May 2024

May 31, 2024

Featured • Russia May See Ukrainian Long-Range Attacks as ‘Precursor to Nuclear Strike’, Ex-DoD Analyst Fears, Ilya Tsukanov, Sputnik International, May 31, 2024

The Biden administration has greenlit the use of American long-range strike systems by Ukraine to launch attacks deep into Russia. This puts the entire planet in a “shockingly” dangerous situation, says former DoD analyst and US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski.

President Biden has knowingly or unwittingly brought the risk of a world-ending nuclear conflict much, much closer after listening to “neoconservative advisors who really don’t have a lot of perspective on the nuclear dangers that they’re walking into” instead of military specialists and okaying Ukraine’s use of NATO weapons to strike the Russian hinterland, Kwiatkowski told Sputnik.

Ritter spotlighted the fact that Moscow has recently signaled that it is well aware of who operates NATO-grade long-range missiles and who provides reconnaissance and communications.

"[Russian President Vladimir Putin] knows that it's not Ukrainian space reconnaissance, it's not Ukrainian communications, it's not Ukrainian technicians that are doing the targeting. It is the French, it is the Germans. It is the British. It is the Americans. And therefore, if these missiles, these weapons systems that are now being greenlit by the respective Western nations, to be used by Ukraine to attack targets inside Russia, if this happens, this is no longer about Ukraine defending itself. It's about NATO attacking Russia."

The question then arises as to how Russia will respond to these attacks, continued the military expert. According to NATO member states, they authorize Ukraine to use their weapons against Russia as sovereign nations, not as a military bloc. According to Ritter, this apparently means that they invite Russia's retaliation strikes inside their respective territories and will not invoke Article 5, stipulating collective defense of NATO member states. "Because if they do that, then it's clear that this is a NATO confrontation against Russia," he stressed....

The West's major problem is that it has completely misread Russia since the outset of the conflict and considered Moscow's calls for dialogue and negotiated settlement as a sign of weakness, according to the military analyst.

"Therefore the collective determination of the West is that they just continue to pressure Russia, ratchet up the pressure that Russia will fold like a house of cards, and run to the peace table and bring an end to this conflict. That's not going to happen. This is a misreading of the situation by the West," warned Ritter.

"And so the West now will attack Russia, trying to pressure Russia to the peace table. But all it will do is guarantee a Russian response that if the West doesn't respond properly to that, if the West thinks that it therefore has the right to strike, Russian return will lead to Armageddon, the end of the world. That's where we're at today. This isn't a game. This isn't a joke. This is the end of all humanity," the military expert cautioned.

A “limited” shift on how Kiev can use donated American arms may be followed by further loosening, officials have told the newspaper.

Ukrainian troops are likely to start firing US-donated weapons at targets in Russia's Belgorod Region this week, after Washington relaxed restrictions on where they can be used, reports in the Western press have claimed.

US President Joe Biden previously maintained that to avoid “World War III,” American arms sent to Ukraine could not target what the US considers Russian territory. The policy change allows Kiev to attack exclusively military targets that pose a direct threat to Kharkov Region, which borders Russia’s Belgorod Region and has seen intense fighting this month. Russian troops made significant territorial gains in the area.

”This is a new reality,” an unnnamed senior US official told The New York Times, “and perhaps a new era” in the Ukraine conflict. It appears Biden will be the first American president to authorize attacks against a nuclear-armed nation on its soil, the newspaper noted on Thursday.

The NYT report provides a detailed account on how Biden’s opinion was moved by foreign pressure and members of his administration. Sources said that the US leader first indicated an inclination to make the change on May 15, when national security adviser Jake Sullivan delivered formal recommendations on the matter. The final decision was taken late last week, after Biden met national security ‘principals’ to discuss the risks of the move.

The newspaper added that it was not conveyed to lower-level officials for days. Indeed, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh defended the old policy during a Tuesday media briefing. By that time, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austing had already issued the relevant orders, but “no one had told her,” the report said.

France could soon send troops to Ukraine to train Ukrainian soldiers and is expected to announce the plan next week despite the risk of provoking Russia, Reuters reported on Thursday.

Diplomatic sources told Reuters that the plan is to send a few dozen trainers at first to assess the mission, and then several hundred French troops will be sent. The training would be focused on demining, maintenance of weapons systems, and advising on Western-provided warplanes.

The sources also said France will finance and train a Ukrainian motorized brigade. “The arrangements are very advanced, and we could expect something next week,” one of the sources said.

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service claims that the US is preparing a major propaganda campaign aimed at sparking fear among the population of Sweden and Finland about Moscow’s alleged “territorial appetites.”

In a press release on Thursday, the service claimed that the US State Department, “gripped with anti-Russian hysteria,” has transformed into an “unprincipled propaganda mouthpiece” that is now striving to turn the entire international community against Russia.

The first targets of this propaganda machine, according to Moscow, are the residents of Sweden and Finland, which recently joined NATO.

The Foreign Intelligence Service has claimed that, under the patronage of the US State Department, a series of short videos will soon flood social media networks and instant messengers to demonstrate “the ‘seriousness of the Russian threat’ and drum up ‘universal fear’ of Moscow’s ‘territorial appetites’” among the Scandinavian population.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s support for Ukraine's targeting of military facilities in Russia's internationally recognized territory is another step toward a world war, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French right-wing National Rally party, said on Thursday.

"Macron wants France to enter the war. This statement is an additional step in that direction. I am against it and I think it creates an enormous risk for the security of our citizens," Le Pen told French radio broadcaster Franceinfo.

The secretary-general of NATO is asking its 32 members to commit $44 billion in military aid to Ukraine every year. The request is two times larger than an earlier proposal of $108 billion over five years, and the military aid would also be funneled through NATO rather than the allies independently.

Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper reported that Jens Stoltenberg will make his pitch for sending $43 billion to Ukraine per year during a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Prague. “We need to sustain that current level of support as a minimum to provide the predictability Ukraine needs for as long as necessary,” the NATO source said. The official added that members of the bloc contributed about $40 billion per year through the first two years of the war.

May 29, 2024

Featured • Walking the Precipice, Alastair Crooke, SONAR, May 29, 2024

Diverse European voices are desperately warning that with the Ukraine project spiralling towards débacle, a humiliated West is left with little choice but to escalate drastically, and bring NATO — in some form, whether limited or not — into the fight.

The former British (Conservative) MP Andrew Bridgen states that this strategic shift (whose speed caught the Europeans unawares), is forcing Europe to face war with Russia.

In fact, Bridgen warns: ‘We (Britain), are ‘already at war’ with Russia. This is the real reason, he explains, why Rishi Sunak has called an early election — he refuses to be a ‘war time president’. He is effectively handing over ‘the baton’ to Keir Starmer (probably to fly away to California after 4 July — voting day). “The Generals” have warned Sunak that the order ‘had come down’ for war with Russia. And Sunak does not wish to be part of it.

Whether Bridgen is right or not on the specifics, there is undoubtedly a chorus out there saying the same thing. Is this cacophony of sudden war warnings merely that which (Matt Taibbi calls) an example of the ‘Elephant Erasure Project’? By which we are constantly being instructed not to see the elephants in the room.

And there are a lot of them: Open borders; plunging standards of living; high prices; runaway debt and dropping ratings for Biden. Add to that, the White House is continuing to arm the Israelis and green-light the Rafah military operation — at the very moment that the ICJ has ordered destruction of lives stopped.

The upcoming summit, whether Piss or Peace, has all the makings of a debacle. Zelensky is no longer recognized by Russia as a legitimate negotiating partner; Joe Biden is taking a pass in order to raise bucks from the Hollywood glitterati, and none of the BRICS nations will attend. I suspect the Russians will use this meeting as an opportunity to deliver a powerful, embarrassing military strike that will underscore Ukraine’s precarious position.

There has been quite a bit of worry over the reports of two drone attacks on Russia’s strategic radar stations in Armavir and Orsk. Steve Bryen provides an excellent overview of the worst case. While these attacks show that Ukraine is desperate and willing to risk provoking a Russian nuclear response, albeit tactical, the actual effect in terms of damage is negligible. Moreover, the Russian Government and media’s muted response reflects, in my judgment, that this was a Ukrainian intelligence information operation, fully backed by the West, as opposed to a full-blown attack designed to cripple Russia’s strategic radar system.

I think the law of unintended consequences is going to take over. Russia is now probably reviewing its air defense systems around these facilities, having apparently discounted the drone threat. I would not be surprised to see Moscow take immediate steps to boost air defense, including the installation of powerful Electronic Warfare systems, in and around the strategic radar sites throughout Russia. Yes, Russia can walk and chew gum at the same time. Russia also will likely increase targeting of Ukrainian drone facilities and work with friendly neighboring countries, such as Kazakstan, to identify and destroy sabotage teams.

The real question that the West and Zelensky need to answer is this — what in the hell are they trying to achieve? Pissing off the Russians and bolstering their commitment to destroy Ukraine’s military and weaken NATO is not a smart move. Or, how about, crippling Russia’s strategic radar system so that it cannot detect inbound ICBMs? That is even more dangerous because it would put Russia in the position of having to assume the worst, i.e. the West is preparing to launch a nuclear strike, and pushing it to act preemptively by launching nukes.

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.

As the Iranian nation mourned the tragic death of President Ebrahim Raisi this week, the United States could not even muster a respectful offer of condolence. The U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, officially that country’s top diplomat, made a crass remark that the Iranian people would be “better off”. This as the Islamic Republic had declared five days of mourning for the late president whose funeral in the city of Mashhad was attended by millions of Iranians. President Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash along with the country’s much-respected Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and several other dignitaries who were also on board the aircraft. The fatal crash happened in treacherous weather over a mountainous region in northwest Iran as the president’s entourage returned from a visit to Azerbaijan. Most of the world expressed shock and grief over the loss. The UN General Assembly held a minute’s silence and at the funeral, 68 nations were represented including officials from Russia and China.

The United States and Iran have been staunch adversaries for more than half a century following the Iranian revolution in 1979. Nevertheless, it is a basic matter of diplomacy and etiquette for countries to show a token of sympathy at such a time of national mourning. The disgraceful and cheap comments about the death of Iran’s president show how inadequate Blinken is as the supposed U.S. primary diplomat. But the failure is not merely a personal matter, it epitomizes the general collapse of Washington’s political quality and international standing. The United States presumes to be a world leader but it evidently has no class. Biden, the president and Blinken’s boss, is a foul-mouthed crank who regularly insults other leaders with ignorant prejudice....

But such sensibility and respect are too much to expect from Blinken who has shown himself to be way out of his depth as a diplomat. Last week, the “top diplomat” embarrassed his office by playing guitar on stage in a bar during an official visit to Kiev. Blinken was in the Ukrainian capital promising billions of dollars more in military aid to prolong a bloody and futile proxy war against Russia. Reliable estimates put the Ukrainian military death toll at over 500,000 in over two years of combat. Yet, here was Blinken strumming electric guitar with a local rock band. Even more cringe-making was his choice of song, Neil Young’s ‘Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World’. Not only was Blinken tone deaf to the horror of war, but he was oblivious to the fact that the song is an explicit condemnation of American imperialist barbarity. How could anyone be so stupid and insensitive?...

What’s more though is the deplorable truth that Washington is full of clones like Blinken. The level of political culture in the U.S. establishment that spawns the likes of Blinken is so putrid and prevalent, that it is difficult to envisage any quality thinkers and leaders emerging.

[..] the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU)’s rapid retreat bears a strong whiff of final defeat wafting in from not so far off in the distance. “Several Ukrainian combat brigades have not defected, or considered doing so,” Seymour Hersh, quoting his customary “I have been told” sources, reported in his newsletter last week, “but have made it known to their superiors that they will no longer participate in what would be a suicidal offensive against a better trained and better equipped Russian force.” Brigades average 4,000 to 5,000 soldiers each and can run to 8,000 or even more. Hersh’s report suggests that a considerable number of Ukrainian troops, and maybe a very considerable number, are now effectively in mutiny against the AFU’s high command. In evident response to Russia’s swift new incursion and the direction of the war altogether, the well-coordinated if not very artful American propaganda machine has begun preparing the public for a wider war that is to extend, as a matter of policy and military strategy, into Russian territory. This effort began with a New York Times interview with Volodymyr Zelensky, which was videoed and published in last Wednesday’s editions.

This document is plainly intended to appeal to kale-consuming, Biden-supporting liberals who must be assured of the Ukrainian president’s just-like-us humanity and good judgment. He talked about his children and his dogs — there must be dogs in this sort of imagery — and how he reads fiction every night but is too tired to get very far. But the core point, beyond the window dressing, was to insist that it is time to begin bombing Russian territory and that the Biden regime must reverse its prohibition of such operations....

Zelensky, a television actor we must not forget, has played this role on numerous occasions: Badger us for tanks, planes, long-range artillery, and missiles, the script written in Washington reads, and we will hesitate briefly before granting you your pressing needs as you defend democracy, the free world, and all those other “values” in the Cold War inventory. Two days later, two, the Times reported exclusively that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, returning from “a sobering visit to Kyiv,” has of a sudden decided it is indeed time to broaden the war in the direction of a direct confrontation with Russia. The byline on this piece is worth noting: It belongs to David Sanger, who typically writes this kind of deep-inside piece because he is by all appearances so unwholesomely deep inside. “There is now a vigorous debate inside the administration over relaxing the ban,” our David reports, “to allow the Ukrainians to hit missile and artillery launch sites just over the border in Russia—targets that Mr. Zelensky says have enabled Moscow’s recent territorial gains.”

...In between the Zelensky interview and the Sanger report, the Russophobes in Congress wasted no time tucking into this operation. Michael McCaul, the Texas Republican who ranks with Tom Cotton among the prominent dummköpfe populating Capitol Hill, pounced partisanly last Wednesday. McCaul, who chairs (I can hardly believe this) the House Foreign Affairs Committee, stood before a map that showed — my best count — 50 or so targets in Russian territory. And there he went for a twofer, arguing in favor of removing restrictions on the deployment of U.S. weapons while turning the question into a boringly pointless attack on the Biden regime. Have a listen:

“We have a really bad situation going on, as you know. This is a sanctuary zone they [Russians] have created…. However, your administration and Jake Sullivan [sic] have restricted the arms use so that Ukraine cannot defend itself and fire back at Russia. That’s why I mandated the attacks in the supplemental [the aid package Biden signed into law last month], the long-range, the short range, and the HIMARS that your administration is tying their hands arms behind their back.” Never mind the incoherence. A sanctuary? The Russians have created a sanctuary on their own soil? What kind of language is this? What is running through McCaul’s odd mind, the Cambodian border in the spring of 1969, Operation Menu? Let us all declare we feel unsafe as we realize what these people are talking about and what they are risking. Any allowance for expanded use of U.S.–made weapons against Russian targets, which will require American personnel on the ground in Ukraine, will unambiguously escalate the proxy war into a direct conflict between the U.S. and the Russian Federation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday warned Western countries against allowing Ukraine to use long-range NATO missiles in strikes on Russian territory.

Putin pointed to comments from NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who recently suggested NATO members should lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of their weapons.

“This constant escalation can lead to serious consequences. If these serious consequences occur in Europe, how will the US behave, bearing in mind our parity in the field of strategic weapons? Hard to say. Do they want global conflict?” Putin said during a visit to Uzbekistan, according to RT.

The Russian leader said that long-range strikes would require NATO support and that it would take “highly qualified specialists” from the West to do the targeting. A recent German military leak revealed that British soldiers are “on the ground” in Ukraine helping fire Storm Shadow missiles, which have a range of about 155 miles.

NATO will establish a permanent entity at July’s summit in Washington to organize mandatory arms supplies to Ukraine and their financing, with the amount to be determined later, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said, speaking at a NATO Parliamentary Assembly meeting. “Support must start to flow in again, but delays and also the fact that not everything is delivered as promised, has caused serious consequences. That’s also the reason why I have suggested that at the summit we agree a bigger NATO role in coordinating and providing security assistance and training for Ukraine. Because I strongly believe that we need a firmer, stronger institutionalized structure for the support. Ad hoc, short-term, voluntary announcements are good, but in the long term we need more predictable, stronger support for Ukraine,” he emphasized. According to Stoltenberg, the budget has not been agreed yet. The secretary general said earlier that it was necessary to create a permanent NATO military fund for Ukraine worth $100 bln a year.

Russian President Vladimir Putin “is correct” when he states that the goal of the upcoming Ukraine ‘peace’ conference in Switzerland is to try to confirm Volodymyr Zelensky’s legitimacy to the Western community, Christopher C. Black, an international criminal lawyer with 20 years of experience in war crimes and international relations and a commentator on international affairs, told Sputnik. “It is a propaganda exercise to try to cover up the fact the Kiev regime is not legitimate. Of course legitimacy cannot be assured by statements by supporters of an illegitimate regime and those who arranged the coup d’etat of 2014,” Black pointed out.He was echoed by Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois’ College of Law, who said in an interview with Sputnik that “everyone knows that the conference in Switzerland is a joke and a fraud that is based upon Zelensky’s peace program.”

“[The] Switzerland [summit] will just be an anti-Russian propaganda stunt designed to further vilify Russia in the eyes of the world. I am surprised the Swiss government is going along with it. But, of course, Switzerland is a member of NATO’s Partnership For Peace (PFP) and is no longer truly neutral — I have lectured there against this and told the Swiss they should pull out of NATO/PFP,” Boyle noted. As for Zelensky, he “has never been a legitimate president of Ukraine,” Black argued. According to him, the last legitimate president of Ukraine was Viktor Yanukovich, “who was overthrown in the NATO orchestrated coup d’etat of 2014” and who “has never served out his complete term.” “So when the Kiev coup regime conducted subsequent elections they could not be considered free and fair by any standards in the world. They were all rigged to maintain the coup regime in power under different figures or puppets,” the analyst noted.

In this vein, he referred to the people of eastern Ukraine who “have never accepted the legitimacy of the regime installed by NATO in the coup of 2014 for two reasons – it was a regime that still regards them as enemies and their democratic choice was denied” and “their chosen president [Yanukovich] was overthrown.” The remarks come after Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that discussing security issues at the Switzerland conference will be “absolutely futile” without the participation of Russia. “Most likely, it will be just empty scholasticism with no prospect of getting at least some tangible result,” Peskov added. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova earlier confirmed that Russia was not planning to participate in the summit due to be held in Buergenstock, Switzerland, on June 15-16. She also said that Russia had no confidence in Bern, a supporter of the Ukrainian government in Kiev that has implemented several rounds of EU sanctions against Russia. “Under these circumstances, Switzerland cannot be a neutral host by definition, let alone a mediator,” the spokeswoman underscored.

A new press release in Ottawa reports that the court martial announced for Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) Colonel Robert Kearney for his disagreement with Canadian, American, and British military planners of Ukrainian battlefield operations against Russia may not proceed. The Canadian government news slip reveals the allegations of disloyalty against Kearney announced publicly last month are now likely to be abandoned. On April 29 a CAF press release was issued in Ottawa claiming that as a senior planning officer based in the UK and in Romania for Ukraine war operations, Kearney had made “derogatory and disloyal comments about Senior CAF [[Canadian] and NATO [US, UK] members. The first offence allegedly occurred in December of 2021 and four subsequent offences ranged from January 2023 to November 2023. The offences are alleged to have taken place in the United Kingdom and in Romania.”...

Canadian military sources believe Kearney is being threatened with court martial now because the Canadian government’s policy to finance, arm, train, plan, and direct Ukrainian operations against Russia is being defeated; and that the military collapse east of Kiev now risks loss of more territory and the lives of Canadians currently working in the Ukraine and at cross-border bases in Poland and Romania. At least one thousand Canadians have been counted by the Russian Defense Ministry on the battlefield since the start of the Special Military Operation; by March of this year, 422 had been confirmed killed in action. Loss of confidence in the Ukraine war has become increasingly public in the military staffs of the US, France and Germany, but this is being kept secret in the UK and Canada.

On May 15, a new press Canadian government release was issued acknowledging that, in fact, no charges have been filed against Kearney, and that the “military [have] yet to decide on court martial for colonel accused of making derogatory comments about Canadian Forces leaders”. The new press release, issued ten days ago in an email to an Ottawa journalist, reversed the meaning of the earlier government announcement. The new message divulges that Kearney has been accused by officers he had criticized for their professional incompetence, but he has not been charged with a military offence.

Russia is able to produce artillery shells much faster and cheaper than Ukraine’s backers in the US and Europe, Sky News has reported, citing a study by the consulting firm Bain & Company. According to the research, based on publicly available data, Russian factories are projected to make or refurbish approximately 4.5 million rounds this year, compared to the West’s combined production of about 1.3 million rounds, the broadcaster reported on Sunday. This means that Moscow currently generates more than three times more artillery shells than the NATO members. The figures given by Bain & Company suggest that the average production cost of a Russian 152mm shell is $1,000, which is one quarter the price of the 155mm rounds used by NATO, which are priced at $4,000. The fact that the output of shells in the US and EU “lags behind” Russia poses “a major challenge” for the Ukrainian military amid the conflict with Moscow, Sky News stressed.

According to the broadcaster, Ukraine’s frontline troops are complaining that they can only fire one round for every five shells launched from the Russian side. The Pentagon said last fall that it plans to increase its output of 155mm rounds from 28,000 to 100,000 per month by the end of 2025. The EU announced in March that its goal is to ramp ammunition production capacity to 2 million shells per year during the same period. During a meeting with the leadership of Russia’s defense industry enterprises on Saturday, President Vladimir Putin said that the production of ammunition in the country has increased 14-fold, drone manufacturing has increased four-fold, and the assembly of tanks and armored vehicles has increased 3.5-fold since the launch of the military operation in Ukraine in February 2022.

The US-led NATO bloc has not only been directly involved in a confrontation with Russia but is now falling into “wartime ecstasy,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said. He was speaking in response to the military bloc’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg advocating the removal of restrictions on use of Western weaponry by Ukraine.

Stoltenberg’s remarks can be only considered as the official stance of the entire US-led military bloc and Russia will respond accordingly, Peskov told the Izvestia newspaper on Monday.

“This cannot be his personal opinion. He is an official, he is the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and that is how we perceive it. NATO is increasing the degree of escalation, NATO is flirting with warlike rhetoric, falling into 'wartime ecstasy.' This is the reality we have to continue to deal with,” Peskov stated.

The former president’s warning comes after Poland said Washington would hit Russian targets if Moscow were to use nukes in Ukraine.

Any US attack on Russian targets in Ukraine would automatically trigger a world war, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has warned.

The official, who currently serves as Deputy Chair of Russia’s Security Council, made the remarks after Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski claimed Washington had threatened to conduct such a strike should Russia use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday, Medvedev suggested that Sikorski “apparently, has decided to scare his masters.” He noted that Washington, unlike Warsaw, has so far refrained from making any such threats publicly “because they are more cautious” than the Poles.

“Americans hitting our targets means starting a world war, and a Foreign Minister, even of a country like Poland, should understand that,” Medvedev added.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Sunday that he had never seen greater irresponsibility than Europe getting involved in the conflict in Ukraine without calculating what it would cost. “Europe is becoming so involved in the war that it does not even have an estimate of the scale of the costs and means necessary to achieve its military objective. I have never seen anything more irresponsible in my life,” Orban said in an interview with the Patriota YouTube channel. He added that, in his opinion, NATO wanted to become a party to the conflict in Ukraine and “the chances that the alliance can be kept from doing so are limited.” Budapest is against having decisions on the service of Hungarian citizens made “in Brussels or Germany,” Orban emphasized. “We don’t want anyone else to be able to make decisions about conscription and sending our young men of draft age anywhere. We have to forget about a European army with compulsory conscription, this is a crazy idea,” the prime minister stressed.

Earlier in May, Manfred Weber, the leader of the European People’s Party, the largest one in the European Parliament, suggested reinstating compulsory military service across the entire European Union. If Weber’s idea was implemented, “Hungarian families would be told from Brussels or Germany that their children would be compulsorily conscripted into the European army and told where they would go,” Orban added. In the years to come, current events may be seen as a prelude to World War III or even its first episode if Brussels’ militarism is not countered, the Hungarian prime minister warned. “Perhaps in 10 years the current processes will be called a prelude to World War III. It cannot be ruled out that if things go badly and we fail to control the military psychosis developed in Brussels, the history of these years will also be an episode of the first years of the big world war,” Orban said in an interview with the YouTube channel Patrióta.

Although European politicians see nuclear weapons as a deterrent, unforeseen worst-case scenarios could come to life, the Hungarian prime minister emphasized. “In my opinion, European politicians think of the nuclear bomb as a tactical deterrence tool and not as something that should really be used, but what they don’t consider at the beginning of a war can still happen at the end, thus worst-case scenarios can come to life,” Orban explained. Previously, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in an interview with The Guardian newspaper that the United States threatened Moscow with the “destruction” of Russian forces in the special military operation zone if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitriy Medvedev said Poland should understand that an American strike on Russian troops would mean the beginning of a world war.

There is little time left to conclude the Ukraine conflict, which risks escalating out of control and inciting a global war, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has warned. Speaking on Friday to the broadcaster Prva Srpska Televizija, Vucic claimed the world is standing on the brink of an all-out global conflict, and it is likely already too late to avoid it. “I am afraid that there is little time left for the war in Ukraine to be stopped. I hope it’s still possible, but I’m afraid it’s actually not. I’m afraid that the train has already left the station, started moving, and no one will stop it,” he said. In my opinion, things will get worse and worse, and it may happen that we will have a greater tragedy than World War II. I’m afraid we are heading towards a great world conflict, and few want to stop it.

Explaining his doomsday prediction, the Serbian leader said the conflict is being pushed by the global military industry, war profiteers who are interested in expanding and prolonging it rather than seeking a resolution. “When the war machine starts to heat up, then there is a military lobby and a military industry lobby who want it to intensify, and then there will be no more [peace] effort, it is difficult to stop,” Vucic said. The president also urged “someone” to do something “real” to stop the hostilities instead of “just shifting the blame to the other side.” He warned that “if this doesn’t happen, I’m afraid we’re headed for disaster.”

May 26, 2024

 • 'Peace' Summit? Moscow Slams NATO Chief's Call to Let Ukraine Hit Deep Into Russia, Sputnik International, May 25, 2024

On Friday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg urged the military blocs members to lift restrictions on the use of Western weapons by Ukraine to carry out strikes against targets in Russia.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has condemned NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's call for the alliance to let Ukraine hit Russian territory with Western-supplied missiles.

"It is useful to know this for everyone who is invited to the so-called 'peace conference' in Switzerland," Zakharova wrote on her Telegram channel.

The growing presence of NATO on Russia’s western borders worries our country. There are signs of the US-led bloc’s transition from hibernation to preparations for a major military confrontation in Europe. The path of increasing escalation and pressure on Russia is a dead end: Moscow takes the NATO threat seriously and has the means to deal with it. The militarization of the Baltic states, the strengthening of the bloc’s influence in the Black Sea and near the Russian border will increase the number of episodes in which our interests collide and keep us in constant tension. Russia has no aggressive plans against the Baltics – this is a threat invented by Washington and Brussels. However, if NATO chooses the path of escalating tensions, Moscow will not shy away from this challenge. I believe that this path is a fool’s errand for Western Europe – it becomes a hostage to the American desire to isolate the EU’s main economies from Russia.

Escalation creates a series of phobias, removes any impetus for economic cooperation and ultimately ties Western European states to the US economy, making them much less competitive. As a result, the Americans are “cannibalizing” the Western Europeans under the noble guise of protecting the European continent from an imaginary Russian threat. I believe that those in Western Europe should not be blind to this artificial inflation of tensions by the US – they must act in their own interests. Russia has now turned its attention to other regions of the world and is developing its historic relations with the countries of Asia and Africa with great vigor. To some extent, Western Europe is turning away from Russia and Russia is turning away from Western Europe. I accept that this, like many things in history, is a spiral. And in time there will be a process of return. But it is obvious that today Western Europe is for Russia not a region that is very important or offers many opportunities.

On the contrary, what we hear from there nowadays are the most bellicose statements, but not backed up by much political resolve. While Russia continues to perceive Western European actions against our country as a threat, the focus of Moscow’s attention is shifting to other parts of the world. At the same time, the US remains the most active – in a destructive sense – force in international relations, constantly working to create ad hoc coalitions to use against its opponents. Now it’s acting more and more feverishly, realizing that time is not on its side. Instead of this nonsense, it would be wise for Washington to accept that objective demographic, economic and social processes are making Asia the world’s main center of gravity in the new century, and to work to ensure that the conditions for stability and development are maintained. The actions of the Americans, unfortunately, show the opposite: they are exacerbating the perception of their own decline, which would be less acute if they behaved more constructively.

The US is directly responsible for a Ukrainian strike on a key element of Russia’s nuclear umbrella, Senator Dmitry Rogozin has said, warning that such attacks could lead to the collapse of the entire global nuclear security architecture. In a statement on Telegram on Saturday, Rogozin, a senator who previously headed up the Russian space agency Roscosmos and is now in charge of a military technical center called Tsar’s Wolves, said that the attack targeted a nuclear early warning system in the southern Krasnodar Region. The Russian Defense Ministry has yet to comment on the matter, while the extent of the damage remains unclear.

Rogozin suggested that it was extremely unlikely that the strike, which Ukrainian media reported involved several drones, was carried out at Kiev’s sole initiative and without US involvement. According to the senator, Washington has always sought to achieve military superiority over Moscow since the very dawn of the nuclear age, but this rivalry was mostly limited to a battle of minds between scientists, strategists, and policymakers. This seems to have changed, however, as “the US has commissioned a crime by hiring an irresponsible bandit” to attack Russia’s early warning system, the official said, apparently referring to Vladimir Zelensky. Rogozin claimed that Washington’s “deep involvement in the armed conflict and total control over Kiev’s military planning means that the version that the US does not know about Ukrainian plans to strike Russia’s missile defense system can be discarded.”

May 25, 2024

Featured • Russo-Ukrainian War: Widening the Front, The Fifth Battle for Kharkov, Big Serge, May 25, 2024
A particularly well-seasoned, sober analysis of why and how Ukraine will lose this war on the battlefield, and also a good analysis of the Russian MOD shakeup.

Featured • SITREP 5/24/24: Situation Turns Critical as De-legitimized Zelensky Dangerously Escalates, Simplicius, May 25, 2024
I have no quibble with any of this. Nobody has a "good enough," i.e. perfect, air defense system, including Russia. Quality is one thing; quantity another.

The situation is very unstable. If Ukraine is indeed able to threaten Russian command and control, or fly a Taurus cruise missile to to Putin's office in the Kremlin, we are in serious trouble. We could be one more bad Biden decision away from nuclear war. Biden is unlikely to resist, even if on a good day we wanted to resist, the calls to attack deep into Russia.

Featured • ICJ Rules Against Israel as Ukraine Crosses a Major Red Line, Larry Johnson, May 25, 2024

While Russia is continuing to pulverize Ukrainian forces all along the line of contact, Ukraine — now armed with a new batch of ATACM missiles — is launching attacks that are very dangerous and likely to provoke a more powerful and deadly Russian response. Simplicius the Thinker is out with a piece tonight that is a bit alarmist, in my view, and asserts that Russian air defense is failing. I do not believe there are enough facts to justify that conclusion. However, I think he is correct in his assessment that Zelensky, who is becoming more desperate with each passing day, is keen on trying to provoke a nuclear response from Russia in hopes that this would compel NATO to ante up and enter the fray in full force.

Ukraine, with Western assistance, crossed a red-line today that is going to be followed, I believe, by a very powerful, widespread Russian response.

Apparently Ukraine has attacked a Russian ballistic missile early warning radar in Armavir, Russia. This destruction of this particular radar node has limited direct military utility for Ukraine, due to its coverage. I guess some one really wants to test stability.

This ICBM warning radar is located in the Federal Republic of Voronezh, which is 150 miles (250 kilometers) east of Belgorod. The radar is damaged, but not destroyed. Nonetheless, this marks a direct attack on Russia’s early warning system to detect a nuclear attack. Ukraine and the West have crossed a definitive red line for Russia and there will be hell to pay for this. This attack does not harm Russia’s tactical position on the battlefield one iota. But it does represent a clear escalation by the West to target Russia’s nuclear deterrence capability. The rubicon is crossed and this war is going to enter a new level of peril, especially for Ukraine and the West.

At a minimum, Russia is likely to intensify efforts to locate and destroy ATACM launchers and missile supplies. This means that more NATO troops will likely die in the coming weeks. Insanity rules in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin and Kiev. The nuclear genie may be out of the bottle and, if there is another attack of this nature, Russia may decide to use tactical nukes on Ukrainian bases. Here I agree with Simplicius, this is a damn reckless move by the West. [emphasis added]

The United States should stop sending money to Ukraine and attempt to negotiate peace as soon as possible, US Congressman Thomas Massie told Sputnik on Friday. “I think we should quit sending money there. I think we should try to negotiate peace as soon as possible,” Massie said on the sidelines of the 2024 Libertarian National Convention. US lawmakers are showing dwindling support for sending military aid to Ukraine each time the matter comes to a vote, Massie highlighted. “The support for sending weapons to Ukraine is weakening in the US Congress, as you can see with each subsequent vote,” the congressman emphasized. There should be some effort made to bring both Ukraine and Russia to the upcoming conference in Switzerland as it is hard to imagine negotiations without Russia, Massie stressed “This sounds kind of hard to negotiate a peace if they don’t have Russia at the table. So I think there should be some effort to have Ukraine and Russia there,” the congressman said.

Talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Joe Biden could help solve the conflict in Ukraine, and even lower-level discussions between top diplomats could help achieve progress, Massie highlighted. “I think it could help,” Massie said when asked whether talks between Biden and Putin could help solve the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. “Although, even lower-level negotiations would help as well, I think.” When asked at what level such discussion should be held, the congressman said, “Maybe at the secretary of state level, for instance.” Massie expressed his view that it is “wrong” that communications between the US and Russia are limited. “I think there should be talks,” he said. The US government freezing of foreign assets, including those of Russia, is a very short-sighted policy and sends a message to the international community that the United States may stop honoring transactions, the congressman emphasized.

“I think it’s very short sighted of our government to freeze for instance, Treasury assets, that are held by other countries, such as Russia, because it sends a message to the world that if you buy our debt, then we may not honor the transaction at some point,” Massie explained. The representative added that US moves to freeze foreign assets are “extremely dangerous” because they will increase the price that Washington has to pay to finance its debt. “I’m sure that our closest allies will still trust that we’ll be good on our word, but other sovereign funds will have a diminished appetite for financing our debt,” Massie said. “So, I think it’s very short-sighted of us to do that.” Moscow has maintained that any attempt to confiscate its frozen assets would violate international law, with the Russian Foreign Ministry labeling such an action as theft. Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov has also said that Moscow is willing to issue a “symmetrical” response to this form of Western financial aggression.

The congressman argued that he opposes the US government sending more money to Ukraine unless such assistance achieves peace. “I told our own speaker – if you want to send $60 billion and the goal is to achieve some kind of peace, I might be compelled to vote for it. But I’m not voting for $60 billion that will then only necessitate another $60 billion,” the representative clarified. Massie also said that both sides to the conflict in Ukraine will eventually run out of people if fighting continues. “I think it’s immoral to grind up people in this war on both sides,” Massie added. Earlier on Friday, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that the United States was providing a new weapons package for Ukraine worth $275 million. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Monday the United States has already delivered many of Ukraine’s “top-priority requirements” and much more assistance is on the way.

Austin added that he expects a steady flow of US assistance for Ukraine on a weekly basis.

Are we so disgusted with politicians of all sides that we have sunk into fatalistic apathy on this point. Do we have a permanent Que Sera, Sera attitude to just about everything outside our own limited sphere of influence now?

Perhaps take a look at that foreign land they call the past sometime where minds were not as dulled or as lazy, where there was a communal desire to survive and determination to get together in solidarity to protest the insanity being demonstrated by our leaders? Discover what has been largely lost in the western world, the desire to act together in unity when we are in mortal danger from the stupidity and recklessness of our leaders.

Have we all been sold on the selfishness and self-interest of competing rather than cooperating? Have the last few decades of rampant, materialist consumerism made us all self-isolating to the degree that we trust no one but our direct family any more. Is that it?

Whatever lies behind the apparent slothful unwillingness to stand up and be counted and take a stand for everyone against the oncoming war the resemblance to lemmings heading blindly to the cliff edge is striking.

The US should be seen as directly responsible for a Ukrainian strike on a key element of Russia’s nuclear umbrella, Senator Dmitry Rogozin has said, warning that such attacks could lead to the collapse of the entire global nuclear security architecture.

In a statement on Telegram on Saturday, Rogozin, a senator who previously headed up the Russian space agency Roscosmos and is now in charge of a military technical center called Tsar’s Wolves, said that the attack targeted a nuclear early warning system in the southern Krasnodar Region. The Russian Defense Ministry has yet to comment on the matter, while the extent of the damage remains unclear.

Rogozin suggested that it was extremely unlikely that the strike, which Ukrainian media reported involved several drones, was carried out at Kiev’s sole initiative and without US involvement.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has argued that members of the Western military bloc should let Ukraine freely use their weapons to launch strikes deeper into Russian territory. “The time has come for allies to consider whether they should lift some of the restrictions they have put on the use of weapons they have donated to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said on Friday in an interview with The Economist. “Especially now when a lot of the fighting is going on in Kharkov, close to the border, to deny Ukraine the possibility of using these weapons against legitimate military targets on Russian territory makes it very hard for them to defend themselves.” Stoltenberg noted that some NATO members have already lifted restrictions on using their weapons to attack targets in Russian territory.

Asked whether he was referring to the US as the one major holdout, he said, “I think what we see now demonstrates the need to reconsider those restrictions, not least because we have fighting going on along the border between Russia and Ukraine.” However, according to Moscow, the rhetoric about restrictions on the use of US munitions are false and designed to maintain the illusion that the West is not part of the conflict. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that US weapons, such as ATACMS missiles armed with cluster warheads, have already been used on attacks inside Russia, including strikes against civilian targets. “We proceed from the fact that American and other Western weaponry strikes targets on the territory of Russia, primarily civilian infrastructure and residential areas,” he told reporters on Friday.

NATO is forming a network of cyber laboratories along the perimeter of Russia’s borders in Estonia, Latvia, Finland and Romania, Artur Lyukmanov, the special presidential representative for international cooperation in information security of the Russian Foreign Ministry, said in an interview with Sputnik. “Washington has long been practicing methods of hybrid warfare against Russia in the information sphere. Ukraine is used as the main training ground, whose hackers, including from the much-touted ‘IT army,’ carry out acts of electronic sabotage under the close tutelage of NATO supervisors,” he said. Lyukmanov said entire units of Western security services and armed forces have been sent to Kiev.

But the irony of all of the above is that, up until now, his endless doubling-down has secured his position and power. It may be counter-intuitive but where his crony Stefanchuk sounds like Stalin, Zelensky’s whole recipe of survival has now boiled down to “the worse, the better,” a phrase usually, if perhaps apocryphally, attributed to Lenin.

Against this backdrop, the most important point about Zelensky skirting an election is not whether he is now legitimate or not, but that this is just one more stage in that strange double trend: While his position is steadily getting weaker and his actual policies are a bloody dead end for his country and its people, he is incapable of even considering a genuine change of course.

Zelensky, the former low-taste comedian, has become a desperate high-stakes gambler who has locked himself and his whole country into a devastating sequence of losing while constantly raising the stakes. His single most urgent remaining ambition is to draw more of the world into this vortex. Zelensky should never have been president; and it is high time that he ceases to be one. Ironically, since he would probably not have been ousted in elections, there is little need to regret their loss.

Hungary is reevaluating its role in NATO, as it has no intention to take part in actions that could involve member states in the Ukraine conflict and lead to a direct clash with Russia, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday. Speaking on local Kossuth Radio, Orban stated that his country has already been relegated to the role of a non-participant within the US-led military bloc due to its stance on Ukraine, and Budapest is now working on legal ways to retain its membership but reserve the right to abstain from joining NATO operations it disagrees with. “Hungary’s position must be redefined, our lawyers and officials are working on ways to allow Hungary to continue to exist as a NATO member without participating in NATO activities outside the bloc’s territory. We need to create a new approach, a new definition for our position as a pro-peace force within NATO,” Orban said.

According to the prime minister, there are “alarming similarities” between the emotionally charged media publications and statements by Western politicians regarding the Ukraine conflict and the atmosphere preceding the First and Second World Wars. “What is happening today in Brussels and Washington… looks like warming up for a possible direct military conflict. We can safely call it the preparation of Europe’s entry into the war,” Orban said, adding that there are working groups within NATO that are assessing the best ways for the bloc to further boost its participation in the conflict. He warned that the end result of these actions could be a direct conflict between the EU, NATO, and Russia – a “grim prospect,” as the conflict would involve nuclear powers.

May 24, 2024

Featured • Scott Ritter: US Threats to Greenlight Ukrainian Attacks on Russia Could Spill Out Into Nuclear War, Ilya Tsukanov, May 23, 2024
Yesterday the U.S. Congress -- the House specifically, but the Senate will not be far behind -- and the "Administration" (i.e. Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Biden being mostly incapacitated) began talking in earnest about helping Ukraine make serious long-range attacks against strategic targets in Russia.

This is madness.

I disagree with Scott Ritter's choice of words in one place just slightly. He said it will make no difference "on the battlefield." Yes, on the Ukrainian battlefield it will make no difference. It very likely might however, as he suggests, make that battlefield much bigger. It will make a difference alright, a big difference, and we won't like it. I don't think Russia will sit there and take a barrage of strategic attacks by NATO without responding. Yes they are cool under fire. But they are not asleep, or dead, or incapable, or bluffing. "FAFO," as Larry Johnson says they are saying with their nuclear drills: "Fuck around, find out." Find out what? Well, we'll find out, won't we?

It is time to flood Congress with calls. Everybody, including us, is busy. Is that our problem? Too busy to bother surviving? Too busy to stop the latest and most explicit genocide, or the rush to nuclear war?

Featured • No Matter What the U.S. Does to Arm Ukraine, There is No Path to Victory, Larry Johnson, May 23, 2024

The key point I made with Danny Davis is that violence, in and of itself, does not ensure a successful military outcome. Consider a physical punch. If you punch a wall during a fit of passion, the most likely outcome is a broken hand. You accomplish nothing beyond possibly damaging the wall and breaking your hand. If you are walking down the street and sucker punch a stranger, you have committed a crime and harmed someone without cause. But, if you are being mugged and punch the attacker (and hopefully knock them out), you are engaged in self-defense. A punch is not “just a punch.”

Ukraine’s desperate plea to get long-range ATACM missiles in order to hit targets deeper inside Russia has nothing to do with carrying out a military strategy. Even if the West gave Ukraine all missiles in its entire inventory, those weapons are insufficient to destroy critical Russian military installations and logistics facilities. But such an attack would ignite an escalation by Russia that would further decimate Ukraine. In other words, this would be a meaningless use of force. Zelensky would be better off punching a wall.

Many members of Congress are also calling for President Biden to lift the ban, which risks a major escalation.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is leading a push within the Biden administration to allow Ukraine to use US-provided missile systems and other weapons to hit Russian territory, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

The report said there is a “vigorous debate” within the administration in the wake of Russia’s new offensive in Kharkiv, which was launched from over the border in Russia’s Belgorod oblast.

It’s unclear how many other high-level officials agree with Blinken, but the pressure is growing on President Biden to lift the prohibition on Ukraine using US weapons on Russian territory, a ban that, according to the Times, is designed to “avoid World War III.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and many other members of Congress are also calling to lift the ban. Ultra-hawk Victoria Nuland, who left the State Department in March, appeared on ABC News this week to make the pitch for Ukraine to extend its use of US weapons to Russian territory.

“I think there’s also a question of whether we, the United States and our allies, ought to give them more help in hitting Russian bases, which heretofore we have not been willing to do,” Nuland said.

“I think if the attacks are coming directly from over the line in Russia, that those bases ought to be fair game, whether they are where missiles are being launched from or where they are where troops are being supplied from,” she added.

Moscow recently warned the UK that if Ukraine used British weapons on Russian territory, Russian forces would target UK military sites in Ukraine “and beyond.” The warning came after British Foreign Secretary David Cameron said Ukraine had the “right” to use British arms in attacks on Russia.

Russia is currently conducting tactical nuclear drills that it launched in response to provocative rhetoric from Western officials about sending troops to Ukraine. The Times report said that the US was also considering deploying troops for training, although Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown said there were “no plans” to do so at the moment.

May 23, 2024

Featured • Last Dance at the Vampire Ball: West Searches for Answers to Its Demise, Simplicius, May 23, 2024

As the reality of the coming Russian victory over the combined NATO Leviathan has slowly dawned on the West, it has engendered a poignant shift in the increasingly high-pitched narrative. The comprador elite class has awakened to the fact that their global order is on the brink of dissolution, following Russia’s unclothing of their designs. The many decades of Gladio and other subversions are coming undone before our very eyes, as the dreams of a certain line of elite architects stretching back many generations are being washed away by the fitful birth of a new world...

Recently, Jeffrey Sachs gave an interesting account of this very question on the Duran show:

"I want to take it back to the 1840s, to the real roots of hegemony, which is Great Britain. Never was there a hegemon with such ambition and such a curious view of the world. But Britain wanted to run the world in the 19th century and taught America everything it knows. Recently, I read a fascinating book by a historian named J.H. Gleason, published by Harvard University Press in 1950. It's an incredibly interesting book called 'The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain.' The question is, where did England's hate of Russia come from? Because it's actually a little surprising. Britain has HATED Russia since the 1840s and launched the Crimean War that was a war of choice in modern Parliament—a war of choice by Palmerston in the 1850s—because it hated Russia. So, this author tries to understand where this hate came from, because it was the same kind of iterative hate that we have now. And by the way, we hated the Soviet Union because it was Communist, but we hated Russia afterwards when it wasn't communist. It doesn't matter. So, it's a deeper phenomenon, and he tries to trace where this hatred came from. The fascinating point is, Russia and Britain were on the same side in the Napoleonic Wars from 1812 to 1815, from the Battle of Moscow in Russia to Napoleon's defeat in Waterloo. They were on the same side, and in fact, for many years, the relations weren't great, but they were kind of normal. So, this historian reads every snippet of the newspapers, what's written, of the speeches, to try to understand where the hatred arose. The key point is there was no reason for it. There was nothing that Russia did. Russia didn't behave in some perfidious way. It wasn't Russian evil; it wasn't that the tsar was somehow off the rails. There wasn't anything except a self-fulfilling lather built up over time because Russia was a big power and therefore an affront to British hegemony. This is the same reason why the US hates China: not for anything China actually does but because it's big. It's the same reason, until today, that the United States and Britain hate Russia—because it's big. So, the author comes to the conclusion that the hate really arose around 1840 because it wasn't instantaneous, and there was no single triggering event. The British got it into their crazy heads that Russia was going to invade India through Central Asia and Afghanistan—one of the most bizarre, phony, wrongheaded ideas imaginable—but they took it quite literally. And they told themselves this: 'We're the imperialists. How dare Russia presume to invade India?' when it had no intention of doing so. So, my point is, it's possible to have hate to the point of war and now to the point of nuclear annihilation for no fundamental reason. Talk to each other." [emphasis by Simplicius]

...The British quest to create a colony in the Middle East under the auspices of ‘Zionism’ was always linked to maintaining British interests in the Heartland, keeping France from the region, as when Napoleon had conquered Egypt, as well as Russia from encroaching on the erstwhile Ottoman lands.

To quote Mao:

Following the vote, the PRC's rancor toward the Jewish state became increasingly radical as Beijing boosted its support for the PLO cause. During an official address with a PLO delegation in 1965, Mao characterized Taiwan and Israel as pawns created by the West in order to exercise control over them and depicted Israel as the target of the Arab battle against the West. "Imperialism fears China and the Arabs. Israel and Taiwan are bases of operation for Imperialism in Asia. They created Israel for the Arabs and Taiwan for us. They both have the same objective," said Mao Zedong.

Calls by American lawmakers to allow Ukraine to use foreign-made weapons against targets deep in Russian territory play into Kiev’s hands, as they encourage a direct clash between Moscow and NATO, Russia’s Ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, has warned.

On Wednesday, a group of US congressmen submitted a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin asking him to authorize “the use of US-provided weapons to strike strategic targets within Russian territory under certain circumstances.” This stance has previously been supported by Victoria Nuland, the former acting US Deputy Secretary of State, who played a major role in the Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014.

Earlier this week, however, Austin stopped short of endorsing the policy shift, suggesting that Kiev should focus “on the close fight” rather than on long-range strikes with foreign-made weapons.

On Thursday, Antonov denounced the “provocative” and “extremely dangerous and reckless” calls to allow Ukraine to use Western-supplied weapons to attack deep inside Russia. He added that “the calls by Russophobes mean only one thing – further US involvement in the conflict in Ukraine on the side of the agonizing Zelensky regime.”

The envoy suggested that the debates on the matter were a “hysterical reaction” to Russia’s successes on the battlefield against Ukraine, and that Western policymakers “continue to test our patience.”

According to Antonov, it is also obvious that by requesting permission to attack deep inside Russia with foreign-made weapons, Kiev seeks “to provoke the United States, as well as other NATO countries, into rash actions and achieve a head-on collision between Russia and the bloc’s members.”

The neocon crowd in Washington, DC is in an uproar, with a growing realization of Ukraine’s looming defeat. Their solution? More Cowbell!! Yep, they want Biden and his Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, to empty the U.S. military cupboards and ship everything possible to Ukraine, including long-range missiles that would be used to hit targets deep inside Russia. Fools!!

Meanwhile, Russia started its tactical nuclear weapons exercise today. That means this exercise had been planned well in advance. This is not something ginned up in the aftermath of Putin’s announcement from two weeks past. The exercise is a clear message to the West — FAFO!! (For those not familiar with the acronym, FAFO, it means, Fuck Around Find Out.)

On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) expressed support for Ukraine using US-provided weapons on Russian territory, a step that would risk a major response from Russia.

Ukraine has been lobbying the US to allow the use of US-provided missile systems on Russian territory in the wake of Russia’s Kharkiv offensive, and the idea is gaining support in Congress.

A group of bipartisan members of the House sent a letter to President Biden on Monday urging him to lift any restrictions on Ukraine’s use of US weapons. “It is essential the Biden administration allows Ukraine’s military leaders to conduct a full spectrum of operations necessary to respond to Russia’s unprovoked attack on their sovereign land,” the lawmakers said.

Johnson was asked if he supported the idea of Ukraine hitting Russian territory with US weapons and replied that the US needs “to allow Ukraine to prosecute the war in the way they see fit.”

“They [Ukraine] need[s] to be able to fight back. And I think us trying to micromanage the effort there is not a good policy for us,” he told Voice of America.

Elon Musk has cast doubt on Western involvement in the Ukraine conflict being described as upholding democracy, if the country’s leader has a questionable legal claim to power. Tuesday marked the first day after the expiration of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s five-year presidential term. His government declined to hold a new election, citing martial law put in place due to hostilities with Russia. The American billionaire entrepreneur responded to an X (formerly Twitter) post highlighting the deadline published by conservative journalist Jack Posobiec. Musk said: “But I thought we were there to ‘uphold democracy’?” Zelensky’s democratic bona fides were called into question before the fighting with Russia started in February 2022. His government had cracked down on critical media and opposition politicians, claiming that it was fighting Russian influence and the power of oligarchs. His remaining in power is based on the absence of a duly elected successor, who Zelensky’s office has argued cannot be produced during war time.

Kiev cited a constitutional restriction on voting under martial law as the reason for not organizing a presidential vote. The Ukrainian Constitution does explicitly forbid parliamentary elections and some kinds of referendums during national emergencies, but says nothing about presidential elections.

Western officials have been talking about sending troops to Ukraine since the beginning of the year. French President Emmanuel Macron said that he is ready to consider “any scenario,” including a ground operation. Government officials in Estonia and Lithuania (including Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte) were quick to support him. And the Leader of the House Democratic Caucus Hakeem Jeffries became the first US politician who didn’t exclude the possibility of sending troops. Formally, Ukraine hasn’t requested Western troops – Kiev has only demanded more weapons. But now, the New York Times reports that Kiev has officially asked the US and NATO to send military instructors to train 150,000 recruits on its territory, closer to the front line. Though the US has refused to comply with the request, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q. Brown Jr, has said that a NATO deployment of trainers appears inevitable, and that “we’ll get there eventually, over time.”

May 22, 2024

 • Zelensky wants NATO to shoot down Russian missiles, RT, May 21, 2024

The US and its allies should shoot down Russian missiles, give Ukraine more weapons, and allow Kiev to strike Russia directly, Vladimir Zelensky has told the New York Times. Zelensky spoke to the US outlet in Kiev, on the last day of his presidential term, which he has sought to extend for the duration of martial law he declared due to the conflict with Russia. He demanded that NATO countries shoot down Russian missiles over Ukraine, wondering if they are too afraid to provoke Moscow. “So my question is, what’s the problem? Why can’t we shoot them down? Is it defense? Yes. Is it an attack on Russia? No. Are you shooting down Russian planes and killing Russian pilots? No. So what’s the issue with involving NATO countries in the war? There is no such issue,” Zelensky told the Times....

With Russian troops advancing all along the frontline, Zelensky and his aides have ramped up calls for more of everything – Patriot air defense systems and F-16 fighters in particular – but also demanded the lifting of restrictions on use of Western-provided weapons to strike deep inside Russia. The US and its allies have struggled to maintain the legal fiction that their missiles can only target Russian territory that Ukraine claims as its own – i.e. Crimea, Zaporozhye, Kherson, Donetsk and Lugansk – though Western-supplied weapons have been used against Belgorod Region on multiple occasions, including the Christmas market massacre.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky believes his generals are hiding the truth from him and has taken to shouting at them, The Economist has claimed, citing a government source. Purported fits of presidential rage were mentioned in a Monday report on the situation in Kharkov Region, where Russian forces have gained significant ground over the last month. According to the British newsweekly, Ukrainian troops deployed there are angry at the development and have competing theories about the causes. Some blame the US and its allies for insufficient and untimely aid, not unlike Zelensky himself, while others “suspect that incompetence, or even treachery, played a more significant role.” There are also “conspiracy theories” about politicians in Kiev and Washington conspiring to sell the territory “down the river ahead of an ugly peace deal.”

May 21, 2024

Featured • Ukraine Conflict Reveals Russian Supremacy in High-Tech Warfare of the Future - Report, John Miles, Sputnik International, May 19, 2024

“The US has been Ukraine’s single most important ally” in its conflict with Russia, observes analysis from Business Insider Friday, but Kiev’s use of American weapons systems has left it reliant on technology with “serious flaws.” The website’s investigation reveals Russian superiority in a number of areas, including drones and electronic warfare, as well as the deficiencies of the United States’ military production sector. “One area in which the US has revealed its shortcomings is in electronic warfare,” the author writes. “Russia’s jamming systems have created major issues with Western precision weaponry, including GMLRS rockets and Excalibur artillery shells. Russia’s electronic warfare units have become increasingly adept at scrambling the GPS navigation systems used to guide the missiles and shells to their targets, sending them off course and rendering them useless.”

The observation was also made recently by The New York Times, which acknowledged that Russia’s electronic jamming capabilities have managed to disable even the US’s vaunted HIMARS missiles, and echoed this week by an ex-Pentagon analyst. The retired Army lieutenant general suggested America is significantly behind in developing similar technology. The Business Insider analysis also noted that Russia has better adapted to modern realities of fighting in the age of drone warfare, with constant surveillance making attempts to obscure troops and supply routes impossible. US Army units currently rely on a small number of outdated drones, the article admits. The US military’s attempts to develop microwave weapons and drone swarms to counter Russian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have so far failed to bear fruit, demonstrating the weaknesses of a military industrial complex that for decades has been focused on “war against militant groups such as the Taliban* in Afghanistan” rather than combating large state actors.

The result has been an inefficient defense production base, both in terms of cost and developing sufficient quantities of weapons. Analysis published earlier this year revealed that Russia is now producing three times more ammunition than the United States and all European allies of Ukraine combined as Russian military industry has stepped into high gear. Kiev reportedly “was being outfired at a rate of 10-1 on parts of the front line” earlier this year, notes Business Insider. The article observes that the United States is capable of producing high-quality armaments, but claims they are hopelessly expensive compared to Russian equipment that can be produced at a much lower cost, allowing the country to prevail in “fights which require endurance.” A similar observation was made recently by geopolitical analyst and ex-US Marine Brian Berletic, who noted, “the West still seems incapable of learning that quantity can indeed be a quality of its own.”

“The collective West still believes firmly in its own full-spectrum supremacy in terms of political, economic, and military power, despite the growing body of evidence to the contrary,” Berletic added. “Russia for many years worked on making itself more self-sufficient in general, dismantling many potential dependencies on an increasingly aggressive and irrational West. This clearly paid off when Western sanctions in 2022 failed to have the crippling impact Washington, London, and Brussels had hoped for, and instead backfired on the West itself.” “Russia has continuously expanded its military industrial base while at the same time the West allowed theirs to atrophy,” he concluded. “The result is a proxy conflict where the collective West is incapable of matching let alone exceeding Russia’s level of ammunition, weapons, and vehicle production.” “And while the West appears to understand this mistake in hindsight, they still seem incapable of grasping just how much time is needed to rectify this or accept the possibility that it is perhaps impossible at this point to rectify.”

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping added another to their count of 40–odd summit meetings when the Russian and Chinese presidents convened in Beijing, later proceeding to Harbin in Northeast China, for two days of talks that ended Friday. At 9:55 Thursday evening Beijing time, a day’s work done, the two sat behind a long table draped in green to address “members of the media,” as Xi put it.

Western officials and the media that clerk for them have done their best, per usual, to dismiss this latest encounter of the Russian and Chinese leaders as of no account, just two authoritarians bound together by nothing more than their shared enmity toward the West. Pay no attention. We ought not miss the significance of what Putin and Xi had to say this week to one another and to the rest of humanity. The world just turned once again....

It will be a long walk through the 21st century before Russia, China and the rest of the non–West arrive at the new world order these nations advocate. They will get there. Some important steps were taken in Beijing and Harbin this week. This is how history’s wheel turns.

Russia won’t view Western European countries as partners again for “at least one generation,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has predicted.The diplomat remarked that Moscow and the West are already locked in a confrontation that has no end in sight. Top Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have repeatedly described Moscow’s ongoing military conflict with Kiev as a proxy war waged by NATO against Russia. Evidence of this, the Kremlin says, is the material aid, the training, and the intelligence that the US and many European countries have been providing to defend Ukraine. Speaking on Saturday, Lavrov cited an article by Russian political scientist Dmitry Trenin, who has written that “Europe as a partner is not relevant for us for at least one generation.” The minister said that he “can’t help but agree” and that Moscow is “feeling this in practice almost daily.”

The senior Russian diplomat also claimed, without elaborating, that “many facts speak in favor of such a prognosis.” “The acute phase of the military-political confrontation with the West continues [and] is in full swing,” Lavrov said, pointing to the nature of the narratives currently prevalent in the US and Europe. In an interview with TASS on Friday, Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia Sergey Ryabkov compared Western elites to delinquent youths and provocateurs intent on escalating tensions to the brink of a “catastrophic collapse,” and with no regard for the consequences. Speaking of the work of Russian diplomats in the West, the official revealed that it is “in a crisis-management mode, aimed at preventing an escalation into a really massive conflict.”

NATO is “a group in which we feel not an ounce of trust, which triggers political and even emotional rejection” in Moscow, Ryabkov told the media outlet. He said that, no matter who comes out on top in the US presidential election in November, “no chance for the improvement of the situation can be seen, considering the fundamental anti-Russian consensus of the American elites.” During his inauguration speech on Tuesday, nonetheless, Russian President Vladimir Putin asserted that Moscow does not “refuse dialogue with Western states.” “The choice is theirs,” the president proposed, posing the question: “Do they intend to continue trying to restrain the development of Russia, continue the policy of aggression and relentless pressure that they have pursued for years, or look for a path to cooperation and peace?”

It is noteworthy that Biden and Blinken declare Russia is committing genocide, when the actual number of civilian casualties inflicted by Russia in the war in Ukraine are scant, while Israel inflicts genuine slaughter on defenseless Palestinian civilians. This level of hypocrisy has a tangible consequence — it has destroyed whatever vestige of U.S. moral credibility remained.

There is no doubt that the United States will continue to try to use sanctions, especially against weaker countries, in order to compel them to adhere to U.S. political and economic interests. But the emergence of a vibrant Russian/Chinese partnership is creating an alternative economic and political platform that is attracting more nations with each passing week.

The Captain America or Superman meme that dominated my childhood in the 50s and 60s, where the United States pretended to be the defender of the oppressed, the guy who stops the bully, is dead. America, in my view, has become the bully — preying on the weak and inflicting pain, grief and suffering on people who can’t fight back.

There is a reason that movies like the Karate Kid resonate so powerfully. Most cultures around the world celebrate the kid who is bullied but, through determination and hard-work, acquires the skill to beat Cobra Kai, rather than slink away and curl up into the fetal position....

I am all in favor of Making America Great Again. But my definition of greatness means that America stops meddling in the internal affairs of other countries; that American puts an end to its thirst for foreign military interventions; that America beats its swords into plough shares; and that America recaptures its belief in the supreme rights of the individual. If America’s guiding spirit is to promote the welfare and freedom of people, I think the world would be a better place.

But that is not what we have. Mike Pompeo’s commencement address to Liberty University is a shining example of what is wrong with America. Here you have the former head of the CIA, and a guy who insists he is a devout Christian, condemning Russia, China and Iran as “dark forces” devoted to chipping away “at our Judeo-Christian foundation.” What a load of crap! This so-called smart guy does not even have the decency and integrity to acknowledge the re-birth of Christianity in Russia. If he was a genuine Christian, he would be celebrating the Russian faithful as brothers and sisters. But that’s not his game. He backs a satanic regime in Ukraine that is attacking churches and locking up priests.

As I noted in the opening paragraphs, the hypocrisy from “leaders” like Pompeo reeks like a fetid cesspool. Russia and China are not responsible for killing at least 200,000 Iraqi civilians in Operation Iraqi Freedom (and I think that is a very conservative estimate). Russia and China are not responsible for the deaths of at least 70,000 Afghanis and Pakistanis, who died as a result of U.S. and NATO military operations. That ain’t a Judeo-Christian foundation in my book.

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.

The upcoming conference at the Burgenstock resort in Switzerland, touted by its organizers as an event to further the peace process in Ukraine, will most definitely be anything but a peace summit, says Swiss MP and former executive director of the Geneva Press Club Guy Mettan.

“The deliberate rejection of Russia is now jeopardizing the success of the meeting and returning against its organizers,” Mettan tells Sputnik, pointing out that Russia was not invited to participate in the conference. “Aware of this problem, the Swiss official narrative is now trying to put forward that Russia didn’t wish to participate and that its absence came from its own decision, which is false and will not mislead anybody outside the collective West.”

Ukrainian officials have launched a new push to pressure the US into allowing US-provided missile systems to be used in attacks on Russian territory, which would mark a significant escalation in the proxy war.

A delegation of Ukrainian lawmakers has been in Washington lobbying for the restriction to be lifted in the wake of Russia’s Kharkiv offensive, which was launched from Russia’s Belgorod oblast. According to The New York Times, they’re also asking for more intelligence on Russian military positions inside Russian territory.

David Arakhamia, a senior Ukrainian MP and leader of the ruling Servant of the People party, is leading the delegation and slammed the US for not letting Ukraine use its US-made missiles on Russian territory.

Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 5.4% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2024, the state statistics agency Rosstat said in a preliminary report published on Friday.

According to the estimates, Russia saw robust growth in retail turnover (up 10.5%), manufacturing (up 8.8%) and construction (3.5%) in January-March.

The Rosstat data aligns with an earlier estimate from the Economics Ministry, but exceeds that of the Bank of Russia (4.6% growth) and analysts’ expectations (5.3%). The agency is due to publish more detailed data on GDP in mid-June.

According to an earlier forecast from the Bank of Russia, GDP growth is expected to slow in the second quarter due to tightening fiscal conditions. The regulator, however, expects consumer and investment demand to remain high and continue to drive economic growth.

Kiev has urged Washington to provide intelligence on targets on Russian soil, as the Ukrainian Armed Forces lose ground on the battlefield, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, saying US administration officials have begun “to review” the request. In addition, members of Ukraine’s parliament have approached lawmakers in Washington, requesting the green light to use US-provided weapons in strikes on Russia, the paper wrote, citing US and Ukrainian officials. The Russian offensive in Kharkov Region was facilitated by the US restrictions, which are “handcuffing the Ukrainian war effort,” Kiev’s delegation told Congress, according to news website Politico. Despite such requests being turned down in the past, administration officials are now reviewing the latest requests, the NYT wrote.

Intelligence from the US and other allies on military targets on Russian soil would allow Ukraine to better plot approach routes for its drones and missiles, the newspaper said. With detailed terrain mapping, it would allow them to fly low and avoid radar detection, increasing their effectiveness. While Kiev already has access to commercial satellite imaging data, US intelligence would provide more detailed and timely information, they wrote. General Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed that Kiev has been seeking to ramp up strikes inside Russia. The Ukrainians have been “asking us for help to be able to strike into Russia,” the US general told reporters on Thursday, while flying to Brussels for NATO meetings. The day before, State Secretary Antony Blinken stated that the US has left it up to Ukraine whether or not it uses US-supplied armaments to attack Russian territories. “We have not encouraged or enabled strikes outside of Ukraine, but ultimately Ukraine has to make decisions for itself about how it’s going to conduct this war,” he told reporters in Kiev.

In early May, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron said Kiev had the right to use UK-provided weaponry to for cross-border strikes on Russian targets. Moscow condemned the remarks and summoned London’s ambassador. Any use of British weapons against Russian territory could prompt Moscow to strike “any British military facilities and equipment on the territory of Ukraine and beyond,” the Russian Foreign Ministry warned. Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed on Friday that it is Kiev’s repeated strikes against residential districts in Russia that is forcing Moscow into creating a buffer zone on the border, as Russian forces push Ukrainian troops further back into Kharkov Region.

The spectacle unfolding in Tbilisi is reminiscent of a Monty Python skit, only this one includes real violence and bloodshed. We have seen the Foreign Ministers of Lithuania, Estonia and Iceland show up in Tbilisi and join the protests, by giving speeches to seething crowds, denouncing the actions of the Georgian legislature. Can you imagine the freakout in Washington if Russia’s Lavrov, China’s Wang Yi, and Hungary’s Szijjártó showed up at a Trump rally to denounce Biden’s policy in Ukraine? Exactly. The United States would not tolerate that shit for one minute. Talk about double standard.

Then you have the Georgian President, who was born in France and is a French citizen. Salome Zourabichvili, if she had the same pedigree (i.e., born in France but granted U.S. citizenship) in the United States, she would be banned by the Constitution from serving as President. Yet, here she is, shamelessly promoting foreign interests over those of the people she was elected to serve. And the majority of the European governments, as well as the Biden Administration, are vowing to impose sanctions if the legislature dares to override Zourabichvili’s veto....

The obsession of the West to meddle in other governments and foment regime change must end. I think Russia and China, as a result of their latest summit, are committed to achieving that goal. The weaker nations of the world, especially in the Global South, are awakened to this threat. That’s one of the reasons that the nations in the African Sahel have given the French and the United States the boot. I personally hope that marks the beginning of a welcome turn in world affairs.

Ukrainian officials have asked NATO countries to send troops to Ukraine to help train 150,000 new recruits, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

The report said NATO countries are “inching closer” to sending trainers, which would mark a significant escalation and risk direct war with Russia. A small number of NATO special operations forces have been inside Ukraine — 97 as of March 2023 — but an open deployment to train a large number of Ukrainian troops would take things to another level.

May 17, 2024

Featured • The DragonBear-Hug Signals Unprecedented Expansion of Ties, Simplicius, May 17, 2024
Foreign policy "experts" to Biden: "what hath thou wrot?"

 • Putin reveals plans for Kharkov, RT, May 17, 2024

 • Russia Has No Plans to Take Kharkov Under Control Now - Putin, Sputnik International, May 17, 2024

 • Zelensky blames ‘whole world’ for Ukraine’s failures in Kharkov, May 16, 2024

The whole world is to blame for Ukraine’s failure to stop Russia’s recent advances in Kharkov Region and must now help Kiev to change the situation, President Vladimir Zelensky told ABC News in an interview on Thursday. It comes after Russian forces managed to capture several settlements near Ukraine’s second-largest city over the past week. Top military officials in Kiev have admitted that the situation is now “extremely difficult,” and that Ukrainian troops are struggling to hold ground due to being outgunned and outnumbered. Asked if he believes Ukraine’s failures on the battlefield to be the fault of the US, Zelensky told ABC reporters that “it’s the world’s fault,” and accused the international community of giving “the opportunity for Putin to occupy.” The Ukrainian leader said the country “cannot afford to lose Kharkov,” and that “the world can help” Kiev to hold on to the vital city in the country’s northeast.

“All we need are two Patriot systems,” Zelensky said, suggesting that “Russia will not be able to occupy Kharkov if we have those.

May 16, 2024

Featured • Slovak PM Robert Fico Expected To Survive; UK Media Appears To Justify Assassination Attempt, ZeroHedge, May 16, 2024

Journalist Glenn Greenwald has commented, for example, "Listen to this Sky News report on the shooting of Robert Fico. Not only do they come close to justifying it because he opposes aid to Ukraine, but they also casually imply that he's being paid by the Kremlin. This casual accusation is so prevalent in the West, and toxic." The Sky segment in question which calls Fico "very pro-Russian" and that it's "not surprising" that the attack took place is below: [https://twitter.com/i/status/1790765583711297690]

My thanks to all readers who flagged the disgusting video of Antony “NERO” Blinken opting to play guitar rather than a fiddle while Ukraine burns. I don’t know what it will take for Western politicians, observers and analysts to grasp the fact that Ukraine is losing, and losing badly. I do not understand people who insist that this war will stretch on for years without any end in sight. Not going to happen. Here is why.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken made an unannounced visit to Ukraine on Tuesday and delivered a speech where he justified President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to postpone elections.

Presidential elections were due to be held in March, but they weren’t, and Zelensky will remain in office after his term ends on May 20. Ukrainian parliamentary elections were scheduled to be held last year in October, but they were also canceled.

Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials have justified the decision by pointing to Ukraine’s constitution, which prohibits elections during martial law. Martial law was first declared when Russia invaded and has been extended since. However, at one point, Zelensky made it clear that he could hold a vote if he wanted to.

Last year, Zelensky said that he could hold elections if the US and other Western countries paid for them and if Ukrainian legislators agreed to amend the constitution. He later ruled out the idea and there’s been no pressure from Ukraine’s Western backers to hold a vote despite the claims that the proxy war is a fight for democracy.

Everyone knows that the war is coming to an end. That there will be a victor, Russia, and a lot of looser. The U.S. as well as the EU are now trying to find a face saving way to acknowledge that without admitting it.

The easiest way will be to blame Ukraine, and especially its President Zelenski, for having not listened to western advice during some of the hotter phases of the war (Bakhmut etc). "We gave them a chance and they blew it," will soon become the major tenor of official statements.

But in reality there never was a chance for Ukraine to defeat or even to weaken Russia. All numbers, capacities and people, pointed against that. Despite that fact it was pushed to its death by western delusion.

One hopes that its people, and others, will have learned from it.

There is a clear need for a set of guiding ideas about “who we are,” “where we are in this world” and “where we are going.” However, the word ‘ideology’ is too closely linked in many people’s mind with the rigidity of Soviet Marxism-Leninism. Whatever finally emerges will probably be built on the values-led foundation of traditional religions, starting with Russian Orthodoxy, and will include elements from our past, including the pre-Petrine, imperial, and Soviet periods. The current confrontation with the West makes it imperative that some kind of a new ideological concept finally emerges, in which sovereignty and patriotism, law and justice take a central role. Western propaganda pejoratively refers to it as “Putinism” but, for most Russians, it may be simply described as “Russia’s way.”...

It doesn’t look like a some sort of 'purge' is coming. The changes, nonetheless, will be substantial, given the age factor. Most of the current incumbents in the top places are in their early 70s. Within the next six to ten years these positions will go to younger people. Ensuring that Putin’s legacy lives on is a major task for the Kremlin. Succession is not merely an issue of who eventually emerges in the top position, but what kind of ‘ruling generation’ comes in.

Russian forces have launched a large-scale offensive towards Kharkov, revealing apparent gaps in Ukraine’s previously proclaimed fortified defenses along the northern border. According to military analyst Scott Ritter, the Ukrainian military, expecting robust defenses including anti-tank obstacles and minefields, was significantly outmaneuvered. As Russian troops continue to push south from the Belgorod area, Ritter notes that the situation exposes a broader vulnerability within the Ukrainian defense strategy. “The Ukrainians are now in a panic, pulling forces from critical fronts elsewhere,” Ritter explained. This reallocation of troops to the north leaves other strategic areas, such as Kherson and Odessa, potentially exposed to new Russian attacks.

Simultaneously, Russia’s military seems to be capitalizing on a lack of Ukrainian reserves, with simultaneous pressures in the Zaporozhye and Donetsk regions contributing to what Ritter describes as “the collapse of Ukraine as a cohesive combat force.” In the midst of these battlefield developments, Russia has appointed a new Minister of Defense, Andrei Belousov, a move that has sparked discussions and speculation both within Russia and internationally. Belousov, an economist with extensive governmental experience but no military background, steps into a role that seems more focused on managing the defense industry’s growth and sustainability amid the conflict.

Some question the timing and suitability of appointing an economist as defense minister during wartime. However, supporters argue that his economic acumen is crucial for maintaining the efficiency and integrity of the defense sector’s expansion. “This is exactly the kind of person Russia needs,” Ritter states, asserting that the strategic appointment aims to strengthen Russia’s military capabilities indirectly through economic stability and reduced corruption. Meanwhile, General Gennady Gerasimov will continue to oversee the military operations, ensuring continuity in leadership. According to Ritter, this combination of economic and military leadership is far from a sign of Russian weakness. “By bringing in Andrei Belousov, we’re talking about Putin creating tempered steel,” he remarked, suggesting that the West may underestimate Russia’s strategic positioning.

Mobilization is a necessary step toward future NATO membership, the top US diplomat has claimed.

Ukrainians must accept more mobilization as a necessary step toward the country’s eventual NATO membership, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a speech in Kiev on Tuesday.

Speaking to students at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, the top US diplomat noted that Ukrainians are relying on his country for continued support, but insisted that they must see the importance of the military draft for the fight against Russia.

“Your recent mobilization was a difficult decision, but a necessary one. The defenders who have so courageously held the line for more than two years need help. They need rest,” Blinken said.

Joining the military will “allow you to harden your defenses, to build more units, to take the fight to Russian aggressors,” he added....

During his visit to Ukraine, Blinken also claimed that the US goal is to ensure the country’s future as a “free, prosperous, secure democracy fully integrated into the Euro-Atlantic community.”

“We are bringing Ukraine closer to, and then into NATO. We’ll make sure that Ukraine’s bridge to NATO is strong and well-lit,” he promised, predicting “tangible” progress along that path later this year.

Robert Fico’s third term as prime minister of Slovakia has put him squarely at odds with both the European Union and NATO on the matter of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. RT takes a look at the Slovak leader’s stance, and why it has drawn the ire of Brussels.

The Slovak prime minister was shot on Wednesday, during a visit to the town of Handlova, and was rushed to the hospital for surgery in serious condition. His attacker has been arrested and identified in media reports as Juraj Cintula, 71, a poet and supporter of the opposition Progressive Slovakia party. Cintula told police he shot Fico because he “disagreed” with his government’s policies.

“This is not only a shot at Fico and Slovakia, but also at Russian-Slovak relations,” Russian lawmaker Konstantin Zatulin said in reaction to the news.

“Fico knew very well that the majority of Slovaks, at least half, sympathize with Russia, despite the campaign of deception that rules the roost in Europe,” Zatulin added, noting that the Slovak PM had been “subjected to endless extortion and threats” from the EU over his political positions that ran counter to those of Brussels.

Fico led the government in Bratislava twice before, from 2006 to 2010 and from 2012 to 2018. He returned to office last October, having campaigned on stopping weapons deliveries to Ukraine and arguing that “people in Slovakia have bigger problems” than the war.

The Ukraine conflict “began in 2014, when Ukrainian Nazis and fascists started murdering the Russian population of Donbas,” Fico said at a campaign rally last August. He has also described Ukraine’s Azov Battalion as “clearly a fascist regiment.”

A number of Western leaders believe they would be able to maintain their hegemony if they plunge the world deeper into turmoil, information possessed by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) suggests, according to the agency’s head, Sergey Naryshkin. The SVR chief’s statements come as French President Emmanuel Macron and several officials from the Baltic states have repeatedly hinted in recent months at the possibility of deploying Western troops to Ukraine. Russia has warned that such a move would escalate the conflict. Speaking during a plenary meeting of the Federation Council on Tuesday, Naryshkin stated that his agency had obtained information that “some Euro-Atlantic politicians consider it possible to unleash a large-scale military conflict in order to maintain their hegemony.”

He noted that there are “strong reasons” to believe that such an escalation could actually occur if the West decides that it would be “reasonably safe” and beneficial to its interests. However, the spy chief admitted that there are also “truly responsible” global and regional players in the world who, if united, could have the potential to “ensure the impossibility of unleashing such a conflict, including the use of nuclear weapons.” Russian special services will continue to monitor the development of the situation “very closely,” Naryshkin stated.

Macron has consistently refused to rule out the idea of sending NATO forces into Ukraine, calling such threats “necessary” to maintain the West’s “strategic ambiguity.” While NATO and most of its members, as well as the EU, have vehemently denied the possibility of such a move, Lithuania has backed Macron’s proposal. Meanwhile, Madis Roll, the national security adviser to Estonian President Alar Karis, has also stated that Tallinn was “seriously” considering sending troops to fill “rear” roles in Ukraine.

Moscow has repeatedly warned that any NATO troop deployment to Ukraine would be treated as a major escalation and would almost certainly lead to a direct confrontation between Russia and the US-led bloc. Russia’s Foreign Ministry has also pointed out that any NATO troops that appear in the conflict zone would “inevitably become targets for the Russian military,” as would any foreign-supplied weapons used to strike Russian territory, no matter if they are deployed in Ukraine or elsewhere.

May 13, 2024

Featured • Putin's Cabinet Shakeup Stumps Western Intelligentsia, Simplicius, May 13, 2024
Includes a good update on Russian progress in the Karkov district.

Featured • Historical Revisionism Erasing Russia’s Lead Role in WWII Akin to Holocaust Denial, Ian DeMartino, May 12, 2024

The push by the West to minimize and erase the contributions of Soviet Russia in defeating Nazism and fascism in WWII is a deplorable act of historical revisionism that should be condemned, just as Holocaust denial is condemned by most of society.

In recent years, there has been an attempt to minimize Russia’s contributions to the war effort against the Nazis, despite the long historical consensus that they did more to defeat the German army than any other country and sacrificed more to accomplish that, some 25 to 27 million Russians, than any other country.

Despite Western aid, the Ukrainian military is reportedly already running low on air defense systems as Russian forces continue to successfully advance on several key areas of the front line.

Several German MPs have approved the idea of Western “cross-border” anti-aircraft units shooting down Russian missiles over Ukraine.

"This would relieve the burden on Ukrainian air defenses and allow them to protect the front line," Roderich Kiesewetter of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) argued, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.

He referred to the US, the UK and France helping Israel repulse Iran’s massive missile attack in April, which Kiesewetter claimed shows that "the involved states do not necessarily have to become ‘warring parties’ to a conflict."

Agnieszka Brugger of the Alliance 90/The Greens party insisted that "it’s OK to station air defense systems at the borders of Ukraine’s neighboring nations so that the western parts of the country can also be protected."

Moscow earlier warned European leaders from intentionally stirring up tensions around the situation in Ukraine now that they know perfectly well that the Kiev regime is on the verge of total breakdown. British Foreign Secretary David Cameron has ruled out the possibility of NATO forces intercepting Russian missiles over Ukraine. Speaking to The Times, Cameron cited “many” allegedly “non-escalatory things” the UK “can do,” like supplying anti-tank weapons, tanks, and long-range artillery to the Kiev regime — military aid that Russia has repeatedly warned would only exacerbate the Ukraine conflict. “But the one thing we have to try to avoid is NATO forces in conflict with Russian forces,” Cameron stressed. “And that’s why, from the start, I’ve said I don’t think we can do a no-fly zone or NATO interception into Ukraine.”

At the same time, he argued that with NATO soldiers “not directly fighting off” Russian servicemen, any aid to Ukraine by the alliance is “acceptable. The British foreign secretary spoke after an array of German MPs backed the idea of NATO “cross-border” anti-aircraft units downing Russian missiles in Ukrainian airspace, something they claimed could “relieve the burden on Ukrainian air defenses and allow them to protect the front line.” Nico Lange, senior researcher at the Munich Security Conference, earlier insisted in a televised interview that NATO allies should use their “numerous” Patriot anti-aircraft systems to destroy “all Russian missiles and drones” over Ukraine from the territory of Poland. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov pointed out that Europeans are deliberately stoking tensions over Ukraine because they realize that Kiev’s forces face a complete collapse amid Russia’s ongoing offensive. “The moment is very important and, of course, this is very provocative on their part,” Peskov warned.

German lawmakers from both the ruling coalition and the opposition support the idea of NATO imposing a no-fly zone over western Ukraine amid the conflict with Russia, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) has reported. For its article on Saturday, the paper asked members of parliament about the proposal, earlier floated by the defense minister’s chief of staff, Nico Lange, who suggested that Russian missiles and drones targeting Ukrainian energy infrastructure and military installations could be shot down from the territory of neighboring Poland and Romania. According to Lange, this would lead to the creation of a 70-km-wide safe zone on the border between the EU and Ukraine, while also allowing Kiev to re-deploy its own air defense systems, which are in short supply, from the west of the country to the front line.

The UK and its allies got tricked into backing a “corrupt mafia state” in Ukraine and getting into a war of attrition against a Moscow-Beijing partnership, Dominic Cummings has said in an interview.

The longtime Tory political strategist led the Vote Leave campaign for Brexit and was one of the key aides to then-PM Boris Johnson until resigning in November 2020.

“We should have never got into the whole stupid situation,” Cummings told the outlet I News in an interview published on Wednesday, commenting on London’s full-throated support for Kiev. He also described Ukraine as a “corrupt s**thole that doesn’t matter at all.”

“This is not a replay of 1940 with the pumpkin [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky as the Churchillian underdog,” he added. “This whole Ukrainian corrupt mafia state has basically conned us all and we’re all going to get f**ked as a consequence.”

May 11, 2024
Featured • Special Report: Russian Forces Breach Kharkov Border, Simplicius, May 11, 2024

Featured • Scott Ritter Predicts How Ukraine Will End, Ian DeMartino, Sputnik International, May 10, 2024

“As we speak, the attritional warfare model has Ukraine losing around 1,500 troops a day. This number is going up now because Russia's expanded its operations into the Kharkov region. So, you can expect this number [to] easily top 2,000 a day,” Ritter told Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Friday.

“What the Ukrainians have had to do is pull in reserves and take forces out from other fronts, including the Kharkov front and the Odessa front, to come into the battlefield where they've been eliminated, or they've been worn down and there are no replacements…what's going to happen is Ukraine will be compelled to withdraw reserves from the Kiev region and from Odessa, to go to Kharkov to fill that gap. While they do that, the Russians will then launch a second major attack somewhere in the Zaporozhye area, and Ukrainians are going to be put to the classic horns of a dilemma where if they go north they lose, they go south they lose, if they stay in the middle they lose - there's no good option for them,” Ritter explained, adding that we will then see “the total collapse of the Ukrainian army” and the “rapid withdrawal beyond the Dnepr River” to set up a new defense line, something he does not think the Ukrainians will be able to accomplish.

Eventually, Ritter predicts, “Ukrainian generals faced with the inevitable slaughter of the totality of their force will sue for peace.”

Ritter added that the military aid package recently signed into law by US President Joe Biden has had “zero impact” on the battlefield. “What we’ve seen, for instance, the desperately needed 155-millimeter artillery shells were brought in from Romania on a ship, offloaded in Odessa into a warehouse and struck by two Iskander missiles. Boom, there goes a couple of billion dollars right there.”

But the biggest issue for Ukraine remains manpower, not ammunition, Ritter explained. “Today, they don’t have the manpower to waste, and there’s nobody being trained. There’s nothing there. So everybody that dies just puts Ukraine deeper into a hole… you could give the best gold-plated ammunition in the world, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t have anybody to use it.”

Also on Friday, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that the Ukrainian military suffered 3,300 losses in the Kharkov region and the Donetsk People’s Republic alone during failed attempts to retake Novokalinovo, Kiselevka and Kotlyarovka over the past week.

The UK and its allies got tricked into backing a “corrupt mafia state” in Ukraine and getting into a war of attrition against a Moscow-Beijing partnership, Dominic Cummings has said in an interview.

The longtime Tory political strategist led the Vote Leave campaign for Brexit and was one of the key aides to then-PM Boris Johnson until resigning in November 2020.

“We should have never got into the whole stupid situation,” Cummings told the outlet I News in an interview published on Wednesday, commenting on London’s full-throated support for Kiev. He also described Ukraine as a “corrupt s**thole that doesn’t matter at all.”

“This is not a replay of 1940 with the pumpkin [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky as the Churchillian underdog,” he added. “This whole Ukrainian corrupt mafia state has basically conned us all and we’re all going to get f**ked as a consequence.”

May 10, 2024

Featured • NATO To Officially Reject Ukraine Intervention, Moon of Alabama, May 9, 2024
The NATO summit is still two months away. A lot can happen between now and then. However, NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine in the face of Russian nuclear threats would be disastrous for Biden's popularity heading into the election, assuming he makes it that far. I imagine that other NATO-country leaders see it the same way. Macron's threat has been run up the flagpole. Nobody saluted. I don't think anybody will. But what else will they do, to save collective NATO face?

Featured • Russia Remembers, the United States Forgets, Larry Johnson, May 9, 2024

The staggering scale of Soviet losses is beyond the comprehension of most Americans. The Soviets tripled all American losses in the European theater in just one battle — Stalingrad. Yet, Hollywood has propagated the myth that the United States carried the burden of the battles that led to the destruction of the Third Reich. Not just Hollywood. In the immediate aftermath the capture of Berlin, the United States and the United Kingdom behaved as if they were the ones who save the world.

Well, if that is true, why are the Americans and Brits silent on VE day? Because they did not endure the catastrophic human loss that the peoples of the Soviet Union endured, especially the Russians. That is why millions of Russians marched today carrying photographs of their grandfathers, grandmothers, great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers who served and died in the colossal fight to destroy the Nazis. The legacy of the sacrifice of those who fought 80 years ago still burns bright in the souls of the Russian people....

Today’s America is the Alzheimer’s Generation when it comes to history. We are on a trajectory to pursue wars against Russia, Iran and China without the tiniest bit of appreciation of the potential loss of human life and capital that may be inflicted on the United States if it consummates its rapacious, foolish desire.

I salute those Americans who served in World War II and all of the succeeding foreign expeditionary boondoggles. The names of 58,000 Americans decorate a black wall in Washington, DC. The vast majority served honorably and died in part because they believed the lies fed them by corrupt Presidents and a compliant media. Many of those who followed in their footsteps and served honorably in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are victims of a big lie. They were not fighting to defeat Islamic extremism. They were duped into fighting to fatten the stock portfolios of General Dynamics, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and scores of other Beltway Bandits. War is good business as long as only a small, insignificant (and despised) class of Americans pay the price in blood.

The failure of the vast majority of Americans to commemorate May 9 will, I fear, come back to haunt us. If we do not find a way to live in peace with Russia, China or Iran, Americans are not likely to have the good fortune to avoid massive casualties. I hope I am wrong.

The warnings of an impending fiscal crisis are coming fast and furious now, and they sound very different than before. If in years past one might have heard a call for fiscal responsibility couched in idealistic rhetoric touting America’s strength and rectitude – “History will show you there’s no country in history that’s been strong and free and bankrupt,” an old-school former Congressman from Tennessee, John Tanner, once said – today’s warnings are stark, immediate, and specific.

They sound more like what Joao Gomes, the vice dean of research at the Wharton business school, told the US Senate Budget Committee in March: “the coming fiscal crisis will be triggered by a sudden loss of confidence by the general public in the federal government’s finances and on those tasked with managing them.” “Its consequences will be severe and leave lasting – probably irreversible – scars on our economy and society,” he concluded.

But very little is being done to actually avert this outcome because there is little room for maneuver. An enormous and complex system that evolved over decades in a world of low interest rates cannot be transferred to new footing overnight – and certainly not without a lot of pain and political risk. The approach so far has been to simply keep spending and throw liquidity at anything that breaks in the financial system due to the higher interest rates....

The leading theorists of the Washington establishment pose essentially the same question: what is America if not the globe’s indispensable state? Such rigidity only exacerbates the paralysis.

Swedish commentator Malcom Kyeyune observed that “the single most dangerous period for a political system is when it has ignored a looming crisis for years and decades, and then finally, backs snugly perched against a wall that cannot be moved, tries to apply wide-reaching reforms.”

Just as the French monarchy’s financial woes on the eve of the convening of the Estates General in 1789 had, after decades of mismanagement, become an issue that could not be addressed by purely technical means, the problem of the looming fiscal crisis has moved far beyond the realm of economic policy.

Those holding the reins of power of the US government seem to sense the truth of Kyeyune’s words: they are doing as little as possible, because there is nothing they can do without wading right into that most dangerous period.

May 8, 2024

Featured • Putin updates Russia’s national development goals, RT, May 8, 2024

The country should have the world’s fourth-largest economy by 2030, the president has decreed.

The Russian government must ensure the country’s economic, social and technological development in seven key areas, according to a new decree issued by President Vladimir Putin.

The objectives for the next six to 12 years were signed by the Russian leader on Tuesday, after he was inaugurated for his fifth term in office. The planning period covers the next two presidential terms.

The targets, some of which are specific and others more general, are grouped into seven categories: health and demographics, citizens’ talent fulfillment, comfortable living conditions, environmental goals, economy, technological leadership, and digital transformation.

The underlying intention is to ensure Russia’s position as a sovereign nation that respects traditional values, engages with friendly nations, and improves its economic stance through science and private entrepreneurship, the document states.

Relations with West, national resilience and forging victory: Key takeaways from Putin’s inauguration.

The specific goals set by Putin include Russia having the fourth-highest gross domestic product (GDP) in the world by 2030 measured by purchasing power. By then, the value of imported goods and services should amount to roughly 17% of Russian GDP. Its exports should shift away from energy products, with agriculture considered a significant driver of future foreign trade.

In six years, Russia should also be among the top 25 nations in terms of using robotics in manufacturing, and in the top ten producers of scientific knowledge, according to the plan.

Meanwhile, Putin also wants citizens to enjoy better economic equality, with the Gini coefficient – one of the metrics showing wealth inequality in a nation – set to fall to 0.37 by 2030 and 0.33 by 2036. Last year, it was estimated at 0.40, according to national statistics.

The decree sets targets for birth rates, life expectancy, road safety, and other factors that affect living standards. Broadband internet access should be available to 97% of Russian households within six years, and 99% of them in 12 years. Garbage recycling should be available to all Russian households by 2030. And virtually all government services should be provided remotely online by the same year.

The previous set of mid-term national goals, which is superseded by the new document, was published in 2020.

Or the English transcript version [of Putin's speech]: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/73981

As most speeches go, it was a bit boilerplate. However, one key aspect was the focus on economic and societal development, the all-important stability of the people under the shadow of war. A few weeks back there was another key interview Putin gave where he gave a small answer that flew under the radar, but which was extremely revealing as to his general strategic outlook for the SMO.

In essence, he expressed that the most important goal is to maintain societal stability and economic development. While it may sound self-evident or obvious, it was one of the few times he expressly enunciated it in such a way in relation to the goals of the SMO. In other words—as I understood it—he was basically saying: societal stability and development is supreme, and the SMO is subordinate to that.

This answers the big question many have had on their minds since the beginning: why the slow-walking of the conflict, why no “total war” declaration, forced conscriptions, massive provocations and escalations against NATO (like shooting down their craft in the Black Sea, etc). This is why: Putin believes the most important virtue by far is shielding society from the effects of the SMO, and keeping the SMO on a sort of parallel but insulated track. We may not agree with that view, but that’s what it is. But know that this view can only really be born of the knowledge that the goals of the SMO are achievable by way of this ‘low intensity’ conflict management. If Putin’s internal metrics told him otherwise, then he would likely have no choice but to institute a WWII-style total war economy.

So far, though, it’s working.

Vladimir Putin was officially sworn in as president of the Russian Federation at the Grand Kremlin Palace on May 7. Afterwards, the head of state gave a speech, in which he declared that Russia is a great power thanks to the selflessness and patriotism of its people.

Newly inaugurated President Vladimir Putin has sent a clear message to the West that “Russia is there to stay as one of the world’s major powers,” strategic analyst Paolo Raffone told Sputnik.

The director of the CIPI Foundation in Brussels cited Putin’s remarks signaling Russia’s intent to “use political and diplomatic means to defend its lawful interests,” while remaining “open to negotiations and dialogue.”

In his inauguration speech, Putin “rightly claims that after 2000, he, with the support of the Russian people, ‘stood firm against the attacks of international terrorism and saved the country from the very real threat of collapse,’” Raffone noted.

The analyst singled out two cornerstone statements by the Russian president. First, that, “The main objective of the coming six years is now 'to transform the potential we have built up into a new development energy and to use it to bring about a fundamentally new quality of life for our people and a real, tangible increase in their prosperity.'”

Second, that “Russia’s success and prosperity 'cannot and should not depend on one single person or one political party, or political force alone. We need a broad base for developing democracy in our country and for continuing the transformations we have begun.'”

"Putin underlines that he 'serves' the interests of Russia that has chosen him again as president. Putin acknowledges that the post-2000 recovery of Russia is still underway, and he summons the peoples of Russia to strengthen social cohesion to continue the path of 'transformations' and 'develop democracy.' Two statements and two goals that are a cornerstone of his new term in office," Raffone said.

Full Video: Putin’s Speech After Taking Oath as Russia’s President

As for the US-driven calls in the Western capitals and mainstream press to delegitimize the Russian presidential election process, “It is the continuation of the historic confrontation of Anglo-Saxon powers against Russia,” Raffone explained.

He weighed in on the fact that representatives of Western countries stayed away from the ceremony. While the UK, Canada, and most European Union nations opted to boycott the swearing-in, France, Hungary, and Slovakia sent their ambassadors, Raffone pointed out, noting that the "tune is set by the US that is faced with tremendous domestic and external challenges in the months ahead of the November elections."

“Despite the US/UK-imposed boycott, there is no united Western front against Russia… The reaction of Anglo-Saxon powers against Russia is a weak representation of the relativization of their global standing, a process with which their political elites have difficulty to come to terms. Despite their bellicose rhetoric, there is mounting sentiment that the relations with Russia cannot be eased without fresh diplomatic initiatives,” Raffone concluded.

May 7, 2024

Featured • Ukraine SitRep: Eating The Seed Corn - Intervention Threats And Responses, Moon of Alabama, May 6, 2024

Russia also announced a spontaneous drill of the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons:

Russia has threatened to strike British military facilities and said it will hold drills simulating the use of battlefield nuclear weapons in response to UK weapons being used by Ukraine to strike its territory.

...It is the first time Russia has publicly announced drills involving tactical nuclear weapons, although its strategic nuclear forces regularly hold exercises.

The exercises will be held by the southern group of Russian forces which is also involved in the special military operation in Ukraine.

This should for now shut up the loud voices who dream of defeating Russia in Ukraine.

There is zero hope that this could be achieved. The Ukrainian army has had 600-700,000 soldiers, maybe even more. It has been defeated. How many soldiers could France deploy into Ukraine? 5,000-10,000? And all NATO together? 100,000?

No western force is currently configured and equipped to defeat a near peer competitor force. Twenty-five years of 'war of terror' have left those armies in a very sorry state. At least during the first year of an expanded war their troops would have no chance to survive. The Russian forces, by now a well oiled machine with plenty of excellent weapons, would defeat them within one or two weeks. What then?

Since February 2022 Russia's old and new president Vladimir Putin has warned against all interventions:

Let me emphasise once again: if anyone intends to intervene from the outside and create a strategic threat to Russia that is unacceptable to us, they should know that our retaliatory strikes will be lightning-fast. We have the tools we need for this, the likes of which no one else can claim at this point. We will not just brag; we will use them if necessary. And I want everyone to know this; we have made all the decisions on this matter.

I for one do not take that lightly.

“Things are getting pretty intense and the Russians are pretty much saying, ‘okay, that's enough,’” said McGovern, responding to the latest statement from Russian government officials. British Foreign Secretary David Cameron was quoted by media saying Ukraine could use UK-supplied weapons to strike within Russian territory during a visit to Kiev last week.

The comment provoked a strong response from Moscow suggesting Russia could target British military assets in Ukraine or elsewhere in response to such an attack on its territory.

“We have those reports that [French President Emmanuel] Macron is crazy enough to want to send French troops into battle there in Ukraine, and… the Russians actually have claimed to have killed seven of them this morning,” McGovern added.

“We have those reports that [French President Emmanuel] Macron is crazy enough to want to send French troops into battle there in Ukraine, and… the Russians actually have claimed to have killed seven of them this morning,” McGovern added.

“Friends vacationing in Cyprus or other military facilities run by the British, I would tell them to go and sun themselves on some other beach,” he said. “The Russians are speaking pretty tough – tougher than ever before. If one of these British long-range missiles does significant damage in Russia proper there will be retaliation. It will be tit-for-tat, and the Russians will be perspicacious, but they’ll be offensive. These will not be defensive measures.” McGovern claimed Russia’s response could even be nuclear in nature, noting, “the Russians are waving the nuclear possibility as never before. I can say ‘never’ because I’ve been around a while – would you believe six decades of watching Soviet and then Russian leaders? They don’t brandish nuclear weapons. Now they are.”

Moscow will retaliate against British targets in Ukraine or elsewhere if Kiev uses UK-provided missiles to strike Russian territory, the Foreign Ministry told London’s ambassador on Monday. Ambassador Nigel Casey was summoned to the ministry following remarks by British Foreign Secretary David Cameron to Reuters that Ukraine has the right to use long-range missiles sent by the UK to strike deep inside Russia. ”Casey was warned that the response to Ukrainian strikes using British weapons on Russian territory could be any British military facilities and equipment on the territory of Ukraine and beyond,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement following the meeting.

May 6, 2024

Featured • Macron Again Struts Feathers, NATO Troop Paranoia, & More, Simplicius, May 6, 2024
A detailed update.

Featured • Putin orders tactical nuclear weapons drills, RT, May 6, 2024

An exercise to check the military’s ability to use smaller-range systems was announced by the Defense Ministry on Monday.

Russia will test its ability to deploy tactical nuclear weapons, the Defense Ministry announced on Monday. The drill will be conducted “in the near future” and was ordered by President Vladimir Putin, the statement said.

Missile forces of the Southern Military District will be directly involved in the exercise. It will also require the participation of military aircraft and the Russian Navy, the ministry said.

The goal of the exercise is to iron out “the practical aspects of the preparation and deployment of non-strategic nuclear weapons,” it added.

The military cited “provocative statements and threats against Russia by certain Western officials” as the reason for the drill. The troops will confirm that they can “ensure unconditional territorial integrity and sovereignty” of the nation, it added.

Moscow has a wide range of nuclear-capable weapons, from long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles to smaller-range tactical nukes. Amid the Ukraine conflict, senior Russian officials, including Putin, have stated that the country’s nuclear doctrine allows the use of these weapons when the existence of the nation is at stake.

The US and its allies have accused Moscow of nuclear saber-rattling. Putin said in March that at no point in the conflict has the situation required such a radical move as a nuclear strike.

The US and its allies need a reminder of the nuclear risk posed by the Ukraine conflict, Dmitry Medvedev believes.

The US, the UK, France and other Western nations should take a Russian nuclear drill as a reminder of where escalation of the Ukraine conflict could take them, former President Dmitry Medvedev has said.

On Monday, the Russian Defense Ministry announced an imminent exercise to test the capability to deploy non-strategic nuclear weapons. It said the training was ordered by President Vladimir Putin after “provocative statements and threats” by Western officials.

Medvedev, who serves as deputy head of the Russian security council, referred to debates in the West about possible deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine, as well as “active encouragement [of Kiev] to use [Western] missile weapons against the entire Russian territory” as grounds for the drill.

Russia “will have to respond” to the proposed deployment of Western soldiers, “and this response will not be” in Ukraine, the Russian official warned. In that case “there will be no hiding on Capitol Hill, in the Elysee Palace or at 10 Downing Street.”

The upcoming Swiss-hosted peace conference on Moscow’s conflict with Kiev is a “parody of negotiations” in which Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky will be promoted, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has stated.

In an interview with Bosnian broadcaster ATV released on Sunday, he claimed that Bern is “lying” about its willingness to invite Russia to the upcoming summit scheduled for June 15 at the Burgenstock Resort near Lucerne.

“When our Swiss colleagues declare their desire to invite Russia to the first conference, they are lying,” Lavrov said, adding that Moscow will not participate in any events that promote Zelensky’s “peace formula.”

Such an investigation would “achieve nothing,” the Swedish Foreign Ministry told the agency.

There is no need for an international investigation into the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines, Sweden’s Foreign Ministry has told RIA Novosti news agency.

Last week, China's deputy envoy to the UN, Geng Shuang, called for a probe into the September 2022 blasts that ruptured the pipelines, which were built to deliver Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Europe. Countries should work together on an investigation “to bring the perpetrators to justice in order to prevent the reoccurrence of similar incidents,” Geng said.

When asked about Beijing’s proposal by RIA Novosti on Friday, the Swedish Foreign Ministry insisted that “there is no need for an international investigation. It’s going to achieve nothing.”

“An investigation into the incidents was carried out by the Swedish authorities in accordance with the fundamental principles of independence, impartiality and the rule of law. Other national investigations are still ongoing,” the ministry stated.

A “peace formula” on Ukraine boils down to cutting off Western weapons supplies to the Kiev regime, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said. The diplomat noted remarks by EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell who asserted that without Western arms supplies Ukraine would capitulate in two weeks. “An amazing confession! Here’s the entire ‘peace formula’ for you – the end of Western arms supplies to the Kiev regime,” she wrote on her Telegram channel. Earlier, Borrell said that the conflict in Ukraine could end as quickly as in “a couple of weeks” without Western military aid to Kiev.

“I know how to finish the war in Ukraine. I can finish the war in Ukraine in a couple of weeks just by cutting the supply. If I cut the supply of arms to Ukraine, Ukraine cannot resist – they will have to surrender and the war will finish,” Borrell said. Earlier, Swiss President Viola Amherd said her country would host a conference on the so-called Ukrainian “peace formula” at the Burgenstock resort near Lake Lucerne in central Switzerland this June. The Russian embassy confirmed that “the Swiss authorities have not sent Russia an invitation to the conference in Burgenstock.” Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that any talks on Ukraine without Russia are pointless, and are, in fact, “a negotiation process with no purpose.”

A Ukrainian military victory over Russia is unfeasible, a senior military intelligence official in Kiev has predicted. Peace talks with Moscow are nonetheless unlikely before 2025, he claimed. Vadim Skibitsky, the deputy head of Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency, shared his grim perception of the frontline situation in an interview with The Economist published on Thursday.

France has sent its first troops officially to Ukraine. They have been deployed in support of the Ukrainian 54th Independent Mechanized Brigade in Slavyansk. The French soldiers are drawn from France’s 3rd Infantry Regiment, which is one of the main elements of France’s Foreign Legion (Légion étrangère)....

The initial group of French troops numbers around 100. This is just the first tranche of around 1,500 French Foreign Legionnaires scheduled to arrive in Ukraine.

These troops are being posted directly in a hot combat area and are intended to help the Ukrainians resist Russian advances in Donbas. The first 100 are artillery and surveillance specialists.

Kiev is openly readying for a new attack on Russian territory, with the support of its Western backers, FM spokeswoman has said.

Any Western-backed Ukrainian attack against Russia’s Crimean Bridge or Crimea itself will be met with a powerful revenge strike from Moscow, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said.

The warning follows a recent post by Ukraine’s envoy to the UN, Sergey Kislitsa, which had a threatening tone, implying that the bridge connecting the Russian peninsula to the Krasnodar Region will not be standing by the end of the year.

According to Zakharova, Kiev is openly preparing for a new attack on the Crimean Bridge, with the support of the West. She told a press briefing on Friday that, on the eve of May 9, Russia’s annual Great Victory Day commemorating the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, “the Kiev regime and its Western masters are hatching plans for new terrorist attacks on Russian territory.”

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Ukraine has already lost more than 111,000 troops and 21,000 units of weapons and military equipment in 2024, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Friday.

"In total, this year, they [Kiev's losses] have exceeded 111,000 servicepeople, 21,000 units of weapons and military equipment," Shoigu said at a conference call with the senior staff of the Russian armed forces.

Moreover, Kiev loses 1,000 soldiers a day due to the demands of the United States and its allies to stop the offensive of the Russian armed forces at any cost, Shoigu said....

The minister said that the Russian military had taken control of 547 square kilometers (211 square miles) of the territory of new regions of the country since the beginning of the year.

Budapest is opposing a potential €100-billion ($107 billion), five-year NATO plan to fund Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has said. The draft plan on the military aid fund was presented to member states of the US-led bloc by Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg earlier this week, Szijjarto revealed. The minister made the remarks on Thursday to Hungarian broadcaster M1 before heading for a ministerial meeting of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in Paris.“On Tuesday, the NATO member states received the secretary-general’s proposal to raise 100 billion that NATO plans to spend on the war,” the diplomat said, adding that since the money is to be collected over five years, this means NATO “expects the hostilities to continue for this period.”

May 2, 2024

Featured • Odessa Massacre Ten Years On: How Radicals Drowned City in Blood to Subdue Ukraine, Ilya Tsukanov, Sputnik International, May 2, 2024
Good review of past events -- follow the links to see more.

Featured • SITREP 5/1/24: The Russian Steamroller Rolls On as Ukraine Braces for Impact, Simplicius, May 2, 2024
Too much, and too complex, to further summarize, per usual.

Featured • What 10 Years of U.S. Meddling in Ukraine Have Wrought (Spoiler Alert: Not Democracy), RealClear Wire,, Aaron Maté, Apr 30, 2024
Excellent review of events, very restrained -- too restrained, really. The full story would take a large book and be more damning.

Nowhere do we see Nordstream in here, and the full weight of the conclusions that can be made overall is left to the reader. That's fine. It should be damning enough as it is.

Featured • Russia defends traditional values the West is abandoning – Dugin to Carlson, RT, Apr 30, 2024

The Western world has abandoned classical liberalism in favor of a new version defined by the rule of minorities and woke-ism, the Russian philosopher explained.

The ever-growing anti-Russia sentiment in the West stems from the fact that Russia adheres to traditional values that Western “progressives” are trying to destroy, philosopher and political commentator Aleksandr Dugin said in an interview with journalist Tucker Carlson that was posted on the latter’s YouTube channel on Monday.

During the interview, Dugin laid out his view of the contemporary Western world and what he sees as the historical origins of its current ideology. He explained that the West has moved from “classical liberalism” – which professed individual freedom and democracy as understood as the rule of the majority – to a “new liberalism” defined by the rule of minorities and woke-ism. Rather than emphasizing freedom of the individual, the new incarnation of liberalism prescribes adherence to certain progressive values that are completely at odds with traditional values and in fact seeks to abolish them.

Carlson asked Dugin why many Westerners, even those who previously supported the Soviet Union, turned against Russia when President Vladimir Putin came to power in the early 2000s and started professing Russophobic ideas. The philosopher said that “Putin is a traditional leader” who defends traditional values, which run counter to those currently in vogue in the West.

READ MORE: Western media's favorite Russian philosopher: Who is Aleksandr Dugin, whose daughter was killed in a Moscow car bombing?

“When [Putin] came to power, from the very beginning, he started to extract Russia from global influence. He started to contradict the global progressive agenda… tried with success to restore traditional values – sovereignty of the state, Christianity, traditional family,” he said, explaining that Western progressives saw these developments as being in opposition to their values.

NATO is starting to deploy combat troops to Ukraine. Soldiers from Poland, France, the UK, Finland and other NATO members are arriving in larger numbers.

Although Russia says there are over 3,100 mercenaries in Ukraine, these newly arriving troops are not mercenaries. They are in uniform, home country proclaimed via insignia. They mostly are concentrated in the western part of the country, although in some cases they are close to the actual fighting in the east.

NATO is putting out the word these are not combat soldiers but are in Ukraine to operate sophisticated western hardware. But if they are firing at the Russians the only proper way to interpret their presence is that they are playing an active part in the shooting war.

May 2024

April 2024

March 2024

February 2024

January 2024

December 2023

November 2023

October 2023

September 2023

August 2023

July 2023

June 2023

May 2023

April 2023

March 2023

February 2023

January 2023

December 2022

November 2022

 • ‘The Real Purpose In Making The Bomb Was To Subdue The Soviets.’ Now It’s Happening Again, On A Vast Scale. Why? – July 22 At Fuller Lodge, Los Alamos Reporter, Jul 19, 2023

 • Bulletin 330: "'The real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets.'* Now it's happening again, on a vast scale. WHY?" A conversation with acclaimed historian Peter Kuznick and Greg Mello in Los Alamos, July 22, Jul 7, 2023

 • Ukraine War Makes it Harder to be a Nuclear ‘Dove’ | Our Land, Laura Paskus, New Mexico in Focus, Jun 30, 2023

 • Bulletin 329: Russia rules out nuclear disarmament negotiations; second week of Ukrainian offenses fail; what will US and NATO do? Build 60 projects in LANL's Pajarito Corridor?, Jun 17, 2023

 • Ukraine; Biden's Manicheism; the U.S. cannot even conduct a nuclear arms race, let alone win one, LASG friends ltr, Mar 16, 2023

 • Ukraine protest and updates, pit production delays and cost increases in NNSA's new budget, LASG friends ltr, Mar 14, 2023

 • Antiwar rally 2 pm Saturday in Albuquerque; LANL pits delayed, endorse the "Call for Sanity"; Ukraine update; the Nordstream investigation (and likely impeachment) "imperative" LASG friends ltr, Mar 11, 2023
 • Ukraine losses mount toward critical point; ANSWER rally against the war is now 2 pm (not 1 pm), March 18, Albuquerque; nearly half U.S. citizens believe WWIII is near, LASG friends ltr, Mar 7, 2023

 • Ukraine news and views; antiwar rally March 18; pending guest editorial; pit production precis, LASG friends ltr, Mar 3, 2023

 • Bulletin 325: Understanding the Nordstream sabotage and punishing those responsible, Feb 18, 2023

 • Ukraine news with comments and excerpts; bookmark for future reference if desired,LASG friends ltr, Feb 8, 2023

 • Bulletin 324: Opposition to Ukraine war gains visibility in New Mexico and via our web site, more broadly, Feb 6, 2023

 • Anti-nuclear activist opposes helping Ukraine, encourages peace, Santa Fe New Mexican, Feb 5, 2023

 • Bulletin 323: "Nuclear Hotseat" interview / Ukraine war updates, Feb 4, 2023

 • Bulletin 322: Right and Left To Join in D.C. Protest: ‘Not One More Penny for War in Ukraine’ / Bulletin of Atomic Scientists resets clock, blames Russia, Jan 25, 2023

 • $10 Trillion for Nuclear War: Racing to the Nuclear Cliff, The Socialist Program with Brian Becker, Jan 10, 2023

 • Bulletin 321: Last day for 2022 donations! / A few quick updates, Dec 31, 2022

 • Bulletin 320: Neocon humiliation -- or nuclear exchange / The centrality of war resistance in moral politics / 3 days left for 1:1 donation match!, Dec 29, 2022

 • Bulletin 319: Ukraine; NDAA: omnibus appropriations bill; fundraising --thank you; some matching funds still available, Dec 21, 2022

 • Stop the war now, Jean Nichols, The Taos News, Dec 19, 2022

 • Bulletin 318: Speak out now against further U.S. escalation in Ukraine; daily updates for your use, Dec 14, 2022

 • Agenda for tonight's emergency Ukraine meeting in Albuquerque, and by Zoom, Nov 15, 2022

 • Bulletin 314: Reminder re next week's antiwar, disarmament, & nuclear safety events: come if you can or tune in, outreach needed; pit interview on KNME tonight 7 pm; fundraising drive continues; erratum, Nov 11, 2022

 • Bulletin 313: Important meeting about Ukraine next week; DNFSB hearing in Santa Fe; more, Nov 7, 2022

 • Biden Administration releases aggressive nuclear strategy envisioning "first use" of nuclear weapons in wars like Ukraine, press release, Oct 27, 2022

 • Bulletin 310: Speak up! We urge you to take up the call for peace in Ukraine, Sep 25, 2022

 • Pope Francis: "World War III has been declared." We agree. Stop LANL's pit factory; Stop the U.S. war against Russia, presentation, Jun 15, 2022

 • Bulletin 301: Oppose the war! Demand and create accountability for lawmakers who fund and promote more war in Ukraine, May 16, 2022

 • Grave dangers loom in Ukraine war votes and escalations; opportunities open for journalists and citizens; We urge news media to widen debate, pose questions, create accountability, press release, May 16, 2022

 • LASG friends ltr: Thursday evening public discussion in Albuquerque: Ukraine, propaganda, progressives supporting Nazis and war, May 10, 2022

 • Escalation in Ukraine: The Nuclear War Danger is Real, Brian Becker & Greg Mello discuss the U.S. policy of waging proxy war on Russia, BreakThrough News, May 4, 2022

 • Bulletin 299: Emergency call to action: stop Biden's proposed $33 billion war escalation, Apr 28, 2022

 • Bulletin 298: Talk on pits & renewed U.S. nuclear weapons production Tuesday evening 4/26/22; antiwar billboard; what you can do, Apr 25, 2022

 • The core debate, Searchlight New Mexico, Mar 23, 2022

 • Bulletin 294: Please consider forwarding this fine statement from UNAC re Ukraine, Mar 23, 2022

 • Nuclear expert speaks on the dangers of war between the US and Russia, World Socialist Website, Mar 15, 2022

 • A Proposed Solution to the Ukraine War, Consortium News, Greg Mello, Mar 7, 2022

 • Bulletin 293: Ukraine conflict: If you want a ceasefire (as we do), stop firing, Mar 5, 2022

 • Bulletin 292: Statement on the Ukraine conflict and war with Russia, Mar 1, 2022

 • "What can we in New Mexico do?," LASG letter, Feb 23, 2022

 • Bulletin 288: US nuclear weapons since 2020: continuity and change, Dec 7, 2021 (see discussion of US, NATO, and Russia)

 • Nuclear experts speak on the dangers of war between the US and Russia, World Socialist Web Site, Apr 15, 2017

 • US Leaders Reject “Nuclear Winter” Studies, Ignore Existential Danger of Nuclear War. Turn a Blind Eye towards Armageddon, Steven Starr, Global Research, Nov 1, 2016

 • The Ukraine Conflict: What's Behind It? Why Is It Important?, Sep 26, 2015

 • Bulletin 200: Warhead budget bloat; U.S.-caused Ukraine catastrophe at the brink; hello peak oil, Feb 8, 2015