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On Tuesday, the military forces of Azerbaijan shelled territory in neighboring Armenia. “The hostilities erupted minutes after midnight, with Azerbaijani forces unleashing an artillery barrage and drone attacks in many sections of Armenian territory, according to the Armenian Defense Ministry,” reports to the Associated Press. The premier corporate propaganda outfit cited serious damage to “civilian infrastructure and also wounded an unspecified number of people,” including 49 Armenian soldiers (later updated to 99 soldiers).
“There are reports of dead and wounded among civilians and military servicemen,” said Hikmet Hajiyev, a spokesman for the Azerbaijani presidency.
The latest clash between the two rivals follows the decades-old conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, yet again another instance of violence over ethnicity and culture. According to the “international community” (those onboard with the neoliberal agenda dictated by the US), the region is recognized as part of Azerbaijan.
The Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast has a population of 192,000, 76% Armenian and 23% Azerbaijani. There are Russian and Kurdish minorities.
The 1988-1994 war prompted the Russian Federation sent peacekeepers to the disputed separatist region.
NATO Is Prepping Azerbaijan for NATO’s War
The highly biased Wikipedia does not mention an important detail—the presence of NATO in Azerbaijan.
In 1992, toward the end of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict NATO initiated relations with Azerbaijan and invited it to join the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, described as a liaison program with the Warsaw Pact states following the fall of the Soviet Union. This NATO “friendship” spinoff has provided an open door to introduce NATO programs in Azerbaijan.
“Documents are the main national papers that define key principles and goals of Azerbaijan’s individual partnership with NATO. In these documents Azerbaijan expressed its readiness for cooperation with NATO in the areas such as defence and security sector reforms, developing military forces according to NATO standards, participation in the NATO-led peace operations, civil emergency planning, addressing the emerging security challenges as well as science, environment and public diplomacy,” declares the Mission of the Republic of Azerbaijan to NATO. (Emphasis added.)
Last December, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg invited President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan to NATO Headquarters in Brussels, reportedly concerning “the security situation in the South Caucasus region. President Aliyev also met with the 30 Allied ambassadors in the North Atlantic Council,” the NATO website reported.
The North Atlantic Council is the decision-making apparatus of NATO.
Azerbaijan participated in Worthy Partner 2022, a military exercise held at the training ground of the 4th Infantry Brigade in Vaziani, Georgia, and supported by the NATO-Georgia Joint Training and Evaluation Center, according to News.am.
“The purpose of Worthy Partner 2022 is to improve readiness and interoperability between Georgia, the United States, regional partners and allied nations to ensure a stable and secure environment in the Black Sea region.”
In short, the put an end to Russian presence there (despite the long-standing presence of Russia’s Sevastopol Naval Base in Crimea, home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.)
Russia and Georgia became bitter enemies during the South Ossetia conflict. The brief war resulted in Russia establishing military bases in the Georgian province of Abkhazia. Russia recognized both provinces “as independent states, while most of the world has continued to consider them part of Georgia,” according to the Associated Press (as usual, no evidence is provided to verify this claim).
Ponars Eurasia released a memo in 2019 stating:
Under [Shavkat Mirziyoyev, president] Uzbekistan has been in high demand as a security partner. Russia has watched U.S. undertakings in Uzbekistan closely, making every effort to present its security cooperation as being more valuable to Tashkent than its partnership with Washington. The United States, however, has a distinct advantage in meeting Uzbekistan’s demands for high-quality professional military education (PME), one of the key pillars of Tashkent’s defense reform. Uzbekistan’s defense establishment is genuinely interested in transforming not only the out-of-date curriculum, doctrine, and training philosophy, but also the modes of thinking and learning in military education.
Mirziyoyev is characterized as an autocrat with tendencies of his mentor and predecessor, Islam Karimov, accused of boiling and freezing his opens to death.
The Ponars Eurasisa website has posted numerous links to articles favoring Ukraine in the conflict with Russia and its special operation to disarm and denazify the Ukraine.
Although Russia Federation President Putin is attempting to negotiate a truce between the opposing sides, the Armenia-Azerbaijan border clash has yet to de-escalate.
This ethnic and separatist conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh is a sideshow to NATO’s true intention in Uzbekistan. It is fair to say the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh plays a secondary role to the main objective—surrounding Russia (however, in the case of Uzbekistan, there is a very large buffer between the two countries, Kazakhstan).
Preparing the Kazakhstan Front
Relations between Kazakhstan and Russia were on good terms before the start of the conflict in the Ukraine. The two countries are founding members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and are additionally part of the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
The agreement included building the Baikonur Cosmodrome, but all of that is in question now that Russia has ordered the shutdown for a month of the Caspian Pipeline transporting oil from Kazakhstan’s massive Tengiz Field across Russia to the Black Sea.
Russia did this as part of the objective of closing down Europe as it continues to provide the regime in the Ukraine with arms and munitions totaling billions of euros. “Heavily dependent on fossil fuels, Kazakhstan is reliant on Russian pipelines for oil exports to Europe,” notes Reuters.
NATO and the US are prepared to inflame this situation to enlarge the offensive against Russia. Kazakhstan and Russia share the largest border in the world.
The US is determined to make headway in Central Asia. Sebastian Engels of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies writes:
Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and the ever-present threat of Islamic extremism provide sufficient reason to stay engaged in Central Asia. Training programs that professionalize Kazakhstan’s military can offer a cost-effective way for the United States to further a lasting partnership with Central Asia’s most stable country. These efforts must be nested within higher-level strategies, thoughtfully planned in coordination with the host nation, carefully executed by appropriate personnel, and continually scrutinized for value added to the U.S. goals for the country and Kazakhstan’s military.
However, Kazakhstan has attempted to stay neutral while the war wages in Ukraine, and this has been viewed with displeasure by Russia.
Foreign policy analyst and Visiting Researcher at Russia’s MGIMO University, Clint Ehrlich, tweeted a month before the outbreak of hostilities that the “situation in Kazakhstan is a much bigger deal than Western media is letting on… I believe it significantly increases the risk of NATO-Russia conflict.”
Part of the effort to destabilize Kazakhstan is to soften it up in preparation to, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin brazenly declared, “weaken” Russia so it cannot defend itself. Blinken also said Russia is actively trying to destabilize and occupy the country.
It is not clear if the recent riots in Kazakhstan are a product of NED (National Endowment for Democracy), a more subtle version of the CIA and its efforts to overthrow unfavored countries. The subversion unit is active in Kazakhstan.
“The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets depicted the violence as a result of the doubling of fuel prices and unhappiness with political authoritarianism and corruption,” opines PopularResistance.org.
Pepe Escobar wrote in Strategic Culture about the protesters provoking “total anarchy, robbery, looting, hundreds of vehicles destroyed, attacks with assault rifles, ATMs and even the Duty Free at Almaty airport [being] completely plundered.” This assessment dovetailed with that of Galym Ageleulov, a human rights activist in Almaty who participated in the protests. He described the crowd as “an unruly mob of…thugs…clearly organized by crime group marauders.”
This sounds a lot like the behavior of the Maidan thugs during the 2014 fascist coup d’Etat in Kyiv. They were graciously provided with treats by then Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, an especially vile bureaucrat married to top neon Robert Kagan.
“Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland [under Biden], run a remarkable family business: she has sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so America can meet these new security threats,” wrote the late Robert Parry of Consortium News.
Though there was no evidence that Putin had instigated the Ukraine crisis and indeed all the evidence indicated the opposite, the State Department peddled a propaganda theme to the credulous [more like actively complicit] mainstream U.S. news media about Putin having somehow orchestrated the situation in Ukraine so he could begin invading Europe. Former Secretary of State Clinton compared Putin to Adolf Hitler.
It reminds to be seen if Kazakhstan, with its sprawling frontier with Russia, will become a second front for the entirely insane effort to defeat Russia, assassinate Vladimir Putin, and break the nation into ethnically divided statelets controlled by the neoliberal bankster gang and its professional thieves, murderers, and hijackers of disfavored governments by way of NED color revolution and other means.
We should take Vladimir Putin and Russian General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi seriously. If Russia faces and existential threat, as seems to be the endgame for the one-world elite, it will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons to defend itself.
Of course, such a move would quickly escalate into a worldwide nuclear conflagration and the murder of all life on the planet, either directly or by way of nuclear winter.
Unfortunately, Americans are, by and large, wholly unaware or are blithely ignorant this prospect, instead playing the fool by putting Ukrainian flags on their social media accounts, totally unaware the Ukraine gambit fed by the US and its military-industrial complex. As the covid bioweapon demonstrated, Americans will do whatever their government instructs, so long as the right amount of fear and dread are employed.
Maybe radiation sickness while change their minds.
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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from Al Mayadeen English
