Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 02, 2023 1:05 pm

The situation in the Donetsk area
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 02/01/2023

Image

The year ended in Ukraine and in the Donbass unchanged from the events of the past few days: just 48 hours after the last missile attack, Russia again launched a significant attack. Despite the damage that occurred, kyiv continues to claim to have shot down almost all of the missiles. With the attack, Moscow once again showed that the constant statements by Ukraine and its Western partners about the shortage of missiles in Russian arsenals, which were repeated throughout the year starting as early as March, have a large dose of propaganda from Russia. war. The story is as important in this war as the reality of the front.

Ukraine, for its part, continued with its habit of firing indiscriminately against the city of Donetsk, the target of Ukrainian artillery since the end of May, with which kyiv seeks a double objective. The material damage and the constant trickle of dead and wounded civilians in different areas of the city, including the center, previously protected from bombing, is a form of collective punishment for a population that has not only rejected the Government of Ukraine, but also he has remained in the city despite the danger and difficult conditions. Since the beginning of the summer, Donetsk, the main city of Donbass, has suffered from very serious water supply problems, the control of which is in the northern part of the region, under Ukrainian control. For months, Donetsk, whose urban area had a million inhabitants before the war, survives with a water supply of just a few hours on alternate days, schedules that cannot always be met. But apart from this collective punishment against a population considered disloyal, the bombings and the attempt to make life difficult also seek to undermine the confidence of that population in the Russian troops and authorities, which for the moment have not been able to guarantee services that, in a city ​​of such magnitude, are basic nor is the security of the population.

Last week, talk began in Russia about the pipeline installation project that would proceed to supply water from the Rostov region, which would finally achieve a solution, at least partially, to a very serious problem. The magnitude of the work required and the distance to be covered make it an expensive work. However, the other pending work in Donetsk requires more than just a financial investment. Local sources yesterday denounced numerous Ukrainian bombardments against the city and highlighted the 18 projectiles fired indiscriminately against residential areas of the city in just three minutes.

The Donetsk bombings were, throughout 2022, one of the most debated issues. Although the consensus is on the need to move the Ukrainian troops away from the city, the difficulty lies in how to achieve it. All this involves defeating the Ukrainian group in the area, which has some of the strongest fortifications, prepared by the Ukrainian Armed Forces throughout the eight years of the Donbass war. One of the key points is the town of Avdeevka. This is how Boris Rozhin, Colonel Cassad , explained it yesterday :

1.A frontal assault on Avdeevka through the industrial zone or from Novobajmutovka in the current circumstances does not promise significant results, both due to the lack of sufficient forces for a frontal assault in this area, and due to the existence of large enemy fortifications and the presence of the undefeated grouping. Avdeevka, which is in much better condition than Artyomovsk, which is bleeding to death right now.
2.But even if the command of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation concentrated significant forces for such an assault, it is unlikely that there could be talk of a rapid attack on Avdeevka if we look at the precedent of slow progress in Marinka or Artyomovsk. So, as you can guess, the shelling will continue.
3.It is more promising to increase the pressure south of Avdeevka and Tonenkoe, as well as to resume attacks in the direction of Krasnogorovka, north of Avdeevka, and to establish a tighter control over the Kamenka area. In other words, more decisive actions are required against the flanks of the Avdeevka grouping. But even under current conditions, that would require seriously reinforcing the Russian Donetsk area grouping with additional troops. However, the command also has to take into account the situation in Ugledar and the Zaporozhye front, as well as the needs of the offensive on Artyomovsk and Soledar.
4.So, in the current phase of the operation, rapid changes in the situation in the Avdeevka area should not be expected. The Nevelskoe-Vodianoe, Marinka, Artyomovsk or Soledar sections are more promising.


The situation in Donetsk will continue to be serious in two ways: the deficiencies that the war situation implies, especially in relation to the water supply, and the lack of security linked to the Ukrainian bombings. The needs are clear, but not so much the way in which to achieve them. In any case, for this, Russia will have to stop making serious mistakes that can be fatal and sometimes even catastrophic. Last night, in an attack very similar to the one carried out against the Elenovka prison a few months ago, Ukraine used its HIMARS to attack a base where a whole unit of recruits was stationed in the town of Makeevka, outside Donetsk. The base was completely destroyed. Ukrainian war propaganda boasts of more than half a thousand fatalities. The actual number is unknown, but it is already known to be in the tens. Russia cannot claim to protect Donetsk or Donbass if it is not even capable of protecting its recruits.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/01/02/26327/#more-26327

Google Translator

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Could NATO Directly Intervene in Ukraine?
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 1, 2023



NATO somehow getting more directly involved in Ukraine represents a worst case scenario. What clues are there so far that this might be a possibility?

– Rumors of a Polish mobilization;

– Stubborn Ukrainian resistance and multiple attempts to create a pretext for wider NATO intervention;

– Extensive Russian defenses being built behind the front line and;

– Russia’s careful consideration of the other weapons NATO has despite their inability to transfer them to Ukraine.

References:

Alexander Mercouris – Russia Missile Strikes, Ukraine Admits Heavy Losses, Turkey Mulls Syria Pullout, Xi Putin Friendship:



Judge Napolitano – Judging Freedom – Will Ukraine ever have enough Fire Power? Col Doug Macgregor:



https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... n-ukraine/

Utterly partisan but a serious question nonetheless.

*************

The second birthday
January 1, 22:00

Image

Military commissar Alexander Kharchenko tells how he and Sergei Shilov miraculously survived getting into a bind while on the front lines.

The second birthday

As you already understood, we got into a pi…rez ( https://t.me/bayraktar1070/630 ). Yes, they themselves, unwillingly, were at the forefront for almost 10 days. Everything started normally. We went at night with a group of scouts to one of the hottest places on the front. There are no whole houses there, so the only shelters are basements. That is where the opposing sides are hiding. We got not the most comfortable "apartments". Mud sloshed underfoot, and water oozed from the ceiling.

The battle began in the morning. Our guys went ahead and were able to take a few basements. It looks something like this: assault groups covertly accumulate in the nearest shelters, and on command go on the attack. Then several hours of dagger fire at short distances, grenades flying into the chimneys of the cellars. By the end of the day, several points come under our control.

All actions of the parties are controlled by quadrocopters. The sky is crowded and collisions often occur. It is impossible to imagine modern conflict without drones.

By the end of the second day, the Ukrainians decided to avenge their losses and significantly increased the number of shelling. Our shelter was bombed 5 times a day. We spent about 5 shells per raid. It is an indescribable feeling when clods of dirt fall loudly on the roof of the basement from a close gap. We just had to be baptized. Our basement would not have survived a direct hit by 155 shells.

Unfortunately for us, a new batch of copters was brought to the enemy, and now several "birds" were on duty in the air day and night. Any movement was detected and worked out on it. They poured heavily. As soon as we ran into one of the buildings in order to discuss the evacuation, we were hit by a tank. Our guide was shell-shocked, but we escaped with a slight fright.

We did not want to look for death on the surface, so we decided to stay in the basement until the end and go out with the boys. Night fell and the command was given to move to the evacuation point. We gathered a small group and rushed out of this hell. We did not know then that from the very beginning we were led by a quadcopter with a thermal imager. We reached the targeted intersection and were immediately surrounded by 120 mines. Three pieces exploded 30 meters from us. Each time they hit closer, so we decided to run in short dashes. A leap forward, then you hear an “exit” and fall into the greasy Donbass mud. I preferred to find the deepest rut. On the one hand, it hides most of your body, on the other hand, it is always filled with water. Several times I literally swam in this December sludge. In total, we did this fitness for 1.5 hours. The enemy managed to change 3 birds. During the shift change, we managed to crawl to cover and the enemy lost sight of us. Not finding us, the Ukrainians began to bomb the basement from which we came out. One 120th mine hit the roof exactly, but by a lucky chance did not explode. This is such a divine act. The end of December can now rightfully be considered one of the days of our birth with Sergey.

I will write an analysis on the situation on this sector of the front later. Sergey will publish a story, where he will reveal in detail the characters of our escorts, and in general will describe our adventures artistically.


Alexander Kharchenko

https://t.me/boris_rozhin/74244 - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8072223.html

Google Translator

**********

From Cassad's Telegram account:

***

Colonelcassad
Concerning

Makiivka Arrived at the vocational school from HIMARSa.
The mobilized were lodged in the building.
A significant number of dead and wounded.
In the evening, the rubble was still dismantled.

After strikes on large ammunition depots and fuel and lubricants, the depots began to be dispersed in order to avoid a large loss of materiel in the event of strikes. This brought its results and the enemy had many times fewer effective strikes on large warehouses.

It would seem that a similar approach should be applied to the issue of crowded deployment of personnel within the effective fire engagement of the enemy. But as you can see, despite several months of war, some conclusions are not drawn, hence the optional losses, which, when taking elementary precautions related to the dispersal and shelter of personnel, could not have happened.

Incompetence and inability to perceive the experience of war continues to be a serious problem.

Peace to the ashes of the dead. And I hope that after this story, conclusions will finally be made.

***

Colonelcassad

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Zaporizhia direction
situation as of 14.00 December 30, 2022

In the Zaporozhye direction, Russian military personnel entrenched themselves on the liberated lines as a result of a successful local offensive .

🔻In the Pologovsky sector , during the assault on Ukrainian positions, control over Dorozhnyanka was restored . The Ukrainian formations retreated to reserve lines, the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine amounted to 36 people killed and wounded.

▪️In addition, a Russian reconnaissance and sabotage group conducted a raid on Ukrainian positions north of Novopokrovka , eliminating three people at two observation posts.

▪️To regain control, the command of the 65th Mechanized Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is planning a counteroffensive from Zaliznichny with the support of units of the 103rd Battalion of the 108th Terodefense Brigade at the Belogorye-Charivnoe line .

On the defense line of 108 arr TRO, a rotation of personnel was carried out, and additional anti-tank guided missiles were delivered to the Javelin ATGM.

🔻In the Orekhovsky sector , reinforcements from among the mobilized were transferred to Shcherbaki, and detachments of the 108th brigade of the territorial defense of the Armed Forces of Ukraine arrived in the vicinity of Yegorovka and Omelnik .

▪️Local residents of the part of the Zaporozhye region controlled by Ukraine are spreading information about the preparation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces for an offensive in the direction of Tokmak .

***

Colonelcassad
Soledar direction
situation as of 12:00 January 2, 2023

Intense clashes continue in the vicinity of Bakhmut and Soledar . The Armed Forces of Ukraine are trying to hold back the advance of the RF Armed Forces and intend to conduct reconnaissance in combat in the industrial zone to determine the front line of defense of Russian military personnel.

🔻In the Bakhmut (Artyomovsky) sector, the Armed Forces of Ukraine tried to recapture positions on the southeastern outskirts of Bakhmut with the forces of 57 ompbr. The attack was repulsed, the Ukrainian formations retreated with losses.

In the 57th brigade they spread information about the huge losses in the 17th battalion of the formation - only 100 people remained . On January 16, the 17th OpMB, which was previously withdrawn to Konstantinovka , will be disbanded, and the personnel will be transferred to other units.

In addition, formations that previously operated in the Kherson direction arrived in Chasov Yar . After a short coordination, the deployed units will become part of the 57th brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

▪️In the northeast of Bakhmut, the "Wagnerites" established control over two platoon strongholds near Podgorodny , as well as seven firing positions northwest of the Bakhmutskoye - Soledar line .

▪️In the southwest, the assault continues on the fortified area of ​​the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Kleshcheevka , held by combined detachments of 24 and 63 ombr, as well as 57 ombr. During the fighting, Russian troops established control over another strong point.

▪️Engineering detachments of the 28th Ombre of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are equipping the second line of defense in the Ivanopol region in case the line in Kleshcheevka is broken through .

🔻In the Soledar sector, assault detachments of the Wagner PMC are advancing on Soledar from the direction of Bakhmutsky and Yakovlevka . As a result of active battles, two company strongholds and five observation posts of the 128th Guards Rifle Brigade and 61st Ombre of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were liberated.

▪️At the same time, advancement continues in the direction of Razdolovka and Vesely . To deter the offensive, the engineering units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine have installed minefields in the center of Vesele, and artillery crews are firing at the southern outskirts of the village and Yakovlevka.

🔻In total, over the past two days, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have lost more than 200 irretrievable people as a result of battles and artillery strikes of the RF Armed Forces . In addition, an artillery strike hit the RAV warehouse in the Yablonovka area, where the personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were also located.

To make up for losses, the transfer of units of the National Guard of Ukraine from the Sumy region to Bakhmut is expected. In Konstantinovka, the distribution of diesel generators transferred by the United States as part of military assistance began.

Image

https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 03, 2023 1:00 pm

common values
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 01/03/2023

Image

The imposition of the nationalist discourse as a national discourse, a process that has occurred constantly and openly over the past eight years and has increased markedly since February 2014, has led to certain diplomatic contradictions for Ukraine throughout this weather. A clear example of this has been relations with Israel, an allied country with which Ukraine has repeatedly stated that it shares values. kyiv, both in the time of Poroshenko and in the time of Zelensky, has always aspired to repeat the Israeli example in different aspects, fundamentally in the relations of friendship -or dependency- with the United States. As one of the countries most financed and armed by the United States, Israel could not fail to be an example for Ukraine to follow. Hence, both Poroshenko and Zelensky have tried to approach the Tel Aviv government to highlight the unity of the two countries. But if Petro Poroshenko had to make the traditional formal floral offering at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, Zelensky has simply used his Jewish origin first and the war with Russia later.

But despite the good words, the dependence on the same ally, the United States, and some shared values ​​-such as the use of violence against the enemy within the borders considered as their own-, the disagreements have been notable and public in recent eight years. Faced with other countries, which have avoided speaking out or justifying any action, Israel could not afford to stop publicly criticizing certain measures implemented by the Ukrainian government. This has happened with the exaltation of figures and groups that collaborated with Nazism, SS divisions now normalized or the liturgies linked to that exaltation. Faced with countries or political blocs such as the European Union, which reacted in 2010 when Viktor Yushchenko named Stepan Bandera a hero of Ukraine,

The most shameful public confrontation for kyiv occurred in 2016, when Reuven Rivlin, President of Israel, recalled from the rostrum of the Ukrainian Parliament the role of certain Ukrainian nationalist groups, mainly the OUN, in the mass murder of the Ukrainian Jewish population. , butchered all over the country in mass murders, but also in the pogroms that accompanied the first moments of the German invasion. As Eduard Dolinsky, president of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee and staunch fighter against historical revisionism that tries to erase collaborationism in crimes like the Holocaust from the OUN or UPA file, explained, in certain places in western Ukraine, those pogroms against the Jewish population began even before the arrival of the Nazi troops and continued when it did. At that time,

Prey to its own contradictions, the Israeli position has always lacked coherence. Although revisionism, or even denial, of the Holocaust had to be considered a red line, the sale of weapons to battalions then considered neo-Nazis or bearers of Nazi-inspired symbols was not. The Haaretz newspaperHe went so far as to denounce these contradictions with an image of a soldier from the Azov regiment carrying an Israeli weapon, without this posing any problem for the Government. Along the same lines, the same Israeli media that normalized the visit of a contingent of the Azov regiment on their propaganda tour just two weeks ago, yesterday criticized a thread published on the official Twitter account of the Ukrainian Parliament expressly apologizing for Stepan Bandera. . The thread, which used a quote attributed (according to some sources falsely) to the leader of OUN(B) in which he openly specified that the objective was to destroy Russia, was deleted yesterday Tuesday after criticism that had arisen through the social networks of the very explicit apology of who led a group that collaborated with Hitler's Germany.

The last ten months have shifted geopolitical trends and objectives, eclipsing those petty squabbles between allies that had arisen over the glorification of Holocaust collaborators. Like other countries, Israel has played a game in the ten months of the Russo-Ukrainian war in which it has tried to maintain a certain balance and has even aspired to mediate. Its good relations with both countries made the Israeli government think last February that it was in an optimal position to obtain the benefits of mediating in a conflict in which large economic interests are involved. That role has been cleverly wrested from him by Turkey,

Unlike Turkey, Israel saw its aspirations undermined by its need to maintain a balance between supporting Ukraine and trying not to alienate Russia, something that continues today with the new government of Binyamin Netanyahu. Israel could not afford to meet the demands of Kiev, which for months has publicly insisted on the Israeli government's moral obligation to supply Ukraine with its Iron Dome , its anti-missile shield. Such delivery would jeopardize the impunity with which Israel is capable of violating Syrian airspace for its attacks " against Iran " in Syria, whose skies are controlled by the Russian Federation, which until now has given Tel Aviv a free hand.

The mobilization of resources and the centrality that the war in Ukraine has acquired in the last ten months has reinforced the figure of Zelensky and has created in the Ukrainian government the appearance of obligation to supply everything demanded by kyiv. Zelensky personally, but also his closest circle, have publicly and repeatedly disgraced Tel Aviv by limiting itself to humanitarian aid and the reception of refugees in its supplies to Ukraine. Despite the demands, neither the past government nor the current one have shown any interest in jeopardizing their ability to bomb Syria at will by delivering anti-aircraft weapons to Ukraine.

Last week, this geopolitical dispute was reflected in the United Nations General Assembly in a vote in which the majority of countries voted in favor of referring the Palestinian question to the International Criminal Court, which according to the resolution must rule on the Israeli occupation. of the Palestinian territories. The resolution was approved with the contrary vote of the United States and some of its partners and the implicit or explicit rejection of a large part of the European Union (which with exceptions such as Poland, the Netherlands or Portugal abstained or rejected the proposal).

Axios has published these days the ins and outs of the negotiation between Ukraine and Israel around Kiev's vote on this issue, with both executives using the vote as a form of pressure on the other party in search of their particular interests. According to the American media, the Israeli government demanded that the Ukrainian vote against the resolution. Instead, Tel Aviv received a proposal from kyiv: Ukraine would vote as Israel demanded in exchange for anti-aircraft weapons. The Israeli refusal to risk its privileges in Syria in exchange for a vote that was not going to change the final result - support for the Palestinian cause in the UN is the majority despite the position of Western countries - caused the shock of Ukraine , which simply did not show up for the vote.

Just a few hours earlier, the Ukrainian president had welcomed the Netanyahu government, which has come to power claiming Jewish rights over all the lands it occupies, including the West Bank. In his message, Zelensky wished the new president luck in the search for the country's security and highlighted Ukraine's "close cooperation to strengthen our ties and face common challenges, achieve prosperity and victory over evil." A statement very similar to that stated by Gandalf, a member of the Azov regiment who visited Israel a few days ago and leaving behind his past Holocaust denial statements, stated that he "sees Israel and Ukraine on the same side, the civilized fighting against the uncivilized in a fight for the future of The humanity". It is difficult not to see in this "evil" and those "uncivilized" a reference to Palestine and a parallelism between Israel's treatment of the Palestinian population with that given by Ukraine to the population of Donbass. However, Ukraine and Israel also have another common enemy, Iran, a scapegoat chosen by kyiv and demonized for the use of Iranian drones in Russian missile attacks, which are actually causing damage to Ukrainian infrastructure, while drones are mainly used as decoy. In any case,

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/01/03/valor ... more-26334

Google Translator

*****************

Are There Any U.S. Red Lines?
The Biden administration has so far refrained from sending longer range missile to Ukraine. It fears a severe Russian reaction should it change that policy. Some warmongers dislike such sensible restrain.

In today's New York Times some former British diplomat, now working for a pro-war think tank, is arguing for the delivery of longer range weapons to Ukraine.

Putin Has No Red Lines

“What are Putin’s red lines?”
This question, asked with growing urgency as Russia loses its war in Ukraine but does not relent in its aggressions, is intended to offer analytical clarity and to guide policy. In reality, it is the wrong question, because “red line” is a bad metaphor. Red lines are red herrings. There are better ways to think about strategy.


Red lines, where a consequence is threatened when an opponent does a specified escalating move, do not really exists, says the author. Red lines are movable, responding to a red line violation is a cost to the one who drew the line and red lines invite deceptions - says the author.

After spending several hundred words arguing that red lines are a useless concept the author argues that the 'west' should draw a big one:

Concerns about Russia’s “red lines” are driven above all by the fear that Russia might resort to nuclear escalation. The West should avert this by deterring Russia rather than by restraining itself — or pressuring Ukraine to do so — for fear of “provoking” Russia. It can do so by communicating the certainty of severe consequences should Russia use nuclear weapons.

For the record: Russia has never threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. It is a false assertion by the Biden administration that Russia did so.

Communicating that the 'west', i.e. the U.S, will do severe consequence X if Russia does Y is drawing as red a line as I have ever seen.

So what is the purpose of that red line:

Russia has no red lines: It only has, at each moment, a range of options and perceptions of their relative risks and benefits. It only has, at each moment, a range of options and perceptions of their relative risks and benefits. The West should continually aim, through its diplomacy, to shape these perceptions so that Russia chooses the options that the West prefers.
America has done this before. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most dangerous nuclear confrontation so far, the Soviet Union’s position shifted in a matter of days, ultimately accepting an outcome that favored the West.


The former British diplomat obviously lacks a decent education in history. The Soviet missiles in Cuba were stationed there because the U.S. had stationed nuclear capable Juniper mid range missiles in Turkey and Greece. Those missiles threatened Moscow. They had crossed the Soviet red line. The missiles in Cuba were a counter threat to what the U.S. had done. When the Kennedy administration recognized that it negotiated the removal of its missiles in Turkey and Greece in exchange for the removal of the Soviet missiles in Cuba.

It were the Soviets who had won that round of the Cold War, not the U.S.

As he does not know the history of the Cuba crisis the author is drawing false conclusions from it:

While Russia is more invested in subordinating Ukraine than it was in deploying missiles to Cuba, the logic is the same. In 1962, America persuaded the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, that removing nuclear weapons from Cuba was, however unpalatable, a better choice than deploying them. Similarly, the West should now aim to persuade Mr. Putin that withdrawing his forces from Ukraine is less perilous than fighting.

To convince Russia to retreat, says the author, the 'west' should not restrain itself in weapon deliveries to Ukraine. It should increase sanctions on Russia to increase its costs. It should communicate that a retreat from Ukraine would not mean regime change in Moscow. (Even when that in fact is the obvious U.S. endgame.)

Pursued firmly and resolutely, these diplomatic “shaping operations” in support of Ukraine’s military campaign can ensure that Russia’s least-bad option aligns with what the vastly more powerful West wants. Such a strategy is the opposite of accepting red lines.
...
Mr. Putin [..] should not be allowed to define the limits of Western policy now. Strategy needs rigorous thought, not lazy metaphors.


A lazy metaphor is like arguing against red lines while drawing a new one. A lazy metaphor is like faking history to draw the intended but wrong conclusion from it. The op-ed is not rigorous thought but muddled gibberish.

As soon as it becomes obvious to everyone that the Ukraine is losing the war, the Biden administration is likely to deliver more long range weapons to Ukraine with the advice to use them within Russia. Russia will respond to that. But most likely not in Ukraine, but in a place and at a time where it hurts the U.S. more than anything that can be done to it in Ukraine.

Posted by b on January 2, 2023 at 17:07 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/01/a ... .html#more

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New Year Missile & Drone Strikes Continue Across Ukraine as NATO Recognizes Scale of Conflict
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 2, 2023



Update on Russian military operations in Ukraine for January 2, 2023:

– Fighting continues around Bakhmut and across the wider Donbass region;
– Russian missile and drone strikes continue for several days now;
– Ukrainian sources claim “all” drones were downed but damage to infrastructure proves otherwise;
– Ukraine claims to have hit Russian troops with a HIMARS rocket attack;
– The attack is only in the news because it happens so infrequently;
– Russia carries out similar attacks nearly daily with its much larger number of guided-rocket launchers and ballistic missile systems;
– NATO admits Russia can fight on long-term and that Ukraine requires long-term support;
– EU begins training 1,100 Ukrainians for 2 months and plans to train up to 15,000 over the next 2+ years;
– 200-300 Ukrainian perish in fighting daily at a minimum with fighting around Bakhmut raising deaths and injuries to around 1,000 daily;
– Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterates that the West is using Ukraine as a proxy to harm Russia, a fact stated in US policy documents like RAND’s 2019 “Extending Russia” paper;

References:

BBC – Ukraine claims hundreds of Russians killed by missile attack:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe…
BBC – Ukraine must get long-term support, warns Nato chief:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe…
RAND Corporation – Extending Russia Competing from Advantageous Ground (2019):
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_re…
Bloomberg – Bloomberg – Ukrainian Troops Begin EU Training as Bloc Expands Military Role:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl…

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... -conflict/

Air Base Attacks Deep Inside Russia Point to CIA Covert Ops and a Planned War
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 1, 2023
Finnian Cunningham

Image

An air base deep in Russian territory has been attacked twice with drones in less than one month. It is not some remote outlying facility either. The air base near the city of Saratov houses nuclear-capable Russian strategic bomber aircraft.

The latest attack was on December 26 in which three Russian servicemen were killed from falling drone debris after the weapon was reportedly shot down. Saratov is 730 kilometers southeast of Moscow and hundreds of kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

On December 5, the air base was also targeted, again apparently by drones. On the same day, an air base at Rayazan less than 200 kilometers from Moscow was also attacked. The next day on December 6, a military facility at Kursk was targeted.

Ukrainian forces have not openly claimed responsibility for the attacks but there have been reports in the U.S. media hinting at that. The White House and State Department have both denied any American involvement, claiming that the U.S. has urged Ukraine not to strike Russian territory. “We are not encouraging Ukraine to strike beyond its borders,” said Ned Price, the State Department spokesman.

Nevertheless, there is the question of how are drones making their way deep inside Russian territory to launch air strikes on strategic targets.

It seems implausible that offensive unmanned aerial vehicles could travel undetected for hundreds of kilometers over Russian airspace, and then mount attacks on highly sensitive military sites. More likely, the weapons have been activated near their intended targets.

A recent separate report by investigative reporter Jack Murphy may shed some light. He does not refer to the spate of drone attacks on Russian air bases. But he cites former U.S. intelligence agents who claim that the Central Intelligence Agency is running clandestine sabotage teams inside Russia.

According to the report, the CIA is working with a European NATO ally to activate sleeper cells that have infiltrated Russia with caches of weapons. There are no Americans on the ground and the purported liaison with the NATO ally’s agents gives an extra layer of plausible deniability for Washington.

The reporter claims that the extra plausible deniability is a major factor that would enable U.S. President Joe Biden to approve of such provocative covert operations on Russian soil.

Lending credibility to such a scheme is numerous reports of mysterious explosions across Russia since it launched its special military operation in Ukraine back in February. Several military facilities have been destroyed by fires which Russian media have tended to report as due to unexplained accidents.

A Russian aerospace research institute in the city of Tver was set ablaze on April 21 in which several people were reportedly killed. Several other munition depots have also been hit with apparently freak accidental infernos.

Last week, on December 23, a military center in Moscow’s Eastside was badly damaged by a major fire that burned for over four hours. The day before, Russia’s sole aircraft carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, was engulfed in flames while undergoing repairs docked in Murmansk.

What we are surmising here is that it is entirely plausible that a spate of deadly incidents at military facilities across Russia over the past year is no accidental coincidence but rather has been instigated as sabotage operations aimed at sowing confusion and logistical problems for Russia’s campaign in Ukraine.

That pattern ties in with the above report claiming that the CIA has been busy infiltrating Russian territory along with a European NATO ally for this very purpose.

In particular, the attacks carried out on high-security air bases deep in Russia strongly suggest that the weapons used for such raids were already emplaced in Russia by the alleged CIA sleeper cells. It seems unlikely that drones could have traversed such long distances from Ukrainian territory deep inside Russia undetected.

The use of sabotage teams behind enemy lines is nothing new for the CIA in regard to Russia. Following the Second World War, the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency recruited Nazi intelligence officers and operatives to carry out terrorist attacks in Soviet territories. Hitler’s top spymaster Lieutenant General Reinhard Gehlen and the Gehlen Organization became prized CIA assets following the war.

But it is significant that the CIA reportedly took a renewed active role in infiltrating Russia after the 2014 coup it helped orchestrate in Ukraine.

According to reporting by Jack Murphy: “The first of these sleeper cells under the combined control of the CIA and the allied spy service infiltrated into Russia in 2016, according to a former U.S. military official and a U.S. person who has been briefed on the campaign… After the 2016 infiltrations, more teams slipped into Russia over the next several years. Some smuggled in new munitions, while others have relied on the original caches, according to two former military officials and a person who has been briefed on the sabotage campaign.”

What this means is that the U.S. war planners were fully anticipating the current proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.

This corroborates admissions by NATO chiefs and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the post-coup Kiev regime was prepped for war against Russia at least eight years prior to the eruption of hostilities in February 2022.

If indeed the CIA is behind the deeply penetrating attacks on Russia and President Biden has signed off on them, then that has grave implications for how this conflict can be resolved. It suggests that the United States has been systematically planning a war on Russia and is not simply reacting to Russia’s operation in Ukraine by supplying defensive weapons.

In other words, Ukraine was put on a hair-trigger, set to go off as a cover for American aggression against Russia.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... anned-war/

Yeah, it's all going on all the time but this is nonetheless alarmists.

*****************

From Cassad's Telegram account:

***

Colonelcassad
Prigozhin https://t.me/Prigozhin_hat/2321 in Makeevka.

1. The billing of mobile phones was called the preliminary reason for the missiles to hit the Makiivka vocational school. Is it necessary to take away the means of communication from the military while they are in their places of deployment? What are the rules for handling mobile phones for Wagner PMC?
2. What places for deployment are chosen for PMC “Wagner” in order to prevent shells from hitting the Armed Forces of Ukraine? Is it possible to use this practice in the Russian Armed Forces and why is it not being used now?
3. Why did the missiles fired at Makiivka fail to bring down the air defenses? Did they work at the wrong time, or were there too many shells?
4. How to avoid similar cases in the future? Place the military in the basements or are there any other ways?

We publish a comment by Evgeny Viktorovich:

“The questions are all very correct. But, unfortunately, I cannot give you a public answer to any of these questions, since my public answer will be the reason for the next blow. For clarity, I suggest you hang a wartime poster "Don't talk" in your office."

***

Yes, for christsake take away their phones!!People's dependency on these devices is frightening.

***

Colonelcassad
Starobelsk direction
situation as of 18.00 January 2, 2023

Image

🔻Artillery duels continue on the Kupyansko-Svatovsky section . Units of the 14th brigade and the 114th arr of the TRO of the Armed Forces of Ukraine conduct reconnaissance of Russian positions with the help of drones and advanced gunners in the area of ​​Olshany , Pervomaisky and Kislovka .

▪️In the vicinity west of Yagodnoye, a partial rotation of the forces of the 92nd brigade was carried out. Reinforcement with a tank arrived in the area of ​​​​responsibility of the brigade, and Javelin anti-tank systems were delivered to the area of ​​\u200b\u200bPeschanoye and Stelmakhovka .

▪️In addition, on January 6-7, an unidentified unit of the Ukrainian army is expected to arrive from the Zolochiv district in the Kharkiv region.

🔻In the Liman sector , the enemy is preparing for a large-scale attack on Kremennaya . Pontoon ferries were built at the Dronovka-Serebryanka line.

▪️Ukrainian DRGs use gaps in the defense of the RF Armed Forces to infiltrate rear areas. A railway convoy with personnel and equipment is expected to arrive in the combat area.

▪️Drone crews of the 66th brigade, 25th brigade, 80th and 95th brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are reconnaissance of the positions of the RF Armed Forces in the area of ​​Dibrova , Kremennaya , Belogorovka .

🔻At the moment, the most likely site of the offensive is the direction of Kremennaya. Now the Armed Forces of Ukraine are conducting an active counter-battery fight and searching for artillery firing points and air defense position areas.

The maneuvering groups of the RER of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are actively intercepting the communications of Russian military personnel and bearing the location of radar stations and personnel deployment points.

Along with this, the group is building up by transferring armored vehicles. With the arrival of cold weather and freezing of the soil, attempts to break through the defense of the RF Armed Forces near Dibrov and access to Kremennaya should be expected.

***

Colonelcassad

Image

Zaporizhia direction
situation as of 14.00 December 30, 2022

In the Zaporozhye direction, Russian military personnel entrenched themselves on the liberated lines as a result of a successful local offensive .

🔻In the Pologovsky sector , during the assault on Ukrainian positions, control over Dorozhnyanka was restored . The Ukrainian formations retreated to reserve lines, the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine amounted to 36 people killed and wounded.

▪️In addition, a Russian reconnaissance and sabotage group conducted a raid on Ukrainian positions north of Novopokrovka , eliminating three people at two observation posts.

▪️To regain control, the command of the 65th Mechanized Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is planning a counteroffensive from Zaliznichny with the support of units of the 103rd Battalion of the 108th Terodefense Brigade at the Belogorye-Charivnoe line .

On the defense line of 108 arr TRO, a rotation of personnel was carried out, and additional anti-tank guided missiles were delivered to the Javelin ATGM.

🔻In the Orekhovsky sector , reinforcements from among the mobilized were transferred to Shcherbaki, and detachments of the 108th brigade of the territorial defense of the Armed Forces of Ukraine arrived in the vicinity of Yegorovka and Omelnik .

▪️Local residents of the part of the Zaporozhye region controlled by Ukraine are spreading information about the preparation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces for an offensive in the direction of Tokmak .

***

Colonelcassad
Soledar direction
situation as of 12:00 January 2, 2023

Intense clashes continue in the vicinity of Bakhmut and Soledar . The Armed Forces of Ukraine are trying to hold back the advance of the Russian Armed Forces and intend to conduct reconnaissance in combat in the industrial zone to determine the front line of defense of Russian military personnel.

🔻In the Bakhmut (Artyomovsky) sector, the Armed Forces of Ukraine tried to recapture positions on the southeastern outskirts of Bakhmut with the forces of 57 ompbr. The attack was repulsed, the Ukrainian formations retreated with losses.

In the 57th brigade they spread information about the huge losses in the 17th battalion of the formation - only 100 people remained . On January 16, the 17th OpMB, which was previously withdrawn to Konstantinovka , will be disbanded, and the personnel will be transferred to other units.

In addition, formations that previously operated in the Kherson direction arrived in Chasov Yar . After a short coordination, the deployed units will become part of the 57th brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

▪️In the northeast of Bakhmut, the "Wagnerites" established control over two platoon strongholds near Podgorodny , as well as seven firing positions northwest of the Bakhmutskoye - Soledar line .

▪️In the southwest, the assault continues on the fortified area of ​​the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Kleshcheevka , held by combined detachments of 24 and 63 ombr, as well as 57 ombr. During the fighting, Russian troops established control over another strong point.

▪️Engineering detachments of the 28th Ombre of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are equipping the second line of defense in the Ivanopol region in case the line in Kleshcheevka is broken through .

🔻In the Soledar sector, assault detachments of the Wagner PMC are advancing on Soledar from the direction of Bakhmutsky and Yakovlevka . As a result of active battles, two company strongholds and five observation posts of the 128th Guards Rifle Brigade and 61st Ombre of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were liberated.

▪️At the same time, advancement continues in the direction of Razdolovka and Vesely . To deter the offensive, the engineering units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine have installed minefields in the center of Vesele, and artillery crews are firing at the southern outskirts of the village and Yakovlevka.

🔻In total, over the past two days, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have lost more than 200 irretrievable people as a result of battles and artillery strikes of the RF Armed Forces . In addition, an artillery strike hit the RAV warehouse in the Yablonovka area, where the personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were also located.

To make up for losses, the transfer of units of the National Guard of Ukraine from the Sumy region to Bakhmut is expected. In Konstantinovka, the distribution of diesel generators transferred by the United States as part of military assistance began.

Image

https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin

Google Translator

************

About the consumption of ammunition
January 3, 12:02

About the consumption of ammunition

Miscalculations of the General Staff in the rate of accumulation of shells (900 shots) led in 1914 to an acute shortage of shells for the army in the field. Urgent measures were required to save the army from complete shell starvation. The military industry was not ready to solve this problem.

Although the measures taken made it possible already in the first half of 1915 to improve the supply of artillery shells to the front, the "shell hunger" was fully eliminated only in 1916.

Modern industry of ammunition and special chemicals.
Engaged in the development and production of ammunition (AP) and cartridges of all types, gunpowder, rocket fuel, chemical warfare agents and special chemicals. As of 2022, the ammunition and special chemicals industry united 91 enterprises.

The Russian army in the early 1990s inherited from the Soviet army about 15 million tons of missiles and ammunition stored in 180 arsenals, bases and warehouses.

As of January 1, 2013, the presence of ammunition in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation is 3.7 million tons, of which 1.1 million tons are unusable. That is, suitable - 2.6 million tons.

In 2020, almost 300 thousand ammunition was repaired at the arsenals on its own, and more than 20 thousand shells for multiple launch rocket systems were collected.

The real need for ammunition is MILLIONS of pieces per year.

(c) Viktor Murakhovsky

https://t.me/Viktor_Murakhovskiy/398 - zinc

Actually, this question perfectly shows why our ancestors created and stored such huge stocks of ammunition.
And how many conversations there were - "Why?", "For what?", "Who needs it?" and other schizoid nonsense.
Now everyone understood that they were stockpiling and storing not in vain. And by the way, after this war, there will be a serious question of the need to replenish what has been spent in order to leave it to posterity. This applies not only to ammunition, but also to military equipment.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8076000.html

Google Translator

***************

A German-China-Russia Triangle on Ukraine
DECEMBER 31, 2022

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Chinese President Xi Jinping (Right) with Chairman of the United Russia Party Dmitry Medvedev (Left), Beijing, December 21, 2022. Photo: Yekaterina Shtukina/Sputnik.

By M. K. Bhadrakumar – Dec 24, 2022

The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken probably thought that in his self-appointed role as the world’s policeman, it was his prerogative to check out what is going on between Germany, China and Russia that he wasn’t privy to. Certainly, Blinken’s call to Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Friday turned out to be a fiasco.

Most certainly, his intention was to gather details on two high-level exchanges that Chinese President Xi Jinping had on successive days last week — with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the Chairman of the United Russia Party and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev respectively.

Blinken made an intelligent guess that Steinmeier’s phone call to Xi on Tuesday and Medvedev’s surprise visit to Beijing and his meeting with Xi on Wednesday might not have been coincidental. Medvedev’s mission would have been to transmit some highly sensitive message from Putin to Xi Jinping. Only last week, reports said Moscow and Beijing were working on a meeting between Putin and Xi Jinping later this month.

Steinmeier is an experienced diplomat who held the post of foreign minister from 2005 to 2009 and again from 2013 to 2017, as well as of Vice Chancellor of Germany from 2007 to 2009 — and all of it during the period Angela Merkel was the German chancellor (2005-2021). Merkel left a legacy of surge in Germany’s relations with both Russia and China.

Steinmeier is a senior politician belonging to the Social Democratic Party — same as present chancellor Olaf Scholz. It is certain that Steinmeier’s call with Xi was in consultation with Scholz. This is one thing.

Most importantly, Steinmeier had played a seminal role in negotiating the two Minsk Agreements (2014 and 2015), which provided for a package of measures to stop the fighting in Donbass in the downstream of the US-sponsored coup in Kiev.

When the Minsk agreements began unravelling by 2016, Steinmeier stepped in with an ingenious idea that later came to be known as the Steinmeier Formula spelling out the sequencing of events spelt out in the agreements.

Specifically, the Steinmeier formula called for elections to be held in the separatist-held territories of Donbass under Ukrainian legislation and the supervision of the OSCE. It proposed that if the OSCE judged the balloting to be free and fair, then a special self-governing status for the territories would be initiated.

Of course, all that is history today. Merkel “confessed” recently in an interview with Zeit newspaper that in reality, the Minsk agreement was a western attempt to buy “invaluable time” for Kiev to rearm itself.

Given this complex backdrop, Blinken would have sensed something was amiss when Steinmeier had a call with Xi Jinping out of the blue, and Medvedev made a sudden appearance in Beijing the next day and was received by the Chinese president. Notably, Beijing’s readouts were rather upbeat on China’s relationship with Germany and Russia.

Xi Jinping put forward a three-point proposal to Steinmeier on the development of China-Germany relations and stated that “China and Germany have always been partners of dialogue, development, and cooperation as well as partners for addressing global challenges.”

Similarly, in the meeting with Medvedev, he underscored that “China is ready to work with Russia to constantly push forward China-Russia relations in the new era and make global governance more just and equitable.”

Both readouts mentioned Ukraine as a topic of discussion, with Xi stressing that “China stays committed to promoting peace talks” (to Steinmeier) and “actively promoted peace talks” (to Medvedev).

But Blinken went about his mission clumsily by bringing to the fore the contentious US-China issues, especially “the current COVID-19 situation” in China and “the importance of transparency for the international community.” It comes as no surprise that Wang Yi gave a stern lecturing to Blinken not to “engage in dialogue and containment at the same time,” or to “talk cooperation, but stab China simultaneously.”

Wang Yi said, “This is not reasonable competition, but irrational suppression. It is not meant to properly manage disputes, but to intensify conflicts. In fact, it is still the old practice of unilateral bullying. This did not work for China in the past, nor will it work in the future.”

Specifically, on Ukraine, Wang Yi said, “China has always stood on the side of peace, of the purposes of the UN Charter, and of the international society to promote peace and talks. China will continue to play a constructive role in resolving the crisis in China’s own way.” From the US state department readout, Blinken failed to engage Wang Yi in a meaningful conversation on Ukraine.

Indeed, Germany’s recent overtures to Beijing in quick succession — Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s high-profile visit to China last month with a delegation of top German CEOs and Steinmeier’s phone call last week — have not gone down well in the Beltway.

The Biden Administration expects Germany to coordinate with Washington first instead of taking own initiatives toward China. (Interestingly, Xi Jinping underscored the importance of Germany preserving its strategic autonomy.)

The current pro-American foreign minister of Germany Annalena Baerbock distanced herself from Chancellor Scholz’s China visit. Evidently, Steinmeier’s phone call to Xi confirms that Scholz is moving according to a plan to pursue a path of constructive engagement with China, as Merkel did, no matter the state of play in the US’ tense relationship with China.

That said, discussing peacemaking in Ukraine with China is a daring move on the part of the German leadership at the present juncture when the Biden Administration is deeply engaged in a proxy war with Russia and has every intention to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” But there is another side to it. Germany has been internalizing its anger and humiliation during the past several months. Germany cannot but feel that it has been played in the countdown to the Ukraine conflict — something particularly galling for a country that is genuinely Atlanticist in its foreign-policy orientation.

German ministers have expressed displeasure publicly that American oil companies are brazenly exploiting the ensuing energy crisis to make windfall profits by selling gas at three to four times the domestic price in the US. Germany also fears that Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act building on foundational climate and clean energy investments may lead to the migration of German industry to America.

The unkindest cut of all has been the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline. Germany must be having a fairly good idea as to the forces that were behind that terrorist act, but it cannot even call them out and must suppress its sense of humiliation and indignation. The destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines makes a revival of German-Russian relationship an extremely tortuous affair. For any nation with a proud history, it is a bit too much to accept being pushed around like a pawn.

Scholz and Steinmeier are seasoned politicians and would know when to dig in and hunker down. In any case, China is a crucially important partner for Germany’s economic recovery. Germany can ill afford to let the US destroy its partnership with China also, and reduce it to a vassal state.

When it comes to Ukraine war, Germany becomes a frontline state but it is Washington that determines the western tactic and strategy. Germany estimates that China is uniquely placed to be a peacemaker in Ukraine. The signs are that Beijing is warming up to that idea too.

(Indian Punchline)

https://orinocotribune.com/a-german-chi ... n-ukraine/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Wed Jan 04, 2023 2:05 pm

The Makeevka tragedy
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 04/01/2023

Image

On Sunday, January 1, just a minute after midnight, Ukrainian HIMARS directly hit a vocational school building in Makeevka, a town just a few kilometers from Donetsk and therefore in full view of Ukrainian troops. Russia initially claimed to have recovered the bodies of 63 recruits, young Russians called up as a result of the mobilization that began after the Kharkov debacle and whom the authorities have failed to protect even in their bases. The complete destruction of the building and the huge number of people gathered there - whether or not they were for a party, something irrelevant considering the time and date of the attack, obviously prepared in advance - suggested that the figure would be much higher. Today, Russia has updated the figures to 89 deaths.

The incident shows a serious failure in the security of the troops, located in a place known to Ukraine, close to the front and in which an excessive number of people were concentrated, an easy target for enemy fire. Ukraine, which has claimed responsibility and bragged about the attack, has not had to answer questions about the similarity of this attack with the bombing of the Elenovka prison, where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war died and in which kyiv blamed Moscow to bomb their own territory. Russia, for its part, will not only have to clear up responsibilities, but will have to accept a situation that it apparently still does not fully understand: Ukraine has the ability to pursue Russian troops across much of the territory under Russian control, and any security lapse can lead to tragedies of this magnitude. The events have caused enormous anger in Russia, even among sectors favorable to military intervention and the press, which is why Moscow has not even had the option of denying or minimizing the events.

Criticism has not been long in coming and beyond the demand for accountability, several of these comments are aimed precisely at minimizing basic errors that put the lives of young recruits called up, Russian professional soldiers, members of the armies of the People's Republics, volunteers and also of the civilian population that they must protect from the Ukrainian bombardments. But if Russia is not able to properly protect its troops, it is hardly going to be able to protect, for example, the population of Makeevka or Donetsk.

Following what happened, correspondent Dmitry Steshin, who has spent months on the front lines and who has covered the war in Donbass since its inception in Slavyansk in 2014, was referring to a comment by Alexander Jodakovsky, founder of the Vostok battalion and in the war also from its first days, as an authority on the issue of troop security and what to do in the context of war. The reality is that those who have fought in Donbass since the start of the war are eight years ahead of those who are currently preparing the war from distant offices.

Dmitry Steshin's comment:

Alexander Khodakovsky about the tragedy in Makeevka. He is one of the few people with the capacity to assess this bloody history, because I know firsthand what measures are taken in Vostok to prevent these things from happening. Even on the front line. It is no coincidence that the first thing he did in the distant February 2022 was winter camouflage and that in summer he had a camouflage net for the car that completely covered one or more vehicles.

Security measures are elementary, here's how to watch TV. Settling in buildings with impacts to avoid chances of being targeted again and preventing soldiers from using generators at night or during blackouts are basics. The next level is not to prepare “a parking lot in the supermarket” in the places where decisions are made. Changing places where rotation soldiers are received, having different points of access to positions, always checking places to camouflage with the help of aerial reconnaissance equipment...

It seems that the Makeevka tragedy will serve as the basis for organizing the events. Once again, we have to thank the indoor wrestlers, who spent two days gorging on salads while the Ukrainians dished out the wildest theories and set the agenda. The culprits were not found until the second day and they were the dead and wounded [Russia claims that the use of mobile phones made the attack possible and Ukraine boasts of it, although it is more than questionable that Ukraine did not know that that school was being used as a base]. Ukrainian propagandists could not dream of such a gift.

Hours earlier, Alexander Jodakovsky, who has lived at the front during the years in which the DPR, with scarce resources, had to protect -something that it has not always done successfully, as shown by the assassinations of such important figures as Zakharchenko, Motorola or Givi- at ​​all costs to its personnel and equipment, thus referred to what happened in Makeevka:

When things like Makeevka's happen, helplessness overwhelms you. Powerlessness not for the enemy, but for ourselves. We will defeat the enemy only if we win over ourselves. We knew that our permanent destinations were on the kill list and we took steps to minimize personnel presence there. It's obvious that stacks will attack, wouldn't we do the same? What has happened cannot be changed. It is possible to prevent a recurrence, but if action is not taken after this tragedy, the responsibility will fall first and foremost on those whose inaction has led to these consequences.

Commanding is not leading the battle under pressure, it is not making decisions in a basement with constant connection problems, when the situation changes every minute. It's sitting in a warm room without humidity and bothering to think about the possible consequences or acting according to simple rules. In conditions of accumulation of resources near the front line, that is, in the combat zone, there is more than one Makeevka vocational school in danger. We know that there are still places of accumulation of personnel that are known to the enemy and we are waiting for the reaction of the military authorities. If it does not happen and there is another enemy attack, the failure can only be understood as treason .


The messages from Steshin or Jodakovsky, who have known about the war since it began and who have defended the Russian intervention since February 2022, are significant: in the face of the apathy and lack of self-thinking that the Western press ascribes to the Russian population, these stand out days of anger at the way in which the authorities have failed to provide minimal protection for the troops. This discontent does not come only from those who are against the war, but fundamentally from those who accuse the country's political and military authorities of not recognizing the reality of a war that goes far beyond a special military operation .

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/01/04/la-tr ... more-26341

Google Translator

I dunno, while some of the above is no doubt true that is no excuse to let the phones off the hook. They are a serious security risk and abolishing their presence from active military zones is mandatory, despite the apparent addictive effect that they have. Perhaps a good idea for society in general....

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Donbass: The War on Remembrance
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 3, 2023
Arnaud Develay

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World War II memorial in Saur-Mogila. [Source: Photo courtesy of Arnaud Develay]

The Ukrainian Army wants not only to annihilate pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine but also wipe out the region’s heroic history of resisting the Nazi onslaught in World War II.


We had just received the news that another shelling had taken place.

To be sure, the school we had just left had been hit for the umpteenth time with a 155 mm NATO-made missile during the morning hours. The quasi-totality of the window frames was covered with wood panels which bore witness to the almost frantic desire of the NATO-supported Kyiv regime not only to target the most vulnerable but also to impede the transmission of remembrance in an attempt to eradicate the future.

In what has become a grim reminder of the daily ordeal suffered by the population of Donetsk these past nine years, we drove to the site of the bombardment only to discover that this time the target had been the football stadium.

Known as the Donbas Arena, this state-of-the-art stadium had been home to the Shakhtar Donetsk (the Donetsk Coal Miners) football team since its inauguration in 2009.

It embodied the vibrant economy of the region and its then-attractiveness to foreign investors. (The structure had been built and completed ahead of schedule by a Turkish consortium and its architectural style was conceived by a famed British designer.) The DONBAS ARENA was selected to host a few games of the 2012 European Football Championships, including a semi-final game featuring future champion Spain.

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What immediately struck me upon arriving at the site was that it was built adjacent to the city’s war memorial in Lenin Komsomol Park.

Known as the Monument dedicated to the DONBAS Liberators, the site features a towering 18-meter high sculpture depicting a soldier and a miner (Donetsk’s name during the Soviet Era was Stalino and as the symbol of the city’s then-vibrant mining industry, “Stalino” had been named as twin city to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) jointly holding a sword with its edge planted firmly in the ground.

At the foot of the statue stands the entrance to a museum with an eternal flame.

The Monument was dedicated to “the memory of all military units and formations that liberated Donbas during the Great Patriotic War.

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The contrast between the gravitas oozing from this place in opposition to the consumerism, almost pagan rituals, symbolized by the stadium situated a stone’s throw away highlights the struggle currently taking place in this part of the world against the unhinged forces of materialism.

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The cult of money and ephemera-like gratification of supporting football teams stands in stark contrast with the timeless sobriety and dignified undertones emanating from the site where the names of thousands of martyrs are forever etched in dark granite.

In the background, the thundering of artillery resonated sporadically in the grim grey sky as if to remind the visitor that the war is ongoing and that its outcome is still uncertain.

This dichotomy plays out throughout all of the Donbas.

We then drove to a place where the current war might very well have turned out completely differently had it not been for a few soldiers turning the tide of fate against incredible odds back in 2014.

As a place where the forces of nihilism also attempted to eradicate the memory of those who had given their lives in liberating the region, Saur-Mogila was “the focal point of intense fighting, when Soviet troops managed to retake control of the height from German forces in August 1943. In 1963, a memorial complex was unveiled at the top of the hill to honor fallen soldiers, comprising an obelisk with a steel-and-concrete statue of a Soviet soldier, four steel-and-concrete sculptures built along the slope leading up to the obelisk (each memorializing infantrymen, tank men, artillerymen and airmen involved in the battle), and walls inscribed with the names of fallen soldiers in the battle.”[1]

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In May 2014, the Kyiv junta launched a massive military attack on this highly strategic hill. They started by bombing World War II war memorials. A few DPR volunteers managed to contain the offensive by calling their artillery gunners to target their own coordinates with the intention of inflicting huge casualties on the enemy.

This tactic succeeded in allowing the Republic of Donetsk time to mobilize in a way conducive to survival in order to prolong the struggle. “Alec,” one of these heroes, was with us and told us about the ferocity of the fighting. He joined the ranks of the volunteers at 48 years old. He is now 57. He testifies that, in the heat of the moment, he called on his commanders “to bomb the Germans.”

Former SBU operative Vassili Prozorov perfectly captured the war for the control of the narrative going in Ukraine for at least 20 years. In his documentary “Culturocide,” he recalls in detail how the school manuals throughout the cities of the Lugansk and Donetsk Republic were aimed at brainwashing children with crude russophobic propaganda and an invented history of Ukraine predicated on an ideology known as “integral nationalism.”[2]

Oleksii Arestovych, a former intelligence officer now serving as an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, once stated that “Ukraine’s national narrative is predicated on a lie that we tell ourselves and others for if the truth was to come out, the country would cease to exist.”[3]

These are the stakes of the Special Military Operation.

References:

1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donbas_st ... gust_1943)
2.https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/v ... tion=click
3.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aXu1lYABJI

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... membrance/

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Attack "Geranei" at CHP-5 in Kyiv
January 4, 15:13

Image

Night attack by "Geran" on the thermal power plant in Kiev
Despite the serious fire resistance, at least 1 "Geran" reached the target - CHP-5 was hit.

(Video at link)

Actually, the whole story with Geranium attacks shows that even in conditions of air defense massing to cover key objects, these drones, when used en masse, are capable of breaking through the defense of an air defense center. This was revealed back in Yemen, where air defense units were built on the basis of American air defense systems. Ukraine only confirmed the obvious.

At the same time, it is not difficult to imagine what effect Geraniums achieve when they attack objects less covered by air defense systems. According to various estimates, the Zelensky gang pulled together from 30 to 40% of all air defense systems near Kyiv, including most Western systems, which is not difficult to notice from the regular detection of fragments of NASAMS and IRIS-T missiles in Kyiv.

As you might guess, interest in buying Iranian drones will increase after such videos.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8077940.html

Statement of the Russian Ministry of Defense on the shelling of a vocational school in Makeevka
January 4, 6:07 am

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Statement of the Russian Ministry of Defense on the shelling of a vocational school in Makeevka

▪️On January 1, at 00:01 Moscow time, the artillery of the Armed Forces of Ukraine dealt a blow with 6 shells of the Khaimars MLRS at the point of temporary deployment of one of the Russian military units in the city of Makeevka.

▪️2 rockets were intercepted by air defense forces on duty.

▪️4 rockets with a high-explosive fragmentation warhead hit the building where the Russian military was stationed. From the detonation of the warheads of the Hymars rockets, the ceilings of the building collapsed.

▪️Immediately after the tragedy, the command and officers of this military unit, junior commanders and servicemen of other units, took all available measures to save the victims. First aid was provided, the wounded were evacuated to medical facilities.

▪️Unfortunately, during the analysis of the rubble of reinforced concrete structures, the number of our comrades who died increased to 89. Among the dead was the deputy commander of the regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Bachurin.

▪️All the victims and the families of the dead servicemen are provided with all the necessary assistance and support.

▪️The launcher of the MLRS, from which the Armed Forces of Ukraine fired at Makiivka, was destroyed by return fire.

▪️Also, as a result of missile and air strikes on the accumulation of military equipment in the area of ​​​​the Druzhkovka railway station of the DPR, another 4 Himars MLRS launchers, 4 RM-70 Vampire MLRS combat vehicles, more than 800 rockets for them, 8 vehicles, and also more than 200 Ukrainian Nazis and foreign mercenaries.

▪️In addition, in the area of ​​​​Maslovka, a temporary deployment point of one of the units of the "Foreign Legion" was hit, where more than 130 foreign mercenaries were destroyed.

▪️Currently, a commission is working to investigate the circumstances of the incident. But it is already obvious that the main reason for what happened was the inclusion and massive use, contrary to the ban, by personnel of mobile phones in the reach of enemy weapons. This factor allowed the enemy to locate and determine the coordinates of the location of military personnel for launching a missile strike.

▪️Necessary measures are currently being taken to prevent similar tragic incidents in the future. As a result of the investigation, the guilty officials will be brought to justice.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8076951.html

2022. Year of Lost Illusions
January 4, 13:54

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2022. Year of Lost Illusions

The special military operation (SVO) in Ukraine that began on February 24, 2022, launched a chain of processes that led to a global conflict, politically and economically comparable in scale to world wars. We are probably in the initial phase of this conflict, over time more and more players will be involved in it, however, some conclusions can be drawn already now.

The past year was the year of the collision of postmodernism with the real world. Almost all direct and indirect participants in the Ukrainian crisis built their domestic and foreign policies on theoretical, highly ideological constructions, on wishful thinking, and the more the consequences are more difficult for them.

Let's take a look at the main players.

Russia

Our first and main illusion is about the negotiability of counterparties. Throughout the post-Soviet period, we tried to resolve peace in Ukraine, based on the fact that it would be better for everyone: the West, on the border with a leading nuclear power, would receive a predictable security belt and clear rules of the game, coupled with a high degree of influence on Ukraine; Europe, in addition, will maintain and strengthen ties with Russia as a major resource base and a vast sales market; Ukraine will get the opportunity of soft integration into Europe while maintaining deep economic and cultural ties with Russia, while Russia, in addition to further gradual integration into the Western and, first of all, into the European system (up to symbiosis), will retain influence on Ukraine and guarantee Kyiv’s friendly policy towards attitude towards both Moscow and the multi-million Russian population in Ukraine.

Nevertheless, the entire history of post-Soviet Ukraine is a history of reverse movement (more on that below); this movement has become irreversible since 2014, and consistent ignoring of this fact, attempts to re-stubborn the large-scale historical process with agreements either with Kyiv or with the West led us to the NWO. What exactly went wrong at the end of February, we will not know soon. But if Moscow set a goal to solve the Ukrainian problem according to the Georgian scenario - with little bloodshed and within a few days, this goal, obviously, was not achieved.

The anti-Russian outpost that had been created for thirty years turned out to be very strong and ready to fight even at the cost of its own destruction - again, contrary to common sense, as it is understood in Moscow.

I would like to believe that Moscow's illusions have been finally dispelled, and our military-political leadership no longer hopes for the sanity of the West and Kyiv. However, so far, the course of the NMD suggests rather the opposite: after the February throw, offensive operations are carried out only in the Donbass, and not along the entire front, but in local areas - mainly by the forces of PMCs and the former people's militia of the republics. There is a feeling that during the year we did not really understand what to do next, as if we were waiting for the enemy to get bored before us, and he would finally begin to negotiate for real.

Our second illusion is the combat capabilities of the army. The actions of the Armed Forces of Russia (RF Armed Forces) during the NVO in a patriotic environment are usually scolded. But it should be understood that since the time of the Serdyukov reform, our army has not been preparing for a large-scale land conflict with a front line of a couple of thousand kilometers, with the need to conduct combined arms operations at the level of the Great Patriotic War, with the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people. It won't change overnight. And although the identified shortcomings in the actions of the RF Armed Forces, the General Staff and the rear are recognized and somehow eliminated, we still do not see a full-scale offensive with the decisive goal of defeating the Ukrainian army (AFU). Maybe we'll see it next year. Perhaps the army is preparing right now, and not waiting.

USA

The main illusion of the United States in the post-Cold War era is about complete control (or at least dominance) over the processes taking place in the world, and therefore the conviction that the degree of consideration for the interests of counterparties is determined in Washington, and only in Washington. Simply put, as I want, it will be so, and if it is not the way I want, then I have enough means to coerce and punish those who disobeyed.

In many respects, this inflexibility led to the current crisis: if desired, it was possible to negotiate with Russia - saving face and even to its own economic and political benefit: Moscow was probably ready for a lot in response.

A similar situation is observed all over the world: everywhere the States act on the principle of "there is power - no mind is needed."

In the Middle East, such behavior has already led the US to a sharp weakening of its position; made the prospect of conflict with China almost irreversible; time bombs have been planted under relations with allies in Europe and Asia that are likely to go off in the coming years.

Since the Second World War, the United States has been creating a global system, in a way, a new type of empire. They consistently took control of the political and economic processes in the world without encountering much resistance - on the contrary, everyone tried to integrate into this system, receiving in return some sales markets and access to cheap money, some - a security umbrella and the opportunity not to spend money on the army, some - Newest technologies.

The United States itself, having found itself in the role of the mother country of the Earth, skimmed off all this, and after several generations, the American political class became convinced that such a system was not the result of painstaking work and taking into account the interests of partners, but some kind of birthright, sometimes becoming a burden. Hence the stagnation, and the further - the greater the hysteria of American foreign policy, attempts to force others to act in their own way and, as a result, undermine the global American-centric system.

The United States has a solid margin of safety, the food base is still extensive, alternative global institutions are just beginning to take shape, so one should not expect noticeable changes in American policy in the coming years, especially since the internal split, on the contrary, is forcing to increase foreign policy tension.

The second American (and also European) illusion is that a military conflict of the Ukrainian scale can be won without direct involvement in it. Yes, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are holding up well, but Russia has so far deployed a small part of its military resources in the NMD, and the degree of escalation on our part is now determined by political decisions, and not by military and mobilization capabilities. If we are willing and ready, we can multiply the onslaught, which will be extremely difficult for the West and the United States to respond to without direct involvement in the conflict with their troops (at least air defense and air force). However, President Biden has repeatedly stressed that he will not agree to such an intervention as long as he lives.

Europe

The main illusion of Europe is that its well-fed well-being of the last decades is its own merit, and that it is based on a set of some abstract values. In fact, the well-being of Europe stood on two pillars: the American military, political and economic roof and a cheap resource base, primarily Russian.

The absence of the need to take care of one’s own security, resources and sales markets, the impossibility of internal conflicts, on the one hand, contributed to an unprecedented economic take-off, a real golden age, and on the other hand, led to the degeneration of European elites and the political class, who sincerely believed that this would be the case. always and that for this it is enough to cultivate values ​​and strive to spread them to the entire surrounding backward world.

This explains the obstinacy of Europe in the Ukrainian issue - obstinacy, bordering on fanaticism. Europe takes the most vicious anti-Russian sanctions with the greatest zeal, regardless of any damage.

If the United States in this crisis is borrowing from the future, then Europe naturally shoots bursts at its knees.

Here and now, it is depriving itself of a large market, its most important resource base, and is sent into almost colonial dependence on Washington, which, unlike Europe, has real military power and real control over political and economic processes in the world.

After the combined attempt by the West to give Russia economic shock and awe failed, the leaders of Europe are at a loss: the same people, with a difference of a couple of days, can talk about the need for a military victory over Russia and the need for diplomatic dialogue - seemingly without really understanding what "military victory" means and what "diplomatic dialogue" means.

The prospect of many years of multiple growth in energy prices and, as a result, deindustrialization and falling living standards, the prospect of a trade war with the United States in a global recession, the prospect of maintaining a devastated Ukraine for an indefinite number of years, the prospect of hundreds of billions of losses from the loss of accumulated investments in Russia is already sobering, but does not yet lead to any decisions - there is simply no one to make and implement them. Plus, the long-standing problems of the European Union that it stumbled over in previous years have not disappeared: the migration crisis, the constant balancing of southern Europe on the verge of economic collapse.
The undermining of Nord Stream was a milestone, primarily in terms of what is allowed and what is not in the handling of strategically important infrastructure. Such schemes have so far remained the lot of authors of spy detective stories. But there is another aspect - the state and nature of relations between Europe and the United States, the so-called transatlantic relations.

Ukraine

The main illusion of Ukraine is the belief in the possibility of building a mono-ethnic state hostile to Russia within the post-Soviet borders with a significant share of the Russian population, as well as the conviction that such a Ukraine will be infinitely favored by both the West and Russia itself - as they say, for beautiful eyes.

Ukraine is not Poland, and the attempt to pursue its own policy led to a civil conflict, each side of which was supported by the West and Russia, respectively. After this conflict entered an open phase in 2014, Ukraine began to turn from an anti-Russian outpost into a weapon, into a kind of kamikaze drone of the West against Russia.

It should be admitted that this was partly successful: both the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Ukrainian state as a whole withstood the February blow, recovered and, with the support of the West, inflicted a number of painful defeats on Russia by autumn.

Military successes, however, are not of a strategic nature, and their cost is the death of the Ukrainian economy. According to various estimates, up to a third of the population fled Ukraine, production was cut by half even before the Russian strikes on energy facilities that began in October, and by the new year, according to official statements from Kyiv, already by 70 percent. This means unemployment, an empty treasury, the impoverishment of the population and massive closures of enterprises.

Yes, now the West acts as a powerful rear for Ukraine and goes to serious expenses for this, however, it evades direct involvement in battles, shifting all the hardships and hardships to Kyiv. Whatever the outcome of the hot phase of the conflict, the devastated Ukraine, apparently, will have to deal with its consequences on its own, and the further, the more difficult these consequences will be.

However, even if among the Ukrainian elites someone even guesses how they are being used, they cannot stop. The control from the West is too tight, the ideological pumping is too great, everything has gone too far.

Ukraine now is a zombie, a walking dead man, and he will walk as long as the West galvanizes him. However, even in this form, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are capable of fighting for years, especially with the current sluggish course of the conflict.

The West can refuse to galvanize Ukraine only in one case: if the Armed Forces of Ukraine are defeated and physically lose the ability to fight, if Ukraine is physically reduced enough to lose its strategic significance for the West. Any truces will only postpone the conflict for the future, and one should not have any illusions about this.

The global conflict is only growing. For both Russia and the West, it is existential, and neither side shows an inclination to compromise. It is all the more surprising that the hostilities are still relatively local in nature, limited to one Ukrainian theater, and even on it - in a dosed and positional manner. It seems that the parties have focused on how to learn how to live in the new conditions, which means that the development of the next world order and the rules of the game has a chance to go relatively peacefully, without turning into an endless struggle of all against all with the risk of a nuclear catastrophe.

The initiative in this process will be given to those who accept reality before others, understand their place in it, and begin to act accordingly. This applies not only to the participants in the Ukrainian crisis listed above, but also to neutral countries that have yet to part with their own illusions.

(c) Sergey Poletaev (Vatfor project)

https://globalaffairs.ru/articles/ob-utrate-illyuzij/ - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8077700.html

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With an Eye on Iran, Netanyahu Wades into the Ukraine War
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 3, 2023
M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

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Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a meeting in Sochi

In his second coming as Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has hit the ground running. The international climate in which he skilfully operated for close to 15 years in two stints as prime minister has changed beyond recognition.

Netanyahu’s foreign policy legacy has become listless — principally, the Abraham Accords and Israel’s hugely consequential relationship with Russia, both of which significantly impacted the tough neighbourhood in which he successfully navigated Israel’s core interests.

For sure, breathing new life into the above two vectors — Abraham Accords (Israel- Saudi ties) and Israel’s relations with Russia — will remain top priorities for Netanyahu. While Israel-Saudi relations impact regional security, Israel’s relations with Russia will have far-reaching consequences for Israel’s security. That is for three reasons.

First, Putin is at war with the US and the Western world who are Israel’s traditional allies. But Netanyahu is anything but a one-dimensional man. Trust him to turn challenges into new opportunities.

Second, recapturing the verve in the relationship with Moscow has a great deal of collateral significance. Russia has become a full-fledged West Asian actor today and, arguably, in certain ways makes a more effective regional partner for Israel than the US. The US’ retrenchment is plain to see and the ensuing decline of its capacity to leverage allies such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE or Egypt hits Israeli interests.

Third, during these 18 months that Netanyahu was out of office, Russia and Iran have turned around their difficult relationship into a quasi-alliance, thanks to western sanctions against Moscow. Netanyahu senses the folly of the West trying to “erase” Russia.

The media is discussing a possible deal between Moscow and Tehran over Russia’s Su-35 Super Flanker multi-role 4+ generation fighter jets. What lends an intriguing touch is that the deepening military ties between them coincide with Tehran’s intention to expand its uranium enrichment program. Iran reportedly reached 60% enrichment of uranium at its Fordow enrichment plant and has reportedly informed the IAEA that it had started to enrich uranium at the higher levels.

Then, there is the Syrian sub-plot where Israel continues to operate in that country’s air space, which Russia controls, largely due to the secret understanding between Netanyahu and Putin whereby Moscow acquiesced with Israeli activities to contain Iran and its militia groups and squash its attempt to turn Syria into yet another “resistance front” like Lebanon or Gaza.

However, it is the Ukraine war that has dramatically uplifted Russia-Iran strategic ties. Netanyahu realises that the fledgling Russo-Iranian quasi-alliance can be tackled if the Russian dependency on Iranian military technology is rolled back.

That ultimately requires that the Ukraine war should be brought to an end sooner rather than later and also an easing of western sanctions. Most certainly, the war should not be allowed to run its current indeterminate course. This is precisely where Netanyahu can be expected to concentrate his formidable diplomatic skill.

The signs are there already. Soon after taking over as the new foreign minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet, on Monday, Eli Cohen stated that he was planning to have a conversation with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov on January 3.

The manner in which way Cohen framed this disarmingly simple proposition during his inaugural speech (which was broadcast live by Israeli Foreign Ministry’s press service) needs to be carefully noted: “Tomorrow, I am supposed to talk with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and later on with other European ministers.”

Earlier, in a recent speech, Cohen hinted that on the issue of Russia and Ukraine, Netanyahu government will be discreet in its public utterances, pointing toward a major course correction toward engaging Russia. The outgoing Israeli PM Yair Lapid had condemned Russia publicly. Since the Russian operation in Ukraine began on February 24, Lapid as FM never once spoke with Lavrov — or with Putin, while officiating as interim PM.

However, even under Lapid, Israel’s pro-Kiev policies did not go far beyond rhetoric. The Israeli ambassador to Kiev, Michael Brodsky told Washington Post recently that Israel’s relations with Russia are creating “limits that cannot be overcome.” Brodsky added that Israel is aware of the “frustration of some Ukrainian Jews,” but “no government in Israel is going to jeopardise this interest [with Russia] for anybody else, including the Ukrainians.” Brodsky also noted that Israel’s situation is “fragile,” as it is not part of NATO, and most Ukrainian Jews understand that Israel is in a “tough position.”

For Israel, Russia is not like any country. Russian-speakers constitute 15% of Israel’s population. It is an influential constituency in Israeli domestic politics and has kinship with the Jewish population in Russia. Russian investment in Israel is rather substantial and it is an open secret that Russia’s oligarchs viewed Israel as a home away from home.

Truly, the umbilical chords that tie Russian culture and history with Jerusalem cannot easily be ruptured. Only last week, Moscow reiterated its demand to reclaim Russian assets in Israel. Former prime minister Sergei Stepashin who handles the issue announced in Moscow that Russia will submit a claim to Israeli court for the Church of Mary Magdalene, Chapel of the Ascension, and the Viri Galilaei Church!

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Church of Mary Magdalene, Orthodox Christian Church on Mount of Olives across the Temple Mount in Jerusalem built in 1888 by Tsar Alexander III and his brothers to honour their mother

Putin has also demanded an end to the litigation preventing the transfer of Alexander Nevsky Church in the Old City, after commitments made by Benjamin Netanyahu during a previous term as prime minister. Conceivably, such demands are part of internal Russian politics as well.

The Kremlin feels elated that Netanyahu is back in the diplomatic circuit. What is most gratifying will be that unlike the previous Israeli set-up, Netanyahu will not passively accept a subaltern role in the US-Israeli partnership.

Netanyahu has extensive networking with American elites and he won’t hesitate to leverage it if Israeli interests are at stake. And, without doubt, Israel is a stakeholder in the Ukraine crisis and Israeli interests are well served by creating space for peace talks to commence between Moscow and Kiev.

Netanyahu has Putin’s ears and can play a role for the Biden Administration, too, like no other western leader can perform today. On the other hand, Iran’s nuclear programme is turning into a fuming volcano and a point may come very soon when Netanyahu will be compelled to act. And that could happen in the 2024 election year, something that the Biden Administration can ill-afford to see happening. Suffice it to say, the Ukraine conflict and Iran’s bomb are joined at the hips, as it were.

Putin said in a message to Netanyahu on Thursday, “In Russia, we greatly appreciate your personal and longstanding contribution to strengthening friendly relations between our countries.” Russia’s foreign ministry said it was “ready for constructive cooperation” with Israel to “clear up the climate in the Middle East and the international scene in general”.

On December 22, Putin called Netanyahu to congratulate him on his election victory and the establishment of a new government, while Netanyahu’s office disclosed in a statement that the conversation mainly revolved around the conflict in Ukraine. Netanyahu told Putin he hopes a resolution to end hostilities will be found as soon as possible, and the consequent suffering.

Netanyahu also told Putin that he is determined to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and curb Tehran’s attempts to establish military presence in Lebanon and Syria along Israel’s northern border.

To be sure, Putin is all ears and eyes for Netanyahu. The point is, Moscow gains if diplomacy reappears on the wasteland of Ukraine issue. Certainly, it is far from the case that Russia is enjoying the destruction of Ukraine or the sorrows of the fraternal people.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... raine-war/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Wed Jan 04, 2023 11:13 pm

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Torchlight parade behind portrait of Bandera on his birthday, Jan. 1, 2015. (Wikimedia Commons)

On the influence of neo-Nazism in Ukraine
Originally published: Consortium News on December 29, 2022 by Joe Lauria (more by Consortium News) | (Posted Jan 04, 2023)

The U.S. relationship with Ukrainian fascists began after the Second World War. During the war, units of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) took part in the Holocaust, killing at least 100,000 Jews and Poles. Mykola Lebed, a top aide to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the fascist OUN-B, was recruited by the C.I.A. after the war, according to a 2010 study by the U.S. National Archives.

The government study said, “Bandera’s wing (OUN/B) was a militant fascist organization.” Bandera’s closest deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko, said:

I… fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine… I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine… The study says:

At a July 6, 1941, meeting in Lwów, Bandera loyalists determined that Jews ‘have to be treated harshly… We must finish them off… Regarding the Jews, we will adopt any methods that lead to their destruction.’


Lebed himself proposed to “’cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population,’ so that a resurgent Polish state would not claim the region as in 1918.” Lebed was the “foreign minister” of a Banderite government in exile, but he later broke with Bandera for acting as a dictator. The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps termed Bandera “extremely dangerous” yet said he was “looked upon as the spiritual and national hero of all Ukrainians…”

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C.I.A.’s Allen Dulles asks U.S. Immigration to allow Lebed re-entry to U.S. despite murder conviction. (From Hitler’s Shadow. Click to enlarge.)

The C.I.A. was not interested in working with Bandera, pages 81-82 of the report say, but the British MI6 was. “MI6 argued, Bandera’s group was ‘the strongest Ukrainian organization abroad, is deemed competent to train party cadres, [and] build a morally and politically healthy organization…’” An early 1954 MI6 summary noted that,

the operational aspect of this [British] collaboration [with Bandera] was developing satisfactorily. Gradually a more complete control was obtained over infiltration operations…

Britain ended its collaboration with Bandera in 1954. West German intelligence, under former Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen, then worked with Bandera, who was eventually assassinated with cyanide dust by the KGB in Munich in 1959.

Instead of Bandera, the C.I.A. was interested in Lebed, despite his fascist background. They set him up in an office in New York City from which he directed sabotage and propaganda operations on the agency’s behalf inside Ukraine against the Soviet Union. The U.S. government study says:

CIA operations with these Ukrainians began in 1948 under the cryptonym CARTEL, soon changed to AERODYNAMIC… Lebed relocated to New York and acquired permanent resident status, then U.S. citizenship. It kept him safe from assassination, allowed him to speak to Ukrainian émigré groups, and permitted him to return to the United States after operational trips to Europe. Once in the United States, Lebed was the CIA’s chief contact for AERODYNAMIC. CIA handlers pointed to his ‘cunning character,’ his ‘relations with the Gestapo and… Gestapo training,’ [and] the fact that he was ‘a very ruthless operator.’

The C.I.A. worked with Lebed on sabotage and pro-Ukrainian nationalist propaganda operations inside Ukraine until Ukraine’s independence in 1991. “Mykola Lebed’s relationship with the CIA lasted the entire length of the Cold War,” the study says.

While most CIA operations involving wartime perpetrators backfired, Lebed’s operations augmented the fundamental instability of the Soviet Union.

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Bandera monument in Lvov. (wikimapia.org)

Bandera Revival

The U.S. thus covertly kept Ukrainian fascist ideas alive inside Ukraine until at least Ukrainian independence was achieved. “Mykola Lebed, Bandera’s wartime chief in Ukraine, died in 1998. He is buried in New Jersey, and his papers are located at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University,” the U.S. National Archives study says.

The successor organization to the OUN-B in the United States did not die with him, however. It had been renamed the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), according to IBT.

“By the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration was honeycombed with UCCA members. Reagan personally welcomed [Yaroslav] Stetsko, the Banderist leader who oversaw the massacre of 7,000 Jews in Lviv, in the White House in 1983,” IBT reported. “Following the demise of Yanukovich’s regime, the UCCA helped organise rallies in cities across the U.S. in support of the EuroMaidan protests,” it reported.

That is a direct link between Maidan and WWII-era Ukrainian fascism.
Despite the U.S. favoring the less extreme Lebed over Bandera, the latter has remained the more inspiring figure in Ukraine.

In 1991, the first year of Ukraine’s independence, the neo-fascist Social National Party, later Svoboda Party, was formed, tracing its provenance directly to Bandera. It had a street named after Bandera in Liviv, and tried to name the city’s airport after him. (Svoboda won 10 percent of the Rada’s seats in 2012 before the coup and before McCain and Nuland appeared with its leader the following year.)

In 2010, pro-Western Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko declared Bandera a Hero of Ukraine, a status reversed by Yanukovych, who was overthrown.

More than 50 monuments, busts and museums commemorating Bandera have been erected in Ukraine, two-thirds of which have been built since 2005, the year the pro-American Yuschenko was elected. A Swiss academic study says:

On January 13, 2011, the L’vivs’ka Oblast’ Council, meeting at an extraordinary session next to the Bandera monument in L’viv, reacted to the abrogation [skasuvannya] of Viktor Yushchenko’s order about naming Stepan Bandera a ‘Hero of Ukraine’ by affirming that ‘for millions of Ukrainians Bandera was and remains a Ukrainian Hero notwithstanding pitiable and worthless decisions of the courts’ and declaring its intention to rename ‘Stepan Bandera Street’ as ‘Hero of Ukraine Stepan Bandera Street.’

Torchlit parades behind Bandera’s portrait are common in Ukrainian cities, particularly on Jan. 1, his birthday, including this year.

Mainstream on Neo-Nazis

From the start of the 2013-2014 events in Ukraine, Consortium News founder Robert Parry and other writers began providing the evidence NewsGuard says doesn’t exist, reporting extensively on the coup and the influential role of Ukraine’s neo-Nazis. At the time, corporate media also reported on the essential part neo-Nazis played in the coup.

As The New York Times reported, the neo-Nazi group, Right Sector, had the key role in the violent ouster of Yanukovych. The role of neo-fascist groups in the uprising and its influence on Ukrainian society was well reported by mainstream media outlets at the time.

The BBC, the NYT, the Daily Telegraph and CNN all reported on Right Sector, C14 and other extremists’ role in the overthrow of Yanukovych. The BBC ran this report a week after his ouster:





After the coup a number of ministers in the new government came from neo-fascist parties. NBC News (green check) reported in March 2014: “Svoboda, which means ‘Freedom,’ was given almost a quarter of the Cabinet positions in the interim government formed after the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych in February.”

Svoboda’s leader, Tyahnybok, whom McCain and Nuland stood on stage with, once called for the liberation of Ukraine from the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” The International Business Times (green check) reported:

In 2005 Tyahnybok signed an open letter to then Ukrainain president Viktor Yushchenko urging him to ban all Jewish organisations, including the Anti-Defamation League, which he claimed carried out ‘criminal activities [of] organised Jewry’, ultimately aimed at the genocide of the Ukrainian people.

Before McCain and Nuland embraced Tyahnybok and his social national party, it was condemned by the European Parliament, which said in 2012:

[Parliament] recalls that racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views go against the EU’s fundamental values and principles and therefore appeals to pro-democratic parties in the Verkhovna Rada [Ukraine’s legislature] not to associate with, endorse, or form coalitions with this party.
Such mainstream reports on Banderism have stopped as the neo-fascist role in Ukraine was suppressed in Western media once Putin made “de-nazification” a goal of the invasion.


The Azov Battalion, which arose during the coup, became a significant force in the war against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass, who resisted the coup. Its commander, Andriy Biletsky, infamously said Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival … against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

In 2014 the now Azov Regiment was officially incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard under the control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It is further integrated into the state by working closely with the SBU intelligence service. Azov is the only known neo-fascist component in a nation’s military anywhere in the world.

As part of the Ukraine military, Azov members have still sported yellow arm bands (until this week) with the Wolfsangel once worn by German SS troops in World War II. Including the atrocities it has continued to commit, Azov shows the world that integration into the state has not denazified them. On the contrary, it may have increased its influence on the state.

The U.S. and NATO have also trained and armed Azov since Barack Obama had denied lethal aid to Ukraine. One reason Obama declined sending arms to Ukraine was because he was afraid they may fall into these right-wing extremists’ hands. According to the green-checked New York Times,

Mr. Obama continues to pose questions indicating his doubts. ‘O.K., what happens if we send in equipment—do we have to send in trainers?’ said one person paraphrasing the discussion on the condition of anonymity. ‘What if it ends up in the hands of thugs? What if Putin escalates?

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Collage of Neo-fascist leader Oleh Tyahnybok. meeting with McCain, Biden and Nuland. (Facebook image by Red, White and You of clip from film Ukraine on Fire)

NewsGuard’s Objections

NewsGuard’s argument against the major influence of neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine rests on neo-fascist political parties faring poorly at the polls. This ignores the stark fact that these groups engage instead in extra-parliamentary extremism.

In its charge against Consortium News for publishing “false content” about neo-fascism in Ukraine, NewsGuard’s Zack Fishman wrote:

There isn’t evidence that Nazism has a substantial influence in Ukraine. Radical far-right groups in Ukraine do represent a ‘threat to the democratic development of Ukraine,’ according to 2018 Freedom House report. But it also stated that far-right extremists have poor political representation in Ukraine and no plausible path to power—for example, in the 2019 parliamentary elections, the far-right nationalist party Svoboda won 2.2 percent of the vote, while the Svoboda candidate, Ruslan Koshulynskyy, won just 1.6 percent of the vote in the presidential election .

But this argument of focusing on elections results has been dismissed by a number of mainstream sources, not least of which is the Atlantic Council, probably the most anti-Russian think tank in the world. In a 2019 article, a writer for the Atlantic Council said:

To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of ‘red herring.’ It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity. Whether this is due to a continuing sense of indebtedness to some of these groups for fighting the Russians or fear they might turn on the state itself, it’s a real problem and we do no service to Ukraine by sweeping it under the rug. [Emphasis added.]

“Fear that they might turn on the state itself,” acknowledges the powerful leverage these groups have over the government. The Atlantic Council piece then underscores how influential these groups are:

It sounds like the stuff of Kremlin propaganda, but it’s not. Last week Hromadske Radio revealed that Ukraine’s Ministry of Youth and Sports is funding the neo-Nazi group C14 to promote ‘national patriotic education projects’ in the country. On June 8, the Ministry announced that it will award C14 a little less than $17,000 for a children’s camp. It also awarded funds to Holosiyiv Hideout and Educational Assembly, both of which have links to the far-right. The revelation represents a dangerous example of law enforcement tacitly accepting or even encouraging the increasing lawlessness of far-right groups willing to use violence against those they don’t like.

Since the beginning of 2018, C14 and other far-right groups such as the Azov-affiliated National Militia, Right Sector, Karpatska Sich, and others have attacked Roma groups several times, as well as anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, an event hosted by Amnesty International, art exhibitions, LGBT events, and environmental activists. On March 8, violent groups launched attacks against International Women’s Day marchers in cities across Ukraine. In only a few of these cases did police do anything to prevent the attacks, and in some they even arrested peaceful demonstrators rather than the actual perpetrators.


The Atlantic Council is not the only anti-Russian outfit that recognizes the dangerous power of the neo-fascist groups in Ukraine. Bellingcat published an alarming 2018 article headlined, “Ukrainian Far-Right Fighters, White Supremacists Trained by Major European Security Firm.”

NATO has also trained the Azov Regiment, directly linking the U.S. with far-right Ukrainian extremists.

The Hill reported in 2017 in an article headlined, “The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda,” that:

Some Western observers claim that there are no neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine, chalking the assertion up to propaganda from Moscow. Unfortunately, they are sadly mistaken.

There are indeed neo-Nazi formations in Ukraine. This has been overwhelmingly confirmed by nearly every major Western outlet. The fact that analysts are able to dismiss it as propaganda disseminated by Moscow is profoundly disturbing.

Azov’s logo is composed of two emblems—the wolfsangel and the Sonnenrad—identified as neo-Nazi symbols by the Anti-Defamation League. The wolfsangel is used by the U.S. hate group Aryan Nations, while the Sonnenrad was among the neo-Nazi symbols at this summer’s deadly march in Charlottesville.

Azov’s neo-Nazi character has been covered by the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, the Telegraph and Reuters, among others. On-the-ground journalists from established Western media outlets have written of witnessing SS runes, swastikas, torchlight marches, and Nazi salutes. They interviewed Azov soldiers who readily acknowledged being neo-Nazis. They filed these reports under unambiguous headlines such as “How many neo-Nazis is the U.S. backing in Ukraine?” and “Volunteer Ukrainian unit includes Nazis.”

How is this Russian propaganda?

The U.N. and Human Rights Watch have accused Azov, as well as other Kiev battalions, of a litany of human rights abuses.


Neo-facism has infected Ukrainian popular culture as well. A half-dozen neo-Nazi music groups held a concert in 2019 commemorating the day Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

Amnesty International in 2019 warned that “Ukraine is sinking into a chaos of uncontrolled violence posed by radical groups and their total impunity. Practically no one in the country can feel safe under these conditions.”

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Zelensky with an Azov member (right) addressing the Greek Parliament in April. (Greek Parliament TV)

Zelensky & Neo-Nazis

One of Ukraine’s most powerful oligarchs from the early 1990s, Ihor Kolomoisky, was an early financial backer of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. According to a 2015 Reuters (green-checked) report:

Many of these paramilitary groups are accused of abusing the citizens they are charged with protecting. Amnesty International has reported that the Aidar battalion—also partially funded by Kolomoisky—committed war crimes, including illegal abductions, unlawful detention, robbery, extortion and even possible executions.

Other pro-Kiev private battalions have starved civilians as a form of warfare, preventing aid convoys from reaching separatist-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine, according to the Amnesty report.

Some of Ukraine’s private battalions have blackened the country’s international reputation with their extremist views. The Azov battalion, partially funded by Taruta and Kolomoisky, uses the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol as its logo, and many of its members openly espouse neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic views. The battalion members have spoken about ‘bringing the war to Kiev,’ and said that Ukraine needs ‘a strong dictator to come to power who could shed plenty of blood but unite the nation in the process.’


In April 2019, the F.B.I. began investigating Kolomoisky for alleged financial crimes in connection with his steel holdings in West Virginia and northern Ohio. In August 2020 the U.S. Department of Justice filed civil forfeiture complaints against him and a partner:

The complaints allege that Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Boholiubov, who owned PrivatBank, one of the largest banks in Ukraine, embezzled and defrauded the bank of billions of dollars. The two obtained fraudulent loans and lines of credit from approximately 2008 through 2016, when the scheme was uncovered, and the bank was nationalized by the National Bank of Ukraine. The complaints allege that they laundered a portion of the criminal proceeds using an array of shell companies’ bank accounts, primarily at PrivatBank’s Cyprus branch, before they transferred the funds to the United States. As alleged in the complaint, the loans were rarely repaid except with more fraudulently obtained loan proceeds.

Meanwhile, the Azov backer’s television channel had by this time aired the hit TV show Servant of the People (2015-2019), which catapulted Volodymyr Zelensky to fame and ultimately into the presidency under the new Servant of the People Party. The former actor and comedian’s presidential campaign was bankrolled by Kolomoisky, according to multiple reports, including this one by Radio Free Europe (not rated).

During the presidential campaign, Politico reported:

Kolomoisky’s media outlet also provides security and logistical backup for the comedian’s campaign, and it has recently emerged that Zelenskiy’s legal counsel, Andrii Bohdan, was the oligarch’s personal lawyer. Investigative journalists have also reported that Zelenskiy traveled 14 times in the past two years to Geneva and Tel Aviv, where Kolomoisky is based in exile.

Before their run-off election, Petro Poroshenko called Zelensky “Kolomoisky’s puppet.” According to the Pandora Papers, Zelensky stashed funds he received from Kolomoisky off shore.

During the campaign Zelensky was asked about Bandera. He said it was “cool” that many Ukrainians consider Bandera a hero.


Zelensky was elected president on the promise of ending the Donbass war. About seven months into his term he traveled to the front line in Donbass to tell Ukrainian troops, where Azov is well-represented, to lay down their arms. Instead he was sent packing. The Kyiv Post (green check) reported:

When one veteran, Denys Yantar, said they had no arms and wanted instead to discuss protests against the planned disengagement that had taken place across Ukraine, Zelensky became furious.

‘Listen, Denys, I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons. Don’t shift the conversation to some protests,’ Zelensky said, videos of the exchange show. As he said this, Zelensky aggressively approached Yantar, who heads the National Corps, a political offshoot of the far-right Azov volunteer battalion, in Mykolaiv city.

‘But we’ve discussed that,’ Yantar said.

‘I wanted to see understanding in your eyes. But, instead, I saw a guy who’s decided that this is some loser standing in front of him,’ Zelensky said.


It was a demonstration of the power of the military, including the Azov Regiment, over the civilian president.

After the Russian invasion, Zelensky was asked in April by Fox News about Azov, which was later defeated in Mariupol. “They are what they are,” he responded. “They were defending our country.” He then tries to say because they are part of the military they are somehow no longer neo-Nazis, though they still wear Nazi insignia (until Tuesday). (Fox’s YouTube post removed that question from the interview, but it is preserved here:)

[youtube]http//youtu.be/bltsSD8QtU4[/youtube]

Outrages Greek Officials

Also in April, Zelensky infuriated two former Greek prime ministers and other officials by inviting a member of the Azov Regiment to address the Greek Parliament. Alexis Tsipras, a former premier and leader of the main opposition party, SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance, blasted the appearance of the Azov fighters before parliament.

“Solidarity with the Ukrainian people is a given. But nazis cannot be allowed to speak in parliament,” Tsipras said on social media. “The speech was a provocation.” He said Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis “bears full responsibility… He talked about a historic day but it is a historical shame.”

Former Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras called the Azov video being played in parliament a “big mistake.” Former Foreign Affairs Minister Nikos Kotzias said:

The Greek government irresponsibly undermined the struggle of the Ukrainian people, by giving the floor to a Nazi. The responsibilities are heavy. The government should publish a detailed report of preparation and contacts for the event.

Former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’ MeRA25 party said Zelenky’s appearance turned into a “Nazi fiesta.”

Zelensky has also not rebuked his ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, for visiting Bandera’s grave in Munich, which provoked this reaction from a German MP:

Anyone like Melnik who describes the Nazi collaborator Bandera as ‘our hero’ and makes a pilgrimage to his grave or defends the right-wing Azov Battalion as ‘brave’ is actually still benevolently described as a ‘Nazi sympathizer.’

Zelensky has closed media outlets and outlawed 11 political parties, including the largest one, Eurosceptic Opposition Platform for Life (OPZZh) and arrested its leader. None of the 11 shut down are far-right parties.

Donald Trump was rightly castigated for remarks he made about white supremacists in Charlottesville. But Zelensky, whose oligarch backer funded Azov, and who brought a neo-Nazi to address a European Parliament, is given a pass by a Democratic administration and the U.S. media though he condones the far worse problem of neo-fascism in Ukraine.

https://mronline.org/2023/01/04/on-the- ... n-ukraine/

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White Lives Matter More in Ukraine
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 04 Jan 2023

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Ukraine's military Commander in Chief, General Valerii Zaluzhny, celebrates the birthday of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera (Photo: Twitter)
The open white supremacy and racism exhibited in Ukraine is conveniently swept under the rug. Nazis are bad, unless they serve the interests of the U.S. state.


The accuracy of this commentary’s title is borne out by statements made and actions taken by the Ukrainians themselves. In 2020 millions of people around the world protested against racism in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. Ukrainians made it clear that they were not to be included amongst that mass of humanity and in fact expressed their support for white supremacy.

In June 2020, a group of football fans at a match in Ukraine unfurled a banner reading, “Free Derek Chauvin .” Chauvin is the man who murdered George Floyd. Not to be outdone, members of the neo-Nazi group Nazionalny Sprotyv, National Resistance, marched on October 14, 2020 with a banner that made the point very clear. The words “White Lives Matter ” were written in English and in much larger type than the name of the organization which appeared in small type below. October 14 is celebrated as the Day of the UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought alongside Nazi Germany after it invaded Ukraine during World War II. The words in the pink graphic on the video read, “On the march of UPA Nazis carefully burned the poster of BLM.” Nazionalny Sprotyv is known for its racist, anti-Russian, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-Communist beliefs.

The war propaganda disseminated by the Biden administration and its friends in corporate media tells us to ignore the swastikas, Hitler salutes, and other clear indicators of Nazi sympathies when they appear in Ukraine. Suddenly symbolism which we were told to abhor as indisputable signs of hate speech are now to be accepted or explained away as figments of our collective imagination.

Nazi regalia and symbolism should make assistance to the Ukrainian government an automatic deal breaker. But the U.S. has always been rather flexible in its approach to Nazism. After World War II an intelligence program known as Operation Paperclip brought more than 1,600 German scientists to the U.S. to fight in the new cold war against the Soviet Union. Their links to the Nazi party were covered up so that they might be of assistance to the U.S. Werner von Braun and other Nazi linked scientists were instrumental in creating the U.S. space program.

Ukraine was a divided nation from its very beginnings after World War I, with half of the country hating the Soviet Union so much that they sided with and fought alongside the Germans. January 1 is officially celebrated not just as the first day of the year but as the birthday of Ukraine’s chief Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera. The 2023 celebration was no exception but not without embarrassment. The Ukrainian parliament was forced to delete a Twitter post featuring a photo of army commander General Valerii Zaluzhny juxtaposed with an image of Bandera. Bandera massacred thousands of Poles during the war and the Ukrainians had to be reminded through diplomatic channels that everyone isn’t as forgiving as clueless Americans. Just as Operation Paperclip is an inconvenient and rarely discussed truth, Ukraine’s continuing Nazi and white supremacist connections are now hushed up by the U.S. state and its media partners.

It is indeed awkward for Joe Biden to greet president Zelensky at the white house and for him to speak in congress if these facts are openly discussed. Of course Zelensky is president because the Obama administration helped to engineer a coup against an elected Ukrainian president in 2014. Members of congress like senator Chris Murphy and the late John McCain are among those who traveled to Kiev and addressed rallies sponsored by the right wing Svoboda and Right Sector parties and aided in the coup effort.

The Biden administration invitation to Zelensky was an effort to ensure that an additional $45 billion was allocated to Ukraine before the congressional session ended. The standing ovations and blue and yellow flags and cries of “Slava Ukraini!” were orchestrated to get more buy-in at a time when many Americans are asking why their needs go unmet and why Ukraine can’t resume the negotiations it was holding months ago with Russia. It has been reported that the U.S. sent the then prime minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, to tell Zelensky that any talk of peace had to end . Russia was ready to withdraw in exchange for security guarantees and an end to Ukraine's efforts to secure NATO membership. But Ukraine is the latest U.S. forever war and its people have to suffer and die because of its dictates.

Perhaps the saddest sight of the night of Zelensky’s congressional speech was the adulation he received from some members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). CBC members Sheila Jackson-Lee and Barbara Lee eagerly sought to shake his hand. Perhaps they are unaware of Ukraine’s white supremacist leanings. But that can’t be true. After all, in 2015 their CBC colleague, the late John Conyers, co-sponsored an amendment that would have barred U.S. funding to the Azov battalion and other Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups. The amendment was ultimately removed from the final spending bill.

CBC member Gregory Meeks is Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs committee and said, “This war is about Russian aggression against Ukraine and the security of Europe, and it is also about democracy over tyranny, and freedom over oppression.” Ukraine has banned left wing parties and collective bargaining rights. Its people are openly racist. Barbara Lee, now elbowing her colleagues to get a little Zelensky facetime, was the only member of congress to have voted against the authorization to invade Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Now she brags about her role in securing more funding for a white supremacist state.

White lives matter just as much in the U.S. as they do in Ukraine. Even Black politicians go along with supremacist ideology. As the war grinds on, and casualties and public spending go ever upward, it is wise to remember that there are very few anti-racists in positions of authority anywhere in the world. Apparently the war propagandists are right. The U.S. and Ukraine are united in every way.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/white ... re-ukraine

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We’ve Reached Peak Zelensky. Now What?
JANUARY 3, 2023

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Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky presenting honors on the Day of the Defender, Oct. 14. File photo.

By Robert Freeman – Dec 29, 2022

After the farcical, almost psychotic over-promotion, Robert Freeman says the only place for the Ukrainian president to go from here is down. And, that is surely coming. Soon.

When the president of the poorest, most corrupt nation in Europe is feted with multiple standing ovations by the combined Houses of Congress, and his name invoked in the same breath as Winston Churchill, you know we’ve reached Peak Zelensky.

It’s a farcical, almost psychotic over-promotion, probably surpassed only by the media’s shameful, hyperbolic railroading of the country into war with Iraq, in 2003. Paraphrasing Gertrude from Hamlet, “Methinks the media doth hype too much.”

Let’s remember that before ascending to his country’s presidency, Volodymyr Zelensky’s greatest claim to fame was that he could play the piano with his penis. I’m not joking. And he ran on a platform to unite his country for peace, and for making amends with Russia. Again, I’m not joking.

Now, he’s Europe’s George Washington, FDR and Douglas MacArthur all rolled into one and before whom the mighty and powerful genuflect.

Please. The only place to go from here is down. And, that is surely coming. Soon.

Consider some inconvenient facts that the fawning media, which is essentially the public relations arm of the weapons industry, doesn’t want you to know.

The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, recently let slip that the Ukrainian army has lost more than 100,000 troops in the eight months since the beginning of the war. Over the nine-year span of the Vietnam War, the U.S. with a population six times that of Ukraine, lost a total of 58,220 men.

In other words, on a per day, per capita basis, Ukraine is losing soldiers at a rate 141 TIMES that of U.S. losses in Vietnam. The U.S. lost the public on Vietnam when middle class white boys began coming home in body bags. Does anybody with half a brain believe such losses in Ukraine are sustainable? Does anybody have another plan to avert such slaughter?

Von der Leyen is shrewdly laying the predicate for Western withdrawal from Ukraine and ending the war. If you look at the facts on the ground, not the boosterish propaganda ladled out by the media, you can understand why.

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Ursula von der Leyen at a NATO defense minister session in 2019. (NATO)

In a matter of weeks, Russia, with its hypersonic missiles, destroyed half of Ukraine’s electrical power infrastructure. This, as winter is coming on. It can just as easily take out the other half, effectively bombing Ukraine back into the Stone Age. Is that what anybody wants?

The startling, indeed, terrifying part of this is that neither Ukraine nor the West have any defense against these hypersonic missiles. They travel so fast, and on variable trajectories, they cannot be shot down, even by the most advanced Western systems. They represent one of the greatest asymmetries in deliverable destructive power in the history of warfare, probably dwarfed only by the U.S.’s possession of atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

Top Zelensky Advisor Threatens War With Iran


Again, there is no effective defense against them. The Russians have them. The Ukrainians don’t. Game over. Can you understand why leaders in the West are beginning to wake up?

On the conventional front, the Ukrainians are having trouble securing even conventional weapons to defend themselves. U.S. arms suppliers are working around the clock to replace their own stocks and the stocks that European countries have given to Ukraine. But the backlog is running into years. A recent headline from The Wall Street Journal stated, “Europe is Rushing Arms to Ukraine but Running Out of Ammo.”

Finally, the U.S. has committed $112 billion to Ukraine. That includes $45 billion just slipped into the omnibus funding bill against the likelihood that a Republican-controlled House will cut such funding, almost certainly substantially.

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Volodymyr Zelensky and Nancy Pelosi during a Joint Meeting of Congress with flag of Ukraine signed by the Ukrainian soldiers fighting at Bakhmut. (Office of the House Speaker)

That’s more than $10 billion per month since the war started in February. And that doesn’t even count the subsidies, both material and financial, from the EU which amount to billions of dollars more per month.

Without such subsidies, Zelensky would not have lasted a month in the war. How many hours do you think he is going last once that flow dries up? And it surely is.

Europeans Waking Up

The Europeans are coming to realize that their continent is being de-industrialized, literally moved backwards an entire epoch in economic terms, because of their willingness to serve as the doormat for the U.S.’ imperial war against Russia. Not even they, with their supine fealty to U.S. domination, are willing to commit collective economic suicide on behalf of the U.S.


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France’s President Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz are suggesting that accommodations to Russian interests must be devised in order to bring about a peaceful settlement of the war.

Macron suggested in a television address to his nation that an antagonized Russia is not in the security interests of Europe. “We need to prepare what we are ready to do … to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table.”

Scholz was even more specific. In an interview he declared, “We have to go back to the agreements which we had in the last decades and which were the basis for peace and security order in Europe.”

This is a direct repudiation of the U.S.’s maximalist position before the start of the war, that Russia’s security needs were of no interest to a marauding NATO.

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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, left, visits NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, , Dec. 11, 2021. (NATO)

Even U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is now mooting the idea that territorial concessions must be on the table. In a Wall Street Journal article, Blinken stated that, “Our focus is … to take back territory that’s been seized from [Ukraine] since February 24th.”

Notice, that this is a significant climb down from the U.S.’ earlier position that all Russian gains since 2014, including Crimea, must be reversed before negotiations could begin. And this is just Blinken’s opening hand. More concessions are sure to follow as Russian gains become greater and their likelihood of being reversed, lesser.

Formula for Losing the War

Put these four things together: staggering, unsustainable losses of soldiers; terrifying, indefensible asymmetries of destructive power; inability to supply oneself with even conventional defensive weapons; and categorically reduced support from your most important backers.

Does that sound like the formula for winning a war? It is not. It’s the formula for losing the war, which is why von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz and Blinken are now laying pipe for getting out. The tide is going out under Zelensky. He will soon be remembered as a Trivial Pursuits question, or an answer on Jeopardy: “The only modern head of state known to be able to play the piano with his penis.” Ding. “Contestant #3?” “Who is Volodymyr Zelensky?”

A peace will soon be declared. Russia will keep the Donbass and Crimea in recognition of the facts on the ground. Both sides will be better off for this. The Donbass is ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally Russian, which is why it voted overwhelmingly for assimilation into Russia. Besides, if Kiev loved them so much, it wouldn’t have murdered 14,000 of them over the past eight years and resumed massive shelling in early February of this year, before the Russian invasion.

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May 9, 2015: Casualties of the War in Donbass. (Andrew Butko, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Ukraine will foreswear any future affiliation with NATO. This is Putin’s highest priority and what he asked for — and was denied — in his request to the U.S. and NATO last December, before the invasion was launched. If Russia begins its much-feared winter offensive, as many expect, Ukrainian generals will dispatch Zelensky in a coup rather than send their few remaining soldiers to certain annihilation.

U.S. grain and pharma conglomerates will buy up Ukrainian farmland — some of the best in the world — for pennies on the dollar. This is the standard MO of U.S. multinational vultures coming in after the kill to pick apart the carcasses. U.S. weapons makers will look for and help provoke the next feeding frenzy, much as they materialized Ukraine barely a year after the humiliating U.S. defeat in Afghanistan derailed their last gravy train.

Russia and China, driven together by U.S. bullying, will continue to constellate the nations of the Global South into an anti-Western bloc committed to collaborative, mutually profitable, peaceful development. The U.S. and its closest allies will cower behind the walls they’ve constructed of the ever-shrinking share of the global economy that they can manage to hold as their own.

Ukraine will prove a turning point in the dismantling of U.S. hegemony over global affairs that it has enjoyed — and, let’s be honest, often abused — since 1945. The U.S. public is not psychically prepared for such a come down. But that is the cost of living in the fantasy world that the media lavishes up to keep that self-same public ignorant, fearful, confused, entertained, and distracted.

Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity. We need to be on the lookout for their next gambit to pillage the treasury and advance their own private interests above those of the nation. It will surely come.

https://orinocotribune.com/weve-reached ... -now-what/

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Germany Rules Out Negotiating War Reparations With Poland

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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz attends a question session of German Bundestag in Berlin, capital of Germany, on Jan. 12, 2022. | Photo: Xinhua/Shan Yuqi

Published 3 January 2023 (12 hours 1 minutes ago)

Germany has refused to enter into negotiations with Poland regarding reparations for World War II (1939-1945), the Polish Foreign Ministry denounced.


"On December 28, 2022, the German Foreign Ministry replied to the note of the Polish Chancellery dated October 3, 2022. On January 3, 2023, the note reached the Polish Foreign Ministry. According to the German Government, the issue of reparations and compensation for war losses in Poland remains closed, and the German Executive has no intention to negotiate on it," the statement said.

The Polish diplomatic body insists that "the Government of the Republic of Poland will continue its efforts to settle the debts incurred due to German aggression and occupation between 1939 and 1945".

At the beginning of October, Poland sent an official note to Germany asking it to pay some 1.3 billion dollars for the destruction caused during World War II.

The Berlin government emphasized that it had no intention of making transfers to Poland because they had already paid enough and there was no reason to question the Polish waiver of reparations, formulated in 1953.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ger ... -0016.html

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krainian PM outlines government priorities for 2023
Xinhua | Updated: 2023-01-04 09:01

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Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal. [Photo/Agencies]

KYIV - Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal on Tuesday outlined 10 priorities of the government for 2023, including support for the army and the whole security and defense sector.

"The year 2023 should be the year of Ukraine's victory. We do our best for this," Shmyhal said on Telegram.

Integration into the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is also a top goal for Ukraine, he noted.

Among the priorities are post-conflict reconstruction, energy security, macro-financial stability, and support for war veterans.

The government will also focus on developing education, and implementing decentralization, pension and public administration reforms, Shmyhal said.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... a78b6.html

British-Run Spy Tech Powers Ukraine Proxy War, Putting Civilians at Risk
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 3, 2023
Kit Klarenberg

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Leaked files reveal the Anomaly 6 spy firm is providing intelligence to the British military through a cut-out involved in the Kerch Bridge bombing and other acts of dangerous sabotage in the Ukraine conflict.

On December 6th, The Grayzone revealed how British military and intelligence agencies were deploying technology created by shadowy private intelligence firm Anomaly 6 to illegally spy on citizens across the globe.

The company’s technology effectively transforms every individual on Earth into a potential target for surveillance and/or asset recruitment by monitoring the movements of their smartphone. Anomaly 6 embeds tracking software in popular applications, then slices through layers of theoretically anonymous data to uncover a wealth of sensitive information about a device’s owner.

Anomaly 6’s services are provided to Britain’s soldiers and spies through Prevail Partners, a private military company which The Grayzone has exposed as Whitehall’s arm’s-length cutout for prosecuting its proxy war in Ukraine. The firm has constructed a secret partisan terror army on Kiev’s behalf, and helped plan the Kerch Bridge bombing by Ukraine’s services.

Now, the Grayzone can reveal that Prevail is exploiting Anomaly 6 to provide “decision-enabling intelligence to the UK’s defence and security architecture.”

Files anonymously leaked to this outlet reveal that Britain’s Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) has used Anomaly 6’s technology to monitor and track the movements of Russian military and intelligence personnel in real-time, on both a group and individual basis. Through aggressive harvesting of data, the technology has enabled the planning of military offensives and artillery attacks, assassinations, asset recruitment, and other measures.

The leaked files raise serious questions about whether Anomaly 6’s technology has been used throughout the Ukraine conflict in an array of targeted operations against specific individuals and infrastructure. If it has, Britain bears ultimate responsibility for the outcome of these disturbing actions, which in some cases amount to crimes against humanity.

As The Grayzone has already demonstrated, Anomaly 6 markets its technology as impeccably precise, while it hoovers up massive amounts of private data and targeting innocent individuals, falsely painting them as national security risks. The firm’s ham-handed approach raises the obvious risk of Russian and Ukrainian citizens being misidentified by Britain’s military intelligence apparatus, with dangerous if not deadly consequences.

British military intelligence tracks Russians ‘in realtime’

By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Anomaly 6 was already providing its surveillance services to the British Home Office through Prevail. Over the course of several months, the firm racked up a multi-million dollar tab.

Anomaly 6 sold its technology to Britain as an innovative means for tracking movements of newly-arrived refugees to the country. Without the migrants’ knowledge or consent, they were steered through “passive data collection gates” as soon as they registered at immigration centres. Their phones were then tagged for monitoring in the hope they could lead authorities to criminal gangs and human traffickers.

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This connivance is likely to have been completely illegal under data protection laws, and the European Convention on Human Rights.

As soon as Moscow launched its military operation, the British government deepened its involvement with Anomaly 6. London’s Defence Intelligence Agency instigated what it called “Project MATTERHORN”, a six week trial in which Prevail provided Anomaly 6-sourced “location-based commercial telemetry data” in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.

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Six weeks later, Prevail wrote to the DIA outlining the costs of three and six-month-long extension packages. The Agency apparently took them up on the second offer; two days after receiving Anomaly 6’s pitch, the company provided a detailed proposal and contract to Prevail.

For $708,750 over the half-year period, Anomaly 6 was contracted to provide “a data feed of country specific data containing harvested first party commercial telemetry data and delivered to client directed cloud-based infrastructure.” Should the DIA require it, “additional countries, regions or queries” could be added at any point during the contract.

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It’s not hard to see why Anomaly 6’s services were considered so valuable by the DIA. Files reviewed by The Grayzone include case studies showing how the company’s technology was used both before and after the Russian invasion “to gain a realtime/near realtime understanding of the disposition” of Russian “troops, equipment, and lethal materials.”

For example, Anomaly 6 tracked Moscow’s pre-invasion military buildup, starting in April 2021. By harvesting smartphone data signals generated at a Russian Military training area south of Voronezh, the company identified over 100 devices that had been used at the facility, and was able to determine a clear “pattern of life,” including home addresses (or “bed down locations”), areas and sites frequently visited and workplaces for each user.

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This information, Anomaly 6 suggested, could be used for “observing troop movements into a potential conflict zone,” and much more: “combining this data with other open source and classified data sets further enables and empowers the client to permit successful mission outcomes.”

Anomaly 6’s spyware has also been deployed to “corroborate” reports of “Russian trained Syrians” in the conflict, cross-referencing data to find smartphones active in Syria in 2021 that were supposedly detected in Ukraine in March 2022. Some were tracked to the Voronezh training facility, which the company speculated “could be a staging post to integrate Syrians into Russian forces on the Kharkiv axis.”

“This is mostly individual devices, but it is highly likely that these are indicative of larger groups. Additional Syrians at these locations are highly likely,” Anomaly 6 surmised.

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However, the firm did not consider the possibility that it had in fact tracked the devices of Russian military advisors posted in Damascus before heading to Ukraine. Even mainstream Western think tanks have dismissed the proposition that Syrian fighters have been active in the Ukrainian theatre. It was only in the final months of this year that Russia formally deployed such forces.

Anomaly 6 fumbles targets’ identities, putting innocents at grave risk

In other cases, Anomaly 6 claims to have achieved highly precise target identification capability. For example, the company tracked the device of a lone “Chechen militia fighter,” and pinpointed “a hardware device associated with the GRU Aerospace and Geo-intelligence Centre.”

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“Prior to the Russian invasion the device visited a GRU location in Rostov-on-Don, the Kremlin in Moscow, and an unidentified location in Unecha,” an Anomaly 6 presentation asserted. “The device was then active in Donetsk, Ukraine having crossed the border at an unknown time and date.”

This individual appeared keenly aware of the risk of being tracked through their cellphone. Anomaly 6 found it difficult to adequately identify their “pattern of life,” which are said to potentially signify “some tradecraft or communications security awareness.” Nonetheless, what data could be harvested highlighted one location in Donetsk they had visited “more than any other,” leading the company to speculate it was “linked to Russian GRU or Advanced Force activity.”

Anomaly 6 had more luck in tracking another individual whose device pointed to a “pattern of life” consistent with someone “conducting invasion related activity.” Their movements indicated they lived and worked in Moscow, which made their travel to Ukraine “interesting compared to regular force movements” in the eyes of the firm’s analysts. Anomaly 6 identified an area of Donetsk they had visited that was “possibly used for Command and Control, liaison, and governance,” speculating the device in question was “diplomatic or intelligence related.”

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Though this level of detail seems impressive, Anomaly 6 could well have misidentified at least some of its targets, and even the locations they apparently visited. A leaked Anomaly 6 case study exposed by The Grayzone purports to document the company’s identification of the smartphone of a US-based nuclear physics expert who conducted “multiple trips to North Korea” between March and August of 2019.

Anomaly 6 outlined how it unearthed the academic’s name, address, marital status, employer, and photos of their children, along with the schools and universities they attended, by linking their smartphone to sites they visited across the US. The company believed the academic’s supposed trips to Pyongyang made them either a major counterintelligence hazard, or an intelligence asset ripe for recruitment.

When The Grayzone contacted the academic, however, they fervently denied they or their smartphone had ever been to North Korea. They may well have been sincere – smartphone geolocation data can be highly imprecise. If so, the academic and their family were placed in the crosshairs of Anomaly 6’s clients on the basis of a badly bungled analysis. In an active war zone, an error like this is likely to cost innocent lives.

Britain stiffens US resolve at all levels

On August 20th, Ukraine’s CIA-trained Security Service (SBU) assassinated Daria Dugina, the daughter of nationalist Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, deploying a car bomb to kill her as she travelled through a Moscow suburb. The targeted killing was intended as a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been falsely portrayed in Western media as an avid student of Dugin, despite having never met him.

Given what is known about the operation to assassinate Aleksandr and Daria Dugin, the nature of Anomaly 6’s spyware, and Prevail’s relationship with the SBU, the question of whether the firm’s technology was used to track the pair is ineluctable.

Whether it also informed the SBU’s Odessa branch when to trigger the truck bombing of Kerch Bridge must be considered as well. The attempt to assassinate Russian State Space Corporation leaders Dmitry Rogozin and Artyom Melnikov while they dined at a Donetsk restaurant appears to have relied on tracking technology much like the kind spun out by Anomaly 6.

Then there are the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion’s death squads which hunt frantically for “collaborators” in formerly Russian-occupied territory. Have they too been granted use of Anomaly 6’s spyware?

These are only a few of the countless scenarios in which Anomaly 6’s technology could have executed. And it is not only London’s DIA that can exploit the company’s wares, courtesy of Prevail. So too can Britain’s Permanent Joint Headquarters, assorted elite military spying units, special forces such as the SAS and SBS, the GCHQ, MI5, and MI6.

Prevail’s involvement in the Kerch Bridge bombing plot amply demonstrates the company’s utter lack of compunction about civilian casualties and clear interest in terrorist acts. It originally proposed going further than what actually transpired, blowing up a ship packed with ammonium nitrate beneath the structure. The company approvingly cited the carnage caused by the 2020 Beirut Blast, which killed hundreds, injured thousands, and inflicted billions in damage, as an example to emulate.

As such, it seems inconceivable the British special forces veterans running Prevail would be anything other than enthusiastic about guiding Kiev’s most violent undertakings, or shy from carrying out such acts themselves.

Washington’s sharing of intelligence with Ukraine is well known, and has proven pivotal to the execution of an array of successful operations and counter-offensive actions. However, the White House claims to observe rigid limits on what it discloses and when, in order to prevent a wider war with Moscow. This has included a ban against providing precision targeting intelligence for senior Russian officials by name.

No such reservations or restrictions appear to exist in London’s case. In fact, the position of much of the British government, intelligence services, and Army appears to be that the proxy war must be escalated as much and as often as possible. Within London’s military-intelligence circles, any exercise of prudence by the Biden administration is seen as a reflection of cowardice.

On December 16th, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak demanded an audit of the progress of the war in Ukraine to date. The disclosure piqued intense fears within Whitehall that the new premier could emulate and thus exacerbate the “caution” of the Biden administration. A nameless source revealed to the BBC at the time London had “stiffened the US resolve at all levels,” via “pressure.”

“We don’t want Rishi to reinforce Biden’s caution. We want him to [keep] pushing in the way Boris did,” they explained.

Senior British military-intelligence veteran Chris Donnelly echoed this perspective in a chilling email sent to Brigadier Julian Buczacki of the British Army’s elite 1st Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Brigade just hours after the Kerch Bridge assault. Donnelly was a driving force behind that attack, directing his underlings to draw up blueprints for it. He is also the mastermind of Prevail’s secret Ukrainian terror army.

Invited to serve as an “expert” high-level advisor in “escalation” to London’s Chief of Defence Staff, Donnelly condemned Biden’s supposedly careful approach to the conflict as “so unwise as to beggar belief,” and “the opposite word to ‘deterrence’.”

With the political leadership in London under unrelenting pressure to accept Donnelly’s radical view of the conflict, it appears almost certain the UK will seek new and more brazen means of provoking Russia into escalating. The forces gathered around Prevail are determined to throw caution to the wind, even if it means tempting a nuclear winter.

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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 05, 2023 1:14 pm

The challenges of the RPL
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 01/05/2023
Original Article: Antifashist

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The short history of the RPL, which began with the referendum in May 2014, has known two difficult periods: the period of the formation of the Republic, when it was against the ropes and survived only thanks to the help of Russia, and the current period, in which the special military operation is taking place in the region . This year, the Lugansk region finally became part of the Russian Federation, which is what the population wanted back in 2014. At that time, they were promised a referendum in two stages: first the declaration of independence, and then reunification. with Russia, but the second referendum did not take place. It was only held in the fall of 2022.

Before the start of the special military operationin Ukraine, the main problems of Donbass in general and of the PRL in particular were related to the industry and the coal sector: the closure of factories and mines, non-payment of salary debts, shortage of personnel, problems with the sale of products due to sanctions, legal uncertainty. After the departure of the oligarch Sergey Kurchenko from the DPR and the RPL and the transition of the companies to the management of the Southern Mining and Metallurgical Complex (YUGMK by its acronym in Russian) of the businessman Evgeny Yurchenko and another part to the Republic, some of the problems disappeared. For example, the problem of non-payment of debts, and an attempt was made to solve the shortage of personnel by attracting new staff, for which the salaries of the YUGMK companies were increased. The equipment of the factories and mines was not renewed,

However, the start of full-scale hostilities destroyed all those plans and seriously worsened the situation of the Republic's economy. Personnel, who had been so difficult to attract to jobs, were mobilized and sent to the front, again creating labor shortages in LPR companies. And if YUGMK is still trying to fix it, attracting people from the liberated territories, pensioners, women and even people from “mainland” Russia with relatively high salaries, state-owned companies like Vostokugol have not had such a choice.

Following the mobilization, the Republic's mines were left without manpower, a problem that has been recognized at the highest level. The acting President of the Republic, Leonid Pasechnik, raised it in a meeting with Vladimir Putin. According to Pasechnik, 58% of the miners were mobilized, some mines now employ three employees instead of 300, which means that work has basically come to a standstill. Vostokugol is no longer profitable and is making losses. In fact, the Republic's economy is currently at a standstill.

There are those who can say that there is currently a war and the main issue is the front, but that does not mean that the economy of Donbass should be paralyzed. If the mines are privatized now and the new management decides to close them because they are not profitable, that decision will be irreversible. The mine personnel, who will return from the front sooner or later, will have nowhere to work. The Lugansk region may cease to be a coal region, but for the moment there is no prospect of a new economy emerging. So decisions made now will have consequences in the future.

The lack of manpower is one of the most serious problems of the RPL. Today it is felt in all sectors, not only in factories and mines, but also in public institutions, education, health, housing and community services. The general mobilization has seriously exacerbated an already existing understaffing problem. For example, there is a critical lack of personnel in the communications of the Republic because the majority have been mobilized and the part of the staff that remains cannot cover the demand. Pasechnik also admitted this problem in his meeting with the president. “We don't have material time [to place communication towers in the north of the RPL], because we have very few specialists to install communications. I mean mobile communications, internet and so on. We just don't have time to place those towers," the RPL leader said. However, it does not depend only on the time to install the towers, the problem of not having enough specialists is that they are not enough to maintain the existing towers or to solve the incidents on time.

A similar situation has occurred in the housing and housing services sector, where many locksmiths and electricians have been mobilized and have responded to the call. Currently, there are not enough emergency groups to respond quickly to the requests of the citizens even in the city of Lugansk and even less in other cities. In Alchevsk, for example, the population may have to wait weeks for the arrival of emergency services. It is problematic to attract new staff in a region where the war continues and where salaries remain low.

Another major problem is establishing civilian life in the territories liberated from the RPL. The humanitarian situation in the Severodonetsk area remains difficult. Many people lack electricity, water and heating despite the fact that winter has already arrived. In Severodonetsk and Lisichansk, a large population still lives in apartment buildings with broken windows and survives thanks to the help of volunteers. For now, no one has paid them compensation for the destruction of their homes, nor have they been transferred to places in more humane conditions, instead they have been left alone with their problems. Local authorities have not collected firewood or plastic to seal the windows. The population lives by organizing bonfires in their apartments.

For a part of the population of Severodonetsk and Lisichansk, the question of surviving the winter is serious. The population cannot settle for slogans that say that “things will get better soon”. The LPR authorities must solve the problems of the population on the territory of the Russian Federation entrusted to them.

After the incorporation of the RPL into Russia, the customs on the border were eliminated and that is really positive news for the people of the Republic. Also, Russian passports are already issued locally in Lugansk, you don't need to go to the Rostov region for this. However, the situation is not clear for those who have received a residence permit under the simplified procedure. Another positive news is that the mobile operators of the Russian Federation have started operating in the Republic, as well as the Russian bank PSB. For the rest, the RPL has not undergone major changes. It is to be hoped that 2023 will bring a positive development for the Lugansk region.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/01/05/los-r ... more-26352

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Ukraine - The Big Push To End The War

Over Christmas I had a short talk with a relative about the war in Ukraine. He asked me who would win and was astonished when I said: "Ukraine has zero chance to win." That person reads some German mainstream news sites and watches the public TV networks. With those sources of 'information' he was made to believe that Ukraine was winning the war.

One may excuse that with him never having been in a military and not being politically engaged. But still there are some basic numbers that let one conclude from the beginning that Russia, the much bigger, richer and more industrialized country, had clearly all advantages. My relative obviously never had had that thought.

The 'western' propaganda is still quite strong. However, as I pointed out in March last year propaganda does not change a war and lies do not win it. Its believability is shrinking.

Former Lt.Col. Alex Vershinin, who in June pointed out that industrial warfare is back and the 'West' was not ready to wage it, has a new recommendable piece out which analyses the tactics on both sides, looks ahead and concludes that Russia will almost certainly win the war:

Wars of attrition are won through careful husbandry of one’s own resources while destroying the enemy’s. Russia entered the war with vast materiel superiority and a greater industrial base to sustain and replace losses. They have carefully preserved their resources, withdrawing every time the tactical situation turned against them. Ukraine started the war with a smaller resource pool and relied on the Western coalition to sustain its war effort. This dependency pressured Ukraine into a series of tactically successful offensives, which consumed strategic resources that Ukraine will struggle to replace in full, in my view. The real question isn’t whether Ukraine can regain all its territory, but whether it can inflict sufficient losses on Russian mobilized reservists to undermine Russia’s domestic unity, forcing it to the negotiation table on Ukrainian terms, or will Russian’ attrition strategy work to annex an even larger portion of Ukraine.

Russian domestic unity has only grown over the war. As Gilbert Doctorow points out wars make nations. The war does not only unite certain nationalistic parts of Ukraine who still dream of retaking Crimea. It also unites all of Russia. Unlike Ukraine Russia will be strengthened by it.

Casualties are expected in wars and the Russians, with their steady remembrance of the second world war as their Great Patriotic War, know this well. Screw ups also happen and at times some bad leadership decisions puts people into the wrong place where the enemy can and will kill them. That is what happened in Makeyevka (Donetsk) on New Years day 2 minutes after midnight. Some 100 Russian reservists died. The Russian leadership pointed out that they were killed by U.S. HIMARS missiles. The former Indian diplomat M. K. Bhadrakumar judges that this was a U.S. escalation which will likely receive a response:

The intelligence inputs in real time show direct American participation in the horrific operation targeting the Russian conscripts’ New Year party just when the toasts began. Of course, whipping up public sentiments in Russia against Putin is a core American objective in the war.
We are entering a grey zone. Expect “surgical strikes” by the Russian forces, too. After all, at some point soon enough, it will emerge that what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.


Some retaliation has already happened. Yesterday the Russian Defense Ministry reported that over 130 foreign mercenaries were killed in attacks on their bases near Maslyakovka and Kramatorsk. Those Polish soldiers are now gone. The Russian military also continues its quite successful counter-artillery campaign:

Missile and air strikes launched at a hardware concentration near Druzhkovka railway station (Donetsk People's Republic) have resulted in the elimination of:

two launching ramps for U.S.-manufactured HIMARS multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS);
four armoured fighting vehicles for Czech-manufactured RM-70 Vampire MLRS;
over 800 rockets for MLRS;
six motor vehicles, and up to 120 Ukrainian personnel.
Within the counterbattery warfare, two launching ramps for U.S.-manufactured HIMARS MLRS, that were used for shelling settlements of the Donetsk People's Republic, have been detected and destroyed near Kramatorsk.
Three U.S.-manufactured M-777 artillery systems have been destroyed at their firing positions near Artyomovsk (Donetsk People's Republic), and Chervonaya Dibrova (Lugansk People's Republic).

Two Ukrainian fighting vehicles for Grad MLRS have been destroyed near Volchansk (Kharkov region) and Serebryanka (Donetsk People's Republic).

Two D-30 howitzers have been destroyed near Kamenskoye and Gulyaypole (Zaporozhye region).


Those are four HIMARS, three M-777, some Czech 'aid', 800 HIMARS missiles and some Ukrainian guns that were lost in just one day. That was probably more than the 'West' can deliver over the next months.

Even the New York Times notes that Russia is exhausting the Ukraine as well as its western support by simply throwing cheap stuff at it:

The Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones that Moscow has increasingly been relying on since October are relatively uncomplicated devices and fairly cheap, while the array of weapons used to shoot them out of the sky can be much pricier, according to experts. The self-destructing drones can cost as little as $20,000 to produce, while the cost of firing a surface-to-air missile can range from $140,000 for a Soviet-era S-300 to $500,000 for a missile from an American NASAMS.

This only confirms the point Alex Vershinin was making. Russia has cared for its resources while the Ukraine, and NATO, have wasted their stuff mostly in senseless frontal campaigns against well protected Russian troops.

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism points out that Vershinin has left out the economic side of the war where the picture is as bad for Ukraine as it is on the ground:

Ukraine is dependent on the West to fund its government, giving new meaning to the expression “client state”. Ukraine’s GDP contraction is estimated to be on the order of 35-40% for 2022. Ukraine in November projected its 2023 budget deficit to be $38 billion. Mind you, that is for essential services and is likely to underestimate the cost and knock-on effects of dealing with Russia’s attacks on its electrical grid. Again, before the grid strikes, the IMF had estimated Ukraine’s budget needs at $3 to $4 billion a month. It’s an easy bet that that $38 billion funding gap will easily come in at more than $50 billion.

And paying for teachers’ salaries, pensions, road repair, hospitals, are not the sort of thing that enriches the military-industrial complex. This is a huge amount for the West. Euronews, in discussing the then estimated $38 billion hole, strongly hinted Ukraine would come up short: ...


Yves Smith also points out that, as we predicted in March, the pro-Ukraine propaganda is not really fixing the war:

Last and not at all least, the success of Ukraine propaganda seems to be falling despite the media and politicians doing their best to create the impression otherwise. Lambert and I were both very much surprised to read that a recent poll of likely US voters (as in presumably politically engaged) found fewer than 1/3 thought Ukraine was winning the war.

Lastly to find out who will win this war we can point to the mid December interview the Ukrainian war leader General Valery Zaluzhny gave to the Economist.:

General Zaluzhny, who is raising a new army corps, reels off a wishlist. “I know that I can beat this enemy,” he says. “But I need resources. I need 300 tanks, 600-700 IFVs [infantry fighting vehicles], 500 Howitzers.” The incremental arsenal he is seeking is bigger than the total armoured forces of most European armies.

What Zaluzhny really says is that the war is lost if he does not get those resources. He knows well that is he will not receive them.

So how will Russia proceed towards the end game?

Dima of the Military Summary Channel discussed yesterday how two big moves, one up from the Mariupol area and one down west of Kharkiv, can cut all railroad lines that connect west Ukraine with the eastern frontline where some 80+% of the Ukrainian army is now deployed.

I agree that the move from the south will happen but I am less sure about the northern branch.

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The Ukrainian army, just like the Russian one, depends on railroads for medium and long range transport. Neither has enough trucks to move the big amount of supplies that are needed to support the war.

Ukrainian railways
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To be able to supply its forces any Russian move must follow the rail lines and create some safety corridor left and right of them. Some railways will be damaged by fighting but Russia has special railroad regiments that are trained and equipped to do repairs under war conditions. The move from the south would go to Pavlovgrad (Pavlovhrad) while the move from the north would pass Kharkiv in the west and aim at Lozova. When both are taken the Ukrainian army at the eastern front will be completely cut off from the rest of Ukraine and, without supplies, will have to surrender or die.

Both are big 200 kilometer (120 miles) long moves that require significant amounts of forces. But after its mobilization and with volunteers Russia has 350,000 additional forces it can move in. 75 to 100,000 are sufficient for each push while the rest can keep the Ukrainian troops in the east very busy and fixed in their position.

Then comes the question of when.

Due to currently warmer than normal weather the ground in Ukraine is not yet frozen and the mud will return in March and April. That gives only a two months window to move forward. If I were the Russian commander I would probably wait and use the six dry months during the summer. But there are other criteria, like politics and economics, that will come into play and which may require an earlier move.

If the plan works the war will largely be over. Russian troops will be free to move anywhere in Ukraine with only little resistance. A move to retake Kherson and Odessa will then be a rather easy and short affair.

The big question is how the U.S. will respond. If the Ukraine falls the U.S. and NATO will have lost their war against Russia. That will cause serious political damage.

Thomas H. Lipscomb writes that war will be lost because it was badly planned and in a way that could never have changed its direction:

American military planning was once world class. But who would plan a proxy war against Russia, one of the acknowledged masters of artillery with far better air defense technology than any in the West, and then equip our puppet Ukraine with inferior weapons and only enough ammunition to last six months? And surely American planners couldn’t help knowing that there was no longer a manufacturing base for resupply, and NATO warehouses were practically empty?

This will have wide ranging consequences:

T]he United States current leadership is a bunch of total idiots, blinded by ideology, arrogance and illusions of pursuing a “rule-based” global hegemony, an opportunity long passed, as our performance in this proxy war shows. The United States may have won the Cold War but it lost the peace. Its strategic thinking and its military is obsolete and configuration of both forces and equipment is based on assumptions from the past millennium. The battle for a Great Global Reset under a unipolar American hegemony has been lost as well. The World Economic Forum is now about as relevant as the Holy Roman Empire. All they can continue to do is terrorize the increasingly authoritarian states of the West with asinine policy proposals.
The attempt to destroy Russia prodded it to a burst of brilliant diplomacy and leadership by Putin and his team that has quietly established that the rest of the world prefers sovereignty and a multi-polar world. The post Cold War “Pox Americana” as Larry Johnson has called it, is over. Historians of the future will study this period of history with fascination. Few times in history has such immense change happened so fast.


The effect of losing the war will be noticed in global and domestic politics. 'Western' global standing will be degraded and the leadership of the war party will receive some well deserved bashing.

But will the U.S. let that happen? Can it allow itself to lose this war? Or will it escalate? Even when that is likely to only worsen its situation?

I have no idea yet how and who in Washington will decide on those questions.

Posted by b on January 4, 2023 at 19:00 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/01/u ... .html#more

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Satellite image of the Crimean bridge. 01/03/2023
January 5, 1:22 am

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Satellite image of the Crimean bridge.
Made on January 3rd. It can be seen that the damaged spans of the second branch have already been removed after the first one was restored, along which traffic was launched in December.

Completion of the repair of the second branch, which also involves the replacement of the spans damaged by the explosion (they have already been made), is scheduled for March according to the plan. All work, including elimination of the consequences of the explosion on the railway bridge, is expected by early June.

Now the automobile bridge is operating in the mode of one branch + the Kerch ferry crossing is actively operating (except for days when the weather is stormy in the Kerch Strait).

https://t.me/boris_rozhin/74448 - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8079484.html

dugout town
January 4, 23:55

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dugout town

How were the problems of arrivals solved during the two world wars? Because the range of artillery fire had already become quite decent and it could terrorize the near rear without straining.

Construction of dugout towns. When they dug a lot of dugouts and placed them quite compactly, close to each other.

The photo shows a dugout town on the Russian front in the First World War. With a pyramid for rifles under a canopy. Yes, in the event of an arrival and shelling, someone could be covered. But a smaller part of the inhabitants of the dugout town.

Similar dugout towns were built on both sides of the front during the Great Patriotic War. Especially when the front stood in one place for a long time. And not only somewhere near Rzhev, but also on the Karelian Isthmus.

Where groundwater is close (near Leningrad) - there were bunded log cabins.

In general, the main principle is elementary - dispersal and protection from damaging factors.


(с) Alexey Isaev

t.me/iron_wind/356

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8079141.html

Google Translator

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US Climbs Escalation Ladder in Ukraine
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 4, 2023
M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

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Building hit by 6 US-made HIMARS missiles on New Year Day killing at least 89 Russian conscripts, Makeyevka, Ukraine

In all probability, the message conveyed to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov from his American counterpart Antony Blinken via Israel’s new foreign minister Eli Cohen concerned the Ukrainian missile attack on Makeyevka (Donetsk) on New Year Day at 12.02 am killing 89 Russian conscripts.

Kiev claimed that upto 400 Russian soldiers might have been killed. Russian MOD has made a rare acknowledgment of scores of deaths — latest figure is 83. Moscow rarely releases figures for casualties in the war.

The Russian statements stressed that US-made Himars missiles were used in the attack. The site was a “a temporary deployment facility” (a vocational school temporarily used as barracks for scores of recently mobilised troops sent by Moscow.

The incident sparked renewed public criticism over the state of Russia’s military and the decision to use civilian infrastructure to house soldiers. The First Deputy Head of the Main Military-Political Department of the Russian Armed Forces Lieutenant General Sergey Sevryukov told reporters:

“It has already become obvious at present that the main cause of the occurrence was activation and large-scale use, contrary to the ban, of personal phones by personnel within the reach of enemy’s destruction means. This factor enabled the enemy to take the bearing and determine coordinates of servicemen location to deliver a missile strike. Required measures are being taken at present to exclude such tragic incidents in the future.”

Apparently, blame game has begun — that the “main cause” of the tragedy was the unruly behaviour of soldiers who used mobile phones on the warfront. But there is going to be consequences.

Public pressure may increase demanding maximum use of force to end the war quickly. There is always the danger of escalation if certain unwritten, unspoken red lines in the conduct of the war are crossed.

It is entirely conceivable that there could be Cold-War style “strategic deconfliction” parameters worked out between the general staff in Moscow and the Pentagon aimed at avoiding miscalculation or any set of actions (by either side) that could lead to unnecessary conflict. The US and Russian forces have been operating in Syria for years and a communications line, used daily, has helped the two sides avoid direct conflict.

Now, the New Year attack comes as the Biden administration is trying to provide billions in weaponry to Ukraine while also claiming that avoiding a direct clash with Russia has been a top US priority.

At any rate, although Russian intelligence would have a fair idea of the location of NATO officers conducting the Ukrainian operations, they have not been so far targeted. That is why, the Russian MOD’s decision on Monday to highlight that US-supplied Himars missiles have killed scores of Russian soldiers on Sunday night would have caused some uneasiness in Washington.

The big question is whether Moscow will also now go up the escalation ladder and directly target American military personnel deployed in Ukraine.

Of course, any killing of American military personnel in Ukraine will make very damaging headlines in the US news cycle for the Biden Administration. So far, there has not been a single instance of a body bag arriving from Ukraine. The Russian generals probably ensured that.

The Russian reports often mention publicly that the highly advanced HIMARS missile systems supplied to Ukraine are in reality operated by the US personnel. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Tass news agency as recently as last week:

“The Kiev regime is deliberately flooded with the most advanced weapons, including samples that have not yet been put into service in the Western armies, apparently in order to see how they will do in combat conditions… Meanwhile, Westerners are saying they prefer to remain ‘above the fray’ and find a direct face-off between NATO and Russia unacceptable, which is unadulterated hypocrisy. Already now, NATO members have de facto become parties to the conflict: Western private military companies and military instructors are fighting on the side of the Ukrainian forces. The Americans transmit satellite and other reconnaissance data to the Ukrainian command almost in real time and participate in planning and carrying out military operations.”

Neither Washington nor Brussels ever endeavoured to refute these damning Russian allegations. Instead, they choose to tread warily since a public discussion may jeopardise the delicate “strategic deconfliction” arrangement / understanding worked out with the Russian general staff.

It comes as no surprise if Washington distances itself from the dastardly attack on New Year Day in Donetsk, which drew Russian blood. Quoting an unnamed Israeli diplomat, the Times of Israel reported that the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had a call with the newly appointed Israeli foreign minister Eli Cohen on Monday and asked him “to pass messages on to Lavrov but did not say what they were.”

The Russian readout of Cohen’s phone conversation with Lavrov on Tuesday mentioned that the latter “informed his Israeli counterpart about certain aspects of the situation in Ukraine in the context of Russia’s special military operation.”

Lavrov probably had his say on Blinken’s charade that the US had nothing to do with the killing of 89 Russian soldiers. The fact that as many was six deadly HIMARS missiles were fired in rapid sequence at a single target at 12.02 am shows a high level of certainty on the part of the Ukrainian side and/or their western mentors that maximum damage would be inflicted.

The intelligence inputs in real time show direct American participation in the horrific operation targeting the Russian conscripts’ New Year party just when the toasts began. Of course, whipping up public sentiments in Russia against Putin is a core American objective in the war.

We are entering a grey zone. Expect “surgical strikes” by the Russian forces, too. After all, at some point soon enough, it will emerge that what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... n-ukraine/

Fake News about North Korean Aid to the Wagner PMC as an Illustration of New “Evidence” Trends
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 4, 2023
Konstantin Asmolov

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It would seem that not long ago we touched on the intricate situation regarding rumors of North Korean or South Korean arms being supplied to the region of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, noting that there was no real evidence of either. Unfortunately, the situation is not evolving for the better and even those in the US establishment, who previously had refrained from making direct and unsubstantiated accusations, have begun to do so.

On December 22, 2022, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters that the DPRK had completed its initial arms delivery to Russia back in November, including infantry rockets and missiles: “We can confirm that North Korea has completed an initial arms delivery to Wagner, which paid for that equipment”. And while Washington does believe “that the amount of material delivered to Wagner will not change battlefield dynamics in Ukraine,” it is still “certainly concerned that North Korea is planning to deliver more military equipment.”

Kirby’s further statements reflected that, for him, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is taking place on some other globe. It turned out that Russian military officials report to the command of this PMC, which has 50,000 fighters. “It’s pretty apparent to us that Wagner is emerging as a rival power center to the Russian military and other Russian ministries”. The Russian reader can only raise a restrained smile, which also applies to the idea that the PMC has not only heavy equipment, but also missiles and heavy artillery in its arsenal.

Nevertheless, Kirby said the US, along with its allies and partners, would raise the issue in the UN Security Council, as the North’s arms deliveries were a clear violation of sanctions resolutions and he promised new sanctions against the Wagner group. US Permanent Representative to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield also said that the US “intends to raise the DPRK’s and Russia’s violations of UN Security Council resolutions in future meetings of the Security Council and will share information of this violation with the Council’s 1718 Sanctions Committee.”

The ROK and Canadian foreign ministries joined in the condemnation. Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly stressed that the actions of Wagner and Pyongyang “clearly violate international law and United Nations Security Council resolutions.” South Korea’s foreign ministry also condemned the arms trade between North Korea and the PMC, saying it was detrimental to peace and stability in the international community in direct violation of the resolutions.

More interestingly, Stéphane Dujarric, the Spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, told a briefing that the UN had no information on possible arms deliveries from the DPRK to the Wagner PMC. From the author’s point of view, this is a hint…

Equally interesting is that Kirby’s information was published almost exactly the same way a little earlier by the British media. Reuters quoted a senior US administration official as saying that the ammunition had been bought from the DPRK last month and delivered to Russia: allegedly the volume of shipments is not large enough to seriously affect military operations, but the US fears that this channel will continue to operate.

A little earlier, the Japanese newspaper Tokyo Shinbun had reported that similar missiles were being supplied via the Hasan-Rajin railway.

And all this could not but prompt a comment from the DPRK Foreign Ministry, which on December 22 dismissed the manipulative report by the Japanese media as a completely clumsy and groundless PR stunt. The rest of the statement should be quoted as fully as possible:

“The DPRK remains unchanged in its principled stand on the issue of “arms transaction” between the DPRK and Russia which has never happened.

The international community will have to focus on the US criminal acts of bringing bloodshed and destruction to Ukraine by providing it with various kinds of lethal weapons and equipment on a large scale, rather than lending an ear to the groundless theory of “arms transaction” between the DPRK and Russia cooked up by some dishonest forces for different purposes.

Taking this opportunity, I would like to say that the Russian people are the bravest people with the will and ability to defend the security and territorial integrity of their country without any others’ military support”.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner PMC, also dismissed the allegation of North Korean supplies as “gossip and speculation”, and the author partly agrees with him: there is still no regular railway connection between North Korea and Russia. All the more so since the movement of trains across the border is monitored by US military satellites, among others.

The author also draws attention to the fact that the PMC has far less capacity to procure this type of weapons than the state does, because it would require additional time. Finally, if the PMC had received these weapons back in November, they would have already been used on the battlefields, which would have left an information trail.

This looks like another fake about North Korean shells, but for the author it is an excuse to talk about two additional things.

First, that accusations are very often based on the method of projection or, as the saying goes, the tongue ever turns to the aching tooth. And in this context, it is worth talking about a series of US pieces in the Western media which suggest that the “arsenal of democracy is depleting” and it is not Russia, but the “free world” which is having problems in supplying arms.

Second, although this version was first published by a British news agency and then voiced by Kirby himself, no evidence was produced. Meanwhile, the author reiterates a very important point: if you accuse your opponent and you have hard, irrefutable facts that incriminate them in some way, you can safely put them out there – without fear that some independent expert will discover that it was a poorly concocted fake. When someone says “we have secret evidence, but we won’t show it to you because it is a military secret”, this approach has been considered rotten since the Dreyfus affair.

The accusations concerning Moscow’s use of Iranian drones include at least debris that is structurally similar to Iranian designs. There is nothing in this case, and the Wagner PMC seems to be attached because it is today the most demonized armed formation having anything to do with Russia. Moreover, it also operates in the Middle East and Africa, which might have added credibility to the US claims, if there had been any specifics.

The use of accusations, however, which are not backed up by any semblance of credible evidence, did not begin with North Korean shells. One may recall the high-profile doping case in which the Russian side somehow allegedly tampered with urine samples in containers that were not supposed to be opened as per design. One may recall the poisonings of the Skripals or Kim Jong-nam when, in response to a direct question as to how exactly on the technical side the special operation had been carried out, there was no sane answer.

Rather than going into detail and sorting out the extent to which certain actions are technically possible, the analysis is substituted by notions of how capable we think “They” are of doing It. And if They could do it, then They did it, no matter how.

That said, such unsubstantiated information becomes a pretext for imposing sanctions of any level of severity – and this is an important criterion of a post-globalization world in which there is no longer any room for normal investigations and evidence. And this is a worrying sign, because now it is possible to use a fantastic accusation as a pretext for sanctions and if it is said from a high rostrum, the status of the one who said it is confirmation in itself: “How can we doubt the existence of Marquis of Carabas if the talking cat claims it?”

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... ce-trends/

************

Ukraine’s glorification of Stepan Bandera draws criticism even from key ally
Since 2014, the post-Maidan regime in Ukraine and its far-right militias have been glorifying the far-right, hyper-nationalist legacy of World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera

January 05, 2023 by Peoples Dispatch

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A collage of a photo of a right-wing rally in honor of Stepan Bandera and the tweet from the Ukrainian parliament on January 1, 2023. (Photo: via Labor Heartlands)

Ukraine’s support for neo-Nazi groups and its attempts to officially recognize pro-Nazi legions and Nazi collaborators from World War II have been steadfastly criticized by communists and other anti-fascist groups in the region. Even though Kiev’s supporters in Europe and North America have hitherto maintained a complicit silence about these maneuvers, the latest gesture by the Ukrainian parliament, cheering on the birthday of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, has drawn sharp criticism even from neighboring Poland, its staunch ally in the ongoing war with Russia.

On January 1, a post celebrating the 114th birthday of Stepan Bandera—notorious Ukrainian far-right leader and World War II Nazi collaborator—was tweeted from the official handle of the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament. According to reports, the tweet contained “a quote from Stepan Bandera and a photo of the Ukrainian Armed Forces chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, with a large portrait of the Nazi collaborator in the background.” After receiving a significant amount of criticism, it was later deleted from the twitter handle of Verkhovna Rada.

The tweet triggered spontaneous outrage from Poland, otherwise a staunch supporter of Kiev and Volodymyr Zelensky. On January 2, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki denounced the glorification of Stepan Bandera by the Ukrainian parliament. On the same day, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper also slammed Ukrainian authorities for celebrating and quoting an anti-semitic Nazi collaborator.

While addressing the media on January 2, Morawiecki stated, as per RT, that “no nuances were possible that would make the continued glorification of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera palatable,” adding that Bandera’s nationalists had committed “terrible crimes.” He is reported to have said that Poland would not tolerate the minimization of those crimes.

Successive governments that came into power in Ukraine following the anti-Russian Euromaidan coup of 2014 have initiated a virulent campaign of decommunization. They have also attempted to normalize support for far-right Ukrainian nationalist legions, and their leaders, from World War II, who were Nazi collaborators and mass murderers of Jews, the Polish, and fellow Ukrainians. Neo-Nazi groups like Right Sector and the Azov Battalion have been active in post-Maidan Ukraine and continue to be active belligerents in the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war.

Bandera was the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a far-right, ultra-nationalist Ukrainian militant group that collaborated with Nazis during World War II, fought against the Soviets, and perpetrated mass murders of ethnic Jews, Poles, and pro-Soviet Ukrainians. After World War II, Bandera was settled in West Germany and cooperated with Western intelligence services including MI6 in its anti-Soviet activities.

In 2010, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko awarded Bandera with the posthumous title of ‘Hero of Ukraine’—in order to please hyper-nationalist sections in the country. Even this courted criticism from the EU, Poland, Israel, Russia and many other countries. Later, the decision to confer the award on Bandera was annulled by President Viktor Yanukovych. In the aftermath of the Euromaidan coup of 2014, which ousted the pro-Russia Yanukovych, right-wing militias that consider Bandera a hero were given free rein in the country and support from the governments of Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky. Since then, Ukrainian nationalists have regularly marked Bandera’s birthday on January 1 with torch-lit marches and demonstrations.

On January 4, Roman Kononenko from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) told Peoples Dispatch that “if someone today is not yet able to draw an elementary parallel between accusations against Ukraine that it has become a neo-Nazi state, and state-level glorification in this country of the Nazi accomplice and bloody executioner of the peoples Stepan Bandera, then this person is either criminally stupid or deliberately turns a blind eye to obvious things.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/01/05/ ... -key-ally/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 05, 2023 11:39 pm

Christmas Cease Fire

Russian patriarch calls for Orthodox Christmas truce in Ukraine - Reuters, Jan 5 2023 - 10:05 UTC

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, called on Thursday for both sides of the war in Ukraine to observe a Christmas truce, a step dismissed by Kyiv as a cynical trap.
Many Orthodox Christians, including those living in Russia and Ukraine, celebrate Christmas on Jan. 6-7.

"I, Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, appeal to all the parties involved in the internecine conflict to cease fire and establish a Christmas truce from 12:00 on Jan. 6 until 24:00 on Jan. 7 so that Orthodox people can attend services on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day," he said.

A senior aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Mykhailo Podolyak, cast the Russian Orthodox Church as a "war propagandist" that had incited the "mass murder" of Ukrainians and the militarisation of Russia.

"The statement of the Russian Orthodox Church about the 'Christmas Truce' is a cynical trap and an element of propaganda," he said.

---
Putin orders 36-hour weekend cease-fire in Ukraine - AP, Jan 5 2023 - 12:32 UTC

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday ordered Moscow’s armed forces to hold a 36-hour cease-fire in Ukraine this weekend for the Russian Orthodox Christmas holiday, the Kremlin said.
The order follows a proposal by the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, earlier in the day, which was dismissed by an official in the Ukrainian presidential office as propaganda.

“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 cease-fire and give them the opportunity to attend services on Christmas Eve, as well as on the Day of the Nativity of Christ,” according to Putin’s order, addressed to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and published on the Kremlin’s website.


The Russian troops will stop their attacks and offensive artillery strike during the announced time span.

The Ukrainian military is likely to disregard the cease fire. It will try to use it for local attacks which will run into well prepared defenses.

For most of the front lines this cease fire it will thereby be essentially a non-story. The value of it is in lifting the mood of the people in Russia and in the Russian affiliated areas of Ukraine.

Posted by b on January 5, 2023 at 16:19 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/01/c ... l#comments

I doubt that anyone expects anything from this. A warm fuzzy for the Russian masses.

*************

From Cassad's Telegram account:

***

Colonelcassad

Image

Kherson direction
situation as of 12:00 January 5, 2023

In the Kherson direction, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are actively reconnaissance of the positions of the RF Armed Forces along the left bank of the Dnieper River . The activity of Ukrainian formations in the area of ​​the Kinburn Peninsula has increased .

Artillery crews and kamikaze attack drones are trying to fire on the rear facilities of the RF Armed Forces in the Kherson region with the intention of depriving the Russian group of supplies and combat potential.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine use a similar tactic that was used in the Izyum and Krivoy Rog directions. Probably, after the targeted destruction of ammunition depots, air defense systems and firing positions, there will be an attempt to land troops on the Kinburn Peninsula.

🔻For several days in a row , the Ukrainian Bayraktar UAV has been operating in the Primorsky sector in the airspace over Ochakov and the Dnieper Estuary , monitoring the situation on the Kinburn Peninsula.

▪️Ukrainian special services have resumed collecting information about the locations of personnel, supply depots and headquarters of Russian troops on the left bank in the Golopristansky , Tsyurupinsky and Skadovsky districts of the Kherson region.

Pro-Ukrainian citizens, informants and intelligence groups in the rear help them in the search for data. In addition, the satellites of the NATO countries increased the number of sessions of shooting the Earth's surface in this area.

🔻In the Berislav sector , units of the 39th separate consolidated battalion of the territorial defense are firing mortars at the positions of the RF Armed Forces along the Dnieper.

▪️In addition, on the territory of the Berislav Machine-Building Plant, a command post of the 126th troop brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is deployed, from which the mortar battery is monitored.

▪️At one of the sections of the Kherson direction, several foreign mercenaries, in a state of intoxication, shot dead three Ukrainian fighters at a checkpoint. The command of the 121st arr. TRO conducts an emergency check of the advanced lines.

***

Colonelcassad

Image

About the decommissioning of the transport infrastructure in the Zaporozhye region

After the withdrawal of Russian troops from the right bank of the Dnieper in the Kherson region, the command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine focused on the Zaporozhye region .

Using already proven tactics, the Ukrainian formations strike at the rear facilities of the RF Armed Forces, break the supply chains and complicate the supply system of the Russian groupings of troops to the maximum.

In addition, sabotage and reconnaissance groups are used to disable transport infrastructure facilities - bridges and crossings.

Judging by the geography of explosions and strikes, the Ukrainian formations will attempt to cut off individual settlements and “bite off” small areas near Vasilyevka andcanopies .

The fighting in the Bakhmutovsky direction somewhat slowed down the implementation of the plans of the Armed Forces of Ukraine - separate brigades were transferred to the former Artyomovsk in order to restrain the advance of the Russian troops.

But already this month, the command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine expects to begin the active phase of the counteroffensive.

***

Colonelcassad
🇺🇦 About forced mobilization in the east of Ukraine

Reforming the structure of the armed forces and creating two new corps requires huge resources, first of all, the manpower needed to complete regular formations.

To this end, in almost all regions of Ukraine (especially in the east and in the central part) there has long been a forced mobilization , which allows you to close the gaps that arise in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

For example, in the Odessa region , people are taken away immediately after serving the summons and sent to training grounds without the right to training camps. A similar situation is developing in Chernigov in the regions bordering Russia.

🔻Many citizens are aware of the fate of "cannon fodder" prepared for them somewhere in the Soledar direction in the battles near Bakhmut and are trying to avoid such a fate by evading mobilization. In Ukraine, they are trying to fight this with all possible means.

In the military registration and enlistment offices in the Dnipropetrovsk region , they found a rather entertaining way to search for and put pressure on draft dodgers: lists with personal data of people who, for one reason or another, were not drafted into the army, are hung on poles in various cities. The same situation is in the Kharkiv region .

What this initiative is aimed at is not entirely clear. Probably a call to conscience and a call to shame. However, the effectiveness of such actions is highly questionable.

The publication of personal data against the backdrop of martial law will create prerequisites for the infringement of the rights of this category of the population, and in some cases create a threat to the life of the person himself and his loved ones.

Especially on the part of the nationalist stratum of Ukrainian society, which is not particularly in a hurry to go to war for their country, but actively supports repression and oppression against fellow citizens.

***

Colonelcassad

Image
Kherson direction
situation as of 12:00 January 5, 2023

In the Kherson direction, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are actively reconnaissance of the positions of the RF Armed Forces along the left bank of the Dnieper River . The activity of Ukrainian formations in the area of ​​the Kinburn Peninsula has increased .

Artillery crews and kamikaze attack drones are trying to fire on the rear facilities of the RF Armed Forces in the Kherson region with the intention of depriving the Russian group of supplies and combat potential.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine use a similar tactic that was used in the Izyum and Krivoy Rog directions. Probably, after the targeted destruction of ammunition depots, air defense systems and firing positions, there will be an attempt to land troops on the Kinburn Peninsula.

🔻In the Primorsky sector , for several days in a row , the Ukrainian Bayraktar UAV has been operating in the airspace over Ochakov and the Dnieper Estuary , monitoring the situation on the Kinburn Peninsula.

▪️Ukrainian special services have resumed collecting information about the locations of personnel, supply depots and headquarters of Russian troops on the left bank in the Golopristansky , Tsyurupinsky and Skadovsky districts of the Kherson region.

Pro-Ukrainian citizens, informants and intelligence groups in the rear help them in the search for data. In addition, the satellites of the NATO countries increased the number of sessions of shooting the Earth's surface in this area.

🔻In the Berislav sector , units of the 39th separate consolidated battalion of the territorial defense are firing mortars at the positions of the RF Armed Forces along the Dnieper.

▪️In addition, on the territory of the Berislav Machine-Building Plant, a command post of the 126th troop brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is deployed, from which the mortar battery is monitored.

▪️At one of the sections of the Kherson direction, several foreign mercenaries, in a state of intoxication, shot dead three Ukrainian fighters at a checkpoint. The command of the 121st arr. TRO conducts an emergency check of the advanced lines.

https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin

Google Translator

******

Our urgent task: Unite to fight fascism and imperialist war
January 5, 2023 Melinda Butterfield

Image
A protest in Kharkov, eastern Ukraine, in the spring of 2014. Soon after, anti-fascists in the city were forced to flee into exile or go underground. Photo: Borotba

As 2023 begins, it’s undeniable that a dangerous, virulent fascist movement is spreading through U.S. society.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said in 1967, “The bombs dropped on Vietnam explode at home.” Malcolm X expressed something similar when he said, “Chickens come home to roost.”

Feeding the U.S. war machine boomerangs by increasing repression, decreasing rights, and robbing people of desperately needed resources here at home. Promoting fascism abroad facilitates its growth here.

It’s seen in the spread of hate-ridden protests against drag story hours, sometimes attended by armed neo-Nazis, who threaten children, parents, and LGBTQ+ communities, and in the bomb threats targeting medical facilities that provide gender-affirming care to trans children and abortion services to people who can become pregnant.

It takes the form of mass shootings, like the massacre of 10 Black people at Tops grocery in Buffalo, New York, five queer people at Club Q in Colorado Springs, and 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. We recognize it in the targeting of electrical grids from North Carolina to Washington state to sow fear.

At the local level, the fascist influence is evident in the rash of attempts by astroturfed “parents’ groups” to ban books that expose the racist history of the U.S. or validate the lives and experiences of LGBTQ+ people.

At the state level, we see it in the efforts by officials in Texas, Ohio, Florida, and elsewhere to eradicate trans health care, criminalize parents who support trans children, and create a lynch-mob atmosphere against women and others who choose to get an abortion.

At the national level, there is the far-right-controlled U.S. Supreme Court, which gutted voting rights, struck down the constitutional right to abortion, and seems poised to do the same to same-sex marriage.

Looming over it all is the shadow of Jan. 6, 2021, when an organized fascist mob attempted a coup d’etat at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., to keep Donald Trump in power – aided and abetted by a faction of the Pentagon.

Fascist tendencies have existed in the U.S. since it began its rise as an imperialist power in the late 19th century – from the Ku Klux Klan to the John Birch Society to today’s Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Sometimes the ruling class of bosses, bankers, and landlords keep them on a tight leash.

But when times are tough, when they fear the masses of poor and working people could unite and fight back against their unjust capitalist system, the fascists are let off their leash to spread division and, if necessary, physically exterminate those the rich and powerful fear most.

U.S. spread fascism in Ukraine

As top dog of the world imperialist powers – including Britain, Japan, and the European Union – the U.S. has long upheld fascists in its efforts to wring the maximum profits out of the world’s people.

Washington has abetted fascist dictatorships or those with strong fascist aspects, from the Shah of Iran to Suharto in Indonesia, from Pinochet in Chile to Áñez in Bolivia.

During the Cold War against the USSR, the U.S. encouraged the growth of violent fascist movements like the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its post-World War II successors. The U.S. and Canada harbored its leaders, gave them money and weapons, and encouraged their hate propaganda against multinational Soviet socialism.

The many neo-Nazi movements in Ukraine today, like Right Sector and Azov Brigade, are descendants of this lineage.

But that’s not all. The destruction of the USSR and European socialist camp 30 years ago brought economic devastation and plummeting life expectancies. Washington stepped into the ideological vacuum to spread division and prevent a revolutionary response to the cataclysm.

One way it did this was by spreading U.S.-style white supremacy through the capitalist media. Another was to encourage far-right U.S. evangelical movements to spread anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-woman hate.

This happened under both Democratic and Republican administrations and prepared the ground for the growth of fascist movements and reactionary government policies in Eastern Europe that plague the region today.

Donbass resists fascism

I’ve been writing about Ukraine since the U.S.-backed Maidan coup toppled the elected government in early 2014. Fascist groups were at the heart of this “revolution of dignity.” They hobnobbed with the likes of the late Republican Senator John McCain and Democrat Victoria Nuland, who today is Joe Biden’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

I’ve interviewed, spoken to, and visited courageous Ukrainian anti-fascists who resisted. Many were forced to flee east to avoid death. Others were imprisoned and later traded in exchanges for captured Ukrainian soldiers. Today many of them are fighting on the side of the Donbass and Russia.

The neo-Nazis who provided the backbone of Maidan went on to massacre 48 unarmed activists at the Odessa House of Trade Unions on May 2, 2014. None of the perpetrators have been punished. Many survivors, however, were jailed or driven into exile.

Washington preferred its new puppet regime in Kiev to be fronted by more media-friendly faces like oligarch Petro Poroshenko or TV comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. But it made sure the fascists became integral to the repressive bodies of the state, including the Armed Forces of Ukraine, providing them extensive training in the use of Western-supplied weapons.

These neo-Nazis, under various names, also set the tone for the new regime’s virulently anti-Russia and anti-communist ideology. One of the government’s first acts was to ban the use of the Russian language – the daily language of those living in eastern Ukraine. They spoke of working-class residents of the east – especially in the Donbass mining region – as “insects” and “subhumans” to be cleansed.

The writing was on the wall. People in the east – and antifascists throughout the whole of Ukraine – rose up. In most places, they were violently suppressed. But in the Donbass regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, the people seized power and declared themselves independent anti-fascist republics.

Ukraine – with the backing of the U.S. and the NATO military alliance – then waged war on the people of Donbass for eight years, killing more than 14,000 people and setting the stage for the escalation of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia in early 2022.

Fascism must be fought

For a few years in the late 2010s, articles sometimes appeared in the U.S. corporate media highlighting Ukraine’s “Nazi problem.” Some even exposed links between the Ukrainian far right and white supremacist groups in the U.S., like the Rise Against Movement, which participated in the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, where anti-racist protester Heather Heyer was murdered in 2017.

This is not surprising. It’s common practice for U.S. media to be used to keep dependent regimes in line, to remind them that “we made you, and we can break you.”

But when Washington, Wall Street, and Big Oil decided in 2021 that it was time to go full-speed ahead with a proxy war against Russia, those kinds of exposés vanished. Once Russia was backed into a corner and forced to intervene militarily to prevent a genocidal slaughter in Donbass, any discussion of Ukraine’s “Nazi problem” became an unspeakable heresy for the media and liberal mouthpieces on social media.

Today it is common to see Ukrainian soldiers in the media sporting fascist symbols. But the media ignore the symbols, and anyone who dares to point them out is labeled an agent of Vladimir Putin.

The people of Donbass don’t have that luxury. They had to fight, arms in hand, to protect themselves from the fascist threat, and today they must continue to do so as Ukraine rains bombs, mines, and artillery on civilian targets in Donetsk and other cities.

Unite against fascism and imperialism

It’s a tragedy of history that those fighting the rise of fascism in the U.S. and Ukraine are mostly unable to recognize one another.

Just as imperialism spread hate propaganda in the former Soviet countries to sow division, so has it co-opted the language of protest movements, the tactics of anarchism and social democracy, and used nonprofits to confuse people in the West and turn natural allies against each other.

A growing grassroots movement in the U.S. is resisting fascist threats on the lives of the most marginalized communities. This is a great reason for hope.

However, if this movement cannot recognize other genuine anti-fascist struggles and learn from them, if it does not learn about the class nature of imperialist war, it will remain isolated and unable to respond to the underlying causes of fascism.

What’s lacking is not only a basic, class-conscious understanding of what fascism is and how to fight it. The fundamental Marxist understanding of imperialism and war, as explained by Lenin, has been lost to many movements that have emerged in the 21st century.

Opposition to imperialist war and support for its military defeat is not based on political agreement with the non-imperialist countries under attack but an understanding that imperialism’s defeat is a fundamental prerequisite to liberation.

Those who claim to want liberation for LGBTQ+ people in Russia and women in Iran, freedom for Palestine, or a socialist future for Ukraine and Venezuela but who do not do everything in their power to facilitate the defeat of U.S. imperialism internally and externally are misguided at best.

There’s a fundamental commonality between the anti-fascists who fight arms in hand in Donetsk and Lugansk and the armed anti-fascists who defend queer spaces in Texas.

Those who held mass protests in Ukraine against the Maidan coup and those who came out in the streets to defend drag story hour in Queens, New York, are part of the same fight – even if those on both sides cannot see it at the moment.

It’s the job of communist revolutionaries to build bridges of understanding and mutual struggle.

Marxists have revolutionary optimism because we know history never presents people with a task without the means to carry it out. The knowledge, tactics, and forces to defeat imperialism and fascism exist. The numbers who understand them are small for now.

But circumstances demand that knowledge be shared, studied, and put into practice. We must prepare to do so, even if we have to fight to get a hearing.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2023/ ... alist-war/

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War in Ukraine. Summary 01/05/2023
January 5, 23:03

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War in Ukraine. Summary 01/05/2023

Avdeevskoe direction.
The battles for Vodyanoye and Pervomayskoye continue. There are also battles for fortified areas near Nevelskoye. The pace of progress is low.

Maryin direction.
Fighting continues in the western part of the city. Fights go for every house. Additional reserves were transferred to Maryinka from the Zaporozhye direction.

Ugledar direction.
No changes on the Novomikhailovka-Pavlovka line. There are no significant offensive actions in the direction of Ugledar yet. The front here took on a positional character, just as in the sector near Velikaya Novoselka.

Zaporozhye direction.
After the occupation of Dorozhnyanka by the Russian Armed Forces south of Gulyaipol, the fighting here continues in a positional manner. The enemy removed part of the forces from the Zaporozhye direction, so the offensive capabilities of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were somewhat reduced here. At the same time, the enemy continues to strike infrastructure in order to disrupt the logistics of the RF Armed Forces in the Pologi-Tokmak area.

Kherson direction.
In general, the front here has long stabilized along the Dnieper and somehow there are no changes here. The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation today confirmed the preservation of control over the island of Bolshoy Potemkin.

Artemovsk direction.
PMC "Wagner" continues to advance on Podgorodnoye, reaching the outskirts of the village. Fighting also continues on the outskirts of Kleshcheevka, in the central part of Opytny and in the industrial zone in the east of Artemovsk. There is also a promotion in the southeastern quarters of the city. The enemy continues to build up forces near Artemivsk to rotate the battered brigades of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which have partially lost their combat capability after intense fighting.

Soledar direction.
There is a significant advance in the city to the salt mines, which was facilitated by both the offensive from Yakovlevka to the northern outskirts of the city and the Seversk-Soledar highway, and the offensive from Bakhmutsky, which led to the capture of the Dekonskaya station. Stubborn fighting continues near Belogorovka and Disputed. On the Seversky site without any changes.

Wedding direction.
The enemy continues to attack in the direction of Kremennaya, but so far has not been able to achieve a significant result. The main stake was placed on the capture of Chervonopopovka, but it remains under the control of our troops. Fighting continues for Novoselovskoye, as well as in the area of ​​Makeevka and Kuzemovka. Despite the fact that the front here has a positional character, both sides strive to fight for the initiative.

PS. It is reported that the United States intends to supply 50 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine, following the French AMX-10RC heavy armored vehicles. Further, until the end of January, we can expect a decision on the delivery of Marder infantry fighting vehicles from Germany, but in the spring we can expect deliveries of tanks and aircraft. Regarding the batch of Turkish MRAPs "Kirpi", this is part of the old purchase from the summer of 2022. Out of 150, 50 were delivered in 2022,
In the case of "Marders", we can talk about the number of 30-50 pieces. In total, NATO wants to saturate the Armed Forces of Ukraine by the spring with at least 200 infantry fighting vehicles of various types and 250-350 new MCIs, which is necessary for the brigades being formed.

PS2. Regarding the large echelon with the BTR-82A in Belarus, this equipment is intended for the Belarusian special forces brigade. At the moment, there are no signs of mounting a strike force to attack Ukraine from the territory of Belarus. At the same time, today the Ministry of Defense of Belarus confirmed that the number of the joint Russian-Belarusian group deployed on the territory of Belarus will increase. But it is worth remembering that part of this group is busy covering the border with Poland and Lithuania.

Broadcast of hostilities as usual in telegram - https://t.me/boris_rozhin(if you are interested please subscribe)

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8081823.html

On the centralization of the military-industrial complex
January 5, 19:21

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Centralization of the military-industrial complex in Russia - a risk or a solution to problems with equipping the army

Following the statement of the Ministry of Industry and Trade about the need to increase ( https://t.me/suverennews/682 ) the production of gunpowder and ammunition, there was news about the reorganization of 10 defense enterprises at once, one way or another connected with this industry.

All of them will be transformed from federal state-owned enterprises into joint-stock companies (all shares will remain the property of the state), and the management of the companies will be transferred to Rostec.

In fact, we are talking about the centralization of industry management under the control of one organization. Consolidation of defense enterprises into large corporations is an international trend. So, in the US, instead of 51 general contractors left after the Cold War, the Pentagon now works with only 5.

Rostec was originally created precisely with the aim of uniting the efforts of dozens of disparate military-industrial enterprises in order to avoid “double work”, and in order to be able to concentrate efforts on promising developments that require coordinated efforts and significant resources. Both successes and failures awaited the state corporation along this path, but, in general, the government recognizes the experience as positive.

Consolidation will help to simplify cooperation between links in the supply chain. But the corporation also faces several alternative tasks with a comparable priority, so it is not necessary to count on the fact that the state corporation will "tear from the heart" equipment and specialists in favor of the production of ammunition.

Will the reorganization help increase production without taking additional measures? The issue is debatable, but let's hope that this is not the only step planned by the government.

https://t.me/suverennews/690 - zinc

Regarding the discussion https://t.me/suverennews/690 on centralizing the management of defense enterprises.
It is quite obvious that in conditions of war the centralization of the military-industrial complex is inevitable. Of course, these are non-market processes. The military-industrial complex is not about the market at all (although since the time of the "holy 90s" they have tried to convince of the opposite).

The effectiveness of the process can only be assessed by the percentage increase in the output of defense products. If the same "Rostec" copes with the issues of increasing the production of the same gunpowder and shells at managed enterprises, then the process is built efficiently. In conditions of war, the main thing is to ensure the growing flow of the necessary weapons and supplies for the army. Any organizational transformation must be subordinated to this goal.

https://t.me/boris_rozhin/74512

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8081162.html

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Ha!
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 06, 2023 1:24 pm

impose the speech
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 01/06/2023

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As in practically any war conflict, since it began in 2014, the information aspect has been an essential part of the war in Ukraine, both in its contained phase in Donbass and, intensified, in the current phase, which not only involves a third country, Russia, but its consequences have spread to the entire Ukrainian territory. In this task of imposing its discourse against other alternatives, Ukraine has always counted on the participation of the Western media apparatus. In these more than eight years that have elapsed between the events of 2014, which were not limited to the war in Donbass, but also included the Maidan assassinations, the February coup, the Odessa massacre and the incorporation into the structures officials of nationalist groups linked to the most radical extreme right,

Less still have been the reproaches to kyiv for not having been able to solve the cases of the Maidan murders, for punishing a single culprit for the deaths of the Odessa House of Trade Unions, for starting a war to settle for the military way, a problem that, at that time was political, or because of its actions in the seven years after the signing of the agreements that were to transfer the war conflict to the diplomatic level. Despite openly and publicly bragging for years about his refusal to comply with the agreements signed by the parties and negotiated with the mediation of two of the European powers, Germany and France, at the time in which the Minsk agreements were considered a useful path resolution of the conflict, the blame for the perpetual blockade was consistently and consciously placed on Russia.

Despite having tried to resolve a political conflict by military means and having refused to comply with an agreement negotiated by countries of the European Union and having signed or openly refusing to resume the payment of pensions in Donbass, Ukraine was always presented as the country attacked , not the offending party. And despite demonizing and persecuting all kinds of opponents (mainly the communists, although the demonization and humiliation was not limited to them but extended to everything considered pro-Russian, whether or not), Kiev was always considered a bastion of European values ​​and democracy against Russian authoritarianism.

In this context of the resounding success of the imposition of the Ukrainian nationalist discourse throughout the Western press, it is not surprising that the Ukrainian story has been imposed without any effort since February 24, when the Russian troops finally crossed the Ukrainian borders. with the start of its special military operation , actually a new phase of the war, which extended the conflict to the entire Ukrainian territory and risked doing so to part of the Russian territory as well. Forgetting everything that happened in the previous eight years, the official discourse presented then, and continues to present now, an "unprovoked war", which deliberately ignores the fact that the war began in April 2014 when Turchinov announced the anti-terrorist operation., asked the United Nations to participate in it and Prime Minister Yatseniuk openly declared that “Ukraine is already at war”. To this day, even the now exalted commander Valery Zaluzhny admits that, for the Armed Forces, the war began in that year. But ignoring the legitimate demands of the people of Donbass and the war that followed the April protests and May 2014 referendum helps present a recent war in which blame can easily be placed, not on one country, but on one. single person, President Vladimir Putin. This version also means ignoring, as has been done since the war began, the human suffering caused by the decision of the Ukrainian executive, that given the possibility that Donbass would follow a scenario similar to that of Crimea and lose control of more parts of the country ,

The ease with which Ukraine has imposed and generalized its account of the events not only persists, but has increased with the Russian invasion of February 2022. Faced with any Russian statement, published always creating the shadow of doubt for the country to which has created a reputation for never telling the truth, every Ukrainian statement is understood as a fact that does not require any verification. The rapes of babies, a story that would later cost the ombudsman his job, the rape kits, the torture rooms, the conscious use of rape as a weapon of war, the theft of children or the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people have taken the place of Russian self-bombardments against their own territories in the Ukrainian imaginary,

Without the possibility of covering the war from the front, or of doing so continuously, the press has chosen to limit itself to reproducing, practically without nuance, what was stated by three main sources: the Government of Ukraine, Western think-tanks and intelligence services, which it's not always even three different sources. A few months ago, when Russia and Ukraine were preparing for the possibility of a battle for the right bank of the Dnieper River in the Kherson region, which ultimately did not occur due to the Russian withdrawal, two clear examples were given of how the press deals with information from both sides of the front line.

The case of the bombing of the Zaporozhie nuclear power plant, the only Ukrainian nuclear power plant under Russian control, has been repeated over the months. The theory of the Russian self-bombing against a plant in which Ukraine accuses Russia of maintaining troops - nonsense for which the press has not bothered to ask Kiev - was repeated over and over again. Finally, perhaps aware that the Ukrainian discourse was meaningless, the media opted for the Solomonic “the parties accuse each other”, thus giving the same credibility to an accusation that lacked any logic compared to one that did. Ukraine, which was trying to force Russia to withdraw from the plant, always had more incentive to bomb those infrastructures than those who defended it and would suffer the consequences in the event of a nuclear incident.

However, the case of the Kajovka dam is even more flagrant. The accusations came at a time when Moscow and Kiev were also exchanging other types of threats: both Russia and Ukraine claimed that the other side was considering the use of a dirty bomb , an accusation that Kiev had already used in previous years against the People's Republics, to which Russia was then added. The press correctly presented the Russian accusations as war propaganda, fake news , while lending credibility to the equally crude Ukrainian account. Although less sensational than the use of weapons of great danger, the case of the cross accusations about the intention to blow up the Kakhovka dam in the Kherson region follow the same pattern.

Since last summer, the Ukrainian tactic in the Kherson region, the only area in which the Russian troops had a presence on the right bank of the Dnieper, had made the situation untenable for the Russian troops. Attacks on bridges and infrastructure had become the main element of the fight, something that finally forced Russia to give up the battle and withdraw, thus saving the lives of what were some of its best troops, which could have been left completely. besieged and isolated with no logistical possibility of supply. In this context, Russia accused Ukraine of planning to blow up the Kakhovka dam, which would have meant flooding a large part of the country's southern territory, on the left bank of the Dnieper, an area under Russian control.

The press did not give credibility to the Russian accusations, but to the Ukrainian response: Russia intended to blow up the dam to prevent the Ukrainian advance and would blame the events on the Ukrainian troops. At the time, academics such as Ivan Katchanovski made it clear that these accusations lacked any logic. In the event of the destruction of the dam, Russia would not only lose control of the flooded area, but would sacrifice the water supply to the entire southern area, including the Crimean peninsula. On the right bank, Ukraine would suffer no consequences. Despite lacking any logic, that was the version that the Western press opted for.

The Russian withdrawal from Kherson without a battle put an end, at least momentarily, to these mixed accusations. Already in autumn, the high season of mud on the ground, Ukraine chose not to try to force the Dnieper to advance on Russian territory, so the Kakhovka dam has been momentarily forgotten. Hence the current admission published this week by The Washington Post is not going to cause any reaction. Ukraine, as Russia claimed at the time, actually did entertain the possibility of blowing up the dam. According to The Washington Post, Major General Andriy Kovalchuk, who was leading the Ukrainian counter-offensive in Kherson, explained that Ukraine had no chance to advance quickly due to the heavy use of minefields (a practice Russia and Ukraine also share).

The outlet explains that Ukrainian troops had gone to Germany to prepare a broader offensive that would include the southern territories of Kherson and Zaporozhie, which has not yet taken place. As Ukraine's foreign partners, primarily the US military, warned, Ukraine risked being trapped by sending Russian reinforcements, a situation the country is familiar with from its attempts to push deep into Donbass in the summer of 2014 that caused thousands of of casualties among his troops. In that account of the planning of an offensive that did not take place, The Washington Postexplains that “Kovalchuk even considered flooding the river. The Ukrainians, he claimed, even carried out a test bombardment with a HIMARS launcher on one of the gates of the Nova Kakhovka dam, punching three holes in the metal, to see if the river waters would rise high enough to destroy the Russian crossings without flood nearby towns. The test was a success, Kovalchuk said, but the step was left as a last resort. That first attempt and that admission that the plan was on the table coincides with the Russian accusations, then condemned as war propaganda by whoever was going to commit the act he denounced.

Without the possibility of continuously covering the war from the field and the absolute lack of interest in giving a balanced image of the events, the press has chosen to continue with the trend of statement journalism, which exclusively publishes the accusations of one part and that he counts in his list of sources that he considers reliable groups such as the Bratstvo battalion, evidently more interested in presenting his image of the war instead of reality. In other words, the Western press acts exactly as they accuse the Russian press of acting, which in their opinion only repeats the speech that comes from the Kremlin, in which every word has to be understood as propaganda. However, every word of Bankova must be published as a fact that does not require any verification, as if any statement from kyiv were not also part of the official discourse or war propaganda of one of the sides in the conflict. Thus, for example, the Russian offer of a 36-hour Christmas truce must be considered as a tactical move to obtain military gain without ever doubting the response from Ukraine, a country that has not only breached each truce agreed in Minsk, but has also prohibited all negotiations with the Russian president.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/01/06/impon ... more-26359

Google Translator

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Ukraine’s military Commander in Chief, General Valerii Zaluzhny, celebrates the birthday of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera (Photo: Twitter)

White Lives Matter more in Ukraine
By Margaret Kimberley (Posted Jan 06, 2023)

Originally published: Black Agenda Report on January 4, 2023 (more by Black Agenda Report) |

The accuracy of this commentary’s title is borne out by statements made and actions taken by the Ukrainians themselves. In 2020 millions of people around the world protested against racism in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. Ukrainians made it clear that they were not to be included amongst that mass of humanity and in fact expressed their support for white supremacy.

In June 2020, a group of football fans at a match in Ukraine unfurled a banner reading, “Free Derek Chauvin.” Chauvin is the man who murdered George Floyd. Not to be outdone, members of the neo-Nazi group Nazionalny Sprotyv, National Resistance, marched on October 14, 2020 with a banner that made the point very clear. The words “White Lives Matter” were written in English and in much larger type than the name of the organization which appeared in small type below. October 14 is celebrated as the Day of the UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought alongside Nazi Germany after it invaded Ukraine during World War II. The words in the pink graphic on the video read, “On the march of UPA Nazis carefully burned the poster of BLM.” Nazionalny Sprotyv is known for its racist, anti-Russian, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-Communist beliefs.

The war propaganda disseminated by the Biden administration and its friends in corporate media tells us to ignore the swastikas, Hitler salutes, and other clear indicators of Nazi sympathies when they appear in Ukraine. Suddenly symbolism which we were told to abhor as indisputable signs of hate speech are now to be accepted or explained away as figments of our collective imagination.

Nazi regalia and symbolism should make assistance to the Ukrainian government an automatic deal breaker. But the U.S. has always been rather flexible in its approach to Nazism. After World War II an intelligence program known as Operation Paperclip brought more than 1,600 German scientists to the U.S. to fight in the new cold war against the Soviet Union. Their links to the Nazi party were covered up so that they might be of assistance to the U.S. Werner von Braun and other Nazi linked scientists were instrumental in creating the U.S. space program.

Ukraine was a divided nation from its very beginnings after World War I, with half of the country hating the Soviet Union so much that they sided with and fought alongside the Germans. January 1 is officially celebrated not just as the first day of the year but as the birthday of Ukraine’s chief Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera. The 2023 celebration was no exception but not without embarrassment. The Ukrainian parliament was forced to delete a Twitter post featuring a photo of army commander General Valerii Zaluzhny juxtaposed with an image of Bandera. Bandera massacred thousands of Poles during the war and the Ukrainians had to be reminded through diplomatic channels that everyone isn’t as forgiving as clueless Americans. Just as Operation Paperclip is an inconvenient and rarely discussed truth, Ukraine’s continuing Nazi and white supremacist connections are now hushed up by the U.S. state and its media partners.

It is indeed awkward for Joe Biden to greet president Zelensky at the white house and for him to speak in congress if these facts are openly discussed. Of course Zelensky is president because the Obama administration helped to engineer a coup against an elected Ukrainian president in 2014. Members of congress like senator Chris Murphy and the late John McCain are among those who traveled to Kiev and addressed rallies sponsored by the right wing Svoboda and Right Sector parties and aided in the coup effort.

The Biden administration invitation to Zelensky was an effort to ensure that an additional $45 billion was allocated to Ukraine before the congressional session ended. The standing ovations and blue and yellow flags and cries of “Slava Ukraini!” were orchestrated to get more buy-in at a time when many Americans are asking why their needs go unmet and why Ukraine can’t resume the negotiations it was holding months ago with Russia. It has been reported that the U.S. sent the then prime minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, to tell Zelensky that any talk of peace had to end. Russia was ready to withdraw in exchange for security guarantees and an end to Ukraine’s efforts to secure NATO membership. But Ukraine is the latest U.S. forever war and its people have to suffer and die because of its dictates.

Perhaps the saddest sight of the night of Zelensky’s congressional speech was the adulation he received from some members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). CBC members Sheila Jackson-Lee and Barbara Lee eagerly sought to shake his hand. Perhaps they are unaware of Ukraine’s white supremacist leanings. But that can’t be true. After all, in 2015 their CBC colleague, the late John Conyers, co-sponsored an amendment that would have barred U.S. funding to the Azov battalion and other Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups. The amendment was ultimately removed from the final spending bill.

CBC member Gregory Meeks is Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs committee and said, “This war is about Russian aggression against Ukraine and the security of Europe, and it is also about democracy over tyranny, and freedom over oppression.” Ukraine has banned left wing parties and collective bargaining rights. Its people are openly racist. Barbara Lee, now elbowing her colleagues to get a little Zelensky facetime, was the only member of congress to have voted against the authorization to invade Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Now she brags about her role in securing more funding for a white supremacist state.

White lives matter just as much in the U.S. as they do in Ukraine. Even Black politicians go along with supremacist ideology. As the war grinds on, and casualties and public spending go ever upward, it is wise to remember that there are very few anti-racists in positions of authority anywhere in the world. Apparently the war propagandists are right. The U.S. and Ukraine are united in every way.

https://mronline.org/2023/01/06/white-l ... n-ukraine/

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US, Germany to send Ukraine fighting vehicles
Xinhua | Updated: 2023-01-06 08:10

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Combo photo of US President Joe Biden (L) and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. [Photo/Xinhua]

WASHINGTON -- The United States and Germany will send Ukraine armored fighting vehicles built respectively by the two countries to bolster Kiev in its ongoing conflict with Russia, the White House said Thursday.

The announcement was made in a statement about a telephone conversation between US President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz earlier in the day.

During the call, Biden expressed the intent to supply Ukraine with Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles, tracked armored combat vehicles that are used to transport troops onto battlefield. Biden did not specify how many such vehicles will go to Ukraine.

Scholz, for his part, said Germany was prepared to provide Ukraine with Marder Infantry Fighting Vehicles, according to the statement. The United States and Germany will train Ukrainian forces on how to operate the respective vehicles being given to Ukraine.

Additionally, to strengthen Ukraine's air defense capabilities, Berlin will join Washington in providing Kiev with another Patriot surface-to-air missile battery. This will bring the number of such weapon system at Ukraine's disposal to two after the United States announced one such delivery when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Washington in December, according to the statement.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... a7f3d.html

The Bradley is an obsolete piece of 1970s junk which US generals abhor.

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Ukraine’s GDP Plunges Record 30.4 Pct in 2022

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Market in Kiev, 2022 | Photo: Xinhua

Published 5 January 2023 (9 hours 59 minutes ago)

Ukraine's GDP declined by a record 30.4 percent last year due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the country's Economy Ministry said Thursday, citing preliminary estimates.


"In 2022, the Ukrainian economy suffered its largest losses and damage in the entire history of independence," said the ministry's press service, quoting Yulia Svyrydenko, the first deputy prime minister and economy minister.

In December 2022, Ukraine's GDP declined 34 percent due to a certain stabilization of the situation with energy supply, after a fall of 37 percent in November, the ministry said.

In the fourth quarter of last year, Ukraine's economy experienced a decline of 35.5 percent compared with the same period in 2021, it said.

The Ukrainian economy saw a 3.4-percent growth in 2021. The country's GDP is expected to rise 3.2 percent this year, according to the government's projection.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ukr ... -0021.html

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From Cassad's Telegram account:

***

Colonelcassad
According to the "truce".
It was expectedly not observed and is not observed.
The shelling went on and on. Donetsk was defiantly shelled after the formal date of the "truce".
The fighting continues as usual.
In general, the topic has become another dummy in the style of all previous "truces" that existed only on paper and in crackling statements from TV.

***

Colonelcassad
In Ukraine, in all regions and in the territories occupied by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, they introduced restrictions on the consumption of electricity from 8 am to 11 pm. Emergency shutdowns remain in some areas.

***

forwarded from
ADEQUATE Z
Frost is coming to the front. Not only strong, able to quickly ensure soil freezing, but also stable. There are no thaws for ten days ahead, and this hints at the opening of a window of opportunity for an offensive operation.

In any case, it will not be large-scale: there are no signs of a large deployment necessary for this. With a limited purpose - not excluded. In order to secure the initiative, to force the enemy to divert resources to a new direction and thereby test for the future how capable he is of coping with two critical sectors at the same time.

A necessary prerequisite for such an operation is a general weakening of the ukrov to such an extent that the goal of the operation is achievable with any reasonably possible reaction. The question, I would say, is a strategic eye.

If we start to attack in the next few days, it means that we believe that the enemy is weakened enough to ensure the achievement of the operational goal of the offensive. If we refrain, then the conveyor to Bandera near Artemovsk will continue to operate at speed four, continuing to create a reserve for the future.

The decision by the command has probably already been made, and what exactly it will turn out to be - we will find out very soon.

***

Colonelcassad
🔹On possible UAV drone strikes on Primorye and the Khabarovsk Territory - analysis of Rybar and the Military Chronicle

After an attempt to strike at airfields based on strategic aviation, the Main Directorate of Intelligence (GUR) of Ukraine, with the support of several intelligence agencies of Western countries , is planning new attacks using drones. However, unlike the strike on Engels , the new action can be carried out from abroad, and objects in the Russian Far East can become targets .

🔻What objects are we talking about?

▪️In Komsomolsk-on-Amur , there is an aviation plant named after Yu.A. Gagarin (KnAAZ) . This is a strategically important enterprise: Russian Su-35 , Su-35S fighters , as well as the latest fifth-generation Su-57 fighters, are assembled in its workshops . Over the past few years, KnAAZ has been fulfilling contracts under the State Defense Order without delay, delivering unique aviation equipment on time. By the end of 2024, the Russian Aerospace Forces should receive 22 units, by 2028 their number in the troops will be increased to 76. Also,

more than ten Su-35 fighters are stored on the territory of KnAAZ , which, according to Iranian media, Moscowplans to transfer to Tehran in the near future.

In addition, KnAAZ is a manufacturer of civil aircraft "Superjet" - one of the symbols of Russian import substitution of critical technologies.

▪️The Arsenievsky Progress Aviation Plant , the only manufacturer of Ka-52 Alligator reconnaissance and attack helicopters for the needs of the Russian Aerospace Forces, is located in Primorsky Krai .

After the start of the SVO in Ukraine, the Russian Aerospace Forces already lost several Ka-52 units. Therefore, the defeat of the Arseniev plant will actually nullify the possibility of their restoration.

🔻What is the enemy's intention?

It is likely that a group of drones will be launched from civilian ships from neutral waters - possibly from the Sea of ​​​​Japan or the Pacific Ocean . Vessels are planned to be chartered through dummy shell companies.

One of the most likely candidates for such an action is the Chinese Mugin-5 drone , well known to the Armed Forces of Ukraine and Ukrainian intelligence.

Another option is the Ukrainian analogue of the Geranium, the pendant drone . The launcher with these UAVs can be placed on board the vessel and simultaneously launch up to 40 units .

🔻What are the signs of preparation for an attack?

A couple of days before the strike (as was the case in Makiivka or Engels ) , US spacecraft will observe likely targets, after which the definition of the attack vector will begin. Most likely, American military satellites TOPAZ will be used for continuous monitoring of objects , a feature of which is the ability to conduct reconnaissance of targets on the Earth's surface even in bad weather conditions.

Then it will be the turn of reconnaissance aircraft and early warning aircraft: From the Pacific Ocean, US and NATO aircraft will study air defense activity in the Far East. After that, presumably, a blow will be struck.

🔻What will it give the enemy?

The main goal of possible strikes is not so much to defeat factories or assembly shops as an information campaign .

The blow will allow, first of all, to sow panic among the Russian population in the Far East. In the context of the military-political confrontation with the NATO bloc, this will become a real assessment of the readiness of the RF Armed Forces to defend the eastern borders.

In addition, such an action is a demonstrative destruction or, at least, damage to a part of the latest fighters destined for Iran and the shutdown of KnAAZ production facilities for some time.

If the GUR and the Western curators of Ukraine decide on this strike, and the attack is not detected and repelled, then other strategic objects may become targets in the future, for example, the submarine base in Vilyuchinsk or Russian military airfields.

Image

https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin

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That last a bit paranoid but the desperation of the US should not be discounted.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 07, 2023 1:06 pm

"Reforms" and war: a form of social transformation
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 01/07/2023

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Since its beginning in 2014, the war has provided Ukraine with a great argument with which to justify all kinds of reforms, changes and actions that had been impossible just a few years before. Although it has increased markedly since February 24, 2022, when Russian troops violated the Ukrainian borders by land, sea and air, this phenomenon dates back to the war in Donbass, openly used by kyiv to impose a series of policies that the country had failed to consolidate in previous years. This trend is usually spoken of in terms of identity and focused on symbology: the removal of Soviet statues, revision of history to impose the nationalist story as a national discourse or elimination of the Russian language in favor of the Ukrainian language,

It has gone unnoticed in recent years, mainly because the social transformation that is taking place was being promoted by Western institutions, governments and non-governmental organizations. Since Zelensky's coming to power in 2019, which intensified this process, his objective has been twofold: to consolidate the imposition of the nationalist agenda in political terms and also the libertarian ideology linked to the most economically right-wing sectors of the United States. All these authoritarian, deregulatory tendencies and the limitation of the rights of the working class continue now, intensified by the facilities offered by the war, but started since the change of government forced by the coup d'état of February 2014.

In that process, Ukraine must first politically eliminate any alternative to those two ideas, something that began with the demonization of the Party of Regions, communist parties, and any media that deviated even the slightest from the official nationalist narrative. All of them have been, over the past eight years, described as pro-Russian. The Euromaidan victory and the subsequent war in Donbass were useful to first demonize and then ban all kinds of parties and movements, whether they were pro-Russian or not. In the first weeks of the Russian military intervention, Zelensky announced the reorganization of information policy, in reality the government's takeover of information, and the banning of almost a dozen political parties that he accused of being pro-Russian. .

The president's authority was more than enough to justify a measure that did not cause any criticism at the international level either. The war against Russia justified a series of measures that, in reality, were not new either. Long before it had been outlawed, with a law prepared ad hoc, the Communist Party of Ukraine, once one of the main political forces, especially in the industrial areas of the country. But even despite having that law that supposedly prohibited communist and Nazi ideology, symbols and parties alike -thus equating "the most genocidal regime in the history of humanity with the one that liberated Auschwitz and helped put an end to the kingdom" of the terror of the Third Reich”-, the process dragged on for years. What's more, the final decision to ban the KPU was announced by a Lviv court in 2022. By then, Ukraine had already found much easier ways to stamp out all non-nationalist opposition.

The same can be said of the media. In recent weeks, there have been timid comments on the effects of limiting freedom of expression and freedom of the press due to the latest law ratified by Volodymyr Zelensky, which consolidates complete control of information policy, and with it, of the speech. In a war in which the information front has been as important as the military front for both Ukraine and its partners, the war has justified the absolute control of the words and images published. Even Western media are currently highlighting that the law ratified by Volodymyr Zelensky is, according to the European Federation of Journalists, "worthy of the worst authoritarian regimes."

Despite the criticism, neither the legislation nor, above all, the practices already established are going to change in Ukraine, mainly because neither the closure of media nor the harassment of the minimally opposition press have been a novelty in 2022. In the first weeks of Russian military intervention, Odessa journalist Yuri Tkatchev was arrested and imprisoned for weeks falsely accused of possession of some explosives that had been planted by those who came to his home to arrest him because of his publications, a tactic also used since the victory of Maidan against opponents, mainly against communists.

In those years, Ukraine had already fought against the press and journalists considered disloyal. As now, the justification was also the fight against Russia. Ukraine then had the pressure that the extreme right was capable of exerting, a useful element to carry out those tasks such as siege and harassment of the media that the authorities could not yet carry out. Despite his appearance as a politician outsider politicianand a carefully created image, Volodymyr Zelensky's authoritarian tendencies were on display since he came to power. The ban on broadcasting media without even a judicial decision has been a constant during the presidency of the current hero of the West, who also did not hesitate to illegally intervene in the Constitutional Court in search of a concentration of power that continues today, but that precedes the Russian military intervention.

To the authoritarian drives, which finally resulted in the general prohibition of all non-nationalist opposition political parties, and to the stubborn agenda contrary to the peace negotiation -also prior to February 24- an economic ideology of freedom has always been associated , a libertarian trendwhich, in the shadow of the war, continues to increase. The war, and also the reduction in economic relations with Russia that it has brought as a consequence, has meant an economic decline for Ukraine that has justified the increase in power of a whole network of international and "non-governmental" organizations that have seen in the Government from kyiv to its main ally. With Zelensky willing to go even further than the International Monetary Fund has demanded in terms of privatizations and cuts in public services such as healthcare and pensions, this trend of wild liberalization has only increased.

Ukraine, which has not hesitated to use the non-payment of pensions to the population of Donbass as a saving measure, has not had any particular difficulty in making harsh adjustments to the country's health, once public and already abandoned before the war in a health reform led by a US Minister of Health nicknamed Dr. Death. The minister, whose partner is one of the leaders of OUN (B) in the United States, kept her position with the arrival of Zelensky and her subsequent successors have deepened her reform. The few reports that currently present the unfortunate state of local health, the disappearance of the service in rural areas or the need for the Red Cross to care for the population do not show the consequences of the Russian invasion, but rather the continuation of something that began years ago. back of its own accord.

In August, few media paid attention to the signing of law 5371, ratified by Zelensky after accepting a last-minute modification as a concession to the unions: the law will be in force as long as martial law is maintained and not permanently as the environment of Zelensky. This law practically eliminates the role of unions in small and medium-sized companies and eliminates the protection that workers had until then. In this eagerness for freedom , Ukraine has releasedthus to that working mass of collective agreements, with which the contracts will have to be negotiated individually and without collective bargaining by the unions, with the loss of pressure capacity to the companies that this implies. Theoretically, this legislation is only temporary, although the track record and ideology of Volodymyr Zelensky's team calls that intention into question.

The fight to drive out unions and eliminate collective bargaining also began years before Russian troops crossed the border. The approval of the Labor Code caused some debate in 2021, but with leftist movements banned or demonized and unions devoid of any content, there was never any organized resistance to what was openly a reduction in the rights of workers. Law 5388, for example, did not hide its goal in its name: “On amendments to certain legislative acts of Ukraine on deregulation of labor relations”. With that law, Ukraine sought to simplifylabor relations, allowed employers to unilaterally modify the terms of the contract and eliminated unions from negotiating issues such as vacations, overtime or work on weekends, a decommunization of rights in the name of freedom and the rights of Business.

The reform of the Labor Code was presented by Halina Tretiakova, who openly stated that “we will limit the rights of workers a bit and discriminate against them”. The deputy from Zelensky's party had stood out in 2019 for proposing to require military experience to access public employment. Two years earlier, at the head of the organization "Institute of Civil Liberties", she proposed delaying the retirement age and reducing the amounts of the already miserable pensions.

In 2020, as chairwoman of the Ukrainian Parliament's Committee for Social Policies, Tretyakova proposed sterilizing the poor who seek social benefits to support their children, whom she defined as "poor quality." To justify herself, she Tretiakova appealed to the iron lady : “Margaret Thatcher affirmed in this sense that Great Britain is very hard and those who do not want to work do not have to have benefits. Once they had a deputy minister for Social Policy, a lord, who said that anyone who wanted to receive some kind of social benefit should be sterilized. Li Kuan Yew sterilized women who did not have higher education. They are very cruel methods, she would say even sadistic, with which to rid the nation of elements that do not want to defend it or earn their bread, ”she explained then.

The tendencies shown by Zelensky, even more deregulatory than those of Poroshenko and more radical than those proposed by institutions such as the IMF, should cause serious doubts about the temporary nature of any legislative measure that seeks to deepen the tendency to eliminate rights of the working class. in favor of the ruling classes, companies or big capital. All these measures, ignored by supposedly critical media and openly encouraged by Ukraine's Western partners and creditors, precede the entry of Russian troops. The war is an excuse for Ukraine to impose an economic, political and social model based on individualism, the reduction of social rights and the supremacy of capital, be it national and, above all, foreign, an aspect that deserves its own chapter.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/01/07/las-r ... more-26366

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Nuclear Ukraine: Amid ‘Concerns’Over Alleged Russian Threat, the World Overlooks the Real Danger
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 6, 2023
Olga Sukharevskaya

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Last year, Western media and high-ranking politicians actively discussed the possibility of Russian troops using atomic weapons in Ukraine. There has even been speculation on the likelihood of a nuclear war breaking out. However, it could be said that the risk is probably a lot higher on the other side of the barricades.

Ukraine’s Atomic History

Ukraine was a nuclear state after the collapse of the USSR, when 1,700 active atomic warheads remained in the country. Its politicians of that time had the prudence to abandon this status. The weapons were taken to Russia under international control, and their means of delivery were destroyed. Ukraine’s missile silos, with the exception of one which is now a museum near Kiev, were blown up, while its strategic bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons were either transferred to Russia or destroyed.

Despite this, there were still many nuclear specialists in Ukraine, as research into nuclear fission has been conducted in Kharkov since the 1930s. In addition, five nuclear power plants were built in Ukraine during the Soviet years: Zaporozhye, Rovno, Khmelnitsky, and South-Ukrainian, as well as the infamous Chernobyl, where an accident involving a power unit led to an explosion that spewed radioactive fallout throughout Europe.

In addition, uranium is extracted at a deposit in Ukraine’s Kirovograd Region and enriched at a plant in the city of Zheltye Vody. In the 2010s, there were plans with Russia’s Rosatom to build a plant in Ukraine that would produce fuel for nuclear power stations. However, these were abandoned after the Maidan coup in 2014, when the country adopted an adversarial stance towards Russia.

At present, three of Ukraine’s five original nuclear power plants remain under its control. Chernobyl, which continued to generate electricity even after the 1986 accident, was finally decommissioned in 2020, while Zaporozhye, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, has been guarded by Russian troops since last year. It is currently being run by Rosatom but does not produce electricity, largely for safety reasons. This is due to regular rocket and artillery attacks by Ukrainian troops, which have damaged numerous pieces of auxiliary equipment.

Push to Reobtain Nuclear Weapons

It should be noted that not everyone in Ukraine was happy that the country gave up its nuclear weapons. Ukrainian politicians have often failed to hide the fact that their dream of reobtaining nuclear weapons is not so much connected with their country’s security, as the desire to dictate their will to the rest of the world. Radical Ukrainian nationalists were particularly dissatisfied with the abandonment of the country’s nuclear status, and many of their manifestos contain a clause calling for it to be restored.

For example, “the return of nuclear weapons” is specifically cited as a goal in paragraph 2 of the Military Doctrine section in the program statement of the Patriot of Ukraine organization, while paragraph 7 of its Foreign Policy section reads: “The ultimate goal of Ukrainian foreign policy is world domination.” Patriot of Ukraine was created in 2014 by the notorious Andrey Biletsky, who formed it based on the ideology of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and had dreamed of Ukraine possessing nuclear weapons as far back as 2007.

In 2009, the Ternopil Regional Council, which was then dominated by Oleg Tianibok’s neo-Nazi Svoboda Party (called the Social-National Party until 2004), demanded that Ukraine’s president, prime minister, and head of the Verkhovna Rada “terminate the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and retore Ukraine’s nuclear status.”

Ukraine’s longing for an atomic bomb especially increased after February 2014. In an interview with USA Today in March of that year, Ukrainian MP Pavel Rizanenko called Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons a “big mistake.” And that was not just the opinion of one MP. Just a few days later, representatives of the Batkivshchyna party, headed by ex-Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, and UDAR, headed by Kiev’s current mayor, Vitaly Klitschko, including the secretary of the parliamentary Committee on National Security and Defense, Sergey Kaplin, submitted a bill on withdrawing from the non-proliferation treaty. Kaplin claimed that Ukraine could create nuclear weapons in just two years because it already had almost everything necessary: The fissile materials, equipment (except centrifuges), technology, specialists, and even means of delivery. In September of the same year, Ukraine’s minister of defense, Valery Geletey, also expressed the desire to develop nuclear weapons.

In December 2018, the former representative of the Ukrainian mission to NATO, Major General Pyotr Garashchuk, announced the real possibility of Ukraine creating its own nuclear weapons. In 2019, Aleksandr Turchinov, who usurped power in Ukraine in February of 2014, called Ukraine’s renunciation of nuclear weapons a “historic mistake.” Following him, in April 2021, the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Andrey Melnik, stated that if the West did not help Ukraine in its confrontation with Russia, the country would launch a nuclear program and create an atomic bomb. And on February 19, 2022, before the start of Russia’s special military operation, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky announced at the Munich Security Conference that Ukraine has the right to abandon the Budapest Memorandum, which proclaimed the country’s nuclear-free status.

Perhaps the most striking statement by a Ukrainian politician was made by David Arakhamia, the head of the Ukrainian parliament’s ruling parliamentary faction, Servant of the People. “We could blackmail the whole world, and we would be given money to service (nuclear weapons), as is happening in many other countries now,” he said in mid-2021.

Range of Possibilities

Is Ukraine technically capable of creating an atomic bomb? Absolutely. Yes, enriching uranium-235 to the purity necessary to set off a chain reaction would cost a lot, primarily to create centrifuges for separating isotopes. However, though this may be the most effective way to separate isotopes, it’s not the only one. The first American bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were created without the use of this technology.

In addition, it should not be forgotten that there are not only uranium, but also plutonium bombs. Breeder reactors are used to synthesize this chemical element, most often using heavy-water reactor technology, and research reactors are capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. There is presently a nuclear research installation at the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology, and a VVR-M reactor suitable for plutonium production at the Institute for Nuclear Research of Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences in Kiev. Until March 2022, there was a US-built facility in Kharkov that could produce isotopes by irradiating the starting materials with a powerful neutron flux, which could also be used to develop fissile materials for a bomb.

In addition, Ukraine has the technical capability to create a nuclear weapon based on uranium-233, rather than uranium-235, which is usually used. A similar bomb was tested by the US in 1955 during Operation Teapot, and its power was comparable to that of the Fat Man bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki. To obtain uranium-233, it is enough to replace one of the fuel assemblies of a conventional nuclear power plant reactor with a thorium-232 cassette, a supply of which is located near Mariupol, a city that was fiercely defended by Ukrainian nationalists from the Azov regiment earlier this year.

There is another indirect sign that both uranium and plutonium versions of nuclear weapons have been secretly developed at the direction of the post-Maidan authorities. At the beginning of 2021, Ukraine completely banned the export of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) to Russia, as was required by an agreement on its supply by Rosatom. SNF, among other things, is a source of weapons-grade plutonium, which can be isolated from fuel cells that have been in a nuclear power plant reactor.

Nuclear Power on the Brink of Disaster

Just as dangerous is the nuclear power policy pursued by the Ukrainian government.

Ukraine inherited five nuclear power plants with 18 active reactors from the USSR. Three of them located at the Chernobyl NPP were decommissioned by 2000. Five of the six reactors at the Zaporozhye NPP, three of the four reactors at the Rovno NPP, one of the two reactors at the Khmelnitsky NPP, and all three reactors at the South Ukraine NPP have exceeded their original lifespans and received extensions of their operating lives for another 10 to 15 years. The license extensions have sometimes been granted with violations of existing regulations since, after 2015, Ukraine’s State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate stopped cooperating with Russian vendors and has not overhauled reactor vessels, which become brittle after prolonged exposure to neutron radiation. Back in 2015, independent experts noted the critical condition of Reactor 1 of the South Ukraine NPP, which, nevertheless, has had its service life extended until 2025.

Ukraine’s Union of Veterans of Nuclear Energy and Industry sent a warning letter to the government in April 2020, arguing that the country’s nuclear energy sector was faced with a “threatening situation,” which, according to the authors of the letter, could well result in “a new Chernobyl.”

The lack of accountability, which led to the 1986 disaster, does not stop at neglecting the technical condition of the reactors that are not being properly monitored and maintained by their developers. During Viktor President Yushchenko’s administration, the decision was made to replace some of the standard fuel rods in Ukrainian reactors with unlicensed fuel assemblies supplied by Westinghouse Electric Company. In 2012, that experiment led to an emergency shutdown of Reactor 3 of the South Ukraine NPP, after Westinghouse fuel assemblies were damaged due to the specific design features of the American counterfeits.

That fuel assemblies fabricated by Westinghouse tend to malfunction in Soviet-designed reactors was not a revelation. They have repeatedly caused emergencies at NPPs in Finland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, but that did not deter the Ukrainian leadership. Not even losses of around $175 million caused by using non-standard assemblies persuaded Ukraine against conducting risky experiments with its nuclear assets.

The new ‘revolutionary’ government, which came to power in 2014, was quick to plunge into its own experiments with nuclear power together with Westinghouse, which was suffering from financial distress. For the company, which filed for bankruptcy in 2017, the Ukrainian market could have been a much-needed lifeline – however, it wasn’t to be, because it once again emerged that the counterfeit fuel assemblies were dangerous for VVER-type reactors. Emergencies at Ukrainian NPPs became a routine event, and yet Westinghouse assemblies accounted for 46% of all nuclear fuel used in Ukraine by the end of 2018.

These risky experiments went beyond using non-standard fuel assemblies. In the fall of 2014, Kiev sent direct orders to boost electricity production at the South Ukraine NPP by 5 to 7%. To achieve this, three VVER-1000 reactors were supposed to operate in “controlled runaway mode,” and a whole algorithm was developed by Ukrainian and British engineers. It was this type of experiment that resulted in the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986. A potential disaster was only averted by an ‘Italian strike’ organized by the NPP personnel, who refused to fulfil outsiders’ orders. This might have been what former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen meant when he said: “We have, upon Ukrainian request, sent a small team of civilian experts to Ukraine to assist the Ukrainians in improving security of their civilian nuclear plants.”

‘Revolutionary expedience’ was used a pretext for a mass exodus of experienced nuclear engineers from Ukrainian NPPs. As Ukrainian MP Viktoria Voytsitska said in 2018, literally all categories of workers were thinking of leaving Ukrainian NPPs, from steam engine drivers and riggers to engineers who controlled reactors and other high-tech equipment.

Provocation for Nuclear Escalation

After Russian forces assumed control of the Zaporozhye NPP, it became a target for incessant Ukrainian shelling, sometimes with the use of Western-made multiple launch rocket systems, heavy artillery, and attack drones. The plant sustained significant damage and was forced to stop generating electricity due to the destruction of auxiliary equipment and the threat to the reactors themselves. At the same time, an IAEA mission “was unable” to establish who was firing on the nuclear site, where Russian soldiers were present.

As the Western media was busy whipping up hysteria over the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia in Ukraine, it transpired that Ukraine was allegedly plotting a provocation of exactly that nature. According to Russian intelligence services, in October 2022, the Eastern Mining and Enrichment Combine in the town of Zheltye Vody and the Kiev Institute for Nuclear Research were in the final stages of developing a dirty bomb on the orders of the Ukrainian government. A missile plant in Dnepropetrovsk built a mock-up of the Russian Iskander missile, which was supposed to carry a radioactive charge and be “shot down” over the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The goal was to accuse Russia of using nuclear weapons and push NATO to retaliate in kind. In other words, to start a nuclear war in Europe.

All these facts mean that present-day Ukraine is arguably a real threat to nuclear security not just in Europe, but on a global scale. It has everything it would take, from irresponsible people in charge of safety and security at nuclear sites, to the technical capabilities.

Olga Sukharevskaya, ex-Ukrainian diplomat

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... al-danger/

Western Escalation in Ukraine: Sending in Armor – But is it Too Little Too Late?
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 6, 2023



Update on Russian military operations in Ukraine for January 6, 2023:

– After over a week, the Western media continues talking about Ukraine’s HIMARS strike on assembled Russian troops;

– The focus on political optics inadvertently reveals the lack of strategic and tactical importance of this strike and highlights the lopsided nature of fighting against Ukraine;

– Russia possesses many times more means and opportunities to carry out such strikes and does so nearly daily;

– Western pundits are resorting to increasingly fantastical thinking to solve what they admit is Ukraine’s inability to defeat Russia;

– France has agreed to send an unspecified number of its aging AMX-10 RC light tanks;

– The light tanks are wheeled, have light armor, and will not be able to replace the main battle tanks Ukraine has lost over the last year of fighting;

– The US is contemplating sending Bradley infantry fighting vehicles – even less capable than France’s AMX-10 RC;

– Both Western systems will require special ammunition and maintenance provisions including shipping them to the Polish border each time they break down;

– The Western systems including future transfers of even main battle tanks do not address the real deficiency Ukraine suffers from – lack of artillery and long-range weapons that Russia has in abundance;

References:

Politico – Ukraine grinds down Russian morale with deadliest strike in the war: https://www.politico.eu/article/ukrai

Foreign Policy – Ukraine Needs Long-Range Firepower for Victory: https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/01/04/

France24 – Macron promises ‘first Western tanks’ for Ukraine: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news

French Ministry of Defence – Defence Key Figures 2021 Edition: https://www.defense.gouv.fr/sites/def

Washington Post – U.S. edges closer to sending armored weaponry to Ukraine: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation

The Duran – Turkey, Syria coming together. Bolton fumes, wants Turkey out of NATO: https://youtu.be/YjkjteDPwSQ

Al Jazeera – Turkey, Syria, Russia defence ministers hold talks in Moscow: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... -too-late/

Gordon M. Hahn: « The West Has Been Reckless with Vladimir Putin »
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 6, 2023
Mohsen Abdelmoumen

Mohsen Abdelmoumen:You are an expert in geostrategy, what is your view on the current conflict in Ukraine?

Gordon M. Hahn: The war in Ukraine is best called the Russian-NATO Ukrainian war. It is a war over whether or not NATO will be allowed to expand to Ukraine and elsewhere along Russia’s borders, but mostly over Ukraine’s potential membership in NATO. NATO expansion drove democracy-promotion efforts in Ukraine and elsewhere, the 2004 Orange Revolution, and the February 2014 Maidan overthrow of the Yanukovych government. For Russian national security, Ukraine is Geostrategically pivotal. If there is a hostile regime in Kiev backed by the West militarily, then Russia has no virtually no national security other than the resort to nuclear weapons. Western military assistance makes Ukraine a de facto NATO member on Russia’s border and emboldens Kiev to favor a military solution over a negotiated one to the Donbass conflict it started as well as to seek a return of Crimea. The widespread Western belief that Putin is politically weak and Russians are bursting to establish a democratic republic and free market economy (things the West itself is abandoning gradually in favor of the Great Reset, Wokism, and AI) led to a lack of caution in dealing with Putin, thinking he would balk at a war or be overthrown if he started one. This is precisely the situation with which the West confronted Russia no later than the Maidan coup and certainly by January 2022; hence, Putin’s decision to invade.

You wrote the very interesting book « Russia’s Islamic Threat » which has been listed as an outstanding academic title in Choice which lists Current Reviews for University Libraries. In your opinion, by betting on the destabilization of Russia, aren’t the Westerners playing a dangerous game that can benefit the various jihadist groups in the region?

My book “Russia’s Islamic Threat” hypothesized that a global jihadi organization was emerging in Russia’s North Caucasus under the influence of Al Qaida (AQ) in the form of the then titled ‘Chechen Republic of Ichkeriya’ (ChRI). This was much more of a global jihadi-AQ project than one developed by the West, though the latter may have played a peripheral role in the ChRI’s radicalization leading to its transformation into the full-blown jihadi network called the Imarat Kavkaz (IK) or Caucasus Emirate. The IK was an ally of AQ but soon split over the question of allegiance to ISIS, with the majority of IK mujahedin forming ISIS’s Russia-based affiliate. It still seems unlikely that the West under its new ‘decolonization’ policy targeting Russia will be able to separate the North Caucasus from Russia, no less regions such as Tatarstan or Bashkortostan. If this sort of separatism did succeed on the basis of a jihadist ideology, then the blowback would hit Europe and Central Asia. So indeed, this is a potentially dangerous game, not to mention the potential for a nuclear, biological, or chemical civil war in Russia and its implications for Western security.

In your opinion, who would benefit from the fall of Russia?

Given the security risks of a Russian dissolution noted above, there might be no beneficiaries and quite a few victims in the event. Certainly, the West, China, and perhaps others such as Kazakhstan and India could benefit from territorial acquisition or greater access to Russian territory’s natural resources.

With the amount of weapons that the West has sent to the Ukrainian government, is there not a risk that these weapons will fall into the hands of various jihadist groups?

There is indeed some risk that weapons sold to Ukraine will end up in jihadis’ hands. First, Ukrainian weapons have long been on the black market. Second, reports of corruption and re-sale of Western weapons sent since the war began are legion. Third, there are Chechen elements fighting on both sides in the war, and those on the Ukrainian side might be interested in sending weapons to ISIS allies in the North Caucasus or Turkey.

In your last article “The Russian Winter Offensive”, you talked about the « shock and awe » strategy that begins with winter. What can you tell us about this new step of the Russian offensive planned for this winter?

A Russian offensive this winter is most likely because by January all the 300,000 mobilized recruits plus a wave of another 50,000 volunteers will be ready for combat on the front. The recent strategy of destroying Ukraine’s electricity, fuel, and rail transportation infrastructure is setting the stage for the offensive by degrading these infrastructures making it difficult for Ukraine to move and supply its forces. This degrading will peak when those new forces are ready. Then Moscow will have at least four directions from which to choose for conducting offensives: (1) from the east in Donetsk and Luhansk (Bakhmut-Avdiivka) driving west; (2) from western Belarus driving south to cut off the transport routes through which Western weapons and volunteers arrive in Ukraine; (3) a push south from Belarus to threaten or take Kiev and force the government to flee and even seize the capitol, thought this would require a force of 300,000 by itself, limiting options elsewhere; and (4) a drive north from Kherson towards Dnepro, which could meet up with forces driving west from Donetsk. Traditional military science says taking the enemy’s capitol should be a if not the primary strategic goal of any operation, and an offensive on Kiev would force redeployment of Ukrainian forces from other fronts opening up opportunities on those fronts for the Russians. But this is an era of satellite and drone warfare. NATO keeps Ukraine in the know on all Russian troop movements and other matters. So Moscow may be forced to attack on all of these fronts as it is all now along the southeastern fronts from northern Luhansk to Zaporozhe but more robustly thanks to the coming reinforcements. Then if progress is enough to severely weaken the Ukrainian army a final push on Kiev could come.

This may be the plan Moscow will eventually settle upon. With Ukrainian energy and transport debilitated, this strategy could force Zelenskiy to enter ceasefire or peace talks or others to remove him from power in order to begin negotiations.

Isn’t the defeat of the Ukrainian army a defeat for NATO against Russia?

It would be a political defeat but obviously not a military defeat. NATO forces are not directly involved on the ground officially or in any great numbers unofficially (Polish and Rumanian soldiers serving as ‘volunteers’). NATO equipment is being used but it is second and third tier stuff and used by Ukrainians unfamiliar with them. If NATO were directly involved on the ground, the war we see now would be a picnic by comparison. But if Russia wins, it will be a catastrophic political defeat for the US, Europe and NATO and a boon to Russia, China, and the alternative order they are beginning to construct. Other states will join their emerging system in greater numbers and speed than currently, though the growing participation of India and Turkey indicates where things are going. And NATO expansion will difficult to do anywhere on post-Soviet lands from then forward. If Russia loses the war and Ukraine becomes a NATO member, then the dynamic will be the very reverse. The Putin regime will be under constant threat of destabilization, NATO expansion can continue in places like Georgia and Moldova (despite the latter’s constitutional mandate of neutrality), and the Sino-Russian Eurasian and global network of international organizations (BRICS, SCO, the EEU) will be challenged.

Is it not in the interest of the Westerners who wanted this war to push Ukraine to negotiate?

Right now, it is not. Who in the West wanted this war? The US, NATO, and Western arms dealers. The Biden administration benefits by the war, it thinks, by deploying the Russian bogey man to maintain support among its base and the hope of peeling off moderate Republican security hawks during the election campaign. It can boost defense spending to maintain support of the defense industry. The CIA, FBI and other intel and security agencies also benefit in terms of budget items and institutional profile. NATO supports the war for now because it can use the war to study Russian warfighting and weaponry performance and consolidate its members and other support in the West around the ‘Russian threat’ it itself created. The interest of Western arms dealers needs little elaboration.

The American Chief of Staff Mark Milley has mentioned the possibility of negotiations, but we note that some Western politicians, such as Victoria Nuland or Antony Blinken, want to continue the war. Isn’t there a disagreement between the politicians and the military?

There is a disagreement between factions, but they are not strictly defined by the military-civilian divide. There is no evidence that Defense Secretary Austin, for example, supports negotiations, and it appears that CIA Director Nicholas Burns, who always questioned the advisability of NATO expansion, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan favor negotiations. The political and other risks that come with war almost always spark political division and polarization in governments of all types: semi-republican (US), authoritarian (Russia, China), even totalitarian (USSR and pre-Deng China). We have seen soft authoritarian Ukraine and mid-level authoritarian Russia experience internal disagreements over the war.

How far can the West continue to support Kiev?

Until Ukraine is seen as losing the war in a major way with no prospect of rebounding without prohibitively large Western assistance to bolster, the state, regime, and military. This could happen next year.

Hasn’t Zelensky become a burden for everyone? Hasn’t he become an embarrassment, including to the Westerners who support him?

Zelenskiy has both weaknesses and strengths, the latter of which make or can make him a burden to his allies at home and abroad. It must be said that Zelenskiy’s decision to remain in Kiev when Russian forces began to move on Kiev from Belarus in February speaks of a certain courage – perhaps of the kind found in the aphorism ‘there is a fine line between bravery and stupidity’ – and this has certainly rallied many in Ukrainian government and society to his side, when at the war’s beginning his popularity ratings were disastrous. He is also an effective post-modernist PR conman. But in the desperation of the war’s difficulties, he has repeatedly overreached in producing false propaganda stories, for which he finally was exposed during the recent Ukrainian missile hit on Poland. On the other hand, he is still being protected by growing Western media censorship and propaganda of the authoritarian kind, which have refused to report on Kiev’s numerous fake ‘Russian atrocities’ and the like. Chief of the Ukrainian General Staff may be running out of patience, but we simply cannot be sure just how tense the Zelenskiy-Zalyuzhniy relationship is. Zelenskiy continues to make himself useful to Ukraine’s powerful neofascist/ultranationalist element, cracking down on Russian language, the former Russian Orthodox Church affiliate in Ukraine, and pro-Russian media. For Westerners, Zelenskiy is still a beneficiary of the West’s propaganda, which even its propagandists have imbibed and are invested in. Threats to his continuing support are: more exposed lies like the missile hit on Poland episode; massive corruption that is impinging on the effectiveness of Western military assistance; and growing military failure and general staff and/or common soldier dissent in Ukraine regarding the war. This year we are likely to see at home and abroad a serious decline in the popularity of Time’s and Financial Times’ 2022 ‘Man of the Year’.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... mir-putin/

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New US Military Aid Package to Ukraine

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The new aid package will include 50 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, which are sent for the first time. Jan. 6, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/@peterniers544

Published 6 January 2023 (13 hours 42 minutes ago)

This is the most extensive package granted by Washington to Kiev since Russia's special military operation in Ukraine last February 24.


This Friday, the U.S. State Department announced the delivery of a new military aid package to Ukraine amounting to 3.075 billion dollars.

According to the government statement, 2.85 billion dollars from Pentagon reserves will go directly to Volodymir Zelenski's government. Another 225 million dollars from the Foreign Military Financing program will be used to modernize the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

The package includes 682 million dollars for European partners and allies to incentivize and complete donations of military equipment to Ukraine.

The U.S. will supply Ukraine with Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, artillery systems, armored personnel carriers, surface-to-air missiles, ammunition, and others.


There will be 50 Bradley Fighting Vehicles with 500 TOW anti-tank missiles and 250 000 rounds of 25 mm ammunition, among other armaments, according to information from the U.S. Department of Defense.

In this regard, the agency's director, Antony Blinken, said that the new package "will raise total U.S. military aid to Ukraine to about $24.9 billion," which he considered "an unprecedented figure since the beginning of the Biden Administration."

As for humanitarian aid and military support, Washington has provided Kiev with more than half of the total amount it has received from more than 40 countries. The figure amounts to 51.246 billion dollars, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/New ... -0013.html

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Zelensky complicit in corporate takeover of Ukraine: ‘It’s an investment’
January 7, 2023 John Parker

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In 2020, farmers blocked the parliament building in Kiev to protest legislation allowing the sale of agricultural land.

“Your money is not charity, it’s an investment.” That’s what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his address to the U.S. Congress while visiting Washington on Dec. 21.

He came asking for more billions to add to the more than $68 billion in war funding in 2022 alone. Two days later, Congress approved $45 billion in additional aid to Ukraine, bringing the total for 2022 to $113 billion.

Washington’s spigot has been pumping U.S. dollars into Ukraine since before 2004 to fund imperialist regime change. This plan accelerated, with increasing violence and tens of billions in U.S. dollars, culminating with the coup in 2014.

The coup was orchestrated by Washington and used to select the future leadership of Ukraine; from that moment on, destroying a once-sovereign country and replacing it with consecutive regimes of anti-Russian, pro-U.S. governments that were more than willing to honor the wishes of their U.S. masters: provoking war with Russia.

Zelensky’s statement about “an investment” must be seen in the context of the foreign investments that got a green light to sideline and impoverish the Ukrainian population after the coup in 2014. Some of those foreign investors were active shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union as well.

BlackRock steps in

The trajectory of the latest vampiric deals of the foreign investors was set in November when Zelensky signed over even more of his country’s sovereignty to a U.S. firm that will help broker the deals of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and independent foreign investors.

BlackRock Financial Markets Advisory and the Ukrainian Ministry of Economy signed a memorandum of understanding in November. According to President Zelensky’s official website: “In accordance with the preliminary agreements struck earlier this year between the Head of State and Larry Fink, the BlackRock team has been working for several months on a project to advise the Ukrainian government on how to structure the country’s reconstruction funds.

“Volodymyr Zelensky and Larry Fink agreed to focus in the near term on coordinating the efforts of all potential investors and participants in the reconstruction of our country, channeling investment into the most relevant and impactful sectors of the Ukrainian economy.”

The stage was set for BlackRock by the IMF back in 2013 with a deal to “integrate” Ukraine into the European Union, to facilitate greater control and ownership over Ukraine’s resources. In fact, this desire led to the ousting of former President Viktor Yanukovych during the 2014 coup.

In December 2014, the Oakland Institute issued a report titled “The Corporate Takeover of Ukrainian Agriculture,” showing how Yanukovych’s rejection of this proposal led to the coup which ousted him:

“A major factor in the crisis,” the report states, “that led to deadly protests and eventually President Yanukovych’s removal from office, was his rejection of an EU Association agreement that would have further opened trade and integrated Ukraine with the EU. The agreement was tied to a $17 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. Instead of the EU and IMF deal, Yanukovych chose a Russian aid package worth $15 billion plus a 33% discount on Russian natural gas … This deal has since gone off the table with the pro-EU interim government accepting the new multimillion dollar IMF package in May 2014.”

The report exposed the austerity clauses in the rejected EU trade deal, facilitating not only control over Ukraine’s resources, but also opening Ukraine up to the cultivation of genetically modified crops.

The report continues: “In ‘Walking on the West Side: The World Bank and the IMF in the Ukraine Conflict,’ a report released in July 2014, the Oakland Institute exposed how international financial institutions swooped in on the heels of the political upheaval in Ukraine to deregulate and throw open the nation’s vast agricultural sector to foreign corporations.

“This fact sheet provides details on the transnational agribusinesses that are increasingly investing in Ukraine, including Monsanto, Cargill, and DuPont, and how corporations are taking over all aspects of Ukraine’s agricultural system. This includes circumventing land moratoriums, investing in seed and input production facilities, and acquiring commodity production, processing, and transportation facilities.”

Selling off land to agribusiness

After the 2014 coup, cabinet positions were literally assigned by the U.S. State Department. Any legislation protecting the sovereignty of Ukraine economically from foreign takeover was set for destruction, replaced by proposed laws that would allow greater foreign ownership of land.

However, even before the moratorium on land sales could be changed, various loopholes were exploited by foreign agricultural entities. Since the sales prohibition only applied to the land, investors could build foreign-owned factories on leased land and hold it until the moratorium expired.

For example, in March 2014 – just weeks after President Yanukovych was deposed – agribusiness giant Monsanto invested $140 million in building a new seed plant. DuPont, in September 2014, completed the extension of its seed facility.

Ukraine is a big prize for the imperialists. It was once known as the “breadbasket of Europe,” with over 74 million acres of uncharacteristically fertile earth known as “black soil.”

So in March 2020, as a condition for a $5 billion IMF loan supported by Zelensky, Washington, the EU, and Western corporations, an economically desperate Ukraine enacted law 552-IX, which amended the country’s laws on conditions of turnover of agricultural land.

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager and a company that has big interests in Raytheon, Lockheed, Dupont, and Haliburton, companies responsible for destroying Indigenous lands, climate change, supplying weapons of mass destruction for U.S. endless wars, and helping to push World War III.

Now BlackRock is in a close partnership with Kiev, managing billions of dollars in investments to tear away any last shred of Ukraine’s economic sovereignty, while it pretends to be acting in defense of the Ukrainian people’s interests.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2023/ ... nvestment/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Sun Jan 08, 2023 3:12 pm

Dependence and "decolonization"
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 08/01/2023

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In a widely debated article, praised on the one hand and demonized on the other, the Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko criticizes the overrepresentation of identity issues, something that is taking shape in the Western press and academia from the idea of ​​"decolonizing" Ukraine, understood always in symbolic or cultural terms, and appeals to pay more attention to social transformations. Referring as an example to the movements for the liberation of women, for the rights of the LGBTQ community or for the civil rights of African-Americans in the United States, Ischenko raises these struggles within a general idea against an oppressive order, a transformation of the order and a redistribution that goes beyond the representation of their respective groups on the basis of their particularities.Ukrainian voices , fundamentally English-speaking and linked to a specific sector of a much more diverse country, but in which this handful of opinions are presented as a reference for general sentiment.

These few Ukrainian voices present a country that manifestly denies any common social and cultural ties with Russia, hence the euphemism of decolonization to justify, in reality, the erasure of all signs of a common past with the neighboring country. Contrasting with a caricatured image of a traditionalist and dictatorial Asian Russia, these voices present an equally caricatured and idealized modern, democratic European future. But, above all, it seeks to define a country that openly rejects all the Soviet legacy except for its borders.

In 1991, Ukraine inherited from the Soviet Socialist Republic, not only a territory, but a series of infrastructures that are currently being a lifeline for the population. This is the case with the extensive electrical network, which due to its magnitude and diversity is allowing repairs to continue to be possible and minimum conditions to be maintained despite the Russian attacks. Ukraine also inherited a developed industrial network that had been key, for example, in aviation or the space sector, as well as being one of the most important industrial areas during the 20th century due to the extraction of coal, the existence of minerals or metallurgy. . These resources have been in the last three decades a source of enrichment for a handful of oligarchs and the misery of thousands of workers and workers,

Ischenko's argument involves focusing the discourse on the need for a social transformation that seeks to build on the Soviet heritage, an idea that has little to do with the current course of events. In Ukraine, a social transformation is really taking place that has a clear tactic and strategy and is advancing unabated once any movement or political group that aspired to something different has been pushed aside, delegitimized and demonized as an internal enemy at the service of the external enemy. This transformation, as has been seen in recent years with the destruction of healthcare or pensions, the reduction of which is a project of the country's political elites that goes even beyond what is required by the International Monetary Fund. A supposedly democratizing social transformation that in recent years has led to certain attempts to make communities like the LGBTIQ visible, although not to guarantee new rights, a clear gesture towards the West taking into account the harassment to which they have been subjected. Already in Maidan times, Maksym Eristavi, formerly a journalist, nowthink-tanker and always pro-Maidan activist and member of the LGBTIQ community wrote “my country hates me”. In a country where in recent years there have been pogroms against Roma communities, those from Central Asia or even Afghan refugees who arrived in the country after the fall of Kabul and where armed and mobilized groups of the extreme right have acted with impunity, it is hard to imagine that even in this aspect with which Ukraine wants to differentiate itself from Russia, it has made great strides. Although even in this case, the first attempt to celebrate the Gay Pride festival occurred, under enormous police protection in the time of Viktor Yanukovych.

Apart from exceptions that only seek a good image in front of the Western countries' creditors, the social transformation that Ukraine is carrying out openly seeks to eliminate all traces of the Soviet legacy, something that goes far beyond the removal of statues of Lenin, Pushkin, Lomonosov or Gorky, and that includes the elimination of those social rights that characterized the Soviet period. Mortally wounded, health, already eliminated collective bargaining and thus at risk all labor rights and destroyed, partly by the war and partly by privatizing capitalism, the country's industry, Ukraine seeks to renew its economy. In addition to agriculture - the aspiration to become an agricultural superpower, an idea repeated since the Maidan victory - and services, kyiv looks to technology to renew the country and to its Western partners to make it happen. The example of ex-minister Omelyan, who promised that the famousHyperloop that Elon Musk never built anywhere, is repeated over and over again with new and bigger ideas that never come to fruition. In any case, any reform , reconstruction or renewal always goes hand in hand with financialization, extreme liberalization to leave all basic services in the hands of the market and, above all, big Western capital.

The war, which in recent years has justified nationalist entrenchment, the increase in military budgets to artificially maintain the state of war and thus justify continuing on the path marked out, represents one more step towards achieving the country that both the economic and National policies like the NGO complex that has been so influential in independent Ukraine have sought since the 1990s. The destruction that a war conflict necessarily implies is being understood as an opportunity rather than the human drama that it is.

Ukraine, in a similar way to the behavior of the DPR and the RPL with respect to Russia, has used the years of the war in Donbass to seek Western involvement and its economic, political and military integration into the Western bloc. Ukraine has sought foreign investment since 2014, not only to fill its depleted public and private coffers, but to achieve integration into the economy of its Western partners.

It is no coincidence that, even before the war spread to the entire territory of the country, Ukraine sought to leave important aspects such as infrastructure in the hands of large Western capital companies. The giant Bechtel, the company that in 1999 tried to privatize the supply management of Cochabamba, causing what was known in Bolivia as the Water War, was going to be in charge of the construction of the kyiv ring road. There was already talk of the enormous extra cost that Ukraine was willing to pay, always at the expense of other services, to attract Bechtel. Now that kyiv is facing a much broader reconstruction, which is no longer just the result of the years of capitalism, but also of the war, the Government continues to deepen this social and economic reform in favor of big capital and at the expense of the population. .

Throughout the eight years of war in Donbass, Ukraine, which has always demanded that Russia pay for a war that kyiv started, has plumbed different figures on the cost of future reconstruction. In 2020, Oleksiy Arestovich spoke of between 15,000 and 20,000 million dollars for the reconstruction of the infrastructures of Donbass. Before, In June 2016, Deputy Prime Minister Gennady Zubko demanded 15 billion. And in November 2016, Pavel Zhebrinsky, then head of the "civilian-military administration of the region, raised the figure to 20,000 million.

Now, those numbers have risen remarkably. Destruction has increased in cities, especially in Donbass, with Mariupol, Popasnaya, Rubezhnoe, Volnovaja, Artyomovsk or Severodonetsk totally or partially destroyed. On Ukrainian territory, attacks on critical infrastructures require repair which, as in the case of bridges and roads, will be greater thanks to the manifest discontinuation of thirty years of independent Ukraine. The Zelensky government, which has used the war to deepen its privatization agenda and to shift the flow of wealth from national oligarchs to big Western capital, has seen a great opportunity in this.

On December 13, in a plan that precedes the Russian intervention, the Ukrainian Parliament approved amendments to the urban planning legislation that have been criticized by journalists and architects, but have received the backing of construction companies, major beneficiaries of some measures that leave in their power the decision-making capacity on large aspects of construction and urban planning. These types of liberalizing measures not only pose a danger to areas that were previously protected due to their historical or cultural interest, but are a clear step towards promoting real estate speculation.

However, the star measure of the Zelensky government has occurred in recent days, when an agreement was announced between the president of Ukraine and the executive director of Blackrock, the largest investment manager in the world, that is, an expert in speculation. , for the coordination of the reconstruction of Ukraine. In recent months, Ukraine and its partners, who are trying to find a way for Russian assets now seized by different Western countries to remain in the hands of kyiv, have cited various figures as the cost of reconstruction. Prime Minister Denis Shmygal mentioned $750 billion last October. In June, the World Bank had estimated the damage caused by the war at 252,000, with an estimated need of 348,500 million dollars for the reconstruction fund. Whatever the level of destruction and the amount needed for reconstruction may ultimately be, Zelensky has already decided which representative of the most voracious big business will coordinate the search for investors and manage the reconstruction. A doubly beneficial performance from the point of view of ideologylibertarian of the Ukrainian president: more power for the market at the expense of the State and more integration of Ukraine in the game of Western capital, two of the main reforms proposed by the Government and that this war is serving to accelerate. The decolonization to which the Western academy refers is nothing more than the elimination of all traces of the Russian or Soviet past, and the independence that Ukraine claims to seek with the war is only a way of achieving political and economic dependence on the West.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/01/08/depen ... more-26374

Google Translator

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From Cassad's Telegram account:

***

Colonelcassad
"Joker DPR" politely updates https://t.me/JokerDPR a long-standing problem.

Sorry, but I'm going to swear now. Soldiers and officers of the RF Armed Forces, who still use the WhatsApp messenger on the front line, you are motherfuckers. Untrained cretins. You manage to use it at the front, knowing that it is being read by enemies online. I'm tired of reading your correspondence in Ukrainian reports. You still manage to describe exactly where exactly to put military equipment, what losses someone has and what plans someone has. I can't understand what's stopping you from installing at least Telegram?

Unfortunately, the practice of using this service in the army continues - both among soldiers and officers, despite all the obvious consequences of using a fully enlightened service. The retribution for this sloppiness and indifference is often taken in blood. After all, "it's more convenient ...". I’m generally silent about the rear, where it continues to be used all the time.

***

forwarded from
Special for RT
Expert of the Center for Military-Political Journalism, author of the Telegram channel @boris_rozhin Boris Rozhin

The transfer of various modifications of Bradley infantry fighting vehicles by the United States opens the door for massive deliveries of more modern Western armored vehicles to Ukraine. The reasons for this are quite trivial: the Armed Forces of Ukraine are close to exhausting the supply potential of various versions of the BMP-1 and BMP-2 (which are increasingly difficult to find on the arms market), as well as already delivered Cold War BMPs.

To compensate for losses and re-equip the two corps formed on the territory of Central Ukraine (most of their personnel are trained by NATO instructors), a lot of armored vehicles are required, which Ukraine cannot physically produce, as well as buy on the arms market.

Therefore, France acted as a skirmisher with the supply of AMX-10RC heavy cannon armored vehicles (equipped with a 105-mm cannon), and then there were statements about the transfer of 50 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and up to 40 German Marder infantry fighting vehicles (with the announcement of the transfer of Leopard 2 tanks, which in the Ukrainian theater can be expected by summer 2023). And this is not to mention the continued supply of MCI from Turkey and Canada, as well as the still unspecified supply of light armored vehicles from Britain.

Such a quantity of light armored vehicles was announced for transfer with an eye to the end of winter - the beginning of spring, so that the Ukrainian corps being formed and the replenished mechanized brigades could operate more effectively in the conditions of the spring-summer campaign. Taking into account the yet unannounced deliveries of infantry fighting vehicles and MRAPs from other NATO countries, we can expect the transfer to Ukraine in the coming months of up to 500-600 units of wheeled and tracked light armored vehicles. Up to 220-250 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers of various types (Bradley, Marder, M113, AMX-10RC, etc.) can be expected during the first quarter of 2023.

Of course, even this is not enough to compensate for the huge losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in equipment (it’s banal to close the staff of personnel brigades), but the massing of new equipment in key areas should, according to the plans of NATO strategists, allow the Armed Forces to strike in key areas, as it could be observed during the battles in the Kherson and Izyum directions.

https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin

Google Translator

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Was it possible to do without the SVO and solve everything peacefully?
January 8, 9:05 am

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Transcript of an interview for "Business-Online" about the problems of SVO. It was recorded at the end of December, so it's not outdated yet.

Was it possible to do without the SVO and solve everything peacefully?

Boris, in our country, there is a group of people who believe that the SVO is the evil will of one person. Tell me, in your opinion, is this true or were there prerequisites?


— Frankly speaking, the prerequisites for our special military operation appeared in 2014. Many experts said that the NWO could start earlier, that the current situation is not forever. As a result, reducing everything to the fact that no one wanted a military conflict, and the bad Vladimir Putin decided to arrange it, is simply ridiculous and absurd. In fact, this is just misleading those who listen to you. If we look, then the premonition that everything will not be decided by the world was even beyond some of the spectra. The same Igor Strelkov said that all this is possible. It is obvious that a state quasi-Nazi coup was carried out in Ukraine, during which the resulting regime unleashed a civil war. Ukraine was prepared as a battering ram against Russia. In fact, at the end of last year, Angela Merkel openly admitted that that 8 years of the Minsk agreements were the time to pump up Ukraine with weapons. The prerequisites for the SVO were formed back in 2014, and nothing else could come of it. And Putin, just exactly the opposite, tried, if not to resolve the conflict by peace, then at least delay it for a while.

- After a year, evaluate whether Russia was ready for the NWO or not.

- Before the beginning of the NMD, there was an assumption that Russia was ready militarily, but not ready economically. However, everything turned out exactly the opposite. Russia coped very confidently with the economic problems that arose as a result of the NMD, but militarily it was not ready for a clash with the NATO bloc on the territory of Ukraine. If the plans were most likely based on a conflict with the Ukrainian army, now we see that there is a proxy conflict with the NATO bloc. Accordingly, it requires a completely different level of preparation, and we see that Russia is already preparing for this conflict, the enemy is understood, his methods of action are the same, Ukraine only supplies cheap cannon fodder. All equipment, intelligence and operation management are provided by NATO countries. Accordingly, the answer to the question of whether Russia was ready for the NWO would sound like this: directly for the military conflict with Ukraine - yes, but with NATO on the territory of Ukraine - not really. Actually, we see how this is all solved along the way.

- When they started the NMD, they expected to occupy the territory of the enemy with a swift light cavalry strike, to drive the occupiers out of Kyiv, but in the end this did not work out. What was the reason that Ukraine survived? What is the real plan of our army?

- It is difficult to say which plan was the real one, since no one made public the developments of the General Staff. Accordingly, we can assume with a different degree of speculation, like the one that Kyiv was supposed to be taken in three days. By the way, this particular story was thrown in by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, US Army General Mark Milley. No one published the plans of the General Staff during the course of the NMD, this is a matter of military secrecy - what the Russian command wanted and the time frame in which we had to reach certain milestones, we can only assume for ourselves. Moreover, in order to dispel the ground for speculation, I will say right away that we will not see our plans until at least the end of the NWO.

“Going back to those days, the video sequence was fascinating: our tanks break through in all directions, there is a landing in Gostomel, the soldiers heroically hold back the attack and go on the assault themselves. And there already Ramzan Kadyrov plans to take Kyiv. And then everything stalled and we had to leave from the north. What have we not calculated?

- In Ukraine, mobilization was carried out from the first days, additional contingents of troops were recruited, and foreign mercenaries were involved in them. From the first week, by the way, there were cases when foreign mercenaries entered the battle. All actions of Russia, all its movements were monitored and scanned by satellite intelligence of the countries of the NATO bloc. As a result, information was provided in a direct mode, which facilitated measures to counter our troops in one direction or another.

At the same time, the grouping of troops that we used at the initial stage of the NMD turned out to be very limited in terms of the number of personnel. The expectation that the volunteers would be able to cover the shortage of people, which the enemy covered through mobilization, to put it mildly, did not materialize. It was only by moving to the practice of partial mobilization that we were able to equalize the numerical disproportion that existed from the very beginning. At this time, I remind you, Kyiv was defended by several brigades united in a group of troops, there was some talk about the blockade of Kyiv, “agreements” began, which we were conducting in Turkey for some reason, and the withdrawal of troops was tied to them. The agreements themselves, by the way, turned out to be frustrated at the initiative of the United States and Britain, that is, there were not only military, but also legal agreements, which we were not told about. If you remember, those consultations which were conducted in Turkey to satisfy Russian demands, then they did not have any Kyiv, Kherson or Zaporozhye, only the DPR and LPR within the borders of 2014 and Crimea. Apparently, in aggregate, it turned out that they were counting on one thing, but it turned out differently.

“We have been talking all year about foreign mercenaries. It seems that this is an extremely significant force that literally keeps the Ukrainian army in check, preventing it from leaving the front line. How true is this? Do foreigners make the weather at the front?

- There are a lot of mercenaries. At the beginning of the SVO, it was about thousands, now it is already about tens of thousands. These are various PMCs paid by both the Ukrainian oligarchy and the West, these are volunteers who go for a number of different reasons, these are regular NATO forces legalized as PMCs or volunteers. For example, the participation of Polish regular troops under the guise of mercenaries and volunteers is no longer a big secret. However, it is obvious that not only Poles are involved in supporting Ukraine, but there are also citizens of other countries. By and large, they play an extremely important role, they serve complex equipment, deal with technical issues, intelligence, support, logistics, and take on a whole segment of the management of the organization of the Ukrainian army. Therefore, they are now an important component of the military machine that has been created.

“At the same time, we have our own PMC. When you look at the range of what the "Wagnerites" possess, they are not just people with small arms, there are armored vehicles, tanks and planes. How does it turn out, within the framework of our legislation, that private individuals have all this?

- Just like the PMC SADAT in Turkey, there are air defense systems, electronic warfare systems, armored vehicles, attack UAVs. PMC Blackwater also had heavy weapons in the 2000s in Iraq and Afghanistan. The word "private" should not be misleading, these organizations are somehow closely connected with the state. In the same Blackwater, there were employees of the CIA and the Pentagon in the leadership of SADAT - employees of the Turkish Ministry of Defense and the military intelligence service. Accordingly, in our case, it is obvious that the Wagner PMC does not exist in a spherical vacuum, but, on the contrary, has established close cooperation with law enforcement agencies, which provide our Russian PMC with weapons that cannot be obtained. There is no need to think too much, PMCs in modern conditions are just an instrument of state policy where the authorities do not want or cannot act openly, where it is necessary to outsource the solution of the issue to comply with formal measures. In fact, the continuation of our country's policy by other means.

“Then let’s move on to the topic. In 2022, for the first time, we saw how prisoners were agitated in prisons to go to the SVO. Yevgeny Prigozhin promised a pardon to those who go to fight for Russia. Tell me, how is this possible in the conditions that only the president can pardon according to the law?

It's important to understand the context. Now the issue of a large amnesty for May 9 is being discussed. Not only Prigozhin makes such statements, even earlier there was talk that people who went to serve could count on an amnesty. So this is voiced not only by Prigogine. It's just that he most likely knows about some of the decisions regarding May 9th. However, we often have an amnesty for this holiday, a fairly large number of people are released. Putin himself emphasized the importance of the amnesty, that we have a democratic state, that we are striving to reduce the population of prisons. Again, the official position is to reduce the number of inmates to 300,000 by 2030. If in the early 2010s there were more than 800 thousand, now it is a little less than 500 thousand. There is a process that began long before the start of the NWO. What is happening now

- Why didn't we announce mobilization then, in April-May, when we retreated from the Chernihiv region?

“I can’t say why the mobilization started so late. Of course, she asked for it before. Compensation to overcome the disproportion at the expense of volunteers and PMCs, obviously, was not enough, and the crisis was ascertained in the summer at least. It became clear that it would not be possible to close the issue if you rely only on volunteers. Therefore, I repeat, the reasons why we dragged on for so long are not completely clear to me.

- When you look at the map of hostilities in development, you can see that at first our people were walking briskly, and then the unsuccessful cosplay of the First World War began: people are sitting in the trenches, everything around is covered in mud, there is no progress, shells fly in clouds. Why did we have the beginning of the 20th century at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century?

- Let's start with the obvious: stopping the front is due to a shortage of personnel. When the enemy could create a numerical superiority on any sector of the front, the Russian army was forced to retreat under these conditions. For the time being, due to technical superiority, Russia successfully fought off enemy attacks, then it became insufficient, the enemy increased in numbers, and they began to overwhelm him with equipment from abroad. As a result, this led to a halt in the advancement of our army. The enemy was able to stop us, and then seize the initiative and drive until we created the necessary density of troops, through which it was already difficult for him to pass.
Banal numbers also play a role. In terms of promotion, you need to occupy the territory, for this you need a lot of people. Even with the current number of troops is not enough, more than a million people are needed to achieve the goals. Perhaps we will continue to increase, for example, by spring. At the same time, the enemy is in a similar situation: he also lacks forces for offensive operations, units lose their offensive potential, and recovery takes time. In the meantime, the troops are being restored, the front is strengthening the defense, and everything is standing. As a result, the battles were reduced to large-scale artillery duels according to the principle “if you can’t attack, grind parts of the enemy, maximize losses.” A striking example is the "Artemovsk meat grinder". This principle is clearly demonstrated there: the enemy is pulling up more and more troops, and Russia,

- How well did the Ukrainian army show combat training, how well does it fight?

“Different units fight differently. There are many stupid ones that we saw during the offensive operation in the Kherson direction, when the result is minimal, huge losses. There were two attempts in August and September, there were up to 11 thousand dead, mountains of lost equipment: there was almost no movement. But there are separate units, mechanized brigades, air assault, which have been fighting for years in the Donbass. There are people with experience there, there is an established system for transferring it, plus it is important to say that the troops there are mixed with foreign mercenaries. You can’t underestimate them, this is a very dangerous enemy that can cause serious problems. In addition to having combat experience, they have modern weapons and, again, receive fresh intelligence data from the satellite constellation of NATO countries. That is, for them, our movements along the line of contact are not a secret. In sum, rallying rather mediocre units with such units gives a capable military unit, the defeat of which is a priority.

- At the very beginning of the SVO, we had a firm conviction that we would not fire rockets at the barracks with sleeping Ukrainian soldiers. Now we are calmly destroying the Ukrainian armed contingent, this does not bother us. Do I understand correctly that from the very beginning we were morally unprepared to conduct military operations specifically with the Ukrainians, but now this psychological barrier has fallen?

- Obviously, it was necessary to do this in the very first days after the start of the NWO. Practice has shown the need for this solution. Apparently, the troops were instructed to minimize any losses, including the losses of the enemy, and even more so of the civilian population. Again, all this is a clarification to the question that the tasks were set quite differently. After it became obvious that the West was pursuing a war strategy to the last Ukrainian through the hands of the government of Ukraine, we also had to come to a full-scale procedure for the disposal of the Ukrainian armed forces, already together with manpower. To date, the losses announced by the West have already exceeded 100,000 killed military personnel. I think that taking into account the different power structures, the figure is higher and will continue to grow at a rapid pace, because the nature of the conflict has changed. Now we are conducting military operations of attrition on the territory of Ukraine between Russia and the NATO bloc, where the Ukrainian army is nothing more than consumables, cannon fodder. It is logical that in such conditions there is simply no one to feel sorry for, so the military conflict will only intensify.

- It seems that Ukraine is suffering huge losses. Why does Ukrainian society treat them so uncritically for a year and does not want peace?

“Ukraine does not officially recognize these losses. They still tell tales that there were only 12-15 thousand losses, although these were losses only for one Kherson operation or near Artemovsk. But they are talking about it with a blue eye for the population. Even after Ursula von der Leyen said that more than 100 thousand have already been killed, they said that everyone is lying, they say, believe us. It is important to understand that Ukraine is under the information cap. There, by and large, there is only one TV channel, all opposition media have been banned or they are already crushed. Therefore, there is only one position: the Ukrainians are fighting heroically, there are losses, but they are very small. Understatement can go by an order of magnitude, there propaganda is built on this. Can you imagine what internal propaganda was in Nazi Germany in 1944-1945, that Goebbels was broadcasting there in the conditions of an information monopoly. It can be said that the Zelensky government could have been talking about 5,000 dead, and the population would have believed it. The only thing that starts to confuse them is the number of new graves in cemeteries, when everything is covered with flags to the horizon. This should already make you think about what is happening there. But, again, we are not talking about the competition of points of view. If they now admit that they have already lost about 150,000, then questions will immediately arise in society: such a number of those killed, when Russia has not really begun to conduct hostilities, and what will happen in a year? What are the prospects in 2023? 300 thousand killed? 400? 500 thousand dead? And other mechanisms immediately begin to work in the head, different from those that operate with stories about 12-15 thousand dead.

- How did it happen that Zelensky, who came as the president of the world in 2019, sincerely promised the Russians the Russian language, peace in the Donbass, the landing of crooks, eventually created an even more totalitarian state than under Petro Poroshenko, and became the actual initiator of a large military conflict?

- If you look at the history of Ukrainian presidents, then he, like everyone else, came under the slogan of protecting the Russian population. Leonid Kravchuk promised the Russian language, Leonid Kuchma, too, Viktor Yanukovych promised a referendum on bilingualism. These people came to power under the slogan "We will listen to the population of the southeast!" Zelensky is no exception among these people. And the fact that the population was once again deceived suggests that they do not know the history of Ukraine after 1991 well. Those who linked the cessation of the military conflict with Zelensky were cruelly mistaken.
It is important to understand that Ukraine is not a subject of state power. The keys to ending the conflict lay in Washington, and there, on the contrary, it has been actively supported and strengthened since 2014. Both Merkel and the European Union, by the way, were doing the same thing. Accordingly, how could Zelensky end the military conflict with such a position of Ukraine's sponsors? Naturally, no way. He, like any puppet ruler, followed the line of his overlord, and the overlord had obvious intentions to conduct a proxy confrontation with Russia on the territory of Ukraine with her hands. If Zelensky had not been ready to support this line, no one would have elected him president, they would not even have allowed him to the primaries. This is the same question as to whether Ukraine is a subject or not.

- There is a statement that the NWO is the first conflict when small and ultra-small drones are massively used. This is right?

- Not. Small drones have been used in local wars of the last decade, Syria, Iraq, Daesh (the Arabic name for the ISIS group banned in Russia - ed.). Actively used Hezbollah drones in Yemen. If someone did not notice this, because these are local wars in Arab countries, then this indicates that not everyone knows how to track trends in military affairs. Those who tracked realized that drones play an important role on the battlefield. Placed in the service of state military vehicles, they show even greater efficiency, and they also appeared in the trench confrontation in the Donbass. Before the start of the NWO, we already had a lot of them. Of course, in some way we lagged behind progress, even in past years, including I wrote that we have problems, but, apparently, the NVO raised the problem as sharply as possible, and during the conflict it is being solved, saturate the troops with industrial drones of their own production, commercial ones, which are brought by volunteers. Now everyone understands that a drone or copter is the most important element of the battlefield, a consumable that should be in almost every unit.



- What did the NWO show about our troops? What is well-organized in our army, what models of equipment work as they should, and which ones showed bad sides?

- EW systems performed well, confirmed the reputation of the air defense system that they are the most powerful in the world. This was known before, but now it is even clearer. The Tor and Pantsir systems perfectly destroy air targets, and long-range aviation works well. Carriers of cruise missiles, frigates, submarines, various drones showed themselves excellently. There is a Lancet, an old Orlan. Drones are also Russian, despite the fact that one can criticize their lack. Weak (not always good) cameras, surveillance equipment, but in general the cars are quite decent, although they can be improved.
There are problems with issues of artillery reconnaissance, often the speed of decision-making suffers, counter-battery combat is difficult in a number of cases. It can be said that aviation lacks such an element as a planning bomb, which can be launched because of the scope of an enemy air defense system. Let's say that the bombs that the Israeli Air Force uses in Syria are planned, which allows the aircraft not to enter the zone of operation of the Syrian air defense units. We don't have enough of that. Because of this, aircraft are forced to bypass the air defense coverage area at low altitudes and throw "cast iron" from low altitudes, being exposed to MANPADS, and these are all unnecessary problems for aviation.
The NWO has identified a number of problems in this regard. In the conditions of suppressed enemy air defense, some systems showed themselves, and some turned out to be more effective than expected. The army was preparing for a completely different conflict, so some problems could hardly have been avoided in terms of the use of technology. Jambs in this sense are inevitable, and they will have to be eliminated in the process. From here, the legs grow from requests for the development of new reconnaissance systems, or, say, for new enhanced dynamic protection for tanks or counter-battery systems.

- If the army was preparing for one military conflict, but received another, then how effectively is the military machine able to rebuild for it?

- The effectiveness of the restructuring (let's take this word out of the context of its former meaning) determines the outcome. Now we see processes, not only mobilization, but also, say, an increase in the production of the military industry, a restructuring of the state defense order is underway. The defense industry is being strengthened, new systems are emerging, measures that should now give some results. They will not appear immediately, but after a few years, we will actually look: those who prophesied that everything would be bad, and those who had no doubts. Let's see what these measures lead to.

- In fact, we failed the autumn campaign, we had to retreat, not the enemy. Now we and the enemy have concentrated on the line of defense from the Dnieper to Svatovo. How likely is it that we will try to actively conduct a winter campaign?

- The winter campaign has already begun, it seems that there are no agreements planned. Our troops will advance in separate areas, in the Donbass. By the way, there is already advancement at the tactical level, we see how our troops occupy small settlements, defenders, prepare the prerequisites for the capture of large settlements. In principle, this is still local, but in the winter we will see something more serious.

- For the whole of 2022, our main jokes were about military correspondents and the legendary Finnish NKVD. Is the military department hindered by the presence of military correspondents at the front, who write not quite what they want to see in the Ministry of Defense?

- This is a matter of building closer cooperation between the military commanders. I will note right away that some of the military correspondents are already those who work in the press services of army units and formations directly from the Ministry of Defense. Rather, it is a matter of interaction, because we do not have such a hard tightening of the screws. I will make a reservation, formally, of course, there is. Just from December 1, a new law has already been in force, which formally affects the actions of military correspondents. Despite this, how much time has passed, the layer of military correspondents has worked and is still working. And the Ministry of Defense works as it sees fit. All critics who believe that Igor Konashenkov reads reports somehow wrong and that he is about to be changed can continue to think so. Nobody is going to change it.
I note that it cannot be said that criticism is not heard or ignored. But, in my opinion, the military department has a feeling that people are simply getting into their own business. As a result, there are working frictions, but nothing fundamental happens. There are no things that cannot be solved, but I think they have already got used to the military commissars. Apparently, the military department as a whole does not bother much about this. If this were a problem, they could minimize the harm, but there is no regulation, despite the criticism that is sometimes voiced on social media. Until now, even critical views quietly come out into the light. In a sense, this is all an illustration of the fact that we have freedom of speech. Look at neighboring Ukraine, where this freedom of speech is absent as such.

- In the fall, we had a big media scandal around General Alexander Lapin. He was scolded by both Kadyrov and Prigogine. What was it? Why were all the dogs hung on him?

- All this is some kind of political undercover games. Why exactly he was hit by a wave of criticism, I can’t say. I will only note that some of the military correspondents, on the contrary, spoke out in defense of Lapin, especially for people who acted on his sector of the front and saw everything for themselves. I don’t personally know him, I don’t know his command methodology, it’s not clear who was responsible for what, why he, why not another commander from those who acted in the same directions. Therefore, I would not criticize, I do not have information.

- The one who was in all the information reports in 2022, especially after the start of mobilization, is, of course, Igor Ivanovich Strelkov. Why wasn't he allowed to fight? He tried 3 times, but he was almost kicked out of the front in a bag.

I can't say why it was withdrawn. I don't know what he was doing. He allegedly got to the front near Svatovo. From my point of view, if a person can and wants to, then he does not need to put up obstacles, on the contrary, it is better to assist. Did he want to go? Give him a chance to do it. Why not? Apparently, again political showdowns related to his criticism and conflict with the presidential administration. Strelkov himself does not particularly talk about the details, but on the other side there is a deafening silence.

- In 2022, the investigation into the Boeing shot down over Ukraine in 2014 was completed. Guilty appointed again Igor Ivanovich. How much politics is in this or is he really responsible for the downing of the plane?

- In general, I think that Strelkov had nothing to do with it, but completely different people committed this crime. Boeing was shot down by Ukraine, it was she who launched it into the airspace where hostilities are taking place, and in the area where Ukrainian air defense systems and Ukrainian aviation were operating. After that, they admitted that even within the framework of this “verdict” there is a clause that they allegedly shot down from a Russian Buk, which fired at Ukrainian combat aircraft. I remember very well that on the day the Boeing was shot down, according to the Ministry of Defense, there were no Ukrainian combat aircraft in that area, and they claim that a Ukrainian military aircraft allegedly set it up. Actually, this speaks of what this “sentence” is worth. Strelkov, on the other hand, was pulled up as a well-known figure. In addition to him, they mentioned other people who then led the militia: Sergei Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov, Leonid Kharchenko. So we decided to make them responsible, and through them to blame Russia. Since 2014, this topic has been designed and promoted in every possible way. All these are ritual dances, the outcome of which was obvious even despite the fact that in Malaysia, where Boeing was flying from, the Prime Minister said that the court was biased. As a result, I don't think that Strelkov is really at least somehow to blame.

- "Rain" (recognized by the Ministry of Justice as a foreign agent) worked in Russia for 12 years, and in the Baltic states - only 4.5 months. Just one careless phrase about the fact that Russians are people too, and they immediately closed it no matter what. Can the reaction of the Latvian authorities sober up our liberals or is it impossible in principle?

- Absolutely not! The term "demshiza" appeared for a reason! I look at this as a certain mental pathology - sobering up and awareness will not come in them. Some more moderate ones may start to have questions, but the ideological opinion leaders, as well as the nuclear electorate, will not get it. As a maximum, they will simply run away to another country, where they will not be beaten with clubs like that, and will continue to do what they were doing, pretending that this is an excess. Although, if you look at the policy of the West towards Russia, it can be noted that there the culture of cancellation is global in nature and extends to states at the media level. Those who want to work within this paradigm will have to adapt, and keep their opinions on a number of issues to themselves. "Free speech" is worth it. Let them buy it, but I assure you they are ready for it.

“It turned out that we, in the country, have different communists. Many, for example, you, Dmitry Puchkov, Limonovites, went to rescue the residents of Donbass, help, collect humanitarian aid, personally participate. At the same time, citizens like Konstantin Semin refused to participate in this, who said that helping the humanitarian Donbass is to solidarize with the bourgeois state, which means it’s better not to help. Or Andrei Rudoy, ​​who said that “donbass will not blush from humanitarian aid.” Is this how the communists divided or are these examples of individual excesses?

“These are old things. There were those who supported the Donbass, and those who were "Euromaidan". They believed that after the "Euromaidan" an opportunity would open up for the development of socialist ideas. I think that the same fools campaigned against Muammar Gaddafi, they say, they will throw him off and start building socialism. In Egypt, they decided, they say, we will overthrow Hosni Mubarak - and the workers of Alexandria will immediately improve their living conditions, the same thing happened in Syria. People don't learn anything.
There are people of communist views who supported the defense of Donbass and the NVO, and there are those who openly sided with Ukrainian Nazism, like some Parisian inmates who talk about the just struggle of the Zelensky regime. There are those who took a position against everyone, they say, we will not help anyone, they just sit and read Karl Marx, as they did in previous decades. This is also, in general, a position. This is not the first time the left camp has been in this state. There is nothing new for those who followed the events on Poklonnaya and Bolotnaya squares in 2011, the events of 2014.
From the point of view of the struggle for our bright future, when people see that they are helping them not because communism has come, but simply because the communists brought something, repaired it or stood up and fight, this is the best advertisement for communism . You can, of course, surf the Internet, collect donations and read Marx, but this is just a pose, and one is not ashamed of concrete deeds. What did you do? Helped people. The choice of many communists in this sense is quite obvious.
Separately, I want to say about the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which since 2014 has been carrying humanitarian aid, without even promoting this, of course, a noble act. They collect it all over the country, in city committees, regional committees. We see Limonovites who help with humanitarian aid and take part in hostilities. International brigades have appeared since 2014, and there are many dead among them. At the same time, Limonovites criticize the current political system, but this does not prevent them from participating in the struggle against obvious evil as part of volunteer formations, for them these things are clear. Everyone's business. In general, everyone will have consequences, especially those who sided with the Ukrainian Nazis, these people put a good stigma on themselves for life.

“Ukraine directly stated that the communist ideology is harmful, they will be punished for it, and for the hammer and sickle they will be fined and sent to prison. And people who dare to celebrate May 9 will simply be harassed, and the most active will disappear ...

- Again, I can remember the history, the end of the 1930s, the repressions. If we recall some of the accusations within the Communist Party, then this is the complicity of fascist Germany and imperialist Japan, the plan to defeat Tukhachevsky, which meant the surrender of part of the territory of Germany to build a correct Russia, and these were also members of the CPSU (b). Nothing new in this sense. During perestroika, members of the Communist Party of the USSR were engaged in surrendering national interests to the imperialists from the United States. Again, one can see how the US used Trotskyists to fight communist influence in Europe and Latin America. There were projects there that suggested that you should somehow infiltrate the ideological camp and use it to criticize not from the position of the right, that communism is a horror, but from the position that you do not have enough communism. This means that what is needs to be changed and destroyed. This is a way to enter from the other side, so there is nothing surprising. They are simply used, this is a different instrumental approach, they do not seek to build communism, they simply use leftist ideology as a means of destruction, including talking about some kind of mythical unity of the communists. On the other hand, they act to undermine a certain stability of relations at some certain levels of support, Donbass, NVO. Criticism from the left can also be used, some understand this, and therefore take the position of sitting and keeping quiet so that they are not accused of social chauvinism and collaborationism. The question, of course, is an old one: “Where can the poor peasant go?” But here everyone decides for himself.

- Could it have been possible to do without the SVO and solve everything amicably?

- Not. All attempts by Russia clearly show that it was not possible to solve the situation by the world. Russia tried for 8 years, but it was not allowed to do so. All attempts were blocked. The West has chosen a course for war and has consistently been moving towards it for all 8 years. All attempts through the Minsk agreements, through the Steinmeier formula, eventually merged. Now we see disappointment, we wanted peace, we were deceived, and Merkel said that they were doing everything for a different result. This, of course, shows that Russia is morally justified, because it alone has been seeking peace all these years. But, since they wanted war there, everything turned out differently. If they also wanted to solve everything by peace, then it would be concluded. But in conditions when one country wants peace, and the other wants war, an armed conflict inevitably turns out. Russia was simply left with no choice.

Questions were asked by Nikita Yurchenko

https://www.business-gazeta.ru/article/578898 - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8086886.html

A bunch of good questions and some pretty good answers too.

The situation on the Artemovsky direction. 01/07/2023
January 8, 2:14

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The situation on the Artemovsky direction. 01/07/2023

1. To the south of Bakhmut, fighting is going on in the area of ​​the settlement. Kleshcheevka, where the Wagner is being hammered and the fortifications of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are being stormed. We have not yet entered Kleshcheevka itself. To the south, ours are trying to move from the area of ​​​​Kurdyumovka and Ozeryanovka, but the results are still unknown.

2. In Bakhmut itself, fighting is going on in the southeastern outskirts, where the "orchestra" is fighting for every house.

Part of n.p. Experienced, the fighting is going on in the very center of the village, and no one will now mark a clear front line there.

In the area of ​​​​the city industrial complex - fighting in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe gypsum plant, st. Patrice Lumumba. The advances are insignificant, the battles are more positional in nature.

3. Taken n.p. Podgorodnoye, where the system of dills of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is similar to Experimental, but they are still being broken there, and in Podgorodnoye they have already broken through.

There is an assault on the enemy strongholds between Podgorodny and Krasnaya Gora, ours have not yet entered the latter.

4. In Soledar, fighting continues in residential areas in the central part of the city. Assault detachments of PMC Wagner went to the salt mine 1.3, taking it. The enemy identified himself at the State Enterprise Artemsol (video with Butusov). They are sitting at the Sol station, on the western outskirts of Soledar, having transferred the 46th brigade from the Zaporozhye direction to reinforce.

Our troops entered the city from the direction of Yakovlevka, information is coming in about the advance to the west towards the Seversk-Soledar highway, but even here it is difficult to determine the real front line at the moment.

5. According to military expert Boris Rozhin, the capture of Soledar will allow us to cover the enemy positions in Bakhmut from the north. At the same time, problems arise in the defense of the enemy north of Soledar at the turn of the settlement. Merry - Belogorovka - Berestovoye - Controversial.

The cutting of the Seversk-Soledar highway will make it possible to advance along it towards Seversk. With the development of the offensive on Seversk and to the north, the enemy is deprived of the opportunity to use the bridgehead in the area of ​​​​the second Belogorovka near the Seversky Donets to put pressure on Lisichansk and through the forest to Kremennaya.
This is a complex effect.

6. The enemy is trying to cling to the areas of weapons depots, underground communications of Artemsoli and urban development.

7. Withdrawing in Artemovsk, the enemy will try to hold the defense in the western part of the city, if necessary, reaching equipped positions in the area of ​​the settlement. Chasov Yar, using the dominant heights, before retreating to Druzhkovka-Kramatorsk and Konstantinovka. With the pushing through of the enemy in Artemovsk, the front is unlikely to crumble.

8. Breakthrough defense in Soledar may have more serious consequences for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. But it all depends on the pace of our advance and how quickly the enemy will be able to stabilize the line after the loss of Soledar.

The position of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in this direction is close to critical, which is confirmed by the transfer of formations from the Zaporozhye direction to Bakhmut and Soledar. If the front is sprinkled with them, then it will be sprinkled not only there.

https://t.me/boris_rozhin/74702 - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8086699.html

Google Translator

************

Latest US Arms Shipment to Ukraine Cannot Solve Kiev’s Fundamental Problem
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 7, 2023



Update on the ongoing conflict in and around Ukraine:

– The US announced a major military aid package for Ukraine including 50 Bradley fighting vehicles, 18 M109 self-propelled 155mm howitzers, additional MRAP and Humvees as well as additional ammunition for various systems;

– Despite the relatively large size of the package compared with the last several months of aid, the weapons and ammunition fall far short of replacing even Ukraine’s losses let alone granting Ukraine the ability to match or over power Russian forces;

– Ukraine will likely use many of these systems to patch up elite units within its deteriorating brigades; – Germany and France are also sending armored vehicles, the Mauder infantry fighting vehicle and the AMX-10 RC respectively;

– This is likely paving the way to send additional heavy weapons like main battle tanks; – These systems collectively are less-than-ideal for Ukraine, logistics, sustainment, and maintenance issues will hinder their effective use in combat, they also will not be arriving in the numbers necessary to replace Ukrainian losses or outmatch Russian forces;

References:

The Duran on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheDuran Alex Christoforou on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexChristof

Alexander Mercouris on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexMercouris

US Department of Defense – More Than $3 Billion in Additional Security Assistance for Ukraine Jan. 6, 2023: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases

Fort Benning, US Army – Infantry Brigade Combat Team Scout Platoon AntiArmor Engagements at the Joint Readiness Training Center: https://www.benning.army.mil/Armor/eA

Congress of the US Congressional Budget Office – The US Military’s Force Structure: A Primer: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/fil

Defense News – US Army awards BAE contract to build full-rate production howitzers: https://www.defensenews.com/land/2017

Raytheon – Excalibur Projectile: https://www.raytheonmissilesanddefens

NYT – Artillery Is Breaking in Ukraine. It’s Becoming a Problem for the Pentagon. Ukrainian soldiers are firing thousands of shells daily, forcing the U.S. to replace gun barrels across the border in Poland: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/25/us

Russia Matters – What’s Ahead in the War in Ukraine: https://www.russiamatters.org/analysi

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... l-problem/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 09, 2023 12:47 pm

Azov's long memory
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 01/09/2023

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“ We cannot just know truth and goodness upstairs while other human beings are being skinned downstairs .”

According to Olena Semenyaka, one of the main ideological references of Ukrainian nationalism, this quote from Ernst Jünger is appropriate for all those who are not willing to join forces in favor of Ukraine, or who are still unsure about how to position themselves in the face of the war in that country. . Thus, in a post published on December 25, he maintains that this sentence “ is probably the best response to all those who “think geopolitically” both on the left and on the right, to all those who are “anti-war” and “anti-NATO”. , to all those who "understand Putin", etc. ”.

The Azov propagandist acknowledges that it may seem strange to hear this argument from her. It is not for nothing that she is a staunch defender of a specific geopolitical orientation, Intermarium, formulated to promote a complete reform of the European political order from the perspective of the dominant nationalism in Eastern Europe. In this sense, and in the words of Semenyaka herself, Intermarium presents itself as "a geopolitical alliance of Central and Eastern European nations seen as the spearhead of EU reform, an anticipated political center of gravity in the renewed pan-European unity - that of the post-war Ukraine-Russia (unrivaled in the EU since Brexit) - and a platform for the reinvention of the West (through Ukrainian patriotism that revives the classical ideals of antiquity) and Euro-Atlantic solidarity (which has become especially pronounced in the United States after Zelensky's speech in Congress ) ”.

With these statements, Semenyaka deepens his post-third party revisionism to couple his proposal for the reinvention of the West with Euro-Atlantic solidarity and US interests. Also now reconverted to a position of respect for the leadership of Zelensky, the leader of the Ukrainian National Corpus, the political arm of the Azov movement, seems to renounce overcoming the old geopolitical blocs and the neither-nor dialectic of the Third Way to reposition herself forcefully in the face of the facts imposed on the ground.

If you can't get rid of any of the blocks, or you no longer want to, accommodate the position, you will undoubtedly think, just as a mere concession in the process of adjusting concrete policies in the right direction. Because although it is not yet aware of it in the West, in " the deployment of historical developments ", it can be affirmed that the geostrategy outlined by Semenyaka and his colleagues from Intermarium, " today without exaggeration becomes the main current " of the western politics. What would never have been possible " without there being a spiritual impetus behind it ", that Ukrainian nationalist impulse that has made it possible to completely overcome any idea of ​​a "color revolution", in the classical sense, no matter how much "the desire to get rid of “the ridiculous Soviet remnants ” in the direction of the West is “ more than understandable ”, according to Semenyaka.

The qualitative passage from the color revolutions of a local character to the advanced phase of civilizing confrontation represented by the current Ukrainian-Russian war serves to partially justify Semenyaka's post-third party contradiction, but above all to explain the real meaning of the current combat from Azov and Ukraine: “ It is not worth dying in the name or for the sake of any of the existing geopolitical poles and their differences in nuance ”. “ What we are fighting for ,” says the Ukrainian ideologue, “ is for the very substance of freedom and human dignity, something that is the very foundation of a community, a nation, a state, and only after everything else .”

In this way, the community, the nation and the state are once again placed above all else, embodying the supreme embodiment of freedom and human dignity. Faced with enemies that, coincidentally, are called to be historically always the same; He may see them in a certain way as subhuman -Nietzsche is one of his referents-, although Semenyaka does not constantly insist on that argument. But without the dehumanization of the enemy, without the usual consideration among his own (the vata , the moskalis , the orcs, etc., terms that, in the last almost nine years, have been applied not only to Russia and its population, but also to that of Donbass), without the implicit civilizational supremacism, what sense would it make to introduce Ernst Jünger's phrase? All his speech would be simply incoherent. Or is it that he could not have dedicated it, with much greater reason, to the boys and girls of the cities bombed since 2014 by the troops of the State of Ukraine? A childhood in Donbass that the then President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, already placed in 2014 in a universe different from that of Ukrainian childhood: " Our children will go to nurseries and schools, theirs will be sitting in basements ," he said in a speech in the one who sentenced “ because they don't know how to do anything ”.

The fish rots from the head, says Olena Semenyaka, before introducing one of her favorite topics since February 2022: reckoning. The downfall will be hard for the faint-hearted, he says: “ if you see the world from the 'upper floors ' of geopolitics, or any other abstraction, if you don't see the clear truths of human suffering and the genocide of Ukrainian civilians by from the Russians, and you think that everything is not so black and white in terms of causes and effects, remember that the fall from these heights will be just as painful .


From Azov to Falange, international referents of the extreme right movement.

A warning that, of course, does not point to the official European left committed to Ukraine, nor to the one that, from a distance or indifference, is limited at most to look the other way and remain silent. But neither is it really addressed to the groups that warn of the danger that comes from central and eastern Europe, so similar to the one experienced in the 1930s and 1940s on the continent. Semenyaka knows that these groups are small and easy to persecute. For this reason, believing that his group and his country already own the world, in other posts in the month of December he states without shame that, regardless of whether they support "the pro-Russian agenda" or not, " those willing to associate Azov with totalitarian ideologies and stupid subcultures, you will regret it . ”

To those who directly promote " in any sense " a pro-Russian perspective in the West, the leader of the National Corpus simply points out that " she will severely regret it in the future. Those who have already done harm, have the opportunity to improve [their luck is supposed] , we monitor their messages daily ” . And confident of victory, she concludes: “ You know very well that we will determine the course of world history and world historical memory for decades to come. And we have a long memory .

In fact, Semenyaka's December 25 tirade is directed at neutrals, especially those closest to his political space: " The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, they maintain their neutrality ”, he recalls before advising those who, in the political-moral space of the extreme right, are still doubtful: “ Make sure that this is not your “third geopolitical way ”.

On the anti-fascist spectrum there is no reason not to take seriously the threat that characters like Olena Semenyaka spread to all winds. To the extent of her possibilities, and as long as her memory is not exhausted in time, the revenge purpose of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism will spread in the areas under her control or influence. Not in vain, since 2014, the different parts of the Azov movement have found in this purpose the foundation for any new impetus for their war action in the Donbass and in Ukraine.

As much as the true origin of the conflict, already present in force in 2014 and watered with blood since then, has a very different origin: the willingness to resolve political contradictions through the political annihilation of the adversary and war.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/01/09/la-la ... more-26381

Google Translator

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Russia denounces Ukrainian attack on Donetsk thermal power plant

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The kyiv regime launched an attack on the town of Yelenovka in which a business headquarters was destroyed. | Photo: EFE
Posted 8 January 2023 (2 hours 58 minutes ago)

In Novy Svet presumably two employees of the thermoelectric power station could still be under the rubble.

The Ukrainian army launched an attack this Sunday against the towns of Novy Svet, Zugrés and Yelenovka, in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, in which two thermonuclear power plants were affected, local government sources reported.

The Novy Svet authorities reported that presumably two employees of the thermoelectric plant located in that territory could still be under the rubble and that a woman had lost her life due to the bombardment.

The attack would have been carried out with a multiple launch rocket system, of which six have reached the plant and its surroundings, according to an additional statement from the Russian body of the Joint Center for the Control and Coordination of Affairs Related to War Crimes. from Ukraine.


The plant is one of the largest power facilities in the PPR and supplies power to the center and south of Donetsk, disputed between Moscow and kyiv since 2014 and now incorporated into Russia following a referendum in the region.

Local media in Zugrés also reported damage to the thermoelectric plant in that territory due to the impact of a Tochka-U missile in the morning.


Likewise, the kyiv regime launched an attack against the town of Yelenovka in which the headquarters of a business was destroyed, when several projectiles fell from a multiple rocket launcher system, tentatively HIMARS, made in the United States, according to witness accounts.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/rusia-uc ... -0009.html

Google Translator

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First Exchange of Prisoners Between Russia and Ukraine of 2023

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The release of the servicemen was the result of intensive negotiations held in recent days between Moscow and Kiev. Jan. 08, 2023. | Photo: Reuters

Published 8 January 2023

The release of the servicemen was the result of intensive negotiations held in recent days between Moscow and Kiev, he said.


On Sunday, January 8, as a result of a prisoner exchange with Ukraine, 50 Russian soldiers who had been imprisoned were released, informed the Ministry of Defense, while Kiev confirmed that it had received 50 servicemen.

The exchange was the first in 2023. The previous one, according to the Defense Ministry, took place on December 31 last year. Then, 82 Russian servicemen returned from Ukrainian captivity.

"The released military personnel will be delivered to Moscow by aircraft of the military transport aviation of the Russian Aerospace Forces for treatment and rehabilitation in medical institutions of the Russian Defense Ministry," the message reads.


The release of the servicemen was the result of intensive negotiations held in recent days between Moscow and Kiev, the ministry said.

The exchange of prisoners with Russia was confirmed in Kiev. The head of the presidential office, Andriy Yermak, announced the return of 50 Ukrainian soldiers. According to him, among them there are 33 officers, as well as 17 privates and sergeants.

Yermak clarified that Ukraine received prisoners at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, as well as in Mariupol, near Bakhmut (Artemovsk), in the Kiev, Chernihiv and Kherson regions, as well as in other regions.

Since the beginning of the Russian "special military operation" in February last year, several thousand prisoners from both sides have been exchanged.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Fir ... -0002.html

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Activist Silenced for Questioning German Support for Ukrainian Neo-Nazis (Coop Anti-War Cafe Berlin Statement)
JANUARY 8, 2023

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Anti-war and anti-imperialist activists during a gathering at the Coop Anti-War Cafe Berlin. Photo: Coop Anti-War Cafe Berlin/File photo.

Caracas, January 8, 2023 (OrinocoTribune.com)—During the final quarter of 2022, the German regime launched a lawfare campaign against socialists and anti-imperialists in Germany who questioned the propaganda campaign against Russia in relation to the war in Ukraine and dared to express the opinion that the US and NATO were the main instigators of the crisis.

Among those organizations is the Coop Anti-War Café Berlin. One of its organizers, Heinrich Buecker, now faces criminal charges that could result in a punishment of up to three years in prison or fines.This is a regular intimidation strategy implemented by countries that respect the so-called rules-based order–a euphemism for the global dictatorship run from Washington, DC.

Orinoco Tribune is reproducing below a statement made public by Heinrich Buecker to explain the nature of this intimidation campaign aiming at restricting freedom of speech in Europe, a human right already heavily restricted by the conflict in Ukraine especially in Western Europe.

This is also a call to action to show solidarity with these activists in Germany who have shown constant and coherent solidarity with anti-imperialist causes around the world and especially in Latin America.


Statement on the investigation against me by Heinrich Buecker

On the occasion of the attack on the Soviet Union by the fascist German Wehrmacht in June 1941, the Friedenskoordination (Friko) Berlin organized the commemoration event “We will not forget!“ on June 22, 2022, at the Soviet memorial in Treptower Park.

Due to my speech, which I gave as part of this commemoration, and a statement on the Russia-Ukraine conflict on my website, investigations have been initiated against me. According to a letter from the Berlin State Criminal Police Office dated October 19, 2022, a Berlin lawyer has accused me of having committed a crime. One refers to the § 140 StGB “Reward and approval of criminal offenses“. This can be punished with imprisonment for up to three years or with a fine.

https://youtu.be/BshdbeMaM50

In Germany we are currently experiencing a narrowing of the space for debate and massive restrictions on freedom of expression – caused by one-sided reporting in the mainstream-media. In particular, also through legal requirements, such as the newly added paragraph 5 of § 130 StGB (incitement of the people), with which non-state-conforming views, for example on the war in Ukraine, can be criminalized and prosecuted and legally placed on the same level as Holocaust denial – as can the already existing § 140 (“Reward and approval of crimes”).

There are now a number of individuals who are in the crosshairs of the German criminal investigation authorities. Similar tendencies are also being reported from other EU countries.

First of all, the speech that is the basis of this specific case and the allegations against me:

We do not forget! Soviet War Memorial Berlin. On June 22, 1941

The speech refers directly to Operation Barbarossa, i.e. to the war of plunder and annihilation that fascist Germany began against the USSR on June 22, 1941, in which around 27 million citizens of the Soviet Union lost their lives.

In that war, the Nazis destroyed either in whole or in part: 15 cities, 1,710 towns and 70,000 villages, nearly 60 million buildings, 32,000 industrial plants, 10,000 power plants, 60,000 km of railway tracks, 100,000 km of highways, 40,000 hospitals and medical centers, 64,000 schools and colleges, 43,000 libraries, 44,000 theaters, approximately 3000 churches and 400 museums. (Figures from the book “Fathers of Destruction“ by Professor Brian Easlea, London)

In this speech at the Soviet memorial, I explain that today the successors of those right-wing extremist and russophobic forces in the Ukraine, with which fascist Germany cooperated very closely during the Second World War, are again being supported by the german government.

Then I addressed the level of hypocrisy in propagating an even stronger arming of Ukraine and making the completely unrealistic demand that Ukraine must win the war against Russia, or at least that Ukraine must not lose this war. At the same time, more and more sanctions packages are being passed against Russia.

And I explain that it seems incomprehensible to me that German politics should again support the same chauvinistic and especially Russophobic ideologies on the basis of which the German Reich found willing helpers in 1941. The SS and Wehrmacht used Ukrainian national-fascist organizations as repressive and murderous squads against their own countrymen, including millions of Jewish men, women and children.

As vehemently as we oppose right-wing populist and right-wing extremist movements in Germany, we must also vehemently reject the war rhetoric emanating from the neo-fascist formations in Ukraine. We Germans must never again be involved in a war against Russia in any way.

All this should now serve as a basis for criminal proceedings.

My crime: I publicly referred to historical facts, namely the involvement of Ukrainian organizations (UPA and OUN) in pogroms against Jews, Poles and other groups, as well as other police and military operations in Nazi Germany’s unprovoked war of aggression against the Soviet Union Today, nationalist, neo-fascist successor formations in Ukraine have a massive influence on politics, warfare and society. But that hasn’t stopped Germany from providing massive military and financial support to Ukraine since the Russian army invaded. Ukrainian soldiers are even trained in Germany. Conditions in Ukraine after the bloody coup in 2014 are now taboo here. In previous years, however, it was repeatedly reported in detail.

But anyone who continues to report comprehensively on the facts and the history of the conflict in Ukraine can expect rejection, disparagement and censorship.

We must oppose this restriction of freedom of expression.

• As Germans in particular, we should openly and honestly try to understand the Russian reasons for the military intervention in Ukraine and also why the vast majority of people in Russia support their government and president in this.

• Personally, I can and want to understand the view in Russia and that of Russian President Vladimir Putin. I don’t distrust Russia either, because the renunciation of revenge against Germans and Germany has determined Soviet and later Russian policy since 1945.

• In the Coop Anti-War Cafe I opened in Berlin Mitte in 2005, I have been increasingly confronted with hostilities since the Russian invasion. There are always provocations, on the Internet, by email and during the times when the café was closed, there is also graffiti and damage to the front door. In the guest room itself it is peaceful. We discuss with people with different opinions, also on the subject of Russia.

In the statement I published in March 2022 on the war in Ukraine, which is mentioned in the complaint against me, it says explicitly: “We are deeply concerned about the dramatic events in Ukraine and advocate a peaceful solution.“ The statement was signed by hundreds of organizations and individuals from Germany and other countries.

We support the same arguments together with many international friends in a joint call for peace and an anti-imperialist position on the crisis in Ukraine.

https://orinocotribune.com/activist-sil ... statement/

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Urgent Need for Communist Transformers
January 9, 13:20

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Urgent Need for Communist Transformers

Equipment from Europe cannot be used to repair energy facilities in Ukraine due to differences in engineering solutions, the Ukrainian newspaper writes. Ukraine began to experience an acute shortage of Soviet 750 kV transformers, each of which weighs up to 200 tons. This is reported by The Financial Times with reference to the head of the board of the national energy company "Ukrenergo" Volodymyr Kudrytsky.
The publication recalled that most of the Ukrainian energy system uses the old Soviet system. It operates at a higher voltage than the EU, which makes it incompatible with most Western equipment, which therefore cannot be used to replace damaged equipment.

Although some transformers were sent to Ukraine from former communist countries, for example from Lithuania, most of the destroyed transformers must be restored. “During the first eight months <...> we had a large supply of [spare] transformers. Now they are urgently needed, ”Kudritsky said. The head of Ukrenergo called a complete blackout theoretically possible.

In his opinion, Russia's attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure were planned not only by the military, but also by energy experts. Kudrytsky pointed out that Russian engineers knew Ukraine's power grid "like the back of their hand" because it was connected to the Russian system until last February.

https://www.rbc.ru/economics/09/01/2023 ... om_main_13 - zinc

The case when communist transformers were suddenly needed in the conditions of the fascist regime and the persecution of communists.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8089038.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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