Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV
Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2022 11:52 am
the south front
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 08/30/2022
Yesterday morning, Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency announced the news that the inspection mission of the Zaporozhie nuclear power plant, in the town of Energodar, under Russian control, was "on its way" and was he hopes that he will be able to access the infrastructure throughout this week. Hours later, Russian sources published images of the damage caused by a Ukrainian shell on the roof of one of the buildings. Despite the obvious perforation caused on a building in which fuel is stored, local authorities guaranteed that radiation levels are within normal limits, although Russia continues to denounce Ukrainian bombardments that, since the night before, had intensified. Sunday night, Ukrainian shells hit residential areas of the city causing several fires. According to the Ukrainian newspaperStrana , the head of the President's Office, Andriy Ermak, accused Russia of carrying out the bombing with the aim of discrediting Ukraine. Also in the case of the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, Ukraine continues to accuse Russia of bombing the territory under its control. Following reports of a new bombing, Volodymyr Zelensky, whose army continues to play with fire around a nuclear power plant, accused Russia of "intimidating Europe" by making the plant "a battlefield."
The bombing of Energodar and the situation around the nuclear power plant were nothing more than a prelude to a larger attack that took place throughout the day. As several media outlets quoted Natalia Humeniuk, spokesperson for the command of the southern troops, Ukraine has begun the long-awaited counteroffensive on the southern front. Coinciding with that statement, the CNN journalistJim Sciutto published the exclusive on said offensive citing two high-ranking officials of the US administration. According to the journalist, Ukraine is currently conducting training operations, which will include both ground operations and the use of aviation in preparation for the major offensive. Sciutto added that, according to the US intelligence assessment, Russia has not managed to deploy as many units as it had planned.
Triumphalism was immediate and, given the first reports of certain Ukrainian advances on one of the fronts - not towards Kherson, a prize that Ukraine hopes to achieve since it is the only Ukrainian regional capital under Russian control, but towards Novaya Kajovka-, Mijailo Podoliak, advisor to the Office of the President, showed his happiness on social networks. Trying to delegitimize the words of Gennady Trujanov, mayor of Odessa, who had appealed in an interview granted to an Italian media for a negotiation, Podoliak wrote on social networks: "The negotiations with Russia are being carried out today according to the only possible format by a delegation special Ukrainian, specifically in the direction of the southern front. The negotiations are going well. We look forward to new commitmentsin the form of goodwill gestures [by Russia].”
Beyond the confidence that Ukraine has always shown in the success of the great offensive, the information on what happened throughout the day in the different areas of the southern front is scarce. Unlike in Donbass, where the routine of war has created a whole series of war correspondents capable of providing information practically in real time, the southern front is less well known and less visited by the press, so it lends itself to all kinds of misinformation.
Although the balance of this first contact is difficult to assess and it will have to be the next few days that determine the trend that occurs on the front, the directions in which the fight will take place have been made clear. Possibly more anticipated attack in the direction of Kherson, it was not in that area where the Armed Forces of Ukraine managed to advance several kilometers.
This is how Gray Zone picked it up yesterday :
A brief, albeit belated assessment of the emergence of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Nikolaev-Krivoi Rog leadership:
Over the past three days and two nights, the Ukrainian side has chosen to focus on attacking with MLRS HIMARS systems targets of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in the Kherson region. Reconnaissance units have also worked in the area of the Ingulets River [where the last Ukrainian advance in the region took place several weeks ago, although it never went beyond it- Ed ] , which have crossed the river in boats.
At night, after another attack with HIMARS, the opponent managed to advance in several directions. They used up to three pontoons, which could not be destroyed. The enemy advance was made with the support of a tank force that can be up to a company. The presence of enemy aircraft, at least one helicopter, was observed.
Of the opponent's attacks, three were complete. One of them went in the Andreevka-Lozovoe direction, with which the Ukrainian Armed Forces advanced 6 kilometers and occupied the village of Sukhoi Stavok.
There was also an unsuccessful break-in attempt by the Ukrainian side in the towns of Lyubimobka, Miroliubkovka, Dobrianka, Olgovka, Potemkino and Visokopole. Here the paratroopers and the guys from the Black Sea fleet gave a good answer. But the enemy keeps trying to encircle the Russian forces at Visokopole, though luckily they are unsuccessful. Depending on the tactic that has already been prepared, it is possible to use the territorial defense forces for assault tasks and to shoot down volunteer units.
In general, it is too early to speak more precisely about advances and setbacks. The situation is developing with different levels of success for each of the parties. We can safely say that the enemy does not treat the matter in any way, but with confidence in his capabilities. The Ukrainian Armed Forces have managed to hold on and create a bridgehead on one of the broken sections of the front. The enemy awaits the accumulation of forces. The main troop movement maneuvers are likely to take place after nightfall.
Russia acts defensively. The Ukrainian Armed Forces are expected to hit the road infrastructures of the Kakhovskaya power plant to the maximum.
The next few days will tell whether Ukraine has the necessary forces to launch a large-scale offensive and whether Russia has the necessary troops to efficiently defend the areas under its control, especially the cities of Kherson, Novaya Kakhovka, Energodar and Melitopol, all of them targeted by Ukrainian artillery and also by sabotage groups (possibly linked to the SBU), which continue to use means of controlled terror to kill those who collaborate with the Russian authorities. Yesterday, for example, the former deputy of Volodymyr Zelensky's party Alexey Kovalev and his partner were murdered in his home.
After weeks of increased bombing intensity, and gambling around the Energodar nuclear power plant, Ukraine is now trying to go on the attack in an unavoidable offensive. Rejected in March any possibility of recovering those territories through diplomatic channels, kyiv is now trying to reconquer that lost part that it does have an interest in preserving. Unlike Donbass, destroyed, with an industrial economic base that kyiv does not care about and with a population that it considers disloyal, the south, especially the fertile Kherson region, is indeed a target that Ukraine wants to recover.
https://slavyangrad.es/2022/08/30/el-fr ... more-25384
Google Translator
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Ukraine: the never-ending war
Joe Biden’s actions, approving a new allocation of almost 3 billion dollars in arms for Ukraine and Josep Borrell’s initiative for the EU, in addition to providing arms to Kyiv and joining the bandwagon of sanctions against Russia, to train the Ukrainian military involved in a war, show that many have an interest in this war not ending.
Author: Elson Concepción Pérez | internet@...
August 25, 2022 22:08:46 PM
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Both the EU and the US have hindered the search for peace in the conflict. Photo: Reuters
No unfounded premonitions: it is difficult to understand, but the world is being led – and quite rapidly – to the outbreak of a nuclear confrontation, perhaps the last, because it involves weaponry that can exterminate the population of the planet.
Let us look at the elements that make us think in this apparently apocalyptic way.
As recently as this August 24, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, announced a new package of arms shipments to Ukraine in the amount of 2.98 billion dollars. Enough money to feed or cure a few million African children who are dying for lack of food or medicine.
On the same day, the UN Security Council met, at Russia’s request, to discuss the Ukrainian military attacks on the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, which had already been attacked by Kyiv 17 times in the last few days and, in addition, fires had broken out near the facility.
The war in Ukraine has exposed the fact that the United States is using the Ukrainian population as cannon fodder, in its hegemonic eagerness to subdue Russia and turn all its guns against China.
Moscow warned from the very beginning: “We will not allow Russian citizens or citizens of Russian origin living in the Donbas region to be massacred by constant aggressions”.
And another Russian warning: “We cannot allow the United States and NATO to try to encircle Russia, bringing modern weapons to its border with Ukraine”.
Both reasons could well have been part of a dialogue without the interference of third countries and, of course, without the arrogant presence of NATO as the driving force of the war.
However, what has the European Union (EU) done but hinder the search for peace around the conflict and create an adverse economic and social situation, to the detriment of its own nations?
European governments that support U.S. policy on Ukraine, i.e. arming that nation and sanctioning and destabilizing Russia, should bear in mind that this nuclear power plant is the largest in Europe, with six pressurized water reactors and a total capacity of 6,000 megawatts, and anything that happens there can affect the countries of the old continent. In the worst case, the radioactive components can spread and act against the lives of millions of people.
Sending weapons to Kyiv and imposing sanctions of all kinds on Russia has favored the U.S. military complex.
With the policy of Russophobia pursued by the EU and many countries in that region, the situation of every European household and citizen is affected in an extraordinary way. This August 25, for example, the news could not be worse: the price of gas has risen to a record high of 3,200 dollars per thousand cubic meters.
Add to that, the adversity that Europe is today affected by the worst drought in the last 500 years and is the victim of an unprecedented heat wave, which has already caused more than a thousand deaths.
Nevertheless, the head of EU diplomacy has just proposed “a large training and assistance mission to the Ukrainian army”.
Joe Biden’s actions, approving a new allocation of almost 3 billion dollars in arms for Ukraine and Josep Borrell’s initiative for the EU, in addition to providing arms to Kiev and joining the bandwagon of sanctions against Russia, to train the Ukrainian military involved in a war, show that many have an interest in this war not ending.
Source :
Ucrania: la guerra de nunca acabar
https://groups.io/g/cubanews/topic/9326 ... 0f7bea2971
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On the "counteroffensive on Kherson".
August 29, 3:11 p.m
Ukrainian sources claim a "counterattack on Kherson" and a strike in the direction of the village of Sukhoi Stavok (near Belogorka) and even the capture of the village of Sukhoi Stavok. So far, there has been an attempt to move from the Andreevka area in the direction of Bruskinskoye, Sukhoi Stavok and Kostromka.
In general, these are all the same attempts by the Armed Forces of Ukraine to implement the plans of mid-August with an attack on Berislav in order to cut off part of the bridgehead of the RF Armed Forces on the right bank of the Dnieper.
Intense artillery shelling of Berislav is also recorded (the workshop of the machine-building plant is on fire), as well as traditional positional battles on the Ingulets River (Kryvyi Rih direction) and in the Potemkino-Vysokopolye region (Nikopol direction - by the way, at night they covered the accumulation of enemy troops in the Novorontsovka area - many 200x). Enemy losses in people and equipment are noted in the Olginka and Vysokopolye regions.
Also, active battles are going on in the area of Partizansky and Aleksandrovka, where, after the capture of Blagodatny, the front advanced towards Nikolaev.
In Novaya Kakhovka, the evacuation of residents to bomb shelters was announced due to many hours of shelling of the city from the MLRS. Air defense works in Kherson and in the area of Nova Kakhovka. It is worth noting that one HIMARS rocket did not work properly and fell intact in the region. It has already been taken out for study.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7829564.html
Google Translator
"Counteroffensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on Kherson". Evening 29.09.2022
August 29, 23:11
"Counteroffensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on Kherson". Evening 29.09.2022
In the area of Blagodatny, Snigirevka, Vysokopole and Davydov Brod, the enemy failed to achieve significant success, despite the losses incurred. It was not possible to break through to Kiselevka, as well as to provide fire control over the road to Vysokopolye.
In the area of the village of Sukhoi Stavok, the enemy was able to advance from the bridgehead near Andreevka and is now trying to gain a foothold in the village in order to try to cover the positions of the RF Armed Forces near Davydov Brod. They drove the enemy out of the village itself.
The enemy continues to actively strike at Berislav, Novaya Kakhovka, in the Kherson region. At least 1 ammunition depot was destroyed and a barge used to cross the Dnieper was damaged.
The RF Armed Forces are striking in the Krivoy Rog and Nikopol directions.
According to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the enemy lost about 50 units of heavy and light armored vehicles, 2 attack aircraft, more than 560 military personnel killed during today's battles.
Against the background of the shelling of Berislav and the crossing of the Dnieper, the enemy is trying to increase pressure on the river. Ingulets to advance to Berislav. Despite the fact that in most areas the offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine ended unsuccessfully until the next crisis on Ingulets was resolved, it is too early to say that the offensive completely failed.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin - zinc
Video from the Nikolaev direction:
https://t.me/boris_rozhin/61728
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7830381.html
Entry into a building with nuclear fuel at the ZNPP
August 29, 19:00
A hole from a 155-mm American howitzer M777 shell in the roof of a special building of the Zaporizhzhya NPP.
This building stores nuclear fuel for the operation of the station. Another trace of an explosion on the roof, the site of the fall of the Polish kamikaze UAV.
Satellite images from MAXAR.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7829980.html
Google Translator
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Europe's Economic And Social Suicide - Provoked by The U.S. And Helped Along By Europe's Leaders
Due to the stupidity of Europe's political leadership the U.S. has managed to push it towards committing economic and social suicide.
On February 8 Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, wrote about the then upcoming conflict in Ukraine which the U.S. was intentionally provoking.
Michael Hudson: America’s Real Adversaries Are Its European and Other Allies
The sanctions that U.S. diplomats are insisting that their allies impose against trade with Russia and China are aimed ostensibly at deterring a military buildup. But such a buildup cannot really be the main Russian and Chinese concern. They have much more to gain by offering mutual economic benefits to the West. So the underlying question is whether Europe will find its advantage in replacing U.S. exports with Russian and Chinese supplies and the associated mutual economic linkages.
What worries American diplomats is that Germany, other NATO nations and countries along the Belt and Road route understand the gains that can be made by opening up peaceful trade and investment. If there is no Russian or Chinese plan to invade or bomb them, what is the need for NATO? And if there is no inherently adversarial relationship, why do foreign countries need to sacrifice their own trade and financial interests by relying exclusively on U.S. exporters and investors?
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Instead of a real military threat from Russia and China, the problem for American strategists is the absence of such a threat. ...
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The only way left for U.S. diplomats to block European purchases is to goad Russia into a military response and then claim that avenging this response outweighs any purely national economic interest. As hawkish Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, explained in a State Department press briefing on January 27: “If Russia invades Ukraine one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” The problem is to create a suitably offensive incident and depict Russia as the aggressor.
To provoke a war in Ukraine was easy as the movie production team ruling Ukraine was willing to sacrifice its people and country in a unwinnable war against Russia. The Ukrainian actor and president Vladimir Zelensky had already announced that the Ukraine would, by force, take back Crimea and the Donbas republics that were in the hand of a Russia aligned Ukrainian resistance.
On February 15 Professor John Mearsheimer gave a talk (vid) in which he documented how the U.S. had caused, and is responsible for, the whole Ukraine crisis.
Since last year about half of the Ukrainian army was positioned in the county's southeast at the ceasefire line with the Donbas republics. On February 17 it opened preparatory artillery fire against the resistance positions. Over the next days the barrage steadily increased.
The observers of the Organization for Security and Co-operation (OSCE), positioned at the frontline, counted and documented each artillery strike and published daily summaries on its website. From 80 artillery impacts on February 16 the attacks increased each day to over 2,000 per day on February 22.
The OSCE observers also provided maps of where the grenades exploded (here of February 21):
The vast majority of impacts were on three areas east of the ceasefire line on resistance held positions. Anyone with a bit of military knowledge will recognize such intense artillery campaigns along distinct axes as the preparation action for an all out attack.
The leaders of the Donbas republics as well as of Russia had to react to this upcoming attack. On February 19 the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic asked the Russia government for help. Left alone they would have had no chance to resist against the Ukrainian army the U.S. and its allies, since 2015, had financed and built.
Up to this point Russia had insisted that the DPR and LNR were part of Ukraine but should receive some kind of autonomy as provided by the Minsk agreements. But it now had to take steps that would legalize Russian support for the Donbas. On February 21 Russia recognized the republics as independent states. The three parties signed cooperation agreements which included clauses for mutual military support:
Russia’s treaty with the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) stipulates granting the right to build military bases on their territory and provide mutual military assistance, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko told a plenary session of the lower house of parliament on Tuesday.
"An important aspect: the treaty stipulates the intentions by the parties to interact in the field of foreign policy, the protection of sovereignty and territorial integrity and security provision, in particular, by way of rendering each other required assistance, including military aid, and granting the right to build, use and improve military infrastructure and military bases on their territory," the high-ranking Russian diplomat pointed out.
With the agreements in place Russian military help against the Ukrainian attack became (at least arguably) legal under Article 51 (collective self-defense) of the UN Charter.
On February 22, no Russia soldier had yet stepped onto Ukrainian ground, the U.S. and its allies imposed extreme economic sanctions against Russia. President Biden acknowledged that the U.S. had long prepared for this.
Over the last few months, we have coordinated closely with our NATO Allies and partners in Europe and around the world to prepare that response. We’ve said all along and I’ve told Putin to his face a mon- — a month a- — more than a month ago that we would act together and the moment Russia moved against Ukraine.
Russia has now undeniably moved against Ukraine by declaring these independent states.
So, today, I’m announcing the first tranche of sanctions to impose costs on Russia in response to their actions yesterday. These have been closely coordinated with our Allies and partners, and we’ll continue to escalate sanctions if Russia escalates.
On February 24 Russian forces entered the Ukraine to preempt the coming attack on the Donbas republics. (The Russian plan A was to press on Kiev to agree to a fast settlement of the crisis. That failed in early April after Boris Johnson's intervention in Kiev. Russia switched to plan B, the de-militarization of Ukraine.)
The German government announced that the Nord Stream II pipeline, which is technically ready to deliver Russian gas to Germany, would not be launched.
On February 27 the German chancellor Olaf Scholz gave a hysteric and moralizing speech in front of the Germany parliament. It accused Russia of breaking peace in Europe.
The Minsk agreement, under which the Ukraine had committed to federalize and give some autonomy to Donbas, was not mentioned once. Germany and France were both guarantee powers who in 2015 had cosigned the Minsk agreement but had, over seven long years, done little to press for its implementation.
Instead of working for a fast ceasefire and a renewal of economic relations with Russia Scholz committed Germany to economic suicide.
On February 28 Professor Hudson published another deep analysis of the crisis:
America Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century: The MIC, BARE and OGAM Conquer NATO.
In a forward to the piece Yves Smith summarized:
Michael Hudson expands on his theme on how the conflict in Ukraine is the result of much bigger forces at work, and not necessarily the ones you have top of mind. He argues that preventing European countries, particularly Germany, from developing deeper economic ties with China and Russia is what’s really at stake.
Here, Hudson describes the hold key US interests have on foreign policy and how they see conflict as a way to hold off a possible fall in their status and power.
The Hudson piece is quite long and deep. I recommend to read it in full.
The U.S. idea is to isolate Europe from its Eurasian hinterland, to move Europe's industries to the U.S. and to buy up the rest for cheap.
To take Nord Stream II out and to get European countries to boycott Russian energy the U.S. had promised that it would 'help' by selling its (quite expensive) Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to Europe. But when natural gas prices started to rise in Europe free market forces set in and they also started to increase in the United States. High energy prices threatened to damage Biden and to tank the Democrats in the midterm elections.
Then a mysterious accident happened:
An explosion at a liquefied natural gas terminal in Texas has left nearby residents rattled and is taking a substantial amount of the fuel off the market at a time when global demand is soaring.
Freeport LNG will be offline for at least three weeks, the company said Thursday, following a fire in its export facility.
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Most of Freeport LNG's exports were going to Europe, according to Rystad Energy. Europe may be able to offset the lost volume with increases from other facilities, said Emily McClain, vice president at Rystad. Europe gets about 45% of its LNG from the U.S., and the rest comes from Russia, Qatar and other sources, she said.
Three weeks was too short to lower U.S. natural gas prices. The U.S. regulator for such plants, the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), stepped in and prolonged the restart process:
The second-biggest U.S. liquefied natural gas export facility hit by fire earlier this month will not be allowed to repair or restart operations until it addresses risks to public safety, a pipeline regulator said on Thursday.
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U.S. natural gas futures tumbled 15% on Thursday due to the report and on a continued inventory build, contributing to a 33% price drop in June, the biggest monthly drop since 2018.
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"The actual process (of reviews, repairs and approvals) will take longer than three months, and potentially take six to 12 months," said Alex Munton, director of global gas and LNG at consultants Rapidan Energy Group.
There was also some news of sudden 'problems' at other LNG facilities.
It is not only natural gas but also petroleum products that the U.S. is withholding while Europe is in need:
The Biden administration is warning refiners that it may take “emergency measures” to address fuel exports as stockpiles of gasoline and diesel fuel remain near historically low levels in the Northeast.
Fertilizer making plants in Europe have shut down because of way too high natural gas prices. Steel and aluminum smelters are following. Glas production in Europe is severely endangered.
In a long piece today Yves Smith is looking at the economic and political consequences for Europe. In a breach of Betteridge's law</A she headlines:
Will Europe Go Down to Defeat Before Ukraine?
We will be so bold as to posit that not only has the sanctions war against Russia backfired spectacularly, but the damage to the West, most of all Europe, is accelerating rapidly. And this is not the result of Russia taking active measures but the costs of the loss or reduction of key Russian resources compounding over time.
So due to the intensity of the energy shock, the economic timetable is moving faster than the military. Unless Europe engages in a major course correction, and we don’t see how this can happen, the European economic crisis looks set to become devastating before Ukraine is formally defeated.
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As we’ll explain, this shock will be so severe if nothing is done (and as we’ll explain, it’s hard to see anything meaningful enough being done), that the result will be not a recession, but a depression in Europe.
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In theory, the EU could try to make up to Russia. But the time for that has passed. It isn’t just that too many key European players like Ursula von der Leyen and Robert Habeck are too deeply invested in Russia-hatred to retreat. Even if there were blood in the street come December, they wouldn’t be turfed out quickly enough.
It is also that Europe has burned its bridges with Russia beyond just the sanctions. Putin has repeatedly offered the EU the option of using Nord Stream 2. Even with Russia now using half its capacity, it could still fully substitute for former Nord Stream 1 deliveries. Putin did warn that option would not stay open for all that long, that Russia would start using the rest of the volume.
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So the outcome seems inevitable: many Europeans businesses will fail, leading to job losses, business loan defaults, loss of government revenues, foreclosures. And with governments thinking they’d maybe spent a bit too freely with Covid relief, their emergency energy fillups will be too little to make all that much difference.
At some point, the economic contraction will lead to a financial crisis. If the downdraft is rapid enough, it could be the result as much of (well warranted) loss of confidence as actual losses and defaults to date.
The U.S. has, out of purely egoistic reasons, dragged Europe, and especially Germany, into a trap that will lead to its economic and social destruction. Instead of recognizing the danger, and taking the necessary countermeasure, the European and the German 'leaders' committed themselves to help with the process.
The best thing for Europe and Germany would of course have been to avoid the crisis. That failed because of a lack of insight and effort. But now, as Europe is deep down in a hole, the politicians should at least stop digging. It is in Europe's and especially Germany's obvious interest to keep the crisis as short as possible.
But the lunatics who are ruling over Europe are still doing the opposite:
Germany will keep up its support for Kyiv "for as long as it takes", Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Monday, calling for an enlargement of the European Union to eventually include Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia.
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Germany had undergone a "fundamental change of heart" in recent months on its military support for Ukraine, he said.
"We will keep up this support, reliably and, above all, for as long as it takes," he told the packed university audience.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen echoed the "as long as it takes" promise to Kyiv in a speech in Slovenia, calling for "a new strategic thinking" to uphold European values.
As those 'leaders' seem to see it, affordable energy, warm homes, sufficient food, jobs and pensions of Europe citizens are not part of the 'European values' they intend to uphold.
The economic and financial breakdown of Europe will be much faster than the obviously necessary political change of its third rate leadership.
The only political sector that will not be damaged by all this, at least in France and Germany, is the far right. That in itself is also a danger.
Posted by b on August 29, 2022 at 17:38 UTC | Permalink
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/08/e ... .html#more
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Freeze or Starve? Sanctioning Russia Leaves Germans a Choice this Winter
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on AUGUST 29, 2022
C.J. ATKINS
Freeze or starve? Sanctioning Russia leaves Germans a choice this winterFreeze or starve: With energy costs driving up the price of everything, Germans will face a choice this winter. Here, a pedestrian walks through the freezing winter fog in Berlin. | Maurizio Gambarini / dpa via AP
The biggest beneficiary in the whole affair, Pohl argues, has been U.S. imperialism. Its energy companies are breaking into the European market, and the costs of achieving its long-term goal of weakening Russia are being paid for, in part, with West European workers’ earnings and Ukrainian lives. “The winner of this war and sanctions will be the United States.”
BERLIN—“It’s going to be a choice many of us will have to face when winter comes: freeze or starve.” So says Günter Pohl, a glassworker from the the town of Sprockhövel in Germany’s industrial Ruhr region. “The sanctions are supposedly targeting Russia, but they’re hitting us a lot more than they are Russia.”
He was referring to the economic penalties Western governments have imposed on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. Though supposedly intended to cripple the Russian economy and pressure Vladimir Putin to bring his troops home, there are signs it’s the working people of Germany and other European countries who are bearing most of the punishment.
Pohl spoke with People’s World in Berlin on the sidelines of the UZ-Pressefest, a mass cultural and political festival hosted annually by Unsere Zeit, a socialist newspaper affiliated with the German Communist Party (DKP). His sentiment is shared by many here—understandable given that paychecks are covering less and less these days.
Inflation clocked in at 7.6% for Germany in summer 2022, a near 40-year high. At the core of the problem? Energy costs, which are up an astounding 38% according to official statistics. Before the war in Ukraine, Germany secured the natural gas that heats its homes and powers much of its industry from Russia. It had been that way for decades, even during the Cold War.
But in the wake of Putin’s invasion, construction on the nearly-finished $9.5 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline—which would have transported more gas from Russia to the German coast by going under the Baltic Sea—was abruptly canceled. Gas flows through the existing Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Europe have already slowed by more than 60% and will go to zero by the end of August, at least for a while.
That shutdown presents a special problem for Germans. More than half of them—over 40 million people—use natural gas to heat their homes. During the summer, many still hoped the worst of the gas price hike might be avoided. Perhaps Ukraine and Russia would negotiate a ceasefire and the pressure on world energy markets would ease.
But now, fall can already be felt in the air in Berlin, and the prices of everything from food to transport to fuel continue to climb. Many are beginning to worry what will happen when the temperatures really begin to drop.
“We expect prices to double,” Pohl predicts. “And no one will be spared…it’s not just the heating of homes, it’s also the cooking, the hot water for bathing…all of it.” Making the stained glass windows which are his specialty also consumes a lot of energy, so the same problem is repeating in manufacturing and throughout the economy.
Even those Germans who use electric or oil for their homes won’t be able to avoid the rising costs. “A lot of people don’t earn enough money to do it,” he argues. “It’s going to be at least €2,000 more [$2,000 USD] for a family of four this winter. How will they pay?”
Where’s the resistance?
Wera Richter shares Pohl’s skepticism for the cold season ahead. “With prices shooting up, even people who have what are considered ‘decent’ incomes are going to have difficulty paying and surviving.” Richter is the editor-in-chief of Unsere Zeit and covers the latest developments of the war and its economic fallout for Germans in the pages of the newspaper.
She says the DKP and UZ were warning earlier this year of what lay ahead for working-class Germans if a reckless sanctions regime was the West’s response to the war. The continued flow of Russian gas at the tail-end of last winter and the warm weather of summer kept public discontent in check for a time, but when the choice becomes food or heat, will public opinion begin to change?
Richter’s chief concern is that there has so far been “nearly a total lack of resistance” to the ill-conceived structure of the sanctions against Russia. The peace movement is weak, and images of the brutality of the war in Ukraine along with German leaders’ declarations of solidarity with Volodymyr Zelensky’s government have kept most people on-side with the NATO campaign to back Kiev to the bitter end.
In the eastern part of Germany, the areas which made up the former German Democratic Republic, anti-war feelings are stronger, according to Richter. But the call for a negotiated ceasefire, which the DKP and UZ advocate (vs. an all-out military defeat of Russia which NATO says is the goal), is still a tough sell almost anywhere right now, Richter admits.
Heavily discounted public transport tickets and some small energy subsidies for households bought the government time in the spring and summer. It says the long-term strategy is to totally phase out Russian gas and switch to other sources.
It is the trade union leadership’s inaction on the energy inflation issue that is particularly worrying for Richter, though. “They haven’t organized anything,” she laments. Even if they remain bound to the government’s foreign policy stances, at least they should have something stronger to say about the war’s effect on their own members.
Melina Deymann, who works alongside Richter at UZ as the paper’s international affairs editor, told People’s World that the positions taken by some unions amount to almost a total neglect of duty to their members’ well-being. She cited one large service union whose leader last week told members it’s no time to fight with the government or employers “because the evil Russians are threatening the world, together with the even more evil Chinese standing behind them.”
Deymann says, “Under no circumstances would a Communist tell a worker to leave a union, but that kind of situation brings you pretty close to considering it.”
Sanctions war winners
Eagerly waiting to step into the energy void left by the sanctions, of course, are U.S.-based corporations looking for new customers. Before the scuttling of Nord Stream 2, their share of the European gas market was topped out at around 30%. But Russia’s war changed everything—essentially overnight. Soaring prices made expensive-to-produce gas from the U.S. more competitive on world markets, and European leaders could rely on sentiment for Ukraine among the general public to accelerate the turn away from Russia.
“Now they say we will buy fracked gas from the U.S.—ecologically the worst kind—but there’s not even enough ships and terminals to get it here,” Pohl says. American natural gas largely comes from the environmentally-damaging process of fracking, and getting it across the Atlantic requires liquefaction, huge tanker ships for transport, and specialized loading and offloading facilities.
“Maybe you can assemble a terminal pretty quickly,” Pohl grants, “but the number of ships they will need could take years to build.” So although U.S. gas is on the way, it could be a long time coming.
In the meantime, keeping up the economic charade of anti-Russia sanctions is leading to some pretty absurd tactics.
“The German government says we will not buy Russian gas because they are killing Ukrainians and conducting an illegal war, so instead we’ll buy gas and oil from Qatar and Saudi Arabia,” Pohl explains. But Qatar and Saudi Arabia (which is doing plenty of killing of its own in Yemen) can’t supply enough output to fulfill Europe’s needs. “So where do they get it? Russia! Russian oil and gas goes to places like Saudi Arabia, which then turns around and sells it to Germany.”
In this middle-man mark-up system, Germany still ends up buying the same Russian energy supplies it has sanctioned and forbidden—but at higher prices. “It would be funny if it wasn’t all so tragic,” Pohl muses.
In Russia, the oil is still flowing, but now more of it is heading east to customers like India and China. In fact, Russia is selling more oil than ever, and revenues are through the roof. The whole sanctions regime is boomeranging back on Europe; it’s estimated Germans will be paying over €5 billion [$5 billion USD] more for energy.
“Asia has saved Russian crude production,” said Viktor Katona, an energy analyst at the firm Kpler, told the New York Times last month. “Russia, instead of falling further, is almost close to its pre-pandemic levels.”
The biggest beneficiary in the whole affair, Pohl argues, has been U.S. imperialism. Its energy companies are breaking into the European market, and the costs of achieving its long-term goal of weakening Russia are being paid for, in part, with West European workers’ earnings and Ukrainian lives. “The winner of this war and sanctions will be the United States.”
Sanctions war losers
The whole sanctions regime seems to be a failure. The economic impact on Russia isn’t working out as planned, the war drags on with neither side willing to negotiate, and Germans’ euros are shrinking fast.
As for the climate? It’s another casualty of the war: Fracked U.S. gas is pouring onto the world market, more coal and other dirty fossil fuels will be consumed to make up for the lost energy, and Russia is burning off much of its unsold excess gas.
How long this state of affairs can go on is an open question. Will the labor movement leadership continue to sleep at the wheel while the economy heads for the ditch? Will the public’s willingness to pay for the costs of war hold out when the mercury drops? Will Russia and Ukraine work out some kind of peace?
Another determining factor will be the issue of how long the unity of the German ruling class holds up. Pohl says that it has long been split between two wings, “one Atlanticist, which was essentially pro-U.S.,” and a second one which was “neither pro-U.S. nor pro-Soviet (pro-Russia in the post-Cold War days).” The latter wing believed it was good for business to maintain connections to both sides and not get overly attached to American foreign policy dictates.
Since the invasion though, that “collaboration wing,” as Pohl calls it, has gotten weaker. “As of February, the capitalist class has collectively said, the government will determine where we go—it’s the primacy of politics.” Advocating business ties with Russia has simply become untenable, so the search is on for new partners in other places.
This old split in the ruling class had actually played a role in preserving peace, but with the state having declared it intends to be totally free of economic activity with Russia by 2023, Pohl and the German Communists worry what could come next.
“It’s always been said that countries which trade together don’t go to war, but by 2024 there will be no trade with Russia,” Pohl says. “What then?”
That’s why the DKP and UZ have made peace the central focus of the UZ-Pressefest this year. The German Communists know it’s an uphill fight right now to stop the war—both the war in Ukraine and the war on German workers’ living standards—but they’re giving it all they have to mobilize peace sentiment.
There is little time to spare, however. Winter is coming and it’s coming fast.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/08/ ... is-winter/
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Game of nuclear chicken in Zaporozhye
The IAEA’s priority is supposedly nuclear safety, but its priority in Ukraine appears to be to fulfil the selfish political demands of Ukraine and its NATO allies
August 29, 2022 by Prabir Purkayastha
The Zaporozhye (also spelt Zaporizhzhia) Nuclear Power Plant has become a focal point in the Ukraine war, as any major nuclear incident risks radioactivity release over a vast area. In such an accident, not only Ukraine but large parts of Europe could face radioactive contamination and much higher cancer rates and other diseases. Russia has claimed the Ukrainian side shelled the Zaporozhye plant in July and August and, on August 23, submitted photographic and other documentary evidence to the UN Security Council. Ukraine contends Russia has been shelling the plant even though it is under Russia’s occupation.
The Zaporozhye plant in the town of Enerhodar is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, with six 1,000 MW capacity units. They are Pressurized Water Reactors of Soviet vintage: the oldest unit was commissioned 37 years and the newest 26 years ago. Before the war, they used to supply 20% of Ukraine’s electricity. And even after Russia captured Zaporozhye in March, they have continued supplying to the Ukrainian grid.
Before we look at the risks of a major nuclear incident on the scale of Chernobyl or Fukushima, let us take a quick look at the Ukrainian claims regarding the Russian shelling of the plant and the positioning of heavy artillery and other equipment within. It defies logic why the Russians themselves would shell a plant which, by all accounts, is under their control. All the evidence so far supports Russia’s claim that Ukraine shelled the plant and the transmission lines. And if, as Ukraine claims, Russia has positioned heavy military equipment within the plant, it should be a simple matter for Ukraine or its NATO allies to make the evidence public in the age of satellite imagery. That they have not speaks volumes.
Understandably, the Ukrainian side would make such propaganda claims. What is surprising is major news organizations—Reuters, AP, The New York Times, and The Washington Post — have all echoed Kiev’s line that Russia shelled a plant under its control or used it as a shield without even a simple fact or plausibility check. In all such reports, Kiev’s statements are faithfully carried as gospel truth. Big western media appears to be part of the Orwellian Ministry of Truth in the information war over Ukraine.
So what are the risks of a major nuclear incident in the Zaporozhye NPP? The six reactor buildings have robust containment domes and are well protected against artillery shelling and even rocket strikes. It would require bunker busters or equivalent explosives to breach reactor containment. Any accident would lead to a shutdown. However, the risk in a running nuclear plant is that it requires continuous cooling even if it has been shut down. Cooling pumps require auxiliary power. If the reactors are shut down, that auxiliary power normally comes from the grid. In an emergency, diesel generating (DG) sets can provide such auxiliary power, but only as a temporary stopgap measure.
Without cooling pumps, residual radioactivity in the nuclear core will cause continuous heating and rising temperature. If cooling cannot be restored, the core temperature will rise enough to cause a core meltdown and large-scale release of radioactivity. A core meltdown is classified as a Level 7 accident, the highest on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. Only Chernobyl and Fukushima have been classified as Level 7 incidents. The Three Mile Island nuclear plant was only 30 minutes away from a Level 7 full core meltdown.
Why is cooling the reactor core in a nuclear plant so important? The core is where heat-releasing controlled atomic fission takes place. This heat creates the steam that drives turbo-generators to produce electricity. The fission—breaking up—of uranium fuel to other highly radioactive materials continues to produce heat even after a reactor is shut down. As some of these materials have short half-lives, a shut reactor slowly cools, but cooling systems must keep running. This process makes auxiliary power for the cooling pumps necessary.
During the earthquake-tsunami that hit Japan, the Fukushima Daiichi plant lost all auxiliary power due to a grid failure. Three reactors overheated, leading to a core meltdown. The consequence was not only the release of radioactivity into the atmosphere but a huge amount of radioactive water, which is known to have discharged into the Pacific Ocean with unknown consequences for marine life. Since marine products enter our food chain, the implications of the Fukushima disaster will continue for a long time.
Though Chernobyl had a much more significant immediate impact, it was a man-made disaster. The reactor was being tested under extreme low power conditions bypassing all protections. It was the hubris of the engineers running the plant, which is unlikely to be repeated. In the Three Mile Island accident, the auxiliary cooling water pumps were manually switched off as the operating staff completely misunderstood the conditions within the reactor core. A new shift of workers diagnosed the actual event, averting what would have been another Level 7 incident narrowly.
Since auxiliary equipment is not within the reactor containment structures, it is vulnerable to shelling and bombing of the facilities. One shelling incident in Zaporozhye damaged the auxiliary equipment, though not the ones that would affect the reactor cooling systems. If the auxiliary power system fails, reactors lose their cooling system, leading to a core meltdown. DG sets can provide backup power for some time but not indefinitely support cooling systems.
The other risk to the plant comes from the cooling water ponds, which store spent fuel rods immersed in water. The spent rods have residual radioactivity and need to be stored in cooling water for an extended period for radioactive decay to occur and carry away the heat. Any shelling that hits the cooling ponds can lead to a significant release of radioactivity.
Why would Ukraine risk such an event, as it would also become a country badly affected by a Fukushima or a Chernobyl level accident? It appears the trigger for this course of action was the possibility that Russia would connect the Zaporozhye plant to the Russian grid and disconnect from the Ukraine one. The shelling of Zaporozhye started at almost the same time as such a possibility was discussed. Escalating the risk to the plant, leading to an international outcry and now an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection, is one way to maintain the status quo and, therefore, the supply of electricity from the plant to Ukraine.
Here is the irony of the Ukraine war. While Ukraine and its NATO allies have imposed numerous sanctions on Russia, Ukraine was getting natural gas supplies from Russia and electricity from the Zaporozhye plant. With Ukraine’s industrial consumption plummeting alongside the loss of 20% of its territory, its electricity consumption has also been reduced. Consequently, it sold about 100 MW of electricity to the European Union (EU). With the price of electricity recently shooting up in the EU, if Russia disconnects Zaporozhye from the Ukraine grid, Ukraine will lose both; electricity and money. Therefore we have the Zelensky regime playing the game of nuclear chicken—who will back off first from a possible disaster—with the Zaporozhye plant.
The problem for Russia is that internationalizing the shelling of the Zaporozhye plant risks the IAEA and the UN playing a role in the plant. UN Secretary-General António Guterres appears more the voice of the West than the head of the UN. Similarly, the IAEA is heavily influenced by the West, as we saw earlier during the Iraq war and its role in Iran. Though Russia has been asking for an IAEA inspection of the Zaporozhye plant for quite some time, IAEA has argued that the inspection has to take place only through Kiev-controlled territory, and the plant and its surrounding area should be demilitarized. If the task of the IAEA is nuclear safety, that should be its priority over what are clearly political demands emanating from Kiev and its NATO allies.
While the politics being played in the UN Security Council and IAEA can be understood in terms of the narrow interests of the players, should not the demand for the safety of a nuclear plant override such considerations? Should not EU countries, who would also be hit by a Chernobyl or a Fukushima level disaster, think about the interest of their people as well? Or is weakening Russia more important than the safety of its people?
The problem in the world today is that every country seems to see foreign policy in terms of its narrow self-interest. We lack the moral compass that the Non-Aligned Movement with leaders like Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah and Sukarno brought to the world. That is what we badly miss today: a voice of reason to speak up for humanity.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/08/29/ ... aporozhye/
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 08/30/2022
Yesterday morning, Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency announced the news that the inspection mission of the Zaporozhie nuclear power plant, in the town of Energodar, under Russian control, was "on its way" and was he hopes that he will be able to access the infrastructure throughout this week. Hours later, Russian sources published images of the damage caused by a Ukrainian shell on the roof of one of the buildings. Despite the obvious perforation caused on a building in which fuel is stored, local authorities guaranteed that radiation levels are within normal limits, although Russia continues to denounce Ukrainian bombardments that, since the night before, had intensified. Sunday night, Ukrainian shells hit residential areas of the city causing several fires. According to the Ukrainian newspaperStrana , the head of the President's Office, Andriy Ermak, accused Russia of carrying out the bombing with the aim of discrediting Ukraine. Also in the case of the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, Ukraine continues to accuse Russia of bombing the territory under its control. Following reports of a new bombing, Volodymyr Zelensky, whose army continues to play with fire around a nuclear power plant, accused Russia of "intimidating Europe" by making the plant "a battlefield."
The bombing of Energodar and the situation around the nuclear power plant were nothing more than a prelude to a larger attack that took place throughout the day. As several media outlets quoted Natalia Humeniuk, spokesperson for the command of the southern troops, Ukraine has begun the long-awaited counteroffensive on the southern front. Coinciding with that statement, the CNN journalistJim Sciutto published the exclusive on said offensive citing two high-ranking officials of the US administration. According to the journalist, Ukraine is currently conducting training operations, which will include both ground operations and the use of aviation in preparation for the major offensive. Sciutto added that, according to the US intelligence assessment, Russia has not managed to deploy as many units as it had planned.
Triumphalism was immediate and, given the first reports of certain Ukrainian advances on one of the fronts - not towards Kherson, a prize that Ukraine hopes to achieve since it is the only Ukrainian regional capital under Russian control, but towards Novaya Kajovka-, Mijailo Podoliak, advisor to the Office of the President, showed his happiness on social networks. Trying to delegitimize the words of Gennady Trujanov, mayor of Odessa, who had appealed in an interview granted to an Italian media for a negotiation, Podoliak wrote on social networks: "The negotiations with Russia are being carried out today according to the only possible format by a delegation special Ukrainian, specifically in the direction of the southern front. The negotiations are going well. We look forward to new commitmentsin the form of goodwill gestures [by Russia].”
Beyond the confidence that Ukraine has always shown in the success of the great offensive, the information on what happened throughout the day in the different areas of the southern front is scarce. Unlike in Donbass, where the routine of war has created a whole series of war correspondents capable of providing information practically in real time, the southern front is less well known and less visited by the press, so it lends itself to all kinds of misinformation.
Although the balance of this first contact is difficult to assess and it will have to be the next few days that determine the trend that occurs on the front, the directions in which the fight will take place have been made clear. Possibly more anticipated attack in the direction of Kherson, it was not in that area where the Armed Forces of Ukraine managed to advance several kilometers.
This is how Gray Zone picked it up yesterday :
A brief, albeit belated assessment of the emergence of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Nikolaev-Krivoi Rog leadership:
Over the past three days and two nights, the Ukrainian side has chosen to focus on attacking with MLRS HIMARS systems targets of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in the Kherson region. Reconnaissance units have also worked in the area of the Ingulets River [where the last Ukrainian advance in the region took place several weeks ago, although it never went beyond it- Ed ] , which have crossed the river in boats.
At night, after another attack with HIMARS, the opponent managed to advance in several directions. They used up to three pontoons, which could not be destroyed. The enemy advance was made with the support of a tank force that can be up to a company. The presence of enemy aircraft, at least one helicopter, was observed.
Of the opponent's attacks, three were complete. One of them went in the Andreevka-Lozovoe direction, with which the Ukrainian Armed Forces advanced 6 kilometers and occupied the village of Sukhoi Stavok.
There was also an unsuccessful break-in attempt by the Ukrainian side in the towns of Lyubimobka, Miroliubkovka, Dobrianka, Olgovka, Potemkino and Visokopole. Here the paratroopers and the guys from the Black Sea fleet gave a good answer. But the enemy keeps trying to encircle the Russian forces at Visokopole, though luckily they are unsuccessful. Depending on the tactic that has already been prepared, it is possible to use the territorial defense forces for assault tasks and to shoot down volunteer units.
In general, it is too early to speak more precisely about advances and setbacks. The situation is developing with different levels of success for each of the parties. We can safely say that the enemy does not treat the matter in any way, but with confidence in his capabilities. The Ukrainian Armed Forces have managed to hold on and create a bridgehead on one of the broken sections of the front. The enemy awaits the accumulation of forces. The main troop movement maneuvers are likely to take place after nightfall.
Russia acts defensively. The Ukrainian Armed Forces are expected to hit the road infrastructures of the Kakhovskaya power plant to the maximum.
The next few days will tell whether Ukraine has the necessary forces to launch a large-scale offensive and whether Russia has the necessary troops to efficiently defend the areas under its control, especially the cities of Kherson, Novaya Kakhovka, Energodar and Melitopol, all of them targeted by Ukrainian artillery and also by sabotage groups (possibly linked to the SBU), which continue to use means of controlled terror to kill those who collaborate with the Russian authorities. Yesterday, for example, the former deputy of Volodymyr Zelensky's party Alexey Kovalev and his partner were murdered in his home.
After weeks of increased bombing intensity, and gambling around the Energodar nuclear power plant, Ukraine is now trying to go on the attack in an unavoidable offensive. Rejected in March any possibility of recovering those territories through diplomatic channels, kyiv is now trying to reconquer that lost part that it does have an interest in preserving. Unlike Donbass, destroyed, with an industrial economic base that kyiv does not care about and with a population that it considers disloyal, the south, especially the fertile Kherson region, is indeed a target that Ukraine wants to recover.
https://slavyangrad.es/2022/08/30/el-fr ... more-25384
Google Translator
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Ukraine: the never-ending war
Joe Biden’s actions, approving a new allocation of almost 3 billion dollars in arms for Ukraine and Josep Borrell’s initiative for the EU, in addition to providing arms to Kyiv and joining the bandwagon of sanctions against Russia, to train the Ukrainian military involved in a war, show that many have an interest in this war not ending.
Author: Elson Concepción Pérez | internet@...
August 25, 2022 22:08:46 PM
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Both the EU and the US have hindered the search for peace in the conflict. Photo: Reuters
No unfounded premonitions: it is difficult to understand, but the world is being led – and quite rapidly – to the outbreak of a nuclear confrontation, perhaps the last, because it involves weaponry that can exterminate the population of the planet.
Let us look at the elements that make us think in this apparently apocalyptic way.
As recently as this August 24, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, announced a new package of arms shipments to Ukraine in the amount of 2.98 billion dollars. Enough money to feed or cure a few million African children who are dying for lack of food or medicine.
On the same day, the UN Security Council met, at Russia’s request, to discuss the Ukrainian military attacks on the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, which had already been attacked by Kyiv 17 times in the last few days and, in addition, fires had broken out near the facility.
The war in Ukraine has exposed the fact that the United States is using the Ukrainian population as cannon fodder, in its hegemonic eagerness to subdue Russia and turn all its guns against China.
Moscow warned from the very beginning: “We will not allow Russian citizens or citizens of Russian origin living in the Donbas region to be massacred by constant aggressions”.
And another Russian warning: “We cannot allow the United States and NATO to try to encircle Russia, bringing modern weapons to its border with Ukraine”.
Both reasons could well have been part of a dialogue without the interference of third countries and, of course, without the arrogant presence of NATO as the driving force of the war.
However, what has the European Union (EU) done but hinder the search for peace around the conflict and create an adverse economic and social situation, to the detriment of its own nations?
European governments that support U.S. policy on Ukraine, i.e. arming that nation and sanctioning and destabilizing Russia, should bear in mind that this nuclear power plant is the largest in Europe, with six pressurized water reactors and a total capacity of 6,000 megawatts, and anything that happens there can affect the countries of the old continent. In the worst case, the radioactive components can spread and act against the lives of millions of people.
Sending weapons to Kyiv and imposing sanctions of all kinds on Russia has favored the U.S. military complex.
With the policy of Russophobia pursued by the EU and many countries in that region, the situation of every European household and citizen is affected in an extraordinary way. This August 25, for example, the news could not be worse: the price of gas has risen to a record high of 3,200 dollars per thousand cubic meters.
Add to that, the adversity that Europe is today affected by the worst drought in the last 500 years and is the victim of an unprecedented heat wave, which has already caused more than a thousand deaths.
Nevertheless, the head of EU diplomacy has just proposed “a large training and assistance mission to the Ukrainian army”.
Joe Biden’s actions, approving a new allocation of almost 3 billion dollars in arms for Ukraine and Josep Borrell’s initiative for the EU, in addition to providing arms to Kiev and joining the bandwagon of sanctions against Russia, to train the Ukrainian military involved in a war, show that many have an interest in this war not ending.
Source :
Ucrania: la guerra de nunca acabar
https://groups.io/g/cubanews/topic/9326 ... 0f7bea2971
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On the "counteroffensive on Kherson".
August 29, 3:11 p.m
Ukrainian sources claim a "counterattack on Kherson" and a strike in the direction of the village of Sukhoi Stavok (near Belogorka) and even the capture of the village of Sukhoi Stavok. So far, there has been an attempt to move from the Andreevka area in the direction of Bruskinskoye, Sukhoi Stavok and Kostromka.
In general, these are all the same attempts by the Armed Forces of Ukraine to implement the plans of mid-August with an attack on Berislav in order to cut off part of the bridgehead of the RF Armed Forces on the right bank of the Dnieper.
Intense artillery shelling of Berislav is also recorded (the workshop of the machine-building plant is on fire), as well as traditional positional battles on the Ingulets River (Kryvyi Rih direction) and in the Potemkino-Vysokopolye region (Nikopol direction - by the way, at night they covered the accumulation of enemy troops in the Novorontsovka area - many 200x). Enemy losses in people and equipment are noted in the Olginka and Vysokopolye regions.
Also, active battles are going on in the area of Partizansky and Aleksandrovka, where, after the capture of Blagodatny, the front advanced towards Nikolaev.
In Novaya Kakhovka, the evacuation of residents to bomb shelters was announced due to many hours of shelling of the city from the MLRS. Air defense works in Kherson and in the area of Nova Kakhovka. It is worth noting that one HIMARS rocket did not work properly and fell intact in the region. It has already been taken out for study.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7829564.html
Google Translator
"Counteroffensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on Kherson". Evening 29.09.2022
August 29, 23:11
"Counteroffensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on Kherson". Evening 29.09.2022
In the area of Blagodatny, Snigirevka, Vysokopole and Davydov Brod, the enemy failed to achieve significant success, despite the losses incurred. It was not possible to break through to Kiselevka, as well as to provide fire control over the road to Vysokopolye.
In the area of the village of Sukhoi Stavok, the enemy was able to advance from the bridgehead near Andreevka and is now trying to gain a foothold in the village in order to try to cover the positions of the RF Armed Forces near Davydov Brod. They drove the enemy out of the village itself.
The enemy continues to actively strike at Berislav, Novaya Kakhovka, in the Kherson region. At least 1 ammunition depot was destroyed and a barge used to cross the Dnieper was damaged.
The RF Armed Forces are striking in the Krivoy Rog and Nikopol directions.
According to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the enemy lost about 50 units of heavy and light armored vehicles, 2 attack aircraft, more than 560 military personnel killed during today's battles.
Against the background of the shelling of Berislav and the crossing of the Dnieper, the enemy is trying to increase pressure on the river. Ingulets to advance to Berislav. Despite the fact that in most areas the offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine ended unsuccessfully until the next crisis on Ingulets was resolved, it is too early to say that the offensive completely failed.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin - zinc
Video from the Nikolaev direction:
https://t.me/boris_rozhin/61728
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7830381.html
Entry into a building with nuclear fuel at the ZNPP
August 29, 19:00
A hole from a 155-mm American howitzer M777 shell in the roof of a special building of the Zaporizhzhya NPP.
This building stores nuclear fuel for the operation of the station. Another trace of an explosion on the roof, the site of the fall of the Polish kamikaze UAV.
Satellite images from MAXAR.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7829980.html
Google Translator
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Europe's Economic And Social Suicide - Provoked by The U.S. And Helped Along By Europe's Leaders
Due to the stupidity of Europe's political leadership the U.S. has managed to push it towards committing economic and social suicide.
On February 8 Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, wrote about the then upcoming conflict in Ukraine which the U.S. was intentionally provoking.
Michael Hudson: America’s Real Adversaries Are Its European and Other Allies
The sanctions that U.S. diplomats are insisting that their allies impose against trade with Russia and China are aimed ostensibly at deterring a military buildup. But such a buildup cannot really be the main Russian and Chinese concern. They have much more to gain by offering mutual economic benefits to the West. So the underlying question is whether Europe will find its advantage in replacing U.S. exports with Russian and Chinese supplies and the associated mutual economic linkages.
What worries American diplomats is that Germany, other NATO nations and countries along the Belt and Road route understand the gains that can be made by opening up peaceful trade and investment. If there is no Russian or Chinese plan to invade or bomb them, what is the need for NATO? And if there is no inherently adversarial relationship, why do foreign countries need to sacrifice their own trade and financial interests by relying exclusively on U.S. exporters and investors?
...
Instead of a real military threat from Russia and China, the problem for American strategists is the absence of such a threat. ...
...
The only way left for U.S. diplomats to block European purchases is to goad Russia into a military response and then claim that avenging this response outweighs any purely national economic interest. As hawkish Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, explained in a State Department press briefing on January 27: “If Russia invades Ukraine one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” The problem is to create a suitably offensive incident and depict Russia as the aggressor.
To provoke a war in Ukraine was easy as the movie production team ruling Ukraine was willing to sacrifice its people and country in a unwinnable war against Russia. The Ukrainian actor and president Vladimir Zelensky had already announced that the Ukraine would, by force, take back Crimea and the Donbas republics that were in the hand of a Russia aligned Ukrainian resistance.
On February 15 Professor John Mearsheimer gave a talk (vid) in which he documented how the U.S. had caused, and is responsible for, the whole Ukraine crisis.
Since last year about half of the Ukrainian army was positioned in the county's southeast at the ceasefire line with the Donbas republics. On February 17 it opened preparatory artillery fire against the resistance positions. Over the next days the barrage steadily increased.
The observers of the Organization for Security and Co-operation (OSCE), positioned at the frontline, counted and documented each artillery strike and published daily summaries on its website. From 80 artillery impacts on February 16 the attacks increased each day to over 2,000 per day on February 22.
The OSCE observers also provided maps of where the grenades exploded (here of February 21):
The vast majority of impacts were on three areas east of the ceasefire line on resistance held positions. Anyone with a bit of military knowledge will recognize such intense artillery campaigns along distinct axes as the preparation action for an all out attack.
The leaders of the Donbas republics as well as of Russia had to react to this upcoming attack. On February 19 the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic asked the Russia government for help. Left alone they would have had no chance to resist against the Ukrainian army the U.S. and its allies, since 2015, had financed and built.
Up to this point Russia had insisted that the DPR and LNR were part of Ukraine but should receive some kind of autonomy as provided by the Minsk agreements. But it now had to take steps that would legalize Russian support for the Donbas. On February 21 Russia recognized the republics as independent states. The three parties signed cooperation agreements which included clauses for mutual military support:
Russia’s treaty with the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) stipulates granting the right to build military bases on their territory and provide mutual military assistance, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko told a plenary session of the lower house of parliament on Tuesday.
"An important aspect: the treaty stipulates the intentions by the parties to interact in the field of foreign policy, the protection of sovereignty and territorial integrity and security provision, in particular, by way of rendering each other required assistance, including military aid, and granting the right to build, use and improve military infrastructure and military bases on their territory," the high-ranking Russian diplomat pointed out.
With the agreements in place Russian military help against the Ukrainian attack became (at least arguably) legal under Article 51 (collective self-defense) of the UN Charter.
On February 22, no Russia soldier had yet stepped onto Ukrainian ground, the U.S. and its allies imposed extreme economic sanctions against Russia. President Biden acknowledged that the U.S. had long prepared for this.
Over the last few months, we have coordinated closely with our NATO Allies and partners in Europe and around the world to prepare that response. We’ve said all along and I’ve told Putin to his face a mon- — a month a- — more than a month ago that we would act together and the moment Russia moved against Ukraine.
Russia has now undeniably moved against Ukraine by declaring these independent states.
So, today, I’m announcing the first tranche of sanctions to impose costs on Russia in response to their actions yesterday. These have been closely coordinated with our Allies and partners, and we’ll continue to escalate sanctions if Russia escalates.
On February 24 Russian forces entered the Ukraine to preempt the coming attack on the Donbas republics. (The Russian plan A was to press on Kiev to agree to a fast settlement of the crisis. That failed in early April after Boris Johnson's intervention in Kiev. Russia switched to plan B, the de-militarization of Ukraine.)
The German government announced that the Nord Stream II pipeline, which is technically ready to deliver Russian gas to Germany, would not be launched.
On February 27 the German chancellor Olaf Scholz gave a hysteric and moralizing speech in front of the Germany parliament. It accused Russia of breaking peace in Europe.
The Minsk agreement, under which the Ukraine had committed to federalize and give some autonomy to Donbas, was not mentioned once. Germany and France were both guarantee powers who in 2015 had cosigned the Minsk agreement but had, over seven long years, done little to press for its implementation.
Instead of working for a fast ceasefire and a renewal of economic relations with Russia Scholz committed Germany to economic suicide.
On February 28 Professor Hudson published another deep analysis of the crisis:
America Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century: The MIC, BARE and OGAM Conquer NATO.
In a forward to the piece Yves Smith summarized:
Michael Hudson expands on his theme on how the conflict in Ukraine is the result of much bigger forces at work, and not necessarily the ones you have top of mind. He argues that preventing European countries, particularly Germany, from developing deeper economic ties with China and Russia is what’s really at stake.
Here, Hudson describes the hold key US interests have on foreign policy and how they see conflict as a way to hold off a possible fall in their status and power.
The Hudson piece is quite long and deep. I recommend to read it in full.
The U.S. idea is to isolate Europe from its Eurasian hinterland, to move Europe's industries to the U.S. and to buy up the rest for cheap.
To take Nord Stream II out and to get European countries to boycott Russian energy the U.S. had promised that it would 'help' by selling its (quite expensive) Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to Europe. But when natural gas prices started to rise in Europe free market forces set in and they also started to increase in the United States. High energy prices threatened to damage Biden and to tank the Democrats in the midterm elections.
Then a mysterious accident happened:
An explosion at a liquefied natural gas terminal in Texas has left nearby residents rattled and is taking a substantial amount of the fuel off the market at a time when global demand is soaring.
Freeport LNG will be offline for at least three weeks, the company said Thursday, following a fire in its export facility.
...
Most of Freeport LNG's exports were going to Europe, according to Rystad Energy. Europe may be able to offset the lost volume with increases from other facilities, said Emily McClain, vice president at Rystad. Europe gets about 45% of its LNG from the U.S., and the rest comes from Russia, Qatar and other sources, she said.
Three weeks was too short to lower U.S. natural gas prices. The U.S. regulator for such plants, the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), stepped in and prolonged the restart process:
The second-biggest U.S. liquefied natural gas export facility hit by fire earlier this month will not be allowed to repair or restart operations until it addresses risks to public safety, a pipeline regulator said on Thursday.
...
U.S. natural gas futures tumbled 15% on Thursday due to the report and on a continued inventory build, contributing to a 33% price drop in June, the biggest monthly drop since 2018.
...
"The actual process (of reviews, repairs and approvals) will take longer than three months, and potentially take six to 12 months," said Alex Munton, director of global gas and LNG at consultants Rapidan Energy Group.
There was also some news of sudden 'problems' at other LNG facilities.
It is not only natural gas but also petroleum products that the U.S. is withholding while Europe is in need:
The Biden administration is warning refiners that it may take “emergency measures” to address fuel exports as stockpiles of gasoline and diesel fuel remain near historically low levels in the Northeast.
Fertilizer making plants in Europe have shut down because of way too high natural gas prices. Steel and aluminum smelters are following. Glas production in Europe is severely endangered.
In a long piece today Yves Smith is looking at the economic and political consequences for Europe. In a breach of Betteridge's law</A she headlines:
Will Europe Go Down to Defeat Before Ukraine?
We will be so bold as to posit that not only has the sanctions war against Russia backfired spectacularly, but the damage to the West, most of all Europe, is accelerating rapidly. And this is not the result of Russia taking active measures but the costs of the loss or reduction of key Russian resources compounding over time.
So due to the intensity of the energy shock, the economic timetable is moving faster than the military. Unless Europe engages in a major course correction, and we don’t see how this can happen, the European economic crisis looks set to become devastating before Ukraine is formally defeated.
...
As we’ll explain, this shock will be so severe if nothing is done (and as we’ll explain, it’s hard to see anything meaningful enough being done), that the result will be not a recession, but a depression in Europe.
...
In theory, the EU could try to make up to Russia. But the time for that has passed. It isn’t just that too many key European players like Ursula von der Leyen and Robert Habeck are too deeply invested in Russia-hatred to retreat. Even if there were blood in the street come December, they wouldn’t be turfed out quickly enough.
It is also that Europe has burned its bridges with Russia beyond just the sanctions. Putin has repeatedly offered the EU the option of using Nord Stream 2. Even with Russia now using half its capacity, it could still fully substitute for former Nord Stream 1 deliveries. Putin did warn that option would not stay open for all that long, that Russia would start using the rest of the volume.
...
So the outcome seems inevitable: many Europeans businesses will fail, leading to job losses, business loan defaults, loss of government revenues, foreclosures. And with governments thinking they’d maybe spent a bit too freely with Covid relief, their emergency energy fillups will be too little to make all that much difference.
At some point, the economic contraction will lead to a financial crisis. If the downdraft is rapid enough, it could be the result as much of (well warranted) loss of confidence as actual losses and defaults to date.
The U.S. has, out of purely egoistic reasons, dragged Europe, and especially Germany, into a trap that will lead to its economic and social destruction. Instead of recognizing the danger, and taking the necessary countermeasure, the European and the German 'leaders' committed themselves to help with the process.
The best thing for Europe and Germany would of course have been to avoid the crisis. That failed because of a lack of insight and effort. But now, as Europe is deep down in a hole, the politicians should at least stop digging. It is in Europe's and especially Germany's obvious interest to keep the crisis as short as possible.
But the lunatics who are ruling over Europe are still doing the opposite:
Germany will keep up its support for Kyiv "for as long as it takes", Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Monday, calling for an enlargement of the European Union to eventually include Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia.
...
Germany had undergone a "fundamental change of heart" in recent months on its military support for Ukraine, he said.
"We will keep up this support, reliably and, above all, for as long as it takes," he told the packed university audience.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen echoed the "as long as it takes" promise to Kyiv in a speech in Slovenia, calling for "a new strategic thinking" to uphold European values.
As those 'leaders' seem to see it, affordable energy, warm homes, sufficient food, jobs and pensions of Europe citizens are not part of the 'European values' they intend to uphold.
The economic and financial breakdown of Europe will be much faster than the obviously necessary political change of its third rate leadership.
The only political sector that will not be damaged by all this, at least in France and Germany, is the far right. That in itself is also a danger.
Posted by b on August 29, 2022 at 17:38 UTC | Permalink
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/08/e ... .html#more
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Freeze or Starve? Sanctioning Russia Leaves Germans a Choice this Winter
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on AUGUST 29, 2022
C.J. ATKINS
Freeze or starve? Sanctioning Russia leaves Germans a choice this winterFreeze or starve: With energy costs driving up the price of everything, Germans will face a choice this winter. Here, a pedestrian walks through the freezing winter fog in Berlin. | Maurizio Gambarini / dpa via AP
The biggest beneficiary in the whole affair, Pohl argues, has been U.S. imperialism. Its energy companies are breaking into the European market, and the costs of achieving its long-term goal of weakening Russia are being paid for, in part, with West European workers’ earnings and Ukrainian lives. “The winner of this war and sanctions will be the United States.”
BERLIN—“It’s going to be a choice many of us will have to face when winter comes: freeze or starve.” So says Günter Pohl, a glassworker from the the town of Sprockhövel in Germany’s industrial Ruhr region. “The sanctions are supposedly targeting Russia, but they’re hitting us a lot more than they are Russia.”
He was referring to the economic penalties Western governments have imposed on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. Though supposedly intended to cripple the Russian economy and pressure Vladimir Putin to bring his troops home, there are signs it’s the working people of Germany and other European countries who are bearing most of the punishment.
Pohl spoke with People’s World in Berlin on the sidelines of the UZ-Pressefest, a mass cultural and political festival hosted annually by Unsere Zeit, a socialist newspaper affiliated with the German Communist Party (DKP). His sentiment is shared by many here—understandable given that paychecks are covering less and less these days.
Inflation clocked in at 7.6% for Germany in summer 2022, a near 40-year high. At the core of the problem? Energy costs, which are up an astounding 38% according to official statistics. Before the war in Ukraine, Germany secured the natural gas that heats its homes and powers much of its industry from Russia. It had been that way for decades, even during the Cold War.
But in the wake of Putin’s invasion, construction on the nearly-finished $9.5 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline—which would have transported more gas from Russia to the German coast by going under the Baltic Sea—was abruptly canceled. Gas flows through the existing Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Europe have already slowed by more than 60% and will go to zero by the end of August, at least for a while.
That shutdown presents a special problem for Germans. More than half of them—over 40 million people—use natural gas to heat their homes. During the summer, many still hoped the worst of the gas price hike might be avoided. Perhaps Ukraine and Russia would negotiate a ceasefire and the pressure on world energy markets would ease.
But now, fall can already be felt in the air in Berlin, and the prices of everything from food to transport to fuel continue to climb. Many are beginning to worry what will happen when the temperatures really begin to drop.
“We expect prices to double,” Pohl predicts. “And no one will be spared…it’s not just the heating of homes, it’s also the cooking, the hot water for bathing…all of it.” Making the stained glass windows which are his specialty also consumes a lot of energy, so the same problem is repeating in manufacturing and throughout the economy.
Even those Germans who use electric or oil for their homes won’t be able to avoid the rising costs. “A lot of people don’t earn enough money to do it,” he argues. “It’s going to be at least €2,000 more [$2,000 USD] for a family of four this winter. How will they pay?”
Where’s the resistance?
Wera Richter shares Pohl’s skepticism for the cold season ahead. “With prices shooting up, even people who have what are considered ‘decent’ incomes are going to have difficulty paying and surviving.” Richter is the editor-in-chief of Unsere Zeit and covers the latest developments of the war and its economic fallout for Germans in the pages of the newspaper.
She says the DKP and UZ were warning earlier this year of what lay ahead for working-class Germans if a reckless sanctions regime was the West’s response to the war. The continued flow of Russian gas at the tail-end of last winter and the warm weather of summer kept public discontent in check for a time, but when the choice becomes food or heat, will public opinion begin to change?
Richter’s chief concern is that there has so far been “nearly a total lack of resistance” to the ill-conceived structure of the sanctions against Russia. The peace movement is weak, and images of the brutality of the war in Ukraine along with German leaders’ declarations of solidarity with Volodymyr Zelensky’s government have kept most people on-side with the NATO campaign to back Kiev to the bitter end.
In the eastern part of Germany, the areas which made up the former German Democratic Republic, anti-war feelings are stronger, according to Richter. But the call for a negotiated ceasefire, which the DKP and UZ advocate (vs. an all-out military defeat of Russia which NATO says is the goal), is still a tough sell almost anywhere right now, Richter admits.
Heavily discounted public transport tickets and some small energy subsidies for households bought the government time in the spring and summer. It says the long-term strategy is to totally phase out Russian gas and switch to other sources.
It is the trade union leadership’s inaction on the energy inflation issue that is particularly worrying for Richter, though. “They haven’t organized anything,” she laments. Even if they remain bound to the government’s foreign policy stances, at least they should have something stronger to say about the war’s effect on their own members.
Melina Deymann, who works alongside Richter at UZ as the paper’s international affairs editor, told People’s World that the positions taken by some unions amount to almost a total neglect of duty to their members’ well-being. She cited one large service union whose leader last week told members it’s no time to fight with the government or employers “because the evil Russians are threatening the world, together with the even more evil Chinese standing behind them.”
Deymann says, “Under no circumstances would a Communist tell a worker to leave a union, but that kind of situation brings you pretty close to considering it.”
Sanctions war winners
Eagerly waiting to step into the energy void left by the sanctions, of course, are U.S.-based corporations looking for new customers. Before the scuttling of Nord Stream 2, their share of the European gas market was topped out at around 30%. But Russia’s war changed everything—essentially overnight. Soaring prices made expensive-to-produce gas from the U.S. more competitive on world markets, and European leaders could rely on sentiment for Ukraine among the general public to accelerate the turn away from Russia.
“Now they say we will buy fracked gas from the U.S.—ecologically the worst kind—but there’s not even enough ships and terminals to get it here,” Pohl says. American natural gas largely comes from the environmentally-damaging process of fracking, and getting it across the Atlantic requires liquefaction, huge tanker ships for transport, and specialized loading and offloading facilities.
“Maybe you can assemble a terminal pretty quickly,” Pohl grants, “but the number of ships they will need could take years to build.” So although U.S. gas is on the way, it could be a long time coming.
In the meantime, keeping up the economic charade of anti-Russia sanctions is leading to some pretty absurd tactics.
“The German government says we will not buy Russian gas because they are killing Ukrainians and conducting an illegal war, so instead we’ll buy gas and oil from Qatar and Saudi Arabia,” Pohl explains. But Qatar and Saudi Arabia (which is doing plenty of killing of its own in Yemen) can’t supply enough output to fulfill Europe’s needs. “So where do they get it? Russia! Russian oil and gas goes to places like Saudi Arabia, which then turns around and sells it to Germany.”
In this middle-man mark-up system, Germany still ends up buying the same Russian energy supplies it has sanctioned and forbidden—but at higher prices. “It would be funny if it wasn’t all so tragic,” Pohl muses.
In Russia, the oil is still flowing, but now more of it is heading east to customers like India and China. In fact, Russia is selling more oil than ever, and revenues are through the roof. The whole sanctions regime is boomeranging back on Europe; it’s estimated Germans will be paying over €5 billion [$5 billion USD] more for energy.
“Asia has saved Russian crude production,” said Viktor Katona, an energy analyst at the firm Kpler, told the New York Times last month. “Russia, instead of falling further, is almost close to its pre-pandemic levels.”
The biggest beneficiary in the whole affair, Pohl argues, has been U.S. imperialism. Its energy companies are breaking into the European market, and the costs of achieving its long-term goal of weakening Russia are being paid for, in part, with West European workers’ earnings and Ukrainian lives. “The winner of this war and sanctions will be the United States.”
Sanctions war losers
The whole sanctions regime seems to be a failure. The economic impact on Russia isn’t working out as planned, the war drags on with neither side willing to negotiate, and Germans’ euros are shrinking fast.
As for the climate? It’s another casualty of the war: Fracked U.S. gas is pouring onto the world market, more coal and other dirty fossil fuels will be consumed to make up for the lost energy, and Russia is burning off much of its unsold excess gas.
How long this state of affairs can go on is an open question. Will the labor movement leadership continue to sleep at the wheel while the economy heads for the ditch? Will the public’s willingness to pay for the costs of war hold out when the mercury drops? Will Russia and Ukraine work out some kind of peace?
Another determining factor will be the issue of how long the unity of the German ruling class holds up. Pohl says that it has long been split between two wings, “one Atlanticist, which was essentially pro-U.S.,” and a second one which was “neither pro-U.S. nor pro-Soviet (pro-Russia in the post-Cold War days).” The latter wing believed it was good for business to maintain connections to both sides and not get overly attached to American foreign policy dictates.
Since the invasion though, that “collaboration wing,” as Pohl calls it, has gotten weaker. “As of February, the capitalist class has collectively said, the government will determine where we go—it’s the primacy of politics.” Advocating business ties with Russia has simply become untenable, so the search is on for new partners in other places.
This old split in the ruling class had actually played a role in preserving peace, but with the state having declared it intends to be totally free of economic activity with Russia by 2023, Pohl and the German Communists worry what could come next.
“It’s always been said that countries which trade together don’t go to war, but by 2024 there will be no trade with Russia,” Pohl says. “What then?”
That’s why the DKP and UZ have made peace the central focus of the UZ-Pressefest this year. The German Communists know it’s an uphill fight right now to stop the war—both the war in Ukraine and the war on German workers’ living standards—but they’re giving it all they have to mobilize peace sentiment.
There is little time to spare, however. Winter is coming and it’s coming fast.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/08/ ... is-winter/
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Game of nuclear chicken in Zaporozhye
The IAEA’s priority is supposedly nuclear safety, but its priority in Ukraine appears to be to fulfil the selfish political demands of Ukraine and its NATO allies
August 29, 2022 by Prabir Purkayastha
The Zaporozhye (also spelt Zaporizhzhia) Nuclear Power Plant has become a focal point in the Ukraine war, as any major nuclear incident risks radioactivity release over a vast area. In such an accident, not only Ukraine but large parts of Europe could face radioactive contamination and much higher cancer rates and other diseases. Russia has claimed the Ukrainian side shelled the Zaporozhye plant in July and August and, on August 23, submitted photographic and other documentary evidence to the UN Security Council. Ukraine contends Russia has been shelling the plant even though it is under Russia’s occupation.
The Zaporozhye plant in the town of Enerhodar is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, with six 1,000 MW capacity units. They are Pressurized Water Reactors of Soviet vintage: the oldest unit was commissioned 37 years and the newest 26 years ago. Before the war, they used to supply 20% of Ukraine’s electricity. And even after Russia captured Zaporozhye in March, they have continued supplying to the Ukrainian grid.
Before we look at the risks of a major nuclear incident on the scale of Chernobyl or Fukushima, let us take a quick look at the Ukrainian claims regarding the Russian shelling of the plant and the positioning of heavy artillery and other equipment within. It defies logic why the Russians themselves would shell a plant which, by all accounts, is under their control. All the evidence so far supports Russia’s claim that Ukraine shelled the plant and the transmission lines. And if, as Ukraine claims, Russia has positioned heavy military equipment within the plant, it should be a simple matter for Ukraine or its NATO allies to make the evidence public in the age of satellite imagery. That they have not speaks volumes.
Understandably, the Ukrainian side would make such propaganda claims. What is surprising is major news organizations—Reuters, AP, The New York Times, and The Washington Post — have all echoed Kiev’s line that Russia shelled a plant under its control or used it as a shield without even a simple fact or plausibility check. In all such reports, Kiev’s statements are faithfully carried as gospel truth. Big western media appears to be part of the Orwellian Ministry of Truth in the information war over Ukraine.
So what are the risks of a major nuclear incident in the Zaporozhye NPP? The six reactor buildings have robust containment domes and are well protected against artillery shelling and even rocket strikes. It would require bunker busters or equivalent explosives to breach reactor containment. Any accident would lead to a shutdown. However, the risk in a running nuclear plant is that it requires continuous cooling even if it has been shut down. Cooling pumps require auxiliary power. If the reactors are shut down, that auxiliary power normally comes from the grid. In an emergency, diesel generating (DG) sets can provide such auxiliary power, but only as a temporary stopgap measure.
Without cooling pumps, residual radioactivity in the nuclear core will cause continuous heating and rising temperature. If cooling cannot be restored, the core temperature will rise enough to cause a core meltdown and large-scale release of radioactivity. A core meltdown is classified as a Level 7 accident, the highest on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. Only Chernobyl and Fukushima have been classified as Level 7 incidents. The Three Mile Island nuclear plant was only 30 minutes away from a Level 7 full core meltdown.
Why is cooling the reactor core in a nuclear plant so important? The core is where heat-releasing controlled atomic fission takes place. This heat creates the steam that drives turbo-generators to produce electricity. The fission—breaking up—of uranium fuel to other highly radioactive materials continues to produce heat even after a reactor is shut down. As some of these materials have short half-lives, a shut reactor slowly cools, but cooling systems must keep running. This process makes auxiliary power for the cooling pumps necessary.
During the earthquake-tsunami that hit Japan, the Fukushima Daiichi plant lost all auxiliary power due to a grid failure. Three reactors overheated, leading to a core meltdown. The consequence was not only the release of radioactivity into the atmosphere but a huge amount of radioactive water, which is known to have discharged into the Pacific Ocean with unknown consequences for marine life. Since marine products enter our food chain, the implications of the Fukushima disaster will continue for a long time.
Though Chernobyl had a much more significant immediate impact, it was a man-made disaster. The reactor was being tested under extreme low power conditions bypassing all protections. It was the hubris of the engineers running the plant, which is unlikely to be repeated. In the Three Mile Island accident, the auxiliary cooling water pumps were manually switched off as the operating staff completely misunderstood the conditions within the reactor core. A new shift of workers diagnosed the actual event, averting what would have been another Level 7 incident narrowly.
Since auxiliary equipment is not within the reactor containment structures, it is vulnerable to shelling and bombing of the facilities. One shelling incident in Zaporozhye damaged the auxiliary equipment, though not the ones that would affect the reactor cooling systems. If the auxiliary power system fails, reactors lose their cooling system, leading to a core meltdown. DG sets can provide backup power for some time but not indefinitely support cooling systems.
The other risk to the plant comes from the cooling water ponds, which store spent fuel rods immersed in water. The spent rods have residual radioactivity and need to be stored in cooling water for an extended period for radioactive decay to occur and carry away the heat. Any shelling that hits the cooling ponds can lead to a significant release of radioactivity.
Why would Ukraine risk such an event, as it would also become a country badly affected by a Fukushima or a Chernobyl level accident? It appears the trigger for this course of action was the possibility that Russia would connect the Zaporozhye plant to the Russian grid and disconnect from the Ukraine one. The shelling of Zaporozhye started at almost the same time as such a possibility was discussed. Escalating the risk to the plant, leading to an international outcry and now an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection, is one way to maintain the status quo and, therefore, the supply of electricity from the plant to Ukraine.
Here is the irony of the Ukraine war. While Ukraine and its NATO allies have imposed numerous sanctions on Russia, Ukraine was getting natural gas supplies from Russia and electricity from the Zaporozhye plant. With Ukraine’s industrial consumption plummeting alongside the loss of 20% of its territory, its electricity consumption has also been reduced. Consequently, it sold about 100 MW of electricity to the European Union (EU). With the price of electricity recently shooting up in the EU, if Russia disconnects Zaporozhye from the Ukraine grid, Ukraine will lose both; electricity and money. Therefore we have the Zelensky regime playing the game of nuclear chicken—who will back off first from a possible disaster—with the Zaporozhye plant.
The problem for Russia is that internationalizing the shelling of the Zaporozhye plant risks the IAEA and the UN playing a role in the plant. UN Secretary-General António Guterres appears more the voice of the West than the head of the UN. Similarly, the IAEA is heavily influenced by the West, as we saw earlier during the Iraq war and its role in Iran. Though Russia has been asking for an IAEA inspection of the Zaporozhye plant for quite some time, IAEA has argued that the inspection has to take place only through Kiev-controlled territory, and the plant and its surrounding area should be demilitarized. If the task of the IAEA is nuclear safety, that should be its priority over what are clearly political demands emanating from Kiev and its NATO allies.
While the politics being played in the UN Security Council and IAEA can be understood in terms of the narrow interests of the players, should not the demand for the safety of a nuclear plant override such considerations? Should not EU countries, who would also be hit by a Chernobyl or a Fukushima level disaster, think about the interest of their people as well? Or is weakening Russia more important than the safety of its people?
The problem in the world today is that every country seems to see foreign policy in terms of its narrow self-interest. We lack the moral compass that the Non-Aligned Movement with leaders like Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah and Sukarno brought to the world. That is what we badly miss today: a voice of reason to speak up for humanity.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/08/29/ ... aporozhye/