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Arresting Putin – Or Arresting All-Out Western Public Revolt? — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on March 22, 2023

The Kiev regime has been shelling the Donbass for nine years since the CIA coup brought to power this fascist junta. NATO trained the Azov Battalion and other Waffen SS-style paramilitaries which are firing U.S.-supplied HIMARS rockets with the help of American, British, French, German, Canadian, and Polish mercenaries.

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/03/18/arresting-putin-or-arresting-all-out-western-public-revolt/

Finian Cunningham

If there were any genuine principles of justice, Biden should be in the dock facing war crime charges in connection with America’s illegal wars.

Western propaganda outlets (also known as “news media”) are suddenly full of reports that The Hague-based International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The over-the-top coverage (that is, orchestration) is intended to give the ridiculous legal ploy an impression of gravitas and significance when in reality the so-called arrest warrant is meaningless and oozes with kitsch politicized theater.

Along with Putin, the Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova is also named as a wanted person to face “war crimes” prosecution. The alleged crimes are in connection with the supposed deportation of children to Russia during Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine conducted since February 2022.

The basis for the ICC move is as flimsy as an errant weather balloon. It is also an audacious distortion of reality. Russia has evacuated thousands of civilians, including children, from the regions formerly of eastern Ukraine that are now part of the Russian Federation for the precise reason of taking them out of harm’s way from the NATO-backed Nazi regime in Kiev whose forces have been indiscriminately shelling the Donbass and other areas.Ukraine

If anyone should be facing prosecution for war crimes it is Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and his Nazi-adulating commanders, as well as their sponsors: American, European, and NATO leaders.

The Kiev regime has been shelling the Donbass for nine years since the CIA coup brought to power this fascist junta. NATO trained the Azov Battalion and other Waffen SS-style paramilitaries which are firing U.S.-supplied HIMARS rockets with the help of American, British, French, German, Canadian, and Polish mercenaries. Russia intervened in Ukraine last year to put an end to the genocide that Washington and Europe along with their Western media are complicit in. Not a word of this is reported in so-called bastions of journalism, the New York Times and BBC. They’re too busy selling propaganda about the ICC and Russia.

Is this the best case that the ICC and its Western handlers can really find against Russia? Kidnapping children? What about all the other allegations about Russia shelling apartment blocks and civilians? If there were any truth to these widely peddled claims in Western media then why haven’t those allegations been cited for prosecution? They haven’t because there is so little evidence. In fact, the NATO-backed Kiev regime is guilty of using apartment blocks and civilian human shields. Hence, the fallback on an emotively appealing issue of alleged child kidnapping. The cringe-worthy sense alone tells you it is a fit-up.

But the tenuousness of it all only makes the Western claims and the ICC look even more absurd than they already do.

In any case, the ICC has no jurisdiction over Russia, so the arrest warrants are dead letters. They’re not meant to be taken seriously anyway. This is all political theater aimed at smearing Moscow.

Neither has the court jurisdiction over the United States. Just as well, it might be said, because if there were any genuine principles of justice, U.S. President Joe Biden should be in the dock facing multiple war crime charges in connection with America’s illegal wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen among other countries.

On more recent crimes, Biden and his NATO crime partners should be in dock over the blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipelines.

Or for sponsoring and weaponizing the Israeli regime’s renewed war crimes against Palestinians.

Or for persecuting and torturing publisher Julian Assange because he dared to reveal the truth about American and British war crimes.

The astounding hypocrisy and double standards are another proof – if such proof were needed – that the latest ICC maneuver against Russia is a cheap political stunt to bolster badly needed authority for the United States and its Western minions.

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Putin’s “Civilizational” Speech Frames Conflict Between East and West

Posted by M. C. on February 25, 2023

Bets can be made that Patrushev explained in detail to Wang Yi how that is just wishful thinking. The “logic “of the current collective western “leadership” has been expressed, among others, by irredeemable mediocrity Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general: even nuclear war is preferable to a Russian victory in Ukraine.

https://www.unz.com/pescobar/putins-civilizational-speech-frames-conflict-between-east-and-west/?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=pescobar

PEPE ESCOBAR

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s much awaited address to the Russian Federal Assembly on Tuesday should be interpreted as a tour de force of sovereignty.

The address, significantly, marked the first anniversary of Russia’s official recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, only a few hours before 22 February, 2022. In myriad ways, what happened a year ago also marked the birth of the real, 21st century multipolar world.

Then two days later, Moscow launched the Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine to defend said republics.

Cool, calm, collected, without a hint of aggression, Putin’s speech painted Russia as an ancient, independent, and quite distinct civilization – sometimes following a path in concert with other civilizations, sometimes in divergence.

Ukraine, part of Russian civilization, now happens to be occupied by western civilization, which Putin said “became hostile to us,” like in a few instances in the past. So the acute phase of what is essentially a war by proxy of the west against Russia takes place over the body of Russian civilization.

That explains Putin’s clarification that “Russia is an open country, but an independent civilization – we do not consider ourselves superior but we inherited our civilization from our ancestors and we must pass it on.”

A war dilacerating the body of Russian civilization is a serious existential business. Putin also made clear that “Ukraine is being used as a tool and testing ground by the west against Russia.” Thus the inevitable follow-up: “The more long-range weapons are sent to Ukraine, the longer we have to push the threat away from our borders.”

Translation: this war will be long – and painful. There will be no swift victory with minimal loss of blood. The next moves around the Dnieper may take years to solidify. Depending on whether US policy continues to cleave to neo-con and neoliberal objectives, the frontline may be displaced to Lviv. Then German politics may change. Normal trade with France and Germany may be recovered only by the end of the next decade.

Kremlin exasperation: START is finished

All that brings us to the games played by the Empire of Lies. Says Putin: “The promises…of western rulers turned into forgery and cruel lies. The west supplied weapons, trained nationalist battalions. Even before the start of the SMO, there were negotiations…on the supply of air defense systems… We remember Kyiv’s attempts to obtain nuclear weapons.”

Putin made it clear, once again, that the element of trust between Russia and the west, especially the US, is gone. So it’s a natural decision for Russia to “withdraw from the treaty on strategic offensive weapons, but we don’t do it officially. For now we are only halting our participation to the START treaty. No US inspections in our nuclear sites can be allowed.”

As an aside, of the three main US-Russian weapons treaties, Washington abandoned two of these: The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty was dumped by the administration of former president George W. Bush in 2002, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was nixed by former president Donald Trump in 2019.

This shows the Kremlin’s degree of exasperation. Putin is even prepared to order the Ministry of Defense and Rosatom to get ready to test Russian nuclear weapons if the US goes first along the same road.

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US Dismisses Putin’s Christmas Ceasefire as ‘Cynical Ploy’ – News From Antiwar.com

Posted by M. C. on January 6, 2023

What is the big deal with 36 hours? There are plenty of other US wars to keep the pentagram busy.

https://news.antiwar.com/2023/01/05/us-dismisses-putins-christmas-ceasefire-as-cynical-ploy/

by Dave DeCamp

Ukrainian officials also rejected the ceasefire, but Zelensky didn’t explicitly say he won’t follow it

The State Department on Thursday rejected Russian President Vladimir Putin’s order for a unilateral ceasefire in Ukraine for Orthodox Christmas, which is celebrated on January 7, as a “cynical ploy.” Putin ordered the ceasefire to take effect at noon on Friday and last through Saturday after a request from Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

“Based on the fact that a large number of citizens professing Orthodoxy live in the combat areas, we call on the Ukrainian side to declare a ceasefire and give them the opportunity to attend services on Christmas Eve, as well as on the Day of the Nativity of Christ,” the Kremlin said in a statement.

Instead of welcoming a potential pause in fighting, the US dismissed the order as an attempt by Putin to reinforce his troops.

“From our perspective, there is one word that best describes that, and it’s ‘cynical,’” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters. He said it was “cynical” because Russia continued its missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

“So as you can tell, we have little faith in the intentions behind this announcement. Our concern … is that the Russians would seek to use any temporary pause in fighting to rest, to refit, to regroup, and ultimately to reattack,” Price said. President Biden made similar comments, saying he thought it was an attempt by Putin “to find some oxygen,” although any relief for Russian troops would also be a relief for the Ukrainian side.

Other Western governments made similar comments, including the EU’s European Council President Charles Michel, who called Putin’s order “bogus and hypocritical.” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock also slammed the ceasefire, saying, “a so-called ceasefire brings neither freedom nor security to people living in daily fear under Russian occupation.”

Ukrainian officials also rejected the ceasefire, although Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t explicitly say his forces wouldn’t follow it, so only time will tell if Putin’s order brings calm to Ukraine for 36 hours.

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“Putin Has Misread the West And if He Doesn’t Wake Up Soon, Armageddon Is Upon Us” |

Posted by M. C. on December 29, 2022

In other words, by his inaction Putin has convinced Washington and its European puppet states that he doesn’t mean what he says and will endlessly accept ever worsening provocations, which have gone from sanctions to Western financial help to Ukraine, weapons supply, training and targeting information, provision of missiles capable of attacking internal Russia,

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/12/19/putin-has-misread-the-west-and-if-he-doesnt-wake-up-soon-armageddon-is-upon-us/

Dear friends, This website is read by many and supported by few.  I ask those readers who have never contributed to consider responding to this last request of 2022.

“Putin Has Misread the West And if He Doesn’t Wake Up Soon, Armageddon Is Upon Us”

Mike Whitney Interviews Paul Craig Roberts

https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/putin-has-misread-the-west-and-if-he-doesnt-wake-up-soon-armageddon-is-upon-us/

Question 1—You think that Putin should have acted more forcefully from the beginning in order to end the war quickly. Is that an accurate assessment of your view on the war? And—if it is—then what do you think is the downside of allowing the conflict to drag on with no end in sight?

Paul Craig Roberts—Yes, you have correctly stated my position. But as my position can seem “unAmerican” to the indoctrinated and brainwashed many, those who watch CNN, listen to NPR, and read the New York Times, I am going to provide some of my background before going on with my answer.

I was involved in the 20th century Cold War in many ways: As a Wall Street Journal editor; as an appointee to an endowed chair in the Center for Strategic and International Studies, part of Georgetown University at the time of my appointment, where my colleagues were Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor, and James Schlesinger, a Secretary of Defense and CIA director who was one of my professors in graduate school at the University of Virginia; as a member of the Cold War Committee on the Present Danger; and as a member of a secret presidential committee with power to investigate the CIA’s opposition to President Reagan’s plan to end the Cold War.

With a history such as mine, I was surprised when I took an objective position on Russian President Putin’s disavowal of US hegemony, and found myself labeled a “Russian dupe/agent” on a website, “PropOrNot,” which may have been financed by the US Department of State, the National Endowment for Democracy, or the CIA itself, still harboring old resentments against me for helping President Reagan end the Cold War, which had the potential of reducing the CIA’s budget and power. I still wonder what the CIA might do to me, despite the agency inviting me to address the agency, which I did, and explain why they went wrong in their reasoning.

I will also say that in my articles I am defending truth, not Putin, although Putin is, in my considered opinion, the most honest player, and perhaps the most naive, in the current game that could end in nuclear Armageddon. My purpose is to prevent nuclear Armageddon, not to take sides. I remember well President Reagan’s hatred of “those godawful nuclear weapons” and his directive that the purpose was not to win the Cold War but to end it.

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Putin’s ‘Winter War’ on Ukraine

Posted by M. C. on December 10, 2022

For us, the greatest stake in this Russia-Ukraine war is not who ends up in control of Luhansk, Donetsk or Kherson, but that we not be drawn into a military conflict that would put us on the escalator to a war with Russia, a world war and perhaps a nuclear war.      

Nothing in Eastern or Central Europe is worth a major U.S. war with Russia that could go nuclear and cost millions of American lives.

BY PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

Putin’s ‘Winter War’ on Ukraine
Vladimir Putin (from: Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Winter has often proven an indispensable ally of Mother Russia. The impending winter of 1812-13 forced Napoleon’s withdrawal from Moscow, a retreat from which his Grande Armee never recovered. The winter of 1941-42 sealed the ultimate fate of the invading armies of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. 

Vladimir Putin’s new strategy in the war he launched on Ukraine in February is to conscript the coming winter of 2022-23 as an ally of his failing army. For weeks, there have been reports of Russian air, missile and drone strikes on power plants in every major Ukrainian city.      

The false report that a Russian-fired rocket had landed in Poland, killing two civilians, came on a day when 100 Russian bombs, rockets, missiles, and drones hit “infrastructure” targets across Ukraine. It was the heaviest Russian barrage to date in the nine-month war.      

Putin’s goal: As the Ukrainian army battles the Russian army in the Donbas and Kherson, the power grid upon which the Ukrainian nation and people depend is to be systematically attacked, shut down, destroyed. Without electric power, there will be no light or heat in Ukrainian homes, hospitals, offices or schools. Without electricity, food cannot be preserved, stoves do not work, water cannot be pumped. Without power, light, and heat, Putin’s expectation is that the Ukrainian people, who have patriotically supported their army, will, in the tens of thousands this winter, be at risk of freezing to death in the dark. 

Winter, from mid-December to mid-March, is the coldest and darkest of the seasons, and it begins in four weeks. On Friday, CNN reported that, after the latest wave of Russian strikes, 10 million Ukrainians, a fourth of the nation, were without power.

“Russia is turning winter into a weapon, even as its soldiers flail on the battlefield,” wrote The New York Times on Sunday. “In a relentless and intensifying barrage of missiles fired from ships at sea, batteries on land and planes in the sky, Moscow is destroying Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, depriving millions of heat, light and clean water.” Ukraine’s state energy company adds: “Due to a dramatic drop in temperature, electricity consumption is increasing daily in those regions of Ukraine where power supply has already been restored after massive missile strikes on November 15 on the energy infrastructure.”       

The U.S. stance in this war is that the fighting stops and peace talks begin only when Kyiv says the fighting stops and the negotiations begin. But Americans, whose support for Ukraine has been indispensable in this war, also need to have a voice in when the war ends.  

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We Might Be Spared Nuclear War For Now But The Threat Of Home-Grown Tyranny Remains

Posted by M. C. on September 26, 2022

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

If you want to comprehend the collapse of the West, compare, for example, Liz Truss and her UK government with the British government around the middle of the 19th century. James Grant in his biography of Walter Bagehot reports, for example, that Prime Minister Gladstone translated Horace and Homer, published substantial works on religion and Neapolitan politics, and addressed the Ionian assembly in classical Greek. Parliamentarian Robert Lowe was fluent in Sanskrit. Sir George Lewis was the author of Survey of the Astronomy of the Ancients. The House of Lords had its own learned members. Henry Herbert, 4th Earl of Carnarvon, was a Fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s National Academy of Sciences. Today we have presidents and prime ministers who can’t speak English.

In the US merit has been redefined as racist, and educational standards have been so lowered that the large grocery store chains do not trust their checkout clerks to give change.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/we-might-be-spared-nuclear-war-now-threat-home-grown-tyranny-remains

As readers know, I am convinced that Putin’s toleration of insults and provocations has had the effect of encouraging more and worse provocations and not, as he intended, to downplay conflict.  As you also know, I am convinced that his “limited military operation” in Donbass designed to protect the Donbass Russians, formerly a part of Russia, from horrible abuse by Ukrainian forces and the neo-Nazi militias, was a mistake.  It is a mistake because the West characterized a limited operation as an “invasion of Ukraine,” and used its slow progress as evidence of Russian failure.  It is a mistake because the go-slow nature of the Russian offensive in order to minimize the impact on civilian lives and infrastructure gave the West plenty of time to convince itself to get more and more involved with diplomatic support, money, armaments and ammunition, training, and now with satellite  information for targeting the Russian forces.

As I see it, Putin has been behaving as British Prime Minister Chamberlain is alleged to have behaved, thus encouraging more aggressive actions.  Wanting peace at all costs brings war.

As it is no longer possible for the Kremlin to speak of  “our Western partners” or to deny that the West is at war with Russia, the Kremlin, trying to avoid a war that it knows would be nuclear, has reached my conclusion of eight years ago that if the areas in today’s artificial borders of Ukraine that require Russian protection were reincorporated into Russia, the conflict would have to cease or become direct Western military aggression against Russia.  As Biden says he has no stomach for a war with Russia and will not permit one, and as NATO is incapable of such war, the referendums that begin today in the liberated areas of Ukraine, which without question will succeed, promise to reduce the threat of Armageddon.  Although in my opinion the leadership everywhere in the Western world is Satanic and insane, I do not think the Western governing elites are ready to commit suicide by attacking Russian territory. The West can say it doesn’t recognize the rights of people to self-determination, but if Russia says it is Russian territory, it is.

So that you understand, the referendums are Putin’s way of ending the conflict before it widens into nuclear war.  Putin’s rescue of the world from nuclear war will not be acknowledged by the Western presstitutes, Washington’s puppet EU and UK governments, or by the puppet who serves as NATO secretary general.  

But what they think does not matter. Putin, belatedly, is doing his best to save us all from nuclear war.  Pray that he succeeds.

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I Know What I’d Do in Putin’s Shoes – Jordan Peterson

Posted by M. C. on September 24, 2022

The popular commentator said he’d cut off energy supplies to the EU if he were the president of Russia

“We can’t win against Vladimir Putin in any way because you cannot win against someone you cannot say ‘no’ to. Period. And we can’t say ‘no’ to Putin because we sold our soul for his oil and gas,” he said.

“And we did that to elevate our moral stature in relation to ‘saving the planet.’ And here we are, facing a very dire winter, hoisted on the petard of our very own foolishness and moral presumption,” he added.

https://www.rt.com/news/563389-jordan-peterson-putin-ukraine/

Popular conservative political commentator Jordan Peterson has tried to get into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s head and predict how Russia’s conflict with the West in Ukraine will unfold. Peterson said that if he were the Russian president he would leave the EU without energy supplies in the winter.

“I know what I’d do in his shoes,” he said on the Piers Morgan Uncensored show on Thursday. “I’d wait till the first cold snap and shut off the taps.”

Peterson was referring to supplies of Russian natural gas to EU nations. He argued that Moscow indirectly warned that a full shutdown would happen when Russian gas giant Gazprom started curtailing deliveries through the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany, citing maintenance issues.

The political commentator declined to endorse a notion popular in the West that Putin resembles Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin in his thinking, calling the claim “foolish” and not backed by any actual evidence.

Putin “is a lot more like everybody else than anyone thinks,” Peterson argued. He added that “there is a bit of Hitler and Stalin in everyone,” before going into an explanation of how accepting government-imposed lies under pressure was part of human nature.

“The totalitarian state is actually the grip of the lie. And people would certainly go along with that. We’ve seen this emerge with [the] cancel culture. It’s like ‘Lie! Or else!’,” he said.

He mocked the idea that Ukraine and its Western backers could “win” against Russia as “naïve.”

“I just don’t understand that. What do you mean we are going to win? What are we going to win exactly?” he demanded.

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Putin Orders Partial Mobilization, Issues Nuclear Threat to West

Posted by M. C. on September 23, 2022

The Russian leader expressed support for referendums and said a peace deal was possible earlier in the war but was sabotaged by the West

Don’t worry. Our cracked team in Washington is all over this.

by Dave DeCamp

antiwar.com

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered a partial mobilization that will call up 300,000 reservists and warned Western countries that Moscow would use nuclear weapons to defend its territory.

The move marks Putin’s biggest escalation of his war in Ukraine since launching the invasion on February 24, although he is still framing the war as a “special military operation.”

“If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will without doubt use all available means to protect Russia and our people — this is not a bluff,” Putin said in a televised address.

“The citizens of Russia can rest assured that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence, and freedom will be defended — I repeat — by all the systems available to us. Those who are using nuclear blackmail against us should know that the weathervane can turn around,” he said.

Putin didn’t specify the number of reservists that will be activated under the partial mobilization, but the Kremlin later clarified it will be 300,000, which Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu recommended. Putin said Russia will call up “Only those citizens who are currently in the reserve and primarily those who served in the army and have particular military specialties.”

The Russian leader expressed support for referendums on joining Russia that will be held in each area of Russian-controlled Ukraine from September 23-27, which were announced on Tuesday. Referendums will be held in the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk republics in the Donbas region, and in the oblasts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

“I would like to emphasize that we will do everything necessary to create safe conditions for these referendums so that people can express their will. And we will support the choice of future made by the majority of people in the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics and the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions,” Putin said.

Putin made clear that he blames the US and its allies for the current situation and said a peace deal was possible earlier in the war after Russian and Ukrainian negotiators held talks in Istanbul. He said that he was making the details of the peace talks public for the first time.

“After the start of the special military operation, in particular after the Istanbul talks, Kyiv representatives voiced quite a positive response to our proposals. These proposals concerned above all, ensuring Russia’s security and interests,” he said.

Reports in Western media and Ukrainian media have also said that a deal was close after the Istanbul talks, which were held at the end of March. But according to a report from Ukrainska Pravda, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Kyiv in April and told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that even if he was ready to sign a deal with Putin, the collective West was not.

“A peaceful settlement obviously did not suit the West, which is why, after certain compromises were coordinated, Kyiv was actually ordered to wreck all these agreements,” Putin said.

The Russian leader said that Washington, London, and Brussels were now “openly encouraging Kyiv to move the hostilities to our territory.” After Ukraine launched its successful counteroffensive in the northeastern Kharkiv region, shelling was reported in Belgorod, the Russian region that borders the area.

Putin said that the focus will remain on “liberating” the Donbas region. Russia and Russian-backed forces in the region currently control virtually all of the Luhansk oblast, but Ukraine still controls a portion of Donetsk.

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Can Trump and Putin Avert Cold War II?

Posted by M. C. on August 15, 2022

That was 2017. Now the question is can we stop the MIC from starting a nuclear WW III.

January 2, 2017

by Linda

Can Trump and Putin Avert Cold War II?

In retaliation for the hacking of John Podesta and the DNC, Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats and ordered closure of their country houses on Long Island and Maryland’s Eastern shore.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that 35 U.S. diplomats would be expelled. But Vladimir Putin stepped in, declined to retaliate at all, and invited the U.S. diplomats in Moscow and their children to the Christmas and New Year’s party at the Kremlin.

“A soft answer turneth away wrath, but grievous words stir up anger,” reads Proverbs 15:1. “Great move,” tweeted President-elect Trump, “I always knew he was very smart!”

Among our Russophobes, one can almost hear the gnashing of teeth.

Clearly, Putin believes the Trump presidency offers Russia the prospect of a better relationship with the United States. He appears to want this, and most Americans seem to want the same. After all, Hillary Clinton, who accused Trump of being “Putin’s puppet,” lost.

Is then a Cold War II between Russia and the U.S. avoidable?

That question raises several others.

Who is more responsible for both great powers having reached this level of animosity and acrimony, 25 years after Ronald Reagan walked arm-in-arm with Mikhail Gorbachev through Red Square? And what are the causes of the emerging Cold War II?

Comes the retort: Putin has put nuclear-capable missiles in the Kaliningrad enclave between Poland and Lithuania.

True, but who began this escalation?

George W. Bush was the one who trashed Richard Nixon’s ABM Treaty and Obama put anti-missile missiles in Poland. After invading Iraq, George W. Bush moved NATO into the Baltic States in violation of a commitment given to Gorbachev by his father to not move NATO into Eastern Europe if the Red Army withdrew.

Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, says John McCain.

Russia did, after Georgia invaded its breakaway province of South Ossetia and killed Russian peacekeepers. Putin threw the Georgians out, occupied part of Georgia, and then withdrew.

Russia, it is said, has supported Syria’s Bashar Assad, bombed U.S.-backed rebels and participated in the Aleppo slaughter.

But who started this horrific civil war in Syria?

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Was it not our Gulf allies, Turkey, and ourselves by backing an insurgency against a regime that had been Russia’s ally for decades and hosts Russia’s only naval base in the Mediterranean?

Did we not exercise the same right of assisting a beleaguered ally when we sent 500,000 troops to aid South Vietnam against a Viet Cong insurgency supported by Hanoi, Beijing and Moscow?

That’s what allies do.

The unanswered question: Why did we support the overthrow of Assad when the likely successor regime would have been Islamist and murderously hostile toward Syria’s Christians?

Russia, we are told, committed aggression against Ukraine by invading Crimea.

But Russia did not invade Crimea. To secure their Black Sea naval base, Russia executed a bloodless coup, but only after the U.S. backed the overthrow of the pro-Russian elected government in Kiev.

Crimea had belonged to Moscow from the time of Catherine the Great in the 18th century, and the Russia-Ukraine relationship dates back to before the Crusades. When did this become a vital interest of the USA?

As for Putin’s backing of secessionists in Donetsk and Luhansk, he is standing by kinfolk left behind when his country broke apart. Russians live in many of the 14 former Soviet republics that are now independent nations.

Has Putin no right to be concerned about his lost countrymen?

Unlike America’s elites, Putin is an ethnonationalist in a time when tribalism is shoving aside transnationalism as the force of the future.

Russia, it is said, is supporting right-wing and anti-EU parties. But has not our National Endowment for Democracy backed regime change in the Balkans as well as in former Soviet republics?

We appear to be denouncing Putin for what we did first.

Moreover, the populist, nationalist, anti-EU and secessionist parties in Europe have arisen on their own and are advancing through free elections.

Sovereignty, independence, a restoration of national identity, all appear to be more important to these parties than what they regard as an excessively supervised existence in the soft-dictatorship of the EU.

In the Cold War between Communism and capitalism, the single-party dictatorship and the free society, we prevailed.

But in the new struggle we are in, the ethnonational state seems ascendant over the multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial, multilingual “universal nation” whose avatar is Barack Obama.

Putin does not seek to destroy or conquer us or Europe. He wants Russia, and her interests, and her rights as a great power to be respected.

He is not mucking around in our front yard; we are in his.

The worst mistake President Trump could make would be to let the Russophobes grab the wheel and steer us into another Cold War that could be as costly as the first, and might not end as peacefully.

Reagan’s outstretched hand to Gorbachev worked. Trump has nothing to lose by extending his to Vladimir Putin, and much perhaps to win.

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You Don’t Know Whether to Laugh or to Cry. The EU Now Has a Masterplan to Hit Putin Where It Hurts

Posted by M. C. on May 6, 2022

Given that some EU member states have made it pretty clear that they don’t have the means or resources to look for alternative sources of gas, for example, it’s hard to see how an EU directive is going to make any differences.

By Martin Jay
Strategic Culture

Hit Putin where it hurts? He’s more likely to hurt himself from laughing. Try harder, Ursula.

The EU is about to unveil its own sanctions plan to wean its own member states off Russian oil. But getting backing from all EU governments might be harder to push it through. Try not to laugh.

On the foreign policy circuit the EU doesn’t have an impressive track record. For anything. More, if anything, for leaving a trail of havoc in its wake when it dabbles in international politics. The problem is simply that the EU, while quite capable at agreeing on new directives for the size of your windscreen wipers, or the size or shape of a given piece of fruit, struggles with the big stuff. There simply isn’t the support from member states yet to hand over to Brussels how those same governments unilaterally deal with conflict around the world. The result is actually quite comical as who can forget Federica Mogherini’s offer to both President Assad of Syria and opposition fighters of cash from the EU to stop the war? Or for the same office to suggest using British frigates off the coast of Libya to literally blow out of the water smuggler boats laden with African migrants trying to get to Europe. Or that unforgettable foray into conflict resolution on the Chad border in 2001 where French officers under a so-called peacekeeping mission from the EU fled for their lives when rebels actually started firing live rounds at them? Imagine. Live rounds.

And then there was the EU police force in Afghanistan which was so terrified of the streets of Kabul that they simply decided it would be safer for them, even though they were armed, to stay in their barracks. And then the fiasco of Covid where the EU couldn’t even get an agreement from its own governments on how to proceed with a rescue plan and so did nothing, while thousands of its own citizens died. Even Brexit was a catastrophe for the EU, given that after all that drama over the negotiations and the empty threats by Brussels, Britain turns out to be not merely a survivor but a champion with economic growth the envy of the 26-member bloc.

The list just goes on and on. Someone really should write a book about the EU’s comical attempt to be a superpower and how it fails every single time.

And it will be the same with the latest escapade from the European Commission’s own President who seems to have set a new record for being especially ineffective – even for European Commission presidents. Ursula von der Leyen, an unremarkable German politician, bereft of any real dynamism and a particularly obscure foreign minister when she held the post, is grasping the nettle and facing Russia head on. Oh yes she is. Dear Ursula has a new draft directive which will ensure that all EU member states will abandon their deals with Russia oil, or at least phase them out over a period of time. We don’t know what the timeline is but the ambitious plan will have to have the support of all member states and this where it might run into some obstacles. Given that some EU member states have made it pretty clear that they don’t have the means or resources to look for alternative sources of gas, for example, it’s hard to see how an EU directive is going to make any differences. Some might argue that an EU directive is a by-product of a lack of unity in the first place and so the failed superstate needs to look to the bureaucrats to find a fix. But contrary to popular belief, the EU Commission isn’t as powerful as it likes to believe and cannot impose draft legislation on member states or the European parliament for that matter.

Realistically, the Russia move is an act of desperation following the EU’s grotesque support for U.S. and British objectives in Ukraine, i.e the toppling of Putin. The announcement shouldn’t therefore be taken seriously and given the recent Covid ordeal which lost von der Leyen considerable credibility it’s hard to see how she can galvanise opinion across 26 member states. What’s more likely is that this latest ruse will be a rod for her own back as more independently-minded EU member states who have made the headlines of late for not getting in line, will use it as a political tool to hit back at Brussels. And time is also a factor. If, say, it takes a year to be adopted – which is fast tracked – has the Commission president considered the present financial hardship that many EU citizens themselves are facing due to the Ukraine war and the political blowback that this directive would have, if adopted? While Joe Biden says remarkably stupid things like the U.S. is looking to Qatar for a solution to Europe’s energy dependency (they haven’t got any spare capacity to ship to Europe), it seems the EU is duty bound to follow the trend of talking nonsense and producing fake news. Hit Putin where it hurts? He’s more likely to hurt himself from laughing. Try harder, Ursula.

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