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 » Sat Apr 29, 2023 12:14 pm

Proposals for "peace"
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 04/29/2023

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After months of demanding direct communication with China, the second world power and currently one of Russia's main allies, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky achieved his long-awaited telephone conversation with Xi Jinping. It was not a visit to Kiev, an image that the Ukrainian government dreams of in order to use it as an argument to insist on its speech of international isolation of the Russian Federation, but the conversation has been presented as an important step. However, the different political positions and the position before the war have marked the analysis of the results of the conversation and the implications for the future. Optimists of different kinds have wanted to see in the conversation an opening of kyiv to the possibility of dialogue or, on the contrary,pro -Russian

"Unlike the West," explained the BBC In his brief text about the conversation between the Chinese and Ukrainian presidents, an indicator of the importance of the virtual meeting, "China has sought to present itself as neutral towards the Russian invasion." Despite the information leaked by Western governments to the press a few months ago, it has not delivered weapons to Russia and it is likely that it never even considered doing so. That speech, which disappeared from the media as quickly as it appeared, always seemed like an idea existing only in the minds of those who leaked it. Still, it served its purpose: the West was able to use it to “warn” China of the political and diplomatic consequences of such deliveries, and subsequently managed to boast that it had obtained Chinese promises not to send weapons to Russia, something it may never have thought to do. . In the diplomatic game that directly and indirectly surrounds the war in Ukraine, the West has never been a neutral player either. It is not now, when it is based on the moral superiority of defending the weakest, who has been attacked by a military, political and economically superior power, but neither was it before the February 24, 2022 Russian troops intervened extending the whole country the low-intensity war that until then was limited to Donbass.

In his talks with President Xi, Zelensky failed to achieve either a condemnation of the war or for China to deviate from the path marked out by its position in recent months. The clearest message that can be drawn from the conversation with the Ukrainian president is that China remains "on the side of peace." The message is consistent with China's actions over the past year -and also in the last nine years- and, above all, with its road map for peace presented days before Xi Jinping's visit to Moscow.

Despite the evident lack of results, since Kiev failed to extract any phrase that could be presented as an explicit support for the Ukrainian position or a condemnation of Russia, both Ukraine and its allies try to present the conversation as the beginning of a process that will favors. "I spoke with the leader of China," Zelensky said after the phone call, which he defined as "long and quite rational" to later focus on the main message. “It is often said that such conversations open up opportunities. Now there is an opportunity to give a new impetus to our relations: Ukraine and China”. In the last nine years, as in the previous ones, Beijing's interest in Ukraine has gone through maintaining commercial relations, which were maintained despite Ukrainian anti-communist legislation, that it was not an obstacle to the Chinese attempt to acquire the strategic company Motor Sich, which Ukraine was trying to privatize. The US intervention, specifically by John Bolton, prevented the sale when the process was already relatively advanced, an episode that the Western press seems to have forgotten in its analysis of the Chinese position towards the Ukrainian government and the "opportunities" to recruit Beijing for the western side.

With any position favorable to the search for a diplomatic solution to the war, condemned as unforgivable neutrality or equidistance, China's position is being presented as practically explicit support for Russia. On her recent visit to Beijing, Lula da Silva sought Chinese support for her attempt to end the death and destruction that the war is causing by shifting the conflict from military to diplomatic. As expected, the Brazilian president obtained the support of Beijing, whose interests are aligned with that position. However, this push for diplomacy, twisted by Western officials and media as a proposal that favors Moscow - and indirectly Beijing, the real political and economic opponent of the United States and its junior partners Europeans - has forced Lula da Silva to once again condemn the Russian invasion, something that Brazil had already done with its vote at the United Nations. The search for a negotiation process to find a negotiated solution to the conflict -not only to the war- must not be considered as a pro-Russian or even neutral position. Even so, any declaration favorable to peace is condemned as an unforgivable concession to the interests of Moscow.

“It is necessary to stop. People are dying and there is no interest in talking about peace”, declared the Brazilian president during his visit to Spain, which coincided with the departure for Ukraine of the Leopard tanks promised to Kiev. Lula da Silva's speech on the need for peace falls on deaf ears in a country like Spain, where both the authorities and the general press quickly sided with the most Atlanticist and belligerent positions in the face of the conflict. Perhaps the most representative statement of the state of international relations in relation to the Russo-Ukrainian war that has taken place this week is that of the President of the Government of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, who despite describing as "positive" that the Brazilian president is involved in the search for peace, affirmed that both Spain and Brazil want the same thing,

In other words, although the objective is apparently the same, the Atlanticist bloc and the pro-negotiation bloc differ in the way in which peace is to be achieved. While the latter advocate negotiation and set aside high-sounding and absolute statements that in no way favor dialogue or the achievement of the objective, the former have bet everything on the military option.

This is also the case of Emmanuel Macron, who in recent days has been linked to Lula da Silva's proposals for a negotiated solution. Halfway between the position led by da Silva, and which is also that of Xi Jinping, and the maximalism of Kiev and its most radical partners, who will only settle for the complete military defeat of Russia, the French president has made clear his position: the Ukrainian counter-offensive must inflict enough damage to force Moscow to negotiate in a position of weakness where it has no choice but to submit to Kiev's diktat. Of course, it is unlikely that, in that case, Russia would agree to cross some red lines, the clearest of which is the renunciation of Crimea.

With more war as the only bet to end the war, the Atlantic bloc does not give up discrediting pacifist or negotiating positions or putting pressure on Beijing in search of an openly pro-Ukrainian position. "I think it is also important that China has a better understanding of the Ukrainian prospects," Jens Stoltenberg said at his press conference in kyiv. It is unlikely that China is unaware of the situation in Ukraine, of the actions of both Moscow and Kiev and their partners during the Minsk process or the role of the West in prolonging the war in Donbass or interfering to prevent agreements like the Motor Sich. However, Western officials continue to try to sow discord between Moscow and Beijing by using Ukraine as a mere tool,

As expected, during his conversation with Xi Jinping, Volodymyr Zelensky tried to win China's support for his twelve-point "peace plan", a proposal presented a few months ago that seeks to recover Ukraine's territorial integrity according to its borders. of 1991 through the unilateral surrender of Russia. To the chagrin of those who have wanted to see in Zelensky's words about the positive of possible Chinese mediation in search of peace a willingness to negotiate, Prime Minister Shmygal once again insisted on what are the conditions for Ukraine to start a dialogue process. As was the case in the years of the Minsk process, the prerequisite for kyiv is the withdrawal of Russian troops, that is, Russia's unilateral and voluntary surrender.

"It is essential that the voice of the attacked country be heard and that its proposal be taken into account," said the President of the Government of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, in his criticism of Lula da Silva. However, this position does not extend, for example, to the population of Donbass, attacked and ignored for years without the countries that now present Ukraine as the bearer of truth and absolute reason bothering to demand that their allies Kiev to comply with the agreements signed to end the war. As now, also during the war years in Donbass, peace always meant the unilateral and unconditional victory of Ukraine. In this context, any peace proposal or negotiation attempt cannot, despite its good intentions, achieve any result.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/04/29/propu ... more-27162

Google Translator

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After the battle with PMC "Wagner"
April 29, 12:18

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In Artemivsk, quarters near the Armed Forces of Ukraine are gradually ending. "Wagner" quite successfully broke into the defense of the Armed Forces of Ukraine near the military unit and completely cleared it. The front rolls out directly to high-rise buildings, where the last line of defense of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is located in Artemovsk.

This video clearly shows the level of losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the city area. This is just one of the defense sites of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to the west of the city after one battle with the Wagner PMC.

(Video at link.)

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8323069.html

Drone attack on Sevastopol 04/29/2023
April 29, 10:49

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Drone attack on Sevastopol 04/29/2023

As a result of a night drone attack on Sevastopol, 4 fuel tanks were destroyed in Kazachka.
There were no casualties, the fire was localized by morning. They promise to finish it by the evening. 2 drones arrived.

The takeoff of 3 groups of UAVs of the "Mugin 5" type was noted from the Odessa region, through the northwestern part of Crimea in the direction of Simferopol. The 1st group took off at about 01.00-01.30, the second at 02.30-03.00, the third at 03.50 was noted in the areas of Dalekoe, Kormovoe, Gvardeiskoye.

Around 04.00 one UAV was destroyed by air defense forces in the Gvardeiskoye area

04.23 UAV hit an oil storage facility (Yugtorsan) between Kazachya and Kamyshovaya bays

Video:

https://t.me/boris_rozhin/84213
https://t.me/boris_rozhin/84210

Excellent background for the extension of the grain deal.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8322754.html

Google Translator

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From Cassad's Telegram account:

Colonelcassad
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How Russian Troops Disabled a Ukrainian Air Defense Division in an Hour

On Wednesday, we briefly mentioned the successful operation of the RF Armed Forces against Ukrainian air defense. And yesterday, videos appeared with precise hits of Lancet drones on Ukrainian anti-aircraft installations.

All targets were located near the village of Promin in the Nikolaev region: apparently, Russian UAV operators “caught” the division at the time of deployment to positions.

▪️The first launcher (PU) of the S-300 complex was completely destroyed by the explosion. The second launcher was damaged by fragments and the arrival of another drone, which hit the head of the container with the missile guidance system.

Coordinates:46.893040, 32.748303

▪️They tried to hit the third launcher on the move, but the ammunition only damaged the launch containers. The fourth launcher was less fortunate: after arrival, it completely burned down.

Coordinates: 46.925552, 32.743341

▪️The operator also pointed the Lancet at the German Gepard self-propelled anti-aircraft gun, which was the first confirmed defeat of vehicles of this type. The ammunition hit the gun-guided radar and, guaranteed at least temporarily, disabled the equipment.

Coordinates: The result of the operation of the RF Armed Forces was two destroyed and two damaged S-300 launchers, as well as a damaged Gepard SPAAG. During the day, Russian troops actually disabled an entire anti-aircraft and missile battalion of the enemy. At the same time, in the following days, evidence of attacks on other enemy air defense systems and radars appeared:46.894512, 32.747980

➖In the Zaporozhye direction, the Lancet hit the Ukrainian Tor air defense system.
➖In the Donetsk direction, the 36D6 radar was destroyed .
➖Near Snigirevka , the RF Armed Forces hit another launcher of the S-300 complex.
➖According to our information, on April 26, the Russian Aerospace Forces destroyed a vehicle of the S-300 complex near Voznesensk by a Kh-31P missile hit.

I would like to believe that this is part of the systematic work of the RF Armed Forces against Ukrainian air defense. After all, it is really capable of greatly reducing the potential of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the eve of their announced offensive.

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Colonelcassad
0:05
The Armed Forces of Ukraine have been shelling the central and western regions of Donetsk since the morning.
According to information for dinner - 7 people were killed and 2 injured. These are not final numbers.

7 dead in a minibus https://t.me/WarInMyEyes/3242 A child burned to death in a minibus.

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Colonelcassad
3:26
On the issue of the allegedly forcible deportation of Ukrainian children, which PACE today recognized as genocide

I still continue to follow the fate of the boy Vova, who was recently “forcibly evacuated” from Bakhmut by PMC Wagner fighters.

Since our last meeting, things have gotten even better for him. She and her mother were able to find her parents, and finally the family was completely reunited in one of the cities of the DPR.

So that the guy would not be bored and he could quickly adapt after the horror he experienced, the musicians, in addition to the tablet, gave him a soccer ball and a longboard.

Surprisingly, the boy’s mother, “forcibly evacuated with him,” broke down during the conversation and sent a message to Zelensky on camera:

“Only our pan-president says that you are forcibly taking us away, we are bought and we give you interviews for money. No, pan-president, calm down. We really say a big thank you to the PMCs. They are not like your warriors who shot us in the back, smashed our houses, killed our parents. I want you to be in our place. With your relatives, with your parents, and so that at three o'clock in the morning your house would burn with your relatives. So that you can feel it on your own skin. I swear: this is not bought and no one paid me anything, ” the woman said.

By the way, today, with the direct participation of the mayor of the city, an employee of PMC "Wagner" began to resolve the issue of employment of the "forcibly evacuated" parents of the boy. Previously, they will go to work at a local city-forming enterprise with the subsequent issuance of housing.

Oh, this is violence.

@brussinf

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Colonelcassad
Across Artyomovsk on the evening of April 27

Since last night, the positions of the 101st and 73rd territorial defense brigades in the Khromov area, as well as the 5th Special Operations Brigade and the 104th Troop Brigade near Ivanovsky, have been actively processed.

Artillery works almost without interruption, aviation is constantly in the sky. One gets the feeling that a powerful breakthrough of the “orchestra” is being prepared from the south and from the north.

There is not enough transport for the evacuation of the dead by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Drivers of minivans and trucks with refrigerators are invited to “carry goods” from neighboring cities: Druzhkovka, Konstantinovka, Toretsk.

In the city itself, there are heavy battles in the area of ​​​​the military unit: from the high-rise buildings adjacent to the territory of the military unit along Levanevsky Street, the enemy snarls with fire from the anti-tank systems, in response, the tanks of the "orchestra" sort out the targets and force the Armed Forces of Ukraine to leave floor after floor.

The intersection of Yubileinaya and Chaikovsky in the west of the city, which the Military Chronicle reported earlier, is not yet under the physical control of the "orchestra", but is actively shot through, and there is no longer any supply of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on it.

From the north, the tanks and artillery of the “musicians” are pushing through the defense of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the area of ​​the dispensary of the construction college. At the moment, about 8% of the city remains behind the Armed Forces of Ukraine - the area of ​​\u200b\u200bschool No. 18 and the children's hospital, the 54th kindergarten, as well as houses between Levanevsky and Pobedy streets.

https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin

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Colonelcassad

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Most of the UAVs that attacked Sevastopol were destroyed in different regions of Crimea.

In the early morning, Ukrainian formations carried out another raid on the Crimean peninsula . Three groups of Mugin-5 drones (at least ten units) , handicraft equipped with explosives, took off from the Shkolny airfield in the directions of Sevastopol , Gvardeisky and Evpatoria .

In Sevastopol, one of the "Mugins" struck at the fuel tanks in the Cossack Bay. One was shot down by a rifle detachment over the Sevastopol Bay , and four more were suppressed by electronic warfare in the Black Sea .

In addition, about three or four UAVs were landed by electronic warfare on approach to Cape Tarkhankut , and another one was shot down by the calculation of the Pantsir air defense missile system over Gvardeisky , flying from Razdolny .

🔻It is noteworthy that on the eve of the raid over the territory of Romania, the French E-3F AWACS aircraft operated . His activities are practically a guarantee of preparation for an attack on the Crimea, which has been confirmed more than once.

In addition, the Atlantic-2 anti-submarine aircraft of the French Navy and the American UAV RQ-4B Global Hawk were conducting reconnaissance in approximately the same area , which, by the evening of April 28, departed for home airfields after identifying targets for the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

And on the night of April 29, the Armed Forces of Ukraine attacked the Crimea. In this case, the attack was carried out immediately after the improvement of weather conditions and the movement of the anticyclone to the south-west of the Crimean peninsula.

🔻On the eve of the announced offensive, attempts at raids and strikes by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, both by drones and tactical missiles, will most likely continue to disable important facilities and create panic among the population.

And in order to successfully repel each such raid, it is necessary to saturate the Crimean defense forces not only with air defense systems and air defense systems, but also with mobile air defense units with ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft guns, which are effective against low-flying objects, such as the Mugin-5 UAV.

https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin

Google Translator

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Russia’s Retribution for NATO-Backed “Georgian Legion”
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on APRIL 28, 2023
Drago Bosnic

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The mainstream propaganda machine covers the topic of war crimes only when it serves the infowar purposes for their rabidly Russophobic agenda. If there are no war crimes, the political West never shies away from making them up, as demonstrated by decades (if not centuries) of propaganda, half-truths and even outright fabrications, later virtually cemented by so-called “international justice” institutions such as the ICC.

On the other hand, key information on actual gruesome war crimes by its vassals, satellite states, puppets and/or the political West itself is suppressed, distorted, attributed to others or even justified as “worth it”. Understanding this shameless propaganda approach has probably never been more relevant than in the context of the ongoing Ukrainian conflict.

Namely, on April 24, the Russian military announced that it has successfully struck the position of the “Georgian Legion”, a paramilitary and/or mercenary unit within the Kiev regime forces, infamous for its gruesome war crimes against Russian-speaking civilians in the Donbass, as well as Russian POWs. According to the Russian military’s spokesperson Lieutenant General Igor Konashenkov, the ground-based “Iskander” hypersonic missile was used to strike the “Georgian Legion”, killing scores of foreign mercenaries and volunteers. The targets held a portion of the frontlines in the Donetsk oblast (region). The “Georgian Legion” had at least 80 irretrievable losses, of which approximately 60 were killed in action and over 20 seriously wounded, with at least 15 vehicles destroyed.

While the “Georgian Legion” is usually referred to as mercenaries by various sources, including Russian state and private media, statements given by the members themselves indicate that money is hardly their primary incentive, as they have demonstrated to be highly motivated by extremist convictions, most likely bordering those of terrorist groups such as ISIS and/or Al Qaeda. Radical groups such as the “Georgian Legion” almost certainly include mercenaries as well, but for the most part, they are composed of extremists. This particular unit and other similar groups have been active in Ukraine since at least 2014, including in the NATO-backed Neo-Nazi Maidan coup, where they were used to create chaos and ensure the protests turn violent, including by shooting at both protesters and police.

Although its name implies otherwise, the “Georgian Legion” is not exclusively composed of Georgians, as it includes large numbers of foreign (primarily Western) nationals, including Americans. According to last year’s report by Sky News, it’s a 1000-strong paramilitary unit “with one aim – the destruction of Vladimir Putin“. The “Georgian Legion” extremists claim: “Russians aren’t human… Russia is a terrorist state… We have fewer of them here, it means less to kill at home.” They openly talk about the “need to maximize Russian casualties on the Ukrainian front”. The leader of the extremist group Mamuka Mamulashvili repeatedly stated that when fighting Russians “there is no difference between so-called civilians and the government, they are the same occupiers.”

“Yes, we tie their hands and feet sometimes. I speak for the Georgian Legion, we will never take Russian soldiers. Not a single one of them will be taken prisoner,” Mamulashvili stated last year. And just to make it clear, these threats have been anything but empty, as the “Georgian Legion” has proudly published videos of its members torturing and killing Russian prisoners of war. The Russian military regularly rejects the mainstream propaganda reports about how it’s targeting civilian areas and states that it’s successfully destroying enemy units such as the “Georgian Legion”. Commenting on the strike, Lieutenant General Konashenkov stated: “The eliminated militants of the ‘Georgian Legion’ were involved in the brutal torture and murder of Russian servicemen near Kiev in March last year.”

As the political West continues escalating the conflict, the Russian military has been conserving its high-value assets. Thus, systems such as the “Iskander” have been used sparingly in recent months, as preserving the stocks of such advanced weapons is of prime importance for maintaining deterrence against direct NATO aggression more or less intact. As the Kiev regime’s ability to defend against even basic weapons diminishes, extremely cost-effective assets such as drones and loitering munitions are being used more often. However, this is certainly excluded in high-profile cases such as the “Georgian Legion”.

From the moment these ISIS-like extremists started their failed intimidation campaign and particularly after the aforementioned war crimes, they’ve become a high-priority target for Moscow. This clearly indicates that the usage of such an advanced weapon like the “Iskander” to destroy a relatively small unit primarily revolves around sending a clear message to all radicals within the Neo-Nazi junta forces – their war crimes have not been forgotten, let alone forgiven, and that such barbaric deeds will not go unpunished. Indeed, the retribution was swift and, in stark contrast to what the “Georgian Legion” has been doing, there were no civilians and POWs injured or killed.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/04/ ... an-legion/

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RUSSIA HITS BACK FOR "SANCTIONS" AGAINST IT
28 Apr 2023 , 10:05 am .

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The "sanctions" have not had the expected effect (Photo: File)

In collective psychology there is a principle that establishes that what is planned is not always what results, a concept applicable both to society and to the entire reality, what happens when people go out to buy something and arrive with something else. If we extrapolate this notion to the war in Ukraine, we will realize that the plans of the United States and its allies have not turned out as expected. Because?

A report entitled " Failure of US sanctions against Russia " by Oriental Review , published last Wednesday, April 26, offers a fairly comprehensive assessment of how the unipolar bloc's illegal coercive measures against Russia, imposed to weaken the country economically, military and even socially, they have had a boomerang effect against their countries, which exposes not only their ineffectiveness but also their expediency.

"The ' sanctions ' against Russia have failed in the West and have not produced the desired results for the ruble," reports the digital magazine that specializes in Eurasia. The West's desire to burn that currency had unpleasant consequences and what it did was strengthen it.

The pressure against the Eurasian country pushed it to consolidate new exchange schemes with other partners. Today Russia and China can control the prices of gold and oil, and this defines an era.

How did the states that caved in to the flurry of "sanctions" hastened their own demise? The ruble strengthened because it forced Moscow to sell oil and gold in local currency. Proof of this is that in the last six months the rubo has risen against the dollar.

The banking crisis in Western countries is also proof of the displacement of the American sign and the weakness of its fiduciary system. "Western countries' currency is not backed by goods, at the same time the Eurasian bloc is preparing to use currencies based on gold, oil, metals and grains in trade," Oriental Review argues .

CONSEQUENCES OF BAD DECISIONS
America's allies faced rising energy prices and inflation with the rebound effect of "sanctions" against Moscow and the rejection of Russian fuel. As a direct consequence, the cost of energy increased, especially gas, which led to a de-industrialization that also influences the unemployment rate.

The magazine considers that the "sanctions" have turned out to be the biggest miscalculation of the Western world in modern history in that they failed to deal a devastating blow to the Russian economy, as had been predicted; On the contrary, it is the economies of their States, especially the European ones, that are most affected by their bad decisions.

Currently, while the economic growth of European countries is practically at a standstill, Russia is not only overcoming difficulties: It is prospering and strengthening its influence in Asia, Africa and South America.

Oriental Review takes from the IMF forecasts that this year the Russian economy will grow faster than the economies of Germany and Great Britain. It also states that next year it will develop at a better rate than the economies of the United States, Japan and Italy: "Russia's GDP per capita growth will exceed that of the industrialized economies and it will also achieve the lowest public debt/GDP ratio among the G-20 countries," he says.

UKRAINE: A BOTTOMLESS PIT
According to the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Jens Stoltenberg, the United States and its allies have delivered a total of 120 billion dollars to Ukraine in military, humanitarian and financial aid. And they have sent so many weapons that the arsenals of many member countries of that organization are already exhausted, some of them could not even defend themselves if a conventional war breaks out that surrounds them.

"Ukraine's current rate of spending on ammunition is many times higher than our current rate of production," Stoltenberg said. The worst of all this is that Ukraine is not winning the war and many of these weapons end up on the black market and subsequently in the hands of criminal groups.

On the other hand, it highlights the military power of Russia and its current strategic alliance with the armed forces of China and other countries. Last year there were joint military exercises with India, Laos, Mongolia and Nicaragua. In February this year Russia and China participated in a 10-day naval exercise in South Africa.

He also adds that Russia's victory is in diplomatic relations. Although the United States managed to convince many countries to impose "sanctions" against it, the assertiveness of the White House had the opposite effect. China, India and other Asian countries have significantly deepened their ties with Russia, the same is the case with countries in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

"At a time when the West is trying to isolate Russia, some two dozen countries have expressed interest in joining economic and security alliances involving it. These include major regional powers such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Indonesia and Mexico," says Oriental Review.

The resounding failure of the blockade led the United States and its allies to "sanction" those who negotiated with Russia. The G7 recently announced that they will punish those who help Moscow. The main objectives of the western persecution will be the States, companies and individuals that do not give in to the harassment.

But the empire of "sanctions" is being rejected in multilateral instances. She stresses that the UN independent human rights expert, Alena Douhan, criticized the United States for using extraterritorial jurisdiction to impose such measures, arguing that, by doing so, they violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

History has shown that, while they do a lot of damage to the population where they are imposed, "sanctions" are an ineffective US foreign policy tool for overthrowing governments. Palpable examples of this can be seen with North Korea, under pressure since the mid-20th century; Cuba, now in its seventh decade of blockade; and against Iran, after more than 50 years of siege.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/ru ... -su-contra

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"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 Apr 30, 2023 2:22 pm

shared interests
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 04/30/2023

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This weekend, much of the Western press echoed the words of the Ukrainian Defense Minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, who stated that the preparations for the Ukrainian counter-offensive are in their final phase. Despite the fact that barely a week has passed since the Kiev government repeated that it needed ten times more military assistance than promised by Western countries, Stoltenberg's claim that 98% of the promised equipment has already been delivered seems to have caused an immediate change of speech. As a proxy, Ukraine, despite trying, still does not possess the ability it boasts of to mark the times and present its demands. However,

Something similar happened a year ago, when there was a definitive breakdown of the political talks with which Russia and Ukraine tried to reach a diplomatic agreement to end the war and the conflict. For months, and partly thanks to the attitude of Boris Johnson, it was argued from certain positions favorable to the negotiation that it was Western intervention that prevented an agreement from being reached or, at least, the negotiations from continuing. This theory, to which part of the Russian establishment has also adhered, has served to exonerate the Ukrainian command from sabotaging the negotiations and has made it possible to present a distorted image of the war in which Kiev is only a puppet without decision-making capacity or of own interests.

In these twelve months that have elapsed since the breakdown of the negotiations, Ukraine has tried to prepare itself to keep the territories under its control and to recover those under Russian control. In the spring of 2022, as it began to become apparent in places like Guliaipole (Zaporizhia region) that the Russian offensive had lost steam, Ukraine began talking about its counteroffensive in Kherson. For months, while the Russian side assured that the city of Kherson was protected, the Ukrainian attacks focused on making it impossible for Russian troops to supply north of the Dnieper. The destruction of the bridges, the difficult terrain and the inferiority of troops finally made Russia realize this reality and withdraw from the only territories on the right bank of the Dnieper, including the city of Kherson, the only regional capital of Ukraine under their control, without fighting for it. Two months earlier, as Russian troops awaited the offensive on Kherson, a swift Ukrainian maneuver caused Russia to hastily abandon territories under its control in Kharkov, a strategic loss especially on the Donbass front.

Both offensives, which finally achieved their goal at least partially - Ukraine failed to capture Kremennaya and Svatovo in the PRL, thereby fracturing the front at its most vulnerable place - show that Ukrainian and Western interests were aligned and that there was no an acceleration of times to satisfy the demands of its partners. Although for weeks there was talk of Ukraine's need to show its Western bosses its ability to retake territory and defeat Russian forces locally to ensure continued military, economic and financial support, there was no rush and the attack in the Ukraine region Kharkov did not start until the conditions for a quick victory were in place.

Despite the current rehearsal that Ukraine needs an attack to ensure that Western aid does not wane, that argument is even more questionable now. The European Union's economic assistance machinery foresees a constant flow of credits and subsidies for the coming months and the movements of the military industry of the NATO countries also point to supply forecasts in the medium and long term. And despite the constant leaks -mainly to Político , a medium well positioned with the Biden administration- to install in the information space that Ukraine has no time to lose, everything indicates that this offensive that Kiev does not stop announcing has been preparing for months and that it responds to the interests of both Kiev and Washington.

Undoubtedly, Ukraine needs offensive moves to justify, not continued assistance, but promises to deliver large amounts of ammunition and heavy weapons. Both Washington and kyiv have also considered the possibility of freezing the conflict or even agreeing to a temporary ceasefire detrimental. Faced with what happened during the war in Donbass, not even the Pope's intervention in search of a ceasefire for just a few days to celebrate Orthodox Easter made it possible for this possibility to be raised. And although the possibility of peace or the idea of ​​the day after the war is mentioned with some frequency - nobody wants to be pigeonholed in the role of agent of eternal war - the military machine continues to be greased for the resumption of full-scale hostilities.

In his announcement on Friday, Oleksiy Reznikov stated that the only thing missing is an improvement in weather conditions, which affect the state of the land and the possibility of movement of heavy equipment, and the order to attack. Curiously, days before, one of the British intelligence reports alleged that Russia used the argument of the weather and the state of the earth to justify the non-existence of a Russian offensive (which was actually only predicted by the Western media, which even published maps with possible directions of attack without any indication that Russia was preparing for anything other than defending its positions).

However, and despite the words of Zelensky, Reznikov or Podoliak, who have presented the Ukrainian offensive as inevitably victorious, recent months have also seen growing skepticism about Ukraine's chances of meeting its objectives. Only the most optimistic Ukrainian officials - and some Russian liberals - seem confident in the possibility of capturing, for example, the Crimean peninsula. As was seen yesterday, when a Ukrainian drone caused a fire in a fuel depot in Sevastopol, Ukraine has shown its ability to attack the territory, but these localized attacks are undoubtedly insufficient to jeopardize Russian control over the peninsula. . Even so, that remains the objective of the Ukrainian government, as both Podoliak and Danilov or Budanov have constantly repeated,

Volodymyr Zelensky has also shown himself in these terms, that far from lowering expectations, he continues, at the risk of creating false hopes in his population and electorate, increasing them. Yesterday, in an interview given to various Nordic media, the Ukrainian president argued that the war cannot end for Ukraine as the Second World War ended for Finland, that is, with neutrality (which, in reality, meant a great economic and political for the country as a bridge between east and west). For the moment, the Ukrainian government not only does not limit its expectations of what it hopes to achieve with the war, but rather raises its stake to achieve all its objectives: the recovery of all its territory, the submission of Russia to Western dictation and its entry in the European Union and, above all, NATO. However,

After months presenting the 2022 counteroffensive as the decisive, perhaps definitive, battle of the war, the Ukrainian government has begun to qualify that statement. Ukraine does not doubt, at least publicly, its victory, but wants to ensure that Western assistance will continue whatever the outcome. The perspective of a long war raised by Zelensky and repeated on Friday by Kuleba, who stated that "the counteroffensive should not be considered the last battle", points to a scenario that does not consider the search for a negotiated solution in the short term nor after the offensive, as some European leaders such as Emmanuel Macron seem to expect. “The final battle is the battle that will lead to the complete liberation of the Ukrainian territories,” said Foreign Minister of Ukraine, implicitly admitting that the current offensive will not achieve the objective of capturing Crimea, but also rejecting the idea put forward by the French president of a negotiation in a position of strength. Realistic or not, the Ukrainian government's position continues to be that of military victory, interests perfectly aligned with those of Washington, but which, in the future, may begin to clash with those of some of its European allies.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/04/30/inter ... more-27169

Google Translator

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The Last Hurrah

ZubuBrothers has a piece that reports about a talk given by the Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces General Rajmund Andrzejczak:

Andrzejczak said that the situation doesn’t look good for Kiev at all when considering the economic dynamics of this conflict, with him drawing particular attention to finance, infrastructure issues, social issues, technology, and food production, et al. From this vantage point, he predicts that Russia can continue conducting its special operation for 1-2 more years before it begins to feel any structural pressure to curtail its activities.

By contrast, Kiev is burning through tens of billions of dollars’ worth of aid, yet it still remains very far away from achieving its maximum objectives. Andrzejczak candidly said that Poland’s Western partners aren’t properly assessing the challenges that stand in the way of Ukraine’s victory, including those connected to the “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” that the NATO chief declared in mid-February. Another serious problems concerns refugees’ unwillingness to return to their homeland anytime soon.
...
As Andrzejczak himself admitted, “We just don’t have ammunition. The industry is not ready not only to send equipment to Ukraine, but also to replenish our stocks, which are melting.” Considering that Poland is Ukraine’s third most important patron behind the Anglo-American Axis, this strongly suggests that all other NATO members are struggling just as much as it is to keep up the pace, scale, and scope of support, if not more since many are a lot smaller and thus less capable of contributing in this respect.

Accordingly, this observation means that Kiev’s upcoming counteroffensive will likely be its “last hurrah” prior to resuming peace talks with Russia since the West won’t be able to keep up its assistance for much longer. Andrzejczak seems keenly aware of this “politically inconvenient” fact, hence why he wants his side to give its proxies as much as possible until the end of that operation in the hopes that they can then be in a comparatively more advantageous position by the time these talks recommence.


I agree with the General's analysis.

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Bakhmut/Aryomovsk is to 90% under Russian control and the rest will be captured during the next few days. Ukrainian losses in the city must have been huge. The Ukrainian troops who try to escape from the city immediately come under artillery fire. The latest daily Russian clobber report counts 575 'enemy losses' in Bakhmut over the last 24 hours for a total of 815 along the whole frontline. This is the largest number reported over the last two months.

Holding onto the city at all cost was in my view the wrong decision. A more mobile defense would have cost more land but also would have had much fewer losses than occurred in those static positions under strong artillery fire. As Ukraine is geographically big but has relative few mobilizable soldiers it would have been better to trade land its for time and not its soldiers.

The defense of the lowland city cost the Ukrainian army dearly as it eroded its material and human reserves. Those will be missing to patch the holes in the front line when that long announced 'last hurrah' counteroffensive fails to make any serious gains.

Posted by b on April 29, 2023 at 16:37 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/04/t ... l#comments..

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Prigozhin about Artemovsk and shells
April 29, 22:50
Prigozhin about Artemovsk and shell

According to Prigozhin's report, the Armed Forces of Ukraine lost up to 500 people a day.
PMC Wagner lost 94 people over the past day. This is to better understand the price of grinding the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the liberation of Artemovsk.
The enemy controls less than 3 square kilometers of Artemovsk.

He also noted the problem with the lack of shells, which affects the pace of advancement and loss.

The head of the RAV service claims that for the most part they give https://t.me/The_Wrong_Side/8874?single

Prigozhin's big interview on Artemovsk and ammunition to military commissar

Pegov in order to achieve the goals of the NWO.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8324017.html

Google Translator

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‘Ukraine Victory Resolution’ Act: A Delusional Suicide Pact
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on APRIL 29, 2023
Scott Ritter

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A vote for the resolution is a vote for nuclear war with Russia. The resolution is a literal suicide pact with Ukraine. Hopefully the American people will wake up to this reality before it is too late, and let their representatives know that they chose life over death.

Two US Congressmen who sit on a bureaucratic relic of the Cold War have introduced the “Ukraine Victory Resolution” in the House of Representatives calling for the United States to support an outright victory for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.

After the presentation of the resolution, it must then be approved by the Foreign Affairs Committee and then put to a vote in Congress, both at the House of Representatives and the Senate level, before becoming law.

While the “Ukraine Victory Resolution” faces an uncertain future in a Congress where enthusiasm for the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is waning, one should not count out the potential for the resolution becoming law, especially given the track record of its sponsors. Wilson, Cohen and McCaul last collaborated on the “Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act”, which was signed into law on May 9, 2022, by President Joe Biden. That law enhanced Biden’s authority to simplify bureaucratic barriers with regards to military equipment for Ukraine or other Eastern European countries affected by the Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine.

Since the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation, the Helsinki Commission has worked closely with the Ukrainian government to craft legislation that supports Ukrainian goals and objectives when it comes to its conflict with Russia.

To call the Helsinki Commission a de facto adjunct of the Ukrainian government would not be an exaggeration. Indeed, the Ukrainian Ambassador to the US, Oksana Markarova, was the person chosen to make the official announcement regarding the presentation of the “Ukraine Victory Resolution” to the House of Representatives.

The text of the draft resolution “affirms that it is the policy of the United States to see Ukraine victorious against the invasion and restored to its internationally recognized 1991 borders.”
Wilson and Cohen both have stated that the territorial integrity of Ukraine must be preserved, meaning that the conflict in Ukraine could not be ended until the territories of Kherson, Zaporozhye, Donetsk, Lugansk, and Crimea are returned to Ukrainian sovereignty.

While the resolution introduced by Wilson and Cohen accurately reflects both current US policy objectives and Ukrainian government desires, it ignores two critical realities. First, it is Russia that is winning the conflict, not Ukraine, and as such any termination of the current conflict will reflect this hard truth.

Moreover, to tie both the US and Ukraine to unrealistic expectations creates obstacles to any possible negotiated end to the conflict, meaning that the conflict will drag on to its inevitable conclusion—a strategic Russian victory—in a manner which will only increase the human, material, and financial cost to Ukraine.

Indeed, as senior Russian officials such as former President Dmitri Medvedev have noted, if the crisis does not reach a negotiated end, Ukraine itself may cease to exist as a sovereign entity. The irony of a piece of US legislation purporting to defend Ukrainian sovereignty serving as the foundation of the death of Ukraine as a nation seems to have escaped the sponsors of the resolution.

But the resolution also lays the groundwork for the possibility—indeed, if the resolution accomplished its goal, probability—of a general nuclear war between the United States and Russia. Former Russian President Medvedev recently noted that, according to Russian policy regarding the use of nuclear weapons, such weapons “can be used in case of aggression against Russia with the use of other types of weapons that threaten the very existence of the state. This is, in essence, the use of nuclear weapons in response to such actions.”

Any effort by Ukraine to recover its former territories which have been absorbed by Russia would, by definition, constitute a threat against the “very existence of the Russian State,” to quote Medvedev.

“If you have a weapon in your hands,” Medvedev declared recently, referring to nuclear weapons, “and I, as a former president, know what it is, you must be prepared that your hand will not tremble in a certain situation to use it, no matter how monstrous and cruel it sounds.”

“Therefore, all these stories that ‘the Russians will never do it,’ or vice versa, ‘the Russians keep scaring us with the use of nuclear weapons,’ are not worth a penny,” Medvedev said.

This is something Russia’s potential adversaries, including Congressmen Wilson, Cohen, and McCaul—and indeed every member of Congress who will be called upon to vote in support of the “Ukraine Victory Resolution” — should keep first and foremost in their mind.

A vote for the resolution is a vote for nuclear war with Russia. The resolution is a literal suicide pact with Ukraine. Hopefully the American people will wake up to this reality before it is too late, and let their representatives know that they chose life over death.

Ukraine has lost its NATO-driven conflict with Russia. There is no need for the entire world to die as a result.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/04/ ... cide-pact/
"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 May 01, 2023 12:12 pm

past mistakes
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 05/01/2023

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Since 2014, but more acutely over the years, the Ukrainian conflict has been defined by its three components: an internal aspect, a political conflict between Kiev and Moscow, and a broader one between Russia and the West. All of those aspects went through a tipping point that year. The February 22, 2014 coup in Kiev and the Maidan victory were the catalyst for both the Russian response in Crimea, which further escalated the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and led to the first Western sanctions against the Russian Federation. , and from the reaction of a part of the country's population, which eventually led to the war in Donbass. Maidan, and especially its abrupt ending just hours after a power-sharing agreement was signed that the opposition never intended to honor,

One should not look for a direct line between February 22 with the Maidan victory, March 16 with the Crimean referendum or April 13 with the proclamation of the anti-terrorist operation and February 24, 2022, but all those dates they marked what would happen in later years. War was never inevitable nor should it be normalized as an "extension of politics by other means", especially when it could be avoided through political dialogue and, above all, stopped through compromise. Although the war in Donbass was only one of the three edges of the conflict that finally gave rise to the Russian invasion, its resolution could have become the turning point in finding a way out of the complex conflict that has been going on in Ukraine for almost a century now. decade.

That was, at least theoretically, the objective of the Minsk agreements and of the process that arose from the negotiations between Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia in the Belarusian capital in February 2015. However, practically from the moment of the signing of documents, there was a discrepancy in the process between what the agreements apparently intended and the attitude of the parties, both the signatories and the negotiators. For years, despite looking for ways to reach an agreement and almost constantly presenting documents seeking to speed up compliance with the agreements, the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics took advantage of the time to harmonize their legislation with the Russian one and advance in their social, economic and political integration in the Russian sphere. In the face of criticism, which was always directed at Russia,

Encrusted as tensions increased between Russia and Ukraine over Crimea, especially after Volodymyr Zelensky's “Crimea declaration”, and between Moscow and the West especially because of Russian fears that Ukraine would be used as a (military or political) tool against Russia , the conflict in Donbass was central to the cross accusations that occurred between February 2015 and February 2022. During that time, the constant accusations were accompanied by a repeated attempt to simplify the facts. In the same way that Moscow had seen in Maidan only external interference from Western countries, which existed, but which would not have been enough to overthrow the government had there not been a previous internal conflict. The Ukrainian attempt to simplify what happened in Donbass was even cruder. Denying any legitimacy to the Donetsk and Lugansk protests, which were in response to a series of real and legitimate political claims, Ukraine has always claimed that everything that has happened in Donbass since March 2014 has been solely due to Russian action. According to this version, Russia managed the protests of March and April 2014, invaded Donbass that summer, and since that year installed a puppet administration with which kyiv was never to negotiate. And even now, years after Russia finally agreed to issue Russian passports to the people of Donbass, as the People's Republics had demanded for years, Ukraine claims that the population is being forced to acquire Russian identification documents. kyiv, which has ignored the opinion of Donbass since 2014,

The simplification of the facts to allege that it was only a Russian invasion and occupation sought to eliminate that edge of the internal conflict that has been present in the Donbass war. Kiev could thus equate the situation of Donetsk and Lugansk with that of Crimea and continue to demand the return of the territories and the restoration of the territorial integrity of Ukraine according to its 1991 borders unconditionally and without complying with the minimum commitments to which had committed with his signature to the Minsk agreements. Throughout the practically seven years that the Minsk process dragged on, the hope of Moscow, and by extension of the People's Republics, was always that Ukraine's partners would pressure Kiev to finally agree to implement the agreements it had signed.

In this process, there is one person who stands out above the rest: Angela Merkel. Her initiative brought together the heads of State or Government of Germany, France and Russia in Moscow to promote a ceasefire negotiation and transfer of the conflict from the military phase in which it was to a political and diplomatic one. The second Minsk agreements never achieved a complete ceasefire, but they did limit the fighting to the front line, leading to a sharp drop in civilian casualties, but not in civilian suffering. The collective punishment imposed by kyiv on the population of Donbass in the form of a banking and transport blockade, decreed by Poroshenko in the fall of 2014, it continued despite Minsk demanding the resumption of trade and economic relations and kyiv supplemented it in 2017 with a complete economic blockade that Volodymyr Zelensky also refused to lift. The example of non-compliance with the economic points of the Minsk protocol can be extended to its political points, which kyiv always made it clear that it was not going to comply.

Now, after having already declared that, had she had time and political strength, she would have promoted a new format to seek a resolution to the war in Donbass, Angela Mekel has once again reaffirmed her actions and her policy towards Russia and Ukraine. Perhaps her recent words, pronounced in an interview with Die Zeit, are simply a reaction to the recent Ukrainian accusations, which have explicitly reproached Germany for the imposition of Minsk. Merkel had already stated that, at the very least, Minsk had given Ukraine precious time to strengthen itself and prepare for the possibility of a war with Russia, but she has never reneged on the Minsk agreements, as Poroshenko has done more explicitly, Hollande and Zelensky. In defense of her policy, Merkel has insisted that "the fact that it failed is not proof that it was a mistake to try" and has stated, in relation to a broad war between Russia and Ukraine that she used "everything she had at my disposition to try to prevent this situation”.

Merkel, unlike Hollande, who also participated in the negotiations, is aware that the Minsk agreements were for a time the clearest possibility of avoiding a war spread to the entire country like the one currently being experienced. However, the main enemy of that path was among her allies, something that the former German chancellor now admits, but against which she did not act at the time. “President Zelensky was very critical of the Minsk agreements. He already said it during his electoral campaign and pointed out that he considered them unfeasible ”, Merkel affirms now that it no longer matters. In her words there is a double admission: that Ukraine never intended to comply with what was signed and that its Western partners could not or did not want to pressure Kiev to comply with the signed agreements.

However, the German action, whose unconditional support allowed kyiv to strengthen itself and openly fail to fulfill its commitments acquired in the Minsk process, continues to be the target of criticism. Criticizing the negotiations to guarantee the supply of Russian gas - which were once of great importance for Ukraine, since transit brought lucrative income - and the insistence on the need for negotiations, Mikhailo Podoliak, adviser to the Office of the President of Ukraine , affirmed that “if you cannot correct the mistakes of the past, simply stop making excuses and incentivizing the aggressor”. Taking the idea of ​​“if they are not with us, they are against us” to the extreme, Podoliak has turned Ukraine's main ally in Europe for years into an accomplice of the aggressor.. For Ukraine, compromise is unacceptable now, but it was also unacceptable during the Minsk years, when the aggressor was not Moscow but kyiv. Ukraine is now using everything at its disposal, including insulting its allies, to justify it.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/05/01/27176/

Google Translator

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From Cassad's Telegram account:

forwarded from
RT in Russian
❗️How ready are the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the offensive: analysis of RT. Part 3

In the first and second parts of the analysis, we analyzed the readiness of the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the announced offensive. In the third part, we will analyze the main problems that may prevent the Ukrainian troops from implementing and developing the planned offensive.

What is the main problem of the offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine?

The detailed offensive plan of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is currently unknown, however, if the announced offensive involves a breakthrough of the front, then, in addition to preparing reserves that need to be brought into battle in the event of a breakthrough, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will need high-precision weapons.

It is likely that if the offensive is actually planned to break through the front, Ukrainian troops will be forced to use long-range rocket systems for it, including the American M142 HIMARS MLRS. Since the beginning of the NMD, these complexes have been used by Kiev mainly from the depths of the territory controlled by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but for the offensive and strikes into the depths of defense, they will have to be moved closer to the front.

The current number of HIMARS launchers (about 35 units) may not be enough for an offensive along the entire front of 1 thousand km, so the complexes will probably have to be concentrated in one or two directions, which increases the risk of their detection and destruction. In addition, most Western weapons, including HIMARS and other foreign rocket systems, are limited in resources, which allows them to be used at a strictly defined time and in a strictly defined quantity, and have never been used in high-intensity conflicts.

Doctrines and recommendations for the use of HIMARS / M270 MLRS in combined arms combat and in a conflict of this magnitude against a technologically advanced enemy do not exist.

Difficulties with logistics

It is likely that due to the risk of detecting large accumulations of equipment and the fear of losing reserves for the offensive, as is already happening with Artyomovsk (Bakhmut), the Armed Forces of Ukraine will accumulate the main strike formations 12, maximum 24-36 hours before the main strike . It is no longer possible to accumulate a sufficient amount of fuel, ammunition and covertly place people and equipment. Cases of Lancet drones hitting German ZSU Gepard and Soviet S-300 in the immediate vicinity of the front line have already been recorded. Previously hidden and remote from the battlefield, the means began to move and began to be destroyed even before the start of the offensive.

This suggests that a significant part of the routes of movement and places of concentration of Ukrainian military equipment is under surveillance. If the Armed Forces of Ukraine lose a significant amount of fuel, or transport equipment (tank carriers), or engineering units in two or three days, they will have to change the offensive plan on the move or use a backup plan (if any). In addition, the Armed Forces of Ukraine do not have an air bridge for transferring reserves or conducting landing operations. All supply and logistics in general are tightly tied to roads and railways. In such a tight time pressure, the failure of a bridge or railway track on an important supply line can turn into a disaster at the front.

***

Colonelcassad
Zaporozhye direction
situation as of 16:00 April 30, 2023

Ukrainian formations are finishing preparations for the announced offensive. In the Zaporozhye region, a comprehensive training was held with reserve units to enter the designated area and organize communications in the field. A battalion of the 116th mechanized brigade of the 10th army corps of the Armed Forces of Ukraine arrived

at the Orekhovsky sector . In addition, the command of the 128th Guards Rifle Brigade began moving assault groups to the front line. One of the units of the brigade arrived in Shcherbaki .

In Omelnik, a forward command post for a group of troops was equipped. The other day, Ukrainian signalmen established a closed communication channel between 108 arr. TRO and the country's leadership inKiev for interaction at the time of the offensive. Paratroopers of the 46th Airborne Brigade of the Airborne Forces of Ukraine were deployed

to the Gulyaipol sector . At least one battalion of the formation was understaffing in Pavlograd in the Dnipropetrovsk region. A group of special operations forces of Ukraine arrived at the Belogorye-Charivnoe

line . SSO sniper crews equip firing points on the front line. Over the past few days, fuel, ammunition and military equipment have been actively transported through the island of Khortytsya to the Zaporozhye direction . Also to the airfields Shirokoye and Dolgintsevo near Zaporozhye and

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Krivoy Rog was overflown by additional Su-25 and MiG-29 tactical aviation aircraft from a base in Starokonstantinov .

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Colonelcassad

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The battle for Avdiivka
situation as of 16:00 April 29, 2023

To the north of Avdiivka , positional battles continue in the area from the H20 highway near Novobakhmutovka to the railway near Avdiivka itself. To strengthen the positions at Novokalinovo , the Ukrainian command transferred units of the Marines of the 35th infantry regiment.

To the south, assault detachments of the 1st battalion of the 53rd brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine over the past few days have twice tried to attack the positions of the Russian army near Vodyany .

First, a platoon of the 53rd mechanized brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine tried to recapture the lost territories north-east of the settlement, from which they were driven out by soldiers of the RF Armed Forces a couple of days ago. Russian troops repelled the attack again.

Later, the strike group on several tanks and infantry fighting vehicles tried to break through the defenses northwest of Vodyanoye, but the military personnel of the RF Armed Forces successfully repulsed the attack and launched a counterattack.

As a result, units of the RF Armed Forces destroyed two infantry fighting vehicles and one tank of the 53rd brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, four people were injured. The remnants of the Ukrainian assault group retreated to their original lines.

https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin

Google Translator

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From the Comments at MOA:

MOD clobber report has a mention of another missile strike (most likely with several missiles) in Konstantinovka on 24th mech brigade reserve concentration near Konstaninovka.

💥 More than 200 Ukrainian troops have been eliminated and around 280 more have been evacuated with injuries of varying severity as a result of a missile strike on temporary deployment areas of the 24th Mechanised Brigade and a unit of the AFU Special Operations Forces close to Konstantinovka (Donetsk People's Republic).

Posted by: unimperator | Apr 30 2023 15:00 utc | 5

***

SO THIS IS IT THEN ON EVE OF MAY 2023 The counteroffensive starting point was clear from the beginning and it’s getting confirmed now.

🇷🇺 🇺🇦 Zaporozhye direction
situation as of 16.00 April 30, 2023

Ukrainian formations are finishing preparations for the announced offensive. In the Zaporozhye region, a comprehensive training was held with reserve units to enter the designated area and organize communications in the field.

🔻A battalion of the 116th mechanized brigade of the 10th army corps of the Armed Forces of Ukraine arrived at the Orekhovsky section . In addition, the command of the 128th Guards Rifle Brigade began moving assault groups to the front line. One of the units of the brigade arrived in Shcherbaki .

▪️In Omelnik, a forward command post for a group of troops was equipped. The other day, Ukrainian signalmen established a closed communication channel between the 108th troop unit and the country's leadership in Kiev for interaction during the offensive.

🔻Paratroopers of the 46th airborne brigade of the Airborne Forces of Ukraine were deployed to the Gulyai-Polye sector . At least one battalion of the formation was understaffing in Pavlograd in the Dnipropetrovsk region.

▪️A group of special operations forces of Ukraine arrived at the Belogorye-Charivnoe line. SSO sniper crews equip firing points on the front line.

🔻Over the past few days, fuel, ammunition and military equipment have been actively transported through the island of Khortytsya to the Zaporozhye direction .

❗️Also, additional tactical aircraft Su-25 and MiG-29 from the base in Starokonstantinov flew to the airfields Shirokoe and Dolgintsevo near Zaporozhye and Krivoy Rog .
Posted by: Geraint ap Iorwerth | Apr 30 2023 15:05 utc | 7

***

Written by Павел Владимирович:
Of Ukraine’s glorious counter-offensive

Zaluzhny now insists on postponing the long-awaited Ukrainian counter-offensive to the end of June, because he thinks better weather, warmer Dnieper river and dry soil will help Ukraine and be “more comfortable for its soldiers”. To me, this translates to “I don’t want to deal with this, please appoint someone else to orchestrate this debacle”.

It is clear now that Russia is no longer fighting the same Ukrainian army that it did a year and some ago. That army has been annihilated and so has the second one during another glorious counter-offensive, namely that around Kharkov. Now, with a third Ukrainian army, full of untrained men who don’t want to be there, Ukraine is pressed to venture on another great adventure. We’ve seen many videos of people being caught on various streets of what is still Ukraine (although it is getting increasingly silly to call it a country, even objectively) and many of them show less than enthusiasm. We’ve seen a guy fainting, a fella fighting the police (not just one, by the way) and these people will now be sent against the six layers deep Russian defences, protected by the actual Russian army. There was some talk that Ukrainians are hoping to rout the Russian army and throw it into panic (I’m assuming upon seeing their grand armada, carrying the banners of Odin or whatever), which I hope, for their own sake, isn’t true.

The insane mechanics’s dream that is Ukrainian heavy equipment garage is about as wonky as their personnel too. The many nations of the global West chipped in for this fight for the American dollar and so Ukrainians now have a bit of everything. As pretty as all this equipment looks with a swastika painted on it, it can’t do much without ammunition, which Ukraine has very little of now as well.

Another thing to point out now is the shortage of air-defence ammunition, which allows the Russian air-force to pummel the aryans to Valhalla daily.

In summary, the Third Ukrainian Army (I capitalise because it’s funnier that way) is a Frankenstein’s monster of equipment that has only been raised a bit. The monster knows it’s there, but can’t do much, in reality.

All of the things I mentioned aren’t getting any better, it’s all getting worse and worse daily and only accelerating. If this is clear to someone like me, who’s only military strategy experience comes from video games, I’m pretty sure it is clear to Zaluzhny.

I don’t like making predictions, but please allow me to make one: the Ukrainian counter-offensive won’t happen, at least not the way we imagine it. I know some highly knowledgeable people would disagree with me, but what the hell… The Western pressure on Ukraine will force them to do ‘something’ and that ‘something’ will be presented as a great counter-offensive, but it won’t be that at all. Instead it will be a desperate attempt at making it look like a counter-offensive, while throwing the too young and the too old with no experience or training against Russian artillery to please the Western masters.

This post is somewhat more snarky than my usual writings, please forgive me, I couldn’t help myself.

Thank you for reading.


https://t.me/Slavyangrad/43912
Posted by: Down South | Apr 30 2023 17:43 utc | 41

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/04/u ... l#comments

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The question of Germany's reparations to Poland is not closed
April 30, 9:21 am

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The question of Germany's reparations to Poland is not closed

If you think that the question of reparations in Poland is closed, you are very mistaken. On Tuesday, April 18, the Polish government adopted a resolution on the need to resolve the issue of reparations, compensations and indemnifications in connection with the German attack on Poland in 1939 and the subsequent German occupation.
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"The decision on reparations adopted on Tuesday will be the basis for the preparation of another diplomatic note addressed to the German government," said Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Arkadiusz Mularczyk.

That is,Despite Germany's declaration that no reparations are out of the question, since all possible apologies have already been made, and Poland has received full compensation in the form of German eastern lands, the Polish government, under various pretexts, continues to harass the Germans with its claims.

Of course, Poland will not receive any reparations, because otherwise other countries that suffered in World War II would follow its example, and Berlin, of course, will not have enough money to satisfy the claims of all the victims. But reparations are only a pretext. The Polish authorities are not at all as stupid and naive as they might seem. The main goal is the exhaustion of Germany, the weakening of its political will, humiliation. For what?

Germany refused to lead assistance to Ukraine in the conflict between the United States and Russia that unfolded on the territory of Ukraine. Germany was initially against sanctions against Russia and only obeyed the decision of the majority, but most importantly, Germany has repeatedly drawn the attention of the Polish side to the fact that many descendants of the Germans who once lived in Lower Silesia dream of returning to their historical homeland, to their land.

Apparently, in March, as a response, the Polish Army conducted regular exercises in the western territories with imitation of enemy actions from the western direction."At the end of March, the General Staff of the Polish Army organized military exercises in case of an armed attack from the west. (...) An offensive is being prepared aimed at capturing the city of Szczecin and its seaport, as well as the Szczecin-Goleniow airport. The troops of the "aggressor" begin reconnaissance operations " , - reported the Ministry of Defense.

Of course, we are not talking about any aggression from our Western neighbor. The very conduct of these exercises could be a shock for Germany. But as part of a plan to humiliate Berlin (with reference to the events of 1939 and the alleged genetic distrust Poles to their western neighbor) the maneuvers completed their task.
Continuing the topic of military maneuvers, we note that on June 12-23, the multinational exercises Air Defender-2023 will be held under the leadership of Germany. Already now they are called the largest joint exercises of NATO troops in history.

German airspace is reserved for the exercises in the federal states of Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Bavaria. In addition, air bases in the UK, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia and western Poland will be involved.

In other words, the June exercises Defender-2023 could become a kind of continuation of the March maneuvers of the Polish army, but this time with an invasion of the territory of the “Western enemy”. It looks like Poland and its NATO allies are invading Germany, which led many online media to conclude that Poland is preparing an attack on Germany to annex their lands as reparations for World War II.

Also of significance is the fact that the German army is weaker today than ever before; the grueling fight against the effects of sanctions, the energy and economic crises, the transfer of almost all of its military equipment to Ukraine - all this has overthrown Germany from the position of the leader of the EU, which Poland now wants to take, to the position of an outsider.

Let's hope that the conclusions drawn by the representatives of the foreign press are erroneous, since the Polish army, despite the assurances of our politicians, is far from being in the best condition. In addition to negative factors similar to German ones, the Polish military industry is also being destroyed due to the inept actions of our government and its lobbying of the interests of the United States, which, by the way, is interested in the economic and moral destruction of Germany as a strong rival and disobedient vassal. It is the position of a humble representative of US interests that allows the Duda-Morawiecki regime to realize its ambitious plans. Poland boldly spoils relations with its neighbors.

Now, apparently, the time has come for a serious conflict with Germany. With the tacit (or carefully planned) consent of the United States, the upcoming NATO Defender 2023 exercises will look like an aggressive gesture towards Germany.
In fact, this is not Poland, but the United States is trying to humiliate and trample on the reputation of Germany. And although the main concern that Poland is causing Germany at the moment is reparations, Berlin should prepare for new challenges.

The exaggeration of the topic of reparations is presented in Poland as the state's concern for its citizens, their well-being and the restoration of historical justice. However, upon closer examination, one can see completely different motives behind the actions of our government. They are not concerned at all with the well-being of their citizens. The Poles, as always, will receive nothing but promises. Just as we never waited for an admission of guilt or an apology for the Volyn massacre, so the Poles will not receive any reparations from Germany - and again they will be left with nothing.

(c) Marek Galas

https://inosmi.ru/20230430/reparatsii-262586031.html - zinc
https://dziennik-polityczny.com/2023/04 ... cy-rekami- polakow/ - original in Polish

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8324534.html

Google Translator

So, the Poles will pick fights with Russia and Germany at the same time? Brilliant!!

What then of the Banderistas? Seems like some unfinished business there too.

**********

The activities of the OUN qualify under Article 54
May 1, 11:50 a.m
Hymn:March of Chekists

Image

Circular of the Military Prosecutor of the Volga Military District No. 04282. Report of the Decree of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the USSR No. 32/8 / U / s "On the qualification of crimes ... "OUN". September 21, 1944

https://istmat.org/node/ 67789 - zinc

What is the 54th article of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR.

In the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR, approved by the Central Executive Committee of the Ukrainian SSR on June 8, 1927, what was called “counter-revolutionary crimes” fell under Article 54, paragraphs 1 to 14. The Code was adopted on the eve of the 10th anniversary of October.

In terms of counter-revolutionary activities, the code of the Ukrainian SSR differs only in the numbering of articles: article 54 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR, under which the largest number of persons were repressed, corresponds to article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. CRIMINAL CODE

OF THE RSFSR SPECIAL PART Chapter One State crimes 1. Counter-revolutionary crimes

58-1. Any action aimed at overthrowing, undermining or weakening the power of the workers' and peasants' councils and those elected by them, on the basis of the Constitution of the USSR and the constitutions of the union republics, the workers' and peasants' governments of the USSR, union and autonomous republics, or at undermining or weakening the external security of the Union SSR and the main economic, political and national gains of the proletarian revolution.
By virtue of the international solidarity of the interests of all working people, the same actions are recognized as counter-revolutionary even when they are directed at any other working people's state, even if it is not part of the USSR.

58-1a. Treason to the Motherland, i.e. actions committed by citizens of the USSR to the detriment of the military power of the USSR, its state independence or the inviolability of its territory, such as: espionage, disclosure of military or state secrets, defection to the side of the enemy, flight or flight abroad, are punishable by capital punishment – execution with confiscation of all property, and under mitigating circumstances - imprisonment for a term of 10 years with confiscation of all property.

58-1b. The same crimes committed by military personnel are punishable by the highest measure of criminal punishment - execution by firing squad with confiscation of all property.

58-1c. In the event of a serviceman escaping or flying abroad, adult members of his family, if they somehow contributed to the impending or committed treason, or at least knew about it, but did not bring it to the attention of the authorities, are punished by imprisonment for a term of 5 to 10 years with confiscation of all property.

The remaining adult family members of the traitor, who lived with him or were dependent on him at the time of the crime, are subject to deprivation of voting rights and exile to remote regions of Siberia for 5 years.

58-1g. Failure by a serviceman to report an impending or committed treason entails imprisonment for 10 years. Non-reporting by other citizens (not military personnel) is prosecuted in accordance with Articles 58-12.

58-2. Armed uprising or invasion of Soviet territory by armed gangs for counter-revolutionary purposes, seizure of power in the center or in the localities for the same purposes and, in particular, with the aim of forcibly tearing away from the USSR and a separate union republic any part of its territory or to annul the agreements concluded by the Union SSR agreements with foreign states entail - the highest measure of social protection - execution or declaration of an enemy of workers with confiscation of property and deprivation of citizenship of the union republic and, thereby, citizenship of the Union SSR and expulsion from the borders of the USSR forever, with the admission, under extenuating circumstances, of lowering up to imprisonment for a term not less than three years, with confiscation of all or part of the property.

58-3. Relations for counter-revolutionary purposes with a foreign state or its individual representatives, as well as assistance in any way to a foreign state that is at war with the USSR or is fighting against it by intervention or blockade, entail - the measures of social protection indicated in Article 58-2 of this Code.

58-4. Rendering in any way assistance to that part of the international bourgeoisie, which, not recognizing the equality of the communist system that is replacing the capitalist system, seeks to overthrow it, as well as to social groups and organizations that are under the influence or directly organized by this bourgeoisie in carrying out hostile against Union of the SSR activities, entails - imprisonment for a term of not less than three years with confiscation of all or part of property, with an increase, under especially aggravating circumstances, up to the highest measure of social protection - by shooting or declaring an enemy of workers, with deprivation of citizenship of a union republic and thus, citizenship of the USSR and expulsion from the USSR forever, with confiscation of property.

58-5. Inducement of a foreign state or any public groups in it, by intercourse with their representatives, using false documents or other means, to declare war, armed intervention in the affairs of the USSR or other hostile actions, in particular: to blockade, to seize state property of the Union of the SSR or union republics, the rupture of diplomatic relations, the rupture of treaties concluded with the Union of the SSR, etc., entails - the measures of social protection specified in Article 58-2 of this code.

58-6. Espionage, i.e. transfer, theft or collection for the purpose of transferring information that is, in its content, a specially protected state secret, to foreign states, counter-revolutionary organizations or private individuals, entails -

imprisonment for a term of not less than three years, with confiscation of all or part of the property, and in cases where espionage has caused or could have caused especially grave consequences for the interests of the USSR, the highest measure of social protection - shooting or declaring the enemy of workers with deprivation of citizenship of the allied republics and, thus, citizenship of the USSR and expulsion from the USSR forever with confiscation of property.

The transfer, theft or collection for the purpose of transferring economic information that does not constitute a specially protected state secret in its content, but is not subject to disclosure by direct prohibition of the law or by order of the heads of departments, institutions and enterprises, for a fee or free of charge to the organizations and persons indicated above, entails followed by imprisonment for up to three years.

Note 1. Information listed in a special list approved by the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR in agreement with the Councils of People's Commissars of the Union republics and published for general information is considered a specially protected state secret.

Note 2. With regard to espionage of the persons mentioned in Article 193-1 of this Code, Article 193-24 of the same Code shall remain in force.

58-7. Undermining the state industry, transport, trade, money circulation or credit system, as well as cooperation, committed for counter-revolutionary purposes by appropriate use of state institutions and enterprises, or obstruction of their normal activities, as well as the use of state institutions and enterprises or obstruction of their activities, committed in interests of former owners or interested capitalist organizations, entail - social protection measures specified in Article 58-2 of this code.

58-8. The commission of terrorist acts directed against representatives of the Soviet government or leaders of revolutionary workers' and peasants' organizations, and participation in the implementation of such acts, even if by persons not belonging to a counter-revolutionary organization, entails - social protection measures specified in Article 58-2 of this code.

58-9. Destruction or damage with a counter-revolutionary purpose by explosion, arson or other methods of railway or other means of communication, means of public communication, water supply, public warehouses and other structures or state and public property, entails - social protection measures specified in Article 58 -2 of this code.

58-10. Propaganda or agitation containing a call to overthrow, undermine or weaken Soviet power or to commit individual counter-revolutionary crimes (Articles 58-2 - 58-9 of this Code), as well as the distribution or production or storage of literature of the same content entail - Imprisonment for a term not less than six months.

The same actions during mass unrest or with the use of religious or national prejudices of the masses, or in a military situation, or in areas declared under martial law, entail - social protection measures specified in Article 58-2 of this code.

58-11. Any kind of organizational activity aimed at the preparation or commission of the crimes provided for in this chapter, as well as participation in an organization formed for the preparation or commission of one of the crimes provided for by this chapter, entail - social protection measures specified in the relevant articles of this chapter.

58-12. Failure to report a reliably known, planned or committed counter-revolutionary crime entails - imprisonment for a term not less than six months.

58-13. Active actions or active struggle against the working class and the revolutionary movement, manifested in a responsible or secret (agency) position under the tsarist system or with counter-revolutionary governments during the civil war, entail - social protection measures specified in Article 58-2 of this code .

58-14. Counter-revolutionary sabotage, i.e. deliberate failure to perform certain duties by someone or deliberately negligent performance of them with the specific purpose of weakening the power of the government and the activities of the state apparatus, entails - imprisonment for a term not less than one year, with confiscation of all or part of property, with an increase, under especially aggravating circumstances , up to the highest measure of social protection - execution, with confiscation of property.

https://veprin.jimdofree.com/документы/ ... 4-ук-усср/ - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8327820.html

Google Translator

And then that asshole Khrushchev goes and gives this filth blanket amnesty! Whose side was he on?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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

Post by blindpig » Tue May 02, 2023 12:25 pm

signs of offense
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 05/02/2023
Original article: Alexander Kots / Komsomolskaya Pravda

Image

“Which direction is the opponent?” I ask dutifully, pretending I'm not exhausted from the second hour of walking in wellington boots in pitch darkness. No one sees my red face or the sweat that falls directly into my eyes under the helmet. “The shelter is right there”, I hear from Sergeant Max who, smiling, walks ahead. Suddenly, the horizon is cut by a line of light that separates the night, favorite of explorers, from the arrival of his rival, morning. A line of soldiers, glued to the ground with ammunition, backpacks with food, eggplant cooked in a homemade casserole, quicken their pace. The forest belt behind us hides us from the eyes of the other side, a kilometer away. The birds are already singing over a pipe and somewhere to the northwest, the mines begin to do their work. The pre-dawn of the next day of combat is colored by a contrast of heavy clouds and the rhythmic breathing of my companions. In a narrow field, we sat down to rest.

My acquaintance from the reconnaissance battalion of the 19th division turns out to be typical of the special military operation. The boys had asked if it was possible to receive help for the necessary devices through the “Everything for Victory” project. So I went from Lugansk to Zaporozhye to make sure that it is not some plot, of which there are some in the humanitarian field. On VKontakte, for example, someone says that they raise money for refugee children's operations using a fake account in my name and the administration does not respond to the numerous complaints. Other volunteers talk about night vision devices or drones that people they didn't know have been sent to the front and suddenly appear up for auction on the Internet. So the “trust but verify” principle hasn't gone away. As an advance, I bring a couple of reconnaissance quadcopters and a thermal imaging device. "We'll try it tomorrow," they reply.

Food and ammunition go in backpacks. The group's sapper, who calls himself Okhotnik , puts his things in a bag and says: “measuring rods, marks for mines, to mark the safe path, all homemade”. “Do you have anything that is not homemade?” “One loop, detonator, TNT. Here, by the way, I have another homemade detonator. Would you like a snack? It's homemade”, laughs Ojotnik. And he gives us a lesson in battle cooking with sausages and melted cheese. After high school, at the insistence of his uncle, a chef at an Italian restaurant, he graduated as a pastry chef. But then he joined the ranks. He signed a seven and a half year contract with the special forces. He left it, but then the mobilization came. He waited for the call, but he couldn't stand it and went to the recruiting office: “Have you forgotten me or something?” They checked his military record and called him.

Lights out at nine, woke up at two in the morning and check at three. First the armored Ajmat, then on foot. Until we stop to rest and I continue to get acquainted with the explorers. One of those mobilized was a machine operator in his civilian life. He first he was a mechanic in the special military operationand later he was instructed in communications. With his communications suitcase, he coordinates everyone's tasks. Behind the field, something begins to flash and explode in midair. "This forest belt is behind the enemy," he says. "That's where it becomes perpendicular to our positions and they try to dig in towards us." We barely have time to go down to the shelter when a strange noise is heard outside, something similar to the work of the Grads. A few seconds later, the shelter shakes and pieces of earth fall between the slats. We even ducked in surprise. However, would such a maneuver help in the event of a direct hit?

"Aviation is working," says someone. Later, it turns out that an enemy helicopter has fired unguided shells on our positions. Most have exploded in the field before reaching the forest where we are.

Zaporozhye is one of the most likely directions for the opponent's counteroffensive. There are no Russian positions beyond this location, only Ukrainian positions. They can try to break through the defenses and go to Tokmak. Although, seeing these endless fields cut by strips of forest, you do not understand how they will do it. The fields are mined, the artillery is alerted, our aviation can strike without entering the enemy danger zone.

“Yes, they will go along these forest belts,” say the soldiers at the front. “That is why they are digging new trenches closer to us. We try to make it difficult for them."

“Our strong point is like a bone in their throats,” says the commander of the 503rd regiment, by the nom de guerre Inostranets [foreign]. “They periodically test us with sabotage and reconnaissance groups, the mortar works. I suffered a concussion myself in February. Of the explorers, three have died. Inostranets is from Donetsk and fought in the militia. After the second Minsk, he returned to metallurgy. He then obtained nationality and went to Russia, but the special military operation followed him with the mobilization. He didn't avoid her.

“It is noticeable that the enemy has been activated lately. There is a backlog of personnel in the rear areas and more and more equipment appears here. See the gaps in front? It was they who landed 25 people and we who, with our neighbors, worked with grenade launchers. And the opponent quickly disappeared. Both artillery and infantry work here. It's probably combat reconnaissance. It doesn't look like an attempt to attack or capture territory, it's the wrong forces. They jump, work and leave”.

With these kinds of seemingly meaningless attacks, the Armed Forces of Ukraine try to learn our defenses, the speed of reaction to threats, the time it takes for orders. It is an important aspect when planning a counteroffensive and looking for weaknesses. At the same time, they are constantly trying to get closer to our positions, creating new trenches along the forest belt towards our trenches. To identify this activity and stop the dalliances in time are the scouts with whom I have reached this position.

The drone operator empties his suitcase, takes one of the commercial drones out of it. There has been a lot of talk lately about kamikaze drones capable of performing combat charges. Here they are used primarily for intelligence gathering. It is possible to use ordinary drones to fly over the enemy positions, but they will be shot down. You fly around the flanks at high altitude and speed, maneuvering and fighting communication blackouts. An ingenious algorithm is used so that the opponent cannot calculate our position. After the scouts view the slow-motion footage, they point to the target at the corner of the forest belt. "Now it's our gift's turn," says the scout. The drone I'm bringing you has a powerful zoom, so it doesn't have to fly right up to the enemy, you just have to get the camera close enough. In civilian life, the drone operator had his own business, he had several bars in addition to drying and selling the fish that he caught himself. He knows firsthand the art of drones, he even participated in competitions. “I had a hobby, I liked being higher up,” the soldier smiles. “I studied them myself. Reconnaissance drones are the most difficult to control. But they are very fast and it is difficult to blind them with electronic warfare. Conventional quadcopters have stabilization systems, the control is intuitive. It's like learning to drive a bad car and then sitting at a console. Everyone takes a break from work however they can. Some collect coins and we had a drone fan club. We got them and we made them fly.” He had several bars as well as drying and selling the fish that he caught himself. He knows firsthand the art of drones, he even participated in competitions. “I had a hobby, I liked being higher up,” the soldier smiles. “I studied them myself. Reconnaissance drones are the most difficult to control. But they are very fast and it is difficult to blind them with electronic warfare. Conventional quadcopters have stabilization systems, the control is intuitive. It's like learning to drive a bad car and then sitting at a console. Everyone takes a break from work however they can. Some collect coins and we had a drone fan club. We would get them and make them fly.” He had several bars as well as drying and selling the fish that he caught himself. He knows firsthand the art of drones, he even participated in competitions. “I had a hobby, I liked being higher up,” the soldier smiles. “I studied them myself. Reconnaissance drones are the most difficult to control. But they are very fast and it is difficult to blind them with electronic warfare. Conventional quadcopters have stabilization systems, the control is intuitive. It's like learning to drive a bad car and then sitting at a console. Everyone takes a break from work however they can. Some collect coins and we had a drone fan club. We got them and we made them fly.”
"How did you get here?"

“Many of my friends and classmates had already fought here, it made me uncomfortable to sit at home. My grandfather fought against the fascists and for me it is a matter of honor and responsibility. The most important thing is to protect the family. Avoiding it and saying that this is not for me is like covering your ears. We have to fight and move on. If we retreat here, they'll knock on our door. I felt that I could help at the front and I came. Then few knew what this type of drone was. I bought one myself and trained people.”

“Do they help intelligence?”

“In our context, drones have completely changed reconnaissance tactics. Modern technologies make it possible to do all this without risking human lives. That is its main value. And let's talk about the kamikaze. A modern anti-tank shell can cost two million rubles, and an attack drone can be assembled for 50,000. In the right hands, this drone is an anti-tank projectile with the same ability to take out equipment and personnel. But you have to learn it. And regardless of the situation in the world, you have to use the current experience for the development of drones”.

Somewhere to the flanks, a shot is heard followed by the whir of a shell and an explosion on the other side of the woods. In the case of artillery, a short flight is better than a long one because the fragments go straight to the target. Although, of course, it is better to hit the target. The gun is then concealed again to avoid return fire. However, it is almost impossible to calculate the Rapier barrel, the projectile trajectory is too low. To avoid the calculation problem, at night I move away in the same way and go to the artillery positions in the morning.

The commander of the fire support group, a lieutenant with nom de guerre Motor , is a graduate of the Ryazan amphibious school. He is more, from the faculty of special forces. He here he gives orders with a cannon. “In February of last year, he was carrying out tasks in Ingushetia. As soon as he started the special military operation, I asked with my unit to be assigned here, but they did not allow me, ”he explains. “Until the end of May, I did not arrive at the training camp to be sent to the infantry. The commander of the mortar battery was not there, so a mortar battery was formed as part of the motorized battalion. We worked for six months and then the fire support group showed up on the basis of our intelligence unit and I went back to my regular full-time position. My father was an artilleryman, it is in my genes”. He makes corrections and gives the order to fire. The Rapier hits from the side. Another drone operator makes an adjustment: North-1. That is, the correction is only one meter. The artilleryman's pedantry strikes me. “He never says what the goal is,” smiles Motor .

Then, the radio gives a conclusive: “Target”.

"Is the enemy active here?"

“He is not taking offensive actions yet. Suppression of fire points, batteries, command posts... Moreover, it gradually transfers the blows to the second line and to the rear of our defense. This is one of the signs of an impending counteroffensive. They bring equipment. We identified it and we attacked it.”

“Can you say that the example of your fire support group, the notorious reconnaissance and attack environment is formed a reconnaissance and fire control group? With intelligence, correction and artillery in a dense network.

“In times of peace we talk a lot about the development of groups like this. Deficiencies in combat conditions have been identified. Now some of those ideas are being applied in practice, like other intelligence units in the area of ​​operations. And it's very efficient."

They recalculate and hide the barrel to the side so that it does not protrude in any way. Another routine day of combat is over. In the totality of the special military operation , the actions of an intelligence officer may not impress a person with little knowledge. But a military conflict is not just constant feats and spectacular tank attacks. This is the daily routine of combat work, which is also supported by those who supply the front line soldiers in the rear.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/05/02/27187/#more-27187

Google Translator

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

Russian Missile Hit Ahead of Ukraine Offensive & Kiev’s Obsession Over Territory Amid War of Attrition
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 1, 2023



Update on the conflict in Ukraine for May 1, 2023:

– Russia has conducted multiple large-scale missile strikes across Ukraine including the targeting of potential staging activities ahead of Ukraine’s spring/summer offensive;

– Russian missile strikes are also exhausting Ukraine’s air defense capabilities at a rate difficult for its Western allies to replace;

– Errant Ukrainian S-300 missiles falling into populated areas and causing civilian casualties are now regularly blamed on Russia;

– Several of Ukraine’s remaining S-300 systems appeared to be moving into Kherson to provide potential air defenses ahead of the expected offensive but were discovered and destroyed by Russian Lancet kamikaze drones;

– There has a been an up-tick in fantastical propaganda across the West, reflecting the growing issues Ukraine’s war efforts face in reality;

Follow Alex and Alexander of The Duran for daily updates regarding Ukraine: Alexander Mercouris: / @alexmercouris Alex Christoforou: / @alexchristoforou

References:

NYT – Defenses Carved Into the Earth (December 2022): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2

ABC – Ukrainian air defences shoot down 15 of 18 Russian missiles launched in dead of night (April 30, 2023): https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-0

The New Voice of Ukraine – Russia firing at Ukraine missiles made last fall or winter, Air Force says: https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-fir

RFE/RL – Wagner Chief Threatens To Pull Out Of Bakhmut As Zelenskiy Calls For Modern Air Defenses (April 29, 2023: https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-zelen

DW – Soviet-era anti-aircraft system that misfired on Poland (November 2022): https://www.dw.com/en/soviet-era-anti

RFE/RL – ‘Night Of Russian Terror’: Deadly Missile Attacks Target Ukrainian Cities (April 28, 2023): https://www.rferl.org/a/deadly-russia

Al Jazeera – Reported Ukraine drone strike ignites major fuel blaze on Crimea (April 29, 2023): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/05/ ... attrition/

War and the World Majority: Russians Speak
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 1, 2023



International Manifesto Group

As the West’s hybrid proxy war on Russia proceeds, Russia and Russians are faced with momentous choices, both about the structure and orientation of their society, economy and politics domestically and in their foreign policy orientation. As Radhika Desai and Alan Freeman discovered in their recent trip to Russia, the national conversation about these choices, the challenges and opportunities facing Russia and its role in the rapidly changing world today as part of what the Russians have started calling the World Majority is impressively broad and deep. So, in this webinar, they have invited some leading Russian thinkers to dwell on these choices and bring some of these discussions to a broader world audience.

Speakers

Oleg Barabanov is a Russian historian and political scientist. He is Program Director of the Valdai International Discussion Club and a Professor at MGIMO University.

Anastasia Likhacheva is the Dean of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at HSE University in Moscow.

Dmitri Trenin is a Research Professor at the Higher School of Economics and a Leading Research Fellow at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO). Prior to that, he was with the Carnegie Moscow Center from its inception to closure, including serving as its Director (2008-22). Trenin is the author of a number of books on Russia’s foreign policy and history, and on international relations in Eurasia.

Said Gafurov (born 1967) is a Russian politician, scholar, Marxian economist, orientalist, bureaucrat and opera critic. After working in the government in his early career, Gafurov has transitioned into journalistics, trade-unionist activity, electoral politics and the academic sector as an associate professor at Moscow State Linguistic University.

Moderators

Radhika Desai is Professor at the Department of Political Studies, and Director, Geopolitical Economy Research Group, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. Her books include Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: A Geopolitical Economy (2023), Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2013), Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics (2nd rev ed, 2004) and Intellectuals and Socialism: ‘Social Democrats’ and the Labour Party (1994), a New Statesman and Society Book of the Month.

Alan Freeman is the co-director, with Radhika Desai, of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group (GERG) at the University of Manitoba. He was an economist at the Greater London Authority between 2000 and 2011, where he held the brief for the Creative Industries and the Living Wage. He wrote The Benn Heresy, a biography of British politician Tony Benn, and co-edited three books on value theory. He is honorary life vice-president of the UK-based Association for Heterodox Economics and a Vice-Chair of the World Association for Political Economy.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/05/ ... ans-speak/

*********

APU processing in Artemovsk
May 2, 1:03 p.m

Image

Massive processing of the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the western outskirts of Artemovsk. After the intensification of the use of heavy ammunition, the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine seriously increased, including in the basements - 2 Canadian mercenaries who died the other day, were just laid to rest in the basement after the arrival of an air bomb.

(Video at link.)


Plus, a beautiful hit in the ammunition depot of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Kherson direction.


(Video at link.)

Plus a video from a taken opnik of the Armed Forces of Ukraine after being treated with thermobaric ammunition - https://t.me/boris_rozhin/84448 (strictly 18+)
The broadcast of hostilities, as usual, continues in Telegram https://t.me/boris_rozhin subscribe)

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8329556.html

9 years of Odessa Khatyn
May 2, 10:17

Image

9 years ago, the old post-Soviet Ukraine burned down in the house of the Trade Unions in Odessa, along with the Odessans who burned down there.
What is happening in Ukraine now is also a direct consequence of what happened then. Having not met the proper rebuff then, Nazism in Ukraine grew stronger and developed, which led to the fact that now all of Ukraine is on fire, because Nazism is a war and Nazism understands only force.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8329127.html

Google Translator

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BERLIN JUDGE RELEASES HEINRICH BUECKER BUT RULES RUSSIA IS WAGING AN “ILLEGAL WAR”, RESTRICTS THE GERMAN CONSTITUTION’S FREEDOM OF SPEECH TO PRIVATE, NOT PUBLIC AUDIENCES

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By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with

A Berlin court judge has dismissed a charge of threatening public order by a speech by Heinrich Buecker (lead image, left) last year for which he has been prosecuted for “publicly approving a crime of aggression”. Buecker is a well-known Berlin anti-war activist and critic of the German government’s war against Russia in the Ukraine. His speech was given in a Berlin park last June 22 on the 81st anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

In a 90-minute courtroom session on April 27, guarded by five armed police, Judge Marieluis Brinkmann (right) of the Tiergarten District Court of Berlin (at rear of lead image) interrupted and stopped Buecker testifying in what the judge dismissed as “a history lesson”; refused to accept from his defence lawyer mainstream German media publications and Bundestag reports as evidence that Buecker’s opinions had been circulating widely in public before he spoke at the Berlin rally; and would not allow legal argument on Article 5, the free speech provision of the German constitution known as the Basic Law.

Instead, Judge Brinkmann ruled that an earlier conviction and fine for Buecker in the Tiergarten District Court in January should be dismissed because his speech had been a private one in front of Buecker’s “fans”, not a public speech at all.

This is a new interpretation of law for which there is no German constitutional precedent. Article 5 draws no distinction between private and public speech; or the size of the audiences which are covered by the constitution; . “every person,” the text says, “shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures, and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources.”

The Berlin judge also broke German court precedent and judicial practice by announcing in her ruling a finding of fact and law about which she had refused to allow any evidence or argument to be presented and tested in court. In the Ukraine, she announced, Russia is waging a “”war of aggression in violation of international law.”

In her ruling the judge signalled that the German authorities want to prevent the Buecker case from becoming a rallying cause for free speech advocates across the country. “They want the issue to go away as quickly as possible,” Buecker said. “They realize it’s becoming too public.”

Last January, in the first stage of the Berlin government’s prosecution of anti-war critics like Buecker, Judge Tobias Pollman issued a summary judgement in the Tiergarten court without hearing evidence or argument. He ruled that Buecker’s crime came under Section 140 of the Criminal Code and had consisted of “publicly approving a crime of aggression (Section 138 of the International Criminal Code) in a manner likely to disturb the public peace at a meeting.” Pollman charged Buecker with approving in his speech “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in violation of international law, the illegality of which you knew.”

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Left, Buecker reading his speech on June 22, 2022, at the Soviet Memorial in Berlin’s Treptow Park on the 81st anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union; read this report of the case here.

Click to read, and listen to Buecker’s interview on TNT Radio’s War of the Worlds on April 15. The German bureau of Ruptly, a subsidiary of the Russian RT group, has broadcast this interview in German with Buecker at the court house.

Judge Brinkman has repeated Pollman’s conclusion but lifted the conviction and the €2,000 fine imposed. It is unclear what was the source of Brinkmann’s finding that the only people who had heard his speech last year were his “fan base”, or how many of them were present. At the hearing last week, there were more than 70 people attending, , a much larger number than court officials had anticipated, and so they changed courtooms to accommodate the overflow. There were others waiting in the street outside. Five uniformed, armed police for security inside the courtroom was an unusual public demonstration of state force. .

No reporter from the national German media attended, nor any representative of the Berlin papers. Click to read this report.

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Unsere Zeit (“Our Time”)m, a weekly publication of the German communist Party (DKP). Source: https://www.unsere-zeit.de

State prosecutor Wegmann read out the indictment and the state’s case against Buecker from a typescript. This was accepted by the judge; she did not allow Buecker to read from his prepared speech in defence and ordered both Buecker and his lawyer to speak ad lib. In a comment, she told Buecker his remarks were no more than “backing the view of Russia”.

The prosecutor also attempted to conceal her identity. She was only person in the courtroom who wore a Covid-19 mask; when the judge asked to remove it, she refused. “She didn’t want to be photographed,” a courtroom source said.

Read Buecker’s court statement in full here. Less than 10% was allowed to be heard in court. For an English translation of excerpts, read on:


Thank you for reading this speech, its content and statements

I hereby fully confess.

The accusations made against me by the court here I point out with a resolute reponse. On June 22, 2022, I attended the Soviet Memorial in the Treptowr Park when the speech just documented here was delivered. Under the title of my speech, “We do not forget!“, I have had to say that we must keep awake this “painful and shameful memory of the so-called the monstrous and cruel war of extermination, which the fascist Germany waged against the entire Soviet Union – especially the Ukrainian, the the Belarusian and Russian Republics.

During the Second World War in the Soviet Union, the German government either completely or partially destroyed: 15 major cities, 1,710 cities, 70,000 villages, almost 60 million buildings, 32,000 industrial enterprises, 10,000 power plants, 60,000 km of railway tracks, 100,000 km of motorways, 40,000 hospitals and medical centers, 64,000 schools and colleges, 43,000 libraries, 44,000 theatres, about 3,000 churches and 400 museums.

These figures are from the book “Fathers of Annihilation” by Professor Brian Easlea of London.

Germany is responsible for the deaths of about 27 million citizens of the Soviet Union who died during World War II, or they were deliberately killed, the majority of them civilians. Including millions of Jews, Poles, Sinti and Roma, Ukrainians, Russians and Communists who regarded Hitler-Germany as subhuman who have been destroyed.

That’s why I want to take this opportunity again with the deepest conviction to repeat what I declared on June 22, 2022: “Never again may we as Germans get involved in a war against Russia in any form. We we need to unite and join to oppose this madness together

As the operator of the Coop anti-war café in Berlin, that I started in 2005, of course, my stance against the war is self-explanatory. And against all wars. But every war must also be fought in trying to understand and analyse the political-historical context. The German government supports Ukraine and thus at the same time many ultranationalist, fascist elements, the military, police, and secret services which significantly control or influence Ukrainian administrative and political bodies.

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Source: https://www.reuters.com/

Meanwhile, these forces are using heavy weapons in Ukraine and Ukrainian soldiers are being trained in Germany. You are actually working directly with these forces – that is, with the descendants of those forces whom the Nazis had already been using since the beginning of the Operation Barbarossa; this combination has worked together since June 22, 1941, with Nazi collaborators.

The West, i.e. Germany, the USA, Great Britain, yes, almost all NATO countries support a corrupt regime in Ukraine with Nazi ties, which was orchestrated from the outside in 2014 by a western financed coup was brought to power. The illegitimate and illegal coup in Kiev in February 2014 had been prepared for years. Politicians such as the now deceased US senator [John] McCain, the US politician; [Under Secretary of State] Victoria Nuland; and German politicians of the party of the Greens, the FSP, and the CDU fired up protesters in Kiev in 2013 and 2014 at the Maidan in an increasingly charged protest against their President. This is known to have escalated into violent clashes with many dead, and which, to this day very significantly, have never have been investigated according to the rule of law in the state. How would the story have been lost without the intrusive interference of representatives of other states in Ukraine?

The reintegration of Crimea was a concerted action of the residents of Crimea and Russia. The inhabitants of Crimea as Russian-speaking and also ethnic Russians did not want to be part of an anti-Russian country — you should be aware of that.

The Crimeans were a persecuted minority already under the Yushchenko government in 2004 and already in the 90s when they gained very negative experience. The Russian government, for its part, had immediately understood that from the coup in Kiev the Crimea and the Russian naval bases on the peninsula would probably be the next targets of the Russophobes and their forces in Kiev. In March, the population decided in a referendum with over 90% of the votes to re-join the Russian Federation and that is after Russian soldiers without insignia occupied at first the Ukrainian military bases in the Crimea. In response, Berlin and other western governments accused Russia, including the leading western media. They said that allegedly the annexation of Crimea was in violation of international law. The previous coup in Kiev was praised as a so-called “revolution” and dismissed the danger [to Russia] that the Russian Navy, which has leased its naval base for many years at Sevastopol in the Crimea would have been lost and thus at the same time that access across the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.

The consideration that the so-called annexation of Crimea is also a kind of logical consequence of the anti-Russian coup in Kiev was, in my opinion, requires courage in speaking out. In this country Russia is portrayed as aggressive, as an aggressor. But in my opinion, Russia was looking for, and the Russian government is always looking for the most defensive way to resolve conflict. For example, the desire of the Donbass republics for admission to Russia was refused by the government in Moscow for many years.

On the contrary, that government used all their authority to support the secessionists with the Minsk Agreements on bringing about a peaceful settlement with Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Russian side regrets its reluctance, as we now know, was only used by Germany and France to give Ukraine time to “get stronger,” as Mrs Merkel put it. In fact, it’s exactly the other way around. With the endless repeated narrative that Russia wants more territory in Europe distracting from facing up to what it means that NATO has been moving further and further to the east. In the meantime, the war against Russia is practiced in regular and increasingly large-scale maneuvers.

Do you remember that for a long time the rationale for all this was just about defending against Iran or North Korea, albeit if you are setting up missile silos in Eastern Europe? We are already there,so, thanks to the NATO it no longer has to disguise its intention under alleged Russian “aggression”. Donetsk and Lugansk in the Donbass region have also declared independence, because the Ukrainians demonizesd them as a Russian-speaking minority and wanted to live free from under the Russophobic regime of Kiev. When they initially sought autonomy within Ukraine, that was rejected by the Ukrainian side. What did Kiev do instead? Send the military, and when the ordinary soldiers were not rigorous enough, the time has come for the oligarchs to finance those -paramilitary volunteer battalions which have earned their first spurs in the so-called anti-terrorist operation (ATO) in Odessa and other cities in the Ukrainian southeast which have had with strong traditional ties with Russia. Then there were protests and uprisings organized by the coup government in Kiev from the second half of April 2014 and put down brutally.

On May 2, 2014, riots culminated in the massacre in Trade Union House in Odessa when the victims of this day officially stated to be 48 dead and over 200 injured. But about them one thing has been left out. They were all left-wing opponents of the putsch government supporting the federalization of the regions. They already had set up a camp in front of the trade union building, and that became a thorn in the side of the higher authorities. So there were repeated clashes with Kiev support groups, including a local offshoot of the Pravy Sektor group. What had been peaceful opposition was lost.

After street battles in the centre with many injured and six dead, and then an armed mob went to the camp in front of the Union House, whereupon about 400 unarmed people fled to the nearby trade union building and barricaded themselves there. The camp was destroyed and set on fire and then those fleeing for refuge were chased with Molotov cocktails. The trade union building was then attacked. Thirty-two people burned to death in the building, plus a number of those who jumped out of the windows because of the heat were then brutally beaten to death or seriously injured by the right-wing mob downstairs in front of the building. This resulted in another 10 deaths.

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Left, May 2, 2014 – Odessa Trade Union House. Right, May 2, 1933 – German trade union headquarters buildings throughout Germany were taken over by gangs operating with police protection.

For me, May 2 is also the day on which, in 1933, the trade union houses in Germany were stormed by the Nazis, and left-wingers and trade unionists were sent to the first provisional concentration camps and beaten up there, tortured or even murdered.

As an anti-fascist and anti-imperialist, I expressly oppose the policy of regime change, against wars of intervention and against any Interference in the internal affairs of independent states. I call on the German government to adopt a policy in the interest of International peace, in the interests of international security and peaceful coexistence of all peoples. The principles of the Charter of the United Nations must be respected and international law must be defended.

I call for all arms deliveries and training programs for the Ukraine stop immediately. I demand diplomacy instead of weapons. I call for all efforts of our government to negotiate and allow opponents of war without preconditions. The sacrifice of the Ukraine for the geopolitical interests of the West, namely the the strategic weakening of Russia, is a monstrous war crime and must have an end. The role of the media in promoting the current destructive Ukrainian politics is immense. The leading German media in support of the views expressed by the government are expressed almost unreservedly. But about the actual events there is hardly a report in the bourgeois media, or they are reported only in passing. Before the start of the war on February 24, 2022, on the other hand, there were constant reports in the German bourgeois media debunking the ultranationalist elements operating in Ukraine for taking action against their own people. There were threats against ill-wishers, journalists, politicians and lawyers – or their imprisonment and killing. .

But now what is happening in the West and especially in Berlin, in London, in Canada, and in the US, is that the extreme Russophobic ultranationalists in Ukraine are working closely together with the ruling circles. This collaboration is not new in itself, but its intensity has accelerated. Such collaboration already existed in the covert war of the US intelligence services against the Soviet Union after the Second World War, and then from the 1990s to influence the state-building of Ukraine after its separation from the USSR and to change its relations with Russia. Canada, and theold Federal Republic of Germany. This was to adopt a policy of state complicity in order to protect Ukrainian war criminals – that collaborators had generally protected them from prosecution before the Nuremberg Tribunal…

The Wehrmacht wanted to exterminate almost a million people in Leningrad by starvation. Now the Bundeswehr is back on the Russian border, and Ukrainian military personnel are being trained in Germany. I find all this unbelievable….Together we all express that it is incredible what is happening in Germany is that the right to free expression should be restricted, as is happening. This trial today is therefore of great public importance. This is because if I were to be found guilty in this court, this would be represent an extraordinary violation of Article 5 (1) of the Basic Law. There, what is stated is that everyone has the right to express his or her opinion in writing and to express and disseminate this freely.


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Source: https://www.deutschland.de/

https://johnhelmer.net/berlin-judge-rel ... more-87925

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Karl Krökel, master craftsman of the district and initiator of “Craftsmen for Peace”. (Pictures gk)

Germany: “Craftsmen for peace”
Originally published: Schweizer Standpunkt on April 18, 2023 by Marita Brune (more by Schweizer Standpunkt) (Posted May 02, 2023)

For once, it wasn’t the well-known groups of the classic German peace movement that hosted a congress for peace. This time the initiative came from the heart of society, from craftsmen and entrepreneurs from small and medium-sized businesses. On Sunday, 2 April 2023, the “Craftsmen’s Peace Congress” took place in Dessau-Rosslau in Saxony-Anhalt, organised by Karl Krökel, head of the Dessau Metal Guild. About 250 people, twice as many as expected, came to the “Hugo Junkers” Museum of Technology. The star guest of the event was Gabriele Krone-Schmalz, long-time Russia correspondent for the German public TV channel ARD.

In his opening speech, Karl Krökel addressed the dictatorship of opinion in times of war. For some months now, he has been committed as a master craftsman and entrepreneur to peace and to preserving the German economy. For his commitment, he was attacked and slandered in a way that is, unfortunately, common today, like so many who effectively oppose the prevailing “narrative” in public. He has stood firm and continues to keep the course. Organising this congress proves his resilience and courage.

Never apologise for having your own opinion
Karl Krökel spoke of the war against plurality of opinions and called for people not to bow to the dictate. “Never apologise for having your own opinion”, he encouraged the participants. The reason behind the failure of the 2022 peace negotiations, he said, was the failure of politics. “When people speak in a unilateral way, unilateral decisions also come about”—and thus the danger of nuclear war increases. It is the task of politics to avoid such a worst case. “If it does not, it is the duty of the citizens to stand up.”

Imposed “democratic” consensus is the precursor to fascism
Professor Krone-Schmalz, Russia expert and long-time ARD correspondent, began her presentation1 by addressing the diktat of opinion and one-sided propaganda in media, politics and published opinion. Among other things, she cited the term “war fatigue” as an example. This is a perverse term for the will for peace.

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Prof. Gabriele Krone-Schmalz: “Democracy does not work when citizens duck away.” (Screenshot of a recording)

Terms like “democracy” and “value-based politics”, which are constantly invoked today, lose credibility, she said, because in reality many people who do not go along with the prevailing opinion are excluded and do not find themselves to be part of the public debate. As a consequence many people no longer want to express themselves publicly. This is a danger for democracy, because “democracy does not work when citizens duck away”.In the previous century, we painfully learned that silent majorities end in a catastrophe. People who lived through the National Socialist era would perceive the atmosphere today very similar to that time. Gabriele Krone-Schmalz quoted the comment of a citizen: “democratic consensus is the precursor to fascism, no matter what kind”, and urged to “nip it in the bud”. If we fail to stop the development, she agreed with Karl Krökel, the nuclear super-disaster is imminent.

“Mature citizens are system-relevant to democracy”, emphasised Ms Krone-Schmalz. The prerequisite is to be informed as well and as comprehensively as possible.

“Understanding” is not the same as “supporting”
Ms Krone-Schmalz also referred to the absurd term “of Russland-Versteher”, in the sense of being a supporter of Russia which is misused as defamation. This term is also invoked to exclude her from the present media debate. She pointed out that “understanding” is not the same as “supporting”, but a change of perspective is necessary. Understanding is the self-evident prerequisite for judging things. Journalists who are not committed to the pursuit of understanding and truth, but represent a position and look at everything only through this lens, persue a wrong type of journalism; journalists shouldn’t take sides in the controversy of opinions, but should strive for objectivity.

With the term “narrative”, on the other hand, you are already distancing yourself from truth. It is only a kind of “storytelling”. When a narrative is enforced,

anyone dissenting is under suspicion.

She also spoke about the problem of dividing the world into good and evil: Condemning evil is a “declaration of political bankruptcy”. Replacing political analysis by morality is misleading. Politics should think things through to the end and have people in mind, rather than pursuing abstract principles.

An avoidable conflict
She commented in detail on the genesis of the Ukraine/Russia conflict. Former Soviet republics still had unfinished business with Moscow. This was understandable, however, these old grudges are transferred into today’s conflict. It is tragic that the EU is letting these states and their resentments against Russia take the lead in opinion and directives for action—with serious consequences.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin followed the recommendations of economic liberalism. The well-known results were a Wild West capitalism, rampant corruption, impoverishment of the population. The winners were the Oligarchs. Without scruples, they appropriated the property of the people. Anarchy ruled, there were no state or legal structures. The reputation of democracy and liberalism was permanently damaged by these conditions. Yet, in the West, Russians who questioned Yeltsin for his policies were criticised as backward-looking communist glorifiers.

Putin was the antithesis of Yeltsin. He gave back the self-confidence to the people. Putin spoke of the “dictatorship of the law”. “The West heard ‘dictatorship’, the Russians heard ‘law’». The Russians wanted stability and a livelihood which was more important to them than democracy. That was why they went along with Putin.

Putin does not want to go back to the days of the Soviet Union. Ms Krone-Schmalz quoted him: “whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart, whoever wishes it back has no mind.” He had sought connection and cooperation with the West. If he had been accepted by the West during his first and second terms, Russian society would have developed completely differently, much more freely. Now, because of the risk of being attacked by the West, a hedgehog mentality has emerged.

EU: no independent policy
Unfortunately, voices in Europe who wanted to establish military strength independently from NATO were not able to prevail. Otherwise, an independent policy towards Russia would have been possible. The current conflict need not have arisen. There was also no official voice in the EU against Selenski’s war rhetoric. Nevertheless, the majority of Germans are in favour of negotiations. However, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had prevented peace negotiations.

Ms Krone-Schmalz quoted the expert of international law and former UN official Alfred de Zayas: both, the Americans and the EU had no right to jeopardise the survival of the planet for the sake of intra-European squabbling.

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Craftsmen and peace activists on the podium.

Finally, she turned to the accusation of being dependent on Russia’s energy supplies and says economic dependence was part of globalisation. Everyone who is trading and is economically active is “dependent” on his business partners. What is the alternative to that? Or is dependence from Saudi Arabia any better?Finally, she invokes the recently deceased theologian and first-generation Green politician Antje Vollmer, who said: “we must unlearn hate and war.” And she added: well-understood democracy means interfering with fact-based opinions. The participants of the congress thanked Gabriele Krone-Schmalz with a standing ovation.

Wars are the greatest environmental destruction
In his presentation on “Environment and War”, the physicist and conflict researcher Professor Dr Jürgen Scheffran pointed out that wars have always been the greatest environmental destruction, and the current Ukraine conflict is no exception. The “climate chancellor” has now become a “war chancellor”. The military releases more emissions than entire countries. One of the greatest dangers is the legacy of nuclear bombs. In the Ukraine war, the Ukrainians destroyed dams to make the terrain impassable for Russians. The contamination of air and soil as well as the destruction of infrastructure, which would cost a lot of energy to rebuild, were also extremely harmful to the climate. It was remarkable that Professor Scheffran did not refer to the use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons, which London has been threatening to use. This ammunition contaminated air and soil during the war against Serbia and caused terrible impairments not only to participants in the war but also to those born afterwards.

“We craftsmen need peace. No craft can thrive in a state of war.”
Lively discussions took place in three forums, and the results were presented in the plenary session at the end. The final panel was largely made up of representatives of the guilds and other craftsmen. They reported about their commitment with statements, incendiary letters and the organisation of rallies but also on the counter reactions they face from the chambers.2 However, as a roofmaker in traditional roofer garb remarked, the craftsmen have the advantage that they cannot easily be pushed into a political corner. They are neither left nor right and are not part of the cross-thinkers scene.

Disbanding an industry
Peggy Lindemann, chemical worker and member of the workers’ council at the Schwedt oil refinery, took part in the panel. The Schwedt plant has been refining Russian oil from the Druzhba pipeline for decades. Oil that is now missing because of the sanctions. Thousands of jobs and thus an entire region are at stake. Ms Lindemann fought against the sanctions and thus against deindustrialisation within the trade union, but she got no support there. Obviously, the trade unions support the official political course. Officially, Schwedt now receives oil from other sources as a substitute. However, Ms Lindemann told us that this oil was much lighter than the Russian oil, that it could not be used to produce bitumen, which was needed to make asphalt. Moreover, lighter oil is said to damage the refinery facilities. In the long run this means: Schwedt will be shut down, an industry and a whole region will be disbanded.

Various master craftsmen described how their peace activities have exposed them to fierce reactions and even slander from the media and, in some cases, from the national chambers. Klaus Lothar Bebber, head of the Dessau Motor Vehicle Guild, referred to a letter on the sanctions against Russia in which the German Chamber of Skilled Crafts assures Chancellor Scholz: “the skilled crafts stand united behind you.” And this even after the Chamber of Skilled Crafts had already received several harsh letters from craft guilds in eastern Germany, who clearly took a stand against a policy causing lasting damage to the German industry and foremost to small and medium-sized businesses. Mr Wollsiefer, the then chairman of the Chamber, did not respond to the protest of the craftsmen as a result of his statement.

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Crowded rows in the “Hugo Junkers” Museum of Technology.

A craftsman from Oranienburg summed up the concern of his colleagues:

We craftsmen need peace. No craft can thrive in a state of war.

Peace alliances with all who want peace
A main topic and question in the forums and on the podium was with whom people could and should join forces to oppose war and to revive a strong peace movement. Reiner Braun,3 a veteran of the German peace movement, took a very pointed stand on this. He stated that people in the East were more rebellious than those in the West. He considers the protest of the craftsmen to be very important.

He addressed the division of the German peace movement, which is more concerned with separating itself from right-wingers and conservatives and others than with striving for peace. Thus no strong movement can come about, said Rainer Braun and postulated:

If I am a leftist, I must be open to the right. With whom else should I make alliances?

The protest of the craftsmen was very important and encouraging. We are not alone, he explained, the majority of people in the world want peace. We have to talk to the people: at the workplace, in the church choir, in the sports club, in the trade union because people make history. Only they can bring about change in institutions. Change has to happen in people’s minds.

This was echoed by Christine Reymann, a journalist and peace activist. She said she was absolutely in favour of working with many in the peace movement.

We need to focus on the essentials. On ceasefire and negotiations. Then we can move on from there. We must not let ourselves be divided but should encourage each other. Plurality is needed in the peace movement.

The Congress of “Craftsmen for peace” ended with these encouraging and directional statements. Karl Krökel already announced further actions and networking. So we can look forward to it.

Notes:
1.↩Video recording of Ms Krone-Schmalz’s presentation at handwerker-fuer-den-frieden.de
2.↩The chambers are organised nationwide. They are superior to the regional and industry-associated guilds. It is compulsory for crafts people to be member of the guild. The president of the chamber is not elected. So it can happen that a chamber speaks on behalf of “the craftsmen” without them having been consulted, even if they have explicitly stated that they do not agree with a position.
3.↩Reiner Braun was, among other things, Executive Director and Co-President of the International Peace Bureau, IPB, in Geneva.

https://mronline.org/2023/05/02/germany ... for-peace/
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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Wed May 03, 2023 12:12 pm

Sanctions and war
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 03/05/2023

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Since its signing in July 2022, the initiative for the unblocking of the export of Ukrainian grain and other agricultural products through the Black Sea in collaboration with Turkey and with the Russian ability to check cargoes to prevent arms smuggling has been qualified as the greatest diplomatic success of the Russo-Ukrainian war. The deal ended months of uncertainty over the fate of Ukrainian grain exports. Both Russia and the Ukraine are two of the most important producers, although due to their smaller population, Ukrainian exports are proportionally higher. The loss of Russian and Ukrainian grain due to the blockade of the Black Sea, but also to the sanctions against Russia, meant a level of instability for the world market that translated into a sharp increase in prices.

In the months after the start of the Russian military intervention, which, due to its activity in the Black Sea, made maritime transit impossible, the main outlet for Ukrainian products, official political and media discourse accused Russia of using hunger as a political weapon. and to sequester the grain that was to feed the global south. Suddenly, after seven years of war and economic blockade, even the famine in Yemen, a country completely ignored by Western discourse, came to be used as an argument against the Russian authorities. Lost political relations with Western countries, which argued that the sum of sanctions and global rejection of "Putin's war" had isolated Russia, Moscow could not afford the possibility of being accused of worsening the world food situation. .

The agreement unblocked Ukrainian maritime exports and gave Moscow some control over the commercial transit of the Black Sea, primarily to ensure that those shipments were not used to transport arms. For Ukraine, the opening of the Black Sea routes meant the resumption of exports, with the consequent economic benefit, but also the opportunity to present itself as a savior from famine against the evil Russia. And for Turkey, which managed, also with the participation of the UN, to mediate between Kiev and Moscow for the negotiation and signing of the agreement, it gave it a privileged political and economic position between the two countries.

However, since the resumption of maritime transit after the signing of the agreement, the successes have been accompanied by reproaches. As was to be expected since the negotiation and signing did not take place directly but rather separately and with Turkish mediation, the agreement was not a first step towards the political resolution of the conflict between the countries. That hope raised by Antonio Guterres was not only false but also overestimated the value of the signed text.

Last week, an article published in Foreign Policy , just one example of a series of similar arguments that have been repeated in recent months despite the fact that the grain export agreement is in force, stated that "the world is at a distance from a crop failure or natural disaster from a collapse in the global food system.” This speech occurs at a time when the agreement is increasingly being questioned and after great difficulties for its last extension, only temporary, for which reason it will have to be renewed again shortly. The Foreign Policy article insists on the importance of Ukrainian grain, the relevance of which has been generally and consistently overestimated, but also on the issue of fertilizer trade. Although the export of grain is undoubtedly important to guarantee the supply and stability of the world market, a large part of the grain consumed by the world population is due to the own production of the different countries. Those that, like Yemen, are almost completely dependent on imports are not the norm but the exception. The situation differs with regard to fertilizers, equally key products when it comes to guaranteeing harvests worldwide. And in that market, less spectacular in the media but just as important, Russia and Belarus are two leading countries.

Since the signing of the agreement last July, Russia has constantly and consistently raised two complaints: the destination of Ukrainian exports and the impossibility of unlocking its agricultural exports and, above all, fertilizers. The West has managed to block these Russian exports by making transport and insurance contracts difficult, an indirect way to prevent trade without the need to directly sanction companies or the sale of basic products, which would imply negative propaganda for those who imposed these limitations. . A few months ago, it was in the news that a shipment of Russian fertilizers blocked in European ports because of sanctions had been cleared to sail. As Russia had proposed upon learning of the EU's rejection of its charge, it was shipped free of charge to various countries in the global south. With this, Moscow not only managed to unblock this load but, assuming the economic loss that it entailed, made it clear to the poorest countries on the planet who prevents or limits the delivery of products so important to their food security.

Despite its pro-Ukrainian position, the aforementioned Foreign Policy article states that the Global Alliance for Food Security, formed by the World Bank and the G7 under German leadership "has called on all governments to ensure that sanctions against Russia do not affect to foodstuffs and fertilizers, essential products considering Russia's role as a leading exporter." Despite the intervention of the United Nations, which has been negotiating for a long time the way in which to unblock the export of Russian and Belarusian fertilizers, the situation has not changed.

The blocking of these Russian exports is only part of what Russia has argued in its criticism of an agreement in which it has remained until now, and in which it may possibly remain in the future, because it is the only way to control transit. maritime, important to prevent the transfer of weapons and possible attacks against the bases of the Black Sea Fleet. The second complaint from Russia is that, in contrast to the official discourse, which announced that Ukraine would feed the poorest, a large part of these shipments were sent to countries of the European Union.

Ukrainian denials have been called into question by moves in recent weeks, in which several European countries staunch allies of Ukraine have taken steps to ban the sale of Ukrainian grain. Complaints from local producers, who allege that Ukrainian grain, sold at cheaper prices and not always of good quality, have forced some of the countries closest to the Ukrainian government, such as Poland, to prohibit its sale on national territory. The intervention of the European Union, which has taken place after the criticisms have been publicized, has reached an agreement to allow transit, but, for the moment, those countries will be able to prohibit the sale of Ukrainian grain. Despite the EU's attempt to present the agreement as a positive step, what happened in the last days shows that there is some truth in the Russian accusation that a significant part of the Ukrainian grain does not go, as the official propaganda claims, to “feed the third world”, but is sold in the richest countries . And, above all, the need for the European Union to intervene in favor of Ukraine before some of the most pro-Ukrainian countries on the continent shows that the unity around Ukraine that the official discourse continues to extol may seem a priority, but, in reality, it is subject to to the economic interests of certain sectors.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/05/03/27194/#more-27194

Google Translator

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Ukraine SitRep: Offensive In Doubt - No Talks - Social Breakdown

Since early April, when Pentagon briefing slides about the state of the Ukrainian army 'leaked' onto the web, the writing in 'western' media about the much discussed Ukrainian counteroffensive has become more gloomy.The hyping is largely gone and the assessments become more realistic. Three days ago the London Times offered a piece in that category:

Ukraine isn’t ready for its big offensive, but it has no choice (paywalled, archived version)
Kyiv is locked into a spring or summer push despite burning through ammo so fast that the West can’t keep up. Luckily Russia is out of ideas too

[W]hile the Ukrainians are moving quickly to assimilate their 230 new and reconditioned western tanks and 1,550 armoured vehicles, they still lack proper air defences for any big offensive operation. That puts them at risk from Russian airpower. Western defence sources are also uncertain whether senior commanders can adapt to the new systems as well as their soldiers on the ground.
Yet Kyiv has little real choice but to launch a major spring or summer offensive. Its leaders are increasingly boxed in. As an American defence official put it: “The Ukrainians have surprised us as well as Putin in the past, but have much less room for manoeuvre now . . . and the Russians know it.”

President Zelensky has managed the West with great skill, but to maintain its support he has to show what Washington insiders rather tastelessly call a “return on investment”.

He must also balance domestic politics. Hawks such as Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, prevent any meaningful talk about negotiations, even though some in the government think now is the time to put out feelers. One western diplomat in Kyiv described a “surreal parallel experience” as his interlocutors “discuss potential formats for negotiations one evening” and then “shout that there can be no talks with Russia” in public the next day.


During the war Kiev first burned through its standing army material and personnel. It then received a large amount of Soviet era equipment from former Warsaw Pact members and burned through that stash. It has now received 'western' arms for a third army that will largely consist of mobilized civilians with little military experience. After the counteroffensive has run its course, no matter the outcome, that third army will largely be destroyed. There will be no more material and personnel for a fourth army.

In contrast the Russian military is largely undamaged. So says General Cavoli, the U.S. commander in Europe:

Russian ground forces have suffered significant losses in Ukraine. Despite these setbacks, and their diminished stockpiles of equipment and munitions, Russian ground forces still have substantial capability and capacity, and continue to possess the ability to regenerate their losses.
Russia remains a formidable and unpredictable threat that will challenge U.S. and European interests for the foreseeable future. Russian air, maritime, space, cyber, and strategic forces have not suffered significant degradation in the current war. Moreover, Russia will likely rebuild its future Army into a sizeable and more capable land force [..] Russia retains a vast stockpile of deployed and non-deployed nuclear weapons [..]
...
Russia pursues a military modernization program that prioritizes a range of advanced conventional, hybrid, and nuclear capabilities to coerce the West. [...] These weapons provide Russia asymmetric threats to NATO and present new challenges to Western response options.


If or when the Ukrainian counteroffensive will start is still an open question. The weather is a major factor:

The spring rains have been much more intense this year than normal. The heavy downpours in Zaporizhzhia over the last few weeks have turned the battlefield into a gelatinous soup.
“This has been an unusual spring,” a commander with the brigade said. “There has never been this much rain before.”


There is of course also the question of ammunition. Ukraine already lacks sufficient numbers of artillery rounds. Each days it uses more than it receives and what it receives is more than the 'west' can produce. The counteroffensive will burn through whatever ammo is left. Then what?

There may be additional reasons to hold up the counter offense. The British Ministry of Defense is requesting offers from the industry for some specific equipment. Among it are mine breaching equipment for main battle tanks, tank launched bridges with 70 tons capacity and transporters for heavy main battle tanks.

With around 40 tons Soviet tanks are build significant lighter than 'western' tanks which weigh up to 70 tons. The newly delivered Leopard and other tanks can not pass over typically Ukrainian country bridges without seriously damaging them. Without the necessary infrastructure and support equipment in place the 'western' tanks are largely useless. To launch a counteroffensive against hardened Russian defense lines without such equipment is not really possible.

But waiting is not possible either. There is not only the pressure from Washington and other supporters of the war in Ukraine but there is also the permanent threat of Russian strikes on the accumulated stocks and forces. As longer those stay in the preparation areas the higher is the chance that they will get detected and destroyed.

Over the last two weeks Russia destroyed a large part of the Ukrainian air defenses in the Kherson and Pavlograd region. There are no replacements for those systems.

Still, the British Ministry of Defense seams to believe that the war will continue for several more years. For Ukraine it also wants to acquire:

Missiles or Rockets with a range 100-300km; land, sea or air launch. Payload 20-490kg

The closing day for that request is May 4. If you happen to have a few of those missiles laying around or if can produce those you have two more days to make your offer. But realistically the earliest possible delivery for such missiles will likely be in 2024/25. One wonders if Ukraine will by then still be around.

Yves Smith is discussing the chances of a ceasefire after the counteroffensive has run its course. She finds that Russia is unlikely to agree to one without receiving very significant concessions:

I don’t see how peace talks get anywhere. The hawks are still in the driver’s seat and will either balk at negotiations or set preconditions. Recall Russia previously rejected preconditions; even if they were to entertain them now, the odds are very high the West’s initial demands, like an immediate ceasefire, would be rejected, or quickly vitiated by Russian counters like “Only if you suspend the sanctions.” That does not mean there won’t be backchannel chatter, but don’t expect it to go far.
...
Let’s charitably assume, despite all that, that the West actually does ask Russia to negotiate. Unless the request is made in an obviously unacceptable manner, Russia has to entertain it.
But I don’t see how this goes anywhere until leaders in West have really, really internalized that Russia holds a great hand and does not have good reasons to stop until it has subjugated Ukraine.

And all Russia has to do to substantively sabotage negotiations is to bring up the demand that Putin has been making in different forms since the Munich Security Conference of 2007: security guarantees.

Who will give them? The gleeful French and German admissions of duplicity with respect to the Minsk Accords means no NATO state can be trusted, save maybe Turkey (and if Erdogan survives, he’ll likely be deemed too close to Russia to be acceptable). The US clearly can’t be trusted. China would not be acceptable, and is not suited to the role (it’s not a land power and does not have a presence in theater).

So unless some tail events happen (and Taleb warns tails are fat), we still look to be on course to Russia prosecuting the war until it can impose terms on Kiev.


Meanwhile the social-economic situation in Ukraine is getting worse:

The scene in the pawn shop illustrates the crisis of growing poverty in Ukraine, the reality of which stands in contrast to the surface bustle of Kyiv’s busy restaurants and bars where it is often hard to get a table, with many living a precarious existence.
Poverty increased from 5.5% to 24.2% in Ukraine in 2022, pushing 7.1 million more people into poverty with the worst impact out of sight in rural villages, according to a recent report by the World Bank. With unemployment unofficially at 36% and inflation hitting 26.6% at the end of 2022, the institution’s regional country director for eastern Europe, Arup Banerji, had warned that poverty could soar.

Behind his window in Treasure, Stepanov describes the hardships experienced even by those who have work. “The price of everything has gone up. Food is the most expensive and then it is fuel for the car. Some things have gone up by 40-50%. Before the war my wife would go to the supermarket to shop and it would cost 200 hryvnia, now the same shop costs 400-500.”


The billions of dollars and Euros the 'west' provided to Ukraine are skimmed off by those who visit fancy restaurants and bars in Kiev. Those not in the bribes receiving circles will have to get used to being hungry.

Posted by b on May 2, 2023 at 16:32 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/05/u ... .html#more

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From 'A Skeptic':

Image

Remember Odessa!

May 2, 2014

Victims:

1. Aleksey Semenovich Balaban: 1982

2. Berezovsky Leonid Viktorovich: 1973

3. Bezhanitskaya Kristina Alexandrovna: 1992

4. Andrey Vasilyevich Biryukov: 1978

5. Brazhevsky Andrey Gennadievich: 1987

6. Brigar Vladimir Anatolyevich: 1984

7. Bullakh Viktor Dalkhatovich: 1956

8. Verenikina Anna Anatolyevna: 1955

9. Andrey Nikitovich Gnatenko: 1989

10. Gnatenko Evgeny Nikolaevich: 1952

11. Zhulkov Alexander Yurievich: 1968

12. Zayats Igor Leonidovich: 1968

13. Ivanov Dmitry Viktorovich: 1958

14. Ivanov Igor Vladimirovich: 1987

15. Kair Petr Anatolievich: 1969

16. Kalin Anatoly Andreevich: 1976

17. Kovriga Nikolai Sergeevich: 1984

18. Kononov Alexander Vyacheslavovich: 1959

19. Kostyukhin Sergey Nikolaevich: 1967

20. Kushnarev Gennady Alexandrovich: 1975

21. Kushch Ruslan Olegovich: 1984

22. Lomakina Nina Ivanovna: 1953

23. Losinsky Evgeny Lukich: 1980

24. Lukas Igor Erolovich: 1993

25. Markin Vyacheslav Olegovich: 1969

26. Milev Ivan Ivanovich: 1980

27. Mitchik Evgeny Vasilyevich: 1983

28. Mishin Sergey Sergeevich: 1986

29. Negaturov Vadim Mikhailovich: 1959

30. Nikitenko Maxim Alekseevich: 1982

31. Nikityuk Dmitry Igorevich: 1974

32. Novitsky Vladimir Mikhailovich: 1944

33. Ostrozhnyuk Igor Evgenievich: 1964

34. Papura Vadim Vadimovich: 1996

35. Petrov Gennady Igorevich: 1985

36. Pikalova Svetlana Valerievna: 1981

37. Polevoy Viktor Pavlovich: 1966

38. Polulyakh Alla Anatolyevna: 1962

39. Priymak Alexander Grigorievich: 1945

40. Sadovnichy Alexander Kuzmich: 1954

41. Stepanov Viktor Vasilyevich: 1948

42. Taras Vladimirovich Sharf: 1973

43. Shcherbinin Mikhail Ivanovich: 1956

44. Yavorsky Nikolay Anatolyevich: 1976

45. Yakovenko Irina Vladimirovna: 1959

46. Galaganova Lyubov Alexandrovna

47. Karasev Yuri Vladimirovich

@Slavyangrad


https://askeptic.substack.com/p/battlef ... 23-05-02-1

(There are no Nazis in Ukraine...)

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Russian Freight Train Derailed After Explosion Hits Tracks

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Derailed train in Bryansk, Russia, May 1, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/ @Misfit4Ukr68491

Published 1 May 2023 (17 hours 49 minutes ago)

This is the first time that the Russian authorities have reported a train derailment on their territory since February 2022.


On Monday, a locomotive and seven wagons of the freight train was derailed after an unidentified explosive device went off on the tracks in southwestern Russia's Bryansk region.

The incident happened at the 136th km of the Bryansk-Unecha railway, causing no casualties. Emergency services are working at the scene and traffic on this section of the railway has been suspended, Bryansk governor Alexander Bogomaz said.

After being derailed, the freight train carrying fuel caught fire, the Russian state railway company specified, adding that firefighters were already working on the scene to contain the consequences of the accident.

Although the railway company said that the incident was caused by "external people," the Bryansk governor did not offer statements on who could be the authors of the derailment.


This is the first time that the Russian authorities have reported a train derailment on their territory since the special military operation in Ukraine began in February 2022.

On previous occasions, however, Ukrainian forces have carried out various acts of sabotage in Russian military bases, recruiting centers, and railroads.

On Monday, terrorists also blew up a high-voltage pylon in the Leningrad province, Susaninski Governor Alexander Drozdenko said, noting that the power supply was not interrupted in his region.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Rus ... -0014.html

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From Cassad's Telegram account:

forwarded from
Voenkor Kitten Z
Military expert Boris Rozhin on the situation in the Artemovsky direction at 15.25 Moscow time on May 2, 2023, specially for the Voenkor Kotenok channel Z @voenkorKotenok :

1. City.

The slow advance of PMC "Wagner" to the western outskirts continues. The area of ​​high-rise buildings is subject to increasing fire damage.

Problems in communications and the shrinking area of ​​quarters held by the Armed Forces of Ukraine lead to an increase in Ukrainian losses, which amount to 400-500 people a day, which is also confirmed by Western sources, indicating that fresh reinforcements of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the city have an average life time before injury or death is 4 hours.

Simultaneously with fierce fighting in the city, no less fierce fighting continues near the highway west of Khromovo, where the enemy is trying with all his might to push the PMC "Wagner" from the landings adjacent to the route, relying on which the "Wagner" seeks to cross the route and physically cut it.

The story of the shortage of ammunition at PMC "Wagner" continues. The company's management says that they don't provide enough ammunition. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation states that enough ammunition is now being produced, and the RAV service states that for the most part Wagner closes applications, with which Wagner does not agree. According to Prigozhin's statement, the loss of PMCs in Artemovsk is 80-90 people per day.

2. Settlements.

The main settlements, relying on which the Armed Forces of Ukraine hold the neck of the Artemovsky operational bag, are still controlled by the enemy.

Judging by the current dynamics, there will no longer be a full-fledged boiler here, because. Krasnoye and Khromovo will soon be stormed from the east as the enemy is forced out of Artemovsk , where he still holds about 2.5 square meters. km of territory. For them, he will cling to the stop, at least until May 9th.

3. Counterattacks of the enemy.

The weather is not yet quite suitable for active operations, but in a week it is quite possible to expect more serious attempts by the Armed Forces of Ukraine from Chasov Yar , Ray-Aleksandrovka and Severskto stop the activity of our troops north-west of Artemovsk , especially in the Kramatorsk direction.

The accumulation of enemy forces in these areas continues to be recorded, which, among other things, leads to an intensification of strikes against the Slavic-Kramatorsk agglomeration . Chasov Yar , Kramatorsk , Konstantinovka , Slavyansk , Druzhkovka , etc. are subjected to missile and bomb attacks, as well as attacks by kamikaze UAVs.

***

Colonelcassad

Image

Zaporozhye direction situation as of 16:00 on May 2, 2023

Personnel and equipment are being transferred to the settlements at the forefront. Four special forces detachments of the 71st brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine took up positions along the Kakhovka reservoir . Paratroopers of the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade of the DShV of Ukraine arrived at the Kamenskoye-Shcherbaki

line at the Orekhovsky section . To the north, in Grigorovka , a reception point was equipped for those mobilized to replenish the composition of the 128th brigade. North of Orekhov and in the vicinity of Tavriysky

the firing positions of the reactive and self-propelled divisions of the 118 mechanized brigade of the 10 AK were equipped.

And in Slavnoye and Kamyshevakha, cannon artillery crews of 116 ombr 10 AK arrived, which make up the combined-arms strategic reserve of the Ukrainian group in the Zaporozhye region.

Artillery units of the 46th oambr were deployed to the Gulyaipol sector in the vicinity of Kolomiytsev . Also, several MLRS launchers operate north of Gulyaipole . And the 1st assault company of the 108th troop brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine arrived in Upper Tersa .

On the Zaporozhye directionThe Armed Forces of Ukraine are actually ready for the offensive. In connection with the improvement of weather conditions, such attempts by Ukrainian formations should be expected in the coming weeks. At the same time, a large echelon with heavy armored vehicles arrived in Kremenchug tonight , some of which will be transferred to Zaporozhye , and the other - in an easterly direction.

***

Colonelcassad
Project UP-4

We continue to publish documents confirming the activities of American biological laboratories in Ukraine, found by our specialists during a special military operation.

Here is a presentation on the implementation of the UP-4 project in Ukraine .

The UP-4 project was implemented until 2020 by laboratories in Kyiv, Kharkov and Odessa. Its purpose was to study the possibility of the spread of especially dangerous infections through migratory birds, including influenza A (H5N1), whose lethality for humans reaches 50 percent, as well as Newcastle disease .

Due to the fact that Ukraine has a unique geographical position where transcontinental migration routes intersect,145 biological species have been studied within the framework of this project . At the same time, at least two species of migratory birds were identified , the migration routes of which pass mainly through the territory of Russia . At the same time, information about migration routes passing through the countries of Eastern Europe was summarized.

Of all the methods developed in the United States to destabilize the epidemiological situation, this option is one of the most reckless and irresponsible, since it does not allow controlling the further development of the situation.

Of course, we can say that all this was studied for the purpose of subsequent extermination, only the question is, who?

@projectRHBZ

https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin

Google Trans;ator

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FSB defeated the intelligence network of the GUR in the Crimea
May 3, 9:53 am

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The FSB defeated the intelligence network of the Main Intelligence Directorate in the Crimea.

The FSB has uncovered agents of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry who were planning a series of terrorist attacks in Crimea. Among the targets were the head of the Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, the speaker of parliament, Vladimir Konstantinov, the mayor of Yalta, Yanina Pavlenko, and the transport infrastructure of the peninsula. Roman Mashovets, deputy head of Zelensky's office, was named as the direct organizer of the attacks. Mashovets personally recruited one of the members of the terrorist group in Krakow in the spring of 2022.

Members of the Ukrainian intelligence group, citizens of Russia and Ukraine, Viktor Podvalny, Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Krivoshein, Konstantin Evmenenko, Igor Zorin and Sergei Voinarovsky have been detained in connection with the preparation of terrorist attacks in Crimea.
The detainees were found to have 5 ready-to-use bombs, electric detonators, radio-controlled mechanisms, trackers for surveillance

In addition, a channel organized by the Ukrainian special services for smuggling explosives from Bulgaria, passing through Turkey and Georgia, was opened. The bombs were "camouflaged" under electric stoves.

Video of detentions https://t.me/boris_rozhin/84524

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8331000.html

Google Translator

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Whither Ukraine’s Counteroffensive?
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 2, 2023
M. K. Bhadrakumar

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Russian forces delivered massive strikes on Ukrainian military facilities to disrupt the planned “counteroffensive”

The month of May has arrived but without the long-awaited Ukrainian “counteroffensive”. The western media is speculating that it may come by late May. There is also the spin that Kiev is judicious to “buy time.”

The chances of Ukraine making some sort of “breakthrough” in the 950-km long Russian frontline cannot be ruled out but a Russian counteroffensive is all but certain to follow. An open-ended war will not suit Western powers.

Last week, NATO’s top commander, US Army General Christopher Cavoli stated that the Russian army operating in Ukraine is larger than when the Kremlin launched its special military operation and the Ukrainians “have to be better than the Russian force they will face” and decide when and where they will strike.

Cavoli said Russia has strategic depth in manpower and has only lost one warship and about 80 fighters and tactical bombers in an air fleet numbering about 1,000 so far. The general gently contradicted Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chief of General Staff Gen. Mark Milley who have been propagating that Russia is on the brink of defeat.

Speaking at the House panel on Wednesday, Gen. Cavoli said, “This war is far from over.” On Thursday, he went further to tell the Senate, “I think [the Russians] can fight another year.” At the House hearing, Cavoli also said Russian submarine activity has only picked up in the North Atlantic since the beginning of the war and none of the Kremlin’s strategic nuclear forces have been affected by operations in Ukraine.

He said at one point in his written testimony, “Russian air, maritime, space, cyber, and strategic forces have not suffered significant degradation in the current war. Moreover, Russia will likely rebuild its future Army into a sizeable and more capable land force… Russia retains a vast stockpile of deployed and non-deployed nuclear weapons, which present an existential threat to the US.”

Clearly, the entire narrative of lies and obfuscation created by the neocons in the Biden Administration through the past year has unravelled. The balance sheet shows there is nothing to justify the massive amount of aid to Ukraine through the past one-year period — in excess of $100 billion dollars, which is pro rata vastly more than what the US had spent in the twenty years of war in Afghanistan.

Gen. Cavoli’s testimony came soon after the leaked Pentagon documents recently, which has presented a grim picture of the state of Kiev’s military preparedness and the Biden Administration’s lack of confidence in the Zelensky regime.

The Pentagon documents echoed, in effect, a January study titled Avoiding a Long War by the RAND Corporation, which recommended that “the paramount US interest in minimising escalation risks should increase the US interest in avoiding a long war (in Ukraine). In short, the consequences of a long war — ranging from persistent elevated risks to economic damage — far outweigh the possible benefits.”

Indeed, it appears that there is a significant stream of dissenting opinion within the US security and defence establishment, which estimates that President Biden has taken the US on a disastrous policy trajectory that is fated to have a calamitous outcome — a humiliating defeat in Ukraine that may damage the NATO alliance, weaken the transatlantic system and erode the US’ credibility as a global power.

Well-informed veterans of the US intelligence community regard the leaking of Pentagon documents itself as a mini-mutiny. The former CIA analyst Ray McGovern told China’s CGTN, “I believe it could be that some senior policymakers in the Pentagon at the highest reaches of the Department of Defence have decided, ‘You know, it’s a fool’s errand in Ukraine. Maybe, we got to get out the truth. Maybe, we got to expose people like Joint Chief of Staff Milley and Secretary Austin for the lies they have told about Ukrainian progress and Russians being just pulverised. And, maybe, that will stop this widening of the war.’ ”

The well-known former CIA analyst Larry Johnson shares the same view. He wrote: “This looks like a controlled, directed leak… the leaked material is not random intelligence material. It is designed to tell several stories. The most prominent is the deterioration of Ukrainian capabilities and the major obstacles confronting the United States and the rest of NATO in supplying badly needed air defence, artillery shells, artillery pieces and tanks. In other words, Ukraine is going to crash and burn.”

Johnson added, “Let me suggest one possibility for this leak — create a predicate for forcing Joe Biden from office. The revelations in the classified documents are not fabrications designed to deceive the Russians. Nor are they the kind of material to rally more U.S. support for pouring more resources into the black hole of Ukraine. These leaks feed the meme that the Biden team is incompetent and endangering American interests overseas.”

Make no mistake, such coup attempts by the Deep State are nothing new in US presidential history — Eisenhower was undercut when he sought détente with the Soviet Union; a whole corpus of materials available today suggests that CIA framed Nixon in the Watergate affair. Today, all this is happening against the backdrop of President Biden seeking a second term in the 2024 election.

As for Zelensky himself, he is acutely conscious that success or failure of his “counteroffensive” will be critical for continued western support. All things taken into account, a messy diplomatic scenario is looming ahead, one that would also open up divisions between western countries, and in which China could play a more important role.

There is no guarantee that public support for Biden’s proxy war would hold through the 2024 election. Suffice to say, it is increasingly doubtful whether Biden will sacrifice his presidency over the Ukraine war. These are of course early days. A large ship needs a big arc for turnaround.

The Russians are taking their decisions on the basis of own assessments. There has been a perceptible scaling up of Russian strikes against Ukrainian military facilities. Massive strikes deep into Ukrainian military’s rear areas have been reported.

An attack on Sunday on railroad infrastructure and depots for ammunition and fuel in Pavlograd, a major communication hub near Ukraine’s fourth-largest city of Dnepropetrovsk, was particularly devastating. The Ukrainian troops had been accumulating in Pavlograd for an offensive toward Zaporozhye. Two S-300 missile divisions were destroyed.

In the weekend, former president Dmitry Medvedev wrote in Telegram channel that Russia should seek “mass destruction” of Ukrainian personnel and military equipment and deal a “maximum military defeat” on the Armed Forces of Ukraine; strive for “the complete defeat of the enemy and the final overthrow of the Nazi regime in Kiev with the complete demilitarisation of the entire territory of the former Ukraine”; and press ahead with reprisals against key figures of the Zelensky government, “regardless of their location, and without limits.”

Medvedev added, “Otherwise, they will not calm down… and the war will drag on for a long time. Our country doesn’t need that.” The mood has turned ugly and the conflict is set to take a vicious turn, as diplomacy has run aground completely.


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Dmitry Medvedev

The Kiev dog keeps barking. Saliva runs down his hairy muzzle so that the owners can see his fighting qualities:

1. Give more weapons so there are fewer victims.

2. Let’s go take back Crimea.

3. Better support Ukraine now so as not to increase the risk of WWIII.

4. The war could go on for decades.

What is this? The contradictory twilight of a drug-addled mind? The delirium of insecurity? Pressure on their benefactors? A general persistent paranoia?

Absolutely. All of these things go together.

But one should not underestimate even delusional speech. It is also a hysterical manifesto of the Kiev regime in order to consolidate the Nazi elite, maintain the morale of the troops, and gain new support from its sponsors.

And the response to it can only be this:

✓ Mass destruction of personnel and military equipment engaged by the Nazi regime in a counterattack, with maximum military defeat to the AFU.

✓ Complete defeat of the enemy and the final overthrow of the Nazi regime in Kiev with its complete demilitarization on the entire territory of b. Ukraine.

✓ Complete defeat of the enemy and the final overthrow of the Nazi regime in Kiev.

✓ The implementation of acts of retribution against the key figures of the Nazi regime, regardless of their location and without statute of limitations.

Otherwise they will not calm down, drug delusions may turn into reality and the war will drag on for a long time. This is not good for our country.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/05/ ... offensive/

Is US About to Conduct a Nuclear False Flag in Ukraine and Blame Russia?
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 2, 2023
Drago Bosnic

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A view shows the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the course of Russia-Ukraine conflict outside Enerhodar in the Zaporizhzhia region, Russian-controlled Ukraine, October 14, 2022.Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant

The United States is the only country in history to have used all three types of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological, chemical), starting with the atomic bombings of Japan in the closing months of the Second World War to mass usage of chemical and biological weapons against numerous other countries it has attacked ever since (particularly Vietnam). And yet, the belligerent thalassocracy just adores chest-thumping about its supposed “morality” and even “warns” that its geopolitical adversaries are about to use such weapons (naturally, without ever providing any evidence). This is precisely what’s been happening in Ukraine in recent weeks.

On April 28, one of the most prominent neoliberal mouthpieces, the New York Times, ran a story about America setting up numerous radiation sensors across Ukraine in order to detect nuclear blasts. The NYT claims that “such sensors can detect‌‌ bursts of radiation from a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb and can confirm the identity of the attacker”. It adds that “the goal is to make sure that if Russia detonates a radioactive weapon on Ukrainian soil, its atomic signature and Moscow’s culpability could be verified”, further claiming that “…experts have worried about whether President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would use nuclear arms in combat for the first time since the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945″.

Firstly, it should be noted that Russia has a very clear doctrine about the usage of WMDs in an armed conflict, one that has even been updated recently and that states in what sort of situations Moscow would use such weapons. The Ukrainian conflict is still nowhere near a point where Russian WMDs could be used. Secondly, the Russian military dominates the battlefield, inflicting enormous losses on the Kiev regime forces. Even in the case of the much-touted offensive against newly integrated Russian regions in the Donbass and former southern Ukraine, Russia wouldn’t use nuclear weapons. However, the NYT claims precisely that is the case, supposedly because Russia is “desperate” to stop the attack.

Expectedly, “experts” the NYT allegedly spoke to are anonymous and they claim that the goal is to “prevent Russia from conducting a possible dirty bomb false flag in Ukraine”. The operation is officially run by the Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST), part of the Nation Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Interestingly, the NYT notes, citing a 2009 book “Defusing Armageddon” by Jeffrey T. Richelson, that “the NEST often teamed up with the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), an elite military unit so secretive that the Pentagon for years refused to acknowledge its existence”. It should be noted that JSOC is being used to conduct covert operations of all kinds across the world, including false flags.

So, according to these so-called “experts”, we are supposed to believe that US agencies and military units involved in actual false flag operations around the globe will prevent an alleged “Russian false flag” and not use the opportunity to conduct yet another covert op to fake such an event and then blame Russia for it? The NYT itself claims that “Moscow could falsely claim that Kyiv set off a nuclear blast on the battlefield to try to draw the West into deeper war assistance” and that “…in theory, with the sensor network in place, Washington would be able to point to its own nuclear attribution analyses to reveal that Moscow was in fact the attacker”.

The NYT then parrots the usual about Russia’s supposed “battlefield failures” that are “making Mr. Putin, if anything, more dependent on his nuclear arsenal” and how this “could increase his willingness to pull the nuclear trigger”. Even though such claims are laughable to anyone familiar with the actual situation on the battlefield, in the minds of rabid Russophobes this makes “perfect sense”. In addition, recent weeks have seen a dramatic surge in Kiev regime’s attacks on civilians not only in the Donbass and other newly integrated Russian regions, but also in areas such as Bryansk and Belgorod oblasts (regions), with dozens of civilian casualties.

All this would be used to push the narrative that Russia could indeed be the alleged culprit behind a dirty bomb false flag. On the other hand, back in October last year, when Moscow warned that the Kiev regime might use a dirty bomb and then blame Russia for it, the political West rejected it all as a “conspiracy theory”. According to their “logic”, it’s only Russia that could do such a thing, because the Neo-Nazi junta, as a “true beacon of freedom and democracy”, certainly has the “moral high ground”. Additionally, the mainstream propaganda machine usually claims that the Kiev regime doesn’t have the capacity to create dirty bombs, so it allegedly couldn’t do it even if it wanted to.

However, recent reports about “sensitive US nuclear technologies” in (former) Ukrainian nuclear power plants (NPPs) show such claims are patently false. Russia controls one of such NPPs, but still hasn’t disclosed what sort of covert US support the Neo-Nazi junta got. Washington DC itself has “demanded” Moscow to return these “sensitive US nuclear technologies”, meaning they are worried about what might be revealed to the world. It’s not unlikely Russia is keeping the evidence secret for the time being as a possible deterrent to US and Kiev regime’s plan on detonating such a device and then blaming Moscow, which could simply reveal the evidence in case a dirty bomb is used.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/05/ ... me-russia/
"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 May 04, 2023 11:47 am

Attacks away from the front
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 05/04/2023

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Yesterday afternoon, the Kremlin surprised by denouncing what it considered a Ukrainian attack in the heart of Moscow. Accompanied by images showing the downing of a small kamikaze drone, the Russian administration's complaint claimed that the target was President Vladimir Putin. Anti-aircraft defenses, which apparently did not detect the targets until they were over the Russian Federation's center of political power, shot down the two aircraft without causing damage. Apparently, no material or personal damage was produced and the result of the attack is more propaganda than real, although it is also a serious warning to the Russian military authorities about the complete absence of certainties.

With the photograph of the smoke over the Kremlin, possibly not intended to assassinate the Russian president but to create precisely that visual image of the attack at the very heart of Russian politics, Russia's ability to defend even the most apparently protected places has once again been called into question. . Developed to fight much more powerful targets, especially missiles, anti-aircraft defenses are having to deal in this war with the increased use of small drones that are sometimes capable of inflicting heavy damage. The use of drones and the difficulties that traditional anti-aircraft defenses are having against them is one of the elements to be studied in this war, the first war of great intensity in which they are gaining a leading role.

When denouncing the demolition of the two unmanned aircraft, which occurred on the same day that the arrest of a commando preparing sabotage in Crimea was announced, Russia insisted on denouncing an assassination attempt on the head of state and pointed to Ukraine. The first Russian reaction was not to denounce that red lines have been crossed, as had happened on previous occasions, but to announce that Russia considers that it has the right to respond in the manner and at the time it deems appropriate. Despite the certainty that the declaration will cause complaints among the most belligerent sectors of the establishment political, which have already started with statements comparing the Ukrainian government to al-Qaeda and demanding a tough response, this stance is more realistic and avoids the disappointment that previous allegations of red lines have caused that have gone unanswered. Contrasting with the measured government reaction, the loose verse that former president Medvedev has become, in a process of radicalization that seems to have no end, called for the "physical elimination of Zelensky and his clique." Despite Zelensky's accusations in the first weeks of March 2022, Russia has not produced any real indication that Russia has ever sought to assassinate the Ukrainian leader or members of his government. In any case, instead of returning to Ukraine after his visit to the Nordic countries, Zelensky has preferred to travel to Amsterdam.

The first international reactions have met expectations and have replicated the actions of the different international actors in other cases of attacks in the rear. Antony Blinken, Secretary of State of the United States, affirmed that the Russian accusations must be taken with caution “like everything that comes out of the Kremlin”. Despite having published an explosion inside the fort that is theoretically the Kremlin, an image that shames Russia for not having detected two attack drones over its capital, the official story consists in doubting that the incident took place. . Thus, a constant of this war is repeated: it is necessary to question every word that comes out of the Kremlin, while giving credibility to every statement by Bankova or any of her representatives.


Minutes after the facts were made public, Mikhailo Podoliak, adviser to the Office of the President of Ukraine, published one of his usual messages on social networks. The objective was not only, as Volodymyr Zelensky would also do, to deny the participation of Ukraine, but to present a hypothesis of the facts. In his long post About him, Podoliak implied that it was just a false flag prepared by the Russian authorities to justify further actions. Like his president, the Ukrainian official claimed that Russia seeks a justification for "its attacks on civilians." A flimsy argument considering that, at this point in the war and in the face of the announced Ukrainian offensive, neither party is seeking to justify their actions. However, also repeating a familiar performance, Podoliak insisted that Ukraine wages only a defensive war and does not attack Russia and hinted that it is all about increased Russian partisan activity against the Kremlin. As in the case of the attack carried out by groups affiliated with the military intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine in the Belgorod region, in the same message,

However, Podoliak's statements have been taken by the Western press as an official denial to which they give credibility. “Mikhailo Podoliak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, stated that 'Ukraine has nothing to do with drone strikes on the Kremlin.' Such an attack would only incentivize Moscow to send more missiles into Ukraine to terrorize the civilian population, he suggested. "Why would we need that? What logic is there in it? »”, He wrote, giving full credibility to the argument of Mikhailo Podoliak the American media Político. The reality is more complex than the empty declarations of Zelensky's adviser. In the past, Ukraine has also denied taking part in actions in the Russian rear. It happened in the case of the attack on the Crimean bridge, which Ukraine celebrated but did not claim responsibility for, or in the attacks by groups such as Bratsvo and other battalions that act as special forces of Kirilo Budanov's Main Directorate of Military Intelligence (GUR) despite the existence of evidence clear of their guilt.

Podoliak's denial is as credible as it was in the case of the attack by the Russian Volunteer Corps, attached to the Ministry of the Interior and whose actions in the Russian rear have been photographed by media such as The New York Times . Also in that case, Podoliak accused the Kremlin of staging a fake attack while extolling the role of Russian partisan groups.. The facts are also reminiscent of occasions when high-ranking Ukrainian officials have openly dreamed of attacking the Kremlin. With a picture of the plane that landed on Red Square in 1987, the Chairman of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Oleksiy Danilov said on March 29 that Ukraine has drones with a flight range of more than 3,000 kilometers, a thinly veiled warning. . Even more explicit, Anton Gerashenko wrote on April 24 that “a Ukrainian drone flies calmly over Moscow. It seems that the Kremlin has every chance of being an affected area very soon. Fireworks for May 9? Ukraine has already announced the issuance of a commemorative stamp bearing the image of a Ukrainian soldier watching the Kremlin burn. kyiv thus marks a victory for its propaganda.

The attempted attack is also consistent with wishes that Ukraine has repeatedly expressed in the past. Just a few days ago, The Washington Post stated that Kirilo Budanov's GUR had ordered preparations for an attack to be carried out on February 24, the anniversary of the Russian invasion, and precisely in Moscow. According to the outlet, it was the US authorities who forced Budanov to "postpone" the attacks. The article was based on recent Pentagon leaks. Although this type of leak may contain false or interested data, the type of attack that was being proposed is consistent with the actions of groups linked to Budanov, especially focused on acts of sabotage and attacks on the Russian rear.

Although less media coverage than the attack on the Kremlin, acts of sabotage in the Russian rear have increased notably in recent hours. Tonight, drones have attacked two oil refineries in Russia. In previous days, in just 24 hours, two freight trains have derailed in the Bryansk region due to explosions caused by explosive devices placed on the tracks. The Russian Volunteer Corps, a group made up of far-right members and operating under the umbrella of Budanov's GUR, has claimed responsibility for the acts. These attacks come on top of attacks on fuel depots, including one in Sevastopol, and an uptick in assassination attempts in Russian-controlled areas of southern Ukraine, all signs of increased military activity in anticipation of an offensive to big scale.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/05/04/ataqu ... more-27202

Google Translator

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PUSHING ANTI-RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA – PUSHKIN HOUSE HAS REPLACED ALEXEI NAVALNY WITH THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT FOR MONEY

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By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

Pushkin House is the only London platform for anti-Russian propaganda which publishes an annual financial report revealing where its money comes from. The organisation calls itself a charity, according to UK law, whose “principal aim”, it claims in its regular filings to UK Companies House, “is to serve as an independent centre exploring the great richness of Russian culture, language and civilisation.”

It is anything but independent. That’s because the organisation, which has lasted in London for almost seventy years in promotion of Russian culture, has been making large financial losses promoting war against Russia, and the Ukrainian destruction of Pushkin and everything else Russian in body or in book or monument form. Supporting the Ukrainian side in the war, however, has cost the trust which owns Pushkin House’s headquarters and operations a deficit in 2022 of £117,627. It’s the biggest financial loss in the Trust’s history.

It would have been much greater, however, if not for the financial backing of the British government. It has given more than two-thirds of the donation and grant income received in each of the past two years. The government has replaced Alexei Navalny, who appeared as a major donor in 2018 when the auditors called the source of the money “Future of Russia”, a political party which, under British law, cannot legally give money to charities like Pushkin House.

The British government is just as uninhibited. But in the UK, attacking Russia and backing the regime in Kiev either make a lawful tax-deductible charity, or else they are an illegal violation of the Charities Act.

When Pushkin House was established in 1954 by people with “with Russian roots”, the founders said they were creating “a place of meeting for people of all nationalities who are interested in Russian culture; to provide lectures, concerts and readings on all aspects of Russian culture and share opinions in an atmosphere of freedom.”

There is no Pushkin House record that, organisationally or collectively, the members ever supported an allied defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War, or regime change in the Kremlin — although individually some may have thought so. They declared then, and the organisation continues to repeat today:“from the very beginning Pushkin House was a politically independent organisation and it adheres to this principle to this day.”

Its financial status, avoiding UK income tax and allowing donors to give Pushkin House money as deductions from their tax bills, depends on this “political independence”.

When the Pushkin House Trust established itself by name in July 2005 – succeeding the original corporate name, Forum Houses Limited, 1956-2005 — there is no mention of the words “Pushkin” or “Russia” in the 14-page articles of association. Education in languages and music, performances, and discussions were identified; the Russian language and Alexander Pushkin were not.

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Source: https://find-and-update.company-informa ... ce.gov.uk/

Neither does the term “independence” appear in the founding charter of Pushkin House. Instead, in order to comply with the British laws on companies and charities, this one restriction was declared: “that the Company [Pushkin House Trust] shall not support with its funds any object or endeavor to impose on or procure to be observed by its members or others any regulation, restriction or condition which if an object of the Company would make it a Trade Union.” The meaning of terms section of the charter does not give a definition of “trade union”.

On approval by the UK Charities Commission of its charter, Pushkin House became Charity Number 313111. The commission confirms this status, adding that “reporting is up to date”. The Commission says it believes Pushkin House “promotes Russian culture via an extensive programme of lectures, readings, concerts, exhibitions, film and language training.” But this is false. Pushkin House, its executives and trustees promote the destruction of Russian culture, starting with the burning of Pushkin’s books by the Ukrainian government.

This change in the charter might qualify as a British charity but Pushkin House must request Charities Commission approval. There is no restriction on Pushkin House becoming a government propaganda organ; the Charities Commission already knows that in the past year the organisation’s income “includes £52,000 from 1 government grant(s)”.

The Commission’s registration record for Pushkin House also claims that it helps “children/young people [and] Other Defined Groups”. If Alexei Navalny and the Zelensky government in Kiev are included among the “defined groups” benefitting from Pushkin House’s activities, that would cancel the charity status – unless the British government intends to violate its own laws and finance Pushkin House to use the charity status as a cover.

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This Charities Commission registration for Pushkin House reveals that it doesn’t operate in Scotland or Northern Ireland. Source: https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/

The current British law on what charities can and cannot do to qualify disallows much more than a connection to a “trade union”. Taking funds from a foreign political party isn’t permitted. Changing the objectives and purposes of the charity from those in its founding charter is also prohibited. The Charities Commission, which regulates what goes on at Pushkin House, explicitly warns that “charities must remain independent and must not give their support to a political party.”

Pushkin House violated that when it took money from Alexei Navalny’s political party. After the evidence of this transaction – camouflaged in the Pushkin House Trust annual accounts as a donation from “Future of Russia” – was first reported, the trustees and executives of Pushkin House refused to answer.

The British government explicitly warns the Pushkin House trustees and executives to report to the Charities Commission if and when they change their purposes and objectives, according to their charter. Promoting regime change and war against Russia, as Pushkin House has been doing, is illegal for a charity.

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Source: https://www.gov.uk/

In its latest, October 2022 guidance on what charities may not do to keep their status lawful, the Charities Commission says they must “remain independent by: asking political figures you engage with not to promote party political messages at your events or premises; [and by] seeking to engage equally with all major political parties. If your charity always engages with only one party or person this could call into question whether your charity is politically neutral. Charities must never provide money or other resources to anyone who is standing as a candidate [or] promote a particular candidate or political party.”

When Pushkin House has promoted authors, books, and events advocating regime change in the Kremlin, like Catherine Belton in 2021, or appoints panelists well-known for the same war objective, like Anne Applebaum (2018), Fiona Hill (2021) and Masha Gessen (2023), the charity is violating both its charter and the law.

This week the chief executives of Pushkin House were asked to explain the public declaration they have posted on their fence in London, taking sides in the current war.

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Source: https://www.pushkinhouse.org/

They were asked by email: “I note that you post on your front fence your organisation’s public policy under the title, “Pushkin House condemns the Russian invasion”. I can’t find that in your events and interviews, or in your selection of the book prize candidates, Pushkin House has allowed a supporter of Russia in the current war to present his or her views.

“I also note that in your choice of book prize judges, authors and interviewees, and in the current membership of your trust, you have represented uniform support for President Vladimir Zelensky.

“Accordingly, I ask you to say, either personally or for your organisation, whether you support President Zelensky in the policy of removing Pushkin’s books from public libraries, the burning of Pushkin’s books, and the removal of monuments and street signs carrying Pushkin’s name?

“I’ll be grateful if you would acknowledge receipt of this email and I look forward to your prompt reply, as this issue must have arisen for you for some time now. In the event it has not, here are some references for your information: US government source, Ukrainian government source.

“In the event that you do not reply, I will report you by name as refusing to answer.” Elena Sudakova, the executive director, and her colleagues have refused to answer.

The annual Pushkin House Trust financial reports, filed at UK Companies House, explain why. Since 2018, when the Russian oligarch Len Blavatnik stopped financing Pushkin House, and Navalny replaced him, the organisation has been running in the red; that is, its operating expenditures have been greater than its income. The deficit has been covered by income on what the balance-sheet accounts call “UK listed investments.” These, plus the value of the headquarters building on Bloomsbury Square, London, plus a small cash bank balance are the organisation’s assets.

But the listed investments are no longer paying what they used to, according to the latest financial report dated April 11, 2023.

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Source: latest financial report for 2022 at https://find-and-update.company-informa ... ng-history.

As the income has been dwindling, but the costs of its activities have continued to grow, Pushkin House’s auditors have been obliged to issue a “going concern” notice. This is the first such warning in the organisation’s history.

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This excerpt of the balance sheet shows why:

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Source: Page 13 of the 2022 report.

Promoting the war against Russia, the Ukrainian government’s policies, and the British government’s regime change strategy are turning out to be so costly for Pushkin House, it has become financially dependent on the British government. This is disguised in the auditor’s report on sources of income:

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Source: Page 19 of the 2022 report.

Originally called the British Committee for Relations with Other Countries, the British Council is funded by the government and operates as one of its public propaganda agencies under the direction of the Foreign Secretary and his ministry. Its contribution to Pushkin House is small. The much larger source of government money is called a “Covid Restart Grant”. Together, they amounted to £67,000 in the last financial year – that was 61% of total income from donations.

Would the government have paid Pushkin House Covid Restart Grants two years in a row if the organisation had given equal time and resources to the Russian side in the current conflict? If it had given any time or resources to the Russian side?

The organisation answers this way: “With the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in February 2022 we have adapted our programme to support communities of artists and creatives”. In fact, the only “communities” the programme has supported are Russians vocally hostile to President Vladimir Putin and supportive of the Ukrainian regime, mostly from locations outside Russia, and Ukrainians committed to destroying Russian culture, if they can.

“Together with Ukrainian creatives, we collaborated on artists’ social media takeovers, display of war diaries. Anti-war posters by Ukrainian artists were displayed on the façade of our building. We organised fund-raiser film screenings with Ukrainian film-makers and other solidarity events…As the war continues, we see it as part of our mission to support Russian creatives in London…and by providing a safe space for reflection and personal growth.”

There is no longer a safe place in the Ukraine for Alexander Pushkin. In London he is past caring for reflection and personal growth.

https://johnhelmer.net/pushing-anti-rus ... more-87937

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Drone in the Kremlin
May 3, 5:04 p.m
A drone flew into the Kremlin at night.

(Video at link.)

1. Putin is working as usual.
2. There are no plans to cancel the parade in Moscow.
3. The Kremlin regards the attack as an attempt on Putin.
4. Russia reserves the right to respond where and when it sees fit.
5. Moscow banned the use of UAVs.

Well, we are waiting for an answer.
If you have not attacked Bankovaya for more than a year, then you should not be surprised at attempts to attack the Kremlin.
I hope after that at least the grain deal will not be extended.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8332077.html

Google Translator

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Europe Pays More for Banned Russian Oil, Resold by India – As EU Wages Fall
MAY 2, 2023

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Photo composition showing Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) with an oil field in the background, and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen (right). Photo: Geopolitical Economy.

By Ben Norton – Apr 30, 2023

The EU sanctioned Russia and boycotted its oil, yet is still buying it indirectly from India, at a higher price. This is fueling both de-dollarization and inflation in the Eurozone, where workers’ real wages dropped 6.5% from 2020 to 2022.

The European Union heavily sanctioned Russia and pledged to boycott its oil, yet continues to buy it, and at an even higher price, albeit indirectly.

India is importing record levels of discounted Russian crude, purchasing it in currencies other than the dollar. India then refines the Russian oil and exports fuel to Europe at a profit.

Meanwhile, increasing energy costs in Europe have stoked inflation, causing workers’ wages to significantly decline.

The real wages of workers in the Eurozone fell by 6.5% between 2020 and 2022.


As of April, Bloomberg reported, European imports of refined fuel from India are approaching 360,000 barrels per day.

This means that India is expected to soon surpass Saudi Arabia as the largest exporter of refined fuel to Europe.

At the same time, India is importing 44% of its oil from Russia, at an all-time high of approximately 2 million barrels per day, according to Bloomberg.

New Delhi is purchasing this crude at a significant discount.

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In 2022, the G7 vowed to ban Russian energy. In December, the bloc of Western countries and Japan implemented a price cap on Russian oil of $60 per barrel.

The European Union agreed to the same price cap, before updating it in February with a $45 limit on petroleum products traded at a discount to crude and $100 for petroleum products traded at a premium to crude.

Facing Western sanctions, Russia instead sells its oil to Asia
The Western economic war has led to a slight decrease in Moscow’s oil revenue, but has simultaneously pushed Russia to deepen its integration with Asia.

An April report by the Kyiv School of Economics, “Russian Oil Exports Under International Sanctions“, analyzed the effects of the G7 and EU price caps in the first quarter of 2023.

This study was sponsored by the Yermak-McFaul Expert Group on Russian Sanctions, which is supported by the Ukrainian and US governments and co-chaired by Andriy Yermak, the head of the office of the president of Ukraine, and Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia.

It found that Russian oil revenue did decrease by 29%, dropping from $54.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022 to $38.8 billion in the first quarter of 2023, for a total loss of $15.7 billion.

However, in the same period, global oil prices fell. The report estimated that $4.2 billion (27%) of Russia’s loss in oil revenue was due to the decline in international prices.

In fact, the study only attributed $6.1 billion (39%) in the loss in Russia’s oil export revenue directly to the sanctions, with an additional $5.2 billion (33%) lost in the discounts that Moscow gave to customers like India.

This is not nearly as much as many Western governments had hoped. And it led to some other, unexpected consequences.

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Russia’s oil export earnings are now at around the same levels they were at in 2021, before Moscow’s February 2022 invasion and the escalation of the NATO proxy war in Ukraine.

At the same time, the volume of Russia’s crude exports has stayed rather consistent.

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What has significantly changed is not the amount of oil produced by Russia, but rather the customers buying that crude.

The Kyiv School of Economics study showed that the vast majority of Russian oil exports now goes to Asia, primarily to China and India.

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The report wrote:

European countries, previously the largest buyers, now play a negligible role and have been replaced almost entirely by China and India, with the latter appearing as the key “new” buyer over the past twelve months. In 2023Q1, the two countries together accounted for close to 75% of total Russian crude oil exports.

For years, and even throughout much of 2022, Russia had been Europe’s biggest energy supplier. Today, Moscow is looking east.

This transition reflects Russia’s increasing economic and political integration with Asia, and its move away from the West.

As an example of the sudden shift, the Financial Times noted that Russia’s northwestern port of Primorsk, on the Baltic Sea, had previously been used to send oil to Europe, but in the first quarter of 2023, India bought that crude instead, at a neat discount of just $43.9 per barrel.

The EU boycott of Russian energy has also contributed to further de-dollarization.

India is largely purchasing Russian oil in currencies other than the US dollar, including the ruble and the UAE’s dirham.

“U.S.-led international sanctions on Russia have begun to erode the dollar’s decades-old dominance of international oil trade as most deals with India – Russia’s top outlet for seaborne crude – have been settled in other currencies”, Reuters reported.


Real wages of EU workers dropped by 6.5% amid “one of the worst cost of living crises since WWII”
While Europe buys more expensive Russian energy from India, workers at home are suffering from increasing energy costs.

“Households across Europe are facing a persistent pinch from one of the worst cost of living crises since the second world war, despite inflation falling almost as quickly as it rose”, the Financial Times reported in April.

The newspaper estimated that real wages in the Eurozone dropped by 6.5% between 2020 and 2022. (Real wages are workers’ compensation that has been adjusted for inflation.)

In the EU, real wages are expected to stay 6% below 2020 levels until the end of 2024, the Financial Times said.

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Workers in countries in the south of the Eurozone, like Greece, Spain, and Italy, have been especially hard hit, with their real wages falling by nearly 7%, 4.5%, and 3% in 2022, respectively.

The UK Office for Budget Responsibility “estimates that the period from the spring of 2022 to the spring of 2024 will mark the steepest decline in people’s real disposable incomes since records began in the 1950s”, the Financial Times wrote.

The newspaper warned: “Poorer people, who spend a bigger chunk of their income on essentials, have been most exposed to the rise in prices. They will continue to feel the squeeze hardest, with food costs continuing to soar even as energy prices fall”.

The Financial Times attributed this rapid decline in real wages to skyrocketing energy and food costs – which have been greatly exacerbated by Western sanctions on Russia.

Rising grocery bills are also a product of rampant price gouging by monopolistic corporations. This highly profitable practice is a growing problem that has been referred to as “greedflation”.

While real wages are declining across the West, the profit share of companies in the Eurozone is at a record high.

Bloomberg reported in 2022 that US corporate profits grew to their widest margins since 1950, “suggesting that the prices charged by businesses are outpacing their increased costs for production and labor”.

https://orinocotribune.com/europe-pays- ... ages-fall/

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Russia accuses Ukraine of trying to kill President Putin in a drone strike

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The drones and their fragments fell, however, in the Kremlin compound, without causing victims or material damage | Photo: EFE
Posted 3 May 2023

The incident occurred amid preparations for the traditional Victory Day parade held outside the Kremlin every May 9.

The Russian government assured that Ukraine tried to attack the Kremlin in Moscow with drones to kill President Vladimir Putin and warned of retaliatory measures against kyiv

According to the note from the Russian Presidency, "Tonight the Kiev regime tried to hit the residence of the President of the Russian Federation with unmanned aerial vehicles," the Kremlin said in a statement published on its website.

The note continues with the explanation that "two unmanned aerial vehicles were aimed at the Kremlin. As a result of timely actions taken by the army and special services that use radar warfare systems, the devices were deactivated," the publication says. .


As a result of the attack, no one was injured, since "the working hours of the head of state have not changed", in relation to Vladimir Putin, against whom the attack that night was presumed to have been directed.

The drones and their fragments fell, however, in the Kremlin compound, without causing victims or material damage, he said.

According to the information, Moscow considers "these actions a planned terrorist attack and an attempt on the life of the President of the Russian Federation, carried out on the eve of Victory Day and the military parade on May 9, at which the guest attendance," he said,

The Presidency warned that Russia "reserves the right to take retaliatory measures where and when it deems appropriate."

For his part, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, assured that the military parade in Red Square is maintained as planned.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/rusia-uc ... -0009.html

Google Translator

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From cassad's telegram account:

Colonelcassad

After today's terrorist attack, there are no options left except for the physical elimination of Zelensky and his cabal.
It is not even needed to sign the act of unconditional surrender.
Hitler, as you know, did not sign it either. There will always be some kind of replacement like the vice-president
Admiral Dönitz ... (c) Medvedev


Hmm, it took a long time. Although it would seem that there was an experience of recognizing Poroshenko, the idea of ​​fixing an agreement with the Nazis continued to dominate the minds of the ruling elites. Over time, it began to dawn that the Nazis and their sponsors were not going to negotiate with them. After arriving in the Kremlin, apparently finally got it.

You cannot wage war against Nazism at half strength, playing "gentlemanship" in front of a mirror. This looks ridiculous and leads to problems with achieving the desired goals.

I would like to believe that the latest events will lead to a real qualitative revision of some approaches to waging war with Zelensky's Nazi regime and its sponsors.

https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin

Google Translator

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Kiev’s Terrorist Attack on Kremlin Sets Dangerous Global Precedent
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 3, 2023
Ekaterina Blinova

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Two Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) approached Moscow’s Kremlin, the official residence of the Russian president, and were downed through the use of electronic warfare equipment on May 3. The Russian leadership denounced the incident as a “terrorist act” and an attempt on the life of Vladimir Putin.

“This story is related to international terrorism,” Alexander Mikhailov, head of the Bureau of Military-Political Analysis, told Sputnik.

“The fact is that Ukraine is already openly positioning itself as a terrorist state, which is covered up by the collective West, primarily by Washington and Brussels. And with such support, [the Kiev regime] calmly arranges such terrorist acts of sabotage, using the simplest and most modern method for this, that is, buying these products in the West and equipping them with the necessary amount of explosive, and then sending them on a particular course.”


According to Mikhailov, the incident appears to be a Kiev PR stunt aimed at galvanizing the domestic audience in the absence of any achievements at the front line: Ukrainian authorities need a “nice picture” to generate some hype on social media.

“Most importantly, they are trying to show the collective West that this counteroffensive, funded by the West, is underway. It’s just a multi-layered one. One of its stages is an attack on the Kremlin. But we are well aware that from a military point of view, everyone is safe and sound and no damage has been inflicted. And all this [fuss] is just a propaganda stunt,” he said.

The Kiev regime has failed to produce any meaningful effect by this action, as per Lieutenant-General (ret.) Yevgeny Buzhinsky, chairman of PIR-Center think tank executive board and professor of economics who served as the Russian military’s top arms control negotiator from 2001 to 2009. There is no real effect because the drones were simply downed and that’s it, Buzhinsky remarked.

“Today is May 3. Soon we will celebrate Victory Day [on May 9]. It’s a significant event. Ukraine has shown by this that they can try to spoil this holiday for us. Is it possible,” echoed Dmitry Kornev, a military expert and founder of the Military Russia portal.

However, “an information war is one thing, but, in fact, attacks on infrastructure are a completely different thing,” stressed Buzhinsky.


Sputnik’s interlocutors believe that Russia should raise the issue at the highest level, informing the international community that the recent terrorist attack in Moscow has created a dangerous precedent for all global players.

“It is necessary to inform the other side and, above all, Washington, that [drones] may soon fly to the White House too,” said Mikhailov. “This is a very serious matter. It is related to international terrorism and those who are covering it up.”

Mikhailov does not rule out that the collective West would try to play down the incident or turn a blind eye to the terrorist attack altogether. That’s why Russia needs to discuss the matter with its numerous partners and key powers, as well as with BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and other international entities, according to the expert.

“We should explain: ‘Tomorrow they will arrange sabotages in Beijing, in Delhi, in other states, in other developed economies of the world,’ because those who want to maintain their dominance feel that they are falling down; so they are clinging to power, they have already resorted to the meanest methods, pulling the strings of these satellites and their other subordinate states,” Mikhailov said.

Sabotage Ops Record

The Kiev regime and NATO members have a record of false flag and sabotage ops. Earlier this year, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reported that the September 2022 sabotage attack on Russia’s Nord Stream infrastructure in the Baltic Sea was conducted by US and Norwegian operatives at the request of the Biden administration.

The US denied involvement in the destruction of the natural gas pipelines, with the American mainstream press trying to pin the blame on some pro-Ukrainian group that conducted the sophisticated sabotage operation from a pleasure yacht. Later, the US press noted that European officials “have been whispering about the potential involvement of the Polish or Ukrainian government in the attack.” Kiev and Warsaw vehemently rejected the allegations.

At the same time, the US tried to distance itself from the Kiev regime’s most odious terrorist operations against Russian citizens and civilian infrastructure.

While chastising the Kiev regime for unilateral operations “unnerving” the White House, the US press particularly cited a strike in early August on Russia’s Saki Air Base on the western coast of Crimea, a bombing attack on the Crimean Bridge, December drone strikes against Russian military bases in Ryazan and Engels, and an August car bomb that killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. The US media lamented the fact that Kiev is “not always transparent with their American counterparts about their military operations,” which “have frustrated US officials.”

It is still unclear how the Western leadership will react to the latest attack on the Kremlin, according to Sputnik’s interlocutors. Still, they insist on some sort of response to the attempted terrorist operation. “We must respond to that,” said Buzhinsky.

As per Kornev, the reaction could be not a military but an asymmetric one. At the same time, he has drawn attention to the fact that Russia is well aware of “all the targets on the territory of Ukraine, we know where the command posts are.”

“It is clear that it will be impossible to destroy all of them at the same time, but there may be retaliatory measures,” the military analyst concluded.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/05/ ... precedent/

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Official US military supplies to Ukraine 2022-2023

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May 4, 2:23 p.m

The officially declared nomenclature of equipment and ammunition transferred by the United States to Ukraine.

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Of course, in addition to this, there were supplies not included in this list.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8333761.html

The United States is behind the attack on the Kremlin
May 4, 13:13

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The United States is behind the attack on the Kremlin

➖Putin's reaction to the drone attack on the Kremlin was calm and collected;

➖Moscow knows that Kyiv chooses both means and targets for strikes under the dictation of Washington;

➖Moscow believes that Kyiv was involved in the attack on the Kremlin, based on data from the Russian special services;

➖After the attack on the Kremlin, two copper sheets on the dome of the Senate Palace were singed, they will be promptly replaced;

➖The Kremlin is considering "a wide variety of" options for responding to the drone attack on the Kremlin;

➖The situation in the Kremlin after the incident with drones is normal, everyone is working in their places;

➖Putin's address or an emergency meeting of the Security Council of the Russian Federation is not planned after the drone attack on the Kremlin;

➖The security system in the Kremlin will be further strengthened after the incident with drones;

➖The goals and objectives of the special operation do not change after the drone attack on the Kremlin;

➖It is not known from where exactly the drones that attacked the Kremlin were launched, the investigation will deal with this;

➖Any response to a drone attack on the Kremlin will be thoughtful, balanced and in line with Russian interests;

➖Washington is behind the Kyiv attack on the Kremlin, US attempts to disown the drone attack on the Kremlin are ridiculous;

➖It is important that Washington, involved in the attack on the Kremlin, understand the danger of such direct involvement in the conflict.

***

A meeting of the Security Council of the Russian Federation with Putin's participation is to be held tomorrow. Most likely, some retaliatory measures to the Kremlin attack and the fate of the Grain Deal will be discussed there. So tomorrow both strikes and political decisions may follow.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8333529.html

Google Translator

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Russia’s coming revenge attack on Ukraine for the attempted assassination of Putin

Yesterday The New York Times only published a tiny article on the Kremlin’s assertion that Ukraine had targeted Putin in a drone attack on the Kremlin. On the contrary, The Financial Times considered the issue to be of prime importance and gave it lead position in their online edition. And what about the Russians, how did they deal with this?

The hourly news programs were very restrained, giving the story top place but only a minute or two of attention. However, the talk shows gave it extensive attention. Sixty Minutes focused on the U.S. official reaction to the Kremlin charges, with an excerpt from the interview that Antony Blinken gave. In his remarks, Blinken first put in question the whole incident, saying dismissively that you cannot believe anything the Kremlin says. Then he went on to say that Kiev can do anything it deems necessary to repel the aggressor and recover its sovereign territory, for which it has American support. The hosts left it to the audience to interpret Blinken’s words, though none but blithering idiots would fail to understand from Blinken that the USA was in cahoots with Kiev on such an attack. Those who are politically informed about Washington would understand that Blinken is now wholly controlled by his nominal subordinate, Victoria Nuland, since what he said was exactly what she would say, meaning hawkish, anti-Russian in the extreme.

Beyond that, Sixty Minutes directed attention to Zelensky’s convenient departure for Finland shortly after the attack on the Kremlin. They also noted that his stay in Finland has been extended by a day, that he is now headed for Germany, where there was no expectation of his visit, and that he is being transported by a U.S. military plane. Here again, without saying it, the program hosts allow the audience to reach the logical conclusion that Zelensky was directly involved in the plot to assassinate Putin and that the United States was at his side all the way.

The talk show Evening with Vladimir Solovyov was less subtle. The host opened by reminding his audience of what Dmitry Medvedev, former President and head of the Russian Security Council said earlier in the day: that Ukraine is now a terrorist state, that there is no longer any justification for negotiating with Zelensky and that the Kiev regime must be destroyed.

For those who think that Solovyov and Medvedev were just sounding off and have no credibility, I point out that the Volodin, Speaker of the State Duma, yesterday also called for the destruction of the decision-making bodies in Ukraine, which means, of course, the presidential administration first of all.

While American and European newscasters opine over whether all this spells an escalation of the war, I will say with almost certainty that it does. It is hard to imagine that Vladimir Putin will be able or will even want to remain calm and restrained in the face of the latest U.S.-Kiev provocations. If his position is at risk in this war, it is from Russia’s super patriots.

The Russians have the ability to strike anywhere in Ukraine and to destroy any safe-places of the Kiev leadership including the deepest of bunkers. The question now is will they do so before Zelensky returns home, if he ever does? Will they do so during or immediately after the 9 May military parade in Moscow?

We are once again at a turning point in this war which has been provoked by Washington acting through the puppet regime in Kiev.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/05/02/ ... 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 » Fri May 05, 2023 11:36 am

The beginning
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 05/05/2023

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Last week, Ukraine's Defense Minister said that the Ukrainian offensive that kyiv and its partners have been announcing for months is in its final phase of preparation. Despite the fact that the Ukrainian authorities continue to demand even more weapons from the NATO countries, the movements of the last days point to the imminent start of the active phase of hostilities. With practically the certainty that the announced attack will take place in the very short term and with a clear strategic objective - inflicting a defeat on the Russian forces on the southern front - all that remains is to know the tactics that the Ukrainian Armed Forces will use and the direction who will take the future offensive.

Original Article: Voenkor Kotenok

The Ukrainian Armed Forces have increased sabotage and terrorist activities on Russian territory. From a military point of view, they are doing it competently. Nobody has forgotten what a rail war is, attacks against the infrastructure before the offensive, and that is the reason why they are doing it. They try to destabilize the situation. Subversive groups, possibly with the support of a local network, carry out the attacks. The Kapunstin sabotage and reconnaissance group 's publicized visit with selfies on Russian Federation territory may have been a deception tactic while other groups infiltrated elsewhere.

On the possible directions of the attacks:

It is 100% sure that they will try to force the Dnieper. A somewhat lesser possibility of an attack on the former territory of the Russian Federation [i.e., within the Russian borders as recognized in 1991- Ed ] is expected .
The attempt to hit mainland Russia can be tempting, as the raid by the 25th brigade along the border with Russian territory in the summer of 2014 shows. The keyword there is raid.
Possible options in this regard: try to infiltrate the Bryansk or Kursk regions (the nuclear power plant is 60 kilometers from the border, a five-hour walk, much faster in a vehicle). Given the propensity for terrorist attacks and acts of sabotage, it cannot be ruled out. A second possibility would be to organize a big raid avoiding big cities but isolating infrastructure, reaching the rear of the supply lines in Lugansk so that the defense has to shout that the enemy is behind. They really liked that offensive move in the fall of 2022 and would possibly like to repeat it. They entered and dirty their vehicles, avoided large cities, entered small ones, cut off power and burned equipment.
The attempt to cut large Russian highways in order to inflict losses and create panic cannot be ruled out.
The southern direction (Zaporizhia) is the most dangerous because it is the only opportunity to use large tank units.
Special attention should be paid to Energodar. A breakout attempt with tanks cannot be ruled out. A ground attack towards Energodar can also be supported by forcing the Dnieper (as well as other directions, including Kherson), although it is very wide in this area. You can count on the use of 100-200 canisters simultaneously. Energodar is one of the points of a future enemy offensive.
I do not support the version of an attack in the direction of Mariupol. Because? The enemy's task is to cut off the land corridor to the Crimea. Why rush to Mariupol, having to overcome several settlements, if it is possible to advance across the steppe towards Berdyansk, a route on which there are no obstacles or settlements? Their objective is to advance, cut off the corridor to the Crimea and create a bridgehead. It is a matter of achieving tactical and strategic objectives. They are easiest to achieve where there is least resistance, not where you need to bang your head against the wall.

For now, the weather has stopped them. Everything is wet and winter has worsened the state of the roads and the ground. Everything is a quagmire. It takes about ten days of air and dry weather for it to start flowering.

About the battle for Artyomovsk: Chasov Yar is after Artyomovsk. In this area, there are a number of water hazards. If Russia can bypass these obstacles, it will be able to prevent a counterattack by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, gain an operational advantage, and counterattack Ukrainian troops.

The moment: they will definitely do it for May 15-19. They would love to do it now, but the weather is not good: there are rains in various areas. Even so, the weather has already stabilized in many areas, so I would not rule out the possibility that the activation phase of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will start by May 9, with a gift to Russia in the form of simultaneous drone strikes . and acts of sabotage in the central region of the Russian Federation, including major cities.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/05/05/27209/#more-27209

Google Translator

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MAY 4, 2023 BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

Zelensky regime’s fate is sealed

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The West’s cryptic or mocking remarks doubting the Kremlin statement on the failed Ukrainian attempt to assassinate President Vladimir Putin do not detract from the fact that Moscow has no reason on earth to fabricate such a grave allegation that has prompted the scaling down of its Victory Day celebrations on May 9, which is a triumphal moment in all of Russian history, especially now when it is fighting off the recrudescence of Nazi ideology on Europe’s political landscape single-handedly all over again.

The alacrity with which the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken debunked the Kremlin allegation, perhaps, gives the game away. It is in the neocon DNA to duck in such defining moments. That said, predictably, Blinken also distanced the Biden administration from the Kremlin attack.

Earlier, the chairman of Joints Chiefs of Staff General Marks Milley also did a similar thing in an interview with the Foreign Affairs magazine disowning in advance any responsibility for the upcoming Ukrainian “counteroffensive”. This is the Biden Administration’s new refrain — hear no evil, speak no evil. No more talk, either, of backing Kiev all the way “no matter what it takes” — as Biden used to say ad nauseam.

The heart of the matter is that Kiev’s much touted “counteroffensive” is struggling amidst widespread western prognosis that it is destined to be a damp squib. Actually, the salience of the Foreign Affairs podcast this week with Gen. Milley was also his diffidence about the outcome. Milley refused to be categorical that Kiev would even launch its “counteroffensive”!

There is a huge dilemma today as the entire western narrative of a Russian defeat stands exposed as a pack of lies, and alongside, the myth of Kiev’s military prowess to take on the far superior military might of a superpower has evaporated. The Ukrainian military is being ground to the dust systematically. In reality, Ukraine has become an open wound that is fast turning gangrene, and little time is left to cauterise the wound.

However, Kiev regime is ridden with factionalism. There are powerful cliques who are averse to peace talks with Russia short of capitulation by Moscow and instead want an escalation so that the Western powers remain committed. And even after Boris Johnson’s exit, they have supporters in the West.

The militant clique ensconced in the power structure in Kiev could well have been the perpetrators of this dangerous act of provocation directed against the Kremlin with an ulterior agenda to trigger a Russian retaliation.

From Blinken’s vacuous remark, it seems the neocons in the Biden Administration led by Victoria Nuland are in no mood to rein in the mavericks in Kiev, either. As for Europe, it has lost its voice too.

This will probably show up in history books as a historic failure of European leadership and at its core lies the paradox that it is not France but the German government that has aligned itself closer with the US in the Ukraine war and risking an intra-European “epoch of confrontation.”

Even otherwise, these are fateful times, with the political middle ground already shrinking in France and Italy and is much weakened in Germany itself in the wake of the pandemic, the war, and inflation. Importantly, this is only partly an economic story, as the decline of the centre and the de-industrialisation in Europe are closely related and the social fabric that supported the centre has come unstuck.

Germany, the powerhouse of Europe, has been relatively lucky so far. It benefited from cheap labour from east Europe and cheap gas from Russia. But that is over now and the decline of German industry is foreseeable. When society fragments, the political system also fragments and it will take progressively greater effort to govern such countries. Germany and Italy have a three-party coalitions; the Netherlands has four parties; Belgium has a seven-party coalition.

For the present, the hardliners in the Kiev regime have set the pace of events and Europeans will meekly follow. But there’s a ‘chill in the room’ — to borrow the words of Judie Foster in the horror film Silence of the Lambs when Anthony Hopkins transformed in a flash into Hannibal Lecter.

Make no mistake, this is a tipping point; the clumsy attempt on Putin’s life jolts the kaleidoscope beyond recognition. The only comforting thought is that the Kremlin leadership is not going to be driven by emotion. The considered Kremlin reaction is available from the remarks by the Russian Ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov:

“How would Americans react if a drone hit the White House, the Capitol or the Pentagon? The answer is obvious for any politician as well as for an average citizen: the punishment will be harsh and inevitable.”

The ambassador went on to draw the bottom line: “Russia will respond to this insolent and presumptuous terrorist attack. We will answer when we consider it necessary. We will answer in accordance with the assessments of the threat that Kiev posed to the leadership of our country.”

No knee-jerk reactions are to be expected. Nonetheless, the scaling down of the Victory Day celebrations on the Red Square itself must have been a difficult decision. The Victory Day on May 9 is the most important holiday in Russia when the public and the state come together in a patriotic celebration during which people remember their family members who sacrificed their lives to defeat Nazism.

Many of the day’s features—parades, songs and commemorative practices—date back to the Soviet era. Victory Day is the only major public holiday that made the transition to post-Soviet Russia. In a country that lost many of its idols and heroic achievements with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, triumph over Nazism remained a source of enormous collective and personal pride.

But Putin’s hands are tied beyond a point when the country is in rage and demanding retribution, as evident from the comments by former Russian President and current Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev: “After today’s terrorist attack, there are no options left except for the physical elimination of Zelensky and his clique.”

As for Zelensky, he simply left Kiev for Helsinki — and to the Hague thereafter, and arrive in Berlin by May 13 on a state visit — sensing danger, perhaps. Indeed, the fate of the Zelensky regime seems sealed. Zelensky reminds us of the mythical Wandering Jew, who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming.

https://www.indianpunchline.com/zelensk ... is-sealed/

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UKRAINE PREPARED "MASSIVE ATTACKS" ON RUSSIAN TERRITORY SINCE FEBRUARY
May 3, 2023 , 12:36 p.m.

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Major General Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukrainian military intelligence, in his Kiev office (Photo: Serhiy Morgunov / The Washington Post)

In February this year Major General Kirill Budanov, head of Ukraine's military intelligence directorate (HUR), ordered one of his officers "to prepare for mass attacks on February 24. .. with everything the HUR had," according to a classified report from the US National Security Agency.

A Washington Post (WaPo) report based on that report notes that Ukrainian officials "even contemplated a maritime attack with TNT [ explosives] on the Black Sea port city of Novorossiysk, a largely symbolic operation that nonetheless , would demonstrate Ukraine's ability to strike deep into enemy territory."

According to WaPo, US officials were secretly following the Ukrainian plans because the White House was concerned that the incursion into Russian territory "could provoke an aggressive response from the Kremlin."

On February 22, two days before the anniversary, says the WaPo note, the CIA released a new classified report: The HUR "had agreed, at Washington's request, to postpone the attacks" against Moscow. The documents, part of a trove of classified information allegedly leaked on a game server by a 21-year-old member of the National Guard, do not explain precisely who interceded and why the Ukrainians agreed to withdraw.

In this way, the American media tries to sell the version that the Ukrainian government, "desiring to take the fight to Russian territory, is sometimes held back by the United States, which has tried to prevent the conflict from becoming a direct fight between US and Russian forces.

"Attacks against Russia, especially if they involve US-supplied weapons, are considered by some US officials to be highly risky operations that Russian President Vladimir Putin might consider so threatening that he resorted to the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

"However, mysterious explosions and drone strikes continue to take place in Russia. Ukrainian authorities are often coy about the incidents, hinting that they are responsible without directly taking credit."


Despite the fact that Zelensky denied that Kiev stormed the Kremlin via drones, the Ukrainian military has confirmed —de facto— the use of drones and terrorism for its purposes in the war with the logistical and financial support of the Treaty Organization of the North Atlantic (NATO).

https://misionverdad.com/ucrania-prepar ... de-febrero

SEVEN NOTES ON THE TERRORIST ATTACK AGAINST THE KREMLIN
May 3, 2023 , 3:30 p.m.

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1. Two unmanned aerial vehicles targeted the Kremlin presidential residence in the early hours of Wednesday, May 3. The Russian military and special services used "radar warfare systems" to disable the aircraft, the Kremlin said. No one was injured by falling debris and no property damage occurred.

This is an attack described by Moscow as a "planned terrorist act and an attempt on the life of the President of the Russian Federation", thus highlighted in a statement from the press service of the presidency. The Kiev regime was held responsible for the event: "We consider these actions as a planned terrorist act and an attack against the President, carried out on the eve of Victory Day, the May 9 Parade, in which the presence of of foreign guests".

"The Russian side reserves the right to take retaliatory measures," the Kremlin added.

In this way, there is a declaration of principles of Russia regarding the event, which could have repercussions in the short term in the war scenario in Ukraine under the pretext that Russia has identified Kiev from the beginning as the material author of the attack.

2. With the aim of continuing the flow of money and weapons, capitalized by the military-industrial complex of the United States and Europe, the Ukrainian army and other intelligence and security services continue to be fed with the desire to try to defeat Russia on the ground, even though the analysis of military events indicates that there could not be a twist to the scenario of Ukrainian defeat.

All the logistics and financing of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries are being used by Kiev on the Ukrainian battlefield, including drones that have prompted paradigm shifts in military tactics .

But the intentions of the much-announced Ukrainian counter-offensive are closely linked to the context of the terrorist attack against the Kremlin. A Washington Post report in late April indicated that Ukraine's secret services were planning to use drones for a "massive attack" on Russian territory.

On the other hand, the Ukrainian financial oligarch Vladimir Yatsenko offered cash for carrying out drone terrorism in Russia. The intent, according to an investigation by The Grayzone , is a $500,000 reward to any arms manufacturer capable of landing a drone in Red Square during the upcoming Victory Day parade in Moscow.

3 . A no-brainer, perfectly collapsible so that the parties in a high-impact terrorist action can see themselves better: Killing Putin was the —very difficult— main objective, highly unlikely but never completely ruled out. In any case, the "message to Garcia" that is produced is enough to keep the focus of attention, to try to play with something that modifies the current correlation or the bank of objectives that the Russian army and the Kremlin currently prioritize.

The calculation also considered the symbolic dimension based on the dates in a week with various important celebrations: Two days after May 1, one after the commemoration of the Odesa massacre —the almost agreed point at which it began the war—and six from the Victory March, on May 9. In different orders of magnitude, all days of deep significance in the "Russian world".


4 . The action itself expresses, of course, the central doctrinal reflex operating within the Ukrainian forces: Ukraine, what Ukraine is today with a metastatic assimilation of the most sacrificial elements of neo-Nazi thought and the despair of prolonged defeat, coupled with an unquestionable audacity, she is willing to exterminate her own in the process of trying to exterminate the "other" Russian. From the educational system to the calculation of possible Russian reprisals after an assassination attempt, the logic of extermination is present in both directions.

This systematized logical operation has conferred so many important in other military actions of the recent past. An important example lies in what was the evacuation of the Russian army from the right bank of the Dnieper in Kherson in the last quarter of 2022 : certainly the tactical errors meant a complication for the Russian army that could have escalated to a strategic problem, but the main The threat factor was the proven willingness of the Ukrainians to blow up the dams which would ultimately leave hundreds of thousands of Russian troops cut off from their own supply lines, but in the interim would also have been heavy casualties not only Russian but also Ukrainian military and civilians.

A similar mechanic is currently operating in Bakhmut/Artiomovsk , where there is no qualms about sending in waves of conscript soldiers and unprepared units to continue sustaining the "war effort" with a view to preventing the city from falling into Russian hands while many of the critical units have already been evacuated. Something similar has happened in other theaters of operations along the contact line, such as Lyman or Severodonetsk. The human cost is not an issue.

5 . In opposition to this, and as an assumed and assimilated advantage, more or less the opposite occurs on the Russian side. Extreme care has been taken from the beginning not to exceed as much as possible in human damage, particularly civilians. To this must be added two no less important factors within this mechanism:

The unavoidable calculation down to the last particle of what an unplanned reaction, based on extreme provocation, can generate, considering all the NATO/US financial and military mechanics that “backs”—uses—Ukraine.
The tortuous decision-making process, protocols and action processes that it takes for the defense ministry, the army, the Kremlin, the Stavka or all of the above to execute a decision. That overwhelming time frame is also exploited by the other side.
6 . The blowing up of the bridge over the Kersch Strait; the murder of Daria Dugina on the outskirts of Moscow and more recently that of Vladlen Tatarsky in Saint Petersburg; the bombing, also with drones, at the Antonov air base 300 kilometers inside Russian territory itself; North Stream II ; the recent derailment of a logistics train in Bryansk Oblast days before the attack against Putin and the attack itself, the highest point so far in this sequence of operations —which also includes infiltrations in border regions— are and have been organized in collaboration, when not directed directly, by Western intelligence services. The fundamental audacity for these actions to make sense to the Ukrainians can continue to be recognized, but the data and information bank is the product of information interception and infiltration systems under the supervision of Western intelligence services, the CIA and MI6 Mainly, but not the only ones.

7 . There is a background, and historical, key element. Once the Soviet Union and Ukraine dissolved by voting in favor of their "independence" by referendum in 1991, the Commonwealth of Independent States was created, originally founded by Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, made up of the post-Soviet nations. Within this mechanism, which Ukraine never ratified and which now remains on the sidelines, there had been an implicit pact between the officers of the armed forces and the intelligence services in which collaboration was assumed, or at least goodwill ., not to undertake intelligence mechanisms or active information gathering through espionage. For at least one generation, the officers and military commanders coincided in the same academies and training instances, thus establishing a fraternity that made them all common and, therefore, there was no reason for there to be any mistrust. This principle was perpetuated over time, in general terms.

From time to time this status changed, especially in the Russia-Ukraine relationship. Many of the military and intelligence commanders in the days of Maidan (2014) either joined the anti-coup ranks or took critical stances, even disobeying the military orders of first-time politicians. After the ceasefire of 2015 and the time gained through the Minsk II Agreements, part of the structural reforms of the army and the services went through the purge of precisely all these cadres with the Soviet imprint, included in the SBU and the GUR.

Not so, an internal "cleaning" of the same scope and depth within the structures of the Russian services (FSB, GRU, SVR) is unknown, so the presence of infiltrated operators within those institutions, as well as collusion with outside incubations, including pro-Nazi, pro-Ukrainian or simply bought or co-opted Russian activist and volunteer organizations themselves by Ukraine or, even more likely, Western services , art in which the British have the greatest mastery.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/si ... el-kremlin

Google Translator

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Photo: Marco Pregnolato / Unsplash / PopularResistance.org

Force-marching the Europeans
By Patrick Lawrence (Posted May 04, 2023)

Originally published: Popular Resistance on April 27, 2023 (more by Popular Resistance) |

Am I the only American to travel overseas and feel embarrassed by the conduct of the diplomats Washington sends abroad to speak for our republic? It is pretty strange to find yourself, an ordinary citizen, apologizing for the intrusive, cajoling, bullying, badgering and otherwise crude utterances of this or that ambassador in this or that nation. But such is the state of things as the late-phase imperium fields its elbows-out undiplomats—a term I borrow from the Swiss, who suffer one as we speak.

Scott Miller, the Biden regime’s ambassador to Bern for a little more than a year, is indeed a doozy in this line. In his often-demonstrated view, he is in Switzerland to tell the Swiss what to do. At the moment, Miller is all over this nation for not signing on as a participant in Washington’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine—pressuring ministers, denigrating those who question the wisdom of the war, offending the Swiss in speeches and newspaper interviews. It is a one-man assault on Switzerland’s long, long tradition of neutrality, waged in the manner of an imperial proconsul disciplining an errant province. Swiss commentators question why the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, the FDFA, has not expelled this tone-deaf ignoramus.

We should pay attention to people such as Miller and what they get up to, even if they rarely make headlines in our corporate media. It is now nearly lost to history, but Europeans were effectively force-marched—and occasionally bribed at leadership level—into following the Americans as they instigated and waged Cold War I. This is exactly what the State Department is doing once again. It behooves us to watch this process in real time so the realities of Cold War II are not so easily obscured.

According to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, in effect since 1961, diplomats are barred from intervening in the internal affairs of host countries. The State Department lately displays as much concern for this U.N.—sponsored accord as it does for international law altogether: Little to none, you find when you watch these men and women at close range.

I do not know when these breaches of etiquette and indeed law started, but at this point illegal diplomatic interventions into the politics and policies of others are the U.S. Foreign Service’s anti—Convention convention. These coercions are key, let us not miss, to the Biden regime’s concerted campaign to divide the world once again into confrontational blocs and erase all traces of principled neutrality. The Finns have succumbed and just joined NATO. We can put the Swedes in the same file. Now it is the Swiss and their neutrality in international affairs who take the heat. This is the thing about the liberal imperialists: They cannot tolerate deviation from their illiberal orthodoxies. It was George W. Bush who famously told the world “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.” American liberals deployed as diplomats cannot get enough of the thought.

If you want to talk about the decline of diplomacy into crudely asserted demands that host countries conform to the wishes of other powers, you have to start with Andriy Melnyk, the blunt instrument representing Ukraine in Berlin until mid—2022, when even the Zelensky regime, never short of adolescently offensive behavior, found him too much to take. Melnyk thought nothing of calling German ministers “fucking assholes” if they questioned the wisdom of arming Ukraine, and openly celebrating Stepan Bandera, the Russophobic murderer of Jews, who allied with the Third Reich before and during World War II.

For sheer vulgarity Melnyk is nonpareil. I miss the guy, honestly. American diplomats effect a more polished veneer, but they are every bit Melnyk’s match if the metric is self-righteous presumption that what Washington wants others to do is what others should do.

You saw what was coming when Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, named Richard Grenell ambassador to Berlin in 2018. Among Grenell’s choicer acts was to threaten German companies with sanctions—publicly, we’re talking about—if they participated in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, which, as Seymour Hersh has thoroughly and persuasively reported, and whose reporting has not been substantively contradicted, the Biden regime destroyed in a covert operation last year. By then he had dressed down Angela Merkel for opening the Federal Republic’s door to Syrian refugees in 2015. His broader mission, Grenell declared, was to encourage rightist European leaders: Sebastian Kurz, the right-wing populist serving as Austria’s chancellor during Grenell’s time, was “a rock star” in the American ambassador’s book.

You can call this many things, but diplomacy is not among them. I call it a measure of Washington’s loss of interest in dialogue, negotiation, compromise—altogether an understanding of other countries and their interests. It is the diplomacy of no diplomacy, as I have remarked elsewhere. Diplomats are effectively the guardians of trust among nations: Proper statecraft requires they should be competent to talk even to, or most of all, adversaries. But the policy cliques in Washington now prove indifferent to trust, even among allies, in favor of supine obeisance.

The world darkens in many ways. This collapse of traditional statecraft is a certain marker of our not-so-gradual descent into a barbarism that ought to worry all of us.

We come to the case of Ambassador Miller, who arrived in Bern as the Biden regime’s appointee in January 2022.

With increasing alacrity in recent months, he has taken it upon himself to cajole Switzerland to drop its policy of neutrality and begin sending Swiss-made arms to Ukraine while lifting a ban on other nations’ re-export of Swiss matériel to the Kyiv regime.

It is a fool’s errand on the very face of it. I would say trying to persuade the Swiss to abandon their neutrality is the equivalent of telling Americans to put aside the Declaration of Independence, except that the neutrality principle goes much further back in Swiss history. The Congress of Vienna formally guaranteed neutral status for the Confoederatio Helvetica, the nation’s official name, when it fashioned a new European order in 1815. By then the Swiss had considered themselves neutral in international affairs since sometime in the late Middle Ages.

But who cares about all that? Who cares that the Swiss pride themselves on what they have accomplished by way of their neutral role in world affairs—not least but not only during and after World War II? Who cares that Switzerland, because it is formally neutral, has represented American interests in Cuba since 1961 and in Iran since the 1979 revolution? Who cares that Geneva is a city that survives, apart from the watches, on its dedication to mediation, the site of too many negotiations to count?

Not Ambassador Miller.

Surely under orders from the Blinken State Department, Miller has been boisterously hammering the Swiss in speeches and public forums to lift their longstanding stipulation that countries purchasing Swiss-made arms cannot re-export them, along with its determination that it will not sell weaponry to countries at war. It is in part a measure of the Biden regime’s desperation that the Swiss, whose armaments industry’s exports come to all of $900 million yearly, is suddenly essential to saving Ukraine from defeat.

The Swiss are nothing like essential. The thought is ridiculous. The larger point, in my view, is far more insidious. It is to eliminate all thought of neutrality among nations in the (undeclared but obvious) name of the Biden regime’s intent to get everyone on side for a nice, long, profitable new Cold War.

On his arrival, Miller was quick to berate Swiss officials who questioned the sense of the sanctions regime the U.S. and the European Union have imposed on Russia. The Swiss government, reluctantly and controversially, went along with the sanctions that followed the outbreak of hostilities last year, but Miller has been pressing Bern not merely to sequester more funds deposited by Russian oligarchs, but to confiscate them so that they can be sent to Kyiv to finance the eventual reconstruction of Ukraine.

Confiscation of this kind is straight-out illegal—something that matters not at all to the U.S. but matters greatly to Switzerland. When two journalists from Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the big Zurich daily, asked him about this in an interview a few weeks ago, Miller retreated into the cotton-wool language Americans routinely get from public figures. “This requires international dialogue,” Miller replied.

We assume we will find a way.

In other words: We insist you breach international law, and worry not. We do it all the time.

When the Neue Zürcher Zeitung correspondents pointed out that Swiss President Alain Berset had recently defended Swiss neutrality and called for early negotiations to end the war, Miller replied,

Anyone can call for negotiations.

Nice. American diplomacy at its best. Or at its typical worst these days.

It is a matter of record that Miller has imposed himself into ministerial deliberations on the sanctions and arms-sales questions, boasting at one point that senior FDFA officials “know what we expect.” But it was a remark Miller made during the Neue Zürcher Zeitung interview that has landed Miller in seriously bad odor among the Swiss. “In a way, NATO is a donut,” he said with exquisite insensitivity,

and Switzerland is the hole in the middle.

I loved the outrage that followed. He has called Switzerland “nothing in the middle of a greasy American confection,” Roger Kōppel, a populist member of the National Council, the lower house of the legislature, exclaimed.

Bern should have reprimanded him immediately.

It should have but it didn’t. The only constituencies sympathetic to Miller’s obnoxious importunings are sectors of the business community who stand to profit were Switzerland to abandon its neutrality to please the Americans and the political factions allied with them. Miller will stay, but there is no way under the sun that the vast majority of Switzerland’s nine million people would accept so fundamental a change in policy—and, indeed, in national identity.

This leads me to a larger point. Miller can bang on all he likes about his commitment to democracy, but his conduct since arriving in Bern is measure enough that he doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about Swiss democracy—an impressive direct democracy—when it impedes Washington’s imperial pursuits. Do not tell me you are shocked, please: American diplomats no longer represent Americans abroad. They represent American elites to other nations’ elites.

Miller is 43 and arrived with his partner without one day’s experience in statecraft. Together they were and may remain major donors to the Democratic Party, giving the appearance that they bought the Bern appointment—a common practice since at least the Reagan years. Scott Miller is an example of the cost of such practices to our institutions in terms of competence.

The war against neutrality—and effectively sovereignty and self-determination—goes on. Last week Le Temps, the leading Geneva daily, reported that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz accosted Berset during the latter’s visit to Berlin with the demand that the Swiss “take uncomfortable but correct decisions” on neutrality, arms sales, and the Ukraine question. “We hope certain things will get done,” Scholz added with all the subtlety of… Scott Miller.

Certain things will not get done. The Americans are not going to win this one, no matter how many obsequious Olaf Scholzs prevail on the Swiss in their behalf. Berset wasted no time making this clear in Berlin.

I loved the response of Benedict Neff, a commentator at Neue Zürcher Zeitung, after Miller’s hole-in-the-donut remark. Diplomats such as Miller “take a considerable risk,” he wrote.

When their public rebukes are too high-handed, they trigger irritated reactions. The undiplomats are therefore useful in prompting critical reflections on one’s policies and giving them a clearer direction.

This is not as it always turns out with the Europeans—Scholz being proof enough of the point—but it is as it should be, and as one hopes it will come to be.

https://mronline.org/2023/05/04/force-m ... europeans/

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From Cassad's Telegram account:

forwarded from
ADEQUATE Z
I looked at the weather forecasts for the first half of May. I don't know who and how predicted the continuation of rains at the front the other day. But the resource that he used to use himself promises the passage of all cyclones to the north, along our middle lane, and the almost complete absence of precipitation along the entire front line for two weeks in advance. This means that it will begin to dry out - and by the middle of the month, if not even earlier, the condition of the soil will cease to be a factor that strictly excludes the possibility of the movement of many types of equipment on primers and an open field.

Our military meteorologists, apparently, are of the same opinion, and it was not formed yesterday. Because the almost daily, or rather, nightly attacks on near and far tamers, which have been going on for the last week, look like a natural reaction to the penultimate stage of preparing Bandera for the offensive. A preparation that would have been premature in the absence of an understanding of when the mudslide would end.

Every day these blows continue will testify more and more strongly that they are ready to meet the forelock

***

Colonelcassad
❗️🇬🇧🇺🇦The battle for Belogorovka
situation as of 18.00 on

May 4 , 2023 Under enemy fire, the crossing was broken and several dozen pieces of equipment were thrown.

Ultimately, Belogorovka fell after the capture of the Lisichansk-Severodonetsk agglomeration. But after the retreat from the Kharkov region, the RF Armed Forces were forced to withdraw from the occupied settlements in the Luhansk People's Republic.

Belogorovkawas in the hands of the enemy. They repeatedly tried to take the settlement by storm, but because of the quarry, it is difficult to approach it.

▪️Yesterday, units of the Russian Armed Forces, led by Akhmat-Sever, wedged into the enemy defenses near the compressor station in the industrial zone southeast of the settlement. Having managed to clear the buildings, the units took up defense.

▪️Having processed the positions of the RF Armed Forces from artillery, the enemy threw assault units at them and managed to pinch the RF Armed Forces.

▪️By the middle of today, the RF Armed Forces managed to release the encircled units and thin out the enemy's defensive formations. After the rotation, the Russian units continued the positional struggle, gaining a foothold to the east of the quarry.

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Google Translator

https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin

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Armed Forces of Ukraine shot down their "Bayraktar" in the center of Kyiv
May 4, 11:22 p.m

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The hot unmanned week continues. After yesterday's controversy with the arrival of a drone on the roof of the Senate Court, today a victory has come in Kyiv.

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The Armed Forces of Ukraine officially recognized the fact of the destruction of their own "Bayraktar" over Kiev, which fell on a house and caused a fire. They referred to the technical problems of "Bayraktar", they say it broke down. Therefore, we decided to shoot down right next to the Maidan. We decided to blame our own stupidity on Turkish technology. Video of the destruction here https://t.me/boris_rozhin/84710 The car was shot down by the German "Iris-T" air defense system.

All the same, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have no chance to catch up with the Russian Armed Forces in terms of downed Bayraktars.
Well, okay, they slightly sweetened yesterday's pill with their clowning in the center of Kyiv.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8334578.html

Out of service for technical reasons
May 5, 5:51 am

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In continuation of the story with "Bayraktar".

In the evening, 2 versions appeared regarding the reasons for the failure of this machine, which led to a clowning over the Maidan in Kyiv. According to one version, an Israeli system for detecting and suppressing drones was tested in Kyiv, which actually disabled Bayraktar. According to the statement of the "DNR Joker" https://southfront.org/ukrainian-bayrak ... in-action/ hacker interference and violation of control allegedly took place " Bayraktar", which led to the loss of control of the machine, after which it automatically lay down on the return course to the airfield west of Kiev and was mistaken by the panicking air defense of Kiev for a Russian drone launched from the Belgorod or Kursk region.

APU by itself does not disclose the cause of the failure, referring to some technical problems "that happen." Nevertheless, it is quite interesting to find out what led to the loss of control of an expensive drone.

Plus, Rybar writes that Turkish specialists used to train Bayraktor operators at the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but now they have stopped.

Do you know what is the most ridiculous thing about today's incident ( https://t.me/voenacher/44001 ) with the downed Turkish Bayraktar TB2 over Kiev?

This is that the incident occurred almost immediately after the completion of the Bayraktar UAV calculations under the guidance of Turkish instructors.

Yes, now there is activity of 6-8 Turkish drones per day in different sectors of the front. But if during the training a Turkish operator was necessarily included in the calculation, now the Ukrainians turned out to be on their own.

As they said in the air defense of Ukraine? "Lost Control"?

Last year, when only Ukrainians controlled the Bayraktar crews, the Baykar concern suffered reputational losses: the mass failure of Turkish “birds” at that time was due not only to the efforts of Russian air defense, but also to the curvature of the hands of Turkish operators.

Trained a new party. Trusted. Already lost one. Keep it up.

https://t.me/boris_rozhin/84741 - zinc

In general, this story still has some understatement.

PS. By the way, thanks to one clown with a machine gun, air defense positions on the roofs of high-rise buildings burned down, which were de facto turned into military facilities. High-rise buildings are residential.

Accommodation at the kindergarten "Victoria"
May 5, 13:11

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Accommodation at the kindergarten "Victoria"

Everyone has long understood that the Armed Forces of Ukraine are deploying people and equipment at civilian facilities. And the fact that air defense systems are placed next to civilian homes and hit their homes with their old missiles, and that they arrange ammunition depots at school, and then tell how children are bombed, is no longer a secret.

And the most interesting thing is how Commander-in-Chief Zaluzhny lies - the Armed Forces of Ukraine do not place their units on civilian objects. So, according to him, only Russians do it. And his subordinate department of strategic communications constantly lies about it to journalists. The military not only deploys its units on civilian sites, but also sends reports about this to the General Staff.

We see all these documents perfectly. And today we will show you one of them. This is the layout of the base camp of the 122nd separate territorial defense brigade. And this unit was located on the territory of the children's camp "Victoria" in Odessa. Today it is already possible to show this document, because two weeks ago the headquarters of the 122nd Troop Brigade ceased to exist. And since they brought with them to the children's camp a lot of not at all children's toys, the Victoria children's camp is no more either.

Did Stratcom and Zaluzhny think that we would not find out about this? We see all your documents on your computers. And not only. We receive a lot of information from officers who have embarked on the path of correction. And we will continue to record and tell about all your crimes.

We are Beregini! (https://t.me/hackberegini ) We know everything!

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"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 May 06, 2023 11:52 am

Wagner's weight
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 05/06/2023

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Although already known from previous years, the private military company Wagner, owned by Evgeny Prigozhin, once known in the Western press as Putin's cook , has gained a prominent role that it had refused in the past. His presence in African countries, from Libya to the Central African Republic via Mali or Syria, has caused rivers of think-tank ink to flow and Western media that have accused Russian mercenaries of all kinds of crimes, sometimes providing extremely graphic evidence. The over-representation and overestimation of Wagner's role in the war conflicts in which he has participated or as private security contractors at the service of governments on questionable occasions has also been common. This is the case of the current conflict in Sudan, where the weight of Russia is notably less than that of other international actors -the United Arab Emirates or Egypt in military terms and the United States in political terms-, large American media have wanted to highlight the danger of the presence, not even confirmed, from Wagner in the conflict. The presence of Wagner in certain countries of the global south and his performance in different conflicts requires a study that,

The recent performance of the group and its owner contrasts with the position maintained during its initial moments. For years, Wagner not only denied his presence, for example, in Donbass, but even the existence of the company. The start of the special military operation and, above all, the numerical inferiority of the Russian army against its Ukrainian opponent has radically changed the circumstances and, with them, the attitude of Evgeny Prigozhin. Although present since the beginning of the military campaign, especially on the Donbass front, Wagner's role has risen since the battle has concentrated in the north central region of the DPR. While in the southern area, the approach to Mariupol and the surroundings of Donetsk, the different corps of the army of the Donetsk People's Republic have led the assault -and have suffered enormous casualties as a result- together with the regular Russian troops , the advance north has been spearheaded by infantry and assault groups linked to Evgeny Prigozhin. The owner and visible head of Wagner has not hidden his emphasis on recruitment, which has not only been carried out in Russian prisons, although that is the aspect that has obtained the most headlines. Wagner wanted to gain as much prominence as possible at a time when the front on which he was acting was practically the only one on which the fight was still active.

The difficulty of advancing on the central section of the Donbass front, fortified by Ukraine during the eight years of war, meant that, for months, Wagner's presence was used by the Ukrainian discourse simply to insist on the idea of ​​unprepared troops. no weapons. With virtually no bounds in propaganda, it has even been said that Russian troops fought using shovels as weapons. However, the last months of fighting in Soledar and Artyomovsk have changed, perhaps not the situation, but the discourse. On the one hand, Ukraine has gone on to claim, referring to Wagner's troops, that Russia was losing its best-prepared units in a futile battle for Bakhmut. kyiv has thus wanted to justify its obstinacy in defending the ruins of a city that not even its partners and military advisers consider strategically or tactically relevant. On the other hand, Prigozhin himself has wanted to amplify the role of his company and his soldiers in the fight, thus gaining more and more media presence and possibly more political weight. Despite contrary evidence, Prigozhin wanted to imply, for example, that only Wagner's soldiers had liberated the city of Soledar, the only offensive success for Russian troops since last July.

Something similar has happened in the battle for Artyomovsk, an incomprehensibly long fight in which both sides claim to be destroying the best units of the opposing army. Recent weeks have seen significant advances, albeit so slow that they can by no means be called successes, by Russian troops into the city of Artyomovsk. For a time, the Ukrainian military authorities claimed to be preparing a counter-offensive in the city. The statements of some leaders linked to various battalions that act as special forces of Ukraine's military intelligence contrasted with that discourse, especially given the place where their casualties occurred, on the Artyomovsk-Chasov Yar highway, which Kiev tries to maintain. open, not to counterattack, but to keep the supply of his troops.

However, the difficulties of the Russian troops have not been limited to the resistance that Ukraine continues to maintain and that even Prigozhin has praised, nor to the obstacle of fortifying the area, but to the relations between the different sectors. During this time, a conflict has arisen between Wagner's entourage and the Ministry of Defense that has resulted in accusations and complaints raised in the most media-friendly way possible. Initially, this position was joined by the hawks who were seeking greater military firmness against Ukraine by Ramzan Kadirov, who in recent times seems to have moderated his criticism. Just yesterday, although asking for firmness, the Chechen leader praised Vladimir Putin's position in the face of the recent attempted attack with drones on the Kremlin. However, in the case of Evgeny Prigozhin, the complaints not only have not diminished but the confrontation seems more and more clear and more and more public. It is not the first time that the owner of Wagner publicly denounces the lack of ammunition of his troops and in the past he has achieved his objectives. Generally Prigozhin had subsequently announced the start of the supply of the required ammunition.

Although an aspect of theatricality of someone who exaggerates the problems in order to confuse his opponent cannot be ruled out, something that Prigozhin has also done in the past, the statements of the last few hours want to indicate an increase in the confrontation between Wagner and the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff, whose heads, Shoigu and Gerasimov, are addressed explicitly, with serious accusations and terms and tone outside the usual limits. With some of his soldiers behind him, Prigozhin stated yesterday in a video posted by Wagner that, due to lack of ammunition, his troops will hand over their positions to the Russian regular troops and withdraw from Artyomovsk on May 10. Possibly at the most compromising moment in recent months before the start of the Ukrainian offensive,

Yesterday, the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation, to whom Prigozhin addressed his complaints, gave the order to supply all the troops with the necessary weapons and ammunition. At the moment, there is no official Russian reaction to Prigozhin's complaints - there never has been in the past - but, beyond words, it will be the actions that mark in the coming days both the direction in which direct the reorganization of the front and the political weight of the different actors. The way in which the withdrawal is managed, if it occurs, can perhaps show how much of what happened responds to Prigozhin's complaints as an emerging political figure, to a more or less planned rotation at the front or staging. Yesterday afternoon, Ramzan Kadirov expressed his willingness to replace Wagner's troops with his troops in Artyomovsk,

It seems unlikely that Prigozhin randomly chose May 10, the day after Victory Day, a time reference that has not gone unnoticed by Ukraine either. As happened last year, also unfoundedly, Ukraine claimed yesterday that Russia seeks to capture Bakhmut at all costs before May 9. The routine on the ground, where the slow progress street by street, district by district, continues, refutes this statement, which, yes, has sufficient credibility to be presented as objective information by the Western press, which seems to adhere to the recommendation of Mikhailo Podoliak, who affirmed that Prigozhin's threats are nothing more than the staging of a farce, wrote that "real information about the war and Bakhmut is only found in Ukrainian military reports." Despite having lost almost the entire city of Artyomovsk, Ukraine continues to claim that the situation is under control. kyiv thus continues the dynamic of denying the reality that made it take twelve full days to admit having lost Soledar. In war, the media staging and reality differ remarkably.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/05/06/27217/

Google Translator

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Ukrainian Banker Offers Cash for Drone Terror in Russia
MAY 4, 2023

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By Alexander Rubinstein · May 2, 2023

Days before a failed drone assassination targeting Putin, Ukrainian banking baron Volodymyr Yatsenko offered a $500,000 bounty to any weapons maker able to land a drone in Red Square during Moscow’s upcoming Victory Day parade.

On April 23, a Ukrainian drone laden with 30 Canadian-made C4 explosive blocks crashed near Rudnevo Industrial Park in Moscow. Ukraine-based operators deployed the 37 LB arsenal in a failed bid to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was scheduled to visit Rudnevo that day.

The drone ultimately failed to hit its target, crashing roughly 12 miles from its intended destination. Russian media reported authorities discovered three similar unmanned aircrafts in the surrounding area. By the time the Canadian-manufactured bombs arrived in Moscow, the government in Ottawa had provided Kiev with nearly 6 billion dollars worth of aid to support Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s military.


The Ukrainian UJ-22 drone’s flight originated in the country’s Kharkov region. Yuriy Romanenko, co-founder of a think tank with close ties to Kiev’s intelligence services, credited Ukraine’s Secret Service (SBU) with orchestrating the assassination attempt. Romanenko wrote on Twitter: “Last week, our intelligence officers received information about Putin’s trip to the industrial park in Rudnevo… Accordingly, ours launched a kamikaze drone, which flew through all the air defenses of the Russian Federation, and fell not far from the industrial park.”


“Putin, we are getting closer,” Romanenko warned.

The drone was carrying m112 explosive charges, which are used by several states including Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. According to Russian media, the explosives recovered from the botched attack were of Canadian origin.

The failed attempt on Putin’s life came amidst a wave of drone incursions into Russian airspace in recent months. A day after the unsuccessful April 23 offensive, the Russian outlet SHOT recorded 10 drone attacks in the Belgorod border region, some of which included French LU-213 fragmentation grenades and American-made Switchblade drones. The Switchblade has been used in previous air assaults on the region as well.

The uptick in drone attacks inside Russian territory followed Kiev’s July 2022 launch of an “Army of Drones” campaign, an official effort to raise funds, dubbed “dro-nations,” to assist Ukraine’s procurement of foreign-produced, unmanned aircrafts.

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Screenshot from Ukrainian World Congress website urging visitors to “dronate” to their cause

The fundraising push, which counts the Western-backed online troll farm, NAFO, and the Ukrainian World Congress as formal partners, has enlisted famed Star Wars actor Mark Hamill, as its top brand ambassador.

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Star Wars actor Mark Hamill poses as the official face of Ukraine’s “Army of Drones” fundraiser

“Honored to be an Ambassador for the Army of Drones and to help President Zelenskyy and the people of Ukraine in any way possible,” Hamill tweeted in September 2022, attaching a photo of himself on a video call with Ukraine’s president.


The covert nature of Ukrainian drone attacks inside Russian territory makes them difficult to tally on an authoritative basis. A reporter for the British state-funded BBC pressed a Kiev official to provide such data to no avail while participating in a “a training session for Ukraine’s latest group of drone pilots in a secret location on the outskirts of Kyiv.” The BBC filed its dispatch from the heart of Ukraine’s “Army of Drones” on April 25, just two days after the alleged SBU-directed aerial assassination attempt on Russia’s president.

Leading Kiev’s “dro-nation” campaign is Ukraine’s Minister for Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, who “makes no attempt to hide the deadly nature of these drones designed to smash into targets like soldiers or tanks,” according to the BBC.

“But like the rest of his government,” the BBC continued, “he refuses to talk about recent drone strikes on Russian territory.”

Non-governmental actors, however, are not so tight-lipped. In fact, Ukrainian television kicked-off a private initiative to encourage future drone attacks on Russian territory just days before the April 23 aerial attempt on Putin’s life.

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Accused Ukrainian embezzler offers bounty for drone terror inside Russia

On April 6, Ukrainian finance and weapon’s industry magnate, Volodymyr Yatsenko, appeared on the Kiev-based TSN network and offered a cash prize worth approximately $549,000 USD to any national weapons producer that manages to land a drone inside Moscow’s Red Square during Russia’s upcoming Victory Day celebration.

Russia’s annual Victory Day commemoration marks the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s 1945 surrender to the Soviet Red Army. Each May 9, millions of Russian citizens participate in marches throughout the country to honor their nation’s triumph over fascism. In Moscow, citizens and government officials gather in Red Square to view musical performances by Russia’s national army band and a flamboyant parade of the country’s troops and military hardware. The ceremony typically features speeches from the Russian president and Commander of Russia’s Armed Forces as well.

Moscow announced the cancellation of Victory Day parades in its border region this April, following a surge of drone activity in the territory throughout the first months of this year.

On May 2, The Guardian downplayed threats of Ukrainian terrorist violence in Russia, stating that while a “Ukrainian drone attack on Red Square during the Victory Day military parade would be humiliating for Putin,” his government was not calling off Victory Day marches “out of concern for public safety,” but due to a “paranoid obsession” that citizens may hijack the rallies to make statements about the current war.

The Guardian offered no evidence to support its portrayal of Putin as an irrational actor. What’s more, the center-left British paper neglected to mention Ukraine’s “Army of Drones” campaign, or the fact that Yatsenko, a powerful Ukrainian oligarch, is offering a cash prize for an aerial assault on the Red Square event.

Characterizing the upcoming the Red Square celebration as a “very legitimate” military target during his April 6 interview with TSN, Yatsenko revealed that his own weapons company, Dovbush, is already “warming up” for the event. He proceeded to credit Dovbush with operating a drone discovered near a railway in New Moscow on March 28. At the time, Ukrainian media reported the drone was inscribed with Kiev’s Nazi-era battlecry, “Glory to Ukraine.”

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Ukrainian finance and weapons mogul Volodymyr Yatsenko proudly claims credit for operating a drone discovered in New Moscow, Russia this March
Describing the March flight as trial run for Victory Day, Yatsenko insisted that if Dovbush successfully lands a drone in Red Square on May 9, “according to the law, I will not pay the prize to myself.”

Concerns that Yatsenko may not adhere to domestic financial regulations within “the most corrupt nation in Europe” were not unwarranted. The banking tycoon established his career working for Privatbank, a Ukrainian financial institution established in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse. Ukraine’s post-Maidan government nationalized the bank in 2016, after $5.5 billion mysteriously disappeared from its coffers. An investment banker later accused Yatsenko of orchestrating the withdrawal, telling the US-backed Radio Free Europe outlet he was “very important in matters related to the nationalization of Privatbank, as he headed the direction of corporate lending.” The source, Serhii Fursa, charged Yatsenko with funneling the cash to Privatbank’s owners, namely Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky: the infamous patron of both President Zelensky and the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.

“In the morning, ordinary Ukrainians brought money to Privatbank, and in the evening, Igor Kolomoisky used that same money to drink champagne in Geneva,” Fursa said. “Yatsenko was responsible for ensuring that this depositors’ money went to Kolomoisky.”

Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau later alleged that Yatensko withdrew “most of the funds from the bank on the eve of its nationalization” in 2016, which he then transferred to his wife and daughter. Among the assets transferred to his daughter, Hanna, were those belonging to an agricultural company that owned “23 real estate objects, 500 land plots and 17 cars.” In February 2021, a charter flight carrying Yatsenko was “turned around and forced to land” over Ukraine while en route to Vienna. Ukrainian authorities promptly arrested Yatsenko on charges of embezzlement and misappropriation stemming from his role at Privatbank. The office of Ukraine’s anti-corruption prosecutor is scheduled to proceed with his case this September.

While announcing his competition for a drone attack on Moscow’s upcoming May 9 Victory Day parade, Yatsenko declared the winning aircraft must not only land in Red Square, but be recognizable as Ukrainian.

“It must have Ukrainian slogans like ‘Glory to Ukraine,’” the banking magnet insisted, invoking Kiev’s Nazi slogan.

“Let’s create a ‘holiday’ for them,” Yatsenko concluded, raising his hands to emphasize the word “holiday” with air quotes.

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Oligarch Volodymyr Yatsenko uses air quotes to emphasize Ukrainian drone manufacturers should make a “holiday” for Russians during upcoming May 9 Victory Day celebrations

The Soviet victory in WWII, known as The Great Patriotic War in Russia, remains a source of national pride in the country to this day. The Western-backed government in Kiev, meanwhile, has incorporated neo-Nazi battalions into its military and venerated Ukraine’s WWII-era Nazi collaborators with official state honors.

As the prospects of Kiev’s victory against Moscow on the battlefield wanes, its elite are openly promoting a strategy of aerial terrorism inside the Russian Federation. A celebration marking the defeat of Nazi Germany is perhaps their most natural target.


(The Grayzone)

https://orinocotribune.com/ukrainian-ba ... in-russia/

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Odessa After the Massacre: Nine Years Later the Wounds Are Still Fresh
MAY 4, 2023

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Trade Union building on fire in the center of Ukraine's southern port city of Odessa on May 2, 2014. Photo: Reuters.

The west continues to ignore, downplay and misrepresent the trade unionists who were burned alive in Odessa’s trade union building by Nato’s fascist stormtroopers.

This exclusive interview with an Odessa massacre survivor was carried out for Proletarian by Steve Sweeney in Russia.

Sasha gently rolls back the sleeve of her jumper to reveal scarred and damaged skin.

“It still hurts me sometimes even now,” she tells me as we sip coffee in a Moscow cafe. “Doctors said it would be like this for some time. But it has been nearly ten years.”

Sasha [not her real name] was one of the hundreds injured in the Odessa Trade Union House massacre on 2 May 2014.

“I was lucky, I managed to escape. They tried to burn us all alive. The police stood and watched as they shot at us and beat us.

“Many jumped from the windows and were attacked as they hit the ground. It was like hell,” she says.

At least 48 people were killed as far-right Ukrainians set the building alight after pro-Russians took shelter there from a baying mob.

Fighting for the truth
Nine years later, the survivors and the victims’ families are still seeking truth and justice for their loved ones amid a cover-up by the state and the connivance of western institutions including the Council of Europe, the European Union and others.

In fact, the only criminal cases that have been opened by the Kiev administration are against those who were attacked, as Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov explained earlier this year.

“We know the truth,” Sasha says. “We know who did this and they are being protected. But we will not give up. Those who died deserve justice. We need to heal the pain.”

She was on the streets of Odessa just months after the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in a US-backed coup after he refused to sign a deal integrating Ukraine more closely into the European Union.

“We objected to this meddling, this was not what we wanted. Fascists were taking over the country because of the west. They were helping them to control Ukraine and to kill us,” she says.

“I will never forget that day for as long as I am alive. The Banderists and fascists were killing people and the whole world looked away,” Sasha continues. “All we wanted was to be treated like humans, but they treated us like animals, cockroaches. This was terrorism.”

Fascist pogrom organised by Nato’s puppets
The pogrom was coordinated by the Right Sector, a coalition of ultranationalist forces founded by Dmytro Yarosh, a virulent antisemite and supporter of Ukrainian wartime Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera.

They took advantage of a football match held between Odessa and Metallist Kharkiv on the day of the massacre, rallying the support of right-wing ultras from both teams’ supporters.

“We knew there was going to be trouble on the day of the match. These teams had a reputation for violence, but police did nothing to stop them. It started when they marched in the city,” she explains.

There had been an agreement reached to peacefully clear the Kulikov field, the site of a pro-Russian encampment that had been set up in the months after the Maidan coup.

This was reportedly to make way for Victory Day celebrations on 9 May, the date which marks the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany.

But as the violence started, the camp was set ablaze, causing people to flee to the nearby trade union building for shelter.

“It is ironic we agreed to move out of the camp but then it was attacked by the Ukrainian nazis, the same people defeated [in 1945]. But here [in Ukraine] they did not go away,” Sasha says

Hundreds gathered there, and soon after it too came under attack.

“I was in a room that was filled with smoke very quickly. We could hardly breathe. As I left there were bodies on the floor. I could not help them.

“Some people started jumping out of the windows. I heard the sound of their bodies hitting the floor and they were beaten to death.

“On the ground [outside] people stopped us from leaving. I could hear the football fans chanting, singing Ukraine’s anthem …

“Nobody was coming to help. The fire was spreading and there was shooting too. I thought I was going to die,” she recalls.

The Ukrainian police were not passive bystanders – although they did nothing to help, they were filmed firing their guns into the trade union building.

Crowds below chanted “Burn, Colorado, burn”, a reference to the pro-Russian colours of ribbons worn by some of the protesters. As the fire tore through the building, the Ukrainian national anthem was sung by those gathered outside, taunting those trapped inside as they burned to death.

The Nazi-era slogan – Slava Ukraini, now frequently to be heard on the lips of Kiev’s western sponsors – was shouted as people were dying inside the building, whose walls were daubed with swastikas and the name “Galician SS”.

“We escaped, but nobody helped us,” Sasha says, adding: “It was terrifying. After the attacks people were afraid to leave their homes. We didn’t want to go outside for weeks.”

No retribution for the perpetrators
Despite the admissions and footage clearly identifying many of those responsible, the perpetrators remained free.

In the aftermath of the fire, the Right Sector celebrated the deaths, describing the massacre as “yet another bright page in our fatherland’s history”.

Yarosh, whose organisation claimed responsibility for “coordinating” the attack, even became a candidate for the Ukrainian presidency and later an MP. He was never investigated by Ukrainian authorities – and he was not alone.

Svoboda party MP Irina Farion declared: “Bravo Odessa … Let the devils burn in hell’ – yet she also was not charged.

Fatherland party lawmaker Lesya Orobets published a statement on her Facebook page on 2 May celebrating the “liquidation” of the oppositionist kolorady – a derogatory term for those who hold pro-Russian views. She accompanied her post with several photographs of headless corpses.

Aleksey Goncharenko, who took part in the Odessa protests, was later elected to the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe.

These are the so-called democrats backed by the west.

Sasha made her way to the roof as the blaze spread. Exactly what happened inside the building is unclear. Many died there, some of them outside, their bodies found riddled with bullets.

“They [Ukrainian authorities] did nothing while these people celebrated the burning. They hate us and do not have respect for life. We know who our killers are. They are the government.”

The United Nations has criticised Kiev for its unwillingness to carry out proper investigations into the massacre. But, unsurprisingly, there has been a concerted effort to cover up the truth by western powers, which have tried to shift the blame onto Russia.

Petro Poroshenko, who was later to be installed as Ukrainian president, led the charge accusing ‘Russian provocateurs’ and supporters ‘shipped in from Transnistria’ of coming to Odessa to foment violence.

He even accused Moscow of placing gas canisters in the trade union building to deliberately increase the number of casualties. But this has been widely dismissed, including by those not allied with Moscow.

An eyewitness report for the CIA-backed Radio Liberty said: “On 2 May, 48 people died. None of them were ‘Russian saboteurs’ or ‘Transnistrian fighters’ or ‘bussed-in Bandera anarchists’. All were residents of Odessa and the surrounding suburbs.”

Sasha confirmed this and said the only outsiders were the hundreds that had been bussed in the night before the provocations started, along with the football supporters who had been urged to join in with the attacks.

Western media and politicians continue to look the other way
On today’s anniversary, commemoration events have been banned in Odessa once again, as pro-Kiev forces seek to erase the event from memory. Ukraine’s western backers have also colluded in order to downplay the role of far-right Ukrainian forces in the attack.

The Council of Europe’s international advisory panel described the events of May 2014 as “clashes”, as if both groups were equally responsible for the massacre.

But the IAP drew its conclusions from the May 2 Group – made up of journalists and others – many of whom justify the actions of the Ukrainian government while denouncing criticism of Kiev as “pro-Russian propaganda”.

Solidarity for the victims of this heinous massacre has also been in short supply from ‘Ukrainiacs’. Last year passed without a mention from most of those displaying the yellow and blue flag in their social media profile pictures.

The British-based so-called ‘Ukraine Solidarity Campaign’ – in reality a front for the social-imperialist Alliance for Workers Liberty – has gone so far as shamefully to recycle claims that describing the attack as a massacre is “Russian propaganda”, blaming the victims for their own deaths.

It was, of course, these opportunists that organised the poorly attended demonstration last year which saw a handful of trade unionists chanting “Arm, arm, arm Ukraine!” as they marched through the streets of London – just as then prime minister Boris Johnson was in Kiev promising to do exactly that.

We now also know that he was there to strongarm puppet actor-president Volodymyr Zelensky and prevent him from signing a peace deal or entering negotiations with Russia to bring an end to the conflict.

Of course, these supporters of the Kiev regime cannot draw attention to the massacre, or admit who was responsible – to do so would blow a major hole in the narrative that there are no fascists or neo-nazis in Ukraine, which they hail instead as a beacon of freedom and democracy.

Nine years on from the attack, the victims of the Odessa massacre have largely been forgotten by the west, sacrificed as pawns in its proxy war against Russia and abandoned by those who claim to stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine.

The events in Odessa were just one part of an orgy of far-right violence unleashed in the wake of the western-backed Maidan coup.

The Ukrainian neo-nazis – emboldened after the Odessa massacre – carried out another attack in the city just seven days later on Victory Day, shooting dead an unknown number of unarmed demonstrators in an incident that was not even reported in the west.

The rest is history. Today the conflict continues, having escalated into a Nato proxy war and the battle being waged in the areas now incorporated into the Russian Federation.

But for those who lost loved ones in the Odessa Trade Union House massacre, and for those who survived, the struggle for justice continues.

“Please raise our voices. Tell the world not to forget the people of Odessa and our struggle for justice,” Sasha says. “Only then can we put out the flames that continue to burn.”


(The Communists) by Steve Sweeney

https://orinocotribune.com/odessa-after ... ill-fresh/

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Pro-ISIS Fighter in Ukraine Received UK Missiles and ‘SAS Training’
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 4, 2023
Phil Miller

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Daniil Lyashuk received US and UK arms. (Photo: Deni Vendetti / Telegram)

A convicted torturer and supporter of Islamic State obtained British and US rocket launchers and claims to have been instructed by the SAS.


A Belarusian criminal who was reported dead last month in Ukraine claimed to have received training from Britain’s Special Air Service.

He was also filmed in possession of UK-supplied rocket launchers, Declassified has found.

The man, Daniil Lyashuk, came from a far-right hooligan background until he converted to Islam and expressed support for jihadist groups like Islamic State, earning the nickname Mujahid (‘holy warrior’).

He led a pro-Ukraine militia despite a conviction from a Kyiv court for torturing detainees in the Donbas.

Lyashuk made the claim about receiving SAS training on his official telegram channel on 27 March. The post has been viewed over 100,000 times.

His death on the frontline near Bakhmut was reported five days later.

In the telegram post, he mocked a video of Belarusian “goblin” soldiers for splitting bricks on their heads.

He wrote in Russian: “My teacher from the British SAS always said that a single blow to the head does not add intelligence to a soldier.

“Also, he constantly repeated, war is a special art and severe discipline. At the same time, periodically quoting Sun Tzu … War is a way of deception!

“Looks like the communists did not understand the essence of these words … and deceived their degenerate army! The result is on the face … well, or on the head.”

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Lyashuk claimed to have received SAS training. (Photo: Deni Vendetti / Telegram)

Declassified only saw the post after his death, so was not able to contact him for clarification. The UK Ministry of Defence declined to comment on special forces activity.Lyashuk’s claim adds to indications that the SAS is training pro-Ukrainian forces, including those known for human rights abuses and extremism.Leaked US intelligence files said there were 50 British special forces in Ukraine this March. “Retired” UK special forces soldiers have been reported to be operating on “missions deep inside Ukraine”.
Armed forces minister James Heappey has told parliament the UK has “troops on the ground” in Kyiv to protect its diplomats and train Ukrainian forces.

Who was Daniil ‘Mujahid’ Lyashuk?

Originally from Belarus, Lyashuk volunteered to fight for Ukraine after Russia occupied Crimea in 2014.

Coming from a far-right background, he converted to Islam and posed with ISIS flags.

He joined Ukraine’s Tornado battalion, a small paramilitary police unit that fought against pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas.

Around 40 of its members had criminal records, including its leader.

Tornado was disbanded by the interior ministry in 2015 amid concerns over its conduct. Allegations included rape, torture and robbery.

Ukraine’s chief military prosecutor described Lyashuk as “the most dangerous and cruellest” of all Tornado members

More than a dozen of its members were arrested and Lyashuk received a ten year prison sentence from a Kyiv court for crimes including torture.

Ukraine’s chief military prosecutor Anatoly Matios described Lyashuk as “the most dangerous and cruellest” of all Tornado members.

The prosecutor accused him of supporting ISIS and using “extreme cynicism…cruelty and ruthlessness” to commit the “most brutal torture of the local population of Luhansk region” including raping detainees.

Lyashuk was released early in 2021 and returned to the frontline following Russia’s full scale invasion last year. He founded and led the so-called Vendetti combat group and was injured twice.

On 15 April 2022, Lyashuk posted a video of his weapons supplies, which included a British-made Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapon (NLAW).

Another video uploaded on 1 June 2022 recorded him practising with an NLAW. Other footage shows him with US-made Javelin rockets.

Following his death, Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, hailed him as a “hero”.

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Lyashuk’s NLAWs. (Photo: Deni Vendetti / Telegram).

Britain manufactures NLAWs in Belfast and has sent up to 5,500 to Ukraine since Russia invaded. A small number have been supplied by other countries such as Luxembourg, which has sent 100.

Declassified has previously revealed that British-supplied missiles reached far-right and neo-Nazi Ukrainian militias, such as the Azov Battalion and Right Sector.

The UK has donated so many NLAWs to Ukraine that it has had to order thousands more to replenish British stockpiles, under a £229m arms deal.

NLAWs are just a fraction of the £4.8bn worth of weaponry Britain has promised to supply Ukraine.

An MoD spokesperson told Declassified: “The UK has provided a wide range of equipment and support to enable Ukraine to defend itself and its sovereignty. We conduct a rigorous assessment of the risks associated with providing weapons and ensure an End-User Agreement is signed by the Armed Forces of Ukraine upon receipt of lethal aid.”

Blowback?

The UK has extensively criticised Russia for recruiting prisoners to serve in its Wagner mercenary group.

Ukraine’s President Zelensky has overseen a similar but less reported prisoner release scheme, to bolster his troop numbers.

The presence of hardened criminals and extremists among those fighting in Ukraine is likely to concern Britain’s security services, especially if British volunteers are mixing with them.

A report last year by parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee on “extreme right-wing terrorism” contained a heavily redacted section, which may refer to Ukraine.

“Ukraine’s President Zelensky has overseen a similar but less reported prisoner release scheme”

It read: “There is no process in place to monitor those ‘G***’ individuals who have travelled overseas for Extreme Right-Wing Terrorism-related purposes and have returned to the UK – there is a strong possibility that these returning foreign fighters, some of whom may have fought ***, will have been further radicalised *** and developed connections with others who share their Extreme Right-Wing ideology.”

Ukraine’s far-right has already planned attacks in the UK. In 2013, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi Pavlo Lapshyn stabbed to death Mohammed Saleem, an 82-year-old Muslim man in Birmingham.

Lapshyn had also tried to plant bombs outside three mosques in the Midlands before his arrest.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/05/ ... -training/

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U.S. makes up c 40% of global military spending, 10x Russia, 3x China
By Ben Norton (Posted May 04, 2023)

Originally published: Geopolitical Economy Report on May 2, 2023 (more by Geopolitical Economy Report) |

The United States was responsible for nearly 40% of global military spending in 2022.

The US military spent $877 billion, 10 times more than Russia ($86.4 billion), and three times more than China ($292 billion).


US military expenditure in 2022 was bigger than the next 10 largest spenders combined.

This means the Pentagon spent more than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, Britain, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, and Ukraine combined.

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This is according to data published this April by the Sweden-based Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

| US makes up c 40 of global military spending 10x Russia 3x China Image 1 | MR OnlineSIPRI calculated that the planet’s total military expenditure was $2.24 trillion in 2022.

The United States, at $877 billion, thus made up 39.2% of total global military spending.

The US-led NATO alliance spent a total of $1.23 trillion, meaning it was responsible for just over half (55%) of global military spending.

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SIPRI reported that real military spending in Europe, adjusted for inflation, is at the highest levels since 1989, toward the end of the first cold war.

Europe is the region with the fastest growing military spending, the study found.

Business Insider noted that the US federal government only dedicated $76.4 billion in discretionary spending for education in 2022, meaning it spent over 10 times as much on the military.

| US makes up c 40 of global military spending 10x Russia 3x China Image 2 | MR OnlineThe Joe Biden administration has requested a mere $90 billion for education in 2024, compared to $842 billion for the military, Business Insider pointed out.

Moreover, all of these figures could be very conservative, given the US Department of Defense is notoriously opaque in its accounting.

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Bloomberg reported that the Pentagon made $35 trillion in “accounting adjustments” in 2019, as well as $30.7 trillion in adjustments in 2018.

These irregularities in the Pentagon’s accounting are larger than the entire US economy.

The US Department of Defense has failed every audit it has ever tried.

https://mronline.org/2023/05/04/u-s-mak ... -3x-china/

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Belgian Prime Minister de Croo and the transfer of 235 million euros of interest on frozen Russian assets to Ukraine

Yesterday Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Croo announced that he will be sending the interest earned on frozen Russian assets presently under his country’s control to Ukraine as an assistance package.

To be sure, this is not yet transfer of the 58 billion euros of Russian assets frozen by Belgium, the largest sum among all the 27 EU Member States. Until now we have heard from EU authorities that confiscation of frozen assets is not supported by EU or international law and is very problematic. What happens to interest earned on the frozen assets remains an open question.

However, I do wonder if the Prime Minister has paid due attention to Russian state policy on such matters which is crystal clear: confiscations will be met by a mirror image response, meaning the freezing of all assets in Russia of the country perpetrating this atrocity. I wonder if he has consulted with Solvay, with Glaverbel and with the many other Belgian companies that have invested a fortune in industrial capacity and logistics infrastructure in Russia.

I wonder if he has spoken to the leadership of the diamond bourse in Antwerp whose existence depends on continued supply of Russian raw diamonds. De Croo is aware of that sensitive point since he strongly defended the interests of the diamond cutters when he successfully removed a ban on diamond imports from Russia in one of the latest rounds of EU sanctions. What no one considered at the time was that Russia might have its own reasons for refusing to make further sales to Belgium as punishment for actions such as the transfer of its wealth to Ukraine. The consequence would be the further concentration off all the world’s diamond cutting in India, which just happens to be a great friend of Russia today. The mayor of Antwerp and leader of the Opposition N-VA party, Mr. Bart De Wever, may have a thing or two to say about this coming catastrophe for a key local industry.

In a month’s time I expect to participate in the St Petersburg International Economic Forum where there will surely be a delegation of Belgian industrialists. I will be very interested to hear their views on this latest project of their Prime Minister which pitches to European values at the expense of his nation’s own economic survival.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/05/05/ ... o-ukraine/
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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Sun May 07, 2023 12:40 pm

The goals of the war
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 05/07/2023

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It is common for the outcome of major battles, the future of peace negotiations and territorial gains or losses to be the basis for analyzing the effects that a military conflict has had on a territory and for discussing, in cases in which the absence of capitulation of one of the contenders leaves room for ambiguity, who has won the war. Practically since the beginning of the Russian military intervention, it has been debated, or even sentenced, which of the parties in conflict will be able to impose their will on the other. In other words, who is winning the war and who is losing it. War is not only what happens in the military field, but includes all kinds of components directly and indirectly related to the battle. Winning the peace is just as important as winning the war.

Throughout this process, in which Moscow did not even manage to convince its partners in the European Union to pressure Kiev to comply with the most basic and perfectly feasible points, such as the lifting of the economic blockade or the resumption of payments of pensions in the area, Russia lost all the soft power it had in Ukraine. Unable to achieve through diplomatic channels something as apparently simple as compliance with a treaty that Kiev had signed and claimed to defend as the only way to resolve the conflict, the military route seemed to Russia the only way to end the war in Donbass. . More than a year later, the war in Donbass has not only not ended, but has worsened, as has security for the population in an important part of the area, including the city of Donetsk, whose neighborhoods have been bombarded indiscriminately and practically daily since the last week of May. The situation on the ground, the accumulation of destruction in a region that Russia will have to rebuild - it is already doing so in places like Mariupol - and the casualties that are taking place in the slow progress in Donbass make it clear that, for the moment, Russia is not achieving the objectives that were raised at the beginning of thespecial military operation , one of the main points of which was to defend the population of Donbass.

Considering military issues and observing the control map of the territory, it cannot be said that Ukraine has fulfilled its objectives either. For eight years, Kiev stated that it would continue to fight to recover all the territories lost according to its 1991 borders: the territories of the DPR and the PRL, defined as occupied by Russia to disengage, among other things, from pension payment obligations, and Crimea. Currently, the de facto borders not only have they not advanced to the benefit of Ukraine, but Russia controls practically the entire Lugansk region, has reached Mariupol in Donetsk and has important parts of Kherson and Zaporozhye under its control, although not their capitals. Although Ukraine takes for granted its success in the next offensive to get closer to Crimea and make impossible Russian control over the south and the coast of the Azov Sea, territorially, the country has lost an important part that adds to those already lost in 2014 and 2015. To this must be added the enormous destruction of key infrastructures and industries, the massive flight of the population, the death of civilians and the general impoverishment of the population and the casualties in its army, a figure that, although secret and taboo for The press must be, according to the intensity of the battle, significantly high.

But the war is more than the military control of the territories and Ukraine has tried to use the conflict to its advantage since it began, with the decision to launch an anti-terrorist operation to end the protests in Donbass and the emerging self-defense militias , in April 2014. In the almost eight years between then and the Russian invasion of February 2022, Ukraine used the external threat to justify all kinds of political, social and economic measures.

Among them is the historical memory legislation, which not only prohibited any display of Soviet communist ideology or symbology -including the hammer and sickle of the victory flag in World War II- but also the Communist Party, the main reference of the left in the country. This legislation to institutionalize the nationalist discourse as a national discourse also implied the exaltation of the figures who fought "for the independence of Ukraine", among them the groups and individuals who did so hand in hand with Hitler's Germany. Unlike in 2010, when the European Parliament considered the title of Hero of Ukraine that Yushchenko had awarded to Stepan Bandera unacceptable, the exaltation of this type of figure has caused little controversy, sometimes limited to protests by Israel over the involvement of these groups in the Holocaust. For example, only Israel has recently protested against the intention of honoring Volodymyr Kubiovich, a close associate of Hans Frank in the General Government and Otto Wachter in the government of Galicia occupied by Nazi Germany, with a street named after him.

The politics of memory have gone hand in hand with the politics of language. War, and especially the rhetoric of the external enemy and its internal allies, has made possible what was not possible in 2014. The first law passed by the Ukrainian Parliament after the Maidan coup sought precisely to remove from the public sphere the Russian language, an overly ambitious goal at the time that not only provoked Russian threats, then enough to withdraw the project, but also internal protests. The perception of a clear will to eliminate the Russian language, and with it its means of communication, culture and education, was one of the causes of Donbass's rejection of the new government. The years and the gradual work to eliminate the mother tongue or vehicular language of a large part of the population in large areas of the country have proven that these fears were not, as was argued in 2014, “Russian propaganda”. The war with Russia has accelerated the process, but it started long before Russian troops crossed the border.

The changes that Ukraine has made by partly hiding behind the war have not been limited to the social and political aspect, but have been even deeper in the economic field, where since 2014 they have had the invaluable support of their Western partners, financial organizations international organizations and the entire network of non-governmental organizations that have been called civil society, in reality a well-oiled and well-financed machine to advance a neoliberal -if not ultraliberal- agenda based on privatization, reduction of benefits and social rights and limitation of the possessions of the oligarchy in favor of international capital. This last aspect, that of the apparent nationalization of assets in the hands of the oligarchy, although not to be put for the benefit of the State but to be auctioned off to the highest international bidder, was already noticeable when Ukraine acted against Igor Kolomoisky in the first years of the war in Donbass. Since then, each step presented as de-linkingit has actually been a way of using all public and seized assets - legally or not, since in recent years the ideological motive has been enough to seize assets from pro-Russian oligarchs - to obtain funds for the war and to create the The state that post-Maidan Ukraine always wanted to become.

Coming from the private sector, with no experience in politics but with a team that seemed to appeal to technocracy, Volodymyr Zelensky was quickly integrated into this idea and has delved into the neoliberal aspects already present during the presidency of Petro Poroshenko. In recent years, Ukraine has worked to liquidate the last remaining public companies in state hands and has even tried to divest itself, dividing the company into different parts to leave only control of the infrastructure, the public company, in the hands of the state. of rail transport. This privatization was not possible, mainly because the state of infrastructure and material made it unsustainable. The Ukrzaliznitsya leadership became in those years a liberal stronghold of people from thecivil society in which to enjoy astronomical salaries compared to the country's average, while seeking a way to liquidate the public company. Curiously, after years of being classified as a ballast inherited from the Soviet state, in the last year it has received praise from the international press for its role in transporting refugees and internally displaced persons.

Momentarily cast aside his image as a liberal technocrat in favor of that of a war president, Zelensky has wasted no time in his intention to deepen liberal reforms and the privatization of all kinds of assets and services to leave them in the hands of international capital. Before the start of the Russian intervention, it was already known that Ukraine planned to leave the construction of the Kiev ring road, with a starting project significantly more expensive than the similar work carried out in Minsk, in the hands of the Bechtel company, an American complex with important historical ties to the State Department and known, for example, for having tried to privatize water, including rainwater, in Cochabamba in Bolivia.

The start of a much broader and harsher war than the one that has been waged in the country since 2014 has not meant a change of plans. Western consensus on Ukraine's stance in this war on the right side of history It has provided Kiev managers with a constant and generous flow of financing, partly in non-refundable transfers and donations and partly in the form of credits that Ukraine will hardly be able to repay, if it intends to. This unconditional political support has allowed Zelensky's team to propose and approve a whole series of legislative packages that seek to deepen two fundamental economic aspects: privatization and the reduction of social rights. The state of emergency that war entails, with the prohibition of political acts, and the virtual disappearance of all existing opposition have made it possible to approve, for example, measures to restrict labor rights, which in practice leave a large part of the working class at the mercy of companies and employers.

With the certainty of having international credits, Ukraine has not worried about the counterparts that these loans imply in the form of adjustments and strong social cuts. Already with Poroshenko, but even more so with Zelensky, Ukraine has always been ready to meet these demands and go even further. The naivety of certain Western media has led to criticism, for example, of the demands for reformsimplied by loans from the European Union. Without needing to worry about reorganizing to favor the war economy, which is being financed from abroad, Zelensky's team continues to take steps to create the ultra-liberal economic system that he always wanted to create. And for this, the participation of large foreign capital, fundamentally from the United States, is essential. A few months ago, Zelensky was meeting with the CEO of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, to coordinate the future reconstruction of Ukraine and with Goldman Saachs to present Ukraine as a future opportunity for investors. Privatization and sale of the country's assets abroad have always been the norm, hence Zelensky fought to get the moratorium on the sale of agricultural land to foreign buyers lifted. Now, with destruction as his showcase, Zelensky works to present the country as an asset to be acquired cheaply for future profit.

With the land, construction and financial sectors already set to be left in the hands of select international corporations and evidently liked by whoever is pouring the most money into ensuring Ukraine doesn't lose this war, Zelensky's team is looking for Western allies as well. in the gas sector. In the false hope of being or having the potential to replace Russian gas in the European market, the Ukrainian national company, Naftogaz, has recently met with representatives of ExxonMobil, Halliburton and Chevron in search of international investment. The role of these companies in countries controlled by the United States supports the performance that they would probably have in Ukraine. However, any side effect is acceptable to achieve the goal of having more Western presence in the country,

That seems to be the real objective of Ukraine's political action throughout this war. With the country's viability guaranteed with the defense of Kiev, the survival of government and state structures, and control of both its main ports and its western borders, Zelensky's team seeks to use the war to create a new Ukraine: more nationalist, firmly separated from Russia, anti-Russian, but, above all, ultra-liberal and little by little sold out to US capital. In that sense, and regardless of the current losses and possible territorial gains, Ukraine is achieving what it set out to do. In this scenario, the death of thousands of civilians and soldiers, the destruction of entire cities or even the loss of certain regions of lesser interest -as is the case of Donbass, whose industry is not in the interest of kyiv, nor is its population - are only the lesser evil, collateral damage in search of a more important objective. Winning the war is not only fulfilling military objectives, but is fundamentally fulfilling political objectives.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/05/07/27223/#more-27223

Google Translator

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img]https://f3b9m7v4.rocketcdn.me/wp-conten ... lletin.jpg[/img]

Poetry politics and war: Berlin Bulletin no. 210, May 3, 2023
By Victor Grossman (Posted May 04, 2023)

Democracy, History, Imperialism, Movements, WarEurope, Germany, Russia, UkraineCommentaryBerlin Bulletin, Featured
The great author Goethe once caricatured fellow Germans’ chatter:

On holidays there’s nothing I like better
Than talking about war and war’s display,
When in Turkey far away, People one another batter.


Substitute “Ukraine”—or Yemen, Sudan, Sahara, Syria, Palestine … and we are back in Today. But who today is Faust, and who Mephistopheles? I will look to that later on.

Earlier in the same famous play the words of other citizens apply even better—in Berlin:

No, the new mayor doesn’t suit me! … And what’s he done to help the town?…
As always it’s us who must obey, And pay more money down.


Berlin’s new mayor, just inaugurated, has had no time to suit or anger anybody. But the first Christian Democrat to lead this city-state since 2001 inspires few joyous hopes—and will probably want “more money down”. His victory was as suspenseful a drama as any on Goethe’s stage!

First a bungled city-state election had to be fully repeated. The conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) won the most votes, hence the most seats in the legislature, but lacked the necessary majority. The three parties who have ruled Berlin since 2017—Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and LINKE (Left) lost out, the SPD worst by far, yet if the three held together they still had enough to stay on top. But who would then be mayor? Franziska Giffey again, of the SPD? Attractive, always smiling, well-spoken but ever less popular as she leaned ever more rightward, she beat her rival, the Greens leader, after a cliff-hanging recount of the votes, by the skin of her teeth, (279,017 to 278,964—only 53 votes more!) But Giffey led. She could have pasted over past differences and rivalries, praised some thin improvements, and again embraced the Greens and the LINKE to remain Berlin’s mayor.

But then she chose not to! Amazing almost everyone, she switched horses, shoving her shaky Green and LINKE partners onto the opposition benches and aligning instead with the former opponents, accepting the CDU boss as mayor and, for herself, the second-best deputy mayor job plus a cabinet post as economics minister (called Senator here). Still smiling, she told audiences how these old foes, her SPD and the CDU, would now join hands and put Berlin on a new path of happiness and contentment. The new mayor, Kai Wegner, almost fully bald, almost fully unknown, but quite fully conservative, would now win the key job of top man in Germany’s capital and biggest city.

This astonishing turn-around faced two hurdles. SPD rules required approval by the membership, and many, especially members of the affiliated “Young Socialists,” saw this deal as a betrayal of values they still held. How would they vote?

Again a cliff-hanger. After all mailed-in ballots were counted, Giffey and the party officialdom had squeaked through with a meager 54% approval vote. Her smile began to look a little forced.

The last hurdle: The secret ballot vote of approval by the city legislature. 80 “Ja” votes were needed. The two supporting parties, CDU and SPD, had 86 deputies—more than enough. But when the colored ballots were counted—only 71 were in favor, nine short. Which ones voted against their own party? What a scandal! The leaders hustled around, putting pressure on presumed doubters—most likely SPD deputies who had opposed the whole deal. A second vote followed—and with 79 Ja-votes they were still one short of the needed number. This had never ever happened before! Giffey, Kai Wegner, yes, Berlin, too, were butts of ridicule in all Germany. For five bitter hours the legal experts consulted and who knows how many wrists were twisted or juicy offers made? There seemed no choice but to make at least one more attempt. This time the magic number 86 was achieved—just as many as the two parties had delegates! So the two were sworn in, Giffey with no trace of her happy smile, Wegner with as glum a scowl as was ever been seen on a winner’s face as he finally pledged, muttering the customary “With the help of God”. They may need divine help last the course until the next election, not always so certain in European systems.

Incredibly, to make things even worse, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) claimed that some of its deputies had voted “Ja”. If true, then some renegades, SPD (or CDU?) had voted against their own leader, to the end, and the new city government rested on far-right support, a strict taboo! Wegner quickly labeled this claim a lie, meant to sow discord. But balloting had been secret!

The new Berlin cabinet, mostly inexperienced newcomers, now face the same problems as their predecessors: integrating immigrants (now often Ukrainians), vehicle speed limits, the number and width of new bicycle lanes, a lack of teachers, especially in kindergartens, ecology activists blocking highways by gluing their hands to the pavement, food prices out of reach for modest-salary homes, overcrowded free food pantries, and worst of all, soaring rent prices and lack of affordable housing. Franziska Giffey, always comfy with the gents from big real estate companies, will find common ground with Mayor Wegner, while desperate home-seekers may feel less cozy. The LINKE, like the Greens in the chilly unrewarding opposition could use that position well if they try; it was in coalitions, like in Berlin, that they lost support and votes by becoming part of the “Establishment”.

Many of these questions are also national. A governing trio still rules: SPD, Greens, but instead of an occasionally troublesome LINKE a constantly troublesome Free Democratic Party (FDP). The SPD must try to win back its traditional working-class support, the Greens hope to hold onto ties with intellectuals, professionals and young ecology backers, despite multiplying compromises. But the Free Democrats pull unashamedly toward the right, oppose money for children’s aid or help for the poorest, but also say “Nein“ to tax increases on the wealthy or super-wealthy. The CDU, with similar policies, is salivating about collapsing the trio by pulling the FDP out, then taking over, like in Berlin.

Despite all maneuvers, one glue holds them all together; continuing the war in Ukraine. SPD, CDU, FDP, Greens all agree; Russia must be defeated, Zelenskiy must win, with ever more tanks, howitzers, artillery, drones, aircraft and whatever else he demands. A number of somewhat reluctant people in the SPD—including Chancellor Scholz—have been forced into line, a line dictated in Washington and most vociferously voiced by the Greens, with Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in the forefront, waving the troops on (but not getting too close to the battlefront; let the Ukrainians do the dying!)

The fearful destruction, the displacement of families, above all the killing and maiming must be deplored, condemned and brought to an end. But the underlying reasons for this terrible war, concealed in the media, must also be mercilessly examined, regardless of well-orchestrated accusations of “Putin-friendship” or “left-over allegiance to a past Soviet Russia”.

As I see it, two pro-war factors are basic. The fossil fuels lobby in the USA, immensely guilty of knowingly heating up the world and concealing its giant crimes with lies, feared any European coexistence, economic or otherwise, which was based on trade or above all, on Russian gas and oil, thus lessening its influence and threatening its huge super-profits. Many conflicts have centered on Saudi, Syrian, Iraqi or Libyan oil. I fear it again played a big role, symbolized by the years of U.S. pressure to prevent the Baltic pipelines. An almost total media effort to ignore Seymour Hersh’s detailed analysis of their destruction is good for laughs, including the very tardy, very ridiculous attempt to blame it on a small yacht rented by mysterious non-Zelenskiy Ukrainians. When that was shown to be impossible dead silence returned—until a sudden Scandinavian recollection of allegedly seeing a Russian ship seen in that area six months ago. The name Hersh remains strangely taboo.

Only a few people dared recall that it was Joe Biden, in February 2022, who clearly warned that if Russia attacked Ukraine “then there will … no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” Asked how, since the project is in German control, Biden said: “I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.”

An 8-month media silence on the obvious pressure exerted on Amnesty International to retract its report that Ukraine and Russia both were responsible for civilians’ deaths was one more little sample of how the media seems to be directed by some invisible hands, just like in a marionette theater, certainly in Russia—but not only there. (And what have you read or seen lately about Assange, or Mumia Abu-Jamal?)

Washington’s pressure to break Russian economic ties with Europe, especially Germany, its main center, became all-powerful when the Ukraine war began. But is there another very vital reason?

The USA has opposed Russia since the Bolshevik revolution, when they sent in 13,000 troops in 1918 in a vain effort to strangle the hated system in its cradle. After a brief World War Two interruption, NATO, in 1949, became the main force to stop its spread and defeat it. This was accomplished after 1990. With its downfall it would seem that NATO had become superfluous. But it wasn’t.

On Feb. 9, 1990 Secretary of State Baker said that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” A day later Foreign Minister Genscher declared for Germany that NATO “would not be extended eastward.“ Some historians unsurprisingly raise doubts about those pledges, maintaining they referred only to East Germany or were limited in time. Only later did Robert Gates, a CIA director, admit that the Russians had been “misled.” Whatever the facts, the country-by-country advance of a highly militarized NATO membership meant undeniably that while Leningrad was 1200 miles from NATO’s armed edge in 1990, St. Petersburg is less than 100 miles from armed, hostile NATO-Estonia.

The old diplomat George Kennan, who had launched America’s Cold War “containment” strategy, warned in 1997 that this eastward expansion might become “the most fateful error of U.S. policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

His voice was not heeded. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a Congress-financed CIA sibling with less cloak-and-dagger methods, indicated U.S. policy in its 2013 “Resource Summary”:

The NED “has been a proud partner of Ukraine’s civil society groups, media outlets, and human rights defenders since 1989 … The objective of the Endowment is helping new democracies to succeed. For Eastern and Southeastern Europe, this goal is best met through these countries’ accession to the European Union and NATO… In the Europe region, the 2013 priority countries will include Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Kosovo.”

But when I read about “helping new democracies to succeed” I cannot help but recall earlier samples of it, and the shape of freedom, democracy, or a “rule of order” when the CIA, NED, U.S. Army or its surrogates overthrew fairly elected governments and resulting in murderous dictatorships or chaos: in Guatemala, Iran, Haiti, Brazil, Chile, Congo, Burkina Faso and not a few more!

Yes, the Russian invasion is also murderous and tragic. But hardly unexpected; well before it began the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace had warned:

“It’s important to understand that Moscow’s demands of the United States and NATO are in fact the strategic goals of Russian policy in Europe. Their aim is not to restore the Soviet Union, as some suggest. Rather, the idea is to reframe security in Europe—particularly in Europe’s east—as a contractual relationship between the two principal strategic actors in the region, Russia and the United States/NATO… This is regarded as a vital national security interest. If Russia cannot achieve its goal by diplomatic means, it will need to resort to other tools and methods…Russian officials have said that if the talks fail, Moscow will take military-technical and even military measures…

Having what would amount to an unsinkable aircraft carrier controlled by the United States on Moscow’s doorstep, on hostile territory, even if Ukraine is not officially part of NATO, would be far more serious than the Baltic countries’ NATO membership. This isn’t a full-fledged threat just yet, but it certainly could become one, and what happens then?

Another commentator used (or borrowed) the same analogy:

If Ukraine is turned into an unsinkable aircraft carrier anchored on Russia’s border under American control a few hundred miles from Moscow, it would be no more acceptable to the Kremlin than the other unsinkable aircraft carrier—Cuba—was to the White House almost sixty years ago.

Is it possible that Russia—or Putin—was alarmed last year to read reports like this:

Over 2,000 forces and 30 ships are taking part in exercise Breeze 2021 in the Black Sea. The Bulgarian-led maritime exercise, which began on 12 July … involves forces from 14 NATO Allies and partners—Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the USA. The exercise aims to … strengthen NATO’s readiness … ‘The Alliance remains strongly committed to Black Sea security,’ said Deputy Spokesperson Cazalet.

Or to see a photo taken during NATO’s annual “GlobalThunder exercise” showing a soldier loading up a B-52 with (as yet) unarmed cruise missiles. Twelve can fit under the wings; each bomber could deliver 1.8 Megatons of explosive power, the equivalent of 120 Hiroshima bombs.

And to learn that, in another annual nuclear exercise known as Steadfast Noon “more than 50 aircraft practice NATO’s nuclear strike mission … There are currently an estimated 150 B61 bombs deployed at six bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Turkey.”

A broad hint as to motives behind such activities was offered in a new book by John Bolton, once USA ambassador to the United Nations and National Security Adviser to Donald Trump:

After Ukraine wins its war with Russia, we must aim to split the Russia-China axis. Moscow’s defeat could unseat Mr. Putin’s regime. What comes next is a government of unknowable composition. New Russian leaders may or may not look to the West rather than Beijing, and might be so weak that the Russian Federation’s fragmentation, especially east of the Urals, isn’t inconceivable.

Do such ideas differ from those of current political leaders in Washington (and Berlin), aimed at prolonging the war—to the joy of Lockheed-Martin and Northrup-Grumman—but also at recapturing the sole position of leadership and power claimed by post-war USA since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is world hegemony. Is that behind many fine words about freedom and democracy, about opposing authoritarianism and brutality while ignoring the most likely results: Russia under a Yeltsin or, worse yet, what such liberation brought to Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Congo?

Nothing excuses the inflicting of killing and destruction on another country—with one possible single exception: self-defense. While condemning Putin’s frightful and deathly decision of February 24th a cool examination cannot dismiss the question: Were fears of such a fate—and a belief in the need for “preventive self-defense”—its basic motivation, and not a wish to “rebuild an empire”? Was he recalling the invasions of 1812, 1918, and, most horrifying, 1941?

A nasty side-effect of the Ukraine war: People on the left in many countries have been split sharply, not only about who to blame—Putin, Russia, NATO, the USA, or perhaps Zelensky—but on what course to support and march for. On the right—or center—important people have made their decision, as described by Steven Erlanger in the NY Times (April 17, 2023):

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the costliest conflict in Europe since World War II, has propelled NATO into a full-throttled effort to make itself again into the capable, war-fighting alliance it had been during the Cold War… more troops based permanently along the Russian border, more integration of American and allied war plans, more military spending …

NATO now has deployed a battalion of multinational troops to eight countries along the eastern border with Russia. It is detailing how to enlarge those forces to brigade strength in those frontline states to enhance deterrence and be able to push back invading forces from the start. And it is also tasking thousands more forces, in case of war, to move quickly in support, with newly detailed plans for mobility and logistics and stiffer requirements for readiness…

Previously, the annual exercises of NATO’s nuclear forces, known as Steadfast Noon, were kept quiet. But last year, after Russia’s invasion, the exercise went ahead openly. It was important, a NATO official said, to show Moscow that the alliance wasn’t deterred by nuclear threats.

Mr. Putin has long complained about NATO encirclement and encroachment. But his invasion of Ukraine provoked the alliance to shed remaining inhibitions about increased numbers of Western troops all along NATO’s border with Russia.


For me, such talk borders on insanity! Regardless of all disputes about blame or aim, for people on the left or for anyone, left, right or center, who is fearful of such developments, and the growing danger of atomic incidents or accidents that can lead to the annihilation of all of us, it seems to me there can be only one conclusion.

Continuing the war until a final decisive victory for Ukraine, demanded by so many politicians and so much of the media, is basically impossible. Russia, if it sees itself threatened in its existence as an independent nation, would assuredly with atomic weapons. And a threat of a defeat of the Ukraine would lead either to a long-lasting war of attrition at the cost of multitudes of lives, Ukrainian but also Russian, or to that same atomic Armageddon.

The only real alternative is to fight, internationally, for a cease-fire, for negotiations and some settlement, at least temporary, if possible permanent. This solution seemed possible at Minsk—but was throttled (most likely by the UK-USA). It seemed almost attainable with the unusual help of Israel’s Naftali Bennett and then Turkey’s Recep Erdogan. Both Lula of Brazil and Xi Jinping of China have made proposals and will hopefully continue pushing for them. Pressure—on Putin, Biden, on anyone involved in this war—must be increased in every possible way, even when the results are often disappointing. I took heart at the huge enthusiasm for peace at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in February, with perhaps 50,000. And I recall the movement against the Vietnam war which started off with “small bunches of hippies!” There must be a continuing pressure—not to win the war but to win peace—the overwhelming issue of our day and perhaps our lifetime.

This issue is also crucial for the shaky current and future status within the LINKE party in Germany. But I have dealt so long with the Ukraine that I must postpone the matter—and other matters—to my next Berlin Bulletin. Perhaps, to recall Goethe, I have talked too much about mayors—and far-off wars. But as to who, if anyone, plays Mephistopheles, I shall leave that to you.

https://mronline.org/2023/05/04/poetry- ... ay-3-2023/

None of this will happen before a few shoes drop in the next 60 days: the Ukrainian offensive and the inevitable Russian counter-offensive. Then the dust will settle.

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'Nearly A Third Of The World Economy Is Now Subject To Sanctions'
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) just published a study about:

The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions.

The results are as any observer of such acts would expect. Sanctions are used too broadly. They hardly ever serve their supposed original purpose and do not reach their aims. They hurt the poor more than the supposedly targeted leaders of this or that country.

These numbers though are astonishing:

Over the past six decades, there has been significant growth in the use of economic sanctions by Western powers and international organizations. Less than 4 percent of countries were subject to sanctions imposed by the United States, European Union, or United Nations in the early 1960s; today, that share has risen to 27 percent. The magnitudes are similar when we consider their impact on the global economy: the share of world GDP produced in sanctioned countries rose from less than 4 percent to 29 percent in the same period. In other words, more than one fourth of countries and nearly a third of the world economy is now subject to sanctions by the UN or Western nations.

Under international law only sanction imposed by the United Nations' Security Council have legal standing. Sanctions by the U.S. or EU are under international law an illegal use of state instruments. The U.S. is using sanctions constantly to press under nations to do its bidding. Until the recent war in Ukraine the EU has used sanctions mostly to 'do something' because it had run out of ideas or diplomatic abilities.

The recent sanctions on Russia proved to be hurting the Russians much less than they are hurting the people living in the European Union. It was a catastrophic mistake by EU leaders to preemptively agree to the sanctions the U.S. had been pushing for before Russia entered the civil war in Ukraine on the side of its Ukrainian brethren. The consequences had obviously not been gamed out and thought through.

When nearly one third of the world economy is under sanctions the other two-third are losing out too. It would therefore make sense for everyone to abolish all sanctions that have not been issued by the UNSC. Even UNSC sanctions should only be used sparsely and in a very narrowly targeted manner. Sanctions that hit the whole economy of a country are inhuman and should be prohibited.

Posted by b on May 5, 2023 at 15:31 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/05/n ... l#comments

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Assassination attempt on Prilepin
May 6, 12:38

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An attempt was made on the life of Zakhar Prilepin in Nizhny Novgorod. They blew up the car.

1. Prilepin was seriously wounded. He is being helped.
2. His guard with the call sign "Evil" died.
3. The attack was carried out in a village in the Nizhny Novgorod region.
4. The IED was planted under the bottom of Prilepin's car.
5. Prilepin was driving from the LDNR and apparently his car was being driven.

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I remind you that the SBU and the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense have not yet been recognized as terrorist organizations in Russia.

Necessary.

1. Remove the moratorium on the death penalty for terrorism and treason.
2. Recognize the SBU and the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense as terrorist organizations, including so that persons cooperating with them can fall under paragraph No. 1.
3. Recreate the structure of SMERSH with the broadest powers.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8337603.html

Google Translator

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Attack on the Kremlin: Acceleration in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 5, 2023
Yoselina Guevara López

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The Russian presidential press service reported on Wednesday, May 3, that “the Kiev regime attempted to attack the Kremlin residence using two drones”, an action carried out on the night of May 2. The Russian authorities pointed out that “the drones were deactivated” by the security systems of the special forces, and added that “the fragments that fell in the area of the presidential residence did not cause any casualties or material damage”. There is no doubt that this attack, although failed, may cause a sudden change in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Kiev in the eye of the hurricane

According to the official Russian information the drones used in the attack were immediately identified as Ukrainian, as they qualified the operation as “a planned terrorist act” and “an attempt on the life of President Vladimir Putin shortly before the Victory Day and the May 9 parade, which will be attended by important foreign guests”. However from Kiev they have officially denied their involvement in the night attack on the Kremlin and reiterated that “Ukraine’s actions are not aimed at attacking foreign territories”.

Evidently these statements are useless in the face of the track record that Kiev has been building up, and its incursions into Russian territory have been documented. For example, in December 2022, three Russian servicemen were killed when they shot down a Ukrainian drone aimed at attacking a military airfield in Saratov Oblast, Russian territory. But this is one of the many incursions of Ukrainian drones into the space of the Russian Federation. Likewise, the constant threats from Ukraine to take the war to Russian territory, the explosion of the Crimean Bridge, in addition to the terrorist attacks in which the journalists Darya Dugina and Vlanden Tatarsky lost their lives; by virtue of which there are many indications that point to the Kiev regime as the perpetrator of this assassination attempt.

Despite not feeling any sympathy for the Ukrainian authorities, it may be possible that in fact they knew absolutely nothing about the attack in Moscow. It is public knowledge that high-ranking NATO professionals operate in Kiev, as well as intelligence services of the United States and other nations, whose orders are executed by Ukrainians without the Kiev government being informed. It is therefore implausible that the Americans and Western intelligence services on the ground were unaware of the Kremlin’s attack operation. To this must be added the worldwide calls in public opinion for the physical elimination of President Putin by any means and at any price, even if this assassination attempt is still an amateur operation to say the least.

False Flag

Trying to be objective, we must point out that there is also the hypothesis of a false flag operation executed by the Kremlin, even going as far as internal conspiracy. Such an attack could be used to accelerate the outcome of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in order to finally strike directly at the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian leadership. It is curious that President Putin was not in the Kremlin at the time of the attack; his press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, stated that he was not in the residence.

Escalation or Peace in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict

On the other hand, the importance of this military action against the Kremlin is that it could justify a symmetrical retaliation such as the application of war measures never taken by the Russian Armed Forces during these first fourteen months of the special military operation in Ukraine. That is, the generalized attack on the centers of political decision-making in Kiev: the presidential office, the palaces of the ministries, the Verkhovna Rada (unicameral parliament) and the headquarters of the Ukrainian intelligence services. But from another, more positive point of view, it could be a justification for the West to remove Zelensky from the game, for having violated the code of chivalry, thus creating more favorable conditions for the end of hostilities and the beginning of peace negotiations, of which even China has already taken firm steps in this direction. The chessboard is still open, we will see how the pieces move in the coming days.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/05/ ... -conflict/

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Russia to Respond With Concrete Measures to the Drone Attacks

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Russian FM Sergei Lavrov. | Photo: Twitter/ @upholdreality

Published 5 May 2023 (21 hours 36 minutes ago)

"It's pretty clear that the Kiev terrorists couldn't have committed it without the knowledge of their owners," Russian FM Lavrov said.


On Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov assured that his country will respond with concrete measures to the drone attacks against the Kremlin, which could not have happened without the knowledge of the United States.

"I wouldn't even think of the name or the terms here. This was clearly a hostile act. It's pretty clear that the Kiev terrorists couldn't have committed it without the knowledge of their owners. We will respond not by talking about whether or not this is ‘casus belli,’ but by concrete action," Lavrov said at the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

The diplomat also confirmed that Russia will not stop its special military operation in the Donbas since what is at stake are the problems caused by the U.S. and its allies.

"Everyone understands the geopolitical nature of what is happening. Everyone understands that without solving the main geopolitical problem, which is the desire of the West to maintain its hegemony and dictate to everyone its will, it is impossible to solve any crisis, be it in Ukraine or in other parts of the world," he stressed.


Lavrov referred to statements by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made after the drone attacks on the Kremlin. According to Russian diplomat, Blinken expressed that the U.S. "would not dictate to Ukraine the methods by which it defends its sovereignty."

"I guess that says it all,” Lavrov stressed, adding that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his team "are doing everything possible, both in the media space and in their practical steps, so that no self-respecting country wants to communicate with them."

On Wednesday, Russian security forces repelled an attempted drone attack on the Kremlin. Moscow accused Ukraine of having carried out this terrorist act and Washington of being an accomplice of the Zelensky regime.

On Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov assured that his country will respond with concrete measures to the drone attacks against the Kremlin, which could not have happened without the knowledge of the United States. RELATED: "I wouldn't even think of the name or the terms here. This was clearly a hostile act. It's pretty clear that the Kiev terrorists couldn't have committed it without the knowledge of their owners. We won't respond by talking about casus belli; we will respond with concrete actions." , said Lavrov, who is participating in the meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). He also confirmed that Russia will not stop its special military operation in the Donbas since what is at stake are the problems caused by the actions of the US and its allies. "Everyone understands the geopolitical nature of what is happening. Everyone understands that without solving the main geopolitical problem, which is the desire of the West to maintain its hegemony and dictate to everyone its will, it is impossible to solve any crisis, be it in Ukraine or in other parts of the world", he stressed. Tweet Lavrov referred to statements by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made after the drone attacks on the Kremlin. According to Russian FM, Blinken expressed that the US would not dictate to Ukraine the methods to defend its sovereignty. The Russian diplomat indicated that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his team "are doing everything possible, both in the media space and in their practical steps, so that no self-respecting country wants to communicate with them." On Wednesday, Russian security forces repelled an attempted drone attack on the Kremlin. Moscow accused Ukraine of having carried out this terrorist act and Washington of being an accomplice of the Zelensky regime.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Rus ... -0012.html

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From Cassad's Telegram account:

Colonelcassad
9:04
Ramzan Kadyrov said that the Akhmat special forces units are ready to move to Artemovsk to replace the positions of the Wagner PMC units.

(and the Ukes thought they were in trouble before...)

***

Colonelcassad
0:38
On the eve of the day of the ground forces of Ukraine, the Russian military sent "flowers" to the main forge of personnel of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, namely the Odessa National Academy of Ground Forces.

On the night of May 4, the Russian Geran UAVs attacked the NASV located in the city of Odessa, destroying more than 50 Ukrainian military and foreign advisers, and wounding up to 300 military personnel.

To assist the wounded foreign advisers, an entire floor of the city hospital was blocked, and SBU officers took a non-disclosure agreement from doctors.

@razved_dozor

***

Colonelcassad
❗️The situation in the Soledar direction
as of 12:00 on May 6, 2023

Today, the head of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin , said that there were 2.5 km left to go, and the city would be taken. According to him, the enemy pulls up from 400 to 600 people daily due to heavy losses .

🔻In Bakhmut, assault detachments of PMC "Wagner" are fighting along the street of the Liberators of Donbass . To the northwest, Russian units managed to break through the defenses along Pobedy and Tolbukhin streets .

▪️Units of the 3rd battalion of the 93rd brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are mining areas along the line of contact with anti-personnel mines MON-50. Russian artillerymen and aviation strike at fortified areas in low-rise buildings.

🔻One of the units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was withdrawn from Bakhmut due to huge losses. The personnel was sent to Gostomel for resupply via Pavlograd . An unidentified formation from Kramatorsk is expected to replace it .

▪️The command of 93 mechanized and 5 assault brigades rotated their subordinates at the Krasnoe-Khromovo line . The units withdrawn from the battles were sent to training grounds in Slavyansk and 15 km west of Bakhmut.

https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin

Google Translator

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

Ukraine SitRep: Bakhmut - Prigozhin - Counteroffensive
Some 10% of Bakhmut/Aryomovsk, with two distinct areas, are still in Ukrainian hands.

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The northern area consists of single dwellings amongst gardens and trees. The southern area is full of high-rises with little green in between.

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Yesterday the head of the Wagner mercenaries Yevgeny Prigozhin published a video. Standing in front of a number of dead corpses he publicly attacked the Russian minister of defense over an alleged lack of ammunition. He claimed that it had caused those casualties. A day before those troops had tried to further penetrate the upper area and got caught in an ambush. Bad for them but not a cause of serious concern.

'Western' media like to see such Prigozhin tirades as a sign of infighting within the Russian military apparatus. I have long stopped to listen to Prigozhin. Militarily the Wagner troops are just a part of the Russian army and under its command. Prigozhin's concern is marketing for his Wagner enterprise and for the large share he receives from the monthly bill his company sends to the Russian Ministry of Defense. Politically there is no roll for him.

That his claims of lack of ammunition had been just a show was proven some 12 hours after he published his video.

Here are drone shots of the Bakhmut high-rises still in Ukrainian hands after the received a visit by incendiary missiles.

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The same view in infrared. The white spots are burning hot.

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Video of the attack can be seen here and here.

So there is your lack of ammunition. Anything that was outside of the high-rises, trucks, soldiers and supplies, was likely destroyed.

Prigozhin troops have been in the fight for quite some time. They need some rest and will soon move out. The Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov admonished Prigozhin for his public stunt. If needed his troops will replace the Wagners and finish the Bakhmut fight. Meanwhile the attention will move to a different front.

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The long announced Ukrainian counter-offensive will probably start on Victory Day, May 9. One axis of the attack will be in the Zaporizhia region towards south in an attempt to reach the sea. But the first important aim is likely the retaking of the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant near the city of Enerhodar south of the Dnieper basin. Its economic importance to Ukraine is immense as it can easily sell the electricity the six reactors generate to Europe. There is little other income the Ukraine still has.

The Russian military has asked civilians in 17 towns within 50 kilometer (30 miles) of the current frontline to evacuate the area. The Russian army has also prepared defense lines and moved reserves to the south of the region.

The success of the Ukrainians will depend on the gadgets its 'western' supporters have supplied it with. We may see some unexpected weapons or longer range missiles in the field. There is likely also some new bridging equipment that will help with crossing the Dnieper in the Kherson region for a secondary axis. A third axis, or perhaps a diversion, in the northeast towards Soledar is also possible.

The first days of the new fight will be confusing with lots of false claims and propaganda from both sides. We will all have to sit back and wait until the fog of war rises enough to paint a picture of the new situation.

Posted by b on May 6, 2023 at 16:38 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/05/u ... .html#more
"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 May 07, 2023 10:13 pm

Prigozhin on the reasons for the withdrawal of PMC "Wagner" from Artemovsk
May 7, 8:11 am

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Prigozhin on the reasons for the withdrawal of PMC "Wagner" from Artemovsk

In order to exclude rumors, I answer the main questions that the society has for me and for Wagner PMC.

I. What did Wagner PMC do in Bakhmut? Why was Bakhmut needed?

1. PMC "Wagner" entered the territory of the settlement of Pervomaiskoye on March 19, 2022, due to the fact that the Russian Armed Forces could not cope with the assigned tasks, advance the front in a westerly direction and break through the defense of the Armed Forces of Ukraine along the line of 2014.

2. PMC "Wagner" successfully coped with the task of breaking through the fortified defense area of ​​the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the first point of which was the settlement of Popasnaya, by May 9, 2022. The presence of these fortified areas was not included in the plans of the NWO. We were supposed to take Popasnaya by May 14-15, but we balked at doing it according to tradition on Victory Day.

3. After the flight of the units of the RF Ministry of Defense from the Kherson, Nikolaev, Kharkiv and Luhansk regions (Krasny Liman, Kupyansk, Izyum), the units of the PMC "Wagner" held back the onslaught of the enemy on the front with a length of 148 km, while in a day they set up positions on a part of the front with a length of 38 km.

4. On October 8, 2022, together with General of the Army Sergei Surovikin, it was decided to launch the operation "Bakhmut meat grinder" - an assault on the village of Bakhmut in order to provoke Vladimir Zelensky to throw in as many forces as possible to hold Bamkhut. In Bakhmut, we grinded APU, hence the name - “Bakhmut meat grinder”.

5. The purpose of the operation "Bakhmut meat grinder" was to enable the units of the Russian army to take advantageous defense lines, mobilize, re-equip, train personnel and increase their combat potential.

6. The period of the operation, together with Army General S. Surovikin, was a period of 6 months (conditionally until April 8, 2023).

7. The settlement of Bakhmut has no strategic importance for further advancement to the west.

8. Of strategic importance for the advancement of the Russian army is the capture of the settlements of Kramatorsk, Slavyansk, Druzhkovka, Konstantinovka - the “Donbas Ring”, to the west of which flat territories open up, on which it is difficult for the Armed Forces of Ukraine to maintain defense in the event of an offensive by superior forces of the Russian army.

II. Why did “shell hunger” arise?

9. Against the backdrop of the promotion of PMC "Wagner", which occupied 1500 sq. km and 71 settlements, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation suffered setbacks: defeats on the fronts, lack of control, scandals with mobilization, problems with supplies, discipline, and so on.

10. To compensate for their failures, due to envy, when trying to intrigue, the Ministry of Defense decided to start countering the Wagner PMC:

- the recruitment of volunteers among prisoners was prohibited;

- the supply of weapons has been stopped;

- reduced the supply of ammunition to 30% of applications (from May 2023 - up to 10%).

11. The Ministry of Defense also created other problems:

- the issuance of well-deserved orders and medals to the dead ceased;

- PMC "Wagner" was denied the possibility of air flights for the transfer of personnel from Africa to the NVO zone;

- persons from the Ministry of Defense interacting with PMC "Wagner" were forbidden to communicate with units of PMC "Wagner";

– special connection is disabled;

- Aircraft for the operational transfer of ammunition were denied.

12. Despite the opposition of the Ministry of Defense, Wagner PMC continued to successfully conduct military operations.

13. In order to ensure a complete "shell blockade", which does not consist in an artificial shortage of shells, but in a complete cessation of supplies, Colonel General Mikhail Mizintsev was fired.

14. PMC "Wagner" has the opportunity to acquire shells in other ways, not from the stocks of the Russian army. However, PMC Wagner, together with foreign partners, was refused assistance in facilitating its own supplies and production of ammunition.

III. Why is Wagner PMC leaving Bakhmut?

15. PMC "Wagner" has been fighting for almost 400 days, since March 19, 2022. After conducting military operations (for which, according to all current military standards, 25 days are allotted), practically all units are withdrawn for reorganization, retraining and rest.

16. For seven months of the "Bakhmut meat grinder" PMC "Wagner" has lost its combat potential. The reason for this was the restrictions on the reception of personnel, created in February 2023, the lack of the required amount of weapons, the lack of the required amount of ammunition (artificially created "shell hunger").

17. It should be noted that the operation "Bakhmut meat grinder" was designed mainly not to take the settlement of Bakhmut, but to grind the units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and organize a respite for the Russian army to restore combat capability.

18. The Bakhmut meat grinder has fully completed its task.

19. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on March 7, 2023 that taking control of Bakhmut would pave the way for a further offensive deep into the defenses of the Ukrainian army. He called Bakhmut an important center of defense for Ukrainian troops in the Donbass. In the direction of Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, the operational space is already open, and the remainder of 2.42 sq. km does not matter for operational space.

IV. What will Wagner PMC do after leaving Bakhmut?

20. After leaving Bakhmut, Wagner PMC will go to training camps to restore combat capability, retrain units, and will stay there until the threat to Russia and Russian citizens disappears as part of this military operation. In the event of a threat, PMC "Wagner" will certainly immediately stand up for the defense of their homeland.

21. Most of the fighters and commanders joined the Wagner PMC, leaving the units of the Ministry of Defense, as they completely lost confidence in them. Therefore, the divisions of PMC "Wagner" made a decision on the impossibility of joining the structures of the Ministry of Defense. It should also be noted that Wagner PMC is a team of like-minded people. Most "Wagnerians" would rather go on a well-deserved rest than go to other units. PMC "Wagner" is not a place of service, it is a vocation and philosophy.

V. How is the ammunition rate calculated?

(All figures are somewhat distorted, but the general meaning and proportions are observed)

22. So, how is the calculation of ammunition done. We take as a basis the conditional grouping of PMC "Wagner" in 30 thousand people on combat missions in Bakhmut.

- Opposite PMC "Wagner" there is an enemy in the amount of about 80 thousand people. And directly in the Bakhmut agglomeration there are about 35 thousand enemy people.

- When attacked, the standard ratio of forces according to the standards should be 3: 1. That is, for every defender, there are three attackers.

– With an enemy grouping of 35 thousand people and the number of weapons [X], the Wagner PMC should be 105 thousand people, and the number of weapons [X] x 3. – Thus, the

combat potential of the Wagner PMC should exceed three times the enemy’s potential .

- In fact, the combat potential of PMC "Wagner" is less than the combat potential of the enemy by 1.2-2 times (that is, 3.6-6 times less than required for offensive operations).

- Despite the lack of numbers of units, weapons and ammunition, PMC "Wagner" compensates for this lack of serious superiority in the level of organization, interaction and training.

23. PMC "Wagner" spends an average of 6 thousand shells per day. And he submits his applications, based on the required quantity, solely on the experience of previous days.

24. Until May 2023, the leadership of the Ministry of Defense signed from 10 to 30% of the requirements of the ammunition specified in the application, depending on the period. However, thanks to the actions of the responsible officers of the Ministry of Defense, we were able to receive them more than signed - namely, from 30 to 60% of the need.

25. Thus, on average, from October 2022 to May 2023, we received 38% of the requested requirement.

26. The same situation with weapons and military equipment: the supply of Wagner PMC in terms of tanks, artillery and armored vehicles amounted to 30-40% of the required amount for combat missions.

27. How to calculate the required amount of ammunition? There are many different options:

- First: from the experience of conducting combat operations, taking into account the number, including the missing tanks, artillery, armored vehicles and weapons for the previous period. So, in our opinion, this is the most practical option.

- Second: according to the norms determined by the Rules for firing and fire control, the consumption of ammunition for suppressing an enemy platoon stronghold is 180 shells per 1 hectare. The average length of the Wagner front, taking into account different periods, is 80 km. This is about 400 strongholds of the enemy. To suppress them, 180 x 400 are needed, that is, 72 thousand shells per day. And so every day.

- Third: to suppress one NATO mechanized division for a conditional operation (25 days), about 270 thousand calculated ammunition (152 mm) is needed, according to the methodology of operational-tactical calculations. One NATO division is 12 thousand people. 35 thousand is three divisions. Three divisions - 270 thousand times 3 (for suppression) - 810 thousand shells. We divide by 25 days - we get 32 ​​thousand shells per day for suppression.

28. I remind you: we asked for 6,000 shells a day, they signed us from 600 to 1,000 shells, and we received 1,5-2,000 shells a day.

29. For example, in order not to reveal secrets: 10 types of ammunition that were ordered for the first decade of May. Requested by PMC "Wagner" 45 thousand, signed for the issuance of 5800 shells.

30. Thanks to Colonel General Mizintsev for giving out a little more than they signed at the General Staff. Very little, but at least something. Since May 1, after his dismissal, they are no longer issued at all.

VI. How does the lack of ammunition affect sanitary losses?

31. To maintain combat effectiveness during a full-scale war, losses (“200s” and “300s”) of 10-12% in 25 days (the duration of a conditional military operation) are considered acceptable.

The arithmetic is very simple:

- If they give 18 thousand shells per day, the losses are 10%;

- If they give 6 thousand shells per day, the losses are 24%;

- If they give 2 thousand shells per day, the losses are 35% or more.

Nobody expects 10% of ammunition from the norm. In this case, the unit is doomed to death. Now we get 10%.

32. PMC "Wagner" according to military calculations should give 18 thousand shells per day. And there should be weapons [X] x 3. In this case, the losses would be 10-12% in a full-fledged war. The Wagner PMC had not [X] x 3, but [X] weapons, so we asked not 18, but 6 thousand shells. In this situation, our losses should have been 24%, with 6 thousand shells. But we were given 2,000 thanks to the efforts of the responsible generals and Mizintsev. Therefore, our calculated loss should have been 35% for every 25 days. That is, PMC "Wagner" for 6 months "Bakhmut meat grinder" was supposed to lose 200% of the personnel.

33. It should be noted that with a loss of 30%, the unit is considered not combat ready. We had to complete one combat mission (25 days): die and reformat, and so on 14 times in a row. Instead, we have been at war for 14 months in a row. This speaks of the insane effectiveness of Wagner PMC. These are standard calculations taught at the General Staff.

34. Of course, the losses, once again, thanks to the highest level of training, management and interaction, are lower than calculated. But PMC "Wagner" still suffered significant losses, and despite this, we are alive: interaction, control and morale have not been lost.

35. PMC "Wagner" is artificially brought to non-combat readiness due to the artificially created "shell hunger".

36. How do we survive? The answer is simple. Management, optimization, military tricks, interaction, immediate repair, restoration and modernization: both military equipment and personnel who, having been wounded, undergo a quick recovery course and again rush to perform combat missions. Because we are a monolithic team of like-minded people.

37. These qualities allowed us to grind about 50 thousand soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine killed and prevent the enemy’s counteroffensive until today along the entire front line.

VII. Where are the projectiles?

38. The Russian military industry has reached the volume of production of shells sufficient to provide in full about 5 such combat-ready formations as the Wagner PMC, with a front length of 120-150 km and a simultaneous offensive along all sectors of the front.

39. The volume of stockpiles of weapons and ammunition makes it possible to provide for everyone, including in standard quantities.

40. It is safe to say that two-thirds of the sanitary losses of PMC "Wagner" are caused exclusively by artificially created "shell hunger". These are tens of thousands of killed and wounded citizens of the Russian Federation who died and suffered severe injuries due to the artificially created “shell hunger”.

41. It must be borne in mind that many other units are also experiencing "shell hunger." It was assumed that if they received shells, they would share them with the Wagner PMC. Therefore, the termination of the activities of PMC "Wagner" will have a positive impact on other units and subunits, and will provide them with ammunition.

(c) Prigozhin

https://t.me/Prigozhin_hat/3267 - zinc

On the morning of May 7, the forces of PMC "Wagner" controlled 95% of Artemovsk. On May 10, they are relieved by the Akhmat special forces of Ramzan Kadyrov, who yesterday, in continuation of Prigozhin's letter to Shoigu, wrote an open letter to Putin asking him to approve the rotation of troops in Artemovsk.

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PS. The photo shows a burning quarter of high-rise buildings on the western outskirts of Artemovsk, where the last supporters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine still remain. The shelling was carried out with "lighters" from the MLRS "Grad."

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8338829.html

(I agree with 'b' on this guy, he's a blowhard and self-promoter. Obviously he has his uses so is tolerated. After this is over, we shall see. OTOH, he could be blowing smoke at the Ukes:"Please, please, please attack us...." )

"Wagner" will give ammunition

May 7, 13:54
Prigozhin said that PMC "Wagner" will start issuing ammunition. Surovikin will coordinate work with Wagner. Colonel-General Mizintsev will be responsible for this under the Wagner line.

Today we received a combat order, for the first time in all this time. The bottom line is the following - they promise to give us as much ammunition and weapons as we need to continue further actions, they swear to us that everything will be put up on the flank so that the enemy does not cut us off. We are told that we can act in Artemovsk as we see fit, and they give us Surovikin as a person who will make all decisions in the framework of the military operations of the Wagner PMC in cooperation with the Ministry of Defense. (c) Prigogine

Let's see
Well, Artemovsk, one way or another, needs to be cleaned up and see where to go next.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8339282.html

Drone attack on the Crimea and Sevastopol. 07.05.2023
May 7, 16:03

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At night, the Armed Forces of Ukraine tried to attack Crimea and Sevastopol using 22 UAVs. All drones were shot down by air defense or disabled by electronic warfare. One of the drones was able to land intact. It was a nice hunt.
The day before yesterday, the Armed Forces of Ukraine already tried to shell the Crimea from the Grom-2 OTRK - both missiles were shot down by air defense systems.

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https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8339802.html

Google Translator

**********

Taking the Capitalist Road Was the Wrong Choice For Ukraine, Says Ukraine Expert
By Natylie Baldwin - May 5, 2023 4

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[Source: cnn.com]

Renfrey Clarke is an Australian journalist. Throughout the 1990s he reported from Moscow for Green Left Weekly of Sydney. This past year, he published The Catastrophe of Ukrainian Capitalism: How Privatisation Dispossessed & Impoverished the Ukrainian People with Resistance Books.

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[Source: resistancebooks.com]

In April, I had an email exchange with Clarke. Below is the transcript.

Natylie Baldwin: You point out in the beginning of your book that Ukraine’s economy had significantly declined by 2018 from its position at the end of the Soviet era in 1990. Can you explain what Ukraine’s prospects looked like in 1990? And what did they look like just prior to Russia’s invasion?

Renfrey Clarke: In researching this book I found a 1992 Deutsche Bank study arguing that, of all the countries into which the USSR had just been divided, it was Ukraine that had the best prospects for success. To most Western observers at the time, that would have seemed indisputable.

Ukraine had been one of the most industrially developed parts of the Soviet Union. It was among the key centres of Soviet metallurgy, of the space industry and of aircraft production. It had some of the world’s richest farmland, and its population was well-educated even by Western European standards.

Add in privatisation and the free market, the assumption went, and within a few years Ukraine would be an economic powerhouse, its population enjoying first-world levels of prosperity.

Fast-forward to 2021, the last year before Russia’s “Special Military Operation,” and the picture in Ukraine was fundamentally different. The country had been drastically de-developed, with large, advanced industries (aerospace, car manufacturing, shipbuilding) essentially shut down.

World Bank figures show that in constant dollars, Ukraine’s 2021 Gross Domestic Product was down from the 1990 level by 38 per cent. If we use the most charitable measure, per capita GDP at Purchasing Price Parity, the decline was still 21 per cent. That last figure compares with a corresponding increase for the world as a whole of 75 per cent.

To make some specific international comparisons, in 2021 the per capita GDP of Ukraine was roughly equal to the figures for Paraguay, Guatemala and Indonesia.

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Street vendors in Kyiv. Manifestation of a depressed economy. [Source: sott.net]

What went wrong? Western analysts have tended to focus on the effects of holdovers from the Soviet era, and in more recent times, on the impacts of Russian policies and actions. My book takes these factors up, but it’s obvious to me that much deeper issues are involved.

In my view, the ultimate reasons for Ukraine’s catastrophe lie in the capitalist system itself, and especially, in the economic roles and functions that the “centre” of the developed capitalist world imposes on the system’s less-developed periphery.

Quite simply, for Ukraine to take the “capitalist road” was the wrong choice.

NB: It seems as though Ukraine went through a process similar to that in Russia in the 1990s, when a group of oligarchs emerged to control much of the country’s wealth and assets. Can you describe how that process occurred?

RC: As a social layer, the oligarchy in both Ukraine and Russia has its origins in the Soviet society of the later perestroika period, from about 1988. In my view, the oligarchy arose from the fusion of three more or less distinct currents that by the final perestroika years had all managed to accumulate significant private capital hoards. These currents were senior executives of large state firms; well-placed state figures, including politicians, bureaucrats, judges, and prosecutors; and lastly, the criminal underworld, the mafia.

A 1988 Law on Cooperatives allowed individuals to form and run small private firms. Many structures of this kind, only nominally cooperatives, were promptly set up by top executives of large state enterprises, who used them to stow funds that had been bled off illicitly from enterprise finances. By the time Ukraine became independent in 1991, many senior figures in state firms were substantial private capitalists as well.

The new owners of capital needed politicians to make laws in their favour, and bureaucrats to make administrative decisions that were to their advantage. The capitalists also needed judges to rule in their favour when there were disputes, and prosecutors to turn a blind eye when, as happened routinely, the entrepreneurs functioned outside the law. To perform all these services, the politicians and officials charged bribes, which allowed them to amass their own capital and, in many cases, to found their own businesses.

Finally, there were the criminal networks that had always operated within Soviet society, but that now found their prospects multiplied. In the last years of the USSR, the rule of law became weak or non-existent. This created huge opportunities not just for theft and fraud, but also for criminal stand-over men. If you were a business operator and needed a contract enforced, the way you did it was by hiring a group of “young men with thick necks.”

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Ukrainians protest corruption in their government. [Source: washingtonpost.com]

To stay in business, private firms needed their “roof,” the protection racketeers who would defend them against rival shake-down artists—for an outsized share of the enterprise profits. At times the “roof” would be provided by the police themselves, for an appropriate payment.

This criminal activity produced nothing, and stifled productive investment. But it was enormously lucrative, and gave a start to more than a few post-Soviet business empires. The steel magnate Rinat Akhmetov, for many years Ukraine’s richest oligarch, was a miner’s son who began his career as a lieutenant to a Donetsk crime boss.

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Rinat Akhmetov [Source: celebritynetworth123.com]
Within a few years from the late 1980s, the various streams of corrupt and criminal activity began merging into oligarchic clans centred on particular cities and economic sectors. When state enterprises began to be privatised in the 1990s, it was these clans that generally wound up with the assets.

I should say something about the business culture that arose from the last Soviet years, and that in Ukraine today remains sharply different from anything in the West. Few of the new business chiefs knew much about how capitalism was supposed to work, and the lessons in the business-school texts were mostly useless in any case.

The way you got rich was by paying bribes to tap into state revenues, or by cornering and liquidating value that had been created in the Soviet past. Asset ownership was exceedingly insecure—you never knew when you’d turn up at your office to find it full of the armed security guards of a business rival, who’d bribed a judge to permit a takeover. In these circumstances, productive investment was irrational behaviour.

NB: I’ve heard that one source of opposition to political decentralisation—which would appear to have been a possible solution to Ukraine’s divisions before the war—is that centralisation benefits the oligarchs. Do you think that’s true?

RC: There’s no simple answer here. Politically and administratively, Ukraine since independence has been a relatively centralised state. Provincial governors aren’t elected but are appointed from Kyiv. This has reflected fears in Kyiv of separatist trends arising in the regions. Here, obviously, we should have in mind the Donbas.

Despite being centralised, the Ukrainian state machine is quite weak. A great deal of real power lies with the regionally based oligarchic clans. Unlike the situation in Russia and Belarus, no single individual or oligarchic grouping has been able to achieve unrivalled dominance and curtail the power of the chronically warring business magnates. Ukraine has never had its Putin or Lukashenko.

The system in Ukraine can thus be described as a highly fluid oligarchic pluralism, with control over the government in Kyiv shifting periodically between unstable groupings of individuals and clans. On the whole, the oligarchs over the decades seem to have been content with this, since it has prevented the rise of a central authority able to discipline them and cut into their prerogatives.

NB: You discuss how the enforced economic separation between Ukraine and Russia has been detrimental to the Ukrainian economy. Can you explain why?

RC: Under Soviet central planning Russia and Ukraine formed a single economic expanse, and enterprises were often tightly integrated with customers and suppliers in the other republic. Indeed, Soviet planning had often provided for only one supplier of a particular good in a whole swathe of the USSR, meaning that cross-border trade was essential if whole chains of production were not to break down.

Understandably, Russia remained by far Ukraine’s largest trading partner throughout the first decades of Ukrainian independence. Despite problems such as erratic currency exchange rates, this trade had compelling advantages. Customs barriers were absent, and technical standards, inherited from the USSR, were mostly identical. Ways of doing business were familiar, and negotiations could be conducted conveniently in Russian.

Perhaps most critically important was another factor: The two countries were on broadly similar levels of technological development. Their labour productivity did not differ by much. Neither side was in danger of seeing whole industrial sectors wiped out by more sophisticated competitors based in the other country.

Nevertheless, one of the truisms of liberal discourse, both in Ukraine and in Western commentaries, was that the close economic ties with Russia were holding Ukraine back. There was said to be an urgent need for Ukraine to turn its back on Russia, identified with the Soviet past, and to open itself up to the West. Ukraine’s commerce with Russia, in this scenario, needed to be replaced by “deep and comprehensive free trade” with the European Union.

This controversy had wide-ranging ideological, political and even military ramifications. But to be brief, by 2014, opposition within Ukraine had been overcome and an Association Agreement with the EU had been signed. By 2016 trade between Ukraine and Russia had shrunk dramatically, to the point where it was much less than commerce with the EU.

The shift to integration with the West, however, did not bring Ukraine the promised surge of economic growth. After a severe slump in the aftermath of the Maidan events of 2014, Ukrainian GDP saw only a weak recovery between 2016 and 2021. Meanwhile, the country’s trade balance with the EU remained strongly negative. Integration with the West was doing far more for the West than for Ukraine.

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Victoria Nuland hands out cookies to protesters in Maidan Square during uprising. Integration with the West following the coup has been far better for Western countries than for Ukraine, whose economy has done worse under the new order. [Source: twitter.com]

NB: You made an interesting comment about pro-Western liberals in both Russia and Ukraine (including Maidan protesters/supporters): “Like their counterparts in Russia, the members of these ‘Westernising’ middle layers tend to be naïve about the realities of Western society, and about what incorporation into developed-world economic structures means in practice for countries whose economies are far poorer and more primitive.” (p. 9) Can you describe the actual effect of the policies that resulted from Maidan and the signing of the EU Association Agreement? It sounds like a case of “be careful what you wish for.”

RC: If you want to break the hearts of Ukraine’s liberal intelligentsia, just remind them that economic growth in the European Union is stagnant, and European societies crisis-ridden.

Ukraine now has an economic integration agreement with the EU, allowing for extensive areas of free trade. But Ukraine isn’t being integrated into European capitalism as part of the high-productivity, high-wage “core” of the system. After all, why would EU countries want to give themselves an extra competitor?

Instead, the role Ukraine has been assigned is that of a market for advanced Western manufactures, and of a supplier to the EU of relatively low-tech generic goods such as steel billets and basic chemicals. These are low-profit commodities that Western producers are tending to move out of in any case, especially since the industries concerned can be highly polluting.

In Soviet times, as I’ve explained, Ukraine was a centre of sophisticated, at times world-class, manufacturing. But in the mayhem surrounding privatisation, investment levels collapsed, innovation virtually ceased, and products became uncompetitive in developed-world markets. In the dreams of liberal theorists, foreign capitalists had been going to troop over the border, buy up ruined industrial enterprises, re-equip them and on the basis of low wages, make attractive profits from exports to the West. But Ukraine had a criminalised economy run by oligarchs. Rather than swim with sharks, potential foreign investors opted overwhelmingly to stay away.

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Chess factory in Ukraine during Soviet period. [Source: sovtime.com]

The dropping of EU import tariffs was predicted to turn this situation around, by making the attractions of investment in Ukraine irresistible for Western capital. Meanwhile, the foreign investors were supposed to out-compete the oligarchs, and force reforms on the corrupt, business-unfriendly state machine.

But none of this has really happened. Foreign investment has remained tiny. At the same time, free trade with the EU has meant that Western manufacturers, with higher productivity and a more attractive range of offerings, have been able to take over large parts of the Ukrainian domestic market and drive local producers out of business.

As an example, I could cite the Ukrainian car industry. In 2008 the country produced more than 400,000 motor vehicles. The last important year of production was 2014. Then in 2018 a reduction of tariffs brought a huge increase in imports of used cars from the EU, and output of passenger cars in Ukraine effectively ceased.

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UkrAutoProm plant: Car production in Ukraine is way down. [Source: open4business.com]

NB: On a related note, I can’t help but observe that Ukraine seems to have fallen victim to neoliberal corporatist policies that benefit more powerful outside powers—the kind of policies that used to be criticised and opposed by the anti-globalisation movement of the 1990s. The left used to recognise these economic policies, when they were imposed on weaker countries, as a form of neocolonialism. Now it seems like the left—at least in the U.S.—has been reduced to a frightened waif obsessing over a caricaturised form of identity politics and regurgitating the latest war propaganda. What, in your opinion, has happened to the left?

RC: In my view, most sections of the Western left have failed to come up with an adequate response to the war in Ukraine. Fundamentally, I see the problem as rooted in an adaptation to liberal attitudes and habits of thought, and in a failure to educate a whole generation of activists in the distinctive traditions, including the intellectual traditions, of the class struggle movement.

Today, numerous members of the left simply lack the methodological equipment to understand the Ukraine issue—which is, to be fair, fiendishly complex. Here I’d make two points. First, it’s critically important for the left to reach a clear understanding of whether present-day Russia is, or is not, an imperialist power. Second, in addressing this question, there’s no way the left should allow itself to rest on the thinking of The Guardian and The Washington Post. Our methodology has to come from the tradition of left thinkers such as Luxemburg, Lenin, Bukharin and Lukács.

The liberal empiricism of The Guardian will tell you that Russia is an imperialist power, as “proved” by the fact that Russia has invaded and occupied the territory of another country. But even in recent decades, various countries that are manifestly poor and backward have done precisely this. Does this mean we should be talking about “Moroccan imperialism” or “Iraqi imperialism”? That’s absurd.

In the classic left analysis, modern imperialism is a quality of the most advanced and wealthy capitalism. Imperialist countries export capital on a massive scale, and drain the developing world of value through the mechanism of unequal exchange. Here Russia simply doesn’t fit the bill. With its relatively backward economy based on the export of raw commodities, Russia is a large-scale victim of unequal exchange.

For the left, joining with imperialism in attacking one of imperialism’s victims should be unthinkable. But that’s what many leftists are now doing.

Since the early 1990s, NATO has expanded from central Germany right to Russia’s borders. Ukraine has been recruited as a de facto member of the Western camp, and has been equipped with a large, well-armed, NATO-trained army. Imperialist threats and pressures against Russia have multiplied.

Imperialism has to be resisted. But does this mean that the left should support Putin’s actions in Ukraine? Here we should reflect that a workers’ government in Russia would have countered imperialism in the first instance through a quite different strategy, centred on international working-class solidarity and revolutionary anti-war agitation.

Obviously, that’s a course Putin will never follow. But does Russia’s decision to resist imperialism through methods that aren’t ours mean we should denounce the very fact of Russian resistance?

Again, that’s unthinkable. We have to stand with Russia against the attacks on it by imperialism and by the Ukrainian ruling class. Of course, Putin’s politics aren’t ours, so our support for the Russian cause must be critical and nuanced. We’re under no obligation to support specific policies and actions of Russia’s capitalist elite.

That said, the left-liberal position, of seeking victory for imperialism and its allies in Ukraine, is deeply reactionary. Ultimately, it can only multiply suffering through emboldening the U.S. and NATO to launch assaults in other parts of the world.

NB: The war has also been a disaster for Ukraine economically. In October last year Andrea Peters wrote an in-depth article on how poverty had sky-rocketed in the country since the invasion. Some figures she cited included:

*10-fold increase in poverty

*35% unemployment rate

*50% reduction in salaries

*public debt of 85% of GDP

I’m sure it’s even worse now. It appears that the U.S./Europe are almost completely subsidising the Ukrainian government at this point. Can you talk about what you know of Ukraine’s current economic conditions?

RC: Ukraine’s economy has been shattered by the war. Government figures show GDP in the last quarter of 2022 down by 34% on the level a year earlier, and industrial production in September down by a similar amount. In March this year the cost of direct damage to buildings and infrastructure was put at $135 billion, and more than 7 per cent of housing has reportedly been damaged or destroyed. Huge areas of cropland have not been sown, often because fields have been mined.

The military draft has taken large numbers of skilled workers from their jobs. Other highly qualified people are among the Ukrainians, reportedly at least 5.5 million, who have left the country. An estimated 6.9 million people have been displaced within Ukraine, and this has also affected production.

A man goes past burned buildings that were hit by shelling in the small city of Borodyanka near Kiev, Ukraine - 3 March 2022
[Source: bbc.com]
According to Finance Minister Serhii Marchenko, just one-third of Ukraine’s budget revenue now comes from domestic sources. The difference is having to be made up by foreign loans and grants. This aid has been enough to keep annual inflation at a relatively manageable level of about 25 per cent, but workers are rarely being compensated for price rises, and their living standards have collapsed.

In many cases, the Western aid is not in the form of grants but of loans. By my calculation, Ukraine’s external debt in January was about 95 percent of annual GDP. When and if peace returns, Ukraine will have to sacrifice its foreign exchange earnings over decades to pay back these borrowings.

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[Source: dreamstime.com]

NB: Ukraine’s PM Denys Shmyhal has stated that for 2023 alone Ukraine will need $38 billion to cover the budget deficit and another $17 billion for “rapid reconstruction projects.” It would seem that it’s not sustainable (politically or economically) for the West to provide this kind of money for any length of time. What do you think?

RC: The figure I have for total planned U.S. military spending in 2023 is $886 billion, so the NATO countries can afford to maintain and rebuild Ukraine if they want to. The fact that they’re keeping the Ukrainian economy on a relative drip-feed—and worse, demanding that many of the outlays be paid back—is a conscious choice they’ve made.

There’s a lesson in this for developing-world elites that are tempted to act as proxies for imperialism, in the way that Ukraine’s post-2014 leaders have deliberately done. When the consequences get you in deep, don’t expect the imperialists to pick up the tab. Ultimately, they’re not on your side.

NB: The Oakland Institute published a report in February of this year about a specific aspect of the Western-influenced neoliberal policies on Ukraine—agricultural land. One of the first things Zelensky did after he took office in 2019 was to force through an unpopular land reform bill. Can you explain what this law was about and why it was so unpopular?

RC: By 2014 Ukraine’s farmland had almost all been privatised and distributed among millions of former collective farm workers. Until 2021 a moratorium remained on sales of agricultural land. This moratorium was overwhelmingly popular among the rural population, who distrusted the land-office bureaucracy and feared being swindled of their holdings. With only small acreages, and lacking capital to develop their operations, most landowners opted to lease their holdings and to work as employees of commercial farming enterprises.

The result has been described as a “re-feudalisation of Ukrainian agriculture.” Entrepreneurs with access to capital, often established oligarchs but including U.S. and Saudi corporate interests, amassed control of vast lease holdings. With land rents cheap, and wages minimal, the new land barons had little reason to invest in raising productivity, which remained low despite the rich soil.

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[Source: foreignbrief.com]

To this situation, already deeply retrograde, the International Monetary Fund and other institutional lenders brought the wisdom of neoliberal dogma. For many years, structural adjustment programs attached to IMF loans had insisted on the creation of a free market in agricultural land. Ukrainian governments, aware of the massive hostility to the move, had dragged their feet. It was Zelensky whose resistance finally broke. Since mid-2021 Ukrainian citizens have been able to purchase up to 100 hectares of agricultural land, with the figure to rise to 10,000 hectares from January 2024.

In theory, large numbers of small landowners will now sell their land, move to the cities, and take up life as urban workers, while rising land values will force commercial farmers to invest in raising their productivity. But these calculations are almost certainly utopian. Unemployment in the cities is already high, and housing tight. Small farmers are unlikely to risk mortgaging their land to improve their operations while profits remain slender, interest rates high, the banks predatory, and officials corrupt at every level.

The real logic of this “reform” is to strengthen the hold on agriculture of the oligarchs and international agribusiness.

NB: The World Bank recently came out with a report stating that reconstruction after the war ends will cost at least $411 billion. When the fighting ends, what kind of policies do you think would give Ukraine the best chance at building a more stable and equitable economy in the long term?

RC: How is the fighting to end? At present, the Russian forces seem unlikely to be defeated, at least by the Ukrainians. Meanwhile, the closer a Russian victory, the greater the prospect of full-scale imperialist military intervention.

Suppose, though, that Zelensky were to sit down with Russian negotiators and hammer out a peace deal. Realistically, this would require a recognition by Ukraine that the Donbas and Crimea had been lost, along with Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces. Neofascists would have to be purged from the state apparatus, and their organisations outlawed. Ukraine would need to break its ties with NATO, and its armed forces would have to be cut to a level the country could afford.

If such a deal were reached, of course, Ukrainian ultra-nationalists would line up to assassinate Zelensky. If, that is, the CIA didn’t get him first.

Presuming there can be an “after the war,” what might it look like? We must remember that Ukraine is now one of the poorer parts of the capitalist developing world. For countries in this general situation, there can be no genuinely “stable and equitable” economic future. Such a future is conceivable only outside capitalism, its crises, and its international system of plunder.

But let’s suppose that an independent Ukraine were somehow to emerge, that it was at peace, and that it was able to pursue some kind of rational economic course. In the first place, this course would involve a careful demarcation of the economy from the advanced West. Ideally, Ukraine would still have extensive trade with the EU. But this could not be at the cost of allowing unrestricted imports to stifle industries and sectors that had the potential to reach modern levels of sophistication and productivity.

Ukraine’s trading relations need to be based primarily on exchanges with states that share the country’s general level of technological development, so that commercial competition promises stimulus and not annihilation. This shift would involve the re-establishing of a dense network of economic relations with Russia. It would also feature an expansion of already extensive (in 2021) trade with states such as Turkey, Egypt, India and China.

In politico-economic terms, Ukraine’s future doesn’t lie in “integration with the West”—a destructive fantasy—but in the country taking its place among the member states of organisations such as BRICS, the Belt and Road initiative, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. For its financing needs, Ukraine needs to repudiate the IMF and look to bodies such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

Those are necessary changes, and would greatly improve Ukraine’s prospects. But ultimately, a “stable and equitable” future needs much deeper transformations. It will require ousting the country’s crime lord oligarchs from control over the economy.

In some thirty years, and despite Western aid, Ukraine’s liberal reformers have made little progress on this front. The “middle layers” of the country’s society are simply not able or inclined to carry out such an overthrow. They have little social weight, and are not an independent force. Those of them who don’t work directly for the oligarchs are enmeshed, in many cases, in the corrupt state machine that the oligarchs control.

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[Source: euromaidanpress.com]

The only social force in Ukraine that has the massive numbers to end oligarchic power is the organised proletariat. Unlike the “middle layers,” the country’s workers have no stake in preserving oligarchism, and have the potential to act independently of it.

NB: You reported from Moscow in the 1990s for the newspaper Green Left. How did that come about, and what stands out to you most about your time in Russia?

RC: As a Russian speaker, I was sent by the paper in 1990 to Moscow—then the capital of the USSR—to report on the progress of perestroika. I was expecting to be there for about two years, but acquired a Russian family and stayed for nine.

I had only a small income from the paper. My wife and I lived better than the neighbors, but not by much. I watched and reported as highly qualified workers were plunged into destitution. Their wages unpaid, their savings of decades erased by inflation, they sold household belongings outside metro stations, and lived on potatoes dug from their garden plots.

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Street flea market in Rostov-on-Don in 1992. [Source: wikipedia.org]

The eeriest experience was watching people try to cope with a drastic inversion of beliefs and values. Wherever Soviet society had put a minus, Russians were abruptly commanded to put a plus. Behaviour that had earlier been regarded as contemptible—hustling, speculating—now won praise in the media.

Among the people I knew, I suspect the most traumatised were Western-oriented intellectuals who for years had longed for the Soviet Union to perish, and for capitalism to replace it. Now capitalism had come—and it was a nightmare.

In these circumstances more than a few Russians lost their moral bearings completely. Anything seemed permitted. I remember setting out one morning to take my little boy to his day care. On the pavement not far from our building, we encountered a freshly murdered corpse.

Meanwhile, a tornado of history swirled round about. As a journalist I was in the “Russian White House,” the parliament building up the Moscow River from the Kremlin, during the coups of 1991 and 1993. In 1998 I reported as the government effectively declared itself bankrupt, defaulting on its debt obligations. By that time, 40 per cent of the economy had evaporated.

I remember those years, though, as in some ways the richest and most rewarding of my life.

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

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