front lines, led by my gracious host Andrey Afanasiev, military correspondent for the Spas channel, and later joined in Donetsk by a decorated fighter for the Archangel Michael battalion, an extremely bright and engaging young man codename Pilot.

There are between 28 and 30 Orthodox Christian battalion fighting in Donbass. That’s the power of Orthodox Christianity. To see them at work is to understand the essentials: how the Russian soul is capable of any sacrifice to protect the core values of its civilization. Throughout Russian history, it’s individuals that sacrifice their lives to protect the community – and not vice-versa. Those who survived – or perished – in the siege of Leningrad are only one among countless examples.

So the Orthodox Christian battalion were my guardian angels as I returned to Novorossiya to revisit the rich black soil where the old “rules-based” world order came to die.

The Living Contradictions of the ‘Road of Life’

The first thing that hits you when you arrive in Donetsk nearly 10 years after Maidan in Kiev is the incessant loud booms. Incoming and mostly outgoing. After such a long, dreary time, interminable shelling of civilians (which are invisible to the collective West), and nearly 2 years after the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO), this is still a city at war; still vulnerable along the three lines of defense behind the front.

The “Road of Life” has got to be one of the epic war misnomers in Donetsk. “Road” is a euphemism for a dark, muddy bog plied back and forth virtually non-stop by military vehicles. “Life” applies because the Donbass military actually donate food and humanitarian aid to the locals at the Gornyak neighborhood every single week.

The heart of the Road of Life is the Svyato Blagoveschensky temple, cared for by Father Viktor – who at the time of my visit was away on rehabilitation, as several parts of his body were hit by shrapnel. I am shepherded by Yelena, who shows me around the impeccably clean temple bearing sublime icons – including 13th century Prince Alexander Nevsky, who in 1259 became the supreme Russian ruler, Sovereign of Kiev, Vladimir and Novgorod. Gornyak is a deluge of black mud, under the incessant rain, with no running water and electricity. Residents are forced to walk at least two kilometers, every day, to buy groceries: there are no local buses.

Yelena, the caretaker of Father Michael’s temple at the ‘Road of Life’ in Donetsk.

Alexander Nevsky’s icon at Father Michael’s temple.

In one of the back rooms, Svetlana carefully arranges mini-packages of food essentials to be distributed every Sunday after liturgy. I meet Mother Pelageya, 86 years old, who comes to the temple every Sunday, and would not even dream of ever leaving her neighborhood.

Svetlana organizing food packages out of donations by the DPR military to civilians close to the front line.

Mother Pelageya, 86, at Father Michael’s temple in the ‘Road of Life’ in Donetsk.

Gornyak is in the third line of defense. The loud booms – as in everywhere in Donetsk – are nearly non-stop, incoming and outgoing. If we follow the road for another 500 meters or so and turn right, we are only 5 km away from Avdeyevka – which may be about to fall in days, or weeks at most.

At the entrance of Gornyak there’s the legendary DonbassActiv chemical factory – now inactive – which actually fabricated the red stars which shine over the Kremlin, using a special gas technology that was never reproduced. In a side street to the Road of Life, local residents built an improvised shrine to honor the child victims of Ukrainian shelling. One day this is going to end: the day when the DPR military completely controls Avdeyevka.

The Donbass Activ chemical plant at the entrance of the ‘Road of Life’ in Donetsk

‘Mariupol Is Russia’

The traveling priesthood exits the digs of the Archangel Gabriel battalion and heads to a meeting in a garage with the Dmitry Donskoy orthodox battalion, fighting in the Ugledar direction. That’s where I meet the remarkable Troya, the battalion’s medic, a young woman who had a comfy job as a deputy officer in a Russian district before she decided to volunteer.

Onwards to a cramped military dormitory where a cat and her kittens reign as mascots, choosing the best place in the room right by the iron stove. Time to bless the fighters of the Dimitri Zalunsky battalion, named after St. Dimitri of Thessaloniki, who are fighting in the Nikolskoye direction.

At each successive ceremony, you can’t help being stricken by the purity of the ritual, the beauty of the chants, the grave expressions in the faces of the volunteers, all ages, from teenagers to sexagenarians. Deeply touching. This in so many aspects is the Slavic counterpart of the Islamic Axis of Resistance fighting in West Asia. It is a form of asabiyya – “community spirit”, as I used it in a different context referring to the Yemeni Houthis supporting “our people” in Gaza.

Mariupol. Destroyed to the left, rebuilt to the right.

’Mariupol is Russia’. The port is to the left.

Mariupol building

So yes: deep down in the Donbass countryside, in communion with those living life during wartime, we feel the enormity of something inexplicable and vast, full of endless wonder, as if touching the Tao by silencing the recurrent loud booms. In Russian there is, of course, a word for it: “загадка“, roughly translated as “enigma” or “mystery”.

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I left the Donetsk countryside to go to Mariupol – and to be hit by the proverbial shock when one is reminded of the utter destruction perpetrated by the neo-nazi Azov battalion* in the spring of 2022, from the city center to the shoreline along the port then all the way to the massive Azovstal Iron and Steel Works.

The theatre – rather the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theatre – nearly destroyed by the Azov battalion is now being meticulously restored, and the next in line are scores of classical buildings downtown. In some neighborhoods the contrast is striking: on the left side of the road, a destroyed building; on the right side, a brand new one.

At the port, a red, white and blue stripe lays down the law: “Mariupol is Russia”. I make a point to go to the former entrance of Azovstal, where the remaining Azov battalion fighters, around 1,700, surrendered to Russian soldiers in May 2022. As much as Berdyansk may eventually become a sort of Monaco in the Sea of Azov, Mariupol may also have a bright future as a tourism, leisure and cultural center and last but not least, a key maritime entrepot of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasia Economic Union.

The Mystery of the Icon

Back from Mariupol I was confronted with one of the most extraordinary stories woven with the fabric of magic under war. In a nondescript parking lot, suddenly I’m face to the face with The Icon.

The icon – of Mary Mother of God – was gifted to the whole of Donbass by veterans of the Zsloha Spetsnaz, when they came in the summer of 2014. The legend goes that the icon started to spontaneously generate myrrh: as it felt the pain suffered by the local people, it started to cry. During the storming of Azovstal, the icon suddenly made an appearance, out of nowhere, brought in by a pious soul. Two hours later, the legend goes, the DPR, Russian and Chechen forces found their breakthrough.

The icon is always on the move along the SMO hot spots in Donbass. People in charge of the relay know one another, but they can never guess where the icon heads next; everything develops as a sort of magical mystery tour. It’s no wonder Kiev has offered a huge reward for anyone – especially fifth columnists – capable of capturing the icon, which then would be destroyed.

Father Igor reciting prayers.

The Orthodox icon “Mary Mother of God”, gifted to the people of Donbass.

The shrine set up at one of the Orthodox Christian battalion, where Father Igor blesses the soldiers.

The shrine set up at one of the Orthodox Christian battalion, where Father Igor blesses the soldiers.

At a night gathering in a compound in the western outskirts of Donetsk – lights completely out in every direction – I have the honor to join one of the top-ranking officers of the Orthodox units in the DPR, a tough as nails yet jovial fellow fond of Barcelona under Messi, as well as the commander of Archangel Michael battalion, codename Alphabet. We are in the first line of defense, only 2 km away from the front line. The incessant loud booms – especially outgoing – are really loud.

The conversation ranges from military tactics on the battlefield, especially in the siege of Avdeyevka, which will be totally encircled in a matter of days, now with the help of Special Forces, paratroopers and lots of armored vehicles, to impressions of the Tucker Carlson interview with Putin (they heard nothing new). The commanders note the absurdity of Kiev not acknowledging their hit on the Il-76 carrying 65 Ukrainian POWs – totally dismissing the plight of their own PoWs. I ask them why Russia simply does not bomb Avdeyevka to oblivion: “Humanism”, they answer.

The DIY Rover From Hell

In a cold, foggy morning at a secret location in central Donetsk – once again, no drones overhead – I meet two kamikaze drone specialists, codename Hooligan and his observer, codename Letchik. They set up a kamikaze drone demo – of course unarmed – while a few meters away mechanical engineer specialist “The Advocate” sets up his own demo of a DIY mine-delivery rover.

That’s a certified lethal version of the Yandex food delivery rovers now quite popular around Moscow. “Advocate” shows off the maneuverability and ability of his little toy to face any terrain. The mission: each rover is equipped with two mines, to be placed right under an enemy tank. Success so far has been extraordinary – and the rover will be upgraded.

’The Advocate’ setting up his DIY mine-delivering rover test

There’s hardly a more daring character in Donetsk than Artyom Gavrilenko, who built a brand new school cum museum right in the middle of the first line of defense – once again only 2 km or so away from the frontline. He shows me around the museum, which performs the enviable task of outlining the continuity between the Great Patriotic War, the USSR adventure in Afghanistan against the US-financed and weaponized jihad, and the proxy war in Donbass.

At the school/museum in Donetsk only 2 km away from the front line

That’s a parallel, DIY version of the official Museum of War in central Donetsk, close to the Shaktar Donetsk football arena, which features stunning memorabilia from the Great Patriotic War as well as fabulous shots by Russian war photographers.

So Donetsk students – emphasis in math, history, geography, languages – will be growing up deeply enmeshed in the history of what for all practical purposes is a heroic mining town, extracting wealth from the black soil while its dreams are always inexorably clouded by war.

We went into the DPR using backroads to cross the border to the LPR not far from Lugansk. This is a slow, desolate border which reminds me of the Pamirs in Tajikistan, basically used by locals. In and out, I was politely questioned by a passport control officer from Dagestan and his seconds-in-command. They were fascinated by my travels in Donbass, Afghanistan and West Asia – and invited me to visit the Caucasus. As we left deep into the freezing night for the long trek ahead back to Moscow, the exchange was priceless:

“You are always welcome here.”

“I’ll be back.”

“Like Terminator!”

………………………………

https://archive.ph/9xDgA

*The Azov Battalion is a terrorist organization banned in Russia.

(Republished from Sputnik International )