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***

In response to a FOIA request filed by TheBlaze, HHS revealed that it purchased advertising from major news networks including ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as cable TV news stations Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, legacy media publications including the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, digital media companies like BuzzFeed News and Newsmax, and hundreds of local newspapers and TV stations. These outlets were collectively responsible for publishing countless articles and video segments regarding the vaccine that were nearly uniformly positive about the vaccine in terms of both its efficacy and safety.

Hundreds of news organizations were paid by the federal government to advertise for the vaccines as part of a “comprehensive media campaign,” according to documents TheBlaze obtained from the Department of Health and Human Services. The Biden administration purchased ads on TV, radio, in print, and on social media to build vaccine confidence, timing this effort with the increasing availability of the vaccines. The government also relied on earned media featuring “influencers” from “communities hit hard by COVID-19” and “experts” like White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and other academics to be interviewed and promote vaccination in the news.

Though virtually all of these newsrooms produced stories covering the COVID-19 vaccines, the taxpayer dollars flowing to their companies were not disclosed to audiences in news reports, since common practice dictates that editorial teams operate independently of media advertising departments and news teams felt no need to make the disclosure, as some publications reached for comment explained.

The Biden administration engaged in a massive campaign to educate the public and promote vaccination as the best way to prevent serious illness or death from COVID-19.

Congress appropriated $1 billion in fiscal year 2021 for the secretary of health to spend on activities to “strengthen vaccine confidence in the United States.” Federal law authorizes HHS to act through the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies to award contracts to public and private entities to “carry out a national, evidence-based campaign to increase awareness and knowledge of the safety and effectiveness of vaccines for the prevention and control of diseases, combat misinformation about vaccines, and disseminate scientific and evidence-based vaccine-related information, with the goal of increasing rates of vaccination across all ages … to reduce and eliminate vaccine-preventable diseases.”

Anyone who has spent time reading the news, watching TV news coverage, or browsing social media in the past year has more than likely been exposed to the government’s advertising. HHS ads posted to YouTube have been viewed millions of times and commercials featuring celebrities like singer Sir Elton John and actor Sir Michael Caine have been the subject of news coverage, such as this feature from NBC News:

“Fear-based vaccine ads” from HHS featuring “survivor” stories from coronavirus patients who were hospitalized in intensive care units were covered by CNN and discussed on ABC’s “The View” when they were unveiled last October.

Though the federal government was paying each of these companies and others for pro-vaccine advertising while news reports covered the same vaccines, many editorial boards say they have firewall policies that prevent advertisers from influencing news coverage.

“Advertisers pay for space to share their messages, as was the case here, and those ads are clearly labeled as such,” explained Shani George, vice president of communications for the Washington Post, in a statement. “The newsroom is completely independent from the advertising department,” she said.

A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Times gave a similar statement, emphasizing that the “newsroom operates independently from advertising.”

TheBlaze reached out to several other publications that either declined to comment or did not respond before publication.

The COVID-19 Public Education Campaign by HHS also used earned media outreach — word of mouth marketing — with the goal of having “trusted messengers and influencers” speak to news organizations to “provide factual, timely information and steps people can take to protect themselves, their families, and their communities.”

As a result of that effort, various government officials have frequently been quoted by reporters covering the COVID-19 pandemic, offering factual information on vaccine efficacy and safety. An October article from BuzzFeed News featuring the “essential facts” about who is eligible for a COVID-19 booster shot, for example, reported pro-vaccine statements from CDC director Rochelle Walensky, FDA official Peter Marks, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, and University of California, San Francisco epidemiologist George Rutherford.

The article stressed how studies show “boosters work” and cited FDA data that suggests getting a booster shot “can reestablish strong protection against the virus.” BuzzFeed News advised everyone age 65 or older, people with health conditions that put them at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19, those like healthcare workers who are at risk from coming into contact with COVID-19 positive people for work, and anyone in areas with high virus transmission to get vaccine boosters, in accordance with guidance from the CDC.

Other publications, such as the Los Angeles Times, featured advice from experts on how readers could convince vaccine-hesitant people in their lives to change their minds. The Washington Post covered “the pro-vaccine messages people want to hear.” Newsmax has reported how the vaccines have “been demonstrated to be safe and effective” and “encouraged citizens, especially those at risk, to get immunized.”

HHS did not immediately respond when asked if the agency used taxpayer dollars to pay for people to be interviewed, or for a PR firm to place them in interviews with news outlets.

Since the COVID-19 vaccines manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson were given emergency approval for use in the United States last year, more than 215 million Americans have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. An estimated 94.6 million people have also received at least one booster dose. About 65% of the U.S. population has now been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, including 75% of U.S. adults and 88.8% of seniors.

HHS has not yet revealed how much advertising money was spent on each media platform.

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Featured image is from TheBlaze

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***

Paul Nurse is no expert, he says. The geneticist and former president of the Royal Society is humble about the limits of his knowledge when it comes to covid-19, and yet on the hot topic of testing he does not hesitate to use his prominent voice.

“Under Matt Hancock, it was a shambles, frankly, given the strength and quality of UK biomedical science,” he says of the test and trace system. “They immediately turned only to private company solutions without recognising that that had to be set up from scratch when it was needed almost immediately. It is possible, but not something you can put together in weeks. I think they made a fundamental strategic error.”

What irks Nurse is that he and other research leaders with PCR testing expertise and infrastructure at their fingertips were ignored when UK science was chomping at the bit to help fight the virus.

“We have throughout the country many, many academic laboratories with both the facilities and the skilled staff to do these tests, and they were all sitting at home under furlough. [At the Francis Crick Institute, where I am director], we brought them back in and within three weeks we were doing around 10-15% of total test capacity in the country when we’d never done anything of the sort before.”

Nurse appealed to then health secretary Hancock to roll out what his institute was doing around the country. Within weeks, he claims, local laboratories could be providing a 24 hour turnaround testing service using pre-existing healthcare logistics.

“Here could have been a contribution to the complete chaos of the first round when people weren’t being tested—including healthcare professionals.

“We wrote to Hancock about it. Peter Ratcliffe, clinical physician and another Nobel laureate, wrote to him. We talked about it on the radio and television. We got no replies, then after three months we got a holding note from a civil servant. It beggars belief,” he says.

At the Crick, PCRs can be turned around very rapidly, usually within 8-9 hours.

“You just have to be good at logistics and be well organised, and also to have the testing facilities close to the people being tested so that it can work efficiently,” says Nurse.

The Crick’s efforts have kept them “surprisingly active” over the past two years. Nurse is proud of how the institute’s scientists have provided testing for 10 local hospitals and 150 care homes, set up within a week of the start of the pandemic.

Nurse fears that, if a similar pandemic occurs again, the government is likely to do the same thing and fall back on the private sector. And even today, it needs a contingency plan for testing.

“They’re not going to keep testing capacity up at half a million a day running for ever and ever. They can’t afford to do it.”

The UK government is starting to withdraw free testing for everyone, as we learn to live with the virus. Do you think that the time is right for that?

I’m getting more relaxed about it, but given the massive amount of virus that’s circulating around the globe and the extraordinary rapidity in modern societies of how that can spread, we have to always worry about new variants and what they might bring.

The circumstances in which [omicron] is hitting the UK now are certainly not as lethal as covid was 18 months ago, whether that’s partly because of the virus or the fact that so many of us are vaccinated. We know from our own [ongoing] research, although it’s not yet published, that the booster massively increases immunity. We’ve tested over 300 people, including myself, and [antibody levels are] massively increased compared with one dose and two doses of the vaccine.

[But] I’m not as blasé as some—there is a pool of virus there, it’s almost certainly mutating, so something else could go wrong. There is a case for complacency with this. And of course the answer is worldwide vaccination, which has got to be a focus.

Might the tribulations with testing—in terms of the science, the technology, the infrastructure, our understanding, and interpretation of results—lead to benefits for research?

What has been evident and obvious is that high quality testing coupled with essentially social measures are the only defences with a new viral pathogen. It’s clear that testing is a frontline defence system that will always be important and was always identified as being important. Long term planning processes in the NHS over the past 10 years were aware of it and did nothing about it. It was obvious—even to a yeast geneticist like me—that this was the case, and yet nothing happened.

What has this taught us? We should take notice of scientists, and when they say something is important, test it properly in the political domain rather than having a report like the one over flu [Exercise Cygnus in 2016]1 and then just burying it and forgetting about it.

We need to prepare for these sorts of things. The fact that we had no personal protective equipment was ridiculous. We were being run by accountants rather than those who know what goes on—the cost of having a warehouse that is immediately available, and you might throw stuff away after 5-10 years, but you keep it stocked up, compared with [doing nothing and] killing people. We need a major new shift in how to do this, driven not by the accountants, not by constant attention to the penny that can be saved, but [by] the lives and the economy that can be saved.

The UK has long been regarded as a world leader in research—how will the pandemic affect that in the years to come?

I don’t think the research infrastructure as a whole responded brilliantly to keeping students, postdocs, and younger colleagues productive during the pandemic. Like what we did [at the Crick]—it would not have been difficult for many universities to [get involved in testing], but they didn’t, probably because they’re risk averse.

Even for our staff, even though we protected the workplace and kept our research activity going, our graduate students and postdocs work on projects that last for three to seven years, and they’ve been blighted by the pandemic. They’ve not interacted with people, they’ve not had meetings, conferences, seminars—the bread and butter of intellectual research activity has been severely truncated. And that’s brought stress for these younger people, and they are unhappy. I think the system has got to support them because otherwise we will have a cohort of people who didn’t have proper training, who didn’t have the proper exposure to research, who couldn’t make sensible decisions about what their career should be.

What do you see as the biggest challenges to biomedical research over the next five years?

Firstly, there are the consequences of covid-19. The second thing is that we in the UK think we’re very good at research and biomedical life sciences, which in general we are, but we should not rest on our laurels. I’m writing a review for the government [on research and development in the UK], and it isn’t just a question of money and investment, it’s a question of how we order it, how we structure it, how we deliver it.

If we look at the more academic side, we have about £8-9bn being spent in the UK on what I call “discovery research” at the interface between translation and commercial application, which is largely driven by universities. And we have over £4bn a year going into what are called public service research establishments, which are run by the government. These two sectors barely talk to each other. And we know there’s a lot of stress in university departments about people finding money to do research and so on. This all needs to be looked at.

The term “life sciences” has come to simply mean biomedicine and the drug industry, but it is much wider than that, including applications in agriculture, protecting the environment, and other forms of biotechnology. This has been almost lost in the fact that we have a life sciences strategy that takes no notice of other categories. It’s just invisible. We need a new life sciences strategy that embraces the entire territory of life sciences because the different categories have much to learn from each other when it comes to applications.

Finally, the obvious one is we need funding. You only can make a case for funding if you deserve funding. Now is the moment [given everything that science has delivered over the past two years]. So let’s get out there and make the case for it. And not by calling for individual sectors, which is where we tend to go tribal. We need to make a concerted effort to communicate that science as a whole—understanding of the world and ourselves—leads to improvement of humankind and increasing prosperity and protection of the environment.

Has science become more politicised and polarised?

I think communication is critical between scientists, political leaders, policy makers, and the public. And I’m not sure we’re brilliant at it. We need to consider very carefully the relationship between scientific discovery, research, public policy, and communication with the public because we’ve seen politicians having to adapt to science in a way that they’ve never had to before. And they think that one liners like “We are following the science” are appropriate. But that just shows they don’t really know what science is, because there are going to be a range of opinions. What is the evidence base? What is the reasonable thing to follow?

My view is that people have mostly done their best, including the politicians. I give them a hard time, but I think they’ve all had a hard time, and I think we have to recognise that they’re not going to get everything right, just as scientists wouldn’t. But now we need to reassess. We need a healthy relationship between science and the public, and for decision making to be built on it. How can we present science in a way that engages the public, leads to proper outcomes, and doesn’t lead to these one liners, which simply distort the whole process?

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Paul Nurse graduated with a degree in biology from the University of Birmingham and then with a PhD from the University of East Anglia. A yeast geneticist, his research looks at the cell cycle, which led to the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his part in discoveries of protein molecules that control the division (duplication) of cells.

He is a former chief executive of Cancer Research UK and former president of Rockefeller University in New York City. He has been the director and chief executive of the Francis Crick Institute in London for 10 years, during which time he also served for five years as president of the Royal Society. He was knighted by the Queen in 1999.

Mun-Keat Looi is an international features editor.

“Emergency Powers” – to End Humanity

March 7th, 2022 by Julian Rose

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‘The emergency powers’ we have witnessed being enforced in Canada – and by another name in Austria, Italy, France, Australia, New Zealand and Greece in recent weeks  – are quite obviously without precedent. The spectre of Prime Ministers and Presidents awarding themselves demagogic powers of over-reach to force their citizens to comply with the prison persuasions of a police state – represents outright war on humanity.

Brutal acts of thuggery that, in one fell swoop, smash what until now most have considered sacrosanct civil codes of justice and basic human rights.

Evoking such ‘emergency powers’ to crush the right to peaceful protest sets all the red lights flashing simultaneously, putting us on high alert.

The precipitous events in Ukraine have stolen the focus from the swelling voices of reason amongst citizens under the Covid cosh. But this doesn’t take away from the fact that an actual war has been declared right in our own backyards and is being pursued here and now. A war that is essentially as repressive and vindictive as classical weapons based wars of attrition. 

The evoking of dictatorial powers to crush a nation’s own people is deeply criminal. Evoking such powers to brutally enforce absolute control over peace loving citizens is a crime of truly heinous proportions.

The major question raised in the minds of all sentient humans is who could possibly be so devoid of humanity as to be able to enforce such a crime?

In attempting to answer this question we should consider whether this form of evil stems from a recognised psychological sickness, or whether it results from a pathological form of conditioning carried-out on those who willingly open themselves to being programmed?

A form of such conditioning is widely found to be operating within the ranks of technocratic institutions under the title ‘applied behavioural psychology.’ One of a number of psychological tools used by the 0.5% cabal seeking to establish a New World Order/Great Reset centralising power over mankind – including the theft of human DNA and ultimately the complete robotisation of human kind.

What we can ascertain without the need for further uncertainty is that amongst world ‘leaders’ of today, a percentage are clinically insane – seriously mentally ill. So when dealing with those who have no qualms and no emotional instinct against using extreme repression to get their way, one must start from the position of clearly recognising that one is dealing with a person who, in rational circumstances, would be hospitalised and under special treatment.  Not running a country or deciding the future direction of the planet.

One doesn’t plead with a clinically insane person for the return of one’s stolen civil liberties. Nor should one attempt to enter into a rational/intellectual conversation with someone who is regarding one as ‘abnormal’ because one has feelings and emotions. A pathologically possessed person sees a balanced individual that way – and his cold heart finds no commonality with the great majority of human beings.

Brave leaders of resistance movements can suddenly find themselves face to face with a senior state figurehead in an immaculately pressed and ironed suit, perfect manners, seemingly steely resolve and a pre-prepared script in his brain – and think this individual must be clever, successful and strong – but somehow gone astray. Someone who, with enough gentle persuasion and/or prayer, must finally come around to taking a rational and understanding view concerning resolving the conflict in question.

But in truth the good resistance leader in such a situation, is delusional. He or she is not aware that hoping for a rational response from a pathologically driven individual is a futile expectation.

Trudeau’s training as one of Klaus Schwab’s ‘young leaders’ guaranteed that no answer would emerge in response to the Canadian trucker’s call for dialogue. The training indoctrinates the trainee to have no other position than the one which gets the job done.

The same goes for senior technocrats, most politicians and virtually all employees of State hierarchies. We are dealing with entities that are programmed to perform; so what one is facing is a programme that looks like a human.

Only once we have absorbed this fact can we then plan an approach that fits the circumstances. Develop a tactic which fully takes-in the reality that one can’t negotiate with a pre-programmed cyborg.

To be successful, such a plan must be based upon a methodology which fits the reality. That addresses the actual circumstances.

In Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film ‘2001 a Space Odyssey’ the space mission’s logistics are heavily reliant upon ‘Hal’ the onboard computer. But the hero (Dave) is not aware that Hal has been programmed to follow a suicidal mission deep into space.

Hal is programmed to issue advice verbally and persuasively.  It takes a strong action of will for Dave (captain of the space mission) – having discovered the deception – to de-programme Hal and manually re-set the mission’s course back to Earth.

Precisely the same act of courage is needed now, in 2022. The world has been set (programmed) on a course that, if not diverted, will dehumanise the human race and disinvest the planet of its living soul.

In Kubrick’s film, the hero manages to retain his individual will power and self assurance, ultimately resisting and reversing the instructions being proffered by super computer Hal.

Make no mistake, that is exactly what is required of us at this critical moment of history.

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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and holistic teacher. Julian’s acclaimed book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is particularly recommended reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


On March 4, clashes between the Russian Armed Forces and the Ukrainian military continued west of Kyiv. Russian forces have expanded the control zone in the area forcing Ukrainian formations to retreat.

Fierce battles are taking place in the village of Bucha. The Russian Army took control of it in the morning of March 3, but the Ukrainian Army launched a counteroffensive. Serious clashes also occurred in the village of Irpin.

No significant changes of the situation took place near Kharkiv. Russian troops are on the northern outskirts of the city and bypass it from the southeast. They regularly deliver precise strikes on places where pro-Kiev forces are concentrated. In response, Ukrainian units used rocket launchers, at least some of which were deployed in residential areas. An operation to completely clean up the city from pro-Kiev forces is expected in the near future.

In Mariupol, clashes continue in the suburbs of the city. The Ukrainian army and nationalist battalions are trying to resist the superior forces of the DPR and Russia. Negotiations are underway to organize humanitarian corridors for the withdrawal of civilians. The operation to fully clean up the city from the remaining pro-Kiev units are yet to be launched.

In Vonovakha, the Russian military and forces of people’s republics have been developing their operation to eliminate the grouping of pro-Kiev forces there. Ukrainian Army and nationalist battalions suffered significant losses in manpower and equipment. At the same time, DPR forces have almost reached the town of Severodonetsk from the north.

In the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk direction, Russian forces are advancing towards Krasny Liman from the northeast, having taken control over Balakleya. They advance towards the settlement of Izyum. At the moment, there are battles and airstrikes in the area. The main aviation targets are the remaining facilities occupied by the Ukrainian military and the territorial defense fighters. By taking Izyum under the control, the joint forces of Russia and the LPR will create the possibility of encirclement of the grouping of Kiev forces in this area of operations.

The Ukrainian military still holds positions near Horlivka. Pro-Kiev forces carry out regular artillery strikes on Donetsk. According to DPR authorities, civilian objects are the main targets.

Nikolaev is partially blocked by Russian forces. An operation is being prepared to take the city under the full control. Eyewitnesses report the concentration of units of the Ukrainian Army and territorial defense forces in the southern outskirts. As of the morning of March 4, no clashes were reported there.

Intense fighting is taking place near Voznesensk. In order to hinder the attack on Kyiv from the south, the Ukrainian military blew up two crossings across the Yujniy Bug River. According to experts, the advance on Odessa is planned after the establishment of the full control over Nikolaev.

In Kherson, Russian troops are gradually establishing the full control over the region. The delivery of humanitarian aid has begun. The supply of water from the North Crimean Canal to the regions of the Crimean peninsula was organized.

Russian forces blocked the city of Chernihov. Fighting erupted to the north of it. However, no direct assault was launched.

Meanwhile, the Russians started establishing control of Energodar town. Now they are working to eliminate military positions of the Ukrainian Army in the city. Late on March 3 and early on March 4, clashes took place in the area, including areas near Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant where the Ukrainian Army set positions. This allowed the Zelensky government to speculate that the Russian advance may endanger the nuclear plant. Despite this, local sources report that by the morning Russians had established control and secured the facility.

In general, Kiev troops are retreating to the north of Zaporizhzhia Region, where the Russian Armed Forces are also advancing.

The second round of the Ukrainian-Russian negotiations achieved no breakthrough. Nonetheless, the sides agreed to work on establishing of ‘green corridors’ for evacuation of civilians and for deliveries of humanitarian aid.

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Ukraine-Russia Crisis: Not to Give In to Pressures

March 7th, 2022 by Belgrade Forum

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


The root causes and the escalation of the Ukrainian crisis arise from, and rest on, the U.S.-led NATO’s strategy of military expansion to the East and threatening security of Russia, whom the West has defined as the enemy in its doctrines.

The first victims of NATO’s strategy of eastward expansion were Serbian people and Serbia. Their sanctions, demonization and isolation applied during the 1990s against Serbia and the Serbs are presently re-applied against Russia and the Russian people.

The centers of power which have, back in the day, prevented the implementation of the Peace Plan in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and presently demand revision of the Dayton Accords and UNSC Resolution 1244, are now preventing the implementation of the Minsk Peace Agreement in Ukraine, rejecting negotiations on equal security, and firmly pushing for further expansion and ultimately for military encirclement of Russia.

Serbia and Russia, the Serbian and Russian people are centuries-old friends, allies and strategic partners. Russia provides invaluable support to Serbia in her preserving own sovereignty and territorial integrity and also in efforts for peacefully resolving the issues related to Kosovo and Metohija, all in line with international law, UN Security Council Resolution 1244, and the Serbian Constitution.

As a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council, Russia protected Serbia from groundless accusations for alleged genocide, coming from the West. It goes without saying that Serbia must not accuse, or impose any measures and sanctions against such a friend and partner as Russia is, in relenting to pressures coming from those same subjects who bear the greatest responsibility for the gravest violations of the UN Charter and international law in general, for the criminal aggression of NATO in 1999, and for illegal secession of Priština. The harder, more turbulent and volatile the times are, the greater the moral obligation to respect trusted friends and allies is.

Public speculation on whether Russia might be excluded from the United Nations is not well judged. Pursuant to the UN Charter, any initiative would have beforehand to secure consent of the permanent members of the Security Council. Any such attempt in that body would certainly be vetoed Russia, if not China as well. In other words, the UN Security Council would not be able to refer a valid proposal to the General Assembly. Russia has become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by virtue of the act establishing the world organization, as the country that had contributed the most, and had laid the greatest human sacrifice to the altar of the Allies’ victory in World War II and, accordingly, this is the status she cannot be deprived of.

Any contrary course of actions would only make the UN share the fate of the League of Nations. Needless to say, all are aware of what would that pave the way for.

Public speculations on the destiny of UN Security Council Resolution 1244 that go so far as to mention a possibility of the People’s Republic of China withdrawing its support for this universally binding legal document, in succumbing to a hypothetical pressure from the West, does not benefit anyone, least of all Serbia. For Serbia, UN SC Resolution 1244 is and should remain an irreplaceable generally binding legal document of enduring importance, until its consistent and full implementation.

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Video: Did NATO Push Ukraine into War?

March 7th, 2022 by wionews.com

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


The Ukraine conflict has been ‘westsplained’ enough.

On Gravitas Plus, Palki Sharma tells you how Western arrogance & NATO’s expansionism are also to blame, how their actions precipitated the crisis in Ukraine.

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video

Crisis in Ukraine: The Global Risks to Commodities

March 7th, 2022 by Wood Mackenzie

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***

The geopolitical tensions caused by the conflict in Ukraine has had an immediate effect on the global economy and markets. There will be lasting implications for commodities, energy policy and the energy transition.

The world’s dependence on Russia for certain commodities cannot be overstated ‒ from gas, coal, oil, iron ore, aluminium, platinum group metals and zinc to copper, lead, petrochemicals and fertilisers. Many major international oil and gas companies, utilities and miners are invested in Russia.

Our global team has analysed the risks to commodities and corporate exposure, as well as the wider economic fallout. Read on for a brief outline of our views. For more detail, fill in the form to contact our experts.

Gas: short-term pragmatism, long-term change coming

The situation in Ukraine piles more pressure onto a European gas market that was already going through its worst crisis on record. Russian pipeline imports account for 38% of EU demand. If the EU were to impose sanctions that stopped Russian gas flows today, it could muddle through this winter, but struggle to build gas inventories for next winter. Prices would climb. Industries would need to shut down. Inflation would spiral. The European energy crisis would, we believe, trigger a global recession.

But Russia, too, would suffer if it halted gas flows. Consequently, we think business as usual is the most likely outcome, though the EU will inevitably be forced to question its dependency on Russian gas.

Coal: shock from European loss of Russian coal would ripple through global markets

Having to replace Russian coal volumes would result in a price shock to global coal markets and a coal shortage in Europe. Russian coal accounts for roughly 30% of European metallurgical coal imports and over 60% of European thermal coal imports. The primary issue with replacing Russian coal exports in Europe is its reliance on Russia’s particular quality of coal.

Coal-fired power currently accounts for around 14% of Europe’s generation mix. The impact on European power markets from a Russian coal shortage would not be as significant as gas. Crucially, though, Europe may not be able to depend on coal plants to make up for gas-fired generation losses.

Crude oils and refined products: too big to fail?

Crude oil

Although a risk, we do not expect Russia to curtail its oil exports in response to sanctions because its revenues would be sharply reduced. One sanction under consideration is blocking Russia from the SWIFT communication system and other dollar payment infrastructure. Russia has alternative payment methods, but the transition could disrupt exports temporarily.

Russia and Saudi Arabia are partners in an OPEC+ production restraint agreement. The Saudis have shown little appetite for helping the US deal with higher oil prices. In the case of an actual oil supply cut-off, OPEC would be more likely to consider using spare capacity to help offset losses.

Contact our experts with the form above to find out our views on the short- and longer-term direction of crude prices.

Refined products

Russian diesel/gas oil is of greater significance to Europe, as the region imports more than 8% of its demand from Russia. Fuel oil and residues are traded globally and often consumed as feedstocks by US Gulf Coast refiners or as bunker fuel for commercial shipping in Asia. As for crude oil, we do not expect a turn away from Russia’s refined product exports.

We do not expect a demand surge based on gas-to-oil switching if the crisis affects Russia’s gas exports. Fuel switching demand for heating in Europe is limited to Germany. In the power generation sector, European oil-fired capacity is either idled or shuttered, limiting the upside to oil demand.

Metals: supply disruption risk to already tight markets

Ukraine has few metal extraction and processing production facilities of scale, so the disruption to production will have a relatively small impact globally. Ceasing the output and export of certain commodities, such as aluminium, platinum group metals and iron ore, however, would have a disproportionate impact, as markets are already under supply pressure.

Of greater consequence are any limits on the ability of Russian producers to import raw materials to or export finished products from Russia. Another concern is whether counterparties are willing or able to transact with their offshore entities. As sanctions ratchet up, any metals and mining companies whose shareholders have links to the Kremlin are at risk.

Contact our experts for more on the potential disruptions to metal supply.

Petrochemicals: an obstacle to Russia’s major expansion plans

The short-term impact of the situation in Ukraine is likely to be felt through two main petrochemical channels: energy prices and sanctions. Any additional premiums will probably have to be absorbed in the form of reduced margins.

The precise impact of sanctions will depend on their final form. Russia accounts for just under 16% of total European petrochemical production, with its highest exposure in the polyethylene chain. This makes Russia an important – but not critical – contributor to the industry.

Corporate: international exposure

IOC exposure to Russia is concentrated in the hands of a few: BP and TotalEnergies have by far the largest positions of the Majors. Wintershall DEA is proportionately the most exposed through its two large upstream JVs with Gazprom and the current crisis could influence the timing of its IPO.

Stricter rules around access to the international financial system could hurt IOCs’ ability to receive dividends and other payments. Targeted sanctions against their Russian partners seem unlikely, but would present a much more profound challenge.

In the power sector, only legacy investments remain. They are are neither core nor strategic. The Russian metals and mining industry has seen similar diminishing international involvement. Glencore is the last one left, but its exposure accounts for less than 1% of its market capitalisation.

Economics: avoiding energy trade disruption could avert severe impact on the global economy

Russia’s economy is in a better position to withstand sanctions than it was in 2014 when it annexed Crimea. The conflict hurts Ukraine’s economy most. If energy flows are affected, the global impact could be severe. Neither Russia nor the Western allies will want to disrupt flows, but it cannot be ruled out.

Russia has built a reserve cushion that could soften the impact of sanctions short term. Being frozen out of international bond markets means new sovereign debt needs to be financed domestically. Reserves cover the US$ 50 billion due in principal repayments on government debt through 2025.

In Ukraine, the conflict risks disrupting economic activity and causing damage to capital stock. Its economy is likely to be back in recession in 2022 unless the situation de-escalates quickly.

Contact our experts to find out more.

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


The conflict in Ukraine has now entered its second week, with no end in sight. Casualties continue to rise and the flow of refugees through Poland, southern Russia and other countries grows daily. Hostilities must be brought to a quick end, and military confrontation replaced by diplomatic negotiations to stop the war before it spins out of control.

Preliminary negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian authorities have begun, but so far only reached agreement to open ‘humanitarian corridors’ for civilians fleeing some of the conflict zones.

While this is welcome, the main weakness in this limited negotiation process is that  the U.S., one of the key ‘players’ in this conflict, is not at the table, and has repeatedly shown no interest in achieving a settlement on the big issues which have given rise to this crisis.

To achieve any meaningful progress, the world’s peace forces must demand that the two main protagonists, Russia and the U.S., enter into immediate, serious, and comprehensive negotiations (without pre-conditions) to achieve an immediate ceasefire, the de-escalation of tensions, and a lasting solution guaranteeing the sovereignty and national security of all states on the European continent.

In our view, this agreement needs to encompass the following:

(1) the withdrawal of all foreign troops and military personnel – Russian, NATO and foreign mercenaries – from Ukraine;

(2) guarantees of the national security interests of all countries, including an immediate halt to the Eastern expansion of NATO, and its rollback to pre-1997 levels, creating a ‘buffer zone’ of neutral states between NATO and the Russian Federation;

(3) the removal of all sanctions and other unilateral coercive measures against all states;

(4) adoption and implementation of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW); and

(5) restoration of the language and cultural rights of the Russian-speaking and other national minorities within Ukraine (subject to international monitoring).

While this kind of settlement may well seem implausible and unrealizable, we are convinced that only such a comprehensive agreement can help end the current conflict and create a lasting basis for peace and cooperation among all the peoples on the European continent.  The alternative – a return to Cold War hostilities, economic warfare and nuclear brinksmanship – is too frightening to contemplate.

For its part, the Trudeau government, which has sadly played a leading role in stoking this crisis and fueling the flames of war, must abandon this dangerous course, and instead embrace and champion such a path to peace. Canada can show real, independent leadership by rejecting its slavish kowtowing to Washington’s every demand, and by removing all CAF personnel from, and ending all arms shipments to Ukraine, and by withdrawing from the NATO military alliance.

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


Top U.S. officials traveled to Caracas over the weekend to gauge whether the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro might be willing to distance itself from Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, in exchange for an easing of U.S. sanctions on its oil sector.

A source familiar with the talks confirmed on Sunday to McClatchy and the Miami Herald that the meeting occurred, but did not provide details. Reuters reported that the sides made little progress in their first meeting, which included a top White House official and Maduro. The New York Times first reported about the meeting.

 

The United States has supported the opposition to Maduro’s government, and formally severed diplomatic ties in 2019. But the meeting suggests that the White House is willing to engage after years of stalemate.

Read complete article here

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It’s clear that the Biden Regime is committed to sadistically collapsing the United States, with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm all saying over the past week that the world war simmering in Ukraine will not derail the WEF’s genocidal Green New Deal.

They will continue to block US energy independence and not restart US energy production. Instead, buying oil from Iran is now “on the table.”

Complete Upside Down World.

Ice Age Farmer, Christian Westbrook is back with news about the inevitable front in this war: the engineered global food crisis.

He notes that Egypt is the largest buyer of wheat from the Black Sea region of Ukraine and Russia and they’ve been rushing to find alternative wheat suppliers and to stockpile as much wheat as possible as quickly as possible.

Recall that during the Arab Spring a decade ago, the price of bread was the initial trigger for the protests that led to the resignation of then-President Hosni Mubarak.

Christian says, “Egypt is desperately trying to bolster their food supply. Is the EU doing the same thing? Is the US trying to protect its citizens? No. Neither is.

“Yesterday, I mentioned that the EU on Wednesday convened a meeting of their agriculture ministers and is enacting a EU food crisis contingency plan, a crisis mechanism to monitor a food shortage.

“However yesterday, Thursday,  the agriculture minister of Germany announced that despite calls to relax the restrictions on farmers – there’s the EU Common Agricultural policy. The cap under the Farm-to-Fork Program says that farmers can’t use all their land. They have to leave 4% of it or more fallow, in order to receive subsidies which make farming economically possible. The agriculture minister of Germany announced yesterday they would not be relaxing those restrictions.

“In other words, ‘We’re not even going to put our land to use. We’re not going to try and grow wheat, now that we’ve cut off the 40% of global exports from the Ukraine. Just forget it, we want this crisis,’ is what he is telegraphing and that’s why German farmers were furious.

“Here’s one video by a farmer named Christian. I’ll post a link to his YouTube channel below and you don’t have to understand his language to get the message here he is very clear in his words when he says, ‘Hunger is Murder’ by the agricultural minister. ‘What you’re doing is murder.’

“Some of his choice quotes: ‘In the midst of this catastrophe, this Green eco-fanaticism equates to putting ecological madness before human lives.’

“In other words, putting your land and not using it for growing crops, even as people are starving is murder, because that’s the whole thing. They’re saying it’s ‘Global Warming’ and, ‘We can’t grow as much food because of the carbon emissions and we’re not going to relax these restrictions,’ even though there’s a food crisis, even though, on Wednesday, they acknowledged it. But still yesterday, ‘No, we’re not gonna let you grow food.’

“It’s pure madness and that, right there tells you that they want this food crisis. They need it to push their agenda through. The same thing is the case in the US. The Biden administration inside sources have leaked that they are studying whether a biofuel waiver could ease food inflation.

Quote: ‘US President Joe Biden’s administration is studying whether waiving biofuel blending mandates could help offset a surge in prices for key food ingredients like corn and soy oil following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,’

“However, when Reuters contacted them, the administration said, quote: ‘There is no serious consideration of this by the White House right now,’ because ethanol is good for Global Warming and we’ve got to save the Earth. Never mind the people that don’t have food.

“They WANT this crisis and they will not take steps to feed their people; not in the EU, not in the US.

“In my video yesterday, I also asked the question, ‘What does it mean when you enact the EU’s food crisis contingency plan?’ because details are quite scarce and although I wrote them and asked for some details, somehow, I doubt that I’ll hear back and we’ll see but I did scour the web and found only one thing by Martin Armstrong, here that said in 2016, the Merkel administration had put into place a plan that allowed them to seize farms during a food crisis.

“Well, if you look around 2016 new German food policies, almost exclusively you will find headlines that talk about this new plan requiring Germans to have a 10-day food supply.

“Quote: ‘The population will be obliged to hold an individual supply of food for 10 days.’

“Sounds pretty reasonable, right? And that’s all you’ll find. Germany tells people to stockpile food but if you go dig up this plan called the ‘Civil Defense Concept’ and you pull up the plan, right here and you open it up and find the section about Emergency Food and you use Google Translate to figure out what the heck it says, you see that this is exactly the case.

“Quote: ‘When this basic food supply can no longer be achieved by the free market, then a supply of the population with essential food through sovereign management…’ In other words, ‘Through the government, we will take over the farms. We will take over the food and we will distribute it as we see fit.’

“So, this is why the EU said on Wednesday, ‘Yes, there’s a crisis,’ and on Thursday, ‘No, we’re not going to grow food to fix the crisis because this is the plan.’

“This was the plan in 2015, when they convened John Podesta’s Food Chain Reaction game [funded by George Soros] and said, ‘We need more global government. We need a global carbon tax because of these food shortages that are happening.’”

Christian has long been pointing out that we are sleepwalking into disaster and that, just as we went through the the pandemic script from Event 201 so too, now is the Food Chain Reaction game going live, destined to end in localized food shortages and the Carbon Tax and even a ban of meat.

Emergency Survival Gardens for Your Family

He says, “Let’s move on to what do we do about it, right? We all see it. We all know what’s going on. We see that they’re not even trying to help us, so we have to help ourselves. If you are only now thinking about this problem…here’s what we now do:

“We need to stand up emergency survival gardens for our families and for our communities and the way you structure your thinking around that.

“Number one: calories. Try and produce enough calories to feed your family. If that means that you only grow potatoes, because that’s as much room as you have in your garden, just to try and move the needle, fine, that’s good. And I’ve done videos before about potato growing bags, where even just in a 4′ x 6′ little space, I had a three-story tower with grow bags full of potatoes and I yielded buckets of potatoes.

“Right, you can make a meaningful difference in a very small space that fits on top of an RV, right? There’s no excuse for you – or on an apartment balcony – do not tell me that you don’t have room to grow food everyone has to be doing this at this point so if that’s all you have room for, grow some potatoes.

“If you can get your calories met, then you can move on to the next step, nutrition. Then, you can mix in some beans and other things that will have good proteins to keep you well-fed and other vitamin producing things.

“You can add in some herbs for immune support like turmeric, garlic, oregano, ginger. It’s up to you how you structure this. Then, the third priority finally would be how those things taste.

“If you want to mix in some hot peppers or you know just other flavorful things to make your dishes interesting, then that’s fine. But you have to first take care of the needs: calories and nutrition before you have any fun.

“And of course, Step Zero is go obtain what you can now and put it away. Can it, store it, buy the grains, put them in buckets with oxygen absorbers, if you have them.

“Position yourself with a buffer to be able to weather this storm in front of us. We’ve we’ve known this was coming. We talked in 2019, about the UN discussing openly that we needed global food rationing to whip people into shape to accept the agendas and the Climate Change nonsense.

“And here it is, right from the Mainstream Media. It’s it’s almost surreal and it’s certainly unfortunate but let’s all get to growing food immediately. That’s that’s where we are now and please spread this message.

“If everyone were growing as much as they can, then we would literally remove from them their power over us they would no longer have leverage to control us we just walk away from these toxic practices of industrial agriculture. So help me get the message out, Folks.”

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Russia Hits Back on “Sanctions from Hell”

March 7th, 2022 by M. K. Bhadrakumar

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


An innocuous tweet from Russia’s Permanent Representative to International Organisations in Vienna Mikhail Ulyanov earlier today in the afternoon said that he met with the EU Coordinator at the Vienna talks on Iran nuclear issue Enrique Mora and “raised a number of questions which need to be duly addressed now in order to ensure smooth civil nuclear cooperation with Iran.” 

A couple of hours later, he again tweeted,

“The #ViennaTalks continue. I had today a useful meeting with Deputy Foreign Minister of Iran for Economic Diplomacy Mr. Mehdi Safari.” 

Other reports suggest that Russia has put forth a new demand at Vienna that its trade, investment and military cooperation with Iran would not be hindered by US sanctions. Russia seeks written guarantees in this regard at the highest level from the Biden administration. Apparently, Russia put forth this demand a couple of days back. 

A few hours ago in the evening, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov confirmed this development. Disclosing this at a press conference in Moscow, Lavrov explained that against the backdrop of the latest western sanctions, Russia wants to have a “very clear answer” from the US in the context of bilateral Moscow-Tehran relations and the Iranian nuclear deal. 

In Lavrov’s words,

“We need guarantees these sanctions will in no way affect the trading, economic and investment relations contained in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action for the Iranian nuclear program. We have asked the American counterparts, who rule the roost here, to provide us with guarantees at least at the level of the secretary of state [that] the current process launched by the United States will by no means affect our right to free and full-fledged trading, economic, investment, military and technical cooperation with Iran.” [Emphasis added.] 

Furthermore, Lavrov also openly backed remaining Iran’s demands, saying that Tehran’s expectations are “quite fair.” Whether Lavrov spoke in consultation with Tehran, we don’t know. 

The development comes as the 8th round of negotiations on the restoration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the United States’ return to the fold of that multilateral agreement is nearing completion. The negotiators are working on a draft final document. Iran and the IAEA also agreed today on a roadmap with the UN nuclear watchdog to resolve all outstanding questions about the country’s nuclear program by late June, which removes one big stumbling block. 

Lavrov calmly pointed out that the sanctions on Russia create a “problem” from Moscow’s perspective. He noted sarcastically,

“It would have all been fine, but that avalanche of aggressive sanctions that have erupted from the West — and which I understand has not yet stopped — demand additional understanding by lawyers, above all.” 

So, Lavrov insisted:

“We want an answer — a very clear answer — we need a guarantee that these [US] sanctions will not in any way touch the regime of trade-economic and investment relations which is laid down in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.” 

On Iran’s part, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian had told EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell only yesterday,

“I am ready to fly to Vienna when the Western sides accept our remaining red lines… We are ready to finalise a good and immediate agreement. Most of Iran’s requests have been considered.” 

But today, the most anxious person to clinch the deal at Vienna is none other than President Joe Biden himself. After derailing the Russia-Europe energy relationship, Biden is witnessing that the prices for gas are skyrocketing in Europe, and Washington has no solutions to the grave situation that is developing. The spot market price for gas has zoomed to 8 times the price at which Russia had been supplying Germany. (Russia has announced that w.e.f Thursday, it has shut down the Yamal-Europe gas pipeline which is the trunk route transporting gas to German market.) 

On the whole, the situation in the energy market is becoming very complicated, as western oil companies which had invested in Russia are forced to quit due to the sanctions. These include big players such as BP which has a 20-percent stake in Russian giant Rosneft, Shell with 27.5 percent stake in the Sakhalin-II LNG facility and a 50 percent stake in the Salym Petroleum Development, ExxonMobil (Sakhalin-1) and so on. 

Apart from the impairment these companies will suffer running into tens of billions of dollars, their exit will also strain Russia’s ability to maintain such high production levels and continue to meet its commitments under the OPEC+ agreement. Now, the already-tight global market for crude – which saw Brent crude top $115 per barrel in early Thursday trading – can ill-afford these downstream hits from the sanctions against Russia. Evidently, crude prices still have nowhere to go but up from here. Expert opinion is that if oil price touches $125 per barrel, US economy slides into recession. 

Russia has not so far made any direct indications that it will restrict energy exports, though the rhetoric is heating up. Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov warned on Friday that western companies, including energy firms, that are ditching Russia will be considered pushing their Russian subsidiaries to “deliberate bankruptcy,” which under Russian law draws criminal prosecution. 

To solve Europe’s problem of high prices, Biden recently swallowed pride and mentioned buying cheap Iranian oil as a response. Western analysts opine that Biden is in a mood to appease the “Iranian hawks” at Vienna. That is to say, US desperately needs both a lucrative energy deal and Iranian cooperation in Vienna. Israeli observers are apprehensive that the Biden administration might go ahead with easing or lifting restrictions on Iranian oil exports even without signing the Vienna agreements! 

One big reason behind this panic is that the Biden administration is profoundly concerned about the strong growth of motor fuel prices in the US lately. But on the other hand, any visible US appeasement of Iran at this critical stage will be a sign of weakness, and, surely, Biden will come up for trenchant criticism in the domestic opinion. 

Indeed, Lavrov has factored in all these developments while demanding that “at least” Antony Blinken should give a written guarantee. Moscow is paying back for Blinken’s boorishness. Of course, it will be a devastating loss of face for Biden to cave in publicly. Of course, the most awful thing will be that it is not only precedent setting  but makes a complete mockery of America’s weaponisation of the dollar! 

Europeans too must be wondering what is going on. They have passively sacrificed self-interests vis-a-vis Russia on the basis of Biden’s demands! Nord Stream 2 stands abandoned!

This is going to be a catch-22 situation. For, Russia’s green signal is an imperative for the JCPOA deal to be approved within the framework the joint commission of Iran and the international quintet (Russia, Britain, Germany, China and France.) Besides, Iran will surely expect a formal approval for any deal from the UN Security Council. 

On the other hand, if the negotiations at Vienna get prolonged, Iran’s enrichment activities at the accelerated pace will continue and a point of no return may be reached very soon, in a matter of weeks at the most, which will put the Biden administration in an even bigger bind, as the spectre of a nuclear Iran haunts West Asia and Europe. 

To be sure, the blowback to the US sanctions has begun. This is of course only the beginning. Trust Russia to go further and further up on the escalation ladder. Russia would have no conceivable reason to cooperate with the US from now onward. (See my blog Ukraine sparks EU, US rush to  Iran deal, March 1, 2022)

However, if the chronicle of Russian-American relations is anything to go by, trust Biden to start making entreaties using back channels to Moscow.

Actually, in response to a question at a press briefing in Moscow today evening about the current state of Russia-US relations in view of the developments in Ukraine and the pressure of sanctions, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov remarked cryptically that “We are maintaining certain channels of a dialogue with the United States.” He didn’t elaborate. 

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On December 16, 2021, ICAN, through its attorneys, issued a Freedom of Information Act request to the CDC seeking any documents reflecting why a certain VAERS report was no longer available in the VAERS database. The report described an extremely disturbing incident wherein a two-year-old boy “began bleeding out of the mouth, eyes, nose and ears within six hours” of his first dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine on November 18, 2021, and died later that night. On February 14, 2022, the CDC finally responded to ICAN’s request, stating: “A search of our records failed to reveal any documents pertaining to your request.”

Significantly, the CDC has made repeated assurances that “COVID-19 vaccines are being administered under the most intensive vaccine safety monitoring effort in the United States’ history.” The CDC’s VAERS Standard Operating Procedures for COVID-19 even states that the “CDC will perform clinical reviews” for certain “Adverse Events of Special Interest,” which include death, “especially in children (<18 years of age) and recipients of newly licensed vaccines).”

But despite all of these claims of about the unprecedented level of “intensive” safety monitoring of these vaccines, the CDC claims to have no records that would explain why a VAERS report describing the horrific death of a toddler suddenly disappeared from the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccines reactions in the United States, VAERS—a system of which the CDC is a co-sponsor.

ICAN intends to get to the bottom of the disappearance of this deeply disturbing report and will persist in holding the CDC accountable for its purported claims of intensive vaccine safety monitoring.

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Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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This article was first published in 2019.

Western-supported ISIS/al Qaeda and western-supported neo-Nazis are two sides to the same Imperial coin.

They are the product of the West’s moral degradation, its disdain for international law, and its anti-Life core. A rotten apple by any measure.

Imperial strategies driving these proxies are also similar. Whereas the West created and supports ISIS/al Qaeda[1], it presents them as “enemies”.

The terrorists serve as fake humanitarian pretexts for invasions even as they serve as proxies to destroy target countries even before the invasions and the economic warfare are firmly established. Imperialists always need scapegoats, and the Western-supported terrorists also serve this function. Governing agencies fabricate Islamophobia by presenting the “Muslim” terrorists as enemies even when these terrorist behaviours are far removed from Islamic teachings.

‘No clear-cut profile’ of a foreign fighter

The so-called “Caliphate Project”[2]is a CIA project. NATO and its allies support the terrorists in Syria who are carving out territory in resource rich, strategic areas of Syria.  All of this has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt for years despite the widespread ignorance of Western populations who are trained to accept CNN and Defense Department messaging as the truth.

NATO and its allies use the Western-empowered and supported neo-Nazis[3]in Kiev, rotten fruits of the 2014 Western coup against the legitimate Ukrainian government, in a similar fashion. In this case, Russia is the scapegoat, even though the coup preceded Russian involvement that opposes the Western crime scene near its borders.

The neo-Nazi counterpart to the so-called “Caliphate Project” would be the “Reconquista” project. Max Blumenthal explains:

“Foreign Azov volunteers are driven by the call of the ‘Reconquista,’ or the mission to place eastern European nations under the control of a white supremacist dictatorship modeled after the Nazi Reichskommissariat dictatorship that ruled Ukraine during World War II. The mission is promoted effusively by Azov’s chief ideologue, Andriy Biletsky, a veteran fascist organizer who leads the Social National Assembly in Ukraine’s parliament. Biletsky’s assembly has pledged to outlaw interracial contacts and vowed “to prepare Ukraine for further expansion and to struggle for the liberation of the entire White Race from the domination of the internationalist speculative capital.”[4]

So, like the CIA Caliphate Project, the Reconquista project advances imperial designs against Russia, Empire’s real target.

Empire’s end-game is world conquest, a New World Order of fascist totalitarianism. Those controlling the levers of power must deceive domestic populations because the impoverishing “project” is toxic to Life itself. No reasonable, critically-thinking population would ever accept it.

A first step to countering this world-encompassing disease would be a NATO Exit[5]campaign. NATO is the deceptive umbrella under which these diabolical machinations are thriving.

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017.

Notes

[1] Garikai Chengu,“America Created Al-Qaeda and the ISIS Terror Group.” Global Research, 19 September 2014, March 08, 2019, (https://www.globalresearch.ca/america-created-al-qaeda-and-the-isis-terror-group/5402881?fbclid=IwAR0ery1aV8nuqqkTYvjoUJvVJ2cpFX2AGURrd164p4cHkjA2SL08ly4Kar8) Accessed 7 April, 2019.

[2] Washington’s Blog, “The Caliphate Project, Made in America. Declassified U.S. Government Documents Confirm the US Supported the Creation of ISIS.” The Caliphate Project, Made in America. Declassified U.S. Government Documents Confirm the US Supported the Creation of ISIS.” Washington’s Blog 24 May 2015, Global Research, 13 March, 2016, (https://www.globalresearch.ca/newly-declassified-u-s-government-documents-the-west-supported-the-creation-of-isis/5451640) Accessed 7 April, 2019.

[3] Max Blumenthal,” Israel Is Arming Ukraine’s Blatantly Neo-Nazi Militia the Azov Battalion.” The Real News Network, 6 July, 2018, (https://therealnews.com/stories/israel-is-arming-ukraines-blatantly-neo-nazi-militia-the-azov-battalion?fbclid=IwAR1VcIFf0-5min_36EuVUiEMaYg0XUCkGqonc-Nh4y_iKf-Su0RruVG2GoM) Accessed 7 April, 2019.

[4] Max Blumenthal, “The US is Arming and Assisting Neo-Nazis in Ukraine, While Congress Debates Prohibition.” 18 January, 2018, The Real News Network, (https://therealnews.com/columns/the-us-is-arming-and-assisting-neo-nazis-in-ukraine-while-congress-debates-prohibition) Accessed 7 April, 2018.

[5] Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, “NATO-Exit: Dismantle NATO, Close Down 800 US Military Bases, Prosecute the War Criminals.” Global Research, 04 April, 2019, (https://www.globalresearch.ca/nato-exit-dismantle-nato-close-down-800-us-military-bases-prosecute-the-war-criminals/5670610) Accessed 07 April, 2019.


Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

**Voices from Syria**

Author: Mark Taliano

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-9-1

Year: 2017

Product Type: PDF File

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***

 

My students, where I once taught at a private university outside of Bangkok, would often come into class carrying coffee cups conspicuously emblazoned with the universally recognizable Starbucks© logo.

When they set them on their desks, they were uniformly careful to position the cups so as to prominently display the logo.

They didn’t patronize Starbucks© because they liked the taste or thought it to be particularly good, but because of the status they believed it conveyed.

Success, in their estimation, meant consuming the most popular Western products. They had no idea they were diluting their own culture to line the pockets of malicious actors.

Image on the right is from Richard Barrow

What is difficult for the propagandized Western mind (including mine) to grapple with is that the “diversity” obsession is a purely Western phenomenon.

Any other culture understands that diversity is not ideal for cohesion; they’re mutually contradictory values.

If you ever get a chance, make the best-faith argument you can muster to an English-speaking native in a foreign land (who has not been educated in the West) about the merits of the “diversity is our strength” ideology.

You’ll get a blank, uncomprehending stare.

Japan is 99% racially and cultural homogenous and they have significantly fewer social problems than the West. They don’t need racial identity politics because their single racial identity is ubiquitous. They don’t need to predicate a delicate social fabric on the precarious “melting pot” philosophy.

Is that a coincidence?

As opposed to the fictions of corporate PR departments, the following statement conveys true respect for diversity: just like America is for Americans, Thailand should belong to Thais – a nationalist sentiment very commonplace in that land.

But marketing is a powerful thing; it can even trigger cognitive dissonance. Many of those Thai nationalists carve out a glaring exception for status-conferring consumer products imported from the West (or Japan or Korea).

That revered ballad of hippie aspiration, “Imagine” by the Beatles’ frontman John Lennon — and the 1960s zeitgeist that it reflected – always induced maximum cringe. I gagged reflexively even when I was younger, before I had fleshed out how I thought about things:

“Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for…
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one”

I’m sure that when John Lennon wrote that drippy, sappy ballad, he did so with starry eyes. He probably believed he was simply promoting harmony and peace.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Underneath its shiny exterior of utopian idealism, the song promulgates a new kind of global, banal universality by conflating the human desire for brotherhood with an embrace of corporate monoculture.

This is why the corporate media has and always will promote these vapid messages of vague “hope” as promotional gimmicks.

What kind of a world would that one envisioned by John Lennon look like? How droll, how drab, how ho-hum! No flavor or spice; just a monoculture of hip “tolerance” or whatever.

Why would anyone want Bangkok to look like Des Moines, Iowa?

What happened to the “diversity”? Isn’t it our strength? Or is that ideology conveniently discarded when it might oppose corporate creep?

Universal oneness and diversity, again, are antithetical values. But that hasn’t stopped the cultural left and the corporate behemoths that now bankroll their social movements from embracing both simultaneously in full earnestness.

At the same time that these entities expand across the world like a cancer to peddle their sub-par nutrition-free slop to local populations that were better off without them, they simultaneously (unironically) peddle the “diversity” babble.

What the Corporate Slogan ‘Diversity Is Our Greatest Strength’ Actually Means

What they mean: to bring as many of the world’s people into the corporate monoculture fold while simultaneously diluting the inherently valuable aspects of authentic, legacy Western culture through unchecked immigration.

If Apple© and NIKE© and McDonald’s© truly valued diversity, why do they penetrate and vandalize every culture on earth?

Does Wendy’s© belong in the Caucus Mountains on the far stretches of Eastern Europe? Is that “respecting indigenous culture” or whatever trite slogan the corporate PR department has come up recently?

Why, if “diversity is our strength,” do these corporate monoliths lobby for transnational trade deals that destroy the barriers like tariffs that insulate local industries from their predatory creep?

Image on the right: Wendy’s© in Georgia (the country, not the state)

A decade ago, I tried (but failed) to properly convey to my Asian students the unique threat of corporate monoculture.

Via my in-progress memoir, Broken English Teacher:

“I attempted to explain to my Taiwanese students that McDonald’s© is the quintessential representation of corporate monoculture creep worldwide.

The 10-year-old children of Zhushan [a rural remote village in the Central mountain region] — all of whom without exception loved McDonald’s© and viewed the presence of such a restaurant in their hometown as a crowning achievement of modernization — did not understand or appreciate the meaning I hoped to relay.

Somehow, which I can only vaguely recall, I attempted to draw a connection between 9/11 ( which ostensibly had nothing to do with corporate diners directly) and McDonald’s© predatory creep into local markets from Taiwan to Madagascar to Peru. I drew them poorly-drawn pictures, none of which helped them better grasp the thrust.”

The impetus for that poorly executed lecture to Taiwanese schoolchildren was the revulsion I felt each time I stumbled on another soul-crushing McDonald’s© in some far-flung corner of the world – like a cancerous lesion on a supermodel’s face.

All I wanted to do was escape the corporate sludge.

The lecture was poorly conceived, especially given the vast cultural divide and inexperienced unworldliness of my audience. You should’ve seen the mess of illustrations on that whiteboard – like from a schizophrenic explaining the Flat Earth. Or from that character Russell Crowe played in A Beautiful Mind.

Hopefully I did a better explanatory job here:

  • reject globalization; embrace localization.
  • wherever possible, construct a parallel society outside of the global monoculture.
  • leave the unsaved to their McDonald’s© slop; excise the cancer from your own life.

“The factory mass producing fear, bottled,
Capped, distributed near and far
Sold for a reasonable price
And the people, they love it, they feed it
Brush with it, bathe with it, breathe it
Inject it direct to the blood
It seems to be replacing love
Why must we stay where we don’t belong”

-NOFX, Eat the Meek

*

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This article was originally published on The Daily Bell.

Ben Bartee is a Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via his blog, Armageddon ProseSubstack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter.

All images in this article are from TDB unless otherwise stated

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***

Wir Bürger laufen Gefahr, wirtschaftliche und soziale Sanktionen, die gegen ein Land und /oder dessen Präsidenten verhängt werden, als „normal“ und „nachvollziehbar“ hinzunehmen, weil sie seit Jahren sehr populär sind und dabei kein einziger Schuss abgegeben, keine Rakete abgefeuert und kein Panzer in Bewegung gesetzt wird. Über ihre Folgen wird selten informiert. Doch Sanktionen sind keine Alternative zum Krieg, sie sind Krieg – nur mit anderen Mitteln. Sie sind unsichtbare Kriege und perfekte Instrumente der Rache. Wenn wir uns daran gewöhnen, dergleichen hinzunehmen, gibt es nichts mehr, was wir nicht hinnehmen werden.

„Das Sanktionsregime der UNO im Irak.“

Dies ist der Untertitel des im Jahre 2005 erschienenen Buches von Hans-C. Graf Sponeck: „Ein anderer Krieg“ (1). Hans von Sponeck war von 1998 bis 2000 zuständiger Koordinator der Vereinten Nationen für das „Öl für Lebensmittel“-Programm im Irak. Anhand von Zahlen belegt er in seinem Buch die fatalen Folgen und das Scheitern des UNO-Sicherheitsrates in der Irak-Politik: Zunahme der Kindersterblichkeit und des Analphabetismus, mangelhafte Versorgung mit Nahrungsmitteln sowie Nicht-Funktionieren wichtiger Teile der Infrastruktur.

Anfang 2000 trat von Sponeck aus Protest gegen das genozidale Sanktionsregime als Leiter des UNO-Hilfsprogramms zurück. Kurze Zeit später lernte ich ihn auf einer Vortragsreise in der Schweiz persönlich kennen und erzählte ihm, dass ich als Deutscher sehr stolz war, als ich von seinem ehrenwerten Rücktritt erfuhr. Es entstand eine längere Freundschaft mit diesem menschlich vorbildlichen deutschen Diplomaten.

Eine ganz andere Erfahrung war die haarsträubende Antwort der ehemaligen US-Außenministerin Madeleine Albright auf eine Journalisten-Frage: In der Fernsehshow „60 Minuten“ am 12. Mai 1996 fragte Lesley Stahl die US-Außenministerin:

„Wir haben gehört, dass eine halbe Million Kinder gestorben sind (wegen der Sanktionen gegen den Irak). Ich meine, das sind mehr Kinder, als in Hiroshima umkamen. Und – sagen Sie, ist es den Preis wert?“.

Albright antwortete:  

„Ich glaube, das ist eine sehr schwere Entscheidung, aber der Preis – wir glauben, es ist den Preis wert.“ (2)

Sanktionen als perfektes Instrument der Rache (3)

Die jahrelangen Sanktionen gegen die irakische Zivilbevölkerung haben gravierende wirtschaftliche, soziale und psychologische Wunden geschlagen. Die dramatische Verarmung der Bevölkerung sowie der soziale und ökonomische Verfall des Landes waren nach Ansicht von Experten einmalig in der Geschichte der modernen Welt (4). Verzweifelte Not und Hoffnungslosigkeit hielten die Bevölkerung in Atem und raubte ihr die Kraft zur Rebellion. Getroffen von den Sanktionen wurde allein die Zivilbevölkerung. Das Regime des damaligen Präsidenten Saddam Hussein kam ungeschoren davon. Wie wollen wir eine solche politische Strafmaßnahme bewerten?

Die Sanktionen gegen den Irak sind nur ein Beispiel unter vielen: Die Strafmaßnahmen gegen die ehemalige Bundesrepublik Jugoslawien in den 90er- Jahren und diejenigen neueren Datums gegen Venezuela, Nord-Korea, Jemen oder Syrien sind uns ebenso in guter Erinnerung. In diesem Zusammenhang ist darauf hinzuweisen, dass die Lähmung und teilweise Zerstörung staatlicher Institutionen der organisierten Kriminalität Tür und Tot öffnet, das heißt, das rasche Aufkommen mafiöser Strukturen und Machenschaften sehr fördert.

Bald wird sich zeigen, welche ökonomischen, sozialen und psychologischen Wunden die ergriffenen Sanktionen der westlichen Welt unter Führung der USA der Zivilbevölkerung Russlands zufügen werden und inwieweit dadurch die Machtposition des russischen Präsidenten ins Wanken gerät? Der venezolanische Präsident Nicolas Maduro – einst selbst „Opfer“ von US-Sanktionen – verurteilte die westlichen Sanktionen scharf. In einem Zeitungsartikel vom 3. März bezeichnete er die Strafmaßnahmen, darunter im Bankwesen, als Verbrechen gegen das russische Volk und plädierte für diplomatische Auswege aus der Krise (5).

Dabei ist noch nicht abzusehen, welche fatalen Auswirkungen die verabschiedeten Sanktionen auch auf den Alltag der sanktionierenden Länder haben werden: So warnen Experten bereits vor höheren Inflationsraten, vor Energieknappheit und vor Engpässen bei der Produktion und Verteilung von Nahrungsmitteln.

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel ist Rektor a. D., Erziehungswissenschaftler und Diplom-Psychologe. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Noten

(1) Graf Sponeck, Hans C. (2005). Ein anderer Krieg. Das Sanktionsregime der UNO im Irak. Hamburg

(2) https://www.heise.de/forum/Telepolis/Kommentare/Der-US-Putschvers…ter-irakischer-Kinder-sind-den-Preis-wert/posting-34033445/show/

(3) https://monde-diplomatique.de/artikel/!386433

(4) https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/10-jahre-sanktionen-gegen-irak-wenn-ich-denke-werde-ich-verrueckt/156928.html

(5) https://de.rt.com/amerika/133072-venezuelas-prasident-nicolas-maduro-bezeichnet-sanktionen-als-verbrechen/

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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We at Global Research condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. All international issues need to be resolved peacefully through judicious negotiations and dialogue.

The events surrounding the Russia-Ukraine crisis are a poignant reminder of the decaying authority of diplomacy where instead of bilateral agreement, there is military incursion; instead of multilateral force for peace and order, there are sanctions, military aid and international isolation. 

In this weekend selection, we ask our readers to ponder on the urgent need of our time and on what could be done in its pursuit.

***

Russia-Ukraine War: A Different Invasion, the West’s Same ‘Madman’ Script

By Jonathan Cook, March 04, 2022

At a drop of a hat, western leaders are absolved of guilt or even responsibility for the terrible events that unfold. The West remains virtuous, simply a victim of the world’s madmen. Nothing the West did was a provocation. Nothing they could have done would have averted the disaster.

Did NATO Just Declare War on Russia?

By Mike Whitney, March 04, 2022

In a move that can only be regarded as a major escalation, NATO officials announced on Friday that they would deploy troops from its Combat-Ready Response Force to support the Ukrainian regime in its war with Russia. The Alliance will also send additional weapons which will be used to blunt the Russian offensive that has already seized large parts of the country and obliterated most of Ukraine’s defensive capability.

How Ukraine’s ‘Revolution of Dignity’ Led to War, Poverty and the Rise of the Far Right

By Olga Sukharevskaya, March 03, 2022

A survey carried out by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology shows that 64.7% of Ukrainian citizens believe things are going in the wrong direction. One in four Ukrainians and one in three young people want to move to a different country.  All in all, this can hardly be called a victory for the Euromaidan.

France’s Finance Minister: “We’re waging an all-out economic and financial war on Russia”

By Paul Antonopoulos, March 03, 2022

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire declared an “all-out economic and financial war” against Russia for launching its military operation against Kiev last week. It is hoped that such an economic war will ‘punish’ Russia – but shortly after making his comment, Le Maire was quick to change his rhetoric after probably being given a stern warning from within the Champs-Élysées to not make bombastic comments that intensifies tensions and could actually lead to war between Russia and NATO.

‘The Madman Putin’: The Globalists’ Misinformation Ploy

By Vasko Kohlmayer, March 03, 2022

For years the Western establishment considered Putin a “man with whom we could do business.” He was seen as “liberal, humane, and decent European.” He was described as a person of “’alert, controlled poise’ and ‘well-briefed acuity,’ who was open to anything, even Russia joining NATO.”

Racism Thrives in Western Liberal Europe and Ukraine

By Steven Sahiounie, March 03, 2022

Emily, a 24-year-old medical student from Kenya, told the Guardian that she was able to reach a hotel in Warsaw only to be refused a room because she was Black. She was told by hotel staff the rooms were only for Ukrainians.

Everyone Loses in the Conflict Over Ukraine

By Ralph Nader, March 02, 2022

In recent weeks, the State Department said it recognizes Russia’s legitimate security concerns but not its expansionism. Well, what is wrong with a ceasefire followed by support for a treaty “guaranteeing neutrality for Ukraine similar to the enforced neutrality for Austria since the Cold War’s early years,” as Nation publisher and Russia specialist Katrina Vanden Heuvel urged.

Playing with Fire in Ukraine

By Eric Margolis, March 02, 2022

Western media has championed the cause of Ukraine in a totally one-sided manner. So, we have plucky David v. evil Goliath. Never mind that civil war between Ukrainian nationalists, militant rightists and the Kiev regime has been flaring for 14 years.

Follow the Money: US Sanctions, Will Russia Be Able to Bypass Western Economic Warfare?

By Pepe Escobar, March 02, 2022

About the possible introduction of a new Russia-China payment system bypassing SWIFT, and combining the Russian SPFS (System for Transfer of Financial Messages) with the Chinese CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System), Hudson has no doubts “the Russian-China system will be implemented. The Global South will seek to join and at the same time keep SWIFT – moving their reserves into the new system.”

For African and Colonized Peoples, to Understand Ukraine: De-center Europe and Focus on Imperialism

By Black Alliance for Peace, March 02, 2022

NATO’s expansion has been a well-known security concern for Russia since 1999, when Bill Clinton inaugurated the official process of growing NATO’s membership to include former nations of the Warsaw Pact. Today, as the conflict escalates, NATO’s expansion has become an existential threat to African people and all oppressed and colonized people around the world.

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The Pentagon’s “Ides of March”: Best Month to Go to War?

March 6th, 2022 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III Scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research does not support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The history of this war must be understood.

The bombing and shelling led by Ukraine’s Armed Forces directed against the people of Donbass started eight years ago, resulting in the destruction of residential areas and more than 10,000 civilian casualties.

A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


First published on March 13, 2013

March 2022. The War in Ukraine.

***

Is it a coincidence? 

In recent history, from the Vietnam war to the present, the month of March has been chosen by Pentagon and NATO military planners as the “best month” to go to war.

With the exception of the War on Afghanistan (October 2001) and the 1990-91 Gulf War, all major US-NATO and allied led military operations over a period of more than half a century –since the invasion of Vietnam by US ground forces on March 8, 1965– have been initiated in the month of March.

The Ides of March (Idus Martiae) is a day in the Roman calendar which broadly corresponds to March 15.  The Ides of March is also known as the date on which Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC.

Lest we forget, the month of March (in the Roman Calendar) is dedicated to Mars (Martius), the Roman God of War.

For the Romans, the month of March (Martius) marked  “the time to start new military campaigns.”

As in the heyday of the Roman Empire, the US Department of Defense has a mandate to plan and implement a precise “timeline” of military operations.

Does the month of March –identified by the Romans as a “good time” to initiate new military undertakings–, have a bearing on contemporary military doctrine?

Throughout history, seasons including the transition from Winter to Spring have played a strategic role in the timing of military operations.

Do Pentagon military planners favor the month of March?

Do they also –in some mysterious fashion– “idolize” Mars, the Roman God of War?

March 23 (which coincides with the beginning of Spring) was the day “Romans celebrated the start of the military campaign and war fighting season.”

“Homage was paid to Mars the god of war with festivals and feasting. … For the Romans March 23 was a huge celebration known as Tubilustrium”.

Under these festivities which celebrated the Roman god of war,  a large part of the month of March “was dedicated to military celebration and preparedness.”

Timeline of March Military Interventions (1965- 2017)

Recent history confirms that with the exception of Afghanistan (October 2001) and the 1990-91 Gulf War, all major US-NATO led military operations over a period of almost half a century –since the invasion of Vietnam by US ground forces on March 8, 1965– have been initiated in the month of March.

The Vietnam War

The US Congress adopted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized President Lyndon Johnson to dispatch ground forces to Vietnam on March 8, 1965.

On 8 March 1965, 3,500 U.S. Marines were dispatched to South Vietnam marking the beginning of “America’s ground war”.

NATO’s War on Yugoslavia

NATO’s war on Yugoslavia was launched on March 24, 1999. 

The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia code-named by the US Operation “Noble Anvil”. started on March 24, 1999 and lasted until June 10, 1999.

The Iraq War

The War on Iraq was launched on March 20, 2003. (Baghdad time)

The US-NATO led invasion of Iraq started on 20 March 2003 on the pretext that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

(The 1991 Gulf War on Iraq began on 17th January. However, after the 28th February ceasefire was agreed and signed – following the Basra Road massacre of withdrawing soldiers and fleeing civilians on 26th/27th February – the US 24th Mechanised Infantry Division slaughtered thousands on 2nd March.“)

The Covert War on Syria

The US-NATO Covert War on Syria was initiated on March 15, 2011 with the incursion of Islamist mercenaries and death squads in the southern city of Daraa on the border with Jordan. The terrorists were involved in acts of arson as well as the killings of civilians. This incursion of terrorists was from the very outset supported covertly by the US, NATO and its Persian Gulf allies: Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

NATO’s “Humanitarian” R2P War on Libya

NATO commenced its bombing of Libya on March 19, 2011.  The United Nations Security Council passed an initial resolution on 26 February 2011 (UNSC Resolution 1970), (adopted unanimously).

A subsequent United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 was adopted on 17 March 2011. It authorized the establishment of “a no-fly zone” over Libya, and the use “all necessary measures” “to protect the lives of civilians”.

Libya was bombed relentlessly by NATO warplanes starting on March 19, 2011 for a period of approximately seven months.

Yemen 

On 25 March 2015, an international coalition led by Saudi Arabia and supported by the US launched air strikes against the Huthi armed group in Yemen.

**

 

War, Censorship and Half-Truths

March 6th, 2022 by Farms Not Factories

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Visit and follow us on Instagram at @globalresearch_crg and Twitter at @crglobalization.

 


Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


After a dire experience visiting a factory pig farm in Italy, Clodagh McKenna decided to only cook with high welfare meat from then on.

“We all have ideals of the kind of person we want to be and I think every single one of us wants to be somebody that is making a little bit of a difference in this world”, she says in our latest Rooting for Real Farms video.

So, using the power of her purse, the acclaimed chef and author of numerous cookbooks, is helping to close factory farms by only buying meat from high welfare British farms like Helen Wade’s Eastleach Downs Organic Farm.

Helen rears rare-breed saddleback pigs that are sold from their on-farm butchery. She says, “For me the welfare of the animal is the most important thing, pigs are very intelligent creatures and they should have the best possible life we can give them.”

 

War

I am finding it incredibly difficult to focus on our precious farmers when the headlines are dominated by war. The UK is directly involved not least by upgrading its US air bases to enable Washington to intercept international communications and launch military strikes from Britain more quickly and with more devastating effect.

In 2014 I was filming vast pig factories owned by the Danish company Danosha in Western Ukraine, as well as Ukrainian owned factory pig farms in the East. We left a few weeks before all hell broke out as the US backed coup d’etat replaced the Russian backed elected leader with an unelected leader answerable to the US.

Naturally, like all sane people, I absolutely abhor war, it is horrifying from any quarter. I abhor censorship too; how can peoples of the world come together in peace when so much is hidden?

Censorship of the whole story

Last weekend, I met a very prosperous man in his 80s who confessed that he was interested to know the Russian side of the war story with the caveat that he might not believe a word he read. I was impressed that he had even an inkling that the mainstream media are only telling half truths, just as they did to justify our authorities’ invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

In my humble opinion, the truth resides in a fringe niche of journalists who have been banished from the UK’s mainstream media but who continue to provide us with an independent narrative. A pool of these brave truthsayers can be found on the Dont Extradite Assange website.

Silenced by fear of reprisals

In this new world of surveillance, you are not safe to hold an opinion counter to your authorities. In some countries you can be punished for speaking out. The Czech Republic has warned Czech citizens that they can be imprisoned for agreeing with the Russia’s military operation in Ukraine and for not speaking out the conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, was fired for privately refusing to denounce Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.

Whether it is fear of a virus or fear of Russia, we have successfully been polarised into our opposite silos. So it is with some trepidation that I share the info that I sent to the gent about Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, its causes, its aims, and its likely aftermath.

Jimmy Dore Show (976K subscribers);

‘Jimmy and The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté, discuss the lies and misrepresentations surrounding the leadup to the war in Ukraine.The media description of the Russian attack on Ukraine has almost universally elided and whitewashed the role played by the US and its NATO allies, including supporting a coup overthrowing the democratically elected president in 2014, refusing to support the Minsk Accords or refusing to engage in negotiations in the months leading up to the Russian invasion.’

Jimmy and The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal; discuss the past predictions made by noteworthy people ranging from Noam Chomsky and Stephen Cohen to Henry Kissinger and Pat Buchanan.’

Jimmy Dore ‘Ukraine Conflict Centered Around Gas Pipeline – Of Course!’

Consortium News; discuss; Russia Hits Back ;

‘After 30 years of NATO expansion towards its borders, and eight-years of a coup regime’s attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine, Russia has taken military action to “demilitarize” and “de-nazify” the country.’

and 4 articles;

Scott Ritter says the Russian president is working from a 2007 playbook, when he warned European leaders of the need for a new security framework to replace the system built by the U.S. and NATO.

Ukraine update – 04/03/22

Caitlin Johnstone: 12 Thoughts on Ukraine

‘The U.S. power alliance has a choice between escalating aggressions against Russia to world-threatening levels or doing what anti-imperialists have been begging them to do for years and pursue detente.’

Diana Johnstone: former press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996.

US Foreign Policy Is a Cruel Sport

‘……today, a version of bear baiting is being practised every day against whole nations on a gigantic international scale. It is called United States foreign policy. It has become the regular practice of the absurd international sports club called NATO.’

‘‘….And from the start, Washington strategies, in cahoots with a large, hyperactive anti-communist anti-Russian diaspora in the U.S. and Canada, contrived to use the bitterness of Ukraine’s divisions to weaken first the U.S.S.R. and then Russia. Billions of dollars were invested in order to “strengthen democracy” – meaning the pro-Western west of Ukraine against its semi-Russian east.

The 2014 U.S.-backed coup that overthrew President Viktor Yukanovych, solidly supported by the east of the country, brought to power pro-West forces determined to bring Ukraine into NATO, whose designation of Russia as prime enemy had become ever more blatant. This caused the prospect of an eventual NATO capture of Russia’s major naval base at Sebastopol, on the Crimean peninsula.’

‘Meanwhile, major parties in the Russian Duma and public opinion have long expressed concern for the Russian-speaking population of the eastern provinces, suffering from privations and military attack from the central government for eight years. This concern is naturally interpreted in the West as a remake of Hitler’s drive to conquer neighbouring countries. However, as usual the inevitable Hitler analogy is baseless. For one thing, Russia is too large to need to conquer Lebensraum.’

The Secret US Biolabs in the Ukraine

‘the work in the laboratories is carried out under the program of biological experiments. The budget is $2.1 billion and is funded by the US Defence Threat Reduction Agency.’

Sanctions cause pain and relief

The present tranche of sanctions against Russia imposed by the European Union, the US, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, Taiwan and Japan will continue the pain caused by numerous earlier sanctions. However, as reported in Newsweek Russia’s Ambassador to Sweden said;

“Excuse my language, but we don’t give a shit about all their sanctions,” Viktor Tatarintsev told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet in an interview published on Saturday.

“We have already had so many sanctions and in that sense they’ve had a positive effect on our economy and agriculture,” the diplomat said, according to the AFP news agency.

‘We are more self-sufficient and have been able to increase our exports. We have no Italian or Swiss cheeses, but we’ve learned to make just as good Russian cheeses using Italian and Swiss recipes’.

Russian rural kids adopt American junk food

While visiting Russia when Yeltsin was President in the 90s, clicking our cameras to capture the beautiful wooden homes in a tiny village deep in the countryside, a Russian housewife shouted “go away you horrible Americans’. She explained that their children used to drink their home grown apple juice and now, thanks to TV adverts and billboards, only Coca-Cola would do.

Putin pushes for local organic produce

The embargo on importing European foodstuffs, imposed by Russia in 2014, acted as an incentive for domestic production. No less than 95 percent of organic food was previously sourced from imports. So, the present sanctions imposed on food imports to Russia, might even help Putin achieve his 2015 commitment to meet his country’s demand for a local, organic, GMO free diet, as they will no longer be out competed by imports of cheap junk food doused in chemicals derived from dangerous GMO seeds. As such the sanctions could potentially help Russia fulfil its pledge to be the world’s largest producer and supplier of organic food.

In addition, it will strengthen the 2018 law which came into effect in 2020 setting out a new food strategy around organic produce.

‘The Law is designed to regulate relations in the field of production of organic food, to protect agricultural producers, who produce organic products and to attract new producers into this sphere.’

Putin is also giving land away to repopulate former farming land in Eastern Russia near the Japanese border. Plenty of young aspiring UK farmers and growers would love to have some land to build a home and grow food.

Legalising GMOs in the UK

While GMOs have been banned in Russia since 2016, Boris Johnson’s government has abandoned the EU’s precautionary principle that restricts their use, and is presently pushing to legalise this highly controversial technology.

“The clear consensus of 88% of British citizens who responded to the consultation was ‘no to deregulation’. Nevertheless the government has ignored public opinion and announced its plans to deregulate gene editing and, in the longer term plans to deregulate all genetically modified organisms used in agriculture.”

Based on events from a 1998 lawsuit, the film PERCY Vs GOLIATH, follows 70-year old small-town farmer Percy Schmeiser who challenges the agro-chemical conglomerate Monsanto that sued him for damages when their genetically modified (GMO) canola seeds were blown by the wind from a neighbour’s farm onto his land. As he defends himself against the Monsanto’s corrupt lawsuit, he realises he is representing thousands of other disenfranchised farmers around the world who are being sued because of GM seeds unintentionally and unavoidably spreading onto their fields from neighbouring farms. Suddenly, he becomes an unsuspecting folk hero in a desperate war to protect farmers’ rights and the world’s food supply against corporate greed.

Two-faced Tories

Strange that with one hand the Tories are pushing for GMO’s, banned in organic agriculture, and with the other giving more generous subsidies to organic farmers. As reported in Wickedleeks;

‘Payments for organic farming are rising by between 46 and 500 per cent under a new Countryside Stewardship scheme. The new payments will be available until at least 2024 when a new organic standard is promised as part of the wider plan for how farmers will be supported by the government post-Brexit.’

It coincides with news that the organic food market continues to out-perform sales of non organic food, with sales rising by 5.2 per cent in the last year, helped by shopper interest in ethics, the environment and health during the pandemic.

Even the UK could benefit from sanctions against Russia’s food imports

Sanctions against Russia and Belarus will have a massive impact on UK’s conventionally grown food and farming as fertiliser imports sourced from Belarus will dry up along with cheap wheat from Ukraine. Therefore, food prices, now inflated to their highest in more than a decade due to pandemic-related supply constraints, are likely to rise even further.

However, if we look at the long term, sanctions may help our farmers get a fairer price for their home grown wheat and, by increasing the cost of fertiliser across the world, the use of this ecologically damaging and expensive input will be reduced.

An economic system that demands that we have cheap food at a cost to our health, animal welfare and the ecosystem is plainly a failed system. As the Guardian article explains;

‘Farmers from England and Wales gathered in Birmingham on Tuesday, against the backdrop of huge upheaval in agriculture, with labour shortages caused by Brexit and Covid, an ongoing pig cull and the transition to life beyond the EU’s subsidy scheme. The day opened with a blistering attack on ministers from the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) president, Minette Batters, who accused the government of having no post-Brexit plan and of showing a “total lack of understanding of how food production works.” Her views were echoed by farmers speaking from the floor of the conference.’

Only when we break up the corporate farms and pay independent farmers a fair price for their produce, will we prevent their decline and get UK farm workers back on the land to produce healthy food. Farmers would then be free to earn a livelihood while protecting the soil and biodiversity and raise livestock that do not need antibiotics to keep them alive, in sheds that have become a breeding ground of disease. Far better than going vegan and filling up on lab meat or highly processed plant based meat, is to eat less but better real meat from pasture fed animals sourced locally or online from the Real Food Hub.

There is a window of hope in the government’s White Paper, usually a precursor to new legislation, due to be published at the end of March that will respond to the (June 2021) National Food Strategy. More than 100 organisations that include major supermarkets and food retailers including TESCO, Sainsburys, Co-op, Aldi and M&S, have joined forces with civil society groups, health campaigners and academics in calling for bold food legislation in the UK Government’s response to the National Food Strategy.’

The “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to fix nation’s broken food system is massive; As described by Kath Dalmeny chief executive of Sustain;

“……..Councils, academics, health charities and consumers are all signalling that the Government needs to act. Businesses say they need a level playing field to prevent being held back by a system that is skewed in favour of junk food. We need the Government to be bold, to take action and put laws in place that help tackle the systemic problems in our food system.”

Sue Davies, Head of Consumer Rights and Food Policy at Which? said;

“The report highlights some key questions for the UK’s trade policy. Given the government’s commitment to upholding standards and tackling climate change, it is essential that ministers heed the report’s warning on the worrying precedent the Australia deal could create and set core food standards for imports. The UK can’t work to transform its own food system and support people in making food choices that are better for their health and the environment if we allow foods to be imported that are produced to lower safety, environmental or welfare standards.”

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


One of the key underlying themes of the Russia/Ukraine/NATO matrix is that the Empire of Lies (copyright Putin) has been rattled to the core by the combined ability of Russian hypersonic missiles and a defensive shield capable of blocking incoming nuclear missiles from the West, thereby ending Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.)

This has led the Americans to nearly risk a hot war to be able to place hypersonic missiles that they still don’t have on Ukraine’s western borders, and so be within three minutes of Moscow. For that, of course, they need Ukraine, as well as Poland and Romania in Eastern Europe.

In Ukraine, the Americans are determined to fight to the last European soul – if that’s what it takes. This may be the last roll of the (nuclear) dice. Thus the next-to-last gasp at coercing Russia into submission by using the remaining, workable American weapon of mass destruction: SWIFT.

Yet this weapon can be easily neutralized by rapid adoption of self-sufficiency.

With essential input by the inestimable Michael Hudson I have outlined possibilities for Russia to weather the sanction storm. That didn’t even consider the full extent of Russia’s “black box defense” – and counter-attack – as outlined by John Helmer in his introduction to an essay that heralds no less then The Return of Sergei Glaziev.

Glaziev, predictably detested across Atlanticist circles, was a key economic adviser to President Putin and is now the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). He has always been a fierce critic of the Russian Central Bank and the oligarch gang closely linked to Anglo-American finance.

His latest essay, Sanctions and Sovereignty, originally published by expert.ru and translated by Helmer, deserves serious scrutiny. This is one of the key takeaways:

“Russian losses of potential GDP, since 2014, amount to about 50 trillion rubles. But only 10% of them can be explained by sanctions, while 80% of them were the result of monetary policy. The United States benefits from anti-Russian sanctions, replacing the export of Russian hydrocarbons to the EU as well as China; replacing the import of European goods by Russia. We could completely offset the negative consequences of financial sanctions if the Bank of Russia fulfilled its constitutional duty to ensure a stable ruble exchange rate, and not the recommendations of Washington financial organizations.”

De-offshore or bust

Glaziev essentially recommends:

  • A “real de-offshorization of the economy”.
  • “Measures to tighten currency regulation in order to stop the export of capital and expand targeted lending to enterprises in need of financing investments”.
  • “Taxation of currency speculation and transactions in dollars and euros on the domestic market”.
  • “Serious investment in R&D in order to accelerate the development of our own technological base in the areas affected by sanctions – first of all the defense industry, energy, transport and communications.”

And last but not least, “the de-dollarization of our foreign exchange reserves, replacing the dollar, euro and pound with gold.”

The Russian Central Bank seems to be listening. Most of these measures are already in place. And there are signs that Putin and the government are finally ready to grab the Russian oligarchy by the balls and force them to share risks and losses at an extremely difficult for the nation. Goodbye to stockpiling funds taken out of Russia offshore and in Londongrad.

Glaziev is the real deal. In December 2014 I was at a conference in Rome, and Glaziev joined us on the phone. Reviewing a subsequent column I wrote at the time, between Rome and Beijing, I was stunned: it’s as if Glaziev was saying these things literally today.

Allow me to quote two paragraphs:

“At the symposium, held in a divinely frescoed former 15th century Dominican refectory now part of the Italian parliament’s library, Sergey Glaziev, on the phone from Moscow, gave a stark reading of Cold War 2.0. There’s no real “government” in Kiev; the U.S. ambassador is in charge. An anti-Russia doctrine has been hatched in Washington to foment war in Europe – and European politicians are its collaborators. Washington wants a war in Europe because it is losing the competition with China.”

“Glaziev addressed the sanctions dementia: Russia is trying simultaneously to reorganize the politics of the International Monetary Fund, fight capital flight and minimize the effect of banks closing credit lines for many businessmen. Yet the end result of sanctions, he says, is that Europe will be the ultimate losers economically; bureaucracy in Europe has lost economic focus as American geopoliticians have taken over.”

Gotta pay the “tax on independence”

A consensus seems to be emerging in Moscow that the Russian economy will stabilize quickly, as there will be a shortage of personnel for industry and a lot of extra hands will be required. Hence no unemployment. There may be shortages, but no inflation. Sales of – Western – luxury goods have already been curtailed. Imported products will be placed under price controls. All the necessary rubles will be available though price controls – as happened in the U.S. in WWII.

A wave of nationalization of assets may be ahead. ExxonMobil announced it will withdraw from the $4 billion Sakhalin-1 project (they had bailed out on Sakhalin-2, deemed too expensive), producing 200,000 barrels of oil a day, after BP and Norway’s Equinor announced they were withdrawing from projects with Rosneft. BP was actually dreaming of taking all of Rosneft’s participation.

According to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, the Kremlin is now blocking asset sales by foreign investors looking to divest. In parallel, Rosneft, for instance, is bound to raise capital from China and India, who are already minority investors in several projects, and buy them out 100%: an excellent opportunity for Russian business.

What could be construed as the Mother of All Counter-Sanctions has not yet been announced. Deputy Chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev himself hinted all options are on the table.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, channeling the patience of 10,000 Taoist monks, still expecting the current hysteria to fade away, describes the sanctions as “some kind of a tax on independence”,

with countries barring their companies from working in Russia under “huge pressure.”

Lethal counterpunches though are not excluded. Apart from completely de-dollarizing – as Glaviev recommends – Russia may ban the export of titanium, rare earth, nuclear fuel and, already in effect, rocket engines.

Very toxic moves would include seizing all foreign assets of hostile nations; freeze all loan repayments to Western banks and place the funds in a frozen account in a Russian bank; completely ban all hostile foreign media, foreign media ownership, assorted NGOs and CIA fronts; and supply friendly nations with state of the art weapons, intel sharing and joint training and exercises.

What’s certain is that a new architecture of payment systems – as discussed by Michael Hudson and others – uniting the Russian SPFS and the Chinese CHIPS, may soon be offered to scores of nations across Eurasia and the Global South – several among them already under sanctions, such as Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, the DPRK.

Slowly but surely, we are already on the way to the emergence of a sizeable Global South bloc immune to American financial warfare.

The RIC in BRICS – Russia, India and China – are already increasing trade in their own currencies. If we look at the list of nations at the UN that voted against Russia or abstained from condemning Operation Z in Ukraine, plus those that did not sanction Russia, we have at least 70% of the whole Global South.

So once again is the West – plus satrapies/colonies such as Japan and Singapore in Asia – against the Rest: Eurasia, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America.

The coming European collapse

Michael Hudson told me,

“the U.S. and Western Europe expected a Froelicher Krieg (“happy war”). Germany and other countries haven’t begun to feel the pain of gas and mineral and food deprivation. THAT’S going to be the real game. The aim would be to break Europe away from U.S. control via NATO. This will involve “meddling” by creating a New World Order political movement and party, like Communism was a century ago. You could call it a new Great Awakening.”

A possible Great Awakening certainly will not involve the NATOstan sphere anytime soon. The collective West is rather in serious Great Decoupling mode, its entire economy weaponized with the aim, expressed in the open, of destroying Russia and even – the perennial wet dream – provoking regime change.

Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the SVR, succinctly described it:

“Masks have dropped. The West is not just trying to enclose Russia with a new ‘Iron Curtain’. We are talking about attempts to destroy our state – its ‘abolition’, as it is now customary to say in the ‘tolerant’ liberal-fascist environment. Since the United States and its allies have neither the opportunity nor the spirit to try to do this in an open and honest military-political confrontation, sneaky attempts are being made to establish an economic, informational and humanitarian “blockade”’.

Arguably the apex of Western hysteria is the onset of a 2022 Neo-Nazi Jihad: a 20,000-strong mercenary army being assembled in Poland under CIA supervision. The bulk comes from private military companies such as Blackwater/Academi and DynCorp. Their cover: “return of Ukrainians from the French Foreign Legion.” This Afghan remix comes straight from the only playbook the CIA knows.

Back in reality, facts on the ground will eventually lead entire economies in the West to become roadkill – with chaos in the commodities sphere leading to skyrocketing energy and food costs. As an example, up to 60% of German and 70% of Italian manufacturing industries may be forced to shut down for good – with catastrophic social consequences.

The unelected, uber-Kafkaesque EU machine in Brussels has chosen to commit a triple hara-kiri by grandstanding as abject vassals of the Empire, destroying any remaining French and German sovereignty impulses and imposing alienation from Russia-China.

Meanwhile, Russia will be showing the way: only self-sufficiency affords total independence. And the Big Picture has also been keenly understood by the Global South: one day someone had to stand up and say, “That’s Enough”. With maximum raw power to back it up.

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Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Unz Review

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Amidst much fanfare and eager anticipation for imminent restoration of Iran nuclear pact, unilaterally annulled by Washington in May 2018, International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi arrived in Tehran late on Friday. But the much-hyped visit was nothing more than a formality as he would hold talks only with Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian before returning to Vienna in the afternoon.

Before embarking on the futile visit, though, the figurehead chief of the nuclear watchdog told reporters the Iran nuclear deal was a “fait accompli.” Though he likely used the Latin phrase in a positive sense, implying a “done deal,” in order to deliberately raise expectations, fait accompli in legal jargon typically has negative connotations, implying a “past and closed transaction” requiring no further litigation, though the gaffe could also be construed as a Freudian slip spilling out subconsciously held belief.

Restoring Iran nuclear deal doesn’t require a Manhattan Project to hammer out all the intricate details with diplomatic finesse and suave statesmanship. Had Biden been sincere in reviving the pact, he would’ve immediately restored JCPOA within first few months of the presidency.

In fact, all the media hype surrounding imminent restoration of Iran nuclear pact should be viewed in the broader backdrop of escalation of hostilities between the US and Russia following the latter’s military intervention in Ukraine in order to scuttle the steadfast regional alliance Iran has forged with Russia in recent years.

In January, following Russia’s troop build-up along Ukraine’s borders portending imminent invasion, Houthi rebels in Yemen backed by Iran, which is Russia’s most dependable regional ally in the decade-long Syrian conflict, significantly escalated missile strikes on the oil-rich Gulf States in order to take pressure off Russia in the Ukraine stand-off by opening a second front in the veritable Achilles’ heel of the energy-dependent industrialized world.

To buttress the defenses in the Gulf, US F-22 fighter jets arrived in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Feb. 12, as part of an American defense response to missile attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels targeting the country. The Raptors landed at Al-Dhafra Air Base in Abu Dhabi, which hosts 2,000 US troops. American soldiers there launched Patriot interceptor missiles and briefly had to take shelter after the missiles exploded in the airspace above the military base on Jan. 24.

The deployment came after the Houthi rebels launched three successive attacks targeting Abu Dhabi in January, including one on Jan. 17 targeting a fuel depot that killed three people and wounded six. The attacks coincided with visits by presidents from South Korea and Israel to the UAE. Though overshadowed by the Ukraine crisis, the missile strikes targeting the Emirates sparked a major US response. The American military sent the USS Cole on a mission to Abu Dhabi.

Last June, the Associated Press reported [1] the largest warship in the Iranian navy caught fire and later sank in the Gulf of Oman under unclear circumstances. The blaze began around midnight and firefighters tried to contain it, but their efforts failed to save the 207-meter Kharg, which was used to resupply other ships in the fleet at sea and conduct training exercises. The Fars News Agency reported 400 sailors and trainee cadets on board fled the vessel, with 33 suffering injuries.

The ship sank near the Iranian port of Jask, some 1,270 kilometers southeast of Tehran on the Gulf of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf. Photos circulated on Iranian social media showed sailors wearing life jackets evacuating the vessel as a fire burned behind them.

Meanwhile, a massive fire broke out at the oil refinery serving Iran’s capital, sending thick plumes of black smoke over Tehran. Similarly, last April, an Iranian ship MV Saviz believed to be an Iranian Revolutionary Guard base and anchored for years in the Red Sea off Yemen was targeted in an attack suspected to have been carried out by Israel.

Among the major attacks to target Iran, none have struck deeper than two explosions in July 2020 and then again in April last year at its Natanz nuclear facility. Former chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service Yossi Cohen offered the closest acknowledgment yet that his country was behind the attacks targeting Iran’s nuclear program and the assassination of a military scientist.

While Cohen was being interviewed in investigative program Uvda of Israel’s Channel 12 in a segment aired last June, the interviewer, journalist Ilana Dayan, offered a detailed description of how Israel snuck the explosives into Natanz’s underground halls.

The man who was responsible for these explosions, it became clear, made sure to supply to the Iranians the marble foundation on which the centrifuges were placed, Dayan said. “As they install this foundation within the Natanz facility, they have no idea that it already includes an enormous amount of explosives.”

They also discussed the November 2020 killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an Iranian scientist who began Tehran’s military nuclear program decades ago. While Cohen on camera didn’t claim the killing, Dayan in the segment described Cohen as having “personally signed off on the entire campaign.” Dayan also described how a remotely operated machinegun fixed to a pickup truck killed Fakhrizadeh and later self-destructed.

A joint American-Israeli program [2], involving a series of short-of-war clandestine strikes, aimed at taking out the most prominent generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and targeting Iran’s power stations, industrial infrastructure, and missile and nuclear facilities has been going on since early 2020 after the commander of IRGC’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani was assassinated in an American airstrike at the Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.

Besides pandering to Zionist lobbies in Washington, another purpose of these subversive attacks has been to avenge a string of audacious attacks mounted by the Iran-backed forces against the US strategic interests in the Persian Gulf that brought the US and Iran to the brink of a full-scale war in September 2019.

In addition to planting limpet mines on oil tankers off the coast of UAE in May 2019 and the subsequent downing of the American Global Hawk surveillance drone in the Persian Gulf by Iran, the brazen attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia on September 14, 2019, was the third major attack in the Persian Gulf against the assets of Washington and its regional allies.

The September 14, 2019, attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility in eastern Saudi Arabia was an apocalypse for the global oil industry because it processed five million barrels crude oil per day, almost half of Saudi Arabia’s total oil production.

The subversive attack sent jitters across the global markets and the oil price surged 15%, the largest spike witnessed in three decades since the First Gulf War after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, though the oil price was eased within weeks after industrialized nations released their strategic oil reserves.

Alongside deploying several thousand American troops, additional aircraft squadrons and Patriot missile batteries in Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the Abqaiq attack, several interventionist hawks in Washington invoked the Carter Doctrine of 1980 as a ground for mounting retaliatory strikes against Iran, which states:

“Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Although the Houthi rebels based in Yemen claimed the responsibility for the September 2019 complex attack involving drones and cruise missiles on the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, Washington dismissed the possibility. Instead, it accused Tehran of mounting the complex attack from Iran’s territory.

Nevertheless, puerile pranks like planting limpet mines on oil tankers and downing a $200-million surveillance aircraft can be overlooked but the major provocation of mounting a drone and missile attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility that crippled its oil-processing functions for weeks was nothing short of waving red rag to the bull.

Considering the nature of steadfast alliance between Iran and Russia, what if Iran, too, flexed its muscles in the critically important volatile region in order to disrupt the global oil supply and put pressure on the energy-dependent industrialized powers to carefully consider their retaliatory measures against Russia amidst the Ukraine War.

The Persian Gulf holds 800 billion barrels, over half of world’s total 1,500 billion barrels crude oil reserves. If Iran decided to open a second front in the Gulf by mounting subversive attacks on oil installations in Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait amidst the Ukraine War, forget about sanctioning Russia’s oligarchs, the oil price would skyrocket, the dollar would take a nosedive, crippling energy shortages would bring industrial production to a standstill and Washington would find it hard maintaining its grip over neocolonial world order.

In fact, this was the precise message conveyed to Washington’s military strategists by the audacious Houthi attacks on strategic targets in UAE in January, specifically the one targeting al-Dhafra airbase in Abu Dhabi hosting US forces.

In order to mend fences with Iran at a critical time, however, Washington has promptly dispatched IAEA’s chief as a “goodwill ambassador” to Tehran to dangle the carrot of imminent restoration of the Iran nuclear deal to wean Iran off Russia’s orbit, at least, until the gathering storm over the horizon following the Ukraine intervention clears out.

Notwithstanding, the acts of subversion in the Persian Gulf in 2019 culminating in the “sacrilegious assault” on the veritable mecca of the oil production industry in Sept. 2019 should be viewed in the broader backdrop of the New Cold War that has begun following the Ukraine crisis in 2014 after Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula and Washington imposed sanctions on Russia.

The Kremlin’s immediate response to the escalation by Washington was that it jumped into the fray in Syria in September 2015, after a clandestine visit to Moscow by General Qassem Soleimani, the slain commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force.

When Russia deployed its forces and military hardware to Syria in September 2015, the militant proxies of Washington and its regional clients were on the verge of driving a wedge between Damascus and the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia, which could have led to the imminent downfall of the Bashar al-Assad government.

With the help of Russia’s air power, the Syrian government has since reclaimed most of Syria’s territory from the insurgents, excluding Idlib in the northwest occupied by the Turkish-backed militants and Deir al-Zor and the Kurdish-held areas in the east, thus inflicting a humiliating defeat on Washington and its regional allies.

Thus, Iran is under moral obligation to pay its debt to the patron in the latter’s moment of crisis. Let me clarify, however, I’m not inciting anybody to jump off the cliff. But in its blind rage, if Washington goes all out in resorting to economic warfare against Russia, then a limited and calculated response to give the self-styled global hegemon a taste of its own medicine would certainly deter it from resorting to extreme measures.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Af-Pak and Middle East regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research.

Notes

[1] Iran’s largest warship catches fire, sinks in Gulf of Oman

[2] Long-Planned and Bigger Than Thought: Strike on Iran’s Nuclear Program

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @globalresearch_crg and Twitter at @crglobalization.


Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


In an unprecedented move, the European Commission has banned Russian news outlets RT and Sputnik across the EU, calling them ‘Kremlin Media Machines’ and accusing them of indulging in pro-Russia propaganda

Amidst the ever growing list of sanctions against Russia by the US and its NATO allies since its attack on Ukraine on February 24, the European Unions’ announcement of banning some of Russia’s media outlets stands as unique and unprecedented. The move raises fundamental questions about the West’s commitments to freedom of speech and expression and democracy. It also exposes the West’s discomfort about narratives which challenge its preferred version of what is happening in the Eastern Europe.

On 27 February European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the EU is banning Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik because they were spreading Russian government’s propaganda declaring that, these channels and their subsidiaries, “will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin’s war and to sow division in our union.” Since then, these channels have also faced a blockade on Meta owned social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook and Google owned Youtube. Twitter, a popular microblogging platform also announced that it will comply with the ban order when asked.

Though the US has not yet announced a formal ban on RT and Sputnik, it has supported the EU’s move. Several users in the country have claimed that these channels are not accessible to them as well. Similar news has been reported from Australia as well.

Some ministers in the conservative government in the UK, including Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and several MPs from the party have pressured the Ofcom, the country’s media regulator, to issue a EU-like ban on RT and Sputnik in the country. On Wednesday, March 2 Ofcom announced an investigation into RT’s news coverage.

Violates the right to free information for viewers 

Apart from curtailing the choices of its people by proscribing Russian channels, the EU’s move also puts a question mark on its citizens’ maturity to differentiate between fact and propaganda. It is also a clear violation of the right to free access to information which is part of the EU charter. Some public opinion surveys conducted on social media on the issue also confirm that EU leadership’s decision to ban RT and Sputnik does not have popular support.

This is an example of seriously compromising freedom of speech and expression considered fundamental to liberal democratic systems preferred and glorified in the west. The EU has undertaken several punitive actions including sanctions against countries outside the union for their alleged violations of the same rights.

Though the amount of public outrage against the ban in Europe was limited mostly due to overt or covert censorship self-imposed by the Western media groups, there were several people from both within the region and outside who questioned EU leadership’s commitments to free speech and democracy.

The commentators from within the European countries have emphasized that even if the Russian networks were following a particular agenda the correct course of action for the EU leadership was to disseminate counter facts in public domain instead of resorting to a ban. With varied amounts of qualifications, some commentators have also called it an assault on the freedom of press.

Some commentators also questioned the argument that continued broadcasting of these channels would have caused threat to security and unity of Europe.

Several commentators have also questioned the legality of the move as a pan EU ban does not have any precedence and there is no legal regime for the same.

One propaganda over the other

Speaking to RT, Nicola Mircovic called the ban an attempt by the European leadership of “fabrication of consent”. He claimed that most of the electronic and print media in Europe has been disseminating a one sided and biased narrative of what is happening in eastern Europe and by banning RT and Sputnik they want to make sure that the people of Europe do not get to see the alternative side of the story.

Some of the commentators even while opposing the ban on Russian media channels tried to find justifications for demands for the same. Precious Chatterjee Doody, a lecturer in Open University in the UK wrote in the Conversation, that “there are some patterns in how its [RTs] coverage plays out. RT usually gives strictly factual-albeit heavily curated-news coverage that prioritizes sources and perspectives that correspond with Russian interests.” She forgets to add that this is done by most other so-called neutral media outlets as well.

Activists have also questioned the aggressive tagging of pages related to news outlets such as RT, Sputnik and Chinese media outlet CGTN among others as “state-affiliated media”. In some cases even journalists working with some of these outlets are tagged in a similar way by twitter. Activists blame that twitter uses the tags as a yardstick of neutrality very selectively. In most of the cases, western media outlets such as BBC which receives funds from the UK state are exempted from such practices. The personal accounts of several journalists such as Afsin Rattansi who hosts a show on RT called Going Underground, have been marked as “state affiliated media” by Twitter recently.

It is obvious that the West has adopted a tactic of media warfare where all those narratives which question its preferred take on the Russia-Ukraine crisis will be treated as “propaganda”. The ruling class in the west appears to have decided that they have the truth on their side and those who question about NATO’s eastward expansion and present Russia concerns about rise of neo-Nazis in Ukraine are misinformation agents. The people have to believe that, as Ali Abunimah, director of Electronic Intifada said in a twitter post, “all this censorship is to defend free speech, all this conformity is to protect democracy and all this repression is to guarantee freedom”.

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Featured image: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the EU is banning Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik. (Source: Peoples Dispatch)

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***

Maine physician Dr. Meryl Nass, who has been successfully treating covid patients with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and who exposed massive corruption in the suppression of chloroquine drugs for treating covid, talks about finding herself in the Orwellian position of having her medical license suspended by the Maine’s Board of Licensure in Medicine for “public dissemination of misinformation” regarding the covid pandemic and covid vaccines and being ordered to undergo a psychological examination to ensure she is fit to continue treating patients.

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This article was originally published on The Whistleblower Newsroom.

Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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A blog that tracks COVID-19-related “Great Reset” incidents has reported that at least 20 people have been killed over a two-week period in February due to private plane and helicopter crashes.

“The U.S. Helicopter Safety Team (USHST) reported 122 helicopter accidents, with 51 fatalities, in 2019. There were 92 accidents and 35 fatalities in the first year of COVID dystopia (2020) when aircraft were grounded for months. In fact, there was a 107-day period in 2020 with no fatal helicopter accidents, which is unusual compared to other years,” The COVID Blog reported. “Further, small, private aircraft crash relatively-frequently, even before the COVID-19/vaccine era. But the difference since 2021 – more people are dying in said crashes.”

The report goes on to note that USHST data record fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours on a monthly basis, adding that it is very rare for them to exceed one fatal crash per 100,000 hours. Any figure under one is considered a good measurement.

However, the report says that three months in 2021 exceeded the baseline number, peaking at 2.08 fatal crashes per 100,000 flight hours in December of that year.

Meanwhile, The COVID Blog noted that most Americans pay little attention to helicopter crashes, but the exception recently came when a helicopter carrying former NBA star Kobe Bryant and his daughter crashed into a mountain in California, killing them both in 2020.

That said, helicopter crash searches online began trending upward last month, the report continued.

While some mainstream media outlets began reporting on an unusually high number of plane crashes for a brief period over the summer of 2021, for the most part major outlets have ignored the most recent uptick.

The blog then listed several of those recent crashes, including photos of the victims who died and short histories of when they obtained their licenses to fly. The report also listed the types of aircraft being flown by the victims.

Overall, 11 aircraft crashes over a period of 14 days is not necessarily unusual, the blog report notes. But what makes these crashes significant is the high rate of death: At least 20 people have died in these crashes, and that is not normal in any way.

One good thing to note is that none of the crashes killed anyone on the ground, though there were several instances where that was a distinct possibility.

In normal times, the blog reported, this kind of story would make headlines internationally, “but during The Great Reset” — the term for the pandemic — “it’s a mere blip in the 24-hour news cycle.”

“Small planes crashed quite a bit even before The Great Reset. But there were 347 civil aviation deaths in 2017, and 393 in 2018. Twenty people are dead from all the foregoing crashes. That number could rise to 22. But if it stays at 20, and it’s extrapolated for all of 2022, that means 520 will die in aviation crashes in 2022,” the report continues.

“The NTSB considers anything over one fatality for every 100,000 flight hours far too much. The data at the beginning of this article show three months in 2021 with more than one fatality per 100,000 hours in helicopters, with December 2021 having more than two per 100,000 hours. In other words, there will most likely be more accidents this year than any other year, and most definitely far more deaths as a result,” the report adds.

And while it’s impossible to know the cause of these crashes, the data are alarming enough, especially given that they have occurred at a time of maximum COVID-19 vaccination and boosters.

There have been a number of odd, unusual phenomena since the pandemic and, more specifically, since the widespread use of vaccines. People who are otherwise healthy drop over dead; planes and helos fall out of the sky; drivers of vehicles suddenly lose control and crash for no apparent reason.

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Former BlackRock portfolio manager Edward Dowd is speaking out about the real motivations behind the pandemic, which include a global debt problem and an imminent global collapse of the financial industry.

After the Great Financial Crisis, the decision was made to increase the money supply, but this debt-based financial system is unsustainable and Dowd believes it’s on the brink of collapse.

Restrictions on travel, vaccine passports and rampant censorship enacted as measures to control the pandemic are all a global way to control the collapse and its aftermath.

Dowd’s friend in the biotech industry told him that the all-cause mortality endpoint had been missed by Pfizer in the original clinical trial — this means that in the jab group there were more deaths than in the placebo group.

The biotech executives who saw the Pfizer data decided they weren’t going to get boosters, and the people who weren’t yet injected were not going to get the shot.

Looking to Wall Street may give some of the greatest clues that what Dowd says is correct — even with COVID-19 shots so prevalent, Big Pharma stocks are dropping; Moderna is down 70%.

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Another high integrity patriot, former BlackRock portfolio manager Edward Dowd, is speaking out about the real motivations behind the pandemic, which he believes aren’t about COVID at all. Instead, it’s all about money — specifically a global debt problem and an imminent global collapse of the financial industry.

During his career, Dowd witnessed two bubbles — corporate fraud and then bank fraud — and now he believes we’re in the third bubble, which involves central banks and governments.1

“A lot of the regulatory agencies have been captured by deep-pocketed money interests, and so we have to spread the word and awareness through educating people, because the governments aren’t going to come and rescue us this time. We, the people, are going to do it, I believe,” he says.2

Deaths Increased After COVID Shots

Dowd became suspicious of COVID-19 shots early on, as he reviewed data on side effects from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). “These jabs kill people and they maim people. That’s my personal belief, and I think I’m 100% correct,” he says.3

Dowd has been analyzing data about mortality rates before and after COVID-19 shots became widespread, and found that death rates worsened in 2021 — after the shots became prevalent — compared to 2020, particularly among non-COVID-related deaths among young people.

For instance, Scott Davison, the CEO of Indiana-based insurance company OneAmerica, reported the death rate for 18- to 64-year-olds has risen 40% compared to before the pandemic.4

Further, insurance companies citing higher mortality rates include Hartford Insurance Group, which announced mortality increased 32% from 2019 and 20% from 2020 prior to the shots. Lincoln National also stated death claims have increased 13.7% year over year and 54% in quarter 4 compared to 2019.5 Dowd tweeted:6

“Randy Frietag CFO just explained that in 2021 the share of young people dying from covid doubled in the back half of the year & that’s driven the result for Lincoln & its peers. He cited 40% in 3Q and 35% in 4Q were below the age of 65 … Mandates are killing folks … This shouldn’t be happening with miracle vaccines in a working age population period and a mild Omicron.”

Further, Dowd pointed out “a spike in mortality among younger, working-age individuals coincided with vaccine mandates. The spike in younger deaths peaked in Q3 2021 when COVID deaths were extremely low (but rising into the end of September).”7

Dowd also reported data from public funeral home company Carriage Services, which announced a 28% increase in September 2021 compared to September 2020, while August had a 13% increase. He tweeted:8,9

“Business has been quite good since the introduction of the vaccines & the stock was up 106% in 2021. Curious no? Guys this is shocking as 89% of Funeral homes are private in US. We are seeing the tip of the iceberg.”

The Global Debt Bubble Is at Its Peak

The pandemic was the perfect cover for central banks to print money for an “emergency,” Dowd said.10 “Under the cover of Covid they were able to print 65% more money to keep this thing afloat, but we’re at the end days here.”11 After the Great Financial Crisis, the decision was made to increase the money supply, but for every dollar you create, you create a dollar in debt, which then gets multiplied across the globe.

This debt-based financial system is unsustainable and Dowd believes it’s on the brink of collapse. “My overarching thesis is that we have a global debt problem, and after the Great Financial Crisis (of 2007-2008), all the central banks and the governments started pumping money into the system.”12 Since 2008, the central banks have cooperated to keep the debt bubble afloat — he used the example of negative yielding bonds in Europe — but it can’t stay afloat forever.

Restrictions on travel, vaccine passports and rampant censorship enacted as measures to control the pandemic are all a global way to control the collapse and its aftermath, Dowd believes, put in place under the guise of medical care:13

“If you know a debt bubble is going to blow up, and pensions won’t be able to be paid and people’s life savings will be wiped out, wouldn’t it be interesting to use COVID as cover to set up a system to prevent all that from happening, a medical system … under the guise of medical welfare or help. It’s a stealth tyrannical system that can be switched from medical to riot prevention pretty quick.”

“That’s what I would do if I was anticipating a global debt problem,” he added.14 When asked whether the collapse is guaranteed, Dowd said, “Absolutely, it’s just a matter of time.” He didn’t want to speculate on whether the collapse would be this year, next year or at another point in the future, but believes it will be sooner rather than later. Still, he stressed that people shouldn’t run out to make investment decisions based on this prediction.

The Cat Is Out of the Bag

With solid data that non-COVID deaths have skyrocketed among young people since the introduction of COVID-19 shots, evidence of fraud in Pfizer’s COVID shot trials and disturbing Department of Defense (DOD) data on COVID injection side effects, Dowd believes it’s only a matter of time before the criminals behind this scheme are held accountable.

For instance, three DOD whistleblowers datamined the DOD health database, revealing significant increases in rates of miscarriage, cancer, neurological disease and stillbirths since COVID-19 jabs rolled out.15 This, combined with nonsensical public health mandates, doesn’t add up:16

“The responses from governments to this virus that doesn’t kill 99.9% of us makes no sense. And they’re all unified in their determination to put in these systems — these digital vaccination/passport systems. They’re all globally synced. They all want us to get these jabs, and it’s too unified. I suspect there’s a problem coming down the road.”

The systems, including ever-expanding plans for digital currency, vaccine passports and digital IDs, are in place for control and power.17 While digital IDs are being promoted as convenient and easy, underneath it is the ability to track — and tax — everything you do.

If you buy the “wrong” products or foods, you could be penalized by being heavily taxed, for instance, and there’s no limit to how high the tax could go or what products or activities could be affected. Even the promotion of fake meat in lieu of real animal protein, Dowd believes, is a way of turning people off animal-based protein, which is key for health and growth. “They want you to get sick and die,” he said, or at the very least to stay physically weak.

“It’s a total enslavement system,” Dowd said. “And then they can cut off your digital currency if you behave badly, like they do in China … digital currency and social credit will be tied. If you’re a ‘bad citizen,’ they turn it off and you disappear.”18 The answer, Dowd believes, lies in eliminating the debt-based monetary system:19

“We have to have a monetary system that is no longer debt-based … that allows real investments in real things, not financial speculation … I think it’s going to go from global back to local. So it’s really important to make real human relationships locally, develop a network of people who you trust, who you can rely on that will take care of you. It’s not about money. It’s about human connection and taking care of each other.”

In the meantime, he stressed that “cash is good” if you think a financial crash is looming and offered these warning signs of imminent financial collapse:

  • Lots of currency fluctuations versus the dollar
  • Bond market yields rising fast, because they’ve been kept artificially low
  • Signs of officials no longer speaking in public
  • Watch equity markets and prices of gold and silver

Pfizer Fraud Revealed

Dowd was wary of getting a COVID-19 shot from the beginning. “Operation Warp Speed sounds like a disaster,” he said, noting that the drug is experimental and it normally takes seven to 10 years for safety data for shots to be effective. He saw side effects to the shots being reported to the VAERS database early on, so he was very suspicious and didn’t take the shot.

Then, around November, a friend in the biotech industry told him that the all-cause mortality endpoint had been missed by Pfizer in the original clinical trial — this means that in the jab group there were more deaths than in the placebo group. Normally, during the drug approval process, if you fail that endpoint, you do not get approved.

Dowd said. “When that came out in November, the biotech executives who saw that decided they weren’t going to get boosters, and the people who weren’t vaxxed were not going to get vaxxed.”20Seeing we’ve been misled, Dowd started to share his thoughts on Twitter. Around that time, the FDA decided to hide the clinical data from the trial for 75 years.

“When I saw that, that’s when I got very vocal and said fraud has occurred. How do I know that? They won’t show us the clinical data.”21 Then, he spoke with Brooke Jackson, a regional director formerly employed by Pfizer subcontractor Ventavia Research Group, which was testing Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.

She witnessed falsified data, unblinded patients, inadequately trained vaccinators and lack of proper follow-up on adverse events that were reported. After notifying Ventavia about her concerns, repeatedly, she made a complaint to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — and was fired the same day.22 Dowd believes this fraud could not have occurred without the help of the FDA.

FDA Executive: Annual COVID Shots Imminent

If you thought you’d be done with COVID-19 shots after the first two or three doses, you’re mistaken. The end game was revealed in footage published by Project Veritas, in which FDA executive officer of countermeasures initiative Christopher Cole speaks about the FDA’s conflicts of interest.

“You’ll have to get an annual shot [COVID vaccine],” he said. “I mean, it hasn’t been formally announced yet because they don’t want to, like, rile everyone up.” He explained:23

“Well, there’s a money incentive for Pfizer and the drug companies to promote additional vaccinations … it’ll be recurring fountain of revenue. It might not be that much initially, but it’ll be recurring — if they can — if they can get every person required at an annual vaccine, that is a recurring return of money going into their company … that’s one of the benefits. They clearly want it also for that reason.”

Cole also states, “Biden wants to inoculate as many people as possible” and, when it comes to approving COVID-19 shots for toddlers, states, “They’re not going to not approve [emergency use authorization for children 5 years old or less].”24

In an official statement, the FDA responded to Cole’s remarks by saying, “The person purportedly in the video does not work on vaccine matters and does not represent the views of the FDA.”25

However, as it stands, looking to Wall Street may give some of the greatest clues that what Dowd says is correct — even with COVID-19 shots so prevalent, Big Pharma stocks are dropping. Moderna, for instance, was down nearly 70% from its all-time highs of 2021.26 “In a normal time, that would make lots of news.” The answer, he believes, lies in each person speaking up for freedom:27

“We all have to get involved. We can no longer remain silent … if you believe what I say about what’s going on with the Pfizer fraud, you need to make your loved ones aware of it. You’re going to have to have uncomfortable conversations. I am a different voice. I’m a Wall Street voice, and I’m saying fraud.

Also point out the stock prices to these people to convince them something’s going on, Wall Street is turning on us. That, hopefully, can change a mind, make someone pause. This is a battle for the marginal mind, and you’re not going to convince people by screaming at them. You have to come at them in a loving way … Everyone has to stand up for freedom.”

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Notes

1 Zeee Media February 16, 2022, 2:25

2 Zeee Media February 16, 2022, 2:52

3 Zeee Media February 16, 2022, 51:00

4 ZeroHedge January 3, 2022

5 The Verge Funeral Home Stocks Surge February 21, 2022

6, 9 Twitter, Ed Dowd February 2, 2022

7, 8 Zero Hedge February 5, 2022

10, 12 KLIM News February 15, 2022, 0:04

11 Twitter, TheNo1Waffler February 3, 2022

13 Zeee Media February 16, 2022, 22:00

14 Zeee Media February 16, 2022, 23:06

15 Rumble, The Red Line With Dr. Robert Malone, Part I February 3, 2022, 18:48

16 Zeee Media February 16, 2022, 23:31

17 Zeee Media February 16, 2022, 28:00

18 Zeee Media February 16, 2022, 37:52

19 Zeee Media February 16, 2022, 42:00

20, 21 KLIM News February 15, 2022, 6:45

22 BMJ 2021;375:n2635

23 YouTube, Project Veritas February 16, 2022

24, 25 YouTube Project Veritas February 15, 2022

26 Nasdaq February 17, 2022

27 KLIM News February 15, 2022, 42:00

Featured image is from Zero Hedge

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


On 12 March 2014 a historic 10-minute video was uploaded to youtube that acquired over a million hits since then, and that presented and truthfully explained a compendium of video-clips which had been uploaded to the Web during the 2014 overthrow and replacement of Ukraine’s democratically elected President,

Viktor Yanukovych, who had been called to the White House right after his 2010 electoral win and was asked by Obama to help to push his country toward joining NATO (though all of the opinion polls that had been taken of the Ukrainian public showed that the vast majority of Ukrainians viewed NATO to be their enemy, no friend of Ukraine).

Yanukovych said no, and the Obama Administration began by no later than 2011 to organize their coup to take down and replace Yanukovych so as to get Ukraine into NATO in order for America to become able to place its missiles only a five-minute striking-distance away from Moscow, for a retaliation-prohibiting blitz nuclear first-strike attack.

During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it.

In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.”

Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.

The 2014 coup in Ukraine was about two things: getting Ukraine into NATO, and seizing Russia’s biggest naval base, which ever since 1783 has been in Crimea, which (Crimea) the Soviet dictator had transferred to Ukraine in 1954 while still continuing Crimea as the Soviet Union’s biggest naval base. Obama, already by no later than June 2013, was planning to grab that naval base and turn it into yet another U.S. naval base.

However, in order to get that coup-installed new regime to last as being a ‘democracy’, Obama needed to be sure that Crimea, which had voted 75% for Yanukovych, and that Donbass, which had voted more than 90% for Yanukovych, be ethnically cleansed of those especially favorable-toward-Russia voters.

So, promptly as soon as the Obama-installed government received the reins of power in Ukraine, Ukraine’s top generals were replaced by rabidly anti-Russian ones, who planned this ethnic-cleansing of those ‘terrorists’, in what they called their “Anti-Terrorist Operation” or “ATO,” in, especially, Donbass. (Donbass is the farthest-east part of Ukraine’s “East” as shown in slide 26 here, and you can see there that ONLY Crimea was even more anti-U.S. than was Ukraine’s “East.”

Donbass was the most pro-Russian part of that “East.” Those were therefore the two regions where Obama especially needed the ethnic cleansing, the “ATO.”) But it also was done in Odessa, and in other Ukrainian cities that had voted heavily for Yanukovych. This would be the ‘democratic’ way to produce a permanently nazi-controlled Ukraine.

The Obama Administration was demanding that Ukraine quickly conquer Donbass; and, since the only air power over that region was Ukraine’s Air Force, Ukraine relentlessly bombed Donbass. One of their bombers got shot down, but that was only a minor loss for the U.S.-installed regime. Overall, the bombings caused massive devastation in Donbass.

Nonetheless, the U.S. Government’s hopes for a military conquest of Donbass were not fulfilled; and this got us to the current situation.

When, on 15 February 2022, the U.S. Government closed its Embassy in Kiev and relocated it to Lviv (which is the Ukrainian city that was the most ardently pro-Hitler during WW II), it scrubbed from its computers, and from the Web, its correspondences concerning the secret joint U.S.-Ukrainian bioweapons labs that have been built in Ukraine since the Obama coup. (Fortunately, at that link, one can find archived versions of those destroyed documents.) The U.S. Government likewise had established secret Pentagon bioweapons labs in Georgia.

The U.S. Government not only allows Ukraine to firebomb Donbass, but America’s think tanks that have discussed those firebombings have said the Ukrainian Government needs to do more of it.

Ukraine’s nazis also target school buses, so as to kill children, in parts of Ukraine that had voted heavily for Yanukovych.

Furthermore, in the more rightwing parts of Ukraine, nazis are invited into classrooms in order to spread anti-Russia hate and provide literature encouraging the students to join their movement.

This was the situation before Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

Featured image: Members of the Azov Battalion and other far-right groups march through Kyiv during Defenders of Ukraine Day, October 14, 2018. Photo from Leave the West Behind.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


Canadians calling for a no-fly zone over Ukraine have lost the plot. Unless their real aim is nuclear war.

Recently, former Conservative cabinet minister Chris Alexander, New Brunswick education minister Dominic Cardy and former Chief of the Defence Staff Rick Hillier have raised the idea of creating a “no-fly zone” (NFZ) over Ukraine. “We’re calling on all governments of the world to support creating a no fly zone over Ukraine”, declared Michael Shwec, president of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, at a rally in Montréal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and US Congressman Adam Kinzinger have also called for NATO to adopt a NFZ.

A NFZ over Ukraine means war with Russia. It would force the US or NATO to shoot down Russian planes.

A war between Russia and NATO would be horrendous. Both the US and Russia have thousands of nuclear weapons. Highlighting the dangers, Paul Street wrote on Counterpunch that “any elected official calling for a No-Fly Zone over Ukraine should be forced to rescind that call or resign for advocating a policy that could lead to the end of human civilization.”

Fortunately, Canada’s defence minister Anita Anand and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki have rejected the idea of an NFZ.

“It would essentially mean the US military would be shooting down planes, Russian planes,” said Psaki. “That is definitely escalatory, that would potentially put us in a place where we are in a military conflict with Russia. That is not something the president wants to do.”

Even when the target is not a nuclear power, Canadian-backed NFZs have created death, destruction and escalation.

After killing thousands of Iraqis in 1991 the US, UK, France and Canada imposed a NFZ over Northern and Southern Iraq. Over the next 12 years US and British warplanes regularly bombed Iraqi military and civilian installations to enforce the NFZs.

On different occasions Canada sent naval vessels and air-to-air refueling aircraft to assist US airstrikes. Canadian air crew on exchange with their US counterparts also helped patrol the NFZs.

After a September 1996 US strike to further destroy Iraq’s “air-defence network” Prime Minister Jean Chretien said the action was “necessary to avert a larger human tragedy in northern Iraq.” Five years later Chretien responded to another bombing by stating, “if the Iraqis are breaking the agreement or what is the zone of no-flying, and they don’t respect that, the Americans and the British have the duty to make sure it is respected.”

12-years after enforcing the NFZs the US/UK launched a full-scale invasion of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands were killed.

In March 2011 Washington, Paris and some other NATO countries convinced the United Nations Security Council to endorse a plan to implement a NFZ over Libya (China, Germany, Russia, Brazil and Turkey abstained on the vote).Begun under the pretext of saving civilians from Muammar Gaddafi’s terror, the real aim was regime change. The UN “no-fly zone” immediately became a license to bomb Libyan tanks, government installations and other targets in coordination with rebel attacks. With a Canadian general leading the mission, NATO also bombed Gaddafi’s compound and the houses of people close to him. The military alliance defined “effective protection” of civilians as per the UN resolution, noted Professor of North African and Middle Eastern history Hugh Roberts, as “requiring the elimination of the threat, which was Gaddafi himself for as long as he was in power (subsequently revised to ‘for as long as he is in Libya’ before finally becoming ‘for as long as he is alive’).” Thousands, probably tens of thousands, died directly or indirectly from that conflict. Libya has yet to recover and the conflict spilled south into the Sahel region of Africa.

While they may sound benign, NFZs have generally elicited violence. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a terrible violation of international law that is likely to have deleterious consequences for years to come. But, escalating the conflict through a no-fly zone will only make it worse. It could lead to a cataclysmic nuclear war.

 

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


It is simply astonishing how many western journalists, including normally cautious BBC reporters, are shamelessly fawning over young women building Molotov cocktails on the streets of Ukrainian cities like Kyiv.

It’s suddenly sexy to make improvised explosives – at least, if the media consider you white, European and “civilised“.

That might surprise other, more established resistance movements, especially in the Middle East. They have invariably found themselves tarred as terrorists for doing much the same.

Western journalists’ difficulty containing their identification with, and support for, Ukraine’s civilian “resistance” must be maddening to Palestinians in tiny Gaza, for example, who have been locked into a metal cage by an Israeli military occupier for decades.

Palestinians in Gaza make their own Molotov cocktails. But because they can’t get close to the Israeli army, they have to pack them intoballoons that drift over the steel barrier surrounding Gaza and into Israel, sometimes setting fire to fields.

No one from the BBC has celebrated these “incendiary balloons” as a small act of resistance. They are reflexively blamed on Gaza’s governing group Hamas, the political wing of which was recently designated a terror organisation by the British government.

Double standards

Palestinians in Gaza have also suffered a trade blockade by Israel for the past 15 years, one designed to put them on a “starvation diet”. Protesters, including women, children and people in wheelchairs, have regularly turned out to throw a stone in the direction of distant Israeli snipers, hidden behind fortifications, as a symbolic way to demand their freedom. These protesters have often been shot by the Israeli army in response.

The western media offer occasional anguish at the lives lost or the legs amputated of those targeted by the snipers. But none of them cheerlead this Palestinian “resistance” as they do the Ukrainian one. More usually, the protesters are treated as dupes or provocateurs of Hamas.

Gaza, unlike Ukraine, does not have an army, and its fighters, unlike Ukraine’s, are not being armed by the West.

The Guardian newspaper even censored its cartoonist Steve Bell when he sought to depict one of the victims of Israel’s snipers, a nurse, Razan al-Najjar, who had been trying to help the wounded. The paper implied that the cartoon – of Britain’s then prime minister, Theresa May, welcoming her Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, to London, with al-Najjar a sacrificial victim behind them in the fireplace – was antisemitic.

Assuming the media has in the past been reluctant to encourage ordinary people to confront well-armed soldiers – so as to avoid civilian casualties – then why has that policy suddenly been ditched in Ukraine?

The double standards are glaring and everywhere. It is impossible to claim that the journalists doing this are ignorant of reporting conventions elsewhere. They are mostly veterans of Middle East war zones, well used to covering Gaza, Baghdad, Nablus, Aleppo and Tripoli.

Fuelling the fire

Britain and other European states have chosen to fuel the fires of resistance in Ukraine by sending it weapons that can only lead to greater loss of life, especially of civilians caught in the crossfire. One might have expected the British media to examine the ethical implications of such a policy, and the hypocrisy. But not a bit of it.

In fact, much of the media have not only been acting as lobbyists for more weapons to be sent to the Ukrainian army, they have whipped up support for civilians in the UK to get more involved in the fighting.

That has been the case even after No 10 distanced itself from comments by Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, that Britons should be encouraged to volunteer for Ukraine’s so-called “international legions”, supposedly to defend Europe.

Her position was in conflict with usual government practice, which has treated those heading off to fight in war zones in the Middle East as terrorists. Shamima Begum, who went to Syria aged 15, has been stripped of her British citizenship and denied the right to return for doing what Truss has proposed in Ukraine.

Nonetheless, that did not dissuade the BBC from travelling to Essex to meet “Wozza“, a supplier of surplus British army kit he has been selling cheaply to Ukrainians in Britain so they can head off to the battlefront. Wozza was shown tearing off Union Jack insignia from uniforms so Ukrainian militiamen could use them.

Compare that with the treatment of an entirely peaceful form of resistance by westerners in solidarity with the Palestinians, the international Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement. It has been treated as barely better than terrorism, with bans on support for BDS across Europe and the US.

Compromised ‘impartiality’

It is hard to remember in all the media agitation over Ukraine that this sympathetic coverage flies in the face of its reporting conventions. It is inconceivable, of course, that Britain would ever send arms to help, for example, Gaza liberate itself.

For that reason, the media will never have the opportunity to exercise their vocal chords in outrage at such a development.

In fact, the western media more typically echo western government opposition to any support for Gaza, even construction materials like cement to rebuild the enclave after one of Israel’s intermittent wrecking sprees. That is because reporters treat uncritically Israeli claims that humanitarian aid will be repurposed by Hamas and bolster “terrorism”.

Back in 2010, for example, a BBC Panorama programme failed to mention that an Israeli naval attack on a humanitarian aid convoy to besieged Gaza was conducted illegally in international waters. Nine activists trying to deliver aid items like medicine to Gaza aboard the Mavi Marmara ship were killed by Israeli commandoes, but the interviews with these masked men were largely uncritical. There was very little sympathy from the BBC for that act of resistance against a brutal occupier.

A year earlier, the BBC broke with tradition and refused to broadcast a long-established aid appeal because on this occasion it was to provide food and shelter to Gaza, following an Israeli assault that destroyed swaths of the enclave. The BBC justified the decision on the grounds that it would compromise its “impartiality” – something it seems entirely unconcerned about in Ukraine.

The BBC had not responded to questions about these inconsistencies by the time of publication.

Fog of war

The battlefield is well known for becoming quickly enveloped in the fog of war. That is one reason why inexperienced journalists are cautioned by their editors to wait for evidence and to be alert to propaganda. In practice, however, one can assess where the media’s sympathies lie – concealed behind flimsy claims of objectivity – by noting when and for whose benefit these caution rules are abandoned, and which side’s narratives are accepted quickly and uncritically.

In the Middle East, it is clear that US, European and Israeli claims are all too readily amplified, even when their veracity is in doubt.

Such media-fuelled lies have been manifold. That Israel urged the Palestinians it expelled in 1948 to return home. That Saddam Hussein’s troops ripped babies from incubators in Kuwait, and that the Iraqi leader colluded with his arch-enemy, al-Qaeda, in the 9/11 attacks. That Muammar Gadaffi’s soldiers in Libya took Viagra to rape civilians in Benghazi. That Russia paid bounties to the Taliban to kill US soldiers in Afghanistan.

These deceptions and fabrications grabbed headlines when they were useful as propaganda, only to be quietly withdrawn much later on.

In the case of Ukraine, a similar pattern appears to be emerging. There were widespread, inciteful and entirely fictitious reports in the western media of Russian troops butchering a contingent of 13 Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island, in the Black Sea. A fake audio tape was released of the Ukrainians supposedly cursing the Russian invaders. Ukraine’s government promised each of them a Hero of Ukraine award.

But in fact, it was Russian media reports that were true. There were 82 Ukrainian soldiers and they had surrendered. All were alive and well. In another example, a clip from a video game was widely promoted as a heroic lone Ukrainian fighter pilot – dubbed the Ghost of Kyiv – shooting down Russian planes and helicopters.

Misinformation has been shared even more aggressively on western social media accounts, and most of it is designed to evoke sympathy for Ukraine and hostility to Russia.

Softening-up operation

But what we are seeing is more than just an appetite in the media for evidence-free stories and falsehoods so long as they are directed against Russia. And it is about more than the media’s sympathy for Ukrainian “resistance” denied other groups battling their oppressors, when those oppressors are the West and its allies.

The media is chock full of commentators far more rabidly tribal than even western governments and military generals. The media chorus for “more war” seems to be serving as an ideological softening-up operation, clearing the path for governments as they prepare for more extreme propaganda and undemocratic measures.

Along with many others, Mail on Sunday commentator Dan Hodges has beencalling for a no-fly zone over Ukraine that even Boris Johnson has rejected for very obvious reasons. It would lead Europe into a direct confrontation with the Russian airforce and risk confrontation with a nuclear power.

Nonetheless, Hodges has described any rejection of this idea as “an act of appeasement no different to our appeasement of Hitler in 1938”. Russia’s invasion came after nearly a decade of goading by the US using Nato as cover to forge ever tighter military relations with its neighbour.

Rightly or wrongly, Moscow interpreted Nato’s behaviour as an aggressive move by the US and its allies into its “sphere of influence”. The idea that no concession could, and can, be made to Russia – that the only “moral choice”, as Hodges calls it, is risking a potential nuclear war – should be understood as the belligerent provocation it clearly is.

NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, tweeted out what he saw as a “risk calculation” and “moral dilemma”: should the West bomb a convoy of Russian tanks on their way towards Kyiv? Apparently concerned by current inaction, he asked: “Does the West watch in silence as it rolls?”

Utter hypocrisy

Condeleeza Rice, an architect of the criminal invasion of Iraq, has not been challenged by the media over her utter hypocrisy in agreeing that “When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.” If that is the case – and international law says it is – then Rice herself should be on trial at the Hague.

Or what about the media’s horror this week at the shelling of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, where “dozens” were reported killed? Compare that to the media’s breathless excitement over the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign that likely killed thousands in the opening hours of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

What about the media’s mostly complicit silence over many years of Saudi bombing – using British planes and bombs – of civilians in Yemen, leading to a barely imaginable humanitarian catastrophe there? Those in Yemen who resist the Saudi horror show are not heroes to our media, they are simply dismissed as puppets of Iran?

Veteran BBC journalist Jeremy Vine, meanwhile, expressed the view that conscripted Russian soldiers “deserve to die” when they put on a Russian army uniform. “That’s life,” he told a shocked caller to his show.

Did Vine think British and US troops – professional soldiers, unlike Russia’s conscripts – also deserved to die when their armies illegally invaded Iraq? And if not, why not?

The racist undertones and overtones of much western coverage – with commentators and interviewees regularly stressing how Ukrainian refugees are “European”, “civilised”, “blond haired and blue eyed”– is hard to miss.

State propaganda

And in the midst of this rampant, often unhinged western war propaganda, much of its coming from the British state broadcaster, Europe has banned Russia’s state broadcaster RT from the airwaves, while Silicon Valley scrubs its presence from the internet.

There is no doubt that RT generally promotes an editorial line largely sympathetic to Moscow’s foreign policy goals – just as the BBC can invariably be relied on to promote an editorial line largely sympathetic to Britain’s foreign policy goals.

The problem for western audiences is not their exposure to Russian state propaganda. It is their constant exposure to relentless western state propaganda.

If we seek peace – and there are few indications of that at the moment – then we need the western media held to account for its mindless jingoism, its exaggerations, its credulity, its double standards, and its deceptions. But who is going to act as a watchdog on the supposed watchdog of the Fourth Estate?

Right now, we need voices from Russia to understand what Putin thinks and wants, not what the BBC’s “chief international correspondents” think he wants. We need information sources ready to quickly challenge both western and Russian “fake news”.

And most of all we need to stop with our racist view of the world, in which we are always the Good Guys and they are always the Bad Guys, and in which our suffering matters and the suffering of others doesn’t.

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Jonathan Cook is the the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at: www.jonathan-cook.net

Featured image is by MEE

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @globalresearch_crg and Twitter at @crglobalization.

 


Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


The foreign intelligence service of Russia (SVR RF) warned on 4 March that the US and NATO countries are sending ISIS fighters from Syria to Ukraine.

The ISIS members, who are reportedly headed to Ukraine, underwent special training at the US army’s Al-Tanf military base in Syria.

The SVR also stated that similar extremist groups are being recruited throughout West Asia and North Africa. The militants will allegedly enter Ukraine through Poland.

The SVR statement detailed the history of the secret operation they uncovered, saying in a statement: “At the end of 2021, the Americans released from prisons … several dozen Daesh terrorists, including citizens of Russia and CIS countries. These individuals were sent to the US-controlled Al-Tanf base, where they have undergone special training in subversive and terrorist warfare methods with a focus on the Donbass region.”

The US claims that the illegal presence of their troops in northeast Syria is to protect the country’s vast oilfields from falling under the control of ISIS.

Neither Moscow nor Damascus believe this official explanation, with the latter accusing the US of using it as an excuse to steal Syrian oil.

However, ISIS fighters are not the only foreign militants to be recruited to join the fight against Russia in Ukraine.

According to Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov, private military contractors have poured into Ukraine from around the world.

“US military intelligence has launched a large scale propaganda campaign to recruit PMC [private military company] contractors to be sent to Ukraine. First of all, employees of the American PMCs, Academi, Cubic, and Dyn Corporation are being recruited. […] Only last week, about 200 mercenaries from Croatia arrived through Poland, and joined one of the nationalist battalions in the southeast of Ukraine,” Konashenkov said.

Both Iraq and Syria have accused the US of supporting and transferring ISIS fighters within the region.

Earlier this year, The Cradle reported that US forces transferred dozens of ISIS detainees, including high-ranking commanders, to Deir Ezzor governorate, which is close to the Iraqi border. This was reportedly an attempt to “revive ISIS” for the purposes of destabilizing a region that had recently been liberated by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) with the help of Russian troops.

In August last year, similar reports surfaced after a high-ranking officer from Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) reported that their thermal cameras detected US military helicopters transferring ISIS fighters to different locations around the country.

Russia launched a special military operation in Ukraine on 24 February after responding to the call for assistance by the newly-recognized republics of Dontesk and Luhansk.

Despite recognition of their independence by Russia, Ukrainian armed forces continued to shell civilian targets and to breach the borders of the two republics, prompting the leaders of the republics to formally ask Russia for military assistance.

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


April, 2004: In the attack on Fallujah, which ended after 3 weeks in defeat of the “coalition”:

“Forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault; …The town was placed under siege; the ban on bringing in food, medicine, and other basic items was broken only when Iraqis en masse challenged the roadblocks. … After initial instances in which people were prevented from leaving, U.S. forces began allowing everyone to leave except for what they called ‘military age males,’ men usually between 15 and 60. Keeping noncombatants from leaving a place under bombardment is a violation of the laws of war.

“The main hospital in Fallujah is across the Euphrates from the bulk of the town. Right at the beginning, the Americans shut down the main bridge, cutting off the hospital from the town. … This hospital closing (not the only such that I documented in Iraq) also violates the Geneva Convention.

“In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and 2000-pound bombs, and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunships that can demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had snipers criss-crossing the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a series of sometimes mutually inaccessible pockets, divided by the no-man’s-lands of sniper fire paths. Snipers fired indiscriminately, usually at whatever moved. Of 20 people I saw come into the clinic … only five were ‘military-age males.’ I saw old women, old men, a child of 10 shot through the head…

“One thing that snipers were very discriminating about every single ambulance I saw had bullet holes in it. Two I inspected bore clear evidence of specific, deliberate sniping. Friends of mine who went out to gather in wounded people were shot at. When we first reported this fact, we came in for near-universal execration. Many just refused to believe it. Some asked me how I knew that it wasn’t the mujahedin. Interesting question. Had, say, Brownsville, Texas, been encircled by the Vietnamese and bombarded … and Brownsville ambulances been shot up, the question of whether the residents were shooting at their own ambulances, I somehow guess, would not have come up. Later, our reports were confirmed by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and even by the U.S. military.

“The best estimates are that roughly 900-1000 people were killed directly, blown up, burnt, or shot. Of them, my guess, based on news reports and personal observation, is that 2/3 to 3/4 were noncombatants.“

Fallujah and the Reality of War,” –Rahul Mahajan, CounterPunch, Nov. 6, 2004

Act II

“A hospital has been razed to the ground in one of the heaviest U.S. air raids in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Witnesses said only the facade remained of the small Nazzal Emergency Hospital in the center of the city. … A nearby medical supplies storeroom and dozens of houses were damaged as US forces continued preparing the ground for an expected major assault.“

U.S. strikes raze Fallujah hospital,” BBC, Saturday, Nov. 6, 2004

“In a series of actions over the weekend, the United States military and Iraqi government destroyed a civilian hospital in a massive air raid, captured the main hospital, and prohibited the use of ambulances in the besieged city of Fallujah.“

Fallujah: U.S. Declares War on Hospitals, Ambulances,” by Brian Dominick, Antiwar.com, Nov. 10, 2004

“NEAR Fallujah, Iraq Nov. 12, 2004 — Hundreds of men trying to flee the assault on Fallujah have been turned back by U.S. troops following orders … ‘We assume they’ll go home and just wait out the storm or find a place that’s safe,’ one 1st Cavalry Division officer, who declined to be named, said Thursday. … Army Col. Michael Formica, who leads forces isolating Fallujah, admits the rule sounds ‘callous.’ But he insists it’s key to the mission’s success.

“Tell them ‘Stay in your houses, stay away from windows and stay off the roof and you’ll live through Fallujah,’ [Army Col. Michael] Formica, of the 1st Cavalry Division’s 2nd Brigade, told his battalion commanders in a radio conference call Wednesday night. …

“Troops have cut off all roads and bridges leading out of the city. Relatively few residents have sought to get through …On Wednesday and Thursday, American troops sunk boats being used to ferry people … across the river. …“

— “GIs Force Men Fleeing Fallujah to Return,” Associated Press, Nov. 16, 2004

“Insurgent attacks across Iraq stretched American forces to their limits yesterday when rebels appeared to be in control of at least two cities, and the operation in Fallujah entered its most dangerous phase. … Some of the toughest street fighting encountered so far erupted during the day as rebels reemerged in areas already secured by U.S. Marines in the north of the city. Gunmen resumed positions on the roofs of mosques which had earlier been cleared…

“‘I’m supposed to shoot into the houses before our troops go in,’ said Marine Cpl. Will Porter…“

— “U.S. troops stretched to limit as insurgents fight back,” Robin Gedye, Nov. 13, 2004

“Her shins, shattered by bullets from U.S. soldiers when they fired through the front door of her house, are both covered by casts. Small plastic drainage backs filled with red fluid sit upon her abdomen, where she took shrapnel from another bullet.

“Fatima Harouz, 12 years old, lives in Latifiya, a city just south of Baghdad. Just three days ago soldiers attacked her home. Her mother, standing with us says, ‘They attacked our home and there weren’t even any resistance fighters in our area.’ Her brother was shot and killed, and his wife was wounded as their home was ransacked by soldiers. ‘Before they left, they killed all of our chickens,’ added Fatima’s mother, her eyes a mixture of fear, shock and rage.“

Slash and Burn, Dahr Jamail, November 17, 2004

“Journalists with the troops speak of a city that is gradually being devastated. Scarcely a single house does not bear some form of weapons scar and many have been rendered uninhabitable.

“Tactics handed down from years of urban warfare in Israel mean that troops sometimes search rows of buildings by punching holes through walls with high velocity bullets rather than moving from house to house through doors, thus reducing the risk of booby traps and increasing the element of surprise.“

— “The Telegraph: U.S. troops stretched to limit as insurgents fight back,” Robin Gedye, Nov. 13, 2004

“The 33-year-old Associated Press photographer [Bilal Hussein] stayed behind to capture insider images during the siege of [Fallujah] … In the hours and days that followed, heavy bombing raids and thunderous artillery shelling turned Hussein’s northern Jolan neighborhood into a zone of rubble and death. The walls of his house were pockmarked by coalition fire.

“‘Destruction was everywhere. I saw people lying dead in the streets, wounded were bleeding and there was no one to come and help them. … U.S. soldiers began to open fire on the houses, so I decided that it was very dangerous to stay in my house,’ he said. … Hussein moved from house to house — dodging gunfire — and reached the river. … ‘I decided to swim … but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.’

“He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. …’I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim.’“

— “AP Photographer Flees Fallujah,” Katarina Kratovac, Nov. 14, 2004

“No outside aid has reached civilians in the city since the offensive began last Monday, and yesterday U.S. forces kept an Iraqi Red Crescent aid convoy of seven trucks and ambulances waiting at the main hospital near a bridge on the edge of the city. … Reports from within Fallujah yesterday said bodies lay in the streets, homes and mosques were destroyed, and power and telephone lines were down. …

“However, [Marine] Col. [Mike] Shupp said the Red Crescent did not need to deliver aid to civilians in Fallujah and questioned whether there were any. He said: “There is no need to bring supplies in because we have supplies of our own for the people. …

“[U.S.-chosen Iraqi Prime Minister] Mr. [Iyad] Allawi also said he doubted reports of civilians in the city. This contradicted accounts from residents inside the city …

“‘Our situation is very hard,’ said one resident [Abu Mustafa] contacted by telephone in the central Hay al Dubat neighborhood. ‘We don’t have food or water. My seven children all have severe diarrhea.’

“‘One of my sons was wounded by shrapnel last night and he’s bleeding, but I can’t do anything to help him.’

“It is thought about half of Fallujah’s 300,000 people fled the fighting in the city. … In April, 2,000 U.S. Marines fought for three weeks and failed to take Fallujah. This time, six times that number were sent … Major General Richard Natonski of the U.S. Marine Corps: ‘We had the green light this time and we went all the way.’ … [M]ore than 20 different types of planes were used in bombing swarms … as U.S. soldiers began clearing weapons and fighters from every one of Fallujah’s 50,000 buildings, bands of insurgents were still roaming freely in some neighborhoods.“

— “Bodies litter streets in rubble of Fallujah,” Calum MacDonald, Nov. 15, 2004

“[T]he command in Baghdad thought there were at least 2,000 insurgents, and perhaps as many as 5,000. But the coalition forces have failed to find large clusters and now think that there might have been less than 1,000, military sources said yesterday. The senior defense official said some generals now think there might have been 600 or fewer.“

U.S. suspects many insurgents have fled,” Rowan Scarborough, Nov. 12, 2004

“Fallujah has been under relentless aerial and artillery bombardment and without electricity since Monday. Reports have said residents are running low on food. An officer here said it was likely that those who stay in their homes would live through the assault, but agreed the city was a risky and frightening place to live.

“U.S. military says it does all it can to prevent bombing buildings with civilians inside them.“

— “GIs Force Men Fleeing Fallujah to Return,” Associated Press, Nov. 16, 2004

“You read about precision strikes, and it’s true that America’s GPS-guided bombs are very accurate when they’re not malfunctioning, the 80 or 85 percent of the time that they work, their targeting radius is 10 meters, i.e., they hit within 10 meters of the target. Even the smallest of them, however, the 500-pound bomb, has a blast radius of 400 meters.“

Fallujah and the Reality of War,” –Rahul Mahajan, CounterPunch, Nov. 6, 2004

“Once the battle ends, military officials say all surviving military-age men can expect to be tested for explosive residue, catalogued, checked against insurgent databases and interrogated about ties with the guerrillas. U.S. and Iraqi troops are in the midst of searching homes, and plan to check every house in the city for weapons.“

— “GIs Force Men Fleeing Fallujah to Return,” Associated Press, Nov. 16, 2004

“[A]ll the excuses Mr. Bush gave for attacking the people of Iraq were either wrong or lies. … We’ll only mention in passing that the domestic price for ‘our’ sarkar attacking Iraq, a country with no WMD, no al-Qaeda links, and no connections to 9/11 so far has been $87 billion, a good chunk of our civil liberties — and 1,239 or so American soldier’s lives, not to mention a minimum of approximately 8,000 more wounded and/or maimed.“

— L. Reichard White, “The Only Way to Make Your Vote Count,” Oct. 31, 2004

So, are Putin and the Russians as good at invading countries and murdering men, women and children as these guys?

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L. Reichard White [send him mail] taught physics, designed and built a house, ran for Nevada State Senate, served two terms on the Libertarian National Committee, managed a theater company, etc. For the next few decades, he supported his writing habit by beating casinos at their own games. His hobby, though, is explaining things he wishes someone had explained to him. You can find a few of his other explanations listed here.

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About Those 600,000 Barrels…

March 6th, 2022 by Eric Peters

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If you think gas (and food) are expensive now, give it a week.

That’s all it may take for the thing styled the “media” to whip up enough hysteria about the Danger of Putin to cause something far worse and even more idiotic than the pouring out of Russian Vodka into the sink.

That thing being the turning off of the Russian spigot.  

America currently imports something on the order of 600,000 barrels of Russian oil every day – an amount about 200,000 barrels shy of the number of barrels America would not have to import from Russia, had the Biden Thing not cancelled the Keystone Pipeline, among other things.

The deficit of those 200,000-something barrels per day – along with the other things of-a-piece done by the Biden Thing to reduce the supply of oil available to Americans – has helped to almost double the price of a gallon of gas over the course of a little more than one year since Orange Man Bad. And while he may, indeed, have been very bad – as by declaring (and continuing) an “emergency” when there wasn’t one and by turgidly Warp Speeding dangerous drugs not merely into existence but facilitated the forcing of them into the bodies of tens of millions of Americans – he was very good on the energy front. 

It was only about a year ago that America didn’t need oil from Russia.  It was only about a year ago that America was on the verge of being a net exporter of oil – perhaps to places like Russia.

In that case, America could have turned off the spigot – without Americans having to pay three times as much for a gallon of gas as they just may, soon, than they were paying when Orange Man Bad.

Americans ought to consider what that will mean – and whether it’s a cost they’re wanting (are able) to bear.

At $6 per gallon, it will cost the average American just shy of $100 to fill up the 15 gallon tank of the average compact-sized economy car; something in the Toyota Corolla class of car.

Assuming a once-a-week fill-up, the average American will be paying about $400 per month to get to work, in order to pay for that. Assuming it stays at just $6 per gallon – an unsafe assumption, if the Biden Thing stops importing Russian oil to punish the Russians by punishing Americans – the average American will be spending close to $5,000 annually on gas. For the same gas that he spent $30 to buy a tankful of when Orange Man Bad – or $120 per month ($1,440 per year).

His work is not likely going to give him a raise to compensate him for the difference.

Nor for the difference in what it costs him to eat.

Americans may not understand where their food comes from – nor how it is produced – much as they do not understand why the Russians are unsettled about this business of having a Western military alliance ensconced right up against the border of their country. But here’s the spoiler.

It requires oil.

A great deal of it, to create the fertilizer upon which crops depend. Upon which livestock depends, to grow into hamburger and pork chops. Without oil – or rather, without affordable oil – it not  only gets more expensive to grow the crops, it gets harder to grow them. Modern industrial agriculture “guzzles” a great deal more gas – in the form of oil – than any V8-powered SUV.

Than all of them, combined.

Without the oil, you get the double whammy. Less food that costs more. And more to get that food to you. Trucks using oil, you see.

As well as for you to get to it.

Think about that a little bit.

How about $10 for a pound of ground round? How about no ground round, at all? It is a delicious irony – for those who appreciate it – that as the American regime fulminates against the Russian regime, America looks more and more like the Soviet regime.

Well, American supermarkets begin to look more and more like Soviet-era supermarkets, full of empty shelves and high prices. A kopek for your thoughts, comrade? American roads, too.

Or rather, soon will.

Lots of open roads – for the Party nomenklatura, people like the Biden Thing. They don’t have to worry about the cost of filling up, because they don’t have to pay it. The nomenklatura – whether then or there or here and now – never has to worry about such things. What they do worry about is a comfortable, well-fed population of citizens who don’t need them and for that reason can ignore them.

This is harder to do when your stomach – and your tank – are empty.

Or when you can’t afford to fill either.

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


An international cat federation has banned all Russian-owned and bred cats from competing in international competitions, in a move that’s sure to stop Putin’s attack on Ukraine.

No, this isn’t a Babylon Bee story.

The Fédération Internationale Féline (FIFe) issued a statement saying it “cannot just witness these atrocities and do nothing.”

The federation has decided that “no cat bred in Russia may be imported and registered in any FIFe pedigree book outside of Russia. … No cat belonging to exhibitors living in Russia may be entered at any FIFe show outside Russia.”

The ban will apply until at least the end of May and will punish popular breeds such as the Russian Blue, Peterbald and the Siberian cat, which can cost up to $4,000 dollars.

The story attracted condemnation from Chinese users of Weibo, with one asserting, “Animals should not have nationalities.”

As any rational person will surely understand, this is virtually guaranteed to send battle tanks scurrying back to Moscow

As we explain in the video below, the outpouring of utterly moronic moral exhibitionism in the aftermath of the attack on Ukraine is now manifesting itself in a very dangerous form of vitriolic Russophobia.

It’s also a crusade being taken up by leading politicians.

In the United States, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) wants to expel all Russian students from universities, while in the UK Conservative MP called for all Russian citizens to be deported.

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***

By the beginning of 1942 Adolf Hitler had led Nazi Germany into a desperate situation, from which there was probably no escape. At the time, this was not easily apparent to the Wehrmacht or the German population, nor indeed to the Third Reich’s enemies, particularly those in the West.

The failure of Nazi Germany’s Army Groups to deliver a lethal blow against Soviet Russia in 1941, meant that the Wehrmacht had missed its chance to win the war; and well prior to the defeat at Stalingrad, which confirmed to the world that the Germans were unlikely to emerge victorious. As 1942 began, the sands of time were moving rapidly against the Nazis and their Axis allies, principally Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Ion Antonescu’s Romania, both of whom were dependent on German success to ensure their own survival.

The Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, with its greater industrial power and much larger population than the Reich, could only strengthen as the conflict continued and the Germans could only weaken. However, the USSR itself would never completely recover from the devastation inflicted by the Wehrmacht on their state, at a minimum 25 million Soviet deaths suffered and tens of thousands of towns destroyed (1); along with the effort simply expended in the struggle against the German war machine.

English historian Chris Bellamy wrote that the Nazi-Soviet War had ongoing implications, not merely for Germany but for Russia too, and was a leading factor which “ultimately broke the Soviet Union” in 1991. The other central cause behind the USSR’s disintegration was “the succeeding struggle against the West – which followed without any respite”. (2)

Bellamy recognised that Soviet Russia “was a long-term casualty of the Great Patriotic War [1941–45]” (3). Had Hitler known this as he raised a pistol to his head in the Führerbunker, and furthermore that the Soviet Union would collapse without a shot fired, he presumably would have gone to his grave in a more serene state of mind. Russian military journals conceded that the Soviet victory over the Germans was achieved at too great a cost. (4)

During the Nazi-Soviet War, the turning of the tide took far longer than Stalin and his regime had expected. From January 1942 until the high summer, the Soviet hierarchy continued to claim complete triumph was achievable over the Wehrmacht that year (5). The Germans proved to be made of sterner material than Napoleon’s army, in their ill-fated 1812 attack on Russia.

The lingering effects of Stalin’s purges of the Red Army high command (1937-41) should not be underestimated. After the war, Marshal Georgy Zhukov said the purges had inflicted “enormous damage” on “the top echelons of the army command” (6). As Zhukov knew, the repercussions were felt strongly in the war with Nazi Germany. The Red Army had a shortage of top class commanders. It was further deprived of the initiative to make independent decisions when needed, especially early in the conflict against Nazism when Stalin was personally caught by surprise with the German invasion.

Moreover, British scholar Evan Mawdsley observed, “the purges made foreign governments – potential allies as well as potential enemies – assume that the Red Army was a broken shell” (7). The British and French presumed it to be so. As did Hitler’s Germany who had taken advantage of the circumstances.

Red Army intelligence agent Leopold Trepper wrote in his memoirs,

“The Germans exploited this situation to the full, instructing their Intelligence Services to convey to Paris and London the alarming facts – and they really were alarming – on the state of the Red Army after the purges”. (8)

It was the case also that the purges were a factor which influenced Hitler to attack the USSR, on 22 June 1941, otherwise he may have held off until 1942 or later. Proof of the damage imparted on the Soviet armed forces was evident in the Winter War with Finland (30 November 1939–13 March 1940), which the Soviet authorities had predicted would last for between 10 to 12 days. (9)

The Nazis were subsequently confident that a war against Soviet Russia would be a routine one. This confidence grew after the German divisions brushed aside French and British forces, during the summer 1940 Battle of France.

With 1942 continuing from its opening weeks the German high command, on paper at least, still had cause for hope. Most of eastern Europe and European Russia was under Nazi occupation, and there was no immediate threat of a large-scale Anglo-American landing in the West. Though by some distance the world’s strongest country, America and its war industry was shifting slowly into gear after the Great Depression, and would not reach its potential until late in the global conflict.

Much to Stalin’s dismay and frustration, it was the Japanese, and not the Germans, who would then endure the brunt of US industrial might. Stalin and his entourage’s growing suspicions, that the Anglo-American powers hoped the Nazi-Soviet War would last for years, were based on well-founded concerns.

This desire had already been expressed in part by Harry S. Truman, future US president, hours after the Wehrmacht had invaded the Soviet Union.

Truman, then a US Senator, said he wanted to see the Soviets and Germans “kill as many as possible” between themselves, an attitude which the New York Times later called “a firm policy” (10). The Times had previously published Truman’s remarks on 24 June 1941, and as a result his views would most likely not have escaped the Soviets’ attention.

The area of landmass conquered by Nazi Germany increased substantially again through 1942. Expanding to its peak, the Third Reich’s territory was equal to the size of terrain conquered by the legendary Macedonian king, Alexander the Great, in the 4th century BC (11). Alexander the Great had ruled over a land area from the eastern Mediterranean all of the way to north-western India. Hitler’s dominion stretched across the entirety of continental Europe, much of north Africa and had breached into the fringes of western Asia.

As early as 18 October 1941, the Germans had taken captive at least 3 million Soviet troops. Bellamy noted,

“The total of 3 million was almost 10 times the figure of 378,000 admitted by Stalin on 6 November [1941], on the eve of the twenty-fourth anniversary of the 1917 October revolution. By the end of 1941, 3.8 million Soviet servicemen and women had surrendered or been captured”. (12)

Stalin was not assuming responsibility for the fall of Kiev, in the middle of September 1941, which had resulted in 665,000 Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by the Germans, an unequalled number in the military annals. By refusing to allow the Ukrainian capital to be abandoned for strategic reasons, Stalin had overruled the pleas of commanders like Zhukov and Semyon Budyonny. The latter was a distinguished cavalryman, but this did not prevent Budyonny from being scapegoated for the Kiev calamity and sacked on 13 September 1941.

Geoffrey Roberts, a specialist in Soviet history, wrote that

“Stalin fully shared these misconceptions and, as Supreme Commander, bore ultimate responsibility for their disastrous practical consequences. As A.J.P. Taylor noted [a British historian], Stalin’s dedication to the doctrine of the offensive ‘brought upon the Soviet armies greater catastrophes than any other armies have ever known’. There were many occasions, too, when it was Stalin’s personal insistence on the policy of no retreat, and of counterattack at all costs, that resulted in heavy Soviet losses”. (13)

Among Hitler’s goals for the 1942 offensive was to deal a devastating blow on the Red Army, by destroying its divisions in the south-western USSR; and thereafter seizing control of the Soviet oil fields of the Caucasus, primarily at Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The fossil fuel sources there supplied the Soviet Union with almost 90% of its fuel, a remarkable total. Roberts outlined,

“Unlike in 1941, Hitler did not necessarily expect to win the war in the east in 1942” (14). He did expect to place the Reich in an insurmountable position, self-sufficient by enjoying mastery over rich oil deposits and, in doing so, depriving Soviet Russia of those reserves.

Should they fail Hitler acknowledged, “If we do not capture the oil supplies of the Caucasus by the autumn, then I shall have to face the fact that we cannot win this war” (15). German plans for the 1942 summer campaign expounded that the Russian infiltrations, behind Wehrmacht lines, were to be wiped out once and for all. The surrounded German garrisons in the Russian towns of Demyansk and Kholm were to be relieved, and the Soviet pocket at Volkhov, 70 miles east of Leningrad, was earmarked for eradication. (16)

German objectives further stated that the 60 mile Soviet salient near the city of Izyum, in eastern Ukraine, should be cleared of Russian forces; as would the Kerch peninsula in the east of Crimea, while the city of Sevastopol in southern Crimea was to be taken.

The German Army of 1942 was still very powerful, and it remained much stronger than its Soviet counterpart. Between January and June 1942, the Germans would inflict 1.4 million casualties on the Soviet Army, while in those same 6 months the Wehrmacht lost 188,000 men, Mawdsley highlighted (17). The Germans therefore had less than one-seventh (13.4%) of Soviet personnel losses during the first half of 1942.

The German high command had contemplated remaining on the defensive through 1942, so as to build up its strength to something like that of 1941. The primary argument against this once more loomed large, in that the Germans could not afford to let the war drag on indefinitely, and had no alternative but to revert to attack.

The maximum Russian goal in the Winter Campaign was to encircle and annihilate German Army Group Centre, the largest and strongest Wehrmacht force. Were this achieved, the war would have been practically decided in the Russians’ favour in 1942, but it was not to be. By late January 1942 it was clear the operation had failed, largely because of robust counterstrokes launched by the German 9th Army commander, Walter Model, known as Hitler’s “fireman” (18). The less ambitious but realistic Russian aim, supported by Zhukov, of forcing the enemy back to the city of Smolensk, 230 miles west of Moscow, also fell short of being reached.

At the beginning of February 1942, the Eastern front was stabilising, and the threat of a capitulation akin to that suffered by Napoleon had disappeared. The German high command achieved this in part by removing tired commanders when necessary, and replacing them with energetic and skilful officers (19). Perhaps most notably General Model and Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, the new commander of Army Group Centre, who had replaced the disgruntled Fedor von Bock on 19 December 1941. Mawdsley described the 59-year-old von Kluge as “one of Hitler’s most talented and effective leaders”. (20)

In the second week of February 1942, Field Marshal von Kluge issued a positive report about Army Group Centre’s fighting capacity. This account was accurate and warmly received by Hitler and the military staff at the Wolf’s Lair headquarters. The Germans had altogether lost 48,000 men in January 1942, hardly a shattering number (21). In mid-February 1942, Hitler informed his commanders that the “danger of a panic in the 1812 sense” was “eliminated”. (22)

Most senior German officers agreed with Hitler’s wish to instigate another offensive for 1942 but, as the year before, they favoured a major drive through the centre – in order to finally capture Moscow, the heartbeat of Soviet Russia, which had narrowly eluded the invaders at the start of December 1941. The centre of Moscow was just 100 miles from the most advanced German positions (23). If the capital went uncaptured, the Soviet Union would remain in the war beyond 1942. The taking of Stalingrad would not have changed that.

Hitler had recklessly postponed Army Group Centre’s march on Moscow in August 1941, instead dispatching separate panzer formations northward and southward towards Leningrad and Kiev. Undeterred, he intended reverting to this plan for 1942, of holding in the middle and attacking on the flanks; but Hitler accepted (for the time being) that he would have to be less grandiose than in 1941, because his armies were now not as large. The Nazi leader temporarily put to one side capturing Leningrad by storm, so the city would continue to be strangled and bombarded.

In March 1942, after nine months of fighting, the Germans had suffered 1.1 million casualties, a fraction of Soviet losses, but still serious (24). Of the German casualties, by 20 February 1942 about 10% of them (112,627) comprised of frostbite victims (25). This was not surprising in the midst of one of the worst Russian winters ever recorded.

German losses were insufficiently replenished during the winter fighting, with Army Group Centre receiving a modest 9 fresh divisions. Hitler could not restrain himself, however, and he was encouraged by General Erwin Rommel’s victories in North Africa: such as the recapturing in late January 1942 of Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city on the Mediterranean coast.

Before long, Hitler was dreaming not only of advancing through the Caucasus, but of linking up with Rommel’s panzers in North Africa – and then advancing to the oil rich Middle East nations of Iran and Iraq, while another thrust was to be implemented along the Caspian Sea in the direction of Afghanistan and India. (26)

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree and he writes primarily on foreign affairs and historical subjects. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Notes

1 Geoffrey Roberts, “Last men standing”, The Irish Examiner, 22 June 1941

2 Chris Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (Pan; Main Market edition, 21 Aug. 2009) p. 6

3 Ibid.

4 Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953 (Yale University Press; 1st Edition, 14 Nov. 2006) p. 10

5 Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945 (Hodder Arnold, 23 Feb. 2007) p. 119

6 Andrei Gromyko, Memories: From Stalin to Gorbachev (Arrow Books Limited, 1 Jan. 1989) p. 216

7 Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, p. 21

8 Leopold Trepper, The Great Game: Memoirs of a Master Spy (Michael Joseph Ltd; First Edition, 1 May 1977) p. 67

9 Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War, p. 74

10 Alden Whitman, “Harry S. Truman: Decisive President”, New York Times, 27 December 1972

11 Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War, p. 18

12 Ibid., p. 23

13 Roberts, Stalin’s Wars, p. 100

14 Ibid., p. 119

15 Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War (Harper, 17 May 2011) Chapter 10, The Motherland Overwhelms the Fatherland

16 Donald J. Goodspeed, The German Wars (Random House Value Publishing, 3 April 1985) p. 446

17 Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, p. 147

18 Goodspeed, The German Wars, p. 407

19 Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, p. 123

20 Ibid., p. 128

21 Ibid., p. 147

22 Ibid., p. 124

23 Ibid., p 151

24 Roberts, Stalin’s Wars, p.118

25 John Toland, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 3 Feb. 2007) Part 8, The Fourth Horseman

26 Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries (Collins/Fontana, 1 June 1977) p. 56

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With tensions between the U.S. and Russia at historic levels and threat of a hot war breaking out in Ukraine, we would do well to remember FDR’s visionary leadership and pursuit of diplomacy

Reuters reported last week that the Ukrainian military was carrying out war games with newly delivered American military hardware in preparation for a conflict that could break out at any time.

For years now, the U.S. media has been demonizing Russia, accusing its leader Vladimir Putin of being an iron-fisted dictator who has interfered in U.S. elections, poisoned opponents, and carried out aggression by illegally annexing Crimea.

With Russia having amassed over 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border, the U.S. Congress is prepared to pass a “sanctions bill from hell” whose purpose would be to cripple Russia’s economy.

Mississippi Senator, Roger Wicker, the second highest Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, went so far as to suggest in an interview with Fox News that the U.S. should not rule out a preemptive nuclear strike on Russia if it invaded Ukraine.

A screen cap of Roger Wicker on Fox News

Source: mississippifreepress.com

Today’s deeply Russophobic political climate provides an opportune moment to look back to an era of promise in the U.S.-Russian relationship—when U.S. leaders were more sober minded and rationale.

Seventy-seven years ago today, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt brokered a deal with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin that offers a particular model of diplomatic engagement.

Under the terms of the Yalta agreements, Stalin agreed to enter the war in the Pacific in exchange for the return of Russian territory that had been lost during the Russo-Japanese war.

Stalin further agreed to the division of Germany and to stay out of Greece’s civil war. In return, the U.S. and Great Britain agreed to a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe to avoid the prospect of Germany ever invading Russia again.

A group of people sitting around a table Description automatically generated

Leaders of the Big Three at the negotiating table at the Yalta conference. [Source: wikipedia.org]

Conservatives have compared FDR’s performance at Yalta to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at the Munich conference in September 1938.

In May 2005, then-U.S. president George W. Bush stated in a speech in Latvia that “the Yalta Agreement followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable.”

However, as historian Jacques Pauwels shows in the below account drawn from his book, The Myth of the Good War, Stalin was in fact a pragmatic statesman who made many concessions at Yalta. He agreed to the Allies terms because he legitimately feared a renewed German-Western alliance and replication of the Allied invasion of Russia in 1918-1919 following the Russian civil war.

Image on the right is from amazon.com

The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, revised edition: Pauwels, Jacques R.: 9781459408722: Amazon.com: Books

After World War II, the Yalta accords broke down when both Russia and the U.S. violated their terms. FDR’s successor, Harry S. Truman was no longer committed to U.S.-Russia cooperation, having gained power following the purging of Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s Vice-President from 1940-1944, who had wanted to continue the policy of détente.

In a history of the Yalta agreements published in 1970, Diane Shaver-Clemens wrote “we are living with the problems of a world that could not benefit from the experience at Yalta. It is perhaps relevant to ask what the world would have been like if the spirit of Yalta had triumphed.”[1]

The same question, I think, is relevant today.

Below is an excerpt from Jacques Pauwels’ book, The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, rev ed. (Toronto: Lorimer Publishers, 2015), dealing with Yalta. Pauwels’ account debunks historical misconceptions and stereotypes that still prevail about Russia today and gives us a model of diplomatic cooperation that hopefully will prevail again.

Yalta, February 1945: Indulging Stalin?

The events of the years 1943 and 1944 in countries such as Italy, Greece, and France had shown all too clearly that it was the liberators who determined how the local fascists were chastised or spared, how democracy was restored, how much input the antifascist resistance movements and the local population in general were permitted in the reconstruction of their own country, and whether political, social, and economic reforms were introduced or not.

In Italy for example, the American and British liberators had sidelined the leftist resistance movement, established a regime (under Marshal Badoglio) that was sarcastically described as “fascism without Mussolini,” and – violating previous inter-allied agreements – had excluded the Soviets from any input into the postwar arrangements for the country.

This unsubtle conduct set a fateful precedent: it implicitly gave Stalin carte blanche to proceed similarly in countries in Eastern Europe that were destined to be liberated by the Red Army. However, this symmetry was far from perfect. First, until the summer of 1944 the Soviets continued to fight almost exclusively in their own country. It was only in the fall of that same year that they liberated neighbouring countries such as Romania and Bulgaria, states which could hardly rival Italy and France.

A picture containing text, outdoor, person, old Description automatically generated

Soviet parade after liberation from Nazi rule in North Bessarabia in Romania. [Source: wikipedia.org]

Second, a sphere-of-influence formula agreed upon between Stalin and Churchill (during WC’s visit to Moscow in the fall of 1944.) afforded the Western Allies a small but possibly important percentage of input in some countries of Eastern Europe, which the Soviets did not enjoy anywhere in Western Europe. Regarding their prospects for influence in the post-war reorganization of Europe, then, the situation of the Americans and the British did not look bad at all toward the end of 1944.

And yet, there were also reasons for concern. After the failure of Operation Market Garden, the September 1944 attempt by the American and British to cross the Rhine, it had become obvious that the war in Europe was far from over. A considerable part of the continent still awaited liberation, and Nazi Germany itself had yet to be conquered.

In the meantime, it was evident that Poland would be liberated in its entirety by the Soviets, a prospect that alarmed the conservative and strongly anti-Soviet Polish government-in-exile in London. This government, incidentally, did not consist of devoted democrats, as is too often taken for granted, but represented the autocratic Polish regime of the prewar period, a regime that had connived with Hitler himself and that on the occasion of the Munich Pact had followed his example by pocketing a piece of Czechoslovakia.[2]

Furthermore, by the start of 1945 at the latest it was as good as certain that the prestige of marching victoriously into Berlin would fall to the Red Army, and not to American or British troops. The advance of the British-Americans in the direction of the German capital was first checked in the Netherlands at the time of Operation Market Garden and was strongly impeded again between December 1944 and January 1945 by Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s unexpected counteroffensive in the Ardennes.

The latter episode was destined to enter the American collective consciousness as well as American history books as a gigantic and heroic clash, the Battle of the Bulge, and was celebrated in due course in an eponymous Hollywood production. In reality, however, the confrontation in the Ardennes represented a serious setback for the Americans. Von Rundstedt’s counteroffensive did eventually end in failure, but initially the German pressure was considerable.

World War II: Battle of the Bulge

Scene from the Battle of the Bulge. [Source: thoughtco.com]

The Americans battled back heroically on many occasions, for example at Bastogne, but there were also cases of panic and confusion, and the danger would not be fully averted before the end of January 1945.[3] It was therefore decided to call once again on the unloved but useful Soviet partner.

Responding to an urgent American request, the Red Army unleashed a major offensive in Poland on January 12, 1945, one week earlier than originally planned.

Forced to face a new threat in the east, the Wehrmacht had to divert resources from its project in the Ardennes, thus relieving the pressure on the Americans.

But on the Eastern Front the Germans could not stop the Soviet steamroller, which forged ahead so quickly that in a few weeks it reached the banks of the Oder. In early February, the Soviets arrived in Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, a town situated less than one hundred kilometres from the German capital.

The Americans had reason to be grateful for the military favour rendered by Moscow, but they were far from happy that in the undeclared inter-Allied race to Berlin the Soviets had thus taken a huge lead over their Western partners, who had not even reached the banks of the Rhine and were still separated from Berlin by more than 500 kilometres.[4]

Already after the failure of Market garden, it became apparent to the American and British leaders that they would lose the race to Berlin and that the Red Army would eventually control the lion’s share of German territory, so that in keeping with precedents set by the liberators in Italy and elsewhere, the Soviets would be able to impose their will on post-war Germany.

This produced much pessimism, and doomsayers like General MacArthur, who opined in November 1944 that all of Europe would inevitably fall under Soviet hegemony, undoubtedly gained additional credibility at the time of the setback suffered in the Battle of the Bulge.[5] It was true that if military developments alone would be allowed to determine things, the eventual outcome would be very unfavourable to the Western Allies. However, the result might be different if the Soviets could be talked into agreements which would be binding regardless of military developments.[6]

Precisely this is what the British and the Americans hoped to achieve in a series of meetings with Soviet representatives in London in the fall of 1944. They proposed to divide Germany into three roughly equal occupation zones regardless of the position of each ally’s army at the end of the hostilities. (A fourth occupation zone would be assigned to the French much later.)

This arrangement was clearly in their own interest, but Stalin accepted the Western proposal. It was a major success for the BritishAmericans, which must have dumbfounded pessimists such as MacArthur. “In brief,” writes the American historian Gabriel Kolko, “the Russians agreed not to run Germany unilaterally despite every indication of an imminent military victory that would permit them to do so.”[7]

An additional unexpected bonus for the Western Allies turned out to be the fact that the Soviets also agreed that the capital, Berlin, like Germany as a whole, would be divided into three occupation zones, even though it was obvious that the Red Army would take the city and that Berlin would be situated deep in the occupation zone assigned to the USSR.

That a “West Berlin” could later exist in the heart of East Germany was due to the accommodating attitude displayed by Stalin in the fall of 1944 and again the successes of the Red Army and the Yalta Agreements during the winter of 1944-45.

Indeed, the London Agreements regarding the future occupation zones in Germany, and the agreements reached by the Big Three (Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin) at the Yalta Conference between February 4 and 11, 1945, can be properly understood only from the perspective of the conundrum of the Western Allies at the time of the setbacks of their own armed forces and the simultaneous successes of the Red Army in 1944-45.

It has often been said that in the Crimean resort of Yalta the shrewd Stalin managed to dupe his Western colleagues, and above all President Roosevelt, who was already a very sick man at the time. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, it was the British and Americans who had nothing to lose, and everything to gain, from such a meeting. The reverse applied to the Soviets, who might arguably have been better off without this conference.

Indeed, the Red Army’s spectacular advance deep into the German heartland put more and more trumps into Stalin’s hands. On the eve of the conference General Zhukov stood on the banks of the Oder River, a mere stone’s throw from Berlin.

This is why Washington and London, and not Moscow, insisted on a meeting of the Allied leaders. Precisely because they were so desperate to meet Stalin in order to reach binding agreements, Roosevelt and Churchill also proved willing to accept his precondition for a conference, namely, that it be held in the USSR.

The American and British leaders had to undertake an inconveniently long voyage, allowing the Soviets a kind of “home-game advantage” during the tug-of-war that the conference promised to be. But these were minor imperfections compared to the advantages that a conference might bring and compared to the huge disadvantages certain to be associated with the anticipated occupation of most of Germany by the Red Army. Stalin had not needed or wanted a meeting of the Big Three at this stage of the war.

However, as we will soon see, he had reasons of his own for agreeing to hold such a conference, from which he of course also expected to derive certain advantages for the Soviet side, and he also had good reasons to reveal himself accommodating vis-à-vis his Western partners.[8]

Second, the agreements which eventually resulted from the Yalta Conference were indeed favourable to the Western Allies. Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Edward Stettinius Jr., who was present at the Crimean resort, later wrote that in this conference “the Soviet Union made more concessions to the [west] than were made to the Soviet Union.”[9]

And the American historian Carolyn Woods Eisenberg emphasizes that the U.S. delegation left Yalta “in an exultant spirit,” convinced that thanks to the reasonableness of the Soviets not only the Americans but mankind in its entirety had “won the first great victory of the peace.”[10]

Yalta Conference - Wikipedia

Famous photograph of Big 3 at Yalta—Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. [Source: wikipedia.org]

With regard to Germany, the London Agreements were officially confirmed in Yalta by the Big Three. As mentioned, the division of Germany into occupation zones was advantageous to the Americans and the British, because already in the fall of 1944 and even more so at the time of the Yalta Conference it appeared likely that the Red Army, which stood in Frankfurt-on-the-Oder in the east, might find itself in Frankfurt-on-the-Main in the West when the hostilities concluded.

Furthermore, the British and Americans were assigned the bigger and richer western part of Germany. It was also agreed in principle on the Crimean Peninsula that after the war Germany would have to make reparation payments, as had been the case after the First World War.

Both Roosevelt and Churchill found it justified and reasonable that half of these payments, then roughly estimated at 20 billion dollars, would go to the Soviet Union, where the Nazi vandals had conducted themselves in a particularly barbarous and destructive manner. (The amount of 10 billion dollars assigned to the USSR has been considered by some to be too high, but in reality it was “very moderate,” as the German historian Wilfried Loth has put it; a few years after the Yalta Conference, in 1947, the total war damage suffered by the Soviet Union was conservatively calculated at no less than 128 billion dollars.)

To Stalin, the issue of reparation payments was crucially important. It is very likely that he revealed himself to be so accommodating toward his Western partners regarding the division of Germany into occupation zones because he craved their cooperation in the matter of reparations.[11]

Conversely, to obtain the Soviet leader’s ratification of Germany’s division into occupation zones and his acceptance of other arrangements that were advantageous to themselves, the Americans and the British also indulged Stalin in some respects. In return for Stalin’s renewed commitment to eventually declare war on Japan, for example, Roosevelt offered American assent to the Soviet recuperation of the Far Eastern territories that czarist Russia had lost as a result of the Russian-Japanese War of 1904-05.[12]

Crimean conference Left to right: Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Maj. Gen. L. S. Kuter, Admiral E. J. King, General George C. Marshall, Ambassador Averell Harriman, Admiral William Leahy, and President F. D. Roosevelt. Livadia Palace, Crimea, Russia

Yalta American Delegation in Livadia Palace from left to right: Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Maj. Gen. L. S. Kuter, Admiral E. J. King, General George C. Marshall, Ambassador Averell Harriman, Admiral William Leahy, and President F. D. Roosevelt. Livadia Palace, Crimea, Russia. [Source: wikipedia.org]

No definitive decisions for Germany’s future were arrived at in Yalta, even though particularly the Americans, and to a certain extent also the Soviets, showed some interest at the time in the widely publicized plan of the American secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau.

Morgenthau reportedly proposed to solve the “German problem” by simply dismantling the country’s industry, thereby transforming Germany into a backward, poor, and therefore harmless agrarian state. In reality, this plan amounted to not much more than a rather vague and incoherent series of proposals, far less draconian than its opponents claimed and many Germans still believe.[13]

What was not properly realized at the time, neither in Washington nor in Moscow, was that not only major moral but also serious practical objections could be raised against the Morgenthau Plan.

For example, the plan could hardly be reconciled with the expectation that Germany was to pay huge reparations; this presupposed a certain measure of wealth, and for such wealth there was no room in Morgenthau’s scenario. “The logical inference of the Morgenthau Plan,” writes the German historian Jörg Fisch categorically, “was that there could be no question of reparations payments.”[14]

Moreover, as the American historian Carolyn Woods Eisenberg points out, Morgenthau’s plans for a “pastoralization” of Germany were totally “out of step with the thinking of the most important US . . . policy-makers,” who had good reasons for favouring the alternative option, “the economic reconstruction of Germany.”

Certain American politicians feared that the Plan would drive Germany into the arms of anarchy, chaos, and possibly Bolshevism. Businessmen realized that one would not be able to do any profitable business with a poor Germany.

And influential Americans worried about the possibly extremely negative implications of the Morgenthau Plan regarding the fate of Opel, Ford-Werke, and other highly-profitable German branch plants of American corporations.[15]

It was not a coincidence that precisely the representatives of firms with huge investments in Germany—such as Alfred P. Sloan, the influential chairman of the board of GM, the parent firm of Opel—were most categorically opposed to the Morgenthau Plan. (The Soviet ambassador to the U.S., Andrei Gromyko, was not far off the mark when he remarked that the opposition against the Morgenthau Plan was spearheaded by America’s “imperialist circles.”)

The Plan would thus gradually and quietly disappear from the scene during the months that followed the Yalta Conference. Morgenthau himself, a good friend of Roosevelt, would be dismissed from his high-ranking government position on July 5, 1945, by the new president, Truman.[16]

From the perspective of the Western Allies, then, the sometimes vaguely formulated agreements concluded in Yalta regarding Germany were important and advantageous. In addition, Stalin was prepared to discuss the future of the Eastern European countries liberated by the Red Army, such as Poland, even though the Big Three had never discussed the postwar fate of Western European countries such as France, Italy, and Belgium.

Stalin had no illusions regarding Western Europe, and he did not want to jeopardize the relationship with his British and American allies for the sake of countries that happened to be far away from the borders of the Soviet Union, the “socialist fatherland” whose survival and security had obsessed him since the beginning of his career.

With respect to Eastern Europe in general, however, and with Poland in particular, the situation was very different. The Soviet Union was keenly interested in the post-war makeup of neighbouring countries whose governments had formerly been unfriendly and sometimes totally hostile to the USSR, and whose territories formed the traditional invasion road to Moscow.

As for the postwar reorganization of Poland and other countries of Eastern Europe, Stalin had good reasons and, in the form of the Red Army’s presence in these countries, effective means to demand for the Soviet Union at least the same kind of input that the Americans and the British had permitted themselves in Western Europe.

Stalin had not challenged the Western Allies’ modus operandi in Western Europe; it may be supposed that he felt that it was now the turn of his Western partners to give him a free hand in Eastern Europe.[17]

In spite of all this, however, in Yalta Stalin was prepared to discuss the fate of Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe, even though the topic of Western Europe remained unmentioned. In addition, the actual Soviet demands turned out to be minimal and far from unreasonable, as Churchill and Roosevelt could hardly deny: the so-called Curzon Line should form the border between Poland and the Soviet Union (for which Poland would receive compensation in the form of German territory to the east of a line formed by the Oder and Neisse rivers) and no anti-Soviet regimes would be tolerated in Poland and other neighbouring states.[18]

Curzon Line, map enlargement

Source: polishgreatness.com

In return for their agreement to these demands, the Americans and the British received from Stalin what they wanted in the liberated countries of Eastern Europe, namely, no social and economic changes along communistic lines, free elections, and continuing input for themselves—together with the USSR, of course—In the future affairs of these countries.

This kind of formula was far from unrealistic, and variations of it were to be implemented successfully after the war in Finland and Austria.

The Yalta Agreements, then, did not award the Soviet Union the monopoly of influence in Eastern Europe, that is, the kind of exclusive influence that the Americans and the British already enjoyed, with Stalin’s silent approval, in Western Europe, even though they assigned “controlling influence” in Eastern Europe to the USSR.

The Yalta Agreements thus represented a considerable success for the Western Allies. It has often been said of Churchill that he had grave misgivings about the “concessions” that Roosevelt allegedly had made in the Crimean resort. In reality, he was totally euphoric when the conference ended,[19] and with good reason, since the British and Americans had fared far better at Yalta than they would have dared to hope when it started.

The allegation that in the Crimean resort the shrewd Stalin wrung all sorts of concessions from his Western colleagues is therefore totally false. It is true that afterwards the Yalta Agreements would not be properly implemented, for example regarding Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. This had a lot to do with Stalin’s reaction to America’s “atomic diplomacy” of the summer of 1945, after the “nuking” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when Washington believed that it could impose its will on the presumably defenseless Soviets, and also with the irreconcilable, and totally unrealistic anti-Soviet attitude of the Polish government-in-exile in London.

The London Poles did not even want to recognize the Curzon Line as the future eastern border of their country, which had been acknowledged by Roosevelt and Churchill as both fair and inevitable, and which had been officially accepted in Yalta.[20]

Owing to the intractability of the London Poles, Stalin increasingly played the card of a communist and pro-Soviet Polish government-in-exile, the “Lublin Poles,” and this would eventually lead to the installation of an exclusively communist regime in Warsaw.

The Americans, like the British, would complain loudly about this, but their protest was hardly reconcilable with the uncontested fact that after the war they themselves would install or support dictatorial regimes in many countries, such as Greece, Turkey, and China, and that in those dictatorial client states they never insisted on the kind of free elections that they urged Stalin to organize in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Stalin was a realist. On the occasion of the London Agreements and the Yalta Conference he proved to be accommodating vis-à-vis Churchill and Roosevelt not because he wanted to be so, but because he correctly calculated that he could hardly afford not to be.

The war in which the USSR had suffered grievously and had just barely escaped total obliteration was not yet over. The Soviets’ military situation in early 1945 was excellent, of course, but all sorts of disagreeable things could still come to pass. As the end approached for the Third Reich, for example, the propaganda machine of Goebbels aggressively pursued an ultimate rescue scenario for the Nazi state, namely, the project of a separate armistice between Germany and the Western Allies, followed by a common crusade against the Bolshevik Soviet Union.

This plan was not nearly as naive and unrealistic as one might assume, because Goebbels knew only too well that leading circles in Great Britain and virtually everywhere else in the Western world had considered Bolshevism as the “natural” enemy, and simultaneously viewed Nazi Germany as the spearhead in the coming anti-Soviet crusade.

The Nazi propaganda minister was also keenly aware that during the war quite a few Western leaders found the Soviets a useful ally but continued to despise the communist state and were determined to eliminate it sooner or later.

As for the USSR, all this meant that after years of superhuman efforts and huge losses, when victory seemed tantalizingly near, the order of the day continued to be survival—the survival of the country and the survival of “socialism in one country,” which had always been Stalin’s great obsession.

The Soviet leader worried about Goebbels’ scenario, and not without reason. In the camp of the Western Allies several leading personalities, generals as well as statesmen, found this scenario quite attractive. After the war some of them would openly express regret that the American and British armies had not continued to march eastward in 1945, preferably all the way to Moscow.

Churchill himself flirted with the thought of this kind of initiative and actually ordered preparations to be made for what was codenamed Operation Unthinkable.[21]

Operation Unthinkable: Churchill's plan to start World War III - Russia Beyond

Churchill had his sights set on the Soviet Union. [Source: rbth.com]

Stalin harboured no illusions with respect to the true Western feelings for the Soviet Union. His diplomats and spies kept him well-informed about opinions and developments in London, Washington, and elsewhere.

For the Soviet leader, who remembered the historical precedent of the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, the possibility of a reversal of alliances, a combined German-Western undertaking against the Soviet Union, constituted a genuine nightmare. He tried to exorcize it by not giving Churchill and Roosevelt the slightest excuse to undertake something against the USSR.

Thus it becomes possible to understand why he refrained from criticizing their conduct in Western Europe and in Greece, and why he revealed himself to be so accommodating at Yalta.[22] In any event, in Yalta in February 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill did not indulge Stalin, to the contrary, the Soviet leader indulged his “Anglo-Saxon” counterparts.

*

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). Jeremy can be reached at [email protected].

Jacques Pauwels holds PhDs in history (York University) and political science (University of Toronto) and has taught history at numerous universities in Ontario, Canada. He is author of books on Nazi Germany, World Wars I and II, the French Revolution, and the origins and meaning of the names of peoples and places.  He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

Jacques can be reached at [email protected].

Notes

  1. Diane Shaver-Clemens, Yalta (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) quoted in Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano, The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), 65. 

  2. Alvin Finkel and Clement Leibovitz, The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion (Toronto: Lorimer Publishers, 1997), p. 206; Dpmrovp Losurdo Stalin: Storia e critica di una leggenda nera (Rome: Carocci Editori, 2008., pp. 179–180. 
  3. Philip Knightley, The First Casualty (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), pp. 324–25; Helen Keyssar and Vladimir Pozner, Remembering War: A U.S.-Soviet Dialogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) p. 153. 
  4. Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), pp. 256–60; Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945 (New York: Random house, 1968), pp. 350–52; Robert J. Maddox, The United States and World War II (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 250–51; Keyssar and Pozner, Remembering War, p. 154. 
  5. MacArthur’s opinion is cited in Erich Schwinge, Bilanz der Kriegsgeneration (Munich: Universitas, 1997), pp. 10–11. 
  6. Edward M. Bennett, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Search for Victory: American-Soviet Relations, 1939–1945, (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1990), p. 156. 
  7. Rolf Steininger, Deutsche Geschichte 1945–1961: Darstellung und Dokumente in zwei Bänden. Vol. 1 (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983), pp. 20–22; Kolko, The Politics of War, pp. 353–55, quotation from p. 355. 
  8. Fraser J. Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 82. 
  9. Stettinius quotation from Michael Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse (New York Random House: 1969), p. 131. 
  10. Carolyn Eisenberg, The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1943-1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 61. 
  11. Wilfried Loth, Stalins ungeliebtes Kind: Warum Moskau die DDR nicht wollte (Berlin:, Rowohlt, 1994), pp. 14-15; Steininger, Deutsche Geschichte 1945–1961: Darstellung und Dokumente in zwei Bänden. p. 28. 
  12. Francis L. Loewenheim, Harold D. Langley, and Manfred Jonas (eds.), Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975), p. 656. 
  13. Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War, p. 72; Loth, Stalins ungeliebtes Kind: Warum Moskau die DDR nicht wollte, p. 18; Michaela Hoenicke, “Das nationalsozialistische Deutschland und die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (1933–1945),” in Klaus Larres and Torsten Oppelland (eds.), Deutschland und die USA im 20. Jahrhundert: Geschichte der politischen Beziehungen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997), p. 293 ff.; Wolfgang Krieger, “Die amerikanische Deutschlandplanung, Hypotheken und Chancen für einen Neuanfang,” in Hans-Erich Volkmann (ed.), Ende des Dritten Reiches — Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs: Eine perspektivische Ruckschau (Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1995), pp. 36, 40–41; Kolko, The Politics of War, pp. 331, 348–49; Werner Link, Deutsche und amerikanische Gewerkschaften und Geschäftsleute 1945–1975: Eine Studie uber transnationale Beziehungen (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978), pp. 107–08; Lloyd C. Gardner, Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American Foreign Policy 1941–1949 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), pp. 250–51. 
  14. Jörg Fisch, Reparationen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich: Beck, 1992), p. 48. 
  15. Jacques R. Pauwels, Big business and Hitler (Toronto: Lorimer, 2017). 
  16. Eisenberg, The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1943-1949, p. 26; Gromyko’s comment is from Hoenicke, “Das nationalsozialistische Deutschland und die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (1933–1945),” p. 302. 
  17. Parenti The Anti-Communist Impulse, p. 135; Bert Cochran, The War System (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 42. 
  18. Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse, p. 137. 
  19. Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 809; Jost Düllfer, Jalta, 4. Februar 1945: Der Zweite Weltkrieg und die Entstehung der bipolaren Welt (Munich: Drutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1998), p. 29. 
  20. Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse, p. 139. 
  21. “Operation Unthinkable,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable
  22. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1941–1947 (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1972), p. 88; Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (New York: Grove Press, 1993), pp. 118–19; Loth, Stalins ungeliebtes Kind: Warum Moskau die DDR nicht wollte, p.16. 

Featured image is from biblio.com

TGIF: When History Begins – Russia, Ukraine & the US

March 5th, 2022 by Sheldon Richman

Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

An understanding of history is important.

It is absolutely essential that Freedom of Speech prevail as a means to resolving this crisis which potentially threatens the future of humanity.

Global Research,  March 4, 2022


Contrary to what hypocritical U.S. rulers and their loyal mass media suggest, two propositions can both be — and indeed are — true:

  1. that Russia has grossly, brutally, and criminally mishandled the situation it has faced with respect to Ukraine, and
  2. that the U.S. government since the late 1990s has been entirely responsible for imposing that situation on Russia.

If you want the fine details, you can do no better than to watch my Libertarian Institute colleague Scott Horton’s excellent cataloging of the irresponsible misdeeds of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joseph Biden in this recent lecture.

If, after absorbing this shocking record of indisputable facts, you are seething at what the U.S. government has done to squander a historic chance for good relations with Russia, you will be fully justified — and then some. (See also this 2015 lecture by John Mearsheimer, the respected “realist” foreign policy analyst at the University of Chicago.)

To appreciate what bipartisan U.S. foreign policy has wrought, think about 1989 when the undreamt-of virtually bloodless dismantling of the Soviet empire began. At that point humanity was on the verge of a new chapter in which the world’s largest nuclear superpowers would no longer confront each other, holding everyone hostage. Think about that, and then learn how the U.S. government blew it deliberately, despite all the warnings that the consequences would be dire. (Over-optimism about what might have been is always a danger. In 1990, when President George H. W. Bush ordered Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to remove his army from Kuwait, Bush declared a “New World Order,” admonishing, “What we say goes.” The Russians no doubt noticed.)

How so? By kicking the Russian people in the teeth repeatedly in all kinds of ways when they were reeling from seven decades of communism. If the U.S. government’s intent had been to destroy the chance for this historic turn, it couldn’t have done a better job.

Americans have a funny way of thinking that history began the day of the latest crisis. The politicians and media feed this bad habit. So if Russia invades Ukraine, the only explanation is that he’s power-mad, if not just plain mad. The idea that the U.S. might have set the stage isn’t allowed to be entertained. With social-media magnates sucking up to the power elite, this is serious stuff.

Do Americans want to know why Russia went to war? They might not like to hear that “their” government must shoulder a good deal of blame, but it’s undeniable that since World War II the power that occupies Middle North America has had its heavy hand in virtually every part of the world.

The rules of international law that all nations are supposed to observe simply don’t apply to the United States. Just look at the invasions and regime changes that have gone on since 2001, not to mention back to the early 1950s. That’s what it means to be the exceptional nation. The rules apply to everyone except America’s rulers. (See Robert Wright’s “In Defense of Whataboutism.”)

This history forms the larger context in which the unconscionable Russian war on Ukraine — with all the terror it’s inflicting on innocents — is taking place. It is unseemly for an American president to piously admonish the Russian government about its breaches of national sovereignty in light of the shameful U.S. record.

Since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, U.S. presidents have taken a series of actions that seemed designed to make the Russians distrust the West in the new era. This is not hindsight. As noted, many respected establishment foreign-policy figures warned against such measures.

The measures included the bombing of Russia’s ally Serbia in the late 1990s; the repeated expansion of NATO, the postwar alliance founded to counter the Soviet Union, to include former Soviet allies and republics; the public talk of including the former Soviet republics Ukraine and Georgia in the Western alliance; the trashing of long-standing anti-nuclear-weapons treaties with Russia; the placing of defensive missile launchers (which could be converted to offensive launchers) in Poland and Romania: the attempts to sabotage the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline deal; instigating the 2014 regime change in Ukraine (following earlier regime-changes operations in Ukraine and Georgia); the arming of Ukraine since 2017; the conducting of NATO war exercises, with U.S. personnel, near the Russian border; the years-long evidence-free effort to persuade Americans that Russia manipulated the 2016 presidential election to elect Donald Trump; and much, much, much more. Trump — recall his goading of NATO members into spending more on their militaries — was among the offenders: his anti-Russia moves, including NATO expansion like all of his 21st-century predecessors, would fill a list as long as Wilt Chamberlain’s arm. If he was a Russian puppet, as the Democrats, intelligence apparatus, and mainstream media want us to believe, then the Russians have a great deal to learn about puppeteering.

Take one of the biggest spurs to war: the eastward expansion of NATO, which the U.S. government and Western Europe promised would not happen after Germany was reunited while the Soviet Union was heading toward termination. It happened anyway, but not because Russia had behaved badly toward the West. It hadn’t. In fact, after 9/11 Russian ruler Vladimir Putin was the first to call Bush II to offer his support. Later Putin even suggested that Russia be invited to join NATO, something President George H. W. Bush had once mentioned. One wonders why NATO was even necessary with the Soviet Union gone, but if Russia could join — really, what was the point?

The expansion of NATO by 1,200 miles toward Russia demonstrates how myopic American rulers can be. American critics repeatedly pointed out that no president would not have tolerated Russia’s inviting Mexico and Canada into its now-defunct Warsaw Pact. Yet NATO now includes the Baltic states — those former Soviet republics on the Russian border, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia –and Eastern European states that were once in the Warsaw Pact.

Indeed, we already know how the U.S. government reacts when its security concerns are flouted. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy was ready to launch a nuclear war against the Soviet Union when it placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. For days the world sat on the edge of its seat wondering if the end was near. (I remember it!) Finally, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev withdrew the missiles, but only when Kennedy secretly agreed to remove American nuclear-tipped missiles from Turkey.

Later American presidents forgot about that crisis. Clinton added Warsaw Pact states late in his second term. Then it was Bush II’s turn. At its April 2008 Bucharest summit, NATO declared that it “welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” This was a fateful move. As noted, pillars of the foreign policy establishment from George Kennan to Paul Nitze to Robert McNamara had already forcefully spoken out against the first rounds of NATO expansion, which included the Baltic states. No less a figure than Willian Burns, Bush II’s ambassador to Russia and now Biden’s CIA chief, said in 2008,

Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.

Putin responded to the summit declaration, saying he deemed it a “direct threat” to Russia. A few months later, the emboldened president of Georgia, on Russia’s southern border, attacked EU-authorized Russian peacekeepers in the Republic of South Ossetia, which had earlier broken away from Georgia. Russia responded by invading and occupying Georgia. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili thought — no doubt lead on by the U.S. government — that the West would back him up, but it did not. Washington, London, Paris, and the rest of NATO were not willing to go to risk a nuclear war with Russia over South Ossetia. (Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky seems to be imitating Shaakashvili.)

This is all too similar to what’s going on today, but with something more. After talking about bringing Ukraine into NATO, the U.S. and EU in February 2014 instigated a coup in Kyiv, in which opponents of the government, including neo-Nazis, drove a democratically elected and Russia-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych, from office. A leaked recording of a phone call between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (now a Biden official) and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt revealed that the coup and the new leadership of the country were orchestrated by the U.S. State Department. This followed billions of dollars in U.S. aid to “pro-democracy,” that is, anti-Yanukovych, organizations.

Yanukovych had been willing to deal with the European Union, but when he balked at the terms of the proposed loan, Russia offered Ukraine $15 billion under more favorable terms. This the EU and U.S. government could not tolerate. Yanukovych had to go.

Keep in mind that eastern Ukraine and Crimea, which is filled with Russian-speaking people, had voted heavily for Yanukovych, with the western part going for his opponent. So driving out the elected president was a direct slap at the ethnic Russians. When the new government came to power, it downgraded Russians from official-language status and tried to cut back on the autonomy of the far-eastern provinces, the Donbas region, which borders Russia. Violence erupted and has continued. Meanwhile, Russia annexed Crimea, which has been a Russian security concern and the home of its only year-round warm-water naval base since the 18th century. Russia could not take the risk that Crimea would become a base for NATO forces. The predominantly ethnic Russians in Crimea approved of the annexation. But one thing Russia refused to do was to accept an annexation invitation from the people in the Donbas.

As a result, the U.S. government sent large amounts of aid to Ukraine, but Obama refused to send weapons because he did not want to escalate the conflict or risk direct war with Russia. He noted, properly, that Ukraine was a core security interest of Russia but not of the United States and that in a conflict over nearby Ukraine, Russia would have a large advantage over the United States, despite America’s much larger military. Trump, however, reversed Obama’s policy and sent massive arms shipments to Ukraine, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons.

As Russia increased pressure on Ukraine over the last year, with a buildup of troops near the border, it made clear its demands: no NATO membership for Ukraine and no missile launchers in Eastern Europe. Since taking office, Biden has talked tough, proclaiming that the United States would support Ukrainian sovereignty, while also saying, first, that U.S. troops would not be committed, second, that Ukraine would not be joining NATO anytime soon, and third, that offensive nuclear missiles would not be placed in Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, he scoffed at Russia’s demands, insisting that no one but NATO would decide who became a member. This sounded like schoolyard pettiness, with Biden refusing to formalize for Russia his disavowal of things that Biden had already said he would not do.

Would Russia have shelved plans for the invasion had Biden not been so wrongheaded? Who can say? But what was there to lose?

So here we are. The situation is dangerous in a global sense because, in the fog of war, shit happens. (Sorry.) It doesn’t help that some prominent Americans, still in the minority, want the U.S. government to do more than impose sanctions, send even more troops to neighboring NATO countries, and further arm Ukraine, all of which Biden is doing — some, like President Zelensky, are calling for a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone over Ukraine, which would bring America into direct military conflict with Russia. Some are even calling for regime change in Russia. Need we be reminded that, like the U.S. government, Russia has thousands of hydrogen bombs ready to launch. Are these people nuts?

No, history did not begin on February 24, 2022, or even March 18, 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea.

What now? It’s ridiculous to think that Russia — given its $1.5 trillion GDP (smaller than Italy’s and Texas’s) and $60 billion military budget (6 percent of the total U.S. military budget) — is out to re-establish the Russian empire of old or the Soviet Union. To put things in perspective, the U.S. government has had recent annual increases in military spending that exceeded Russia’s entire military budget.

The goal must be a ceasefire. Biden can facilitate that by doing what he should have done long ago: put in writing that Ukraine and Georgia will not join NATO, that the missile launchers will be removed from Eastern Europe, and that the war exercises on Russia’s border will end. Ukraine could help by accepting the status of neutrality with Finland-like assurances that it will not let its territory be used offensively against Russia. Biden should also propose that the arms-control treaties trashed by Bush II and Trump will be reinstated in talks with Russia.

Russia, of course, should pledge to leave Ukraine and offer compensation, while the heavily ethnic Russian areas in the east are given the freedom to join Russia.

We need not be at war — even if it’s a new cold war — with Russia.

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By Courtney Radsch 

Many of the world’s most popular platforms and services have sought to stymie Russia’s information operations and propaganda amid its illegal invasion of Ukraine. Meta, Google, Twitter, TikTok, and others have de-platformed, de-monetized, and de-amplified Russian state media and official channels, making them official participants in the information war that they largely refused to wade into in the months and years leading up to the war on Ukraine.

Apple joined in by removing RT and Sputnik from its App Store outside of Russia and went a step further and stopped all product sales and Apple Pay services in the country, a move that will undoubtedly affect ordinary Russians far more than the ruling class. Netflix has refused to carry Russian channels, and Warner Bros. and Disney have nixed upcoming movie releases in the country. Ukraine has encouraged this and recently asked Xbox and Sony to block Russian and Belarusian accounts and prevent gamers and teams from participating in or hosting esports events.

But Ukraine wants to go even further by kicking Russia off the internet.

On Monday, Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation sent a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, the body that oversees the domain system that forms the backbone of the open web. The letter asks ICANN to shut down Russian-administered domain names (think .RU, .SU, and .рф) and root servers in the country; to revoke Russia’s control of its top-level domain name system root servers; and to revoke the digital signatures that authenticate domain names. This is all a bit technical, but it basically means that the part of the internet run by Russia would not work. Most Russians won’t be able to access their email or apps, search the web, or access local websites because they resolve using the country-level domain. It would also create substantial security risks for anyone trying to navigate to one of those sites.

The domain name system, or DNS, is like the internet’s phone book, allowing anyone to type in a web address and get to the right place without having to figure out the corresponding string of numbers. The ability to authenticate a site is a crucial part of combating disinformation by preventing tampering and impersonation—which means that if you tried to get to novayagazeta.ru (the website of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, whose editor Dmitry Muratov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021), you either would be stuck or could be directed to a spoofed site. The letter claims that “these measures will help users seek for reliable information in alternative domain zones, preventing propaganda and disinformation.”

But it would do the opposite, shutting down some 5 million domains—including those belonging to local news outlets, nongovernmental organizations, and civic groups—and potentially kicking much of the country offline. While it wouldn’t be a full-scale internet shutdown, “this is basically like kicking Russia off the internet,” according to Ephraim Kenyanito, a senior program officer at Article 19 whose work focuses on DNS and censorship. (Disclosure: I’m the U.S. adviser for Article 19.)

Local businesses, news outlets, and civil society would have to scramble to find new hosting services, which could be difficult given the increasing pressure to deny services to Russians. “Government ministries of health would be taken offline, including information on COVID. Basically it would prevent Russians from accessing information, and it would do disproportionate harm,” says Kenyanito.

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Sanctions are Revenge. Sanctions Are Genocide!

March 4th, 2022 by Dr. Rudolf Hänsel

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***

We citizens run the risk of accepting economic and social sanctions imposed on a country and/or its president as “normal” and “understandable” because they have been very popular for years and not a single shot is fired, not a missile is detonated and not a tank is set in motion. Information about their consequences is rarely given.

But sanctions are not an alternative to war, they are war – only by other means. They are invisible wars and perfect instruments of revenge. If we get used to accepting such things, there is nothing more we will not accept.

“The UN Sanctions Regime in Iraq.”

This is the subtitle of the book published in 2005 by Hans-C. Graf Sponeck: “Another War” (1). Hans von Sponeck was the UN coordinator in charge of the “Oil for Food” programme in Iraq from 1998 to 2000. In his book, he uses figures to prove the fatal consequences and the failure of the UN Security Council in its Iraq policy: increase in child mortality and illiteracy, inadequate food supply and non-functioning of important parts of the infrastructure.

In early 2000, von Sponeck resigned as head of the UN aid programme in protest against the genocidal Sanctions Regime. A short time later, I met him personally on a lecture tour in Switzerland and told him that as a German I was very proud when I learned of his honourable resignation. A long friendship developed with this humanly admirable German diplomat.

A completely different experience was the hair-raising answer of former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to a journalist’s question: on the TV show “60 Minutes” on 12 May 1996, Lesley Stahl asked the US Secretary of State:

“We’ve heard that half a million children have died (because of the sanctions on Iraq). I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And – tell me, is it worth the price?”.

Albright replied:

“I think it’s a very difficult decision, but the price – we think it’s worth the price.” (2)

Sanctions as the perfect instrument of revenge (3)

The years of sanctions against the Iraqi civilian population have inflicted serious economic, social and psychological wounds. The dramatic impoverishment of the population and the social and economic decline of the country were, according to experts, unprecedented in the history of the modern world (4). Desperate need and hopelessness kept the population in suspense and robbed them of the strength to rebel. Only the civilian population was affected by the sanctions. The regime of the then President Saddam Hussein got off scot-free. How are we to evaluate such a political punitive measure?

The sanctions against Iraq are only one example among many: The punitive measures against the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the more recent ones against Venezuela, North Korea, Yemen or Syria are equally well remembered. In this context, it should be pointed out that the paralysis and partial destruction of state institutions opens the door to organised crime, i.e. it greatly promotes the rapid emergence of mafia structures and machinations.

Soon it will become clear what economic, social and psychological wounds the sanctions taken by the Western world under the leadership of the USA will inflict on the civilian population of Russia and to what extent the Russian president’s position of power will be shaken as a result? Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro – once himself a “victim” of US sanctions – strongly condemned the Western sanctions. In a newspaper article on 3 March, he described the punitive measures, including in the banking sector, as crimes against the Russian people and pleaded for diplomatic ways out of the crisis (5).

It is not yet clear what fatal effects the sanctions will have on the daily lives of the sanctioning countries: Experts are already warning of higher inflation rates, energy shortages and bottlenecks in the production and distribution of food.

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is a retired rector, educationalist and graduate psychologist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes 

(1) Graf Sponeck, Hans C. (2005). Another war. The UN sanctions regime in Iraq. Hamburg

(2) https://www.heise.de/forum/Telepolis/Kommentare/Der-US-Putschvers…ter-irakischer-Kinder-sind-den-Preis-wert/posting-34033445/show/

(3) https://monde-diplomatique.de/artikel/!386433

(4) https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/10-jahre-sanktionen-gegen-irak-wenn-ich-denke-werde-ich-verrueckt/156928.html

(5) https://de.rt.com/amerika/133072-venezuelas-prasident-nicolas-maduro-bezeichnet-sanktionen-als-verbrechen/

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


The  Video and text provides a factual review of developments on the ground.

***

As of March 3, the situation near Kharkiv remains difficult for both sides of the conflict. Russian units, that suffered losses in the previous days, do not seek to go deeper into the city. At the same time, they carry out targeted strikes on military facilities and hideouts of the Ukrainian military. On the night of March 3, Russian special operations forces continued their activities in the city, aimed at identifying the main defense nodes and eliminating the command staff. The encirclement of Kharkiv has not yet been carried out.

Mariupol remains blockaded by the joint forces of Russia and the DPR. Fighting is going on the outskirts of the city. The major assault has not started, but several clashes have taken place in the outskirts. No attempts of counter-offensive attacks by Ukrainian forces were reported.

Given the large number of military personnel and nationalistic fighters in the city, it will not be possible to take it quickly. However, Kyiv has no forces in the region to deblockade the city. The roads leading to Mariupol are cut off. On March 2, the DPR units closed the ring around Mariupol and took control over the settlements of Primorskoye, Priazovskoye, Shevchenko and Berdyansk.

DPR and Russia organized the evacuation of civilians and created a green corridor from Mariupol. However, the nationalist battalions, which are hiding in large numbers in residential areas, are in no hurry to let their ‘human shields’ go.

In Kyiv Region, Russian units continue their successful encirclement of the capital. Throughout March 2, there was fighting near Irpen. To the southwest of Irpen, there were battles for control over the Kiev-Zhytomyr highway. Russian troops encircling Kyiv from the southwest were spotted on the outskirts of Vasylkiv.

The Ukrainian military blew up a bridge in Baryshevka. This settlement is 10 km north of the Kiev-Boryspil-Poltava-Kharkiv highway. It can be assumed that Russian troops are close to this highway and that they are preparing an operation to intercept it with further advance to Boryspil.

In the direction of Mykolaiv, Russian units attempted to encircle the city in order to blockade it and get a passage to Odessa. On March 2, the Russians failed to cut off the Nikolaev-Krivoy Rog highway. On the same day, airborne troops allegedly landed from helicopters on the outskirts of Mykolaiv. The success of the operation as well as the objectives of the action are unclear.

Despite the fact that the main forces of Russia and the DPR were previously sent to break through to Mariupol, which ended yesterday with a complete encirclement, on March 2, Russian troops continued to strengthen their positions, moving north.

The Russian army took control over the town of Kamenka-Dneprovskoye and Vasilevka in Zaporizhia Region.

On March 1, it was announced that the Zaporozhye NPP, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, located in the city of Energodar, came under the control of Russian  forces in order to avoid provocations from Kyiv. However, local sources said that armed locals continue to block the road to the nuclear plant.

LPR forces continue their offensive north and northwest toward the junction with Russian units near Kharkiv. Meanwhile, Russian units took control of Balakleya and approached Izyum with further plans to advance toward Slavyansk.

As of March 3, the most threatening situation for the Ukrainian Armed Forces is developing in this theater of the military operation. Tens of thousands of servicemen may be completely surrounded.

DPR units are fighting positional battles to the West and Northwest of Donetsk. In this section of the front, DPR units act as an anvil, waiting for a hammer blow to the flanks of the largest grouping of Kiev forces in eastern Ukraine

On the one hand, the seventh day of the conflict demonstrated a certain tiredness of the advancing Russian troops. On the other hand, the Russian command seems to have taken into account the mistakes of the past days and the Russian offensive became a full-scale army operation rather than a cavalry special operation on the enemy’s rear. The morale and technical condition of the most combat-ready units of the Ukrainian military is deteriorating. Both Ukrainian servicemen and fighters of nationalist battalions in all eastern and southeastern parts of the front are surrendering.

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All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


Amid the abusive wave of sanctions against Russia due to the special operation in Ukraine, some specific rumors have caught the attention of experts, suggesting that there are plans on the part of the Western states to simply pressure to remove Russia’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council (UNSC). This kind of illegal maneuver is a real coup attempt and could lead to the end of the UN.

Apparently, an effort is under way to diplomatically isolate Moscow and even challenge Russia’s right to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, alleging that Russia took the seat of the former Soviet Union in 1991 without proper authorization – which in fact is nothing more than a public “justification” to promote such an illegal maneuver.

Currently, there are reports circulating on several websites alleging that Western diplomats, mainly American and British, are starting a research work to investigate whether there is a legal possibility of removing Russia from its position on the UNSC within the current international documents. Obviously, this type of “research” is useless and there is no possibility of carrying out this such a maneuver within the limits of public international law. In practice, when reporting that diplomats are investigating this kind of maneuver, it is only possible to conclude that they are somehow conspiring to carry out a coup against Moscow at the United Nations.

This absolutely absurd idea has become a common discourse in the Western media recently. This is due to the fact that the West has become furious with the Russian veto on the American resolution against the operation in Ukraine, voted on at the UNSC last week. Western political analysts began to say that “administrative reform” was needed at the UN to prevent “aggressor nations” from vetoing sanctions against themselves. Shortly thereafter, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelesnky, during one of his online speeches, claimed that Kiev “demands” Russian removal from the Council, strengthening Western discourse.

Quite unexpectedly, diplomats seem to have paid attention to this utterly unrealistic idea suggested by Zelensky and some ideologically fanatical analysts, initiating the current plan, in which Western officials plan to form a legal argument about the “illegitimacy” of the Russian presence on the Council. It is expected that some document will soon emerge containing various distortions and arbitrary interpretations of the norms of international law, just in order to justify the idea of removing Russia.

It is questionable whether the analysts and diplomats involved in this type of maneuver are taking into account all the consequences of this attitude. This irresponsible, illegal, rude and anti-diplomatic act could simply generate the biggest crisis in international relations since the Second World War, directly threatening the stability of global peace.

The very existence of the UN will lose its meaning without the Russian presence in its Security Council, considering the country’s military and nuclear importance. If that happens, the Russian attitude may simply be to abandon the UN, as it will have become a mere pro-Western international organization. China would certainly take the Russian side in this dispute as it would also have its interests affected by the coup in the Security Council. Russia and China would perhaps form a new organization together. And that would be the end of the UN as the regulator of world peace. The UN would have the same end of its predecessor league and this is something that everyone wants to avoid – except the Western officials who are planning the coup against Russia.

Obviously, administrative reform is needed at the UN and until a few days ago there was a consensus on the need to expand the Security Council’s permanent seats, including new emerging states of geopolitical relevance, such as India, Pakistan, Brazil, among others. Trying to reduce the Council is absurd considering that the world is increasingly multipolar. This would be a mere attempt on the part of NATO to carry out a global coup d’état, but instead of controlling the world, it would only bring about the end of the UN.

It is necessary that good sense prevails in the UN, in order to such an illogical project to be promptly rejected, so that the organization survives. The attempt to “cancel” Russia cannot go beyond the limits of international law. It is essential that the main world powers are on the Security Council and that the most important of them have veto power to prevent the interests of one side from prevailing over those of the other. It is this structure that guarantees world peace. It is necessary to increase the permanent seats, giving this right to new world powers, adapting the UN’s structure to the multipolar world. Any attempt to the contrary threatens the very existence of the organization.

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

Featured image is from the UN/Mark Garten

The Ukraine War and the “Good” Refugee

March 4th, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


“These people are not people we are used to… these people are Europeans.” – Kiril Petkov, Bulgarian Prime Minister, Associated Press, March 1, 2022

In the history of accepting refugees, countries have shown more than an erratic streak.  Universal human characteristics have often been overlooked in favour of the particular: race, cultural habits, religion.  Even immigration nations, such as the United States and Australia, have had their xenophobic twists and turns on the issue of who to accept, be they victims of pogroms, war crimes, genocide, or famine.

The Russian attack on Ukraine has already produced refugees in the hundreds of thousands.  By March 2, with the war one week old, 874,000 people were estimated to have left Ukraine.  The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that up to four million may leave, while the European Union adds a further three million to the figure.

This is already producing a growing capital of hypocrisy on the part of receiving states who have shown deep reluctance in accepting refugees of other backgrounds from other conflicts.  Tellingly, some of these conflicts have also been the noxious fruit of campaigns or interventions waged by Western states.

Refugees care for each other near Polish-border train station Przemyśl Główny (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)

Offers of generosity – least to fair Ukrainians – are everywhere.  Poland, which will be a major recipient and country of passage for many Ukrainians, is showing ample consideration to the arrivals as they make their way across the border.  They find themselves playing moral priests of salvation.

A report from the UNHCR notes facilities at various border crossings stocked with “food, water, clothes, sleeping bags, shoes, blankets, nappies and sanitary products for people arriving with only what they can carry.”  Anna Dąbrowska, head of Homo Faber, notes the sentiment.  “Our two peoples have always had close relations… Of course, we help our neighbours!”

Such solidarity has been selective. Those of African and Middle Eastern background have faced rather different treatment at the border – if and when they have gotten there.  The number of accounts of obstructions and violence both within Ukraine and at the border, are growing.

Polish authorities have also been accused of explicitly targeting African students by refusing them entry in preference for Ukrainians, though the Polish Ambassador to the UN told the General Assembly on February 28 that this was “a complete lie and a terrible insult to us.”  According to Krzysztof Szczerski, as many as 125 nationalities have been admitted into Poland from Ukraine.

The sceptics have every reason to be doubtful.  Only last year, Minister of the Interior Mariusz Kamiński, and the National Defence Minister, Mariusz Błaszczak, gave a very different impression of welcome, suggesting that refugees of swarthier disposition – those from the Middle East, in particular – were immoral types tending towards bestiality.  Such arrivals were also accused of being weapons used by the Lukashenko regime in Belarus as part of a program of “hybrid warfare”.  President Adrzej Duda also signed a bill into law to construct what has been described as “a high-tech barrier on the border with Belarus to guard against an influx of irregular migrants.”

People in Warsaw take part in a protest rally on October 17 in solidarity with migrants who have been pushed back at Poland’s border with Belarus. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

It’s all well to accuse the Russians of disinformation, but Polish authorities have not been averse to sowing their own sordid variants, targeting vulnerable arrivals and demonising them in the process.  In 2021, those fleeing Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Yemen were left stranded by their hundreds in the freezing woods along the Polish-Belarusian border.  Eight individuals perished.

In this cruel farce of inhumanity, the European Union, along with Poland and the Baltic States, notably Lithuania, must shoulder the blame.  The President of the European Council, Charles Michel, has been openly calling Lukashenko’s fashioning of irregular arrivals as “a hybrid attack, a brutal attack, a violent attack and a shameful attack.” Doing so makes it easier to care less.

Globally, the war in Ukraine is now giving countries a chance to be very moral to the right type of refugee.  They are fleeing the ravages and viciousness of the Russian Bear, the bully of history; this is an opportunity to show more accommodating colours.  If nothing else, it also provides a distracting cover for the more brutal policies used against other, less desirable irregular arrivals.

This is a strategy that is working, with media outlets such as USA Today running amnesiac pieces claiming that Ukrainian families, in fighting “Putin’s murderous regime”, were engaged in a “battle … for life and death; there is no time for debates about political correctness.”

Countries in Western Europe are also showing a different face to those fleeing Ukraine.  The UK, which is seeking to adopt an Australian version of refugee processing – the use of distant offshore islands and third countries, lengthy detention spells and the frustrating of asylum claims – has now opened arms for 200,000 Ukrainian refugees.

Hungarian volunteers assisting refugees (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Distant Australia, whose participation in the illegal war against Iraq which produced refugees and asylum seekers that would eventually head towards the antipodes, is now offering to accept a higher intake of refugees from Ukraine and “fast track” their applications.  The same politicians speak approvingly of a system that imprisons asylum seekers and refugees indefinitely in Pacific outposts, promising to never resettle them in Australia.  The subtext here is that those sorts – the Behrouz Boochani-types – deserve it.

In the words of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC), “The Morrison Government has presided over the dismantling of Australia’s refugee intake, leaving Australia unable to adequately respond to emergencies”, with 2022 “marking the lowest refugee intake in nearly 50 years.”  True, the global pandemic did not aid matters, but COVID-19 did little in terms of seeing a precipitous decline in refugee places.  Australia’s refugee intake cap was lowered from 18,750 persons in 2018-2019 to 13,750 in 2020-2021.

The reduction of such places has taken place despite Canberra’s role in a range of conflicts that have fed the global refugee crisis.  Australia’s failure in Afghanistan, and its imperilling of hundreds of local translators and security personnel, only saw a half-hearted effort in opening the doors.  The effort was characterised by incompetence and poorly deployed resources.

The grim reality in refugee politics is that governments always make choices and show preferences.  “Talk of moving some applications ‘to the top of the pile’ pits the most vulnerable against each other,” opines the critical founder of the ASRC, Kon Karapanagiotidis. “This is a moral aberration and completely out of step with the Australian public.”

Sadly, the good people at the ASRC are misreading public sentiment.  This is an election year; accepting Ukrainian refugees will be seen as good politics, just as indefinitely detaining boat arrivals from impoverished and war-ravaged lands – many Muslim majority states affected by the policies of Western states – will continue to be praised.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image: Ukrainian refugees arriving in Przemyśl in Poland (Licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Nina of Arabia: A Novel

March 4th, 2022 by Marina Bulatović

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***

 

 

Synopsis

by Barbara Ellis-Uchino

Nina, growing up in Belgrade, is a different kind of child – she prefers cleaning her parents’ apartment to playing with her younger sister and their friend. Nina cleans so thoroughly that she throws out all the socks her father leaves lying around the apartment – by tossing them off the balcony.

As young adults with good jobs, Nina, her sister, and their best friend enjoy the single life of Belgrade – until her sister marries at 29.

Many years later, Nina is in her 40s… That’s when she meets Filip. “Finally I would have a family of my own, just when everyone had written me off.” After a dismal “vacation” in Toronto in the winter, including an awkward dinner with his ex-wife Selena, they marry in her hometown, with 100 guests invited to the wedding.

Immediately after the wedding, Filip’s surprise new job takes him to Saudi Arabia. Nina is game, if wary. How, living in close quarters, will she adjust to Filip’s foibles? To the rules for women in this alien country? To the loneliness? Can she work? She cannot. And finally, will love win in their long-awaited marriage?

“If I lived in New York, I would have run to my shrink, lay down on the couch and told him this nightmare. I would feel better at once. Then I could meditate in Central Park with other stressed-out people struggling with difficult jobs, unpaid bills and loan payments, dissatisfied spouses, weeping (abandoned) lovers… but I lived in the Arabian Gulf and I had to be my own psychiatrist.”

Nina solves these problems by observing and writing about the men and women and the customs of Saudi Arabia, by dreaming about how to make the abaya a fashion statement, and most of all, by fantasizing that one day, she will fulfill her childhood dream of becoming a Manhattanite.

Nina turns her observations into a novel – Nina of Arabia. It is published to accolades, enabling her to make her dream of Manhattan come true. Faced with the realization that they could lose each other, as they quarrel often, Nina and Filip understand that what they have together is indeed true love. They move to Manhattan and throw a birthday party for all the family and friends who have supported them, both in their marriage and in the writing of the book. The novel ends (utterly believably) with success on every level.


What is it that you can find in the novel Nina of Arabia? And why would you be interested in her adventures at all? And who is this Nina, after all?

Moving from Europe to a different continent (Western Asia) in her early 40s, Nina finds herself momentarily without a clear direction in life, but her spirits are still up.

You will discover that it is her ‘karma’ to always be the second wife to her husbands (Alex and Filip). Why she craves marijuana while driving down Saudi highways.

How Donna Karan helped her to overcome the fashion trauma instigated by wearing the black abaya, but also how her Chinese neighbors, with whom she had hidden in the same bomb shelter, brought delight into her life.  How she coped with the fact that she had no children… Why she thinks that New York  is the capital of our planet – on what occasions she wears her lucky Calvin Klein panties. How often the ghost of Lawrence of Arabia haunts her – why she sometimes pities Saudi men (not women!). How she ended up sleeping in the same bed that Nicholas Cage once slept in. Why she thinks that her acquaintance with Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson is inevitable and written in the stars. Why she is keen on Selena (a new friend) whom she had met under very strange circumstances in Canada. Why she believes that Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla are still friends up there, in Heaven. Why she sometimes longs to move to the Himalayas and live with the Hunza people. Why she had been persistent in inviting King Abdullah while he was alive to be her guest, and all the things she promised him… and much, much more.

My novel “Nina of Arabia” is being sold in three countries: Serbia (publisher: Mali Nemo); Bosnia & Herzegovina and Montenegro (publisher: Nova knjiga).

The manuscript of my novel was translated into English by Alice Copple-Tošić and was then edited by Barbara Ellis-Uchino, who also wrote the synopsis.

My husband and I spent 10 years in Saudi Arabia, and that is where my novel originated, inspired primarily by my life in this Kingdom, but also by numerous travels that we took together.

Since I think that nothing in life happens ‘by accident’, therefore neither did my move to such a faraway and unknown country, it got me thinking: What is my purpose? Why did I, of all the countries in the world, have to move to this particular place? Since I had been one of the pioneers of the PR profession in Serbia, and had been writing for magazines in Serbia and Montenegro for years – writing presented itself as a natural choice, spurred on by a desire to chronicle the world around me.

Image on the right is from the author

“Nina of Arabia” is a modern fairytale and if you catch a glimpse of its magic world, you will discover why love is all around us. It will inspire you to observe your surroundings with hope and optimism.

Considering that societies around the world are founded on multiculturalism, I am sure that the target demographic for my novel will be broad, because my novel promotes these values.

I have written from my heart, with utter sincerity, hoping that readers who are members of my “energy tribe” and share my sensibility will recognize this. Here, I particularly mean women from 25 to 75 years old.

The novel “Nina of Arabia” could easily be adapted into a movie or a TV series script.

Therefore, I believe that Nina of Arabia, a century after the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, could reveal many unknown and interesting details about life in this Kingdom, and inspire people to turn their lives into a FAIRYTALE, regardless of where they live. Lawrence’s Arabia doesn’t exist anymore, and thanks to Nina, you will find out how much it has changed since the beginning of the 20th century.

My novel has 243 pages, and is a work of literary fiction. The book that it could be likened to is Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson, or Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding.

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Marina Bulatovic has been a member of the Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia (NUNS) since 1998. Today, she is a freelance journalist and is working on a new novel, under the title “Happy Serbian New Year”.

Featured image is from Marina Bulatovic Barny/Facebook

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Official data hidden within News Reports published by the New Zealand Ministry of Health has revealed that the fully vaccinated population account for the vast majority of Covid-19 hospitalisations in New Zealand, with some days seeing the triple/double jabbed account for 100% of people admitted to hospital.

The Expose – On the 16th Feb 22 the New Zealand Ministry of Health published a News Report containing information on Covid-19 Hospitalisations by vaccination status. In it they confirmed that of the current hospitalisations among the Northern Region, the unvaccinated population accounted for 2 hospitalisations, whilst the fully vaccinated accounted for 23 hospitalisations.

So we took a look back at previous news reports published by the New Zealand Ministry of Health to paint a picture on the current alleged Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the country.

These are the reports we analysed, dating back to 25th Jan 22.

The following chart shows the total number of Covid-19 hospitalisations by vaccination status each day in New Zealand between 25th Jan 22 and 16th Feb 22 –

As you can see, every single day has seen the fully vaccinated account for the vast majority of Covid-19 hospitalisations, and as of the 16th Feb 22 things look like they are getting progressively worse for the fully vaccinated but improving for the unvaccinated.

On the 25th Jan 22 just 6 people were hospitalised with Covid-19, with the fully vaccinated accounting for 5 hospitalisations, and the unvaccinated accounting for 1 hospitalisation. But by the 16th Feb 22, there were 25 people hospitalised with Covid-19, with the fully vaccinated accounting for 23 hospitalisations, and the unvaccinated population accounting for just 2 hospitalisations.

The following chart shows the percentage of Covid-19 hospitalisations by vaccination status in New Zealand between 25th Jan 22 and 16th Feb 22 –

Six of the 19 days have seen the fully vaccinated account for 100% of Covid-19 hospitalisations, this is despite approximately 79% of the New Zealand population being considered fully vaccinated.

The most recent 2 days of data has seen the fully vaccinated account for 90% of hospitalisations on the 15th Feb and 92% of hospitalisations on the 16th Feb 22.

The New Zealand Ministry of Health has refused to publish the number of Covid-19 deaths by vaccination status, but we think it’s plain to see by the very limited data they have quietly published on Covid-19 hospitalisations, that the country is very much in the midst of a Pandemic of the Fully Vaccinated, and it looks like Covid-19 vaccination has offered zero benefit in preventing hospitalisation.

In fact, from the numbers given it appears vaccination has made things worse.

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Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


And THAT’S why the US media and the government are so shocked and outraged.

The history of the world up until now has been one of peace.

Right?

I do seem to recall, though—so long ago it’s quite dim in memory—the US conducted war in Iraq more than once, and Afghanistan as well. And there was no outrage in the US press then.

And wasn’t there a US war in a place called Vietnam, or am I mistaken?

American journalists are now on wartime alert, fanning every flame of anti-Russian sentiment they can find.

And real red-blooded patriots should shout down and blot out anyone who dissents from absolute hatred of Russia.

Forget the fact that, for many years, the US government has been moving nuclear missiles closer to Russia. If more of those missiles were set up in the Ukraine, it would constitute an even greater threat.

Forget those moves, because they weren’t war. They were FOREIGN POLICY, which is quite different.

Americans aren’t supposed to think about that strange animal called foreign policy. It’s a subject every loyal patriot should make sure he never understands. It’s part of the patriot code.

For example, here is a secret piece of foreign policy carried out by a beloved President who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. You might remember him. Barack Obama. As you read the following details, make sure you don’t think they constituted WAR. There was absolutely no reason for the American press to report on them, or to stir up anti-war sentiment in the public.

The Guardian, January 9, 2017, “America dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016. What a bloody end to Obama’s reign,” by Medea Benjamin:

“…in 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped at least 26,171 bombs. This means that every day last year, the US military blasted combatants or civilians overseas with 72 bombs; that’s three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.”

“While most of these air attacks were in Syria and Iraq, US bombs also rained down on people in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. That’s seven majority-Muslim countries.”

“One bombing technique that President Obama championed is drone strikes. As drone-warrior-in-chief, he spread the use of drones outside the declared battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, mainly to Pakistan and Yemen. Obama authorized over 10 times more drone strikes than George W Bush, and automatically painted all males of military age in these regions as combatants, making them fair game for remote controlled killing.”

“President Obama has claimed that his overseas military adventures are legal under the 2001 and 2003 authorizations for the use of military force passed by Congress to go after al-Qaida. But today’s wars have little or nothing to do with those who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.”

“Given that drones account for only a small portion of the munitions dropped in the past eight years, the numbers of civilians killed by Obama’s bombs could be in the thousands. But we can’t know for sure as the administration, and the mainstream media, has been virtually silent about the civilian toll of the administration’s failed interventions.”

“In May 2013, I interrupted President Obama during his foreign policy address at the National Defense University. I had just returned from visiting the families of innocent people killed by US drone attacks in Yemen and Pakistan, including the Rehman children who saw their grandmother blown to bits while in the field picking okra.”

“Speaking out on behalf of grieving families whose losses have never been acknowledged by the US government, I asked President Obama to apologize to them. As I was being dragged out, President Obama said: ‘The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to’.”

“Too bad he never did.”

Again, that was foreign policy, not war.

Shh. Don’t tell the children.

*

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The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Featured image is from Donbass Insider

The War Between Russia and Ukraine Has Been Brewing Since 1991

March 4th, 2022 by Prof Rodrigue Tremblay

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


“I think it is the beginning of a new Cold War… I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.” George F. Kennan (1904-2005), American diplomat and historian, (in an interview with Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times, May 2, 1998, about the U.S. expansion of NATO)

[NATO’s goal is] “to keep the Russians out [of Europe], the Americans in and the Germans down.”Hastings L. Ismay (1887-1965), first NATO Secretary-General (1952-1957)

We [the State Department] have invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.” Victoria Nuland (1961- ), Under Secretary at the State Department, in a speech, Dec. 13, 2013.

“The North Atlantic Alliance continues to expand, despite all our protests and concerns… Despite all that, in December 2021, we made yet another attempt to reach agreement with the United States and its allies on the principles of European security and NATO’s non-expansion. Our efforts were in vain… For the United States and its allies, it is a policy of containing Russia, with obvious geopolitical dividends. For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation.” Vladimir Putin (1952- ), Speech to the Nation, Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2022.

The tragic and illegal war of aggression launched by Russia (pop. 146 million) against Ukraine (pop. 44 million), its neighbor, on Thurs. February 24, 2022, has raised much emotion and many reactions in the West, and for good reasons.

Most people would much prefer that international conflicts between states be settled through diplomacy, or at the very least, through peaceful arbitration. Unfortunately for humanity, this is not yet the case. It is inadmissible that wars of aggression still rage today. In the end, it is ordinary people, the poor and the young, in particular, who end up paying, often with their lives, for the mistakes and failings of so called ‘leaders’.

At a time when weapons are increasingly lethal and destructive, it would appear that there is no longer any credible arbiter in the world to avoid military conflicts. This makes for dangerous times.

Therefore, several questions come to mind.

Will Europe, which was a large battlefield in the first half of the 20th Century, become embroiled in military conflicts again, in the 21st Century? Has the United States, which controls NATO, pushed that alliance’s expansion into Eastern Europe and Russia too far? Why do the institutions of peace that the world created after World War II seem to have withered away to the point of being incapable of preventing wars? Is it still possible to reform these institutions in order to prevent the world from falling back into the practices of past centuries?

Considering the complexity of today’s world and the divergent interests involved, it could be useful to identify the main reasons for the deterioration of international order over more than the last quarter of a century, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in December 1991.

  • There is a clear danger of repeating the mistakes of the past in isolating countries from international life

The brinkmanship policy of isolating, humiliating and threatening foreign countries is a very dangerous approach in international relations. Such a policy, pursued against Germany by the French and other allied powers after World War I (1914-1918), through the imposition of heavy war reparation payments on Germany, is credited with having created the conditions that ultimately led to World War II (1939-1945).

Today, the world is again facing a European war between Russia and Ukraine, a war that should have been avoided, with a little more goodwill, leadership and perspicacity. Also, such a war of aggression illustrates very clearly how humanity risks returning to the geopolitical situation that prevailed before the Second World War.

It was a time when the League of Nations was paralyzed; much like the United Nations is today. It was also a time when major nations had been humiliated during the aftermath of World War I. They harbored resentment towards the victorious countries, which, in their eyes, only looked after their own narrow interests.

Let us remember that the United Nations was created in 1945 to prevent wars. But in the 21st Century, wars of aggression are still with us. Only during the past twenty years, the world has seen two major wars of aggression, both illegal under the U.N. Charter: the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, by the United States and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia on February 24 of this year.

This may be an indication that the politico-legal system put in place in 1945 to prevent war is not working, at a time in human history when a war involving nuclear weapons could be more than catastrophic.

  • The dangerous mentality prevailing today at the State and Defense Departments in the U.S.

Analysts and decision makers at the U.S. State Department and at the Pentagon rely on war games with simulations of military strategies of action-reaction, using computers, as if foreign policy were a kind of video game. That leaves little space for rational thinking, human feelings and imagination.

Relying on such ‘games’ is very dangerous because such a use of programmed computers could lead to huge mistakes in real life, and because they can make destructive military hostilities seem trivial and inconsequential.

  • NATO as a substitute to the United Nations

After the fall of the USSR, in 1991, some so-called ‘planners’ in the American government saw an opportunity to place the U.S. government as the sole arbiter of international foreign relations in the post-Cold War world. They viewed the United Nations as a cumbersome body where five countries (USA, Russia, China, U.K. and France) held sway over the U.N. Security Council with their veto.

The idea was to rely on the ‘defensive’ NATO, created in 1949 to secure peace in Europe, with the goal of countering the threat posed then by the Soviet Union. It was believed, no doubt rightly, that NATO would be more favorable than the U.N. to U.S. interventions in the world. However, contrary to the U.N., NATO is a war machine, which has no legitimate mechanism to bring about peace.

Even though in the past the U.S. government has often had the backing of the United Nations for its interventions abroad, humanitarian as well as military—the Korean War (1950-1953) was a good example of the latter—things changed in 1999. Then, under President Bill Clinton, U.S. Armed Forces started a bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, under the NATO flag, but without the authorization of the U.N. Security Council. This was a precedent.

Since that questionable decision, all U.S. military interventions abroad have been conducted under the cover of NATO, and not under the U.N. Charter. And that is where the world stands today.

  • Why the beleaguered Russia is in a position similar to defeated Germany in the 1930’s

The shock of the fall of the Soviet Union was to Russia what the shock suffered after its defeat in the First World War was for Germany. In both cases, these involved large populations subjected to foreign interference, lasting several years. The interests of these two countries were ignored in the new international order.

The fall of the Soviet Union raised two fundamental questions. The first: What would become of the two military defense alliances, the Warsaw Pact of 1955 and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of 1949? Both were organizations of mutual assistance, mainly military, against each other during a period of Cold War (1945-1989). The second: How to achieve the reunification of West Germany and the German Democratic Republic (GDR)?

From a geopolitical standpoint, these two questions were interrelated, especially from a Russian point of view. Russia conserves the historical memory of having been invaded by two great armies, by France under Napoleon, in 1812, and by Germany under Hitler, in 1941.

The fall of the Soviet Union meant the automatic dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. Would the same be true of NATO? Not necessarily.

Indeed, for the U.S. government, NATO was its main source of influence in Western Europe. Containing the Soviet Union was not the only objective in creating NATO. Therefore, the George H.W. Bush administration and its Secretary of State, James Baker, had no intention of dismantling NATO.

On the Russian side, the position was that if NATO continued to exist, either as a defensive or an offensive military alliance, it was essential that it commit to not expanding into Eastern Europe and not threaten Russia.

Declassified documents show that the government of George H.W. Bush, through his Secretary of State James Baker, and the governments of major member nations of the alliance, were willing to promise the Russian government that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe, as long as the Russian government accepted the reunification of the two Germanys (1990-1991). History has recorded the colorful expression of James Baker, on February 9, 1990, to the effect that NATO would not expand “one inch Eastward”.

  • The growing influence of neoconservatives (neocons) in U.S. foreign policy

American foreign policy changed dramatically in the 1990’s, notably under the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton (1993-2001), and even more so under the Republican administration of George W. Bush (2001-2009).

Even though President George H.W. Bush used to dismiss the neocons, at least those working in the U.S. government, as “the crazies in the basement” a small group of them did succeed in dominating American foreign policy later on. Their ideas provided the foundations of ‘The New American Empire’, (which is also the title of a book I wrote in 2004).

The neocon hegemonic mantra was very simple: The United States should take advantage of the demise of the Soviet Union and of its unparalleled military power to impose a “Pax Americana” similar to the Pax Romana during the Roman Empire.

In short, the United States must take advantage of its status as the undisputed military superpower in a unipolar world and adopt a very interventionist foreign policy, while putting emphasis on “national greatness”. And above all, they rejected any policy of accommodation or détente with Russia, just as they had done toward the USSR.

Armed with this doctrine, subsequent U.S. administrations, from the Bill Clinton administration on, have more or less followed its dictates. In particular, they have de facto abandoned the U.N. as the arbiter of world peace, and instead have increasingly relied on NATO to impose a Pax Americana.

  • The coup that overthrew the Ukrainian government in 2014

There is an important event not to forget. In 2014, there was a coup in Ukraine that overthrew the pro-Russian government of President Viktor Yanukovych, elected four years earlier, with strong support from the Russian-speaking population in the eastern part of the country.

The above quote of American Under Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, would indicate that the U.S. government had spent billions of dollars to support various organizations in Ukraine.

In the fall of 2013, a protest movement called the ‘Maidan Revolution’ began peacefully in Kiev, the country’s capital. The protestations were directed against the Ukrainian government and its refusal to sign a bilateral commercial trade agreement with the European Union. However, things escalated when initially peaceful protests turned violent, in February 2014. Then, despite elections being scheduled for May of the same year, the Ukrainian parliament summarily dismissed the incumbent president and formed a new government.

That episode may help in understanding the future turn of events in Ukraine.

  • The war between Russia and Ukraine is to a large extent a response to the progressive military encirclement of Russia by NATO

Since 1991, Russia has opposed NATO’s eastward expansion and has many times requested security guarantees that this would not happen.

Nevertheless, in spite of promises made by the George H.W. Bush administration and other governments, some subsequent U.S. administrations did go ahead and expand NATO eastward.

For instance, in 1999, the Clinton administration accepted that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic join NATO. In 2002, George W. Bush accepted seven more eastern countries (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) into NATO. In 2009, it was Albania and Croatia’s turn to join. The most recent adhesions to NATO are Montenegro, in 2017, and North Macedonia, in 2020.

Things went even further when, in December 2014, the Ukrainian parliament voted to renounce its non-aligned status, a step harshly condemned by its neighbor Russia. Ukraine—a former Soviet republic, which became independent in 1991—has made it clear that it wishes to join NATO. And more recently, in 2021, Ukraine became an official candidate for NATO membership. The rest is history.

Conclusion

In these troubled times, an outside and independent moral authority should perhaps intervene to prevent the world from falling into the abyss of military conflicts. Possibly, an invitation could be made to either the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, or to Pope Francis, to serve as conciliator, in order to stop the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, before the Ukrainian people suffer irreparable loses, and before other countries intervene and turn the conflict into a world war.

And afterwards, the world had better recapture the spirit of 1945 and set about reforming its international institutions so that they are truly capable of preventing destructive wars, not in theory but in practice.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay.

International economist Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is the author of the book about morals “The code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles” of the book about geopolitics “The New American Empire“, and the recent book, in French, “La régression tranquille du Québec, 1980-2018“. He holds a Ph.D. in international finance from Stanford University.

He is a Research Associate of  the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

Featured image is from South Front

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***

On incidents centering Ukraine, media reports said:

French President Emmanuel Macron thinks “the worst is yet to come” in Ukraine after talking with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday.

A senior French official said Macron’s warning came after the two leaders spoke for 90 minutes, which did not yield any diplomatic progress.

The official said Putin was determined to carry out the ongoing war in Ukraine until “the end.”

Putin also told Macron that Russia’s goals in Ukraine would be “fulfilled” and that the war was going “according to plan,” Reuters reported, citing a statement issued by the Kremlin.

Oil Prices Surge To Highest Level Since 2014

Global oil prices soared and U.S. stocks sank Tuesday.

Stocks fell as investors tried to measure how the conflict would impact the global economy. The S&P 500 dropped roughly 68 points, or 1.6%, to close at 4,306. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost nearly 598 points, or 1.8%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 1.6%. The declines add to the market’s losses after a two-month skid for the S&P 500.

The bigger moves came from the markets for oil, agricultural commodities and government bonds. Oil has been a key concern because Russia is one of the world’s largest energy producers. The latest bump in prices increases pressure on persistently high inflation that threatens households around the world.

U.S. benchmark crude oil jumped 8% to $103.41 per barrel, reaching the highest price since 2014. Brent crude, the international standard, surged 7.1% to $104.97.

The crisis in Ukraine prompted an extraordinary meeting of the International Energy Agency’s board, which resulted in all 31 member countries agreeing to release 60 million barrels of oil — half of which will come from the U.S.’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).

President Joe Biden dipped into the SPR in November 2021, releasing 50 million barrels of oil at the time to tamp down high gas prices facing American consumers.

“Moving forward with the release reflects the magnitude of expected disruptions to global energy markets driven by sanctions on Russia,” Clayton Allen, director, and Raad Alkadiri, managing director of energy, climate & resources at Eurasia Group said. “Disruptions will also highlight the importance of U.S. domestic production,” the analysts said.

Europe remains highly exposed to Russia in some sectors, particularly energy,” analysts with TD Securities said in a report. “As the West rushes to sanction Russia, Europe is likely to feel the hit the hardest. This poses a typical stagflationary shock, and growth is likely to be lower, and inflation higher, than otherwise.”

Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, climbed to over $119 a barrel to a 10-year high on Thursday as the war in Ukraine continued to stoke supply concerns.

It briefly touched $119.30, its highest level since March 2012, before later retreating slightly meaning Brent has gained $20 in just a week since Russian troops pushed into Ukraine.

West Texas Intermediate was also trading above $115 on the day, its highest since 2008.

Earlier this week, the U.S., along with Japan and other major consumer nations, agreed to release 60 million barrels from their stockpiles in an attempt to stabilize global energy markets.

However, Russia’s key role as an exporter of oil and gas is driving more chaos in energy markets, while the region’s importance for other key commodities means panic is spreading through markets.

After the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, Russia is the third largest oil producer globally, and is also the world’s largest natural gas exporter.

“With Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies (OPEC+), refusing to respond to the sharp spike in oil prices by sticking to its 400,000 barrels per day increase in output in March and with the market unfazed by the IEA’s global crude reserve release, the geopolitical tensions look set to push oil prices higher with Brent crude on track to breach $120 or even $125 as the next major resistance hurdles,” Victoria Scholar, head of investment at Interactive Investor, said.

Russian deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, who attended the OPEC+ talks on Wednesday, said he hoped oil market volatility would ease and that Russian output was expected to reach pre-pandemic levels in May.

Benchmark European natural gas prices jumped as much as 20% to €198 per megawatt-hour on Thursday.

The Dutch April gas futures contract has gained more than 12% to €186 per megawatt hour, setting a new record, while the UK equivalent is also approaching the record high hit at the end of last year.

It is currently 8.3% higher at 426.9p per therm, not far from the all-time high of around 450p in December.

UK drivers are now facing record petrol and diesel prices amid soaring oil prices. February marked the fourth month of rising fuel prices with petrol and diesel both shooting up by £4.5p a liter to new record highs, according to RAC.

Energy analysts warn prices could even reach £1.60 a liter causing yet more pain for motorists with no end in sight.

“February was undoubtedly a shocking month for drivers. A rise of 4.5p in any month is bad enough but when it takes pump prices to record levels, it’s bound to hurt households across the UK,” said RAC fuel spokesman Simon Williams.

“Motorists are having to endure successive months of rising prices and, sadly, it doesn’t look as though February will be the last.”

‘Not Our War’: Gulf States Resist Pressure To Raise Oil Output

The oil-rich Gulf monarchies have so far resisted Western pressure to raise output, prioritizing their own strategic and economic interests.

The OPEC+, led by Riyadh and Moscow, failed Wednesday to respond to a call to produce more and faster, despite pressure on the Gulf states in particular.

The group argued that the “current volatility is not caused by changes in market fundamentals but by current geopolitical developments,” according to a press release.

“Gulf countries are testing their ability to have a strategic autonomy, to defend their own national interests,” Hasan Alhasan, a Middle East specialist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told AFP.

The Gulf countries, which had suffered from declines in oil prices since 2014, now seem all the more reluctant to take immediate action as they benefit from the short-term price surge.

If the barrel stays above $100, this will mean that none of the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries will face a budget deficit by 2022, wrote researcher Karen Young of the Washington-based Arab Gulf States Institute.

Amena Baker, an analyst with Energy Intelligence, said that according to OPEC+ “there is no physical shortage of crude in the market.

“The impact of the Western sanctions against Russia’s hydrocarbon exports is still unknown,” she told AFP.

Baker said the only two OPEC+ countries able to truly open the floodgates are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, but that even they would be unable to make up for Russian exports.

“Overall our calculations put spare capacity of OPEC+ at 2.5 million barrels per day and that’s much less than what Russia exports. Russia’s exports are closer to 4.8 million bpd,” she said.

However, producing countries are aware that high prices risk depressing the global economy and accelerating the energy transition away from fossil fuels, at a time of fragile post-Covid recovery.

“What is most important for Saudi Arabia is oil price stability,” said Alhasan, who added that the kingdom counts on Russia’s cooperation in this.

The last time Saudi Arabia and Russia clashed over production quotas, it led to a price war and a collapse of prices, he recalled.

Baker agreed that “keeping Russia as part of OPEC+ is also seen as very important by member states … That’s the only way to ensure an effective market managing tool in the years to come.”

Alhasan said the pressure the U.S. has exerted on its close Gulf partners has been “limited” so far, adding that “we will see if the pressure will increase in the coming days”.

According to the analyst, the “Gulf countries have said: ‘This isn’t our war.’ A very similar message, by the way, to the one consistently sent by the U.S. to the Gulf states on Yemen over the past several years.”

Saudi Arabia and the UAE — close diplomatic and military partners of the United States — have intervened in Yemen since 2015 to support government forces against Huthi rebels, who are backed by Iran.

Riyadh and Abu Dhabi would like stepped-up support from Washington against the rebels, but the US has been reluctant to engage further in a conflict where all parties have been accused of war crimes.

The UAE hosts U.S. troops and has been a strategic partner to Washington for decades, but its ties with Russia have also been growing.

In its current role as holder of the UN Security Council’s rotating presidency, the UAE abstained last Friday from voting on a U.S.-Albanian draft resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

US-UAE relations now face a “stress test”, said Yousef al-Otaiba, the Emirati ambassador to the U.S., but he voiced confidence that “we will get out of it and we will get to a better place”.

Volunteers Cross Polish Border Into Ukraine To Fight Russian Forces

Small groups of men were heading in the direction to fight the Russians.

Most appeared to be Ukrainian émigrés in their 20s and 30s, but some could also be heard speaking other languages. Many of the men had black tactical boots hanging from their duffle bags.

Judging by the license plates of the cars dropping them off at the crossing in this Polish border town, they had come from as far away as Italy and Germany.

Among those heading east into Ukraine was a man with a military bearing from Great Britain who identified himself only as Ian and said he was 62.

“I’m going to fight,” Ian told NBC News correspondent Jay Gray.

Then Ian walked up to the Ukrainian border guards, who looked him over, checked his papers and sent him to the left to join the other hard-eyed men waiting for a bus bound for the battle against the Russians.

Ian and the others were answering the call that embattled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted on his website Sunday for “friends of peace and democracy” to join their new brigade, the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, and help them fight the Russians.

Zelenskyy said Thursday that some 16,000 foreigners have already joined the brigade, a number NBC News could not immediately confirm.

In France, the Ukrainian Embassy has been actively recruiting former soldiers to join the fight, and it set up a Facebook page with information and paperwork they would need to fill out, The New York Times reported.

More than 1 million Ukrainians, mostly women and children, have fled in the eight days since the Russians invaded their country, and the pace at which civilians have been crossing the border into Poland has been accelerating as the fighting has grown fiercer.

An army of Polish volunteers backed by relief workers from other countries has set up refugee aid centers in nearby cities, like Przemysl, an ancient city of some 61,000 people.

From there, Ukrainian refugees have been bused to major Polish cities like Warsaw, Krakow and Gdansk, as well as to Germany, Austria and even Denmark.

There have been outbursts of anger from Ukrainians frustrated by the bureaucracy on both sides of the border. And there have been allegations of racism lodged by Africans and Asians who had been living in Ukraine and who say their escape was delayed by Ukrainian border guards.

Rather than marching across the border, most of the escapees boarded buses provided by Poland’s national fire department on the Ukrainian side.

Russia Is Stopping Rocket Engine Sales To U.S., ‘Let them fly on their broomsticks’

Russia has stopped selling rocket engines to the US in response to sanctions, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russian space agency Roscosmos said on Thursday, Reuters reported.

“In a situation like this, we cannot supply the United States with our world’s best rocket engines. Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks, I do not know what,” Rogozin said on state-run TV.

Rogozin claimed that since the 1990s, Russia had delivered 122 RD-180 engines to the U.S., and 98 have been used. As part of the decision, Russia will stop servicing rocket engines, meaning that the 24 that are unused will be without the Russians’ assistance.

On Thursday, Roscosmos also announced that it will no longer collaborate with Germany on research at the International Space Station.

Dollar’s Weaponisation Threatens Its Global Dominance

The weaponisation of dollar-based global finance might pose long-term strategic and economic threats to the dominant position the US currency at present enjoys, according to an op-ed for The Hill by Vivekanand Jayakumar, an associate professor of economics at the University of Tampa in Florida.

He noted that the dollar-based global finance system, which has already been facing challenges from America’s spending policies and trade deficits, is now facing a threat of a China-Russia economic and strategic partnership. Jayakumar explained that China has long sought to replace the dollar as the reserve currency and now, seeing how the western nations can voluntarily cut a nation’s banks off SWIFT and slap them with sanctions, Beijing has all the more reason to promote renminbi and digital yuan abroad.

“Recent moves by the West to weaponise dollar-based international finance may yet provide the necessary spur for China to speed up measures to reduce its reliance on the US dollar and create an alternate global financial payments system”, Jayakumar wrote.

The professor noted that Beijing might grow cautious of the existing financial system and try to minimize its exposure to it, in case the situation around Taiwan – its breakaway province – escalates.

Jayakumar said that Beijing’s push for spreading digital yuan and to create alternative payment systems are part of China’s plan to deal with these potential issues. China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative will, in turn, broaden the acceptance of the Chinese currency, the professor said. He sees Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “inward-looking policies” and unwillingness to open its markets fully as the only barrier on this path (and the only hope for the US to maintain the dollar’s dominance).

“Any genuine moves to increase the global acceptance of the renminbi/digital yuan will require China to fully open its capital markets to foreigners. But such a step may not be in accordance with Xi’s dual-circulation economic strategy,” Jayakumar wrote.

The economist stressed that the dollar’s position is already undermined by the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet, growing public debt and a “sizeable trade deficit” with China, which has grown over the past few years.

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


The speed of Western retaliation over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has raised eyebrows among Yemenis who have endured a relentless bombing campaign and deadly air, land, and sea blockade for 2,520 consecutive days.

“We’re brutally bombed every day. So why doesn’t the Western world care like it does about Ukraine?!!… Is it because we don’t have blonde hair and blue eyes like Ukrainians?”  Ahmed Tamri, a Yemeni father of four, asked with furrowed brows about the outpouring of international support and media coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the lack of such a reaction to the war in Yemen.

Over the weekend, a member of Tamri’s family was killed and nine relatives injured when their family home was targeted in a Saudi-led Coalition airstrike in the remote al-Saqf area in Hajjah Governorate. Tamri claims that al-Saqf has been subjected to a brutal Saudi bombing campaign for the past seven years – more so, he says, than all of Ukraine has endured since it was invaded by Russia.

Despite the horrific bombing campaign against Yemeni civilians, Saudi Arabia’s human rights violations and war crimes have garnered nowhere near the level of coverage and sympathy that the mainstream Western media has rightfully given to Ukraine. “They shed tears for the Ukrainians, and ignore our tragedies… What hypocrisy and racism!” Tamri told MintPress News.

Yemenis ask the obvious

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues into the sixth day, an outpouring of support for Ukrainians continues to be seen across the Western world. Severe sanctions against Russia have been imposed by the United States, Europe, Australia, and the West in general, amid a flurry of emergency talks at the UN Security Council. The speed of Western retaliation – which includes banning Russia from the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) international banking network and calls to treat Russians as international pariahs in sports, culture, and even science – has raised eyebrows among Yemenis who have endured a relentless bombing campaign and deadly air, land, and sea blockade for 2,520 consecutive days.

Since Thursday, when Russian forces began their wide-ranging assault on Ukraine, the Saudi-led Coalition, supported by the United States, has launched more airstrikes in Yemen than Russia has in Ukraine. In Hajjah, a province surrounded by heavy Saudi artillery, Saudi-led coalition warplanes launched more than 150 airstrikes on the cities of Haradh, Heiraan, Abbs, and Mustab, killing scores of civilians, including a father of six killed over the weekend by a Saudi drone that targeted his car as it traveled between Shafar and the Khamis Al-Wahat market.

Since Russia’s incursion into Ukraine began, dozens of civilians, including a number of African migrants, have been killed and hundreds wounded by Saudi artillery and airstrikes in Yemen’s heavily populated Saada province, declared a military area by Saudi Arabia at the start of its military campaign in March 2015.

As news cameras and solidarity protests gave much-needed sympathy to Ukrainian civilians, in Sana’a, Yemen – which has effectively been turned into a large prison for the city’s more than four million residents and refugees, thanks to a crippling Saudi blockade – warplanes bombed a number of densely populated areas, including the airport. An additional 160 airstrikes were launched on the provinces of Marib, al-Jawf, al-Baydha, Taiz, Najran, and Hodeida, the main entry point for commercial goods and aid into a country facing the worst man-made famine in the 21st century.

In fact, it seems as though the Saudi regime is taking advantage of a distracted media in order to escalate attacks on a number of sensitive targets along the Yemen-Saudi border and strengthen its hold over the Al-Mahra Governorate. The UAE, the other major Western-backed oil monarchy occupying Yemen, is likewise making hay, accelerating its project to change the demographics on the prized Socotra Island by displacing locals in favor of settlers more aligned with UAE policies. And while the U.S. readies massive shipments of arms and military aid to Ukrainian “freedom fighters” defending against a Russian invasion, Yemeni “rebels” downed an American-made MQ9-1 drone flown by the UAE in al-Jawf and two American-made Boeing Insitu ScanEagles in Marib and Hajjah.

As countries that have spent the past decades building literal and figurative walls to keep out desperate brown and black refugees fleeing violence and foreign invasion in their own lands open their arms, homes, and hearts to fleeing Ukrainian refugees, Saudi Arabia unleashed a force of Yemeni mercenaries upon their homeland with a promise of a Saudi green card and safety for their families if they turn on their fellow countrymen. Ironically named the “Happy Yemen Forces,” the unit was finalized in late 2021, according to leaked military documents, with a mandate to secure Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen and ensure Saudi security in exchange for a green card and access to the Saudi social services that come with it.

If we are to compare

In terms of the sheer cost of human life, the tragedy in Yemen has been much more deadly than that in Ukraine, where 325 Ukrainians, including 14 children have tragically lost their lives according to Ukrainian officials. Granted the war in Yemen has raged on unabated for more than six years, but comparatively the numbers are astonishing. Since 2015 the death toll has reached an estimated 400,000 people, including 3,900 children.

Those deaths have included attacks on civilians so egregious that they did garner fleeting media attention but, inevitably, no sanctions, little international condemnation, not even a cessation in the military aid and support to the perpetrators. Bombed-out schools, funerals, wedding halls, refugee camps, even a school bus full of children targeted by the most advanced U.S. weaponry on offer have not been sufficient to elicit the reaction that Ukraine has garnered in less than one week.

Since 2015, Saudi-led Coalition warplanes have pounded Yemen with over 266,000 airstrikes, according to the Yemeni Army Operations Room, which records airstrikes against civilian and military targets. Seventy percent of those strikes have hit civilian targets. The rising smoke, rubble and flames now seen in Ukraine have been the status quo in Yemen for years, with Western media often deeming the images that appear on local Yemeni television stations, of parents pulling pieces of their children out from the rubble of their homes or schools, too graphic to display.

Thousands of Yemen’s economically vital facilities like factories, food storage facilities, fishing boats, food markets and fuel tankers have been bombed by the Western-backed Saudi Coalition. Critical infrastructure – including airports, seaports, electrical stations, water tanks, roads and bridges and countless more schools, agricultural fields, and places of worship – have been destroyed or damaged. A Saudi blockade and airstrikes on hospitals have crippled Yemen’s health system, leaving it unable to deal with even the most basic public health needs and leaving the 300 facilities that remain in the entire country barely functioning as COVID-19 spreads like wildfire.

As the outpourings of condemnation of Russia’s invasion continue, Western governments have sent massive aid packages to Ukraine and social media campaigns fill in the gaps – while in Yemen the United Nations announced that by March it would likely cut aid to 8 million people in a country that it calls home to the worst humanitarian crisis on earth. Household food insecurity in Yemen hovers at over 80%. Almost one-third of the population does not have enough food to satisfy even basic nutritional needs. Underweight and stunted children have become a regular sight and the worst is yet to come, as the Russian invasion has led to increased fuel and food prices and as humanitarian funding dries up, according to the UN World Food Programme.

Picking and choosing which invasion to condemn

In March 2015, more than 17 countries led by the oil-rich monarchy of Saudi Arabia launched a military invasion of Yemen, a sovereign state and a member of the United Nations. Ostensibly, the war was launched to restore President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi to power after he was ousted following popular protests amid the Arab Spring.

By March 26 of that year, the Saudi-led Coalition, backed militarily and diplomatically by the United States, would begin a bombing campaign that has indiscriminately killed, maimed, and destroyed for seven years. Not only has Saudi Arabia, arguably the most repressive dictatorship on earth, forced Hadi back into power under the guise of protecting democracy, but it has also occupied huge swaths of southern Yemen from al-Mahara to the Bab al-Mandab Strait.

Yemeni journalists, activists and politicians have been left to ponder why Western governments – in particular, the Biden administration – condemn Russia for invading Ukraine under the pretext of national security while defending the Saudi regime’s “legitimate right” to invade Yemen under the very same pretext.

Despite the horrific human rights violations carried out by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, Western nations, and the United States in particular, have not only provided lethal weapons, training, maintenance, intelligence, and political and diplomatic cover to the monarchy but have imposed media restrictions on coverage of the Saudi regime’s human rights abuses in Yemen, pressuring tech and social media companies to deplatform and outright ban Yemeni activists and media critical of the war.

As mainstream Western media gives glowing coverage to Ukrainians resisting their foreign invaders and occupiers – with Western leaders applauding the steadfastness and resistance of Ukrainians and sending aid, weapons and moral support to them – they label Yemenis taking up arms as terrorists and target them with American-made smart bombs and drone attacks. Yemenis who take up arms against invading Saudi and Emirati forces are sanctioned and dismissed as proxies of Iran by liberal media institutions that claim to stand against war.

On Monday, the United Nations Security Council extended an arms embargo and travel ban on Yemeni forces. The resolution strongly condemned what it called cross-border attacks by the “Houthis,” a derogatory term used to refer to Ansar Allalh, the single largest force challenging the Saudi invasion and occupation. It went on to condemn “attacks on Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates” referring to Ansar Allah’s missile and drone attacks on Saudi-led Coalition airports and oil storage facilities.

Commenting on the resolution – which came as the UAE refused to publicly condemn Russiaover its invasion of Ukraine, hoping to gain Russian backing for its own invasion of Yemen – Ansar Allah leader Mohammed al-Houthi made one simple request: that Saudi Arabia’s deliberate targeting of civilians in Yemen lead to a Saudi weapons ban. Essentially, al-Houthi asked for a lifting of double standards, apparently an impossible request in today’s political climate.

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Ahmed AbdulKareem is a Yemeni journalist based in Sana’a. He covers the war in Yemen for MintPress News as well as local Yemeni media.

Featured image is from MintPress News

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

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Important article by Eric Zuesse first published by GR on December 9, 2021 analyses the Biden-Putin conversation (December 7, 2021).

The outcome of this conversation confirms Biden’s outright refusal to accept the legitimacy of the Minsk accords:

  1. Biden is demanding that America now replace the Minsk agreements by an agreement that will be forced upon the Donbass by Russia.
  2. Putin said no. He said that the two warring parties need to come to an agreement, and that he won’t allow the United States to nullify the commitments that both sides (Ukraine v. Donbass) signed onto in those agreements.
  3. America’s demanding that Ukraine’s side in the conflict be imposed upon Donbass — so that Ukraine’s violations of Minsk are allowed but Donbass’s violations in response are prohibited — is not acceptable to him. He especially emphasizes this because ONLY Ukraine’s side wants the Minsk agreements to become nullified.

The two-hour December 7th Biden-Putin conversation (via video-conference) focused mainly on the conflict between Ukraine and its breakaway former Donbass region, which is in Ukraine’s far east and borders on Russia.

In order to understand the conversation, some basic history that produced the current situation there needs to be stated, because this is the point-of-reference behind the summit-conversation that occurred on December 7th:

The 5 September 2014 Minsk Protocol, and its followup 12 February 2015 Minsk II Agreement, established the agreements between Ukraine and the Donbass breakaway region, that ended the intense hot war; and both of the two Minsk agreements were negotiated directly between the two warring sides, in order to stop the hot war, in which the Donbassers were defending themselves against the bombs and missiles from Ukraine, and to peacefully establish the framework — called “The Normandy Framework” — in which a final settlement between the two sides in that war would peacefully become settled, by its two participants.

That “Normandy Framework” was between the two warring regions — Ukraine versus the breakaway former region of Ukraine — being advised by three nations that were not directly, but only indirectly, involved, and which three nations wanted the matter to be settled without restoring the full-fledged warfare which had existed in 2014: these three were France, Germany, and Russia.

France and Germany were involved because they led the European Union, and because the EU wanted Ukraine to become a member of the EU. Russia was involved because both Ukraine and Donbass are on Russia’s border, and Russia doesn’t want U.S. missiles to be placed less than a ten-minute flying time to hit Moscow. Obama wanted Ukraine in the EU as a preparation for Ukraine to become admitted into NATO so that America can then place its missiles in Ukraine.

The United States was not invited into the Normandy framework, because its Government wanted restoration of the warfare between those two regions and a conquest of Donbass by Ukraine.

The initial idea for the Normandy framework had been worked out between Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Francois Hollande, in order to enable Ukraine to be restored to peace so that all member-states of the EU could then vote favorably on Ukraine’s admission into the European Union. (Otherwise, a veto by one or more of the EU member-nations would be certain, in accord with the EU’s still-unratified ‘Constitution’, because the EU’s “Rule of Unanimity” would apply, and because any attempt to override that “Rule” would collapse the EU altogether.)

Hollande and Merkel would not have initiated the Minsk agreements unless they were dissatisfied with the way that Obama was dealing with the Ukraine issue. In other words: America was being shut out of the matter entirely, by the EU.

Biden is demanding that America now replace the Minsk agreements by an agreement that will be forced upon the Donbass by Russia.

Putin said no. He said that the two warring parties need to come to an agreement, and that he won’t allow the United States to nullify the commitments that both sides (Ukraine v. Donbass) signed onto in those agreements.

America’s demanding that Ukraine’s side in the conflict be imposed upon Donbass — so that Ukraine’s violations of Minsk are allowed but Donbass’s violations in response are prohibited — is not acceptable to him. He especially emphasizes this because ONLY Ukraine’s side wants the Minsk agreements to become nullified.

The big hang-up in implementing the agreements is, and has been, the refusal by Ukraine to allow the breakaway region to become a special administrative district of Ukraine as Crimea had been during the 60 years (1954-2014) during which Crimea was transferred by the Soviet government of Nikita S. Khrushchev away from Russia (of which it had been a part since 1783) and forced into Ukraine.

Because of the resistance by Crimeans, Crimea became allowed to be largely self-ruled within Ukraine. The U.S. regime refuses to allow Ukraine to agree to treating the breakaway Donbass region in that way.

The U.S. has the full backing, in this, of the two Ukrainian racist-fascist, or nazi, Ukrainian Parties, “Right Sector,” and (originally called the “Social-Nationalist Party of Ukraine” in honor of Nazi Germany) the “Freedom” Party, or “Svoboda” (which means freedom in Ukrainian); and those two Parties had been the on-the-ground forces whom the CIA trained (inside the U.S. Embassy, and also in Poland) to perpetrate the U.S. coup that occurred in Kiev in February 2014. The coup’s preparation began no later than 2011.

An extermination plan was promptly instituted after the coup, by the new Ukrainian government, against the supporters of Donbass autonomy, and the war against Donbass began, in order to force the residents there to remain in the new, U.S.-imposed, nazi Ukraine. (Among their “Commanders” who admitted this was Ruslan Onishchtschenko, who even admitted that their “mission, being employees of the Ministry of the Interior, is to clean the cities after the army has worked this territory with aircraft, artillery and heavy military equipment.”) Obama wanted the residents eliminated from there, because 90+% of them had voted for the Ukrainian President (“Janukovych”) that Obama overthrew. (Obama overthrew him because that Ukrainian President didn’t want Ukraine to become a NATO-member.)

If those people, in Donbass, were to vote in another Ukrainian Presidential election, then the U.S. control over Ukraine would terminate. The U.S. regime doesn’t want that to happen, because it wants to place its missiles there.

It also planned to turn Russia’s biggest naval base, which was (and remains) in Crimea, into a U.S. naval base, but Russia succeeded in thwarting that aspect of his plan.

Although most EU member-nations wanted Ukraine to become a member of the EU, they objected to America’s plan for a hot war against Russia, even though they were hostile toward Russia.

On 26 April 2015, the Financial Times headlined “Germany urges Ukraine to fulfil Minsk ceasefire agreement”, and that neoconservative news-medium reported:

In the UK, which has followed the US in taking a tougher line against Moscow, an official said Ukraine should fulfill its side of the Minsk deal and “not give Russia the space to criticise them”.

The latest Minsk accord, agreed in February under pressure from Germany and France, has reduced fighting and led to the withdrawal of some heavy weapons from frontlines, though soldiers and civilians still die almost daily.

But Berlin is worried that Kiev is dragging its feet over other parts of the fragile deal, notably in trying to postpone political decentralisation until after local elections are staged in separatist-held territory. [That “until after local elections are staged in separatist-held territory” turned out to have been a false excuse, because those elections soon did occur and Ukraine continued its refusal nonetheless.]

For Ukraine this is critical because it does not want to hand over power to separatist leaders in the Donbas region, who are not recognised by the international community. EU diplomats say, however, that while local elections are indeed envisaged under Minsk, the accord does not insist that they take place before decentralisation.

The “17th EU-Ukraine Summit Joint Statement” was issued on 27 April 2015 and was the 17th EU Summit. It was the first EU Summit that included Ukraine (though still not a member, and still at war), and they stated that the EU nations

expressed their full support for the Minsk Agreements including the Package of Measures of 12 February 2015, endorsed by UNSC Resolution 2202 of 17 February 2015.

12. The leaders called on all parties to swiftly and fully implement the Minsk Agreements and honour their commitments and underlined the Russian authorities’ responsibility in this regard.

They tried to lay the blame upon Russia if the agreements were to turn out not to be complied with. But soon thereafter, no doubt could any longer exist that it was their own side — the Ukraine side — that refused to allow the basic provision, which was that Ukraine must negotiate a settlement with Donbass, to be fulfilled. The EU leaders were either willingly conned, or else they were lying throughout.

Already, on 12 April 2015, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (DWN) had bannered “French Secret Service: Russia never planned to invade Ukraine” and reported:

“The real difficulty with NATO is the fact that US intelligence dominates while French intelligence is only occasionally taken into account. That is why it is important for us to appoint sufficient NATO commanders of French origin. NATO has announced that the Russians are preparing to invade Ukraine. However, based on the findings of the DRM, this claim could not be upheld. In fact, we found that the Russians had neither set up command posts nor took any logistical measures, such as setting up field hospitals. There were no activities to be undertaken in preparation for a military invasion. At the second level of command there was no corresponding cause. As a result, it became clear that our assumptions were correct. The Russian soldiers actually seen in Ukraine acted as if they were carrying out a maneuver to put pressure on Ukrainian President Pororschenko rather than an imminent invasion.”

With this statement, which surprisingly was not discussed further in the committee, the French general contradicts the official NATO doctrine, according to which Russia had made massive preparations to invade Ukraine.

Gomart is a seasoned officer in the French Army and was only appointed Chief of Military Intelligence in 2013.

His statements coincide with the criticism of Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who complained about NATO Commander-in-Chief Philip Breedlove because of obvious differences in intelligence about the situation in Ukraine. The US general was exaggerating Russia’s military role since the crisis began, Der Spiegel reported a few weeks ago. Accordingly, the Chancellery spoke of “dangerous propaganda”, while Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier intervened with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

Steinmeier said there was no intervention, only inquiries. “It is true that I myself have had two inquiries myself in situations in which the information we had from our sources did not completely agree with information that came either from NATO or the American side.” A dispute arises because the federal government has no interest in that [American view]. He is in close contact with US Secretary of State John Kerry so that such differences do not arise. …

In the EU, there is growing resistance to the escalation in relations with Russia, as it is being pursued by the US hawks ( see the notorious thought leader Zbigniew Brzeziński ). Italy and Greece want to get out of the spiral of sanctions because their own economies are being damaged. France must be saved because the coalition of conservatives and social democrats must prevent the Front National from winning at all costs in order not to endanger the euro zone substantially. The fact that the official NATO version about Ukraine is now being described as incorrect by France (of all places) is indelicate in this context.

few weeks ago, US President Barack Obama surprisingly called for a withdrawal and temporarily stopped sending US soldiers to Ukraine. NATO had announced that it would take over some of the training of the Ukrainian army from March. In the course of this training, the right-wing extremist militias in Ukraine are also being trained by the Americans. They are to be integrated into the regular Ukrainian army, but are allowed to continue to act autonomously. The right-wing extremists reject the Minsk Agreement.

On 25 April 2015, DWN headlined “USA and Russia are preparing for a new escalation in Ukraine” and reported:

The ceasefire in the Eastern Ukraine is deceptive: Apparently the Russians and the Americans are preparing for new military actions. The US government wants to keep the issue on the boil, to put the EU and the proposed Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership treaty under pressure [force European governments to accept it, which was a major Obama project to increase their bond with America and their separation from Russia]. The US has fallen in an energy-war tight spot, since Moscow announced it will no longer manage its natural gas from 2019 through Ukraine. The next military incident seems to be only a matter of time.

The President as a perpetual commander: the US has an economic interest that Ukraine remains a controversial land.(Photo: Reuters)

While somewhat keeping the warring parties in eastern Ukraine to the agreements of Minsk, there are, running in the background, obvious preparations for a new escalation. The Financial Times is already writing about a “war of words”. Such propaganda war is inherently favorable to escalation. France and Germany have noted that the US government has indeed recently been criticized for manifest misinformation. But this doesn’t prevent the US officials to maintain the chosen course. The US envoy Geoffrey Pyatt is tweeting almost maniacally about new threats every hour. …

The US government has only recently come under fire from France and Germany for blatant misinformation. But this does not prevent the US representatives from maintaining the course they have chosen. …

On 30 April 2015, Voice of America bannered “Carter Pleased with Russia’s Embrace of Minsk Agreement” and reported:

“In an exclusive interview with VOA after meeting with President Putin, [Jimmy] Carter said the Elders were pleased with Russia’s allegiance to the Minsk agreement. ‘There’s not any doubt in our mind that the Russians genuinely want to see all the aspects of that concluded.’ … [But, General ‘Breedlove’, the NATO Commander,] said many of Russia’s actions are ‘consistent with preparations for another offensive’ into Ukrainian territory. … [And,] Commenting on Carter’s remarks, the U.S. State Department said Thursday it would not speculate on the reasoning behind his [Carter’s] statements. ‘We know that Russia has continued to undermine the Minsk implementation plan and the Minsk agreements.’”

The Obama Administration was determined to discredit that prior Democratic Party U.S. President’s obstructionist pronouncements.

On 2 May 2015, DWN headlined “Chaos in Kiev: Ukraine army now fighting against their own militias” and reported that a U.S.-supplied battalion of nazis (far-right ‘volunteers’, or mercenaries, whom Ukraine’s Government allowed to fight against the Donbass residents and to be led by leaders of the Right Sector and Svoboda parties) were now being attacked by some members of Ukraine’s regular army. Basically, the U.S. regime, which had imposed this government upon Ukraine, was now goading it to provoke Russian forces into the war, perhaps in order for America then to have ‘justification’ to go to war against Russia itself, so as to defend the Ukrainian government that America’s own Ukrainian coup had installed.

As a wrap-up here, the great geostrategic analyst, Alexander Mercouris, headlined, on 8 December 2021, “Following Putin-Biden summit, Neocons push for war”, and he and others listed there the ways in which the entire Biden Administration’s international-affairs team are not only incompetents, but hate-driven incompetents, who are maniacally determined to destroy Russia, if they possibly can.

So, Putin’s rejection of Biden’s demand for the U.S. Government to replace the Minsk agreements by an ‘agreement’ that would be imposed upon Donbass by the U.S (and any perhaps willing U.S.-vassal-nation such as Poland) is actually little else than an application by him of his previously stated “red line” that must not be crossed or else Russia will instantaneously be in a hot war against any nation that does.

The world will soon know whether Biden has finally gotten the message. *

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research 

Featured image is from OneWorld

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Proposed Navy Radio Towers Threaten Community

March 4th, 2022 by Pat Elder

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***

 

Webster Field Annex, Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland plans to build six radio towers to aid drone warfare.

Locals are concerned about radio frequency radiation and the disturbance of contaminated groundwater and surface water.

The six towers the Navy plans to construct on Webster Field will emit various levels of radio frequency radiation, (RFR). Epidemiological studies and research on laboratory animals link RFR with impacts on the heart, brain, and other organs.

Several human studies indicate that proximity to base stations correlates with headaches, dizziness, depression and other neurobehavioral symptoms, as well as increased cancer risk. Animal studies also indicate that these effects may be cumulative.  This is the take-away from a study by Michigan Technological University that urges caution regarding the placement of towers that emit RFR. The study says a 500-meter (1,640’) buffer may help reduce risk for vulnerable populations.  Given the current research, the study says cell towers should be cautiously placed this far away from “lots of sleeping people.”

The quantity used to measure the rate at which Radio Frequency (RF) energy is absorbed in a body is called the “Specific Absorption Rate” or “SAR.” A Maximum Permissible Exposure is recommended by various federal agencies for electric and magnetic field strength and power density. The threshold level is a Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) value for the whole body of 4 watts per kilogram.

(Questions to the Navy in bold.)

The width of St. Inigoes Creek varies from 800’ at the tip of the Lucas Cove peninsula to 2,000’ at the mouth of the creek.

If I am on my dock, 1,600 feet from the shores of Webster Field, can you provide an estimate of the SAR in watts per kilogram from each tower?

If I’m in my boat, directly across from my property, along the shores of Webster Field, can you provide an estimate of the SAR from each tower?

A number of reports have appeared in the scientific literature describing the observation of a range of biological effects resulting from exposure to low levels of RF energy.  Tissue damage in humans can occur as a result of long-term exposure  because of the body’s inability to cope with or dissipate the excessive heat that may be generated.

Have you performed studies that estimate the levels of radio frequency radiation from the types of towers you are constructing? If so, could you share them with us?

If you have not performed a study, are you willing to commission a study in this regard and share the results with us?

We know that guidelines for maximum permissible exposure are different for different transmitting frequencies.  The most restrictive limits on whole-body exposure are in the frequency range of 30-300 MHz where the human body absorbs RF energy most efficiently when the whole body is exposed.

What frequency ranges will the Navy be using at each of the six towers?

The FCC authorizes and licenses devices, transmitters and facilities that generate RF radiation.  It has jurisdiction over all transmitting services in the U.S., but not over the DOD.

Facilities under the jurisdiction of the FCC having a high potential for creating significant RF exposure to humans, such as satellite-earth stations, etc. are required to undergo routine evaluation for compliance with RF exposure guidelines whenever an application is submitted to the FCC for construction or modification of a transmitting facility or renewal of a license.  This oversight is not extended to DOD facilities. Even if it did, the FCC has been failing in its responsibility to enforce health and safety guidelines.

Is the Navy willing to submit to civilian authority in this matter?  

The amount of RF energy to which the public might be exposed as a result of antennas depends on several factors, including the type of station, design characteristics of the antenna being used, power transmitted to the antenna, height of the antenna and distance from the antenna.

Could you describe for us the exact type of stations you are planning to build?

What are the design characteristics of the antennas being used?

How much power will be transmitted to the antennas? 

Calculations can be performed to predict what field intensity levels would exist at various distances from an antenna.

Can you provide the amount of RF energy generated at each tower in terms of increments of 100 feet heading north toward the Rosecroft community?

Also, since energy at some frequencies is absorbed by the human body more readily than at other frequencies, both the frequency of the transmitted signal and its intensity is important.

Could you provide this information for each tower?

We have compelling reasons to be skeptical that the DOD and the federal government are taking steps that are protective of our health. The Children’s Health Defense won a historic case against the Federal Communications Commission in August, 2021. The case challenged the agency’s decision not to review its 1996 health and safety guidelines regarding the latest wireless-based technologies.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled that the FCC failed to consider the non-cancer evidence regarding adverse health effects of wireless technology when it decided that its 1996 radiofrequency emission guidelines continue to protect the public’s health.

Children’s Health Defense Chairman and attorney for the case Robert F Kennedy, Jr. said, “The court’s decision exposes the FCC and FDA as captive agencies that have abandoned their duty to protect public health in favor of a single-minded crusade to increase telecom industry profits.”

We’ve witnessed the same abdication of federal power among several agencies regarding the threat posed to human health by PFAS contamination.

Is there  a potential for radio frequency interference with our communication equipment such as radios, TVs, wireless, cell phones, garage door openers, etc.?

What is the Navy doing to ensure RFI does not occur?

Is there a project test plan that addresses RFI and RF human exposure issues?

Soil, Groundwater and Surface Water Issues

Carcinogenic PFAS foam gathers on my beach on the north shore of St. Inigoes Creek in St. Mary’s City, Maryland.. Webster Field is shown 1,600’ across the creek. The foam was tested and found to contain nearly 5,000 parts per trillion of PFAS while the European Union limits the chemicals to .65 ppt. in surface waters.

This narrative on soil and groundwater contamination at Webster Field is followed by several questions for the Naval command regarding the proposed construction of the six towers on base.

Webster Field is a trainwreck of toxic chemicals. The Navy has reported that high concentrations of aluminum, arsenic, cobalt, iron, manganese, and thallium are present in surface soil samples, while cobalt, copper, cyanide, manganese, mercury, thallium, vanadium, and zinc were recently found in subsurface soil samples.

The construction of the towers may result in contaminated waters draining into the creek and the river.

 The base was used as a bombing range in the 1940’s and 1950’s, leaving massive concentrations of poisons in the soil. Just a few years ago Navy contractors unearthed Twelve 3-pound practice bombs – depths ranged from 2 to 32 inches. The Navy classifies these as MPPEH –  material potentially presenting an explosive hazard.

Navy reports say the primary mechanisms for transport of MPPEH and related constituents from the potential source areas may include:

  • Transport or migration of munitions-related items by erosion or soil disturbance
  • Transport of contaminated soil particulates via overland surface runoff to downgradient terrestrial areas and/or surface water bodies
  • Transport of contaminated soil particulates via wind or soil disturbing activities to surrounding terrestrial areas and/or surface water bodies
  • Leaching of chemicals from surface/subsurface soils into groundwater via infiltrating precipitation, and potential discharge of contaminated groundwater into downgradient surface water bodies
  • Uptake by biota from soil and trophic transfer to upper trophic level receptors (the poisons enter the seafood we consume)

The last item is most important because many in the neighborhood still consume the seafood from these contaminated waters.

*

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Sources

FINAL PROPOSED REMEDIAL ACTION PLAN MUNITIONS RESPONSE SITE UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE 1 (UXO 1) FORMER AERIAL BOMBING RANGE WEBSTER FIELD ANNEX NAS PATUXENT RIVER MD 10/01/2019 CH2M HILL

https://www.navfac.navy.mil/niris/WASHINGTON/PATUXENT_RIVER_NAS/N0428A_003069.pdf

FINAL REMEDIAL INVESTIGATION AND FEASIBILITY STUDY MUNITIONS RESPONSE SITE UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE 1 (UXO 1) FORMER AERIAL BOMBING RANGE NAS PATUXENT RIVER MD 09/01/2019 CH2M HILL https://www.navfac.navy.mil/niris/WASHINGTON/PATUXENT_RIVER_NAS/N0428A_003058.pdf

Featured image: In order to estimate the visual effect, the Navy flew drones to 150’ – the height of the proposed towers, then photo-shopped an estimated appearance of the tower onto an image taken from the water adjacent to the historic properties. https://lexleader.net/navy-plans-webster-field-tower-project/ This is the location of Maryland’s first settlement by English Catholics in 1634. Webster Field was purchased by the Navy from the Jesuits in 1943. The Jesuits acquired the property when Maryland was founded.

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


South Korean Trade Minister Yeo Han-koo secured an exemption from US export sanctions on Russia, something that will shift economic advantages to East Asia as the European Union has decided to sacrifice access to Eurasia to serve an Atlanticist agenda instead. The South Korean Ministry of Trade announced on its website that South Korean companies will not have to apply for licenses to export technology products to Russia. However, South Korea’s export restrictions will be in line with the sanctions of Western states.

“The US side noted that export restrictions of the Republic of Korea against Russia correspond to measures of the international community and agreed to add South Korea into the list of countries with the exception made from the foreign direct product rule,” the Ministry said. “The government will take further measure of export control in accordance with the like measures of the international community and the US.”

The US Department of Commerce has issued a foreign direct product rule (FDPR) regarding Russia. According to this regulation, companies from third countries that use American technology in manufacturing will need a US government license to export products to Russia. At least 32 countries have received such an exemption.

In this way, South Korean manufacturers have fought for their interests so they do not lose access to the Russian market, something that the European Union has already restricted itself from doing. What is evident is that Seoul’s position on sanctions against Russia is clear. In fact, the majority of Asian countries will likely support this position as they view events in Ukraine as far off and something best not to get involved in, especially in the context of the US-China rivalry raging in their own region.

The current election campaign in South Korea is also having a significant impact on the situation in the country. The next presidential election is scheduled for March 9 and current President Moon Jae-in will not run as each person can only be elected as the head of state of South Korea once.

Interestingly, despite the South Korean election only days away, which means we can expect many different policy suggestions as every presidential candidate has their own vision, there appears not to be a negative attitude towards Russia. In fact, it appears that the Ukrainian Crisis is very far low on Seoul’s pecking order of priorities to address or deal with.

However, it is the belief of Professor Lee Sang-chung of Kunming University that South Korean companies will continue to search for foreign trade opportunities, just as they did even during the Cold War.

“Our companies will be willing to continue trading if there are buyers willing to buy their goods,” he said.

His comment came as news began filtering in that South Korea had gained some kind of immunity from US export sanctions on Russia – in exchange for imposing export control measures. However, according to the professor, not being forced into sanctions does not help improve the economic situation in South Korea too much as the global market is still in limbo.

However, the global market will not remain in limbo forever, especially as we begin exiting the COVID-19 pandemic and because the crisis in Ukraine will not wage on forever, especially if Russia remains truthful to its claim that its operation in Ukraine is only aimed at the de-Nazification and demilitarization of the country.

Seoul has not yet formulated a position on sanctions, likely because of the upcoming presidential election. Due to this, there is still much uncertainty that could affect trade with Russia.

“Big companies will try to take some preparatory measures, but small and medium-sized businesses, as far as I know, have stopped and are in a state of tension over how the war will end,” Professor Lee Sang-chung explained.

South Korea has so far only announced a ban on the export of strategic materials. Additional export controls will be announced soon though. Seoul has imposed sanctions against some Russian banks, including Sberbank, VEB, Promsvyazbank, VTB, Otkritie, Sovcombank and Novikombank and its subsidiaries, but it will still be allowed to make transactions related to the supply of agricultural, energy and medicinal products.

However, once the war in Ukraine is over and the long path towards normality is being trotted on again, it will be countries like South Korea and other Asian states that will benefit as Moscow will certainly place more trust in Eastern partners that did not get to involved in the Ukraine war, unlike the European Union.

*

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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***

“There are always those who will want to profit from war or the threat of war, as unscrupulous as it may seem,” said one critic. “And for the American oil and gas industry there is no exception.”

The U.S. fossil fuel industry is poised to benefit from an expected expansion of gas exports to Europe after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Tuesday suspended approval of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in response to Russian military aggression toward Ukraine.

Completed in September but awaiting certification by Germany and the European Union, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which bypasses Ukraine by running under the Baltic Sea, could double the flow of gas from Russia to Germany.

While the $11 billion pipeline—owned by Nord Stream 2 AG, a subsidiary of Gazprom, the Russian majority state-owned energy company, with Western partners including the United Kingdom’s Shell, France’s Engie, and Germany’s Uniper—has been criticized on ecological and geopolitical grounds, Scholz had been reluctant to connect the permitting process to deescalation efforts in Ukraine, calling it a “private sector project.”

Two weeks ago, Sludge journalist David Moore shed light on the potential reason for Scholz’s hesitancy to halt the Nord Stream 2 pipeline:

With Russia massing its military presence along the border with Ukraine, the Kremlin could seek to weaken the international blowback by constricting gas supply delivered through pipelines in Ukraine. The result would be to ratchet up already near record-high costs for German businesses and households. Germany is projected to have enough gas in reserve for the cold months ahead and has been investing in renewable energy, and energy industry experts say it’s unlikely that Russia would entirely cut off the flow of gas because of the severe economic risks to its export markets. But Russian gas accounts for about a third of German supply and over 15% of its electricity generation, making up Europe’s largest gas source, so the pinch could be real.

But after Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday formally recognized the independence of two separatist territories in eastern Ukraine and deployed troops to the Donbas region—a move that U.S. President Joe Biden said last month would spell death for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline—Scholz took steps to shut down the project.

“We have been in close consultations with Germany overnight and welcome their announcement,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki tweeted Tuesday. “We will be following up with our own measures today.”

The Nord Stream 2 pipeline has been the subject of increased lobbying and fierce congressional debate on Capitol Hill, including last month’s failed attempt, led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), to hit the project with sanctions.

Now that Germany has officially pulled the plug on the Russian pipeline, U.S. fossil fuel corporations—along with Cruz and other members of Congress who are heavily invested in oil and gas companies such as Houston-based Enterprise Products—stand to profit further from increased liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to Europe, an ongoing trend that is likely to intensify amid the conflict in Ukraine.

In an opinion piece published on Monday, Oil Change International’s Andy Rowell wrote that

“there are always those who will want to profit from war or the threat of war, as unscrupulous as it may seem. And for the American oil and gas industry there is no exception.”

“As Ukraine and Russia stand on the brink of a potentially lethal and bloody conflict, the American Petroleum Institute and its allies have been active on social media, arguing that now is a perfect time to expand LNG exports,” Rowell continued. “It is a flawed and short-sighted argument and one that will only cause more problems and chaos in the long term.”

As Moore noted earlier this month, the U.S. fossil fuel industry “rushed to link domestic gas exports with European security,” as seen in a recent blog post by an operative from the American Petroleum Institute—Big Oil’s most powerful lobbying group—and the Wall Street Journal‘s right-wing editorial page.

Emphasizing that Russia and the U.S. “have a decades-long history of competing over the European energy market,” Guy Laron, a senior lecturer in International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argued two weeks ago that “the crisis plays right into the hands of American shale gas companies, which are reaping a windfall.”

“American liquefied natural gas exports to Europe increased by 40% in the last quarter of 2021 and are expected to be much higher during the first quarter of 2022,” he added. “American energy executives have declared in recent weeks that they were eager to replace Russian pipeline gas with American liquefied gas.”

Although U.S. exports, Moore noted, “would not be enough to make up for the vast Russian supply, they would serve to develop trade channels for future shipments of fracked fossil gas to Germany.”

Despite numerous scientific warnings about the need to block new fossil fuel projects to have a chance of avoiding the most catastrophic consequences of the climate crisis, extraction is on the rise in the U.S., which is projected to become the world’s top LNG exporter in 2022.

Last decade’s drilling and fracking boom turned the Permian Basin into the “single most prolific oil and gas field” on the planet, and Congress’ decision to lift a ban on crude exports in late 2015 precipitated a massive build-out of pipelines and related infrastructure.

“Well-connected American gas companies,” stressed Moore, “are poised to capitalize on the export boom.”

Meanwhile, the U.S., U.K., and E.U. have all vowed to impose economic sanctions against Russia, heightening fears that the Kremlin might retaliate by cutting off gas supply to Europe.

In the wake of recent developments in Ukraine, oil prices surged to nearly $100 per barrel on Tuesday, the highest in more than seven years, and European gas futures spiked by as much as 13.8%.

Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president and now deputy chairman of its security council, suggested that prices could double: “Welcome to the brave new world where Europeans are very soon going to pay €2.000 for 1.000 cubic meters of natural gas!” he tweeted.

According to Reuters, “Putin did pledge, however, that Russia would not interrupt any of its existing gas supplies.”

Rowell, for his part, argued that “there may be a case for increasing short-term LNG exports to Europe, especially if the conflict between Russia and Ukraine intensifies, but you cannot do that long term if you want to solve the climate crisis or deescalate tensions in the region. Because a Europe addicted to gas will always be vulnerable.”

“The only way to deescalate this crisis across Europe,” he added, “is to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels.”

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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Featured image: 15 May 2019, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lubmin: View of the construction site of the receiving station of the Baltic Sea pipeline “Nord Stream 2” near Lubmin. The 1,200-kilometer-long gas pipeline will transport around 55 billion cubic meters of Russian natural gas from Russia to Germany every year. The first Russian natural gas is expected to flow through the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea pipeline at the end of the year. So far, half the pipes have been laid. Work in Germany is concentrated on the landing site near Lubmin. Photo: Stefan Sauer/dpa

Important article first published by Global Research on March 14, 2014, in the immediate wake of  EuroMaidan.

Provides a broad understanding of the history of the Ukraine crisis.

***

Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

****

The hypocrisy that is part and parcel of US foreign policy throughout the globe has never been more glaring and blatant than now being demonstrated in Ukraine. Rather than succumb to the propaganda-disinformation blitz that it is Russia acting as the bad guy-oppressor, a slightly deeper examination of recent behind-the-scenes events in Ukraine would clearly indicate the opposite.

Since November it was the US and NATO forces in the form of a US State Department cover that launched an all out assault on the democratically elected Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych and his government.

That now infamous statement made by profanity-carping Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland obscured what otherwise was a transparently intended plan for the coup that was attained in February [2014] when armed US backed demonstrators and mercenaries began shooting and killing dozens of Ukrainian citizens in its capitol Kiev that then drove the Ukraine President fleeing his country to seek refuge in Moscow. While the Putin and Yanukovych governments are clearly not saints, the US government that carries on the charade of being so exceptionally virtuous and benevolent is even more clearly anything but.

What historically used to be the not so covert actions of the CIA and joint CIA-military operations throughout the world assassinating and triggering countless government overthrows and regime changes has undergone a not so hidden transformational shift to a covertly led, increasing US State Department role that funds and relies on Non-Government Organizations (NGO’s) with humanitarian window fronts to do its dirty work, craftily distancing and further obscuring any and all accountability and culpability in the growing destabilization of nations around the globe.

This shadowy transformation of US foreign policy has mirrored the development in recent decades of a slithering shadow elite that has formed a loose and informal neocon network of various linked organizations such as think tanks, NGO’s, private corporate sponsors and lobbyists acting as no bid contractors, university research grants, and various intertwined government and mainstream media organizations all designed to seal the cloak of secrecy and deception that permit the oligarchic global cabal to tighten its control, effectively conceal both its overt and covert misdeeds along with its enormous money laundering scam operation from all public scrutiny and accountability.

In recent months five billion dollars at taxpayers expense were invested and poured into Ukraine to topple the government to in effect, install and buy the current puppet regime. The systematically aggressive deployment of a widespread and pervasive strategy to turn every former outer Soviet nation-state against Moscow has been underway ever since the breakup of the Soviet Empire in 1991. One by one all the nations that comprised the former Iron Curtain are now solidly aligned with NATO, the European Union and the US-Western alliance complete with its ongoing schedule of anti-missile defense deployments providing the missile shield directly aimed at Russia along its border. Of course this has Russia reacting with its own missile shield deployment in what has once again ushered in a renewed arms race.

The intended US foreign policy in Eurasia is to cut off Russia from the rest of Europe and all its Central Asian neighbors, thereby weakening Russia’s geopolitical influence and economic power in the region. Once the US has Ukraine in its back pocket which of course this recent coup effectively secures, the gas pipelines that drive Europe’s dependency on Russia to supply 90% of its natural gas will quickly be eliminated and instead the oil and gas rich Ukraine can then be “groomed” as Europe’s new main supplier. So all that protesting since November in Ukraine calling for closer democratic ties to the West was a mere propagandist ploy designed to appear as though it was actually another impromptu, so called populist movement uprising (not unlike the other fake Arab spring neo-con job) ostensibly demanding more democratic freedom and civil liberties, sadly the very same rapidly disappearing freedom and liberties since 9/11 that have been usurped by US government tyranny and oppression in the militarized police state that has now come to firmly roost here in America.

Like a caged animal that for years has been backed into the corner and repeatedly prodded, Russia’s President Putin finally reacted in self-defense to this ever so thinly veiled US assault on his nation by invading Crimea, the part of Ukraine made up nearly entirely of fellow ethnic Russians under the guise of protecting his own people. But in actuality Putin’s so called defiantly offensive move into the Ukraine was a mere reactive gesture out of desperation directly caused by the rising US Empire hegemony and its imposing global, across-the-boards military, geo-political and economic dominance, purposefully designed to severely undercut and weaken Russia’s regional power and influence. In effect, it was Putin acting in self-defense in the face of the US’s full frontal assault on his nation. Yet predictably America is now gleefully leading the charge in its sanctimonious and self-righteous condemnation to impose immediate sanctions in order to swiftly punish Russia for its feeble, desperate attempt to defend itself from the US-led onslaught.

Meanwhile, under the radar it is the United States that has been the insidious and aggressive attacker of sovereign nations around the world, not Russia. It is the United States that has military occupiers waging covert wars in 134 nations around the world, not Russia. It is the United States that possesses over a thousand active military installations around the world on every inhabitable continent, not Russia. It is the United States that has made the world far more armed and dangerous today than any prior time in human history, supplying near twice as much arms including weapons of mass destruction to the rest of the world, not its next distant competitor Russia.

It is the United States that spends more money on its military than the rest of the world combined, not Russia. It is the United States that has murdered thirty million human beings waging nonstop wars around the world ever since World War II, not Russia. In actuality it is the American Empire that is the true enemy of the world, not Russia. Psychopathic lies of deception that constantly twist and distort the true reality are currently being used once again to maliciously demonize the US Empire’s next biggest foe Russia.

It is the covert manipulation of the United States that is center stage aggressively pushing the buttons and pulling the strings behind the Oz-like curtain, ready to be exposed as the true instigator of the resurging cold war now boiling over. But the pathology of US lies consistently used to cover up the systematic raping and plundering of this earth is about to be exposed for all the world to see like never before, and that it in fact is the United States that is the true world bully, serial nation-killer, serial mass murderer and brutal enemy of the rest of the world.

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


How convenient for western leaders that every time another country defies the West’s projection of power, the western media can agree on one thing: that the foreign government in question is led by a madman, a psychopath or a megalomaniac. 

At a drop of a hat, western leaders are absolved of guilt or even responsibility for the terrible events that unfold. The West remains virtuous, simply a victim of the world’s madmen. Nothing the West did was a provocation. Nothing they could have done would have averted the disaster.

The US may be the most powerful state on the planet by far, but its hands are apparently always tied by a deranged, implacable foe like Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Putin, we are told, is not advancing any rational – from his perspective – geopolitical or strategic interest by invading his neighbour, Ukraine. And so no concession could or should have been made because none would have prevented him from acting as he has.

The West, meaning foreign policy hawks in Washington, gets to decide when the timeline of events started, when the original sin occurred. The compliant western media give their blessing, and our hands are washed clean once again.

The subtext – always the subtext – is that something must be done to stop the “madman”. And because he is irrational and a megalomaniac, such action must never be framed in terms of concessions or compromise – that would be appeasement, after all. If every enemy is a new Hitler, no western leader will risk a comparison with Neville Chamberlain.

Instead, what is needed urgently, western politicians and media agree, is the projection – whether overtly or covertly – of yet more western power and force.

Unmitigated catastrophe

The US and British invasion of Iraq nearly two decades ago is a particularly pertinent and telling counterpoint to events in Ukraine.

Then, as now, the West was supposedly faced with a dangerous, irrational ruler who could not be made to see sense and was unwilling to compromise. Saddam Hussein, western leaders and their media insisted, had allied with his arch-enemies in al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of the Twin Towers attack of 9/11. He had weapons of mass destruction, and could launch them towards Europe in 45 minutes.

Except, none of that was true – not even the madman bit. Saddam was a hard, cold, calculating dictator who, like most dictators, kept himself in power through a reign of terror over his opponents.

Nonetheless, the western media faithfully amplified the tissue of evidence-free claims – and patent lies like that preposterous alliance with al-Qaeda – concocted in Washington and London to usher in the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq.

United Nations inspectors could find no trace of stockpiles of Iraq’s former biological and chemical weapons arsenal. One, Scott Ritter, went unheard as he warned that any possessed by Saddam would have turned to “harmless goo” after many years of sanctions and inspections.

The improbable 45-minute claim, meanwhile, was not based on any kind of intelligence. It was lifted straight from a student’s speculations in a doctoral dissertation. Iraq’s invasion by the US and Britain was not only illegal, of course. It had horrifying consequences. It led to the likely deaths of around a million Iraqis, and spawned a terrifying new kind of nihilistic Islamism that destabilised much of the region.

Those interests, of course, were largely concealed because they were so ignoble, flagrantly violating the so-called “rules-based order” Washington claims to uphold. But despite being an unmitigated catastrophe, the US-led invasion of Iraq was no more “irrational” than Putin’s current invasion of Ukraine. Washington’s neoconservatives advanced what they regarded as US geopolitical interests and a strategic vision for the Middle East.

What the neoconservatives wanted was variously to control Iraq’s oil, to eliminate regional pockets of resistance to its own and its client Israel’s hegemony in the Middle East, and to expand the region as an economic market for US goods and weapons.

Saddam fell into the trap set for him because he was equally motivated by his own narrowly defined “rational” self-interest. He refused to admit he had no meaningful weapons systems left after the western sanctions and inspections regimes because he did not dare to look weak, either to his own population or to hostile neighbours like Iran.

The western media’s refusal to consider the real motivations on either side – the neoconservatives’ in Washington or Saddam’s in Iraq – made the 2003 invasion and the suffering that followed all the more inevitable.

Spheres of influence

The same predilection for the simple-minded “madman” narrative has once again pushed us squarely into another international crisis. And once again, it has served as a way to avoid examining the real background to, and reasons for, what is happening in Ukraine and wider eastern Europe.

Putin’s actions – though potentially no less disastrous than the US-led invasion of Iraq, and certainly as illegal – are also rooted in his own “rational” assessment of Russian geopolitical interests.

MEE

But unlike Washington’s reasons for invading Iraq, Putin’s grounds for threatening and now invading Ukraine were not concealed. He has been quite open and consistent about the rationale for years, even if western leaders ignored his speeches, and western media rarely cited anything more than his most tub-thumping, jingoistic soundbites.

Russia has realistic objections to the behaviour and bad faith of the US and Nato over the past three decades. Nato, we should remind ourselves, is primarily a creature of the Cold War, a vehicle for the West to project an aggressive military posture towards the former Soviet Union under the cover of a “defence” organisation.

But following the USSR’s dissolution in 1991, the western military alliance was not disbanded. Quite the reverse. It grew to absorb almost all of the former east European states that had belonged to the Soviet bloc and it made a new bogeyman of Russia. Western military budgets climbed year by year.

Russia expects a so-called “sphere of influence“, in the same way that the US demands one. What’s been going on instead for the best part of 30 years is that the US, as the world’s sole superpower, has expanded its own sphere of influence right up to Russia’s doorstep. Like Washington, Putin has the nuclear arsenal to back up his demands. To ignore either his claim for a sphere of influence or Russia’s ability to impose it by force if necessary is either hypocrisy or foolishness.

That too paved the path to the current invasion.

Cold war mentality

But Putin has other reasons – from his perspective – to act. He also wants to show the US that there is a price to be paid for Washington’s repeated broken promises on security arrangements in Europe. Russia dissolved its own military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, after the fall of the Soviet Union in a sign both of its weakness and its willingness to reorder its relations with its neighbours.

The US and the European Union had a chance to welcome Russia into the fold, and make it a partner in Europe’s security. Instead the Cold War mentality persisted even more in western capitals than in Moscow. The West’s military bureaucracies that need war, or at least the threat of it to justify their jobs and budgets, lobbied to keep Russia at arm’s length.

Meanwhile, eastern Europe became a large, and profitable, new market for western arms makers. That paved the path to this crisis too.

And finally, Putin has every incentive to deal more decisively with the eight-year festering wound of a civil war between anti-Russian, Ukrainian nationalists and ethnic Russian fighters from the Donbas region, in Ukraine’s east. Even before the current invasion, many thousands had died.

Ukrainian nationalists want entry into Nato so it is sucked into the Donbas bloodbath on their side – fuelling a war that could spiral out of control into a direct confrontation between Nato and Russia. Putin wants to show Nato and militant Ukrainians that will be no simple matter.

The invasion is intended as a shot across the bows to dissuade Nato from moving its high-wire act into Ukraine.

Western leaders were warned of all this by their own officials way back in 2008, as a leaked US diplomatic cable reveals: “Strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to Nato membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.”

But even now, the West is undeterred. It is losing no time in pouring yet more weapons into Ukraine, further fuelling the fire.

Dangerous caricatures

None of this, of course, means Putin’s actions are virtuous, or even wise. But for some his invasion of Ukraine looks no more irrational or dangerous than Nato’s decades of provocative moves against a nuclear-armed Russia.

And here we get to the nub of the matter. The West alone defines what “rational” means – and on that basis, its enemies can always be dismissed as deranged and evil.

Western media propaganda only serves to deepen these trends in humanising, or otherwise, those caught up in events.

As the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association observed at the weekend, much of the coverage has been blatantly racist, with western commentators noting with sympathy that those fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, unlike apparently those displaced by western invasions of the Middle East, are “like us”, “civilised” and don’t “look like refugees”.

Similarly, there is a stark contrast between the celebratory reporting of a Ukrainian “resistance” making improvised bombs against the advancing Russian army and the media’s routine demonisation of Palestinians as “terrorists” for resisting Israel’s decades of occupation.

Equally, US global dominance means it dictates the military, political and diplomatic framework of international relations. Other countries, including potential rivals like Russia and China, have to operate within that framework.

That forces them to react more often than act. Which is why it is so critically important that the western media report on the events fully and honestly, not resort to easy tropes designed to turn foreign leaders into caricatures and their populations into heroes or villians.

If Putin is a madman, like Iraq’s Saddam, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders before him, then the only solution is the use of force to the bitter end.

In global power politics that potentially translates into a third European “World War”, the overthrow of Russia’s government, and Putin’s trial at The Hague or his execution. The “strait-jacket” strategy. Which is precisely the catastrophic destination towards which western leaders, aided by the media, have been pushing the region over the past three decades.

There are far less dangerous ways of resolving international crises than that – but not so long as we keep peddling the myth of the “madman” enemy.

*

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Jonathan Cook is the the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at: www.jonathan-cook.net

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from CovertAction Magazine

Did NATO Just Declare War on Russia?

March 4th, 2022 by Mike Whitney

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


“No matter who tries to stand in our way… they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history…. I hope that my words will be heard.” Vladimir Putin issues warning to any country that tries to stop Russia’s “Special Operation” in Ukraine​

In a move that can only be regarded as a major escalation, NATO officials announced on Friday that they would deploy troops from its Combat-Ready Response Force to support the Ukrainian regime in its war with Russia. The Alliance will also send additional weapons which will be used to blunt the Russian offensive that has already seized large parts of the country and obliterated most of Ukraine’s defensive capability.

It is impossible to overstate the gravity of NATO’s action which assigns such importance to preserving its ‘junta regime’ in Kiev that they would willingly pit NATO against a nuclear-armed Russia in what could become a much broader regional war. Clearly, the strategic objectives of this murky conflict go far beyond the mere control of an ethnically-divided, failed state situated between Europe and Asia. Ukraine is no longer just a geopolitical trophy for western elites, but a last-gasp effort for Washington to prove it still controls the levers of global power. Here’s the story from Reuters:

“NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Friday the alliance was deploying parts of its combat-ready response force and would continue to send weapons to Ukraine, including air defences, while saying that Russia was trying to topple the Ukrainian government.

“We see rhetoric, the messages, which is strongly indicating that the aim is to remove the democratically elected government in Kyiv,” he told a news conference following a virtual meeting of NATO leaders.
(“NATO allies to provide more weapons to Ukraine, Stoltenberg says”, Reuters)

Stoltenberg’s decision gives Russian president Vladimir Putin no choice but to locate and destroy whatever weapons or troops enter the country that could be used to kill or injure Russian servicemen. Naturally, the killing of NATO personnel could be used to further escalate the conflict plunging the region into a much wider and more violent conflagration. Here’s more from Stoltenberg’s press conference on Friday:

“Yesterday, NATO Allies activated our defense plans… on land, at sea, and in the air…. The United States, Canada and European Allies have deployed thousands more troops to the eastern part of the Alliance… We now have over 100 jets at high alert operating in over 30 different locations… and over 120 ships from the High North to the Mediterranean… including three strike carrier groups….

We have many planes operating in the eastern part of the Alliance (and) several Allies have partly already assigned troops and forces to the NATO Response Force.” Weapon support also includes “air defence systems…” (which could be used to enforce a no-fly zone.)

This is the most serious security crisis we have faced in Europe for decades….... It is about how Russia is actually challenging core values for security, and demanding that NATO should withdraw all forces and infrastructure from almost half of our members. And they have stated that if we don’t meet their demands, there will be “military-technical consequences.” So, we have to take this seriously. And that’s exactly why we are now deploying the NATO Response Force, for the first time in a collective defence context.” (NATO’s Virtual Summit, Feb 25, 2022)

Stoltenberg is right, Russia is challenging NATO’s core values on security, and demanding that Alliance roll back its forces and infrastructure from Russia’s doorstep. What Stoltenberg fails to mention is that NATO expansion poses an existential threat to Russia by placing missile sites, military bases and combat troops on its border. He also fails to mention that NATO expansion violates agreements (to which all of the NATO members are signatores) stipulating that all parties to the agreement will refrain from any action that could affect the security interests of the other members. In Istanbul (1999) and in Astana (2010), the US and the other 56 countries in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) signed documents “that contained interrelated principles to ensure the indivisibility of security.”

What that means in practical terms, is that nations cannot put military bases and missile sites in locations that pose a threat to other members. It means that parties must refrain from using their respective territories to carry out or assist armed aggression against other members. It means that parties are prohibited from acting in a manner that runs counter to the principles laid out in the treaty. It means that Ukraine cannot become a member of NATO if its membership poses a threat to Russian security.

So, yes, Russia is challenging NATO’s approach to security, mainly because NATO’s approach is built on the rubble of treaties that the member states already signed and approved but now refuse to honor because it doesn’t advance their geopolitical objectives.

Stoltenberg would like us all to believe that joining NATO should simply be a matter of personal choice (“Every nation has the right to choose its own security arrangements”) like choosing which flavor of ice cream one wants to eat. But that is not how leaders protect their countries from potential threats.

Those threats can only be mitigated when other nations agree that they “will NOT strengthen their own security at the expense of the security of others.” That’s the bottom line and that is never going to change. National security is every leader’s highest priority and it always will be. Stoltenberg rejects this fundamental tenet of global security, and his rejection has paved the way to war. If you want to know who’s responsible for the war in Ukraine: Blame NATO. Here’s how Putin summed it up:

“Over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns. Its military machine is moving and, as I said, is approaching our very border.

Why is this happening? Where did this insolent manner of talking down from the height of their exceptionalism, infallibility and all-permissiveness come from? What is the explanation for this contemptuous and disdainful attitude to our interests and absolutely legitimate demands?”

“For the United States and its allies, it is a policy of containing Russia, with obvious geopolitical dividends. For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation. This is not an exaggeration; this is a fact. It is not only a very real threat to our interests but to the very existence of our state and to its sovereignty. It is the red line which we have spoken about on numerous occasions. They have crossed it.”(“Address by the President of the Russian Federation“, Kremlin, RU)

It’s worth noting, that Stoltenberg has been chosen to become Norway’s next Central Bank chief which illustrates the cozy relationship between the Big Money and the geopolitical machinations that invariably end in war. We can only wonder whether this risky gambit in Ukraine is actually an attempt to preserve a western financial system that is so thoroughly-marinated in corruption that its markets require monthly infusions of billions of dollars in digital cash to prevent a system-wide meltdown followed by a precipitous decline in the value of the dollar. By keeping Russia down, Stoltenberg’s backers might be hoping they can breathe new life into the rotting corpse of the imperial system. But whatever the reason may be, the deploying of NATO Combat-Ready Response Force greatly increases the chances of a miscalculation that could lead to disaster. Check out this short blurb from an article by Ulrich Kühn who points out the risks of current strategy:

“President Biden and other Western leaders have made it clear repeatedly that they would not send forces to Ukraine. ….That does not mean, however, that unintended actions by Russia… or by individual NATO member states could not spark a larger conflict that no one planned. During the next hours, days, and weeks, the risk of what strategists call “inadvertent escalation” will increase….

Another possible scenario for inadvertent escalation is linked to western calls for arming Ukrainian forces. A day before the Russian assault, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced, “the UK will shortly be providing a further package of military support to Ukraine. This will include lethal aid in the form of defensive weapons and non-lethal aid.” As morally justified such calls might sound in the current environment, the question remains: How will weapons be transferred to Ukraine, now that Russia has established air dominance over the country? They would almost certainly not be flown in but would have to be provided using land or sea routes. It would thus be in the interest of the Russian military to gain quick control over Ukraine’s western borders with NATO allies. Possible efforts by individual NATO member states to send additional military equipment via the Ukrainian land borders could be met with fierce Russian resistance and may lead to skirmishes between Russian and NATO personnel.”(The pathways of inadvertent escalation: Is a NATO-Russia war (now) possible?” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists)

So, what does this excerpt tell us?

It tells us that the foreign policy establishment has already “gamed-out” the developments we now see unfolding. NATO would like to lure Putin into attacking their supply-lines, so the action could be used to justify greater involvement in the conflict. In other words, what we’re seeing is a calculated effort to (incrementally) increase the probability of a war between Russia and NATO. There’s nothing that would please Uncle Sam more than to see Russia bogged down in bloody quagmire that further isolates Moscow from Europe and prevents the type of economic integration needed to draw the continents together into the world’s largest free trade zone. Washington wants to avoid that scenario at all cost. Check out this quote from Russian economist Sergie Glaziev:

“To maintain their world dominance, the (US) is provoking another war in Europe. A war is always good for America.They even call the Second World War which killed 50 million people in Europe and Russia, a good war. It was good for America because the US emerged from this war as the world’s leading power. The Cold War which ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union was also good for them. Now the US again wants to maintain its leadership at the expense of Europe. US leadership is being threatened by a rapidly rising China. The world today is shifting to yet another cycle, this time political. This cycle lasts centuries and is associated with the global institutions of regulatory economics.

We are now moving from the American cycle of capital accumulation to an Asian cycle. This is another crisis that is challenging US hegemony. To maintain their leading position in the face of competition with a rising China and other Asian countries Americans are starting a war in Europe. They want to weaken Europe, break up Russia, and subjugate the entire Eurasian continent. That is, instead of a development zone from Lisbon to Vladivostok, which is proposed by President Putin, the US wants to start a chaotic war on this territory, embroil all Europe in a war, devalue to European capital, write off its public debt, under the burden of which the US is already falling apart, write off what they owe to Europe and Russia, subjugate our economic space and establish control over resources of the giant Eurasian continent. They believe that this is the only way they can maintain their hegemony and beat China….

Russia and Ukraine are the victims of this war which is being fomented by the Americans. But Europe is also a victim because the war aims to target European welfare and to destabilize Europe. Americans expect the European capital and brain drain to America will continue. That’s why they are setting all of Europe on fire. It’s very strange that European leaders are going along with them.” (Watch this extraordinary 2014 Interview with Russian intellectual Sergei Glaziev that was posted at The Saker website nearly 10 years ago)

The deployment of NATO’s Combat-Ready Response Force provides more evidence that the Alliance is an aggressive and war-mongering​ organization which undermines European security and puts the entire world at risk. As America’s cat’s-paw on the continent, NATO invariably acts in Washington’s interests. With that is mind, we should expect to see a steady intensification of hostilities directed at Russia, all of which are designed to further divide the continents while tightening Washington’s grip on power.

Correction:

NATO troops will not operate within Ukraine but exclusively in NATO member states. This was not clear from NATO’s original communique. The question remains, however, is the providing of heavy weapons an act of war?

In my opinion, it would be quite easy for NATO to end the fighting by simply agreeing to make Ukraine permanently neutral, implementing the Minsk​ Protocol, and abandoning all plans to deploy nuclear missiles to Poland and Romania. Putin’s only demand is that NATO seriously address Russia’s legitimate security concerns.

*

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Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @globalresearch_crg and Twitter at @crglobalization.

***

While Global Research does not normally publish articles pertaining to biblical texts or religious cults, the following 2 articles focus on how religious beliefs, concepts and symbols contained in the Book of Revelation (New Testament)  have been (mysteriously) alluded to by powerful Big Money actors.

“Biblical phrasing” is thereby used to provide “self-legitimation” (cognitive dissonance) to the enforcement of far-reaching Covid-19 actions of a criminal nature which derogate fundamental human rights. 

We bring to your attention the analysis of Peter Koenig, distinguished author and former senior economist with the World Bank followed by the incisive article of Michael Mustapich.

What is at stake is a controversial quotation in the Book of Revelation (Apocalypse of John, Revelation to John) in the New Testament which bears a canny resemblance to the restrictions imposed on the non-vaxxed, those who do not have the QR code or a vaccine embedded digital ID: 

[John stated that this beast] “causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name… his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”[666] (Revelation 13:16-18) emphasis added. 

M. Ch. Global Research, March 3, 2022

***

Introduction

by Peter Koenig

The article below by Michael Mustapich was first published on 4 June 2021, in its Spanish version in TierraPura.org.

The article begins with a reference to the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, also known as The Apocalypse, To further enhance the point of the Apocalypse – or the Triumph of the Beast – it also refers to the Triumph’s predecessor, the “Mark of the Beast” which in the context of Covid crisis could be construed (according to the Mustapich) as the Covid or Green Passport (or the QR Code) referring to the forced, or coerced falsely called vaccination. 

See also – Triumph of the Beast vs. Triumph of the People. UN Agenda 2030 vs. Triumph of the People. 

The article by Mustapich then dives into the science behind what we call the SARS-Cov-2, or Covid-19 plandemic. It is scientifically understood and proven that Covid-19 and its many “derivatives” or “variants” all the way up to Omicron, have never been isolated or identified.

The Tierra.Pura article by Michael Mustapich describes what the false vaxxes inject into people’s body – a potentially highly deadly poison, Graphene Oxide, an electromagnetic (EM) substance that is extremely susceptible to EM ultrashort-waves, like 5G. Thus, graphene oxide may be used to manipulate the human brain – of those who are vaccinated.  According to Klaus Schwab, They then become “transhumans”.

See Klaus Schwab’s statement in the first 3 minutes of the video below .

Video: Towards Digital Tyranny with Peter Koenig

Click here to link to bitchute version

The Vaccine Contains Graphene Oxide

Interestingly, the chemical composition of the graphene oxide is 666. It is also symbolically and mystically referred to as the number of The Beast. Is this relevant? Remains to be ascertained.

The composition of graphene is that of a two-dimensional hexagon consisting of 6 carbon atoms. The carbon atom is composed of 6 neutrons, 6 protons and 6 electrons. 

Bill Gates’ Patent Number 060606. Digital Cryptocurrency Microchip “Using Body Activity Data”

Bill Gates was talking about a microchip — implanted or not under the skin — which bears the Patent Number 060606. Below is the patent filed by Bill Gates on behalf of Microsoft on June 20, 2019, published on March 26, 2020.

In any case, today it looks very much as if the personal ID or the original Bill Gates, and WEF supported, Agenda ID2020, will be integrated into the QR code technology. The QR code may well be in one form or another put under individuals’ skin. Chip-volunteers are already testing such under-the-skin options in Sweden.

The QR coding system has literally unlimited storage capacity for information about each citizen, so that a worldwide network of human, or eventually transhuman surveillance mechanism could be set up – following every step you take, every move you make, and every penny you spend and even the food you eat. It also will allow the system to block your bank account, if We the People do not stop it. Soon we will have only electronic, digital money. No more cash. We are totally controlled, enslaved and swamped by an all-digitized world.

A Profit Driven “Dark Cult” Managed by “Big Money

Indeed, at closer observation, it becomes increasingly clear that we are dealing with a “dark cult”, perhaps a Luciferian cult, directed and managed by an extraordinarily wealthy elite of financial oligarchs, who are the patrons of the pharmaceutical industry, the media and of those who keep the 193 UN member countries in check – all at once. This means, principally the mega-fund managers, BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and Fidelity.

Their partnership is shareholder-interlinked, so as to control together assets of some US$ 20 to US$ 25 trillion which gives them a leverage power of more than US$ 100 trillion (2021 world GDP is estimated at US$ 90 trillion). With that power, they can move every government in the direction that suits them. Governments that may want to object or even bail out – as was the case on several occasions in Africa – are in great danger.

Manipulation, punishment and death for disobedience would be an easy feast. Like with every cult – especially dark and diabolical cults – they are vulnerable to people waking up. In the first place, for them to reach their goals, as a cult-rule, they have to divulge in whatever hidden way, what their plans are and what they are up to. They have quite successfully done this over the past several decades – see this.

The Crisis in Ukraine

What if the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine is part of the globalist agenda, supposedly leading to Armageddon – or the Triumph of the Beast? All is possible in the warped world and minds of the diabolical masters, with the aim of total global control over Mother Earth, her resources and her inhabitants.

Is it a war that may lead to a World War III Scenario as part of the Apocalypse? In parallel with the vaxx pass agenda, a control instrument of the survivors? Thereby enhancing the population reductionist agenda of the globalists, synonymous with the WEF’s Great Reset?

Would the “Triumph of the Beast” be equal to the Great Reset?

When you own nothing but are happy? A sort of ultra-neoliberal “socialism”, where a small elite owns everything and provides the critters, or more literally the serfs, with the necessary amenities and food to survive? And all is digitally controlled, so no serf can exit the Matrix. Mind you, if he or she would try, the subject could be remotely “neutralized”.

Is that the world we are moving towards and the current hot conflict between Russia and Ukraine is playing right into it?

Incidentally, today, March 2, in an exceptional meeting under the auspices of the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly met on the Ukraine crisis (the first such special meeting since 1982) and condemned Russia as an unjustified aggressor by 141 votes, against four votes for Russia (Eritrea, Belarus, Syria, North Korea) with 35 abstentions including China. The text of the UN resolution deplores Russia’s “aggression against Ukraine” and requests an immediate withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine’s territory. While the vote is not binding, it serves as a stark anti-Russia propaganda. 

So far it looks like it is but a local war and the entire western world is up in arms about it, screaming and yelling and propagating Russia-Russia-Russia slurs and condemnations, no matter whether they are substantiated or not. 

But is it really only regional? Australia and the UK have already openly committed they would send troops to help defend Ukraine. How many others will follow to please the decaying empire? Almost all EU countries have promised to send weaponry to Ukraine, including of course, the US.

Suddenly it could resemble a WWIII scenario – Escalation up to Nuclear Weapons?  

The United States adopted in 2002 under the Bush Administration’s doctrine of “pre-emptive” nuclear strike (2002 Nuclear Posture Review).

This is not a Russian policy. Should Washington decide that they are threatened, they could easily be the first to use a nuclear device on Russia. No doubt, Russia would immediately retaliate. And Bingo! There we go – a live WWIII scenario.

Let’s not forget, Washington needs one or several armed conflicts for their defense (war)-industry and simply for the US economy that depends to almost 60% on the American war machine and related industries and services. The 4-year Trump Administration has not given them a war. So, they are falling behind.

A little “False Flag”, accompanied by a worldwide media propaganda blitz and the entire (and entirely bought) UN system would support and justify Washington’s first nuclear hit.  

Let’s hope and pray from the bottom of our hearts in worldwide solidarity that this will not happen, that enough people will wake up to the danger and meditate for PEACE.

As has often been said, We, the People, are many – and they, the globalist commanders of The Reset, are few.

The Book of Revelations talks about several wars, one of them a Final One between East and West.

Is the  world currently in the fangs of cult-driven “decision makers”? 

Is it possible that this war currently in Ukraine and if Ursula Von der Leyen, President of the EU, has her way and will not only arm Ukraine with EU taxpayer’s money but also the opposition in Belarus – that this “conflict” may soon evolve into a “regional war” and from there…?

Could this potentially escalating war game be part of the “Mark of the Beast”, in the view of those who aim at a consolidated One World Order (OWO) leading perhaps by 2030 — target date for the UN Agenda 2030 — to an all-digitized, all-controlling world; with a fraction of today’s population, under the command-scepter of a few super-rich oligarchs, who are emotionless, and remote from human suffering?  

As more and more of their – the obscure cult’s – secrets and intentions come to the fore, We, the People, may evolve and gain a superior consciousness to overcome.

Time is fast running out.

Time to act NOW is of the essence.

With confidence trust and solidarity

VENCEREMOS!

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Apocalypse, COVID Vaccine and the Mark of the Beast

by Michael Mustapich

For most of human history, civilization has been shaped by belief in gods and divine laws. The major religions have guided man’s morality, and their sacred scriptures were taken as the ultimate authority.

But with the degradation of religious institutions and the assumption of science as the new god, man lost contact with the divine, and atheism grew, fueled by disillusionment, rebellion against dogmas and the pursuit of limitless hedonism.

In a decadent society, what is presented as progressivism can only accelerate the fall of civilization. That is why the idea of returning to tradition is gaining momentum, and along with it the study of the sacred scriptures in search of answers.

The book of Revelations in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, also known as The Apocalypse, is attributed to St. John the Apostle and is considered to be prophetic in nature. It narrates his visions while he is imprisoned on the island of Patmos in Greece (1st century AD). It describes with images rich in symbolism the events accompanying the battle between Good and Evil and the Day of Judgment.

One of the parts circulating strongly on social networks for its possible connection to the Covid pandemic, vaccination and the restrictions imposed is the following:

“To all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, shall be given a mark on the right hand and on the forehead, and that no one may buy or sell except the one who has the mark and the number of the beast, or the number of his name…” (Revelation 13:16 ).

The Covid Passport, also known as Green Passport is already a reality, and is being imposed in the USA and the EU, and in other countries in the form of APP for cell phones or vaccination cards. Anyone who does not have it will not be able to travel, study, work or access shows, restaurants, cinemas….

But what is most disturbing in relation to this issue is what is associated with the vaccine….

“Here is wisdom. He who has understanding, let him calculate the number of the beast, and his number is 666” (Revelation 13:16).


Comment from Peter Koenig:

Bill Gates developed a kind of a micro-chip in the form of a tattoo with the patent number 060606 – it would eventually incorporate also his invention Agenda ID2020 – today in the form of an QR code with unlimited information storage capacity. Any reference to this patent has been “fact-checked” out by google and other “fact-checkers” – see for yourself. What they are actually “fact-checking” away is giving away “the fact”. It will tell you what you want to know. “Fact checking” is like “there is no smoke without a fire”.


Serious allegations by experts point out that the components of the Covid vaccine include graphene nanoparticles.

Graphene is a material, that has among other characteristics, biocompatibility, superconductivity and properties of acquiring electromagnetism that makes it attractive in the development of nanotechnology and neuroscience.

Numerous studies are applying it in nanoparticle form next to neurons to send and receive information. They have already managed to manipulate the behavior of living organisms in laboratory tests.


Comments from Peter Koenig:

See this Spanish “Fifth Columns” Doctors and researchers analyzing the mRNA Covid Injections – Graphene Oxide – and the Substances Impact on the Human Body; and this Video: Graphene Hydroxide in the mRNA Vaccine Vial: Assassination of Dr. Andreas Noack. Shortly after or even during producing this video, Dr. Noack was arrested and then mysteriously found dead in his apartment – indications of murder? See this)

See also these links: State of the Nation – Stealthy Global Depopulation Scheme, explained in details (text and video 12 min by Dr. Shankara Chetty of South Africa) Covid-19 Vaccine – a Highly Advanced Bioweapon for Mass Genocide and Graphene COVID Kill Shots: Let the Evidence Speak for Itself by Dr. Ariyana Love.


One of the driving forces behind the development of this technology is Bill Gates, funding several universities and companies, and it is also in line with the ambitions of the founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, in his desire to implement transhumanism (the symbiosis between human and machine).

Graphene nanoparticles have not only been found in the misnamed Covid vaccine, but also in the masks and swabs used for PCR tests.

The composition of graphene is that of a two-dimensional hexagon consisting of 6 carbon atoms.

The carbon atom is composed of 6 neutrons, 6 protons and 6 electrons?

Is it related to the number of the beast?

Is it part of an agenda to access total population control?

Is it connected to the numerous cases of magnetism found in people who had the vaccine?

Does 5G play a role in inducing or controlling these nanoparticles?


Comments from Peter Koenig:

See this: Video: Ex-Pfizer Chief Scientist Dr. Michael Yeadon: Mass Murder with Vaccine Passports/Top Up Vaccines


Unfortunately, those who dare to ask such questions today are considered eccentric or conspiracy theorists. There is no choice but to continue investigating, keeping alert so as not to fall into either the official version or those attractive conspiracy theories, although in the long run they end up being, as they often are, true.

The opinions and ideas expressed by the author of this article do not necessarily represent the position of Pure Earth. TP does not obtain a personal benefit or interest with these publications, but only seeks to inform and hopes that readers exercise discernment, broaden their minds and develop a critical and upright thinking.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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***

I am starting to think I need to file a First Amendment lawsuit over that insane bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security on Feb. 7.

In case you’ve forgotten, that report – a public declaration of the federal government’s official view of terrorism – called the top terrorist threat to the United States:

false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions.

Their words, not mine.

Trying to “undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions” is now a terrorist act?

Then I’m a terrorist.

Especially since the bulletin specifically mentions COVID-19: there is widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19.

There’s that word “misleading” again. As this White House has made clear, “misleading” facts are those that lead people to opinions of conclusions it doesn’t like.

SOURCE

No, no one has knocked on my door or threatened to arrest me.

But that does mean the government is not targeting me – along with other prominent Covid and vaccine skeptics. Per the bulletin, the Department of Homeland Security in 2021 expanded its evaluation of online activity as part of its efforts to assess and prevent acts of violence.

The government has other tools against people it classifies as terrorists too, including plenty of secret ones.

And remember, to be a terrorist under these terms, your speech simply has to potentially inspire acts of violence.”

Potentially.

If this isn’t a government effort to discourage lawful speech, I don’t know what is. The question is whether it is so broad and dangerous that I can prove it will have a chilling and unconstitutional effect on me (and other people) even if I do not know I am being targeted. It feels like a form of prior restraint, all the worse for being so broad.

Will courts agree? There may be only one way to find out.

And quickly, if I do it. The Rocket Docket in the Eastern District of Virginia feels like the place.

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


The official US embassy website recently REMOVED all evidence of bio-labs in Ukraine. These bio-labs are funded and jointly operated by the US Department of Defense (DOD).

The laboratory documents were public knowledge up until February 25, 2022. These documents include important construction, financing and permit details for bioweapon laboratories in Ukraine. But now the US government is scrubbing these documents from the internet and becoming less transparent with this critical information.

This comes at a time when the world population is waking up to the reality of gain-of-function bioweapons research, lab leaks and predatory vaccine and diagnostics development. These bio-labs generate pathogens of pandemic potential that exploit human immune systems and are the foundation for which medical fraud, malpractice, vaccine-induced death and genocide originates.

Could the existence of these bioweapons’ labs have something to do with Russia’s “special military mission?” For years, Russia has accused the US of developing bioweapons near its borders. Are the Russians currently gathering evidence from these labs? What is the current status of these facilities?

The U.S. erected a vast network of bio-labs in Ukraine and is scrubbing details from the net

The US DOD funded at least 15 different bio-labs in Ukraine. These are not Chinese or Russian bio-labs. At least eight of these are bioweapons labs are operated exclusively by the US. These laboratories “consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern” to conduct “enhanced bio-security, bio-safety, and bio-surveillance measures” through “international research partnerships.” Each facility costs the US taxpayers anywhere from $1.8 to over $3 million. The DOD facilitated the permit process to allow Ukrainian scientists to work with pathogens of pandemic potential.

The US DOD works directly with Ukraine’s Ministry of Health, State Service of Ukraine for Food Safety and Consumer Protection, the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences and the Ministry of Defense. This network of bio-labs includes facilities in Odessa, Vinnytsia, Uzhgorod, Lviv, Kiev, Kherson, Ternopil, Crimea, Luhansk and two suspect facilities in Kharkiv and Mykolaiv.

In recent years, many of these labs have reached Bio-safety Level 2 status, allowing scientists to experiment with viruses and bacteria. Over the past two years, these laboratories, in cooperation with the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, erected four more mobile laboratories to conduct epidemiological surveillance of the Ukrainian people. These laboratories are part of a multi-national working group that creates disease surveillance networks that “strengthen global health security.”

Up until February 25, 2022, the existence and details of these bioweapons labs were public knowledge. The US embassy had previously disclosed the locations and details of these laboratories in a series of PDF files online. On February 26, 2022, the official embassy website shut down the links to all 15 bioweapon laboratories. All the documents associated with these labs have been removed from the internet. If you click on any of the links, the PDF files are no longer available. Thankfully, these files have been archived and can still be accessed. What is the US embassy trying to hide?

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.


While Global Research condemns Russia’s military incursion, the following report coupled with videos provides a factual and informative understanding of what is happening on the ground.

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By the seventh day of the operation in Ukraine, the Russian military has changed its tactics, both in terms of conducting military actions and its attitude towards the civilian population.

Numerous unmanned reconnaissance vehicles of the Russian Armed Forces were observed in the skies over Ukraine. Rear and supply columns began to move with combat guards.

The movement of armored vehicles, both on the march and in urban areas with infantry on armor, was noted.

The presence of strike aircraft in the skies of Ukraine has increased.

Coordination and interaction between various units have intensified.

Artillery is used wherever possible. Additionally, the Russians began striking military facilities that they had apparently previously planned to seize relatively undamaged.

 

The reaction of Russian units to provocative actions on the part of civilians and especially members of the so-called territorial defense forces has also changed.

Kiev urges civilians to resist by forcefully throwing Molotov cocktails at vehicles, blocking roads and launching surprise attacks, approaching under the guise of peaceful intentions.

Until March 1, Russian servicemen had orders to avoid retaliating to provocations in every possible way.

Now, the order seems to have changed and Russian units started to act in accordance with the standards of behavior on enemy territory.

For example, on March 1, in response to an ambush by units of the territorial defense near Kherson, who attempted to throw Molotov cocktails at a Russian convoy, brutal retaliatory fire was opened on the enemy. Video records at least 10 dead.

The change in the tactics is attributed to the experience of the first five days of the conflict and the fact that combat generals and senior officers with extensive experience of combat operations in various regions were brought in to command.

The Ukrainian authorities refuse to provide evacuation assistance to their population. Residents in Kyiv are being given up to the mercy of fate. The railway station is jammed. Police and law enforcement forces are absent. Looting and chaos are on the rise.

Russian units are in no hurry to enter the capital. They are expanding the zones of control around it. Russian troops are now close to Brovary, where they have gained a foothold.

On March 1, Russian forces entrenched on the outskirts of Kharkiv, amid heavy missile and bombing strikes against key military infrastructure facilities.

There is intermittent exchange of fire in the outskirts. The city administration rejected negotiations on the opening of a humanitarian corridor. Units of nationalist battalions shoot at cars of civilians that try to leave the city.

DPR and Russian units completely surrounded Mariupol. Almost all of the neighboring settlements are under the control of “Eurasian Coalition” forces. The humanitarian corridors will be open until the end of March 2. After that, the final mopping up of the city is likely planned.

Fighting is going on in Volnovakha, the key stronghold of Kiev in Donbas. Ukrainian units are trying to provide cover for the withdrawal of their main forces from the region.

The DPR military officially confirmed that the headquarters of the Ukrainian Task Force “North” was completely destroyed. Almost all the officers were killed. The headquarters of the “East” task force was also destroyed.

LPR forces also enjoyed considerable success. As of March 2, Starobelsk and a number of nearby villages were liberated. Progress is being made towards Severodonetsk and Rubizhne. Svatovo has been blockaded. Russian troops reached Izyum and entrenched their attack positions.

Meanwhile, Russian forces are breaking through defenses near Vasilievka, the stronghold that covers Zaporizhia. Losses on all sides are reported.

These events came amid the complete takeover of the important regional center of Kherson. The administration is cooperating and doing its best to maintain a peaceful situation in the city with the help of the Russian Armed Forces. The disarmament of the members of the “territorial defense” began. The police, ambulance and emergency services are working as usual.

Russian forces are encircling Nikolaev city. As of March 2 morning, the city is already semi-enclosed. The Nikolayev – Krivoy Rog road is cut.

The war in Ukraine from 2014 to the present has already become the bloodiest conflict in Europe in the last 77 years, surpassing all of the Yugoslav wars combined. Over the past six days, according to sources inside the conflicting parties, at least 2 730 personnel on the Russian and LDPR side and 11 150 on the Ukrainian side, including deserters, have been killed or missing.

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