The US empire’s proxy war in Ukraine has had many jaw-dropping instances of imperialist sociopathy, propagandistic audacity and brazen journalistic malpractice that we’ve discussed in this space many times, but one of the most cringeworthy and degrading aspects of the globe-spanning narrative control campaign surrounding this war has been the way the nation’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has been turned into an ever-present corporate mascot for the most aggressive ad campaign ever devised. The way the most powerful institutions in the western world have been throwing their puppet in everyone’s face to sell the empire’s proxy warfare puts Ronald McDonald to shame.
Here are 20 of the cringiest moments of establishment PR using Zelensky to market the McProxy War to the western world, in no particular order.
1. A House Republican introducing a bill to place a bust of Zelensky in the US Capitol building
Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) introduced a bill this week that would place a bust of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the House wing of the US Capitol building, an idea that was strongly criticized by more conservative GOP members.
2. The fake Hollywood action hero-sounding “I need ammunition, not a ride” quote
Rather than ban TikTok from the U.S., the U.S. Security State is now doing exactly that which China does to U.S. tech companies: namely, requiring that, as a condition to maintaining access to the American market, TikTok must now censor content that undermines what these agencies view as American national security interests.
Accusations of Chinese tyranny are often based on demands from Beijing that Google and Facebook comply with their censorship orders as a condition for remaining in China. Reports over the years suggested that these firms typically comply: Google was building a censored search engine suited to Chinese demands; The New York Timeshas claimed Facebook developed a censorship app as its entrance requirement to the Chinese market, and Vox accused Apple of succumbing to Chinese censorship demands by banning an app from its store that had been used by protesters in Hong Kong demanding liberation from control by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
But now the tables appeared to be turning when it comes to U.S. censorship demands and TikTok. Threats to ban or severely limit the Chinese-owned-and-controlled platform from the U.S. have been hovering over TikTok’s head through both the Trump and Biden years. The most common justification offered for the threat is that TikTok’s presence in the U.S. empowers China to propagandize Americans, a concern that escalated along with the platform’s massive explosion among Americans. Since early 2021, TikTok has been the most-downloaded app both worldwide and in the U.S. In August, Pew Research conducted a “survey of American teenagers ages 13 to 17” and found that “TikTok has rocketed in popularity since its North American debut several years ago and now is a top social media platform for teens among the platforms covered in this survey.”
Concerns over China’s ability to manipulate U.S. public opinion were based on claims that China was banning content on TikTok that was contrary to Beijing’s interests. Western media outlets were specifically alleging that the Chinese government itself was censoring TikTok to ban any content that the CCP regarded as threatening to its national security and internal order. “TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social network, instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong,” warned The Guardian in late 2019.
Rather than ban TikTok from the U.S., the U.S. Security State is now doing exactly that which China does to U.S. tech companies: namely, requiring that, as a condition to maintaining access to the American market, TikTok must now censor content that undermines what these agencies view as American national security interests. TikTok, desperate not to lose access to hundreds of millions of Americans, has been making a series of significant concessions to appease the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, the agencies most opposed to deals to allow TikTok to stay in the U.S.
You could see it as they continuously leapt to their feet and energetically slapped their hands together upon the slightest inanity emanating form the well of the House. That’s because not only is this war not about freedom and human rights, nor even the rule of law, border integrity or the rules of a peaceful, stable international order.
The spectacle in the US Capitol Building last night was downright retch-worthy. And we are not actually referring to the detestable little warmongering clown who preened at the podium in a sweatshirt and cargo pants, offering endless lies and hideously false promises about why American taxpayers and consumers are being bled to death in a pointless and unnecessary war.
No, we are referring to the pathetic gaggle of Representatives and Senators who applauded relentlessly and uproariously in response to the casuistry of the tinny poseur who stood before them, albeit one who should have never been granted that august platform in the first place.
After all, the mountebank who leads the rapidly decaying remnant of a nation that was never built to last anyway has been able to bring the world to the brink of economic catastrophe and even nuclear war for one reason alone: Namely, because the bipartisan duopoly on Capitol Hill has shoveled gargantuan sums of money into Ukraine and Washington’s proxy war on Russia with mindless negligence.
And on that score the numbers tell you all you need to know. To date, Washington has authorized $65 billion of economic and military aid, with other NATO nation’s throwing-in $32 billion additional. On top of that, the pending Omnibus Abomination will authorize $45 billion more, which Zelensky has already implied is not nearly enough.
Still, that’s $142 billion and counting, which in turn has no possibility of enabling the Ukrainian victory that Zelensky promised. And that’s also 91% of Ukraine’s 2020 prewar GDP of $156 billion, and an order of magnitude more than the under $100 billion GDP that is left before Russia’s impending winter offensive finishes it off completely.
Stated differently, these war-besotted fools are enabling the absolute destruction of the cities, towns, villages, countryside and economy of what was the world’s 30th largest polity, even as its soldiers and citizens on both sides of the front lines are being slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands.
Yet contrary to Zelensky’s deceitful rhetoric there is nothing at stake of importance to either humanity or the security of the “free world” or most especially the safety and liberty of the American homeland. Absolutely nothing at all – -and that includes all of the War Party’s cant, robotically repeated by Zelensky last night, about the rule of law, the sovereignty of borders and the freedom of the peoples of Ukraine and their neighbors.
As we have repeatedly documented, this is not a Russian invasion but a civil war in the “borderlands” territory (i.e. “Ukraine” in Russian) that prior to the communist tyranny of the Soviet Union was always a vassal and sometimes integral part of greater Russia. The present civil war, in fact, was instigated in 2014 by the illegitimate government installed in Kiev after Washington’s coup d’ tat against the duly elected and Russian-friendly president.
This Washington managed “regime change”, in turn, set the regions of the artificial state of Ukraine against each other based on long-standing differences of language, religion, ethnicity and economics, among others. And when the Russian speaking populations of Crimea, the Donbas and the Black Sea coastal areas sought separation owing to fears of repression by the Ukrainian nationalist and neo-Nazi politicians who took control of the government in Kiev, the latter brought the bloody violence of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, including the overtly neo-Nazi Azov Brigade, down upon them.
That is to say, the Kiev instigated civil war against the Russian speaking populations of the east and south had been raging for eight years before Putin finally responded to their pleas for overt military assistance; and also after upwards of 14,000 separatist military and civilian personal had been killed by Kiev’s violent onslaught against what was purported to be its own population.
It also came 14 years after Putin had insisted (at the 2007 Munich Security Conference) that Ukrainian ascension to NATO and the emplacement of nuclear missiles within minutes from Moscow was a red line that could not be crossed, yet which action was virtually certain by February 2020.
Finally, the “invasion” also came after 10 days of massively stepped-up Ukrainian artillery attacks on the Donbas, which by every signal of military action and logistics implied that a Kiev “invasion” of the separatist republics was imminent.
It is only by the copious amounts of propaganda our civilization is being hammered with that this is not immediately obvious to everyone. In the future (assuming we don’t annihilate ourselves first), the propaganda will have cleared from the air enough for people to look back with clarity on 2022 and realize that they were lied to, yet again.
War criminal George W Bush and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will be appearing at an event next week at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, in partnership with US government-funded narrative management operations Freedom House and National Endowment for Democracy. The goal of the presentation will reportedly be to address the completely fictional and imaginary concern that congressional Republicans won’t continue supporting US proxy war efforts in Ukraine.
Former US President George W. Bush will hold a public conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky next week with the aim of underscoring the importance of the US continuing to support Ukraine’s war effort against Russia.
The event, which will take place in Dallas and be open to the public, comes amid questions about the willingness of the former president’s Republican Party to maintain support for Ukraine.
“Ukraine is the frontline in the struggle for freedom and democracy. It’s literally under attack as we speak, and it is vitally important that the United States provide the assistance, military and otherwise to help Ukraine defend itself,” David Kramer, the managing director for global policy at the George W. Bush Institute, told CNN. “President Bush believes in standing with Ukraine.”
The Struggle for Freedom event will take place on Wednesday, in partnership with the Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy, at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
To be clear, there is absolutely no reality-based reason to believe Republicans will meaningfully shy away from full-scale support for arming and assisting the Ukrainian military. The proxy war has only an impotent minority of opposition in the party and every bill to fund it has passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Some “MAGA” Republicans have claimed that funding for the war would stop if the GOP won the midterm elections, but they were lying; there was never the slightest chance of that happening.
What then is the strategy that government in Kiev and its overlords in Washington DC are following? Why has the Ukraine not given up? Why didn’t it continue to negotiate with the Russian side?
Is their hope that their daily over the top ‘Russia is losing’ propaganda will create enough political momentum for a large scale NATO intervention?
Russian and Donbas forces have cleared the city of Mariupol except for the giant metallurgic complex of Azovstal which is held by some estimated 4,000 men, including many from the fascist Azov battalion.
On Sunday Russia opened corridors across the front line and asked for those forces to surrender. However the Zelensky government ordered them to stay and to continue to bind Russian forces which otherwise could be used elsewhere:
Russia had given the Ukrainian fighters in Mariupol until Sunday morning to lay down their weapons or be “eliminated.” On Sunday, the forces at the plant ignored the deadline, and Ukrainian officials vowed that they would not surrender. In response, the Russian assault intensified, with missiles and bombs hitting the city and new attacks occurring near the plant, according to the Ukrainian military. … Ukrainian officials said on Sunday that the struggle was not over for Mariupol, which for two months has tied up Russian troops and resources that are badly needed elsewhere.
The Azovstal complex is a 2 by 2 miles industrial area. It can be surrounded and controlled by a relatively small force. Those within the area no longer have heavy artillery ammunition and presumably little other supplies. The Russian forces can see and bomb anything that moves on the open ground and can otherwise sit back and wait their enemies out.
I do not believe that holding on to Azovstal will significantly delay the upcoming second phase of the Russian operation which will surround and destroy the Ukrainian army on the Donbas front.
The Russian military has two huge advantage over the Ukrainian forces in the east. One is of course its air superiority. The other is the unimpeded supply line which allows it to get as much heavy artillery ammunition, fuel and food to its forces as it needs.
Without fuel the Ukrainian army can not move and without constant supply, especially of large amounts of artillery munitions, it can not counter Russian artillery which will be in heavy use against it.
This pictures of a former Ukrainian position show the devastating result of such a situation. bigger
Nearly all of the Ukrainian ammunition and fuel supplies have been bombed and destroyed. What is trickling in through its western borders has difficulties to reach the eastern front and is anyway not enough to supply an actively fighting and maneuvering army.
On April 16 Russia shot down a Ukrainian military transport plane that was bringing ‘western’ weapons to Odessa. Today it destroyed another ammunition depot near Lviv were ‘western’ weapons are crossing the border into Ukraine. Some bits of fuel allegedly still reach the Ukraine through trains from Moldova. But that is far from enough.
Since the beginning of the war, the number of gas stations in Ukraine has decreased three times, and private fuel consumption has decreased by about the same amount, said Sergey Kuyun, director of the A-95 consulting group.
“According to our estimates, a third of the total number of gas stations is operating, this is about 2.5 thousand stations, before the war there were 7.5 thousand. Of course, the main reason is the lack of fuel. Consumption has also decreased three times compared to the pre-war level,” he said at a closed briefing at the Media Center in Lviv on Monday.
At the same time, Kuyun noted that traders or network owners are forced to provide their most strategic and powerful facilities, located mainly in regional centers or on main routes, while peripheral stations are forced to stand idle, although there are also a lot of consumers there.
According to him, the shortage of fuel became especially aggravated after the shutdown of the Kremenchug Oil Refinery as a result of a missile attack by Russian invaders. … On April 2, the Russian invaders destroyed the infrastructure of the Kremenchug oil refinery with their shelling, and it stopped working.
The damage done daily to the Ukrainian military and military industry is huge. One can get a sense of it when one reads through the briefings of the Russian defense ministry. From today’s morning brief (here in full as some have difficulties accessing the site):
In any event, a TV actor who has no script other than that handed to him by his Washington/NATO overseers is one thing. And at the end of the day, it small potatoes compared to the grotesque negligence and misdirection of Sleepy Joe’s own keepers.
That is to say, Secy Blinkey and Snake Sullivan should be bent over the above map in earnest conversation with their Russian counterparts as to the fine points of the partition, and the meaning of “neutrality,” “de-nazification” and “demilitarization” of the green area of the map, which is to become the future “Ukraine,” if there is to be anything left at all.
We were already getting sick and tired of this Zelensky clown, but the sheer chutzpah of comparing Ukraine’s predicament with Pearl Harbor or 9/11 is just fricking outrageous. To paraphrase Senator Lloyd Bensten’s famous retort to Dan Quayle in the 1992 VP debate: We knew the United States of America and Ukraine isn’t any United States.
To the contrary, it is a cesspool of corruption, mal-governance and rank stupidity on the foreign policy front. For crying out loud, its situation is comparable to the drug cartels taking over Mexico, demanding the return of the Gadsden Purchase and then seeking to join a Russian-led anti-American treaty organization.
That is to say, Ukraine brought the Russian attack on itself by poking the bear in its eyes repeatedly since the 2014 coup. Yet now its leader has the gall to petition the US Congress to start WWII via standing-up a No Fly Zone in lieu of the obvious solution: Namely, Zelensky should resign and make way for a collaborationist government that will sue for peace on the following basis:
Recognize that Crimea is Russian territory and always has been since it was purchased by Catherine the Great in 1783;
Permit the separation of the Donbass Republics from Ukraine because the overwhelmingly Russian speaking populations there has been part of “New Russia” for more than 300 years and do not wish to be ruled by the anti-Russian fascists and oligarchs who control Kiev;
Amend the constitution of the rump state of Ukraine to prohibit its joining NATO or any similar western alliance, while reducing its military to a domestic law enforcement agency.
Those terms may seem harsh, but it’s the only alternative to the complete destruction of Ukraine and an eventual Russian win anyway. The fact is, the NATO cavalry simply ain’t coming no matter how many standing ovations are stumped up by the armchair warriors of the US Congress.
That’s because even the bully boys of Washington and Brussels aren’t ready to trigger WWIII over the broken remnants of a country that never had been a country historically until Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev made it an administrative district of the Soviet Empire – the latter being a stain on mankind that thankfully disappeared into the dustbin of history 31 years ago.
Yet without direct US/NATO engagement with the Russian military forces now occupying growing segments of Ukrainian territory the expedient of sending arms – even highly advanced lethal anti-air and anti-tank weapons – is futile. Russia now has total air superiority over Ukraine’s skies, meaning that incoming NATO weapons (and the so-called “foreign legion” fighters, too) will be destroyed long before they can make a difference.
So for god’s sake Washington needs to stop standing on ceremony and leading the hapless Ukrainian government down the primrose path to national destruction. There is no way out of the current catastrophe except for Washington to:
concede that recruiting Ukraine to join NATO and potentially putting NATO missile bases within one minute’s cruise missile flight time from Moscow was an egregious mistake; and
that its demonization of Putin as a modern day Hitler on a quest to revive the Soviet Empire is just plain War Party hogwash and is no justification for its sweeping Sanctions War, most especially if Kiev capitulates to Moscow’s terms.
The truth, in fact, is more nearly the opposite. That is, there really are not two distinct nations there, one invading the other. Russia and Ukraine have never been neighboring independent states like Germany and France or Spain and Portugal or Columbia and Peru. To the contrary, they have been an intermingled territory and peoples for the last 1300 years with borders, governing arrangements episodic external invasions all over the lot.
The Ukrainian language itself is testimony to that history and geography. The dialects spoken in the Donbas (brown and yellow areas) are a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian; the old Galician territories of Western Ukraine centered in Lviv (red areas) are heavily influenced by Polish, Slovakian and Rumanian vocabularies.; and the blue areas of the North present dialects heavily influenced by Belarusian.
What is also true is that these segmented populations have never been united under a common polity except by communist arms between 1922 and 1991; then between 1991 and 2014 by tenuous and continuously shifting electoral balances after the Ukrainian administrative entity was arbitrarily disgorged from the old Soviet Union; and finally after the February 2014 coup by dint of a Kiev government based on central and western Ukraine that essentially declared a civil war on Crimea (which seceded) and the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas regions that have tried to do the same.
So again, what’s wrong with partition? At the end of the day, Zelensky stood before Congress and had the gall to demand WWIII in behalf of an abortion of a nation that has virtually no chance of long-term survival in its present form. Yet the knuckleheads from both parties are in such war heat that they vociferously applauded the unctuous rantings of a clown who should have stuck to the comedy business.
Still, for want of doubt about the madness of defending Ukraine by economic warfare now, and military confrontation with Russia if the warmongers get their way, just recall how the arbitrary borders depicted above got here. If this mongrel merits all out defense in behalf of the “rule of law,” then the rule of law be damned.
Kiev Is the Ancestral Homeland of Russia
In the first place, Putin is essentially correct when he says that Russia and much of the Ukrainian territory have been one through long stretches of history. Ironically, therefore, the Kiev today being laid to waste by the Russian army is actually the birthplace of Russia!
If this war continues to unfold in a manner that is slow, painful and ugly, China and Russia are likely to establish far better relations with each other than either has with the United States.
In an interview with Reuters, Dmitry Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman for decades, made a startling offer. Moscow could end the Ukraine war immediately, said Peskov, if four conditions were met.
Ukraine should cease all military action, recognize Crimea as part of Russia, accept the independence of the Luhansk and Donetsk separatist enclaves, and enact a constitutional commitment to “neutrality,” which would prevent Ukraine from ever joining NATO.
Were this to be done, said Peskov, the war “will stop in a moment.”
As this would restore the situation in Ukraine to the “status quo ante” that existed before Putin ordered the invasion, Peskov’s offer seemed not to be believable.
Yet, according to The New York Times, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky “seemed surprisingly open to the idea.”
Zelensky “said he had ‘cooled down’ on joining NATO, saying it was clear the western alliance ‘is not prepared to accept Ukraine.’”
As for Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea, said Zelensky, “We can discuss and find a compromise on how these territories will live on.”
Monday, Ukraine and Russia held a fourth session of peace talks, and expressions of optimism were heard from both sides.
Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak volunteered that Russia is beginning to talk constructively. “I think that we will achieve some results literally in a matter of days.”
Yet, Russia’s strategic goals, manifest in its unfolding military action, seem to go far beyond the moderate demands of Peskov.
Three weeks into this war, what do Russia’s goals appear to be?
First, besiege and bring down the Kyiv government of Zelensky and replace it with a Russian client regime.
Second, divide Ukraine along the lines of the Dnieper River, which bisects the country north to south, and create an East Ukraine as a pro-Russian state.
Third, seize and occupy the entire coast of the Sea of Azov, turn it into a Russian lake, and capture all of the Ukrainian Black Sea coast from the Donbas to Mariupol, Crimea, Kherson, Odessa and Transnistria, the last a slice of seceded Moldovan land Moscow now controls.
This would leave a landlocked rump state of west Ukraine, which would be a buffer between NATO nations Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland — and Russia-backed East Ukraine.
The Wall Street Journal said Monday that Russia’s realization of these goals would be tantamount to victory in Putin’s war:
“A Ukraine divided in two, with Russia in control of the east, and a rump, Western Ukraine cut off from the coast might look like a victory to Mr. Putin — especially if sanctions are removed in some cease-fire agreement.”
With this kind of peace in hand, Putin could then warn the NATO nations that if they attacked East Ukraine directly, or indirectly by arming insurgents, they would face “consequences you have never seen.”
As no NATO nation risked war to save Georgia from Russia in 2008, or to save Ukraine from the Crimean and Donbas amputations of 2014, it is not likely NATO would risk war with Russia, and a potential third world war, if Russia declared a truce once it got full control of eastern Ukraine.
Where would that leave the West?
The Americans and British would likely treat Putin as a pariah and never meet with him again. But would President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany cut off all communication with Russia, when they have been making daily phone calls to Putin and regular visits to Moscow, even as Putin’s war of aggression was raging?
If Russia and Ukraine reached a ceasefire and a truce, would the EU and NATO nations of Europe not swiftly stand down themselves, rather than keep the Ukrainian resistance fighting?
If Kyiv falls to a Russian strategy of encirclement and strangulation, capitulation and conquest, how long would it be before EU nations seek an end to Russia’s isolation and a new era of detente?
Or would the continued existence of a regime headed by Putin mean permanent hostility?
Three years after Nikita Khrushchev sent Soviet tanks into Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Soviet premier was riding up Pennsylvania Avenue in an open convertible with Dwight Eisenhower to spend the night at Blair House before a 12-day tour as the guest of the president of the United States.
As of now, the winner of this Russia-Ukraine war appears to be China.
Given the severity of U.S. sanctions and the ostracism of Russia from the West, China is the only partner nation and economy to which Moscow can turn to recoup its losses.
If this war continues to unfold in a manner that is slow, painful and ugly, China and Russia are likely to establish far better relations with each other than either has with the United States.
But how is China, which is engaged in cultural genocide against its Uyghur minority of 10 million, a racial and ethnic persecution featuring reeducation camps, rapes, forced abortions and sterilizations, a morally superior regime to Putin’s?
Surely at 3AM Zelensky is visited by the ghosts of Gaddafi, Saddam, Noriega, and endless former US clients who “went rogue” and found themselves on the wrong end of US “democracy promotion.” The price of crossing your US overlords is anal rape and death.
It’s clear that we are not dealing with competent people. No wonder Biden’s approval ratings are at historic lows – below 40 percent! Ironically – and dangerously – that gives a great deal of leverage to the incompetent Obama-holdover hawks like Blinken, Nuland, and Sullivan, who are no doubt whispering in the president’s ear what wonders a delightful little war might bring.
According to some reports, the White House has shared “secret” intelligence with previously hesitant allies, and today Japan, Netherlands, and South Korea have joined the US in frantically demanding their citizens leave Ukraine immediately because, as Biden himself said – along with his incompetent National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan – the invasion is imminent (again) and, “things could go crazy quickly.”
The leaking of “secret intelligence” is the best way to get the lapdog mainstream media to stand up and beg for more. It is also reminiscent of all the bogus “intelligence” that lied us into the catastrophic Iraq war, where we flushed trillions down the toilet in the pursuit of killing a million innocent people. All lies. God have mercy.
It was only a week or so ago that the State Department spokesman was ruthlessly hammered by AP’s Matt Lee over the fact-free claims that Putin was about to make a film faking a Ukrainian attack on Donbas to justify Russia’s own invasion of Ukraine. Lee did what journalists used to do: he asked for proof. The State Department flack – surprise surprise a former CIA officer – found himself pumping mud under what should have been normal scrutiny from the so-called fourth estate.
Here’s how it’s going down, folks, if it does go down. And I mentioned this in an interview tonight:
The US has turned its propaganda amplifiers up to 11 hyping the threat that Russia would somehow want to take Kiev in the next day or two. It has been able to establish this panic with the assistance of the Pravda-esque US mainstream media,
Next step – already happening – is that the US is pulling its OSCE monitors from Donbas in eastern Ukraine due to the MSM/Biden hyped “imminent” threat. US allies may well follow and pull their OSCE monitors from Donbas, leaving no one to actually tell us who started shelling first.
How convenient.
And this while the OSCE monitors in Donbass have recorded a 400% increase in Kiev shelling the area today over the previous seven day average. Goaded by sugar daddy US, an otherwise seemingly-reluctant Zelensky – a comedian who fell into the role of Ukraine president – is the wild card.
There is no doubt that US pressure is on him like a pack of Texas fire ants. He has been desperately walking back unhinged (and objectively false) US assertions over the past several weeks that a Russian invasion was just a day away, but how long can he continue to poke his benefactor in the eye before he recalls what happens to former US allies?
Surely at 3AM Zelensky is visited by the ghosts of Gaddafi, Saddam, Noriega, and endless former US clients who “went rogue” and found themselves on the wrong end of US “democracy promotion.” The price of crossing your US overlords is anal rape and death.
As RPI Academic Advisor John Laughland famously wrote in 2005, “it is better to be an enemy of the Americans than their friend. If you are their enemy, they might try to buy you; but if you are their friend they will definitely sell you.”
Take note, Zelensky!
I’ve been writing for the better part of two decades on the corruption of the OSCE and its infiltration by western intelligence services. So while they are not for the most part reliable in the first place, the removal of all monitors under the false assertion that an invasion is imminent will remove any honest monitor who might lurk.
With no one from “the West” to monitor who fires first, all those wonderful weapons of war provided to Ukraine by the US and UK can be unleashed against the citizens of eastern Ukraine and no one will be there (except those unreliable Russians and their allies) to report that the attack came from Kiev rather than from Moscow.
This is how World War III starts. It’s all laid out before us. An incompetent yet hubristic Biden Administration believes that it can bring Ukraine into NATO and then use Article 5 to regain Crimea from Russia.
It’s like totally insane former US Ambassador Michael McFaul is recalled into a senior policymaking position after three years of sniffing glue!
Dear friends: This is no longer DC think tank speculation. Russia has a legitimate reason to oppose NATO on its doorstep. And that is not an endorsement of the concept of “regions of influence,” which is dumb. It is simply the Russians understanding that the next regime change will be theirs. There is nothing in such a stupid policy for the rest of us Americans. Who cares who runs Russia? Who cares who runs Ukraine?
Here is the forbidden but true conclusion: it is not “pro-Russia” but in fact pro-America to oppose nuclear war over insignificant Ukraine. Let Europe deal with its own border problems and how about we deal with our own as well?
BTW: how do you like that 1970s-era stagflation? Pre-order your bell-bottoms and disco records! It’s coming. We used to rule the world…
Sincerely yours,
Daniel McAdams Executive Director Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
he phone call between President Biden and Ukrainian President Zelensky “did not go well”, CNN headlines: while “Biden warned that a Russian invasion is practically certain in February, when the frozen ground makes it possible for tanks to pass through”, Zelensky “asked Biden to lower his tone, arguing that the Russian threat is still ambiguous”. As the Ukrainian president himself takes a more cautious stance, Ukrainian armed forces are massing in the Donbass near the area of Donetsk and Lugansk inhabited by Russian populations.
According to reports from the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, obscured by our mainstream which only talks about the Russian deployment, Ukrainian Army and National Guard units, amounting to about 150 thousand men, are positioned here. They are armed and trained, and thus effectively commanded, by US-NATO military advisers and instructors.
From 1991 to 2014, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service, the U.S. provided Ukraine with $4 billion in military assistance, which was added to by over $2.5 billion after 2014, plus over a billion provided by the NATO Trust Fund in which Italy also participates. This is only part of the military investments made by the major NATO powers in Ukraine. Great Britain, for example, concluded various military agreements with Kiev, investing among other things 1.7 billion pounds in the strengthening of Ukraine’s naval capabilities: this program provides for the arming of Ukrainian ships with British missiles, the joint production of 8 fast missile launchers, the construction of naval bases on the Black Sea and also on the Sea of Azov between Ukraine, Crimea and Russia. In this framework, Ukrainian military spending, which in 2014 was equivalent to 3% of GDP, increased to 6% in 2022, corresponding to more than $ 11 billion.
In addition to the US-NATO military investments in Ukraine, there is the $10 billion plan being implemented by Erik Prince, founder of the private US military company Blackwater, now renamed Academy, which has been supplying mercenaries to the CIA, Pentagon and State Department for covert operations (including torture and assassinations), earning billions of dollars. Erik Prince’s plan, revealed by a Time magazine investigation, is to create a private army in Ukraine through a partnership between the Lancaster 6 company, with which Prince has supplied mercenaries in the Middle East and Africa, and the main Ukrainian intelligence office controlled by the CIA. It is not known, of course, what would be the tasks of the private army created in Ukraine by the founder of Blackwater, certainly with funding from the CIA. However, it can be expected that it would conduct covert operations in Europe, Russia and other regions from its base in Ukraine.
Against this background, it is particularly alarming that the Russian Defense Minister Shoigu denounced that in the Donetsk region there are “private US military companies that are preparing a provocation with the use of unknown chemicals”. It could be the spark that causes the detonation of a war in the heart of Europe: a chemical attack against Ukrainian civilians in Donbass, immediately attributed to the Russians of Donetsk and Lugansk, which would be attacked by the preponderant Ukrainian forces already deployed in the region, to force Russia to intervene militarily in their defense.
In the front line, ready to slaughter the Russians in the Donbass, is the Azov battalion, promoted to a special forces regiment, trained and armed by the US and NATO, distinguished for its ferocity in attacks on the Russian populations of Ukraine. The Azov, which recruits neo-Nazis from all over Europe under its flag traced from that of SS Das Reich, is commanded by its founder Andrey Biletsky, promoted to colonel. It is not only a military unit, but an ideological and political movement, of which Biletsky is the charismatic leader, especially for the youth organization that is educated to hate the Russians with his book “The Words of the White Führer”.
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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.
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