Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV
Posted: Mon Jun 05, 2023 11:57 am
Blackmail
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 06/05/2023
Once again, a Ukrainian officer, this time Volodymyr Zelensky, has publicly stated that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are ready for the announced spring offensive, delayed so many times that it has already turned into a summer offensive. Oleksiy Reznikov, defense minister, and Oleksiy Danilov, president of the National Security and Defense Council, reportedly already stated that the preparation has been completed and that only the president's order remains. Danilov added that it was necessary to wait for the improvement of the soil conditions, still humid after the spring rains, a circumstance that was resolved some time ago. More intrepid in his public messages, Mikhailo Podolyak has already written on several occasions that the offensive has already begun. The Ukrainian attacks in the Belgorod region would be part of it,false flags of the Kremlin.
While the Ukrainian discourse has remained certain of victory, for months the Westerner has begun to tone down its enthusiasm and, above all, its triumphalism. Zelensky has adapted his speech by linking the victory to the supply of Western weapons. In his last interview, the Ukrainian president insisted on this idea, repeating once again the risk of suffering heavy casualties, an argument that he already used several weeks ago to justify a new delay in the start of the Ukrainian attack. Since then, the Western trend for a continuous flow of war funding has been coupled with obvious Ukrainian moves on different fronts and attacks from the rear. There have been explosions in Melitopol,Russian partisans from the General Directorate of Military Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.
The first of the two adventures that took place last week, seemed to not get beyond its initial phase and the group's advance party was eliminated by the Russian authorities. There was no epic comeback on this occasion recorded by the press, which was able to hear first-hand from one of the main leaders who does not consider the term neo-Nazi an insult. Unable to infiltrate the Belgorod region, the Ukrainian military resorted to the tactic used by nationalist battalions in Donbass in the summer of 2014: attacking civilians and artillery shelling towns without a military presence. These days it has been possible to see both the image of the fallen Ukrainian commando and the burning apartment buildings due to the impact of Ukrainian projectiles.legion . The group did not explain why, in that case, it had not been able to infiltrate the region.
Images of a burning residential neighborhood in shelling have also not stopped Ukraine from bragging about not targeting civilian areas. “While the Russian Volunteer Corps has the protection of its compatriots as a priority, carefully checking every step and action, Putin's troops have no mercy for their own civilians. No way, ”Mikhailo Podolyak wrote reflecting a reality that exists only in his imagination. And taking his arrogance to the extreme, the adviser to the Office of the President offered to open "humanitarian corridors" for the population of Belgorod, the same population that Ukrainian troops continue to bombard and carry out a new infiltration attempt in the last few hours. After threatening raids, small group attacks and artillery barrages against civilian border village .
As for Podolyak, for Zelensky the solution to all problems is clear. In his interview with The Wall Street Journal, the Ukrainian president was aware that the casualties among his troops will be high at the moment the offensive begins. However, everything can be avoided if Ukraine receives the weapons it demands. "Anyone is aware that any counteroffensive without air superiority is very dangerous," he said, making it clear what kyiv's desire is. The argument, which Zelensky has already used in the past, is still a form of blackmail to his partners, eager to see the start of the Ukrainian offensive, in which they have pinned their hopes to later force Russia to a humiliating resolution. . The Ukrainian president's reasoning is also manipulative, since the problem of Russia's air superiority that he now denounces is not going to be solved this summer by delivering F16s, whose arrival would be delayed for weeks, even months, once the American promise was consummated. Blackmail is not just a matter of groups like RDK.
Campaigning to win support for his candidacy for NATO Secretary General, UK Defense Minister Ben Wallace has come out in similar terms to Zelensky. A few days ago, an article in The Wall Street Journal commented on the differences in the position of Ukraine's Western partners, specifically mentioning London's much more belligerent stance compared to Washington. Wallace's words are an example of these differences. While Pentagon representatives have insisted since the Ukrainian offensive began to be considered that Kiev's chances of retaking Crimea are slim, in an interview with The Washington Post,the British minister showed a speech much more aligned with the kyiv narrative.
"What we have seen on the battlefield is that if you hit the Russian forces in the right place, they will really collapse," he said, alleging that it is "a real possibility" for Ukraine to recapture Crimea militarily. To do this, Wallace relies on an argument also regularly repeated by the Kiev political authorities, who seem not to care that even their political authorities have denied it in relation, for example, to the battle for Artyomovsk. "You can send tens of thousands of young people to die, which is what they do, but you can't magically produce the tanks and weapons systems they need," he said, falling back into another of the commonplaces of this war: that Russia is at point of running out of resources to fight.
In war, discourse and reality do not have to coincide. No need to turn to Russian propagandato be aware of the immense personnel cost that the battle for Artyomovsk has taken on the Ukraine as well, which has not yet conceded the loss of the city and in whose fight it has acted exactly as Wallace claims Russia acted. The very development of the war is enough to observe that Wallace's argument for the lack of weapons does not hold up either. Moreover, despite the fact that since March 2022 there began to be talk of a shortage of missiles in the Russian arsenal, the attacks have increased notably now that the Ukrainian preparations for the offensive seem to be in their final phase. And you don't have to go to the Russian media to find out that, despite the damage that Western sanctions are causing in some sectors of the Russian economy, the coercive measures have not brought about the economic collapse they sought nor have they impeded the ability to continue the war. According to an article published this weekend byThe Economist , hardly a pro-Russian medium, Russia has spent 3% of its GDP on the cost of the war, a higher percentage than the 2.3% that the Vietnam war meant for the United States, but that is not going to prevent Russia from have the option of preparing for a long war.
Faced with Russia, which has an important military industry that has been able to supply its troops, Ukraine depends on its allies to replenish, replace and maintain the bulk of the weapons that make it possible for its army to continue fighting. In the first months of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the West repeated ad nauseam the argument that Moscow would not be able to fight a long war. This reasoning was based on both the economic and the military argument: the NATO countries expected a further collapse of the Russian economy that has not occurred, while the country has managed, for the moment, to maintain military production to guarantee the necessary weapons. What's more, Russia's problem in the initial months was a lack of troops, not weapons. In any case, The idea that a long war favors Ukraine has already disappeared from the discourse of the West, which, as Josep Borrell stated on Saturday, seeks to maintain the flow of arms supplies to avoid a quick victory for Russia. To paraphrase Ben Wallace, Ukraine cannot magically produce the tanks and weapons systems its soldiers need. Hence, kyiv's partners must keep very high or even raise military spending to ensure that their proxy army can keep fighting.
https://slavyangrad.es/2023/06/05/27429/#more-27429
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SWEDEN WANTS TO REVERSE THE BATTLE OF POLTAVA – WATCH OUT FOR THE JUNE 12 DEADLINE
By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
In a month it will be three hundred and fourteen years precisely since the Swedes lost their king, their generals, their soldiers, and their empire when Tsar Peter the Great and the Russian army defeated them at the Battle of Poltava (lead image). That battle of July 8, 1709, is the greatest disaster in Swedish military history; it is the bitterest grudge they hold against Russia, still.
The Swedes were obliged to accept their inferiority and become a minor power in Europe. Their strategic calculation ever since has been to conserve their resources by keeping to the winning side in Europe, while hoping to revenge themselves on the Kremlin. At Poltava, in eastern Ukraine, they still hope if, with Swedish money, arms, and men, the regime in Kiev can manage it.
Over the past week the Swedish Air Force has taken its Saab-made JAS39 Gripen fighter-bombers to the air, alongside other NATO forces and the USS Gerald Ford in what they are calling Operation Arctic Challenge 23. At the same time, the Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonsson, has admitted that he is discussing with Kiev supplying the Gripen for attacking Russian forces over the Ukrainian battlefield. “Yesterday [February 14], I had the opportunity to discuss this with the Minister of Defense of Ukraine, Reznikov….We are significantly increasing opur support for Ukraine”. “President Zelensky also asked for it.”
Jonsson didn’t admit that the Swedes are discussing with the US, NATO, and the Czech Republic a form of disguising the battlefield deployment of the Gripen through third countries and through NATO’s Air Defender 23 exercise, which begins on June 12.
Listen to the new War of the Worlds broadcast for a briefing on the latest battlefield developments, followed by a discussion with Marcello Ferrada de Noli, a professor of psychiatry and philosophy who has lived and taught in Sweden for many years.
https://tntradiolive.podbean.com/e/prof ... june-2023/
Left: for the playback link, click. Right: Professor Marcello Ferrada de Noli. Read his latest publications on Sweden’s NATO move and this -- and on the European war strategy here. Follow his commentary here. https://twitter.com/ProfessorsBlogg
On May 30 Putin introduced General Patience and the Russian strategy of standoff targeting without the commitment of Russian ground forces or manned aircraft to a conventional offensive across the Dnieper River. “Russia was forced to respond to the war the Ukrainian regime unleashed in Donbass,” Putin said. “We all had to respond by launching the special military operation. We are striking at the territory of Ukraine, but with long-range precision weapons, at military infrastructure facilities only, either at ammunition or fuel and lubricants warehouses used for combat operations. We have talked about the possibility of striking at decision-making centres. Of course, the headquarters of Ukrainian military intelligence is one of them, and a strike at this target was carried out two or three days ago. In response, the Kiev regime has chosen a different path – attempts to intimidate Russian citizens with strikes at residential buildings. This is an obvious terrorist approach.”
Read more analysis of what happens next for Odessa, Nikolaev and Kharkov.
Boris Rozhin’s (“Colonel Cassad”) analysis of the Russian method of operation in striking the GUR, the Ukrainian military intelligence agency, can be read here.
In a US interpretation of the operation, published on June 1, it is claimed that “the building appears damaged ‘from below’ rather than above, and does coincide with a huge ground-rumbling earthquake which was said to have come from some underground explosion. Rumors of NATO generals being ferried now abound, though I take those as low confidence… Now, of course, there are the obligatory rumors that GUR head Budanov is missing and some claiming he was killed in the strike. Just recently coming off from the Zaluzhny debacle, I remain skeptical. But it’s definitely possible and we’ll just have to wait for any further information and see. After all, aspiring Bond-villain Budanov is a camera whore that loves making idle threats and zinging Russians so it is very odd that he’s suddenly so quiet. Recall, that after the previous round of strikes, the righteously indignant Budanov immediately recorded a threatening video, which I posted last time, where he told Russia that something is coming ‘soon’ for them. One would think that after a hit completely burns out his HQ he would at least make some kind of retort, no?”
Left: the GUR headquarters building after the Russian strike. Right, GUR chief, Kirill Budanov.
To follow the Swedish hankering for imperial revenge on the Russians, start here.
For the recent polling of Swedish public opinion on the war in the Ukraine, read this piece from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. In the Ipsos opinion surveys reported from mid-2022, the Swedes rank far ahead of other west European countries in the attention they are paying to the war; in the risks to their country they see from the war; and in their support for supplying weapons to Kiev.
Follow the upward (red) line of voter support for the current Swedish coalition government’s anti-Russian line. According to de Noli, Swedish support for NATO has been dictated by the political and corporate elites, backed by the mainstream media, without a genuine referdendum test of public opinion. There are almost no alternative media, he adds.
Source: https://www.politico.eu/
A summary of the 2022 election can be read here. At the current 37% level of voter support recorded on May 21, the Social Democrats have gained 4 percentage points on last year’s election level.
For additional background on Swedish government discussions to provide the Ukraine with battlefield weapons like the CV90 infantry fighting vehicles and the MBT LAW anti-tank missiles, as well as the JAS39 Gripen aircraft, click to read.
In this US Defense News videoclip, produced this week, it is revealed that Ukrainian pilots are already training on the Gripen, and that NATO staff consider the Swedish fighter has many advantages over the US F-16, including its cost, ease of pilot training, and capability to land and take off from Ukrainian roads, after the regular airfields have been destroyed.
https://johnhelmer.net/sweden-wants-to- ... more-88081
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Patrick Lawrence: The War We’re Finally Allowed to See
June 1, 2023
After 15 months of conflict, The New Yorker’s reportage by Luke Mogelson and photographer Maxim Dondyuk shows us the war in Ukraine that the propaganda machine has been concealing.
Ceremony in Kiev on March 24 marking the ninth anniversary of the National Guard of Ukraine and the graduation of officers of the National Academy of the National Guard of Ukraine and the Kyiv Institute of the National Guard of Ukraine. (President of Ukraine, Public domain)
By Patrick Lawrence
Original to ScheerPost
Let us consider the following paragraphs, which appear in the May 29 edition of The New Yorker:
“While Tynda and his team were fighting from the trench, long and powerful fusillades had issued from another Ukrainian position, on a hilltop behind them. I later went there with Tynda. In a blind overlooking the no man’s land stood an improbably antique contraption on iron wheels: a Maxim gun, the first fully automatic weapon ever made. Although this particular model dated from 1945, it was virtually identical to the original version, which was invented in 1884: a knobbed crank handle, wooden grips, a lidded compartment for adding cold water or snow when the barrel overheated….
“In the course of the past year, the U.S. has furnished Ukraine with more than thirty-five billion dollars in security assistance. Why, given the American largesse, had the 28th Brigade resorted to such a museum piece? A lot of equipment has been damaged or destroyed on the battlefield. At the same time, Ukraine appears to have forgone refitting debilitated units in order to stockpile for a large-scale offensive that is meant to take place later this spring. At least eight new brigades have been formed from scratch to spearhead the campaign. While these units have been receiving weapons, tanks, and training from the U.S. and Europe, veteran brigades like the 28th have had to hold the line with the dregs of a critically depleted arsenal.”
The piece, from which this passage is drawn, carries the headline, “Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine” and is the work of Luke Mogelson, a magazine correspondent of a dozen or so years’ experience.
Mogelson’s text is accompanied by the photographs of Maxim Dondyuk, a Ukrainian of roughly Mogelson’s age, either side of 40, whose work focuses on history and memory, topics that suggest a lot of thought goes into those 1/1000ths of a second when Dondyuk clicks his shutter.
There are many things to think about and say as we read this piece. I will shortly have more to say about the excellence of Mogelson’s text and Dondyuk’s photographs. For now, the first thing to note is that, after 15 months of conflict, their work suggests Western media may at last begin to cover the Ukraine war properly.
I will stay with the conditional verb for now, but this could mark a significant turn not only for the profession — which could use a significant turn, heaven knows — but also in public support for the U.S.–NATO proxy war against the Russian Federation.
Luke Mogelson, on right, in a 2015 panel discussion of his coverage of political asylum seekers. (Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy University, Flickr, Attribution-NoDerivs, CC BY-ND 2.0)
As astute readers will already know, apart from a few staged forays near the front lines — officially controlled and monitored, never at the front lines — correspondents from The New York Times, the other big dailies, the wire services, and the broadcast networks have accepted without protest the Kiev regime’s refusal to allow them to see the war as it is.
Content these professional slovens have been to sit in Kiev hotel rooms and file stories based on the regime’s transparently unreliable accounts of events, all the while pretending their stories are properly reported and factual.
The exceptions here are Times correspondents such as Carlotta Gall, whose Russophobia seems reliably unbalanced enough to satisfy the Kyiv regime, and the two Andrews, Higgins and Kramer, who have an exquisite talent for stories that make absolutely no sense.
It was the two Andrews, you may recall, who had the Russians shelling the nuclear power plant they occupied and, later on, bombing their own prisoner-of-war camp in eastern Ukraine.
If correspondents cannot see the war and it makes no matter to them, we will not see it either. The result, as your columnist noted a while ago, has been two wars: There is the presented, the mythical war, and the real war.
“Our current brainwashing for war is similar to that preceding other wars,” John Pilger, the journalist and filmmaker, wrote in a Tweet the other day, “but never, in my experience as a war correspondent, as unrelenting or bereft of honest journalism.”
This is what makes Mogelson’s file so startling. In its graphic honesty it is a major step on from the gruel of propaganda corporate media have fed us since the Russian intervention began in February 2022. Those three Times correspondents just mentioned? They all have many years’ experience on Mogelson. None of them could change his typewriter ribbon, as we used to say.
Two Weeks in Trenches
Ukrainian trenchline at the Battle of Bakhmut, November 2022. (Mil.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Mogelson and Dondyuk spent two weeks this past March with a Ukrainian infantry battalion as it fought in trenches “at a small Army position in the eastern region of the Donbas, where shock waves and shrapnel had reduced the surrounding trees to splintered canes.”
This was just outside a village south of Bakhmut, the much-embattled city lately lost to Russian forces. I have no doubt these two journalists were officially embedded with the high command’s approval. That is the way the Kiev regime is running this war. But, for whatever reason — and I will get to this question in a sec — there is no whiff of inhibition or self-censorship in either the reportage or the photographs. Both are raw, unflattering, as unforgiving as the scenes they depict:
“By the time I joined the battalion, about two months had passed since it had lost the battle for the village, and during the interim, neither side had attempted a major operation against the other. It was all the Ukrainians could do to maintain the stalemate. Pavlo estimated that, owing to the casualties his unit had sustained, eighty percent of his men were new draftees. ‘They’re civilians with no experience,’ he said. ‘If they give me ten, I’m lucky when three of them can fight.’
We were in his bunker, which had been dug in the back yard of a half-demolished farmhouse; the constant rumble of artillery vibrated through the dirt walls. ‘A lot of the new guys don’t have the stamina to be out here,’ Pavlo said. ‘They get scared and they panic.’ His military call sign was Cranky, and he was renowned for his temper, but he spoke sympathetically about his weaker soldiers and their fears. Even for him, a career officer of twenty-three years, this phase of the war had been harrowing. On a road that passed in front of the farmhouse, a board had been nailed to a tree with the painted words ‘to moscow’ and an arrow pointing east. No one knew who’d put it there. Such optimistic brio seemed to be a vestige of another time.”
Mogelson then introduces us to others in the battalion:
“Just two of the soldiers who were rebuilding the machine-gun nest had been with the battalion since Kherson. One of them, a twenty-nine-year-old construction worker called Bison — because he was built on like one — had been hospitalized three times: after being shot in the shoulder, after being wounded by shrapnel in the ankle and knee, and after being wounded by shrapnel in the back and arm. The other veteran, code-named Odesa, had enlisted in the Army in 2015, after dropping out of college. Short and stocky, he had the same serene deportment as Bison. The uncanny extent to which both men had adapted to their lethal environment underscored the agitation of the recent arrivals, who flinched whenever something whistled overhead or crashed nearby.
‘I only trust Bison,’ Odesa said. ‘If the new recruits run away, it will mean immediate death for us.’ He’d lost nearly all his closest friends in Kherson. Taking out his phone, he swiped through a series of photographs: ‘Killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . wounded. . . . Now I have to get used to different people. It’s like starting over.’ Because the high attrition rate had disproportionately affected the bravest and most aggressive soldiers—a phenomenon that one officer called ‘reverse natural selection’ — seasoned infantrymen like Odesa and Bison were extremely valuable and extremely fatigued. After Kherson, Odesa had gone awol. ‘I was in a bad place psychologically,’ he said. ‘I needed a break.’ After two months of resting and recuperating at home, he came back. His return was prompted not by a fear of being punished — what were they going to do, put him in the trenches? — but by a sense of loyalty to his dead friends. ‘I felt guilty,’ he said. ‘I realized that my place was here.’”
Reporting and writing of this caliber makes Mogelson look the dazzling star next to the correspondent-reenactors in their Kiev hotel rooms. But for my money he also keeps pace with a lot of standout names from the past. I see in his copy a little Dexter Filkins, a little Bernard Fall, a little Michael Herr, a little Martha Gellhorn, and I’ll go so far as to say a little Ernie Pyle.
As for Dondyuk’s pictures, the way they leap off the page brings to mind Tim Page, Horst Faas, Robert Kapa, and some of the other great war fotogs of their day. If this piece portends a turn or return (however you want to think of it) to reporting with some integrity to it, the project could not have got off to a better start. But let us stay with “if” for now.
There are at bottom two kinds of journalists: There are the analysts, as I call them, who add an interpretive dimension to their coverage — understanding in addition to knowledge. And there are the reporters, empiricists in the just-the-facts vein who stay close to the ground and do not much dolly out for any kind of larger take.
Mogelson is of this latter type. Reporters of his sort invite us to infer from what they tell us. What shall we infer from superbly tactile, eye-of-the-camera reportage?
No Pretense of Victory
No Man’s Land between Russian and Ukraining forces during the Battle of Bakhmut, November 2022. (Mil.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Luke Mogelson is not telling us about an army on the way to victory — or an army that pretends to itself it is on the way to victory, or one that wants the world to think it is on the way to victory. There are no battlefield successes, no advances, no high expectations in Mogelson’s story. There is “holding the line,” although few seem to hold, and there is staying alive. This is a story more given to severe attrition among soldiers waiting for the end and wondering how distant in time the end will prove.
In Mogelson’s writing we meet conscripts sent to the front after little or no training. He describes one man who was kidnapped on a city sidewalk and was under Russian fire three days later. Paralyzing fright, exhaustion, demoralization, desertions, a sort of Beetle Bailey incompetence — these are rampant among the green draftees that now make up the majority of the AFU’s infantry. They fight with Vietnam-era vehicles shipped from the U.S., or muzzle-loaded mortars long out of production, or Soviet-era weapons left over from the pre–1991 days—and, withal, too little ammunition for this kind of matériel to make any difference at all.
A 1945 Maxim gun of 1884 design? Jeez. Mogelson is right to question, if too briefly, where may be all the weapons the U.S. and NATO allies are shipping into Ukraine. A great number of them have already been destroyed, he reports, which comes as no surprise. Being as close to the scene as he put himself earlier this spring, he would have done well to tell us something about the greedheads who run the regime and the military as they sell shocking amounts of arms into the black market as soon as they arrive across the Polish border.
At one point, Mogelson and Dondyuk spend a day in a dugout with a seasoned sergeant named Kaban and a 19–year-old codenamed Cadet, so young he hasn’t lost his baby fat. “Later, Kaban entertained us with stories about his past romantic escapades,” Mogelson recounts, “and Dondyuk, the photographer, asked him whether he’d imparted any lessons to Cadet.
“ ‘There’s no point,’ Kaban said. ‘He’ll be dead soon.’
Cadet laughed, but Kaban didn’t.”
These are the voices of the war Mogelson tells us about. Can’t you just cut the anxiety in Cadet’s laugh with a knife?
I have to mention some wonderful touches in Mogelson’s report because they are superlative writing of the kind that is too rare these days. Of the soldier firing that Maxim gun: “The gun’s operator, a rawboned soccer hooligan with brass knuckles tattooed on his hand, spoke of the Maxim like a car enthusiast lauding the performance of a vintage Mustang.” Describing an unwieldy personnel carrier of Vietnam vintage, Mogelson tells us: “It looked like a green metal box on tracks… The maxed-out machine sounded like a blender full of silverware.”
Did Gellhorn do any better as she covered the Spanish Civil War for Colliers?
Mogelson shows us the war a few independent journalists have written of but a war we have not heretofore read about in mainstream media. This is the war the propaganda machine has kept from us. And now we know that what correspondents reporting for independent media have been describing is by and large the war as it is.
Among much else we can now see the obvious indifference the Kiev regime and its Western backers display for those doing the fighting — who, Mogelson tells us, are now working-class Ukrainians, the more privileged having dodged the draft or otherwise avoided service.
Mogelson reported this piece in March, and we can justly assume conditions on the front line of this war are now three months’ worth of worse. His report makes me want to bang my shoe on the table, Khrushchev-style, in equal measure for the disgraceful conduct of mainstreamers reenacting the work of correspondents, for the senseless loss of Ukrainian lives in the service of the presented war and for the AFU soldiers — veterans and the untrained draftees they command — who the Kiev regime has not quite but nearly abandoned.
Why Now?
The New Yorker mascot Eustace Tilley by Tim Needles. (Flickr, Attribution CC BY 2.0)
The obvious question is why this piece appears now in The New Yorker, a magazine thoroughly committed to every liberal orthodoxy you can think of, including the wisdom of this war and the certainty of an AFU victory. Hell broke loose last year, you will recall, when Amnesty International and then CBS News lifted the lid on the realities of the Ukraine conflict. What is different now?
This is hard to say. But the larger picture suggests publication of this eye– and mind-opening piece reflects a creeping recognition in all sorts of places —among the policy cliques, at the Pentagon, in corporate media — that Ukraine is not going to win this war and the time has come to prepare for this eventuality.
The new drift on the vaunted counteroffensive is that it is not going to make much difference. There is more talk now about the conditions necessary to begin negotiations. NATO officials, per Steven Erlanger, the Times’ Brussels correspondent, are now thinking about doing in Ukraine what the allies did in postwar Germany: Divide it such that the West joins the alliance and the east is left to the East, so to say.
Mogelson’s intent, surely, was to do good work, full stop, and he has. But read in this larger context, its publication looks to me the start of an effort to get all those people with blue-and-yellow flags on their front porches ready for a dose of the reality from which they have been shielded all these months. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Business Insider, Forbes: They have all recently run pieces not nearly as good as Mogelson’s but in the let’s-get-real line.
If I am right, the real war and the presented war will eventually be one. About time, I would say. Not that mainstream media are about to ’fess up to their sins and disgraces in their pitiful coverage of this war. They never will. Let us not get carried away on this point.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His new book Journalists and Their Shadows, is forthcoming from Clarity Press. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
This article is from ScheerPost.
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/06/01/p ... ed-to-see/
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The imperialism-compatible left’s big lie: that being pro-Russia is a reactionary stance
BY RAINER SHEA
JUNE 2, 2023
Russiagate has impacted the thinking of leftists, and even many who call themselves communists, in more ways than they’d like to believe. Everyone with at least some awareness of the Democratic Party’s corruption and hypocrisy has recognized how deranged liberals have become about Russia during the last decade. So leftists have tried to distance themselves from Russiagate, with its embarassing conspiratorial thinking. Yet because the left is predominantly opportunistic, it hasn’t been willing to give up Russiagate’s core belief: that if somebody is serious about challenging U.S. imperialism, and thereby supports Russia’s actions to weaken Washington’s hegemony, then they’re a reactionary.
This was the idea that came from the effort to politically police Donald Trump, where the Democrats, the corporate media, and their neocon allies accused the Trump campaign of Russian collusion to pressure him into going along with the new cold war. When Trump’s opportunism incentivized him to comply, and he became a more dangerously anti-Russian president than Obama, the imperialist narrative managers kept promoting the collusion story. Because even though they had successfully made the new cold war bipartisan, they needed to maintain a myth that justified this and all their other vile policies. The idea that our “democratic institutions” are under threat from a foreign menace, and that these institutions therefore are genuinely worthy of being called democratic, was the perfect myth. One the narrative managers still haven’t let go of.
“The myth of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election provides a convenient escape hatch from the political, social, cultural and economic rot that plagues the U.S.,” wrote Chris Hedges this year. “The liberal class, by clinging to this conspiracy theory, is as disconnected from reality as the QAnon theorists and election deniers that support Trump. The retreat by huge segments of the population into non-reality-based belief systems leaves a polarized nation unable to communicate. Neither side speaks a language rooted in verifiable fact. This bifurcation, one I witnessed in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, fuels the distrust and hatred between antagonistic demographics. It accelerates political disintegration and dysfunction. It is used to justify, as was true with the F.B.I. investigation of Trump, gross abuses of power.”
Because the default liberal view has come to be that Russia is a globally subversive bad actor, one which couldn’t possibly have a good reason for wanting to demilitarize a modern Nazi state, the left opportunists have had to also adopt this neocon stance in order to effectively tail the Democrats. They’ve tacitly accepted the narrative that the GOP has “sold out to Putin,” and therefore that anyone who opposes U.S. hegemony is an asset for reactionary politics.
This narrative is supported by two notions. One, that Russia’s war against Ukrainian fascism and wider pattern of defying U.S. hegemony can be attributed to Vladimir Putin as a personality. The reactionary politicians and commentators who praise Putin as an anti-woke strongman provide the liberals with a rhetorical basis for this. Because both of the partisan sides Hedges talks about share that false perception about how Russia’s anti-American turn was Putin’s idea. When you look at the historical context behind Russia’s break from Washington, you see that Putin did not set out to do this. He was originally supposed to continue Yeltsin’s project to keep Russia a U.S. client state, and he for a time wanted Russia to join NATO. Then the circumstances mandated that he become an anti-American leader, or else become unpopular among a Russian society that’s overwhelmingly anti-imperialist. This isn’t Putin’s war, it’s the Russian people’s war, a war that he did everything to delay until he could avoid doing the responsible thing no longer.
The profit interests of the Russian bourgeoisie in this war only momentarily coincide with those of the wider Russian people, who seek to combat Nazism after it took 27 million of their relatives in World War II. In the long term, Operation Z is against the favor of the country’s capitalist class, as it’s accelerating class conflict and giving the communists more influence. Besides, if your priority is anti-imperialism, the correct stance is to support an action by a non-imperialist, non-fascist country that weakens U.S. hegemony. To engage with the shallow commentary from the reactionaries who reduce this conflict to Putin, and not repudiate this personality-focused narrative, is to frame the matter in a deceptively simplistic way. A way that makes it easy to create a dichotomy between “those who oppose Putin” and “those who support Putin.” Putin is not the point. What kind of person Putin is has no relevance to whether anti-imperialists should support the special operation, our concern is whether it represents a progressive historical event (which it does).
The other notion the imperialism-compatible left operates off of is that because the pro-Russia stance of us anti-imperialists overlaps with the views on Russia of many conservatives, particularly the libertarian kinds of conservatives, for us to take this stance is to create a “red-brown alliance.” This is the argument they used to try to discredit the Rage Against the War Machine coalition, whose communist organizations are appropriately all pro-Russian. What it comes from is the idea that only those who are on the left are worth reaching out to. That if somebody doesn’t share all the “right” ideas (which according to these left gatekeepers include many liberal ideas that aren’t even compatible with genuine Marxism), then they should be discarded.
By this logic, anybody who calls themselves a libertarian shouldn’t be worked with under any circumstances, as everyone in this category is supposedly a threat towards the socialist cause whatever the context. Which is ironic coming from the same types of left sectarians who work obsessively to harm anti-imperialists, something we haven’t seen from libertarians especially during recent times. By this logic, we should make no effort to distinguish between the culture war-obsessed types of conservatives, and the ones who’ve moreso been going in an anti-imperialist direction. Even though there are plenty of communists today who in 2016 would have voted Trump, as well as many who used to be libertarians. Bernie Sanders voters are not the only types of people who’ve been coming to Marxism throughout the last decade. To pretend like they are would be to willingly make the communist movement insular, and divided to an unnecessary degree.
What the imperialism-compatible left seeks to do is drive a wedge between those who came to socialism after being liberals, and the ones who came to it after being libertarians or conservatives. Bringing these two groups to unity, and adopting a shared synthesis that includes principled anti-imperialism, doesn’t have to mean tolerating the elements that refuse to give up their reactionary beliefs.
I’ll always denounce the anti-gay and anti-trans stances of these elements, for instance, as well as their blanket rejection of the concept of tribal sovereignty. What I’ve learned is that many of the types who’ve been won over by Parenti’s proletarian patriotism argument—an argument I don’t embrace, unless it’s a broader kind of “patriotism” that’s not tied to the USA—are also repulsed by these culture warrior edgelords. How can you create a red-brown alliance with people who, by any honest argument, aren’t fascist or fascist-adjacent? There’s a difference between a fascist, and someone who doesn’t share all of your ideas at the moment. To discard anyone who has contradictions is foolish from the perspective of wanting to win the people, yet this is what the left opportunists tell us to do.
The obstinate reactionaries are a fringe, one that’s not capable of winning the people. The pro-Russian element of the communist movement is predominantly made up of actually serious Marxists, ones who reject the culture war obsession of the reactionaries in favor of prioritizing anti-imperialism above all. Because it’s obvious to them that fighting the information war against the empire’s psyops is the most meaningful thing communists can do at this stage in the class struggle.
We in this ideological element have two key differences from the right-wingers who love Putin: one, we understand that Russia’s efforts to stand up to the war machine have been carried out in spite of Putin rather than because of him, meaning it doesn’t make sense from an anti-imperialist perspective to idolize him. Especially not for a communist, as Putin is a bourgeois leader. (Putin also accomodates the anti-gay politics of the Russian Orthodox Church, a kind of practice that most communists in the 21st century have rightly come to reject.) Two, we’re not fixated on the culture war, and we encourage anyone who still is to get out of that unhealthy mindset. Our foremost priority is to combat U.S. hegemony, which entails narratively aiding Russia’s efforts to weaken it.
This does not mean we view multipolarity as the end goal, that’s another strawman the imperialism-compatible left uses against us. We view multipolarity as one of the indispensable steps towards full global victory for the working class, based on how U.S. imperialism is the globe’s primary contradiction and has to be defeated as our foremost objective. We in the core can help realize this step by disrupting the war machine’s narrative management operations, thereby making Washington’s efforts to delay the rise of multipolarity untenable.
https://newswiththeory.com/the-imperial ... ry-stance/
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Ukraine, Human Rights, and International Law, With Alfred De Zayas
JUNE 3, 2023
MintCast thumbnail art featuring Mnar Adley (left), Alan MacLeod (center) and Alfred de Zayas (right). Photo: MintPress News.
By Alan MacLeod – Jun 1, 2023
You can indict Vladimir Putin over war crimes in Ukraine. But if you do, you’d better indict Joe Biden as well. That is the message that Professor Alfred de Zayas, world-renowned human rights and international law expert, gave “MintCast” host Alan MacLeod on today’s episode of the series.
A Swiss-American lawyer, academic and United Nations official with over 50 years’ experience in the field of human rights, de Zayas joins us for a wide-ranging discussion about international law and Ukraine, U.S. sanctions, whistleblowers, the successes and failures of the United Nations and its bodies, and the growth of a new and cynical “human rights industry” that weaponizes the concept to attack foreign governments.
“The double standards [with regard to Russia] are absolutely breathtaking” de Zayas said, noting how British International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan had discontinued all investigations into NATO war crimes in Afghanistan but continued those into the Taliban against NATO. Now the ICC has issued an arrest warrant against Putin, another one-sided decision that de Zayas claims has made the organization a joke:
“There is no question that here, the crime of aggression has been committed, and certainly Russian troops have committed crimes in Ukraine. But you cannot prosecute one side and let the other side off scot-free. If you are going to indict a serving head of state [like Putin], then you would have to indict Joe Biden.”
The United States and NATO, he says, have been carrying out dangerous provocations in Ukraine for years, supplying weapons to militias who use them against civilians, while also carrying out similar crimes to Russia in Afghanistan, meaning that anyone with a semblance of balance or neutrality would conclude that American leaders need to be held accountable, too.
After graduating from Harvard University in 1970, de Zayas practiced law in New York and Florida. For many years, he served in various human rights organizations and as a senior official at the United Nations. From 2010 to 2013 he was editor-in-chief of Ex Tempore, the United Nations’ literary journal. Until 2018, he was UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order. In addition to this, he has taught law at academic institutions across the world, including the University of Geneva, the University of Trier, the Human Rights Institute at the Irish National University and DePaul University.
De Zayas is also a prolific author and thinker attempting to construct the framework for a better world. Among his recent works include “Building a Just World Order” (2021), “Countering Mainstream Narratives,” (2022) and his latest book, “The Human Rights Industry” (2023).
De Zayas has been a leading international critic of U.S. sanctions, which, he points out, should really be referred to as “unilateral coercive measures,” as the former conveys some legitimacy to them. “It’s important not to use the term ‘sanctions,’ because ‘sanctions’ implies that the country imposing them somehow has a legal or moral authority to do so and the targeted country has somehow violated international law,” he told MacLeod. In fact, he notes, it is the U.S. that regularly flouts international law, and it can get away with it because its overwhelming power has allowed it a foster “culture of impunity” for its actions, internationally.
In 2020, after travelling to the country, de Zayas described U.S. sanctions against Venezuela as akin to a medieval siege and estimated that they had killed 100,000 innocent people.
From there, the esteemed diplomat casts his ire on the mainstream, corporate media, who he claims are complicit in Western war crimes, on the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which as “lost its credibility” going along with the U.S. on Syria and on those who keep Julian Assange in confinement because of his services to journalism.
https://orinocotribune.com/ukraine-huma ... -de-zayas/
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War in Ukraine. 06/04/2023
June 4, 22:38
War in Ukraine. 06/04/2023
1. During the day, the enemy made active attempts to conduct reconnaissance in force on a number of sectors of the Zaporozhye and South-Donetsk directions, using a large number of armored vehicles. The main attacks were carried out in the area of Gulyaipol, the Vremievsky ledge, in the area of Ugledar and in the area of \u200b\u200bAvdeevka.
2. Initially, the enemy managed to achieve small tactical successes in the area of the Vremyevskiy salient, including the occupation of two small villages on the border of the gray zone, but after suffering losses (more than 20 tanks and armored combat vehicles), the enemy was forced to retreat, even despite the introduction of his reserves into battle. In most other areas, the enemy had no success. The ratio of losses per day turned out to be strongly not in favor of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
3. Nevertheless, there is a concentration and regrouping of enemy forces in order to continue the offensive activity of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the area of the Vremievsky ledge, Vogledar and Vodyany. Probably tomorrow will be attempt number 2. It is possible that this activity is designed to distract our command from the Kamenskoye-Orekhov-Gulyaipole sector, where a blow could probably be struck in order to reach Tokmak and the subsequent movement to Melitopol, coupled with auxiliary landing forces across the Dnieper.
4. Under Artyomovsk as a whole, no changes. There is local enemy activity in the private sector to the southwest of the city, as well as to the northwest.
The RF Armed Forces cover the concentration of enemy forces in Slavyansk, Kramatorsk, Konstantinovka and Chasov Yar. Tomorrow the rotation of our group in Artemovsk will be completed.
5. In the Belgorod direction, the enemy today continued to actively shell the border areas, and also continued to attempt to break through the DRG into our territory. These actions are aimed primarily at solving information problems, as well as diverting attention from the main sectors of the front. Among the hopes of the enemy command is to provoke the RF Armed Forces to transfer additional forces here from the main directions. To do this, they try to inflate the panic as much as possible. Nevertheless, the situation requires the command to take more decisive measures to transfer hostilities to the northern regions of the Kharkos and Sumy regions in order to make it difficult for the enemy to implement his tactics.
Online broadcast of hostilities in Ukraine continues in telegram https://t.me/boris_rozhin (if you are interested, subscribe)
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8403709.html
The enemy launched a large-scale offensive on 5 sectors of the front
June 5, 1:33 am
The Ministry of Defense about the attempts of the enemy to go on the offensive in the Zaporozhye direction.
On the morning of June 4, the enemy launched a large-scale offensive in 5 sectors of the front in the YuzhnoDonetsk direction with the introduction of the 23rd and 31st mechanized brigades from the strategic reserves of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with the support of other military units and subunits.
In total, 6 mechanized and 2 enemy tank battalions were involved.
The enemy's goal was to break through our defenses on the most vulnerable, in his opinion, sector of the front. The enemy did not achieve his tasks, he had no success.
As a result of skillful and competent actions of the Eastern Group of Forces, the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine amounted to more than 250 personnel, 16 tanks, 3 infantry fighting vehicles, 21 armored fighting vehicles.
The commander of the united group of troops, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation Gerasimov during this period was at one of the forward command posts in this direction.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin/87934 - zinc
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8403826.html
Google Translator
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From Cassad's Telegram account:
Colonelcassad
Mass reconnaissance in combat in the Zaporozhye direction,
the situation by the end of June 4, 2023
Simultaneously with the activation of Ukrainian formations in the Kharkiv and South-Donetsk directions, today in the afternoon, the Armed Forces of Ukraine launched an attack from Malaya Tokmachka near Orekhov .
The assault detachment conducted a sortie to the positions of the RF Armed Forces with the support of several units of armored vehicles. According to some reports, the Armed Forces of Ukraine managed to break through, but subsequently the attack was repulsed, and control was restored.
On the Vremyevsky ledge , according to the Archangel of the Special Forces , in the Bolshaya Novoselka area, the enemy launched an attack with forces of 10 tanks and more than 20 AFVs , which was ultimately repulsed.
All these sorties are more like reconnaissance in combat and an assessment of the capabilities of both the Russian troops and the Ukrainian formations themselves, which operate as part of combined assault formations.
In the Marun tactical group , which, apparently, will form the backbone of the offensive forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the organization of communications and the combat control system between the air assault formations (46 oambr, 82 airborne brigade, 71 ebr and 132 reconnaissance battalions) is now being debugged.
Most likely, the next attempts, and more massive ones , will be made in the near future. Ukrainian formations at the forefront today were given additional batteries, ammunition and uniforms, they are ready for active hostilities.
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Colonelcassad
The situation in the South-Donetsk direction
as of 14.00 June 5, 2023
On the border of the Zaporozhye region and the DPR, in the area of the Vremievsky ledge, the Armed Forces of Ukraine resumed the assault on Russian positions. Yesterday, by the end of the day, the RF Armed Forces recaptured the lost territories, including Novodarovka .
Ukrainian formations (according to some reports, the forces of the 23rd and 31st Ombre are involved in the battles) attack in two directions: near Novodarovka and Rivnopol .
By noon, Russian units repelled an attack by six tanks and infantry at Novodarovka. And from the direction of Novoselka, the offensive continues - reserves are brought in two kilometers west of Neskuchny .
Also in the morning, there was an attempt to storm the positions of the RF Armed Forces near Neskuchnoye and Storozhevoy by marines of the new 37th Marine Brigade on several armored combat vehicles. The attack was repulsed.
The main fighting took place in the Novodonetsk region . This morning, a convoy of 30 AFVs of the 37th Marine Corps of the Ukrainian Navy, including Kirpi and MaxxPRO, attacked the positions of the Russian Armed Forces near the village. As a result, the enemy entrenched himself on the outskirts of the settlement.
Now the fighting continues under heavy artillery fire. Soldiers of the 36th Army of the RF Armed Forces are trying to drive out the Ukrainian marines. At the moment, about half of the village is under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. At the same time , a convoy of 20 armored vehicles is moving southeast
from the Bolshaya Novoselka area, most likely to strengthen positions in Novodonetskoye.
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Colonelcassad
Regarding messages from the enemy that "there is no offensive."
Since so far the enemy has not been able to capture significant settlements in the course of attacks, he has already laid a straw for himself in advance if he cannot take anything significant. In this case, after the failure of the offensive, it will be possible to say that we did not declare an offensive, therefore we did not capture anything. But if they can take something, then they will later declare that this is where the offensive took place.
The enemy simply does not want to step on the same rake as with the "counteroffensive near Artemovsk", which lasted from May 10 to June 1 and did not lead to the occupation of at least one village. Here, the Armed Forces of Ukraine turned out to be hostages of their own propaganda, which rattled incessantly for several weeks about the "counterattack near Bakhmut" and which later turned out to have nothing to show against the backdrop of defeat in the battles for the city.
***
Colonelcassad
About the battles on the Vremievsky ledge by 12-00 06/05/2023
In the area of the Vremevsky ledge, the enemy is trying to conduct an offensive with the forces of 23 and 31 ombr, in three directions
: up to 2 tank platoons (up to 6 tanks).
2. The Novoselka line - the mound Grave Watchtower - 23 ombr is advancing, forces up to reinforced MPR, the goal is mastering the dominant height.
3. The OTF line - the Shaitanka River - was advancing by 37 infantry regiments, with forces up to a platoon, the first attack was repulsed, 3 AFVs were destroyed, 2 AFVs managed to retreat.
Also, in the Shakhtyorsk direction, the 37th infantry regiment with forces up to the RTGR storms our defenses along the Zolotaya Niva - Novodonetskoye line.
Previously, the enemy managed to gain a foothold on the northern outskirts of the settlement of Novodonetskoye, in this case the battle continues, artillery and the Russian Aerospace Forces strike at the enemy.
https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin
Google Translator
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 06/05/2023
Once again, a Ukrainian officer, this time Volodymyr Zelensky, has publicly stated that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are ready for the announced spring offensive, delayed so many times that it has already turned into a summer offensive. Oleksiy Reznikov, defense minister, and Oleksiy Danilov, president of the National Security and Defense Council, reportedly already stated that the preparation has been completed and that only the president's order remains. Danilov added that it was necessary to wait for the improvement of the soil conditions, still humid after the spring rains, a circumstance that was resolved some time ago. More intrepid in his public messages, Mikhailo Podolyak has already written on several occasions that the offensive has already begun. The Ukrainian attacks in the Belgorod region would be part of it,false flags of the Kremlin.
While the Ukrainian discourse has remained certain of victory, for months the Westerner has begun to tone down its enthusiasm and, above all, its triumphalism. Zelensky has adapted his speech by linking the victory to the supply of Western weapons. In his last interview, the Ukrainian president insisted on this idea, repeating once again the risk of suffering heavy casualties, an argument that he already used several weeks ago to justify a new delay in the start of the Ukrainian attack. Since then, the Western trend for a continuous flow of war funding has been coupled with obvious Ukrainian moves on different fronts and attacks from the rear. There have been explosions in Melitopol,Russian partisans from the General Directorate of Military Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.
The first of the two adventures that took place last week, seemed to not get beyond its initial phase and the group's advance party was eliminated by the Russian authorities. There was no epic comeback on this occasion recorded by the press, which was able to hear first-hand from one of the main leaders who does not consider the term neo-Nazi an insult. Unable to infiltrate the Belgorod region, the Ukrainian military resorted to the tactic used by nationalist battalions in Donbass in the summer of 2014: attacking civilians and artillery shelling towns without a military presence. These days it has been possible to see both the image of the fallen Ukrainian commando and the burning apartment buildings due to the impact of Ukrainian projectiles.legion . The group did not explain why, in that case, it had not been able to infiltrate the region.
Images of a burning residential neighborhood in shelling have also not stopped Ukraine from bragging about not targeting civilian areas. “While the Russian Volunteer Corps has the protection of its compatriots as a priority, carefully checking every step and action, Putin's troops have no mercy for their own civilians. No way, ”Mikhailo Podolyak wrote reflecting a reality that exists only in his imagination. And taking his arrogance to the extreme, the adviser to the Office of the President offered to open "humanitarian corridors" for the population of Belgorod, the same population that Ukrainian troops continue to bombard and carry out a new infiltration attempt in the last few hours. After threatening raids, small group attacks and artillery barrages against civilian border village .
As for Podolyak, for Zelensky the solution to all problems is clear. In his interview with The Wall Street Journal, the Ukrainian president was aware that the casualties among his troops will be high at the moment the offensive begins. However, everything can be avoided if Ukraine receives the weapons it demands. "Anyone is aware that any counteroffensive without air superiority is very dangerous," he said, making it clear what kyiv's desire is. The argument, which Zelensky has already used in the past, is still a form of blackmail to his partners, eager to see the start of the Ukrainian offensive, in which they have pinned their hopes to later force Russia to a humiliating resolution. . The Ukrainian president's reasoning is also manipulative, since the problem of Russia's air superiority that he now denounces is not going to be solved this summer by delivering F16s, whose arrival would be delayed for weeks, even months, once the American promise was consummated. Blackmail is not just a matter of groups like RDK.
Campaigning to win support for his candidacy for NATO Secretary General, UK Defense Minister Ben Wallace has come out in similar terms to Zelensky. A few days ago, an article in The Wall Street Journal commented on the differences in the position of Ukraine's Western partners, specifically mentioning London's much more belligerent stance compared to Washington. Wallace's words are an example of these differences. While Pentagon representatives have insisted since the Ukrainian offensive began to be considered that Kiev's chances of retaking Crimea are slim, in an interview with The Washington Post,the British minister showed a speech much more aligned with the kyiv narrative.
"What we have seen on the battlefield is that if you hit the Russian forces in the right place, they will really collapse," he said, alleging that it is "a real possibility" for Ukraine to recapture Crimea militarily. To do this, Wallace relies on an argument also regularly repeated by the Kiev political authorities, who seem not to care that even their political authorities have denied it in relation, for example, to the battle for Artyomovsk. "You can send tens of thousands of young people to die, which is what they do, but you can't magically produce the tanks and weapons systems they need," he said, falling back into another of the commonplaces of this war: that Russia is at point of running out of resources to fight.
In war, discourse and reality do not have to coincide. No need to turn to Russian propagandato be aware of the immense personnel cost that the battle for Artyomovsk has taken on the Ukraine as well, which has not yet conceded the loss of the city and in whose fight it has acted exactly as Wallace claims Russia acted. The very development of the war is enough to observe that Wallace's argument for the lack of weapons does not hold up either. Moreover, despite the fact that since March 2022 there began to be talk of a shortage of missiles in the Russian arsenal, the attacks have increased notably now that the Ukrainian preparations for the offensive seem to be in their final phase. And you don't have to go to the Russian media to find out that, despite the damage that Western sanctions are causing in some sectors of the Russian economy, the coercive measures have not brought about the economic collapse they sought nor have they impeded the ability to continue the war. According to an article published this weekend byThe Economist , hardly a pro-Russian medium, Russia has spent 3% of its GDP on the cost of the war, a higher percentage than the 2.3% that the Vietnam war meant for the United States, but that is not going to prevent Russia from have the option of preparing for a long war.
Faced with Russia, which has an important military industry that has been able to supply its troops, Ukraine depends on its allies to replenish, replace and maintain the bulk of the weapons that make it possible for its army to continue fighting. In the first months of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the West repeated ad nauseam the argument that Moscow would not be able to fight a long war. This reasoning was based on both the economic and the military argument: the NATO countries expected a further collapse of the Russian economy that has not occurred, while the country has managed, for the moment, to maintain military production to guarantee the necessary weapons. What's more, Russia's problem in the initial months was a lack of troops, not weapons. In any case, The idea that a long war favors Ukraine has already disappeared from the discourse of the West, which, as Josep Borrell stated on Saturday, seeks to maintain the flow of arms supplies to avoid a quick victory for Russia. To paraphrase Ben Wallace, Ukraine cannot magically produce the tanks and weapons systems its soldiers need. Hence, kyiv's partners must keep very high or even raise military spending to ensure that their proxy army can keep fighting.
https://slavyangrad.es/2023/06/05/27429/#more-27429
Google Translator
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SWEDEN WANTS TO REVERSE THE BATTLE OF POLTAVA – WATCH OUT FOR THE JUNE 12 DEADLINE
By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
In a month it will be three hundred and fourteen years precisely since the Swedes lost their king, their generals, their soldiers, and their empire when Tsar Peter the Great and the Russian army defeated them at the Battle of Poltava (lead image). That battle of July 8, 1709, is the greatest disaster in Swedish military history; it is the bitterest grudge they hold against Russia, still.
The Swedes were obliged to accept their inferiority and become a minor power in Europe. Their strategic calculation ever since has been to conserve their resources by keeping to the winning side in Europe, while hoping to revenge themselves on the Kremlin. At Poltava, in eastern Ukraine, they still hope if, with Swedish money, arms, and men, the regime in Kiev can manage it.
Over the past week the Swedish Air Force has taken its Saab-made JAS39 Gripen fighter-bombers to the air, alongside other NATO forces and the USS Gerald Ford in what they are calling Operation Arctic Challenge 23. At the same time, the Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonsson, has admitted that he is discussing with Kiev supplying the Gripen for attacking Russian forces over the Ukrainian battlefield. “Yesterday [February 14], I had the opportunity to discuss this with the Minister of Defense of Ukraine, Reznikov….We are significantly increasing opur support for Ukraine”. “President Zelensky also asked for it.”
Jonsson didn’t admit that the Swedes are discussing with the US, NATO, and the Czech Republic a form of disguising the battlefield deployment of the Gripen through third countries and through NATO’s Air Defender 23 exercise, which begins on June 12.
Listen to the new War of the Worlds broadcast for a briefing on the latest battlefield developments, followed by a discussion with Marcello Ferrada de Noli, a professor of psychiatry and philosophy who has lived and taught in Sweden for many years.
https://tntradiolive.podbean.com/e/prof ... june-2023/
Left: for the playback link, click. Right: Professor Marcello Ferrada de Noli. Read his latest publications on Sweden’s NATO move and this -- and on the European war strategy here. Follow his commentary here. https://twitter.com/ProfessorsBlogg
On May 30 Putin introduced General Patience and the Russian strategy of standoff targeting without the commitment of Russian ground forces or manned aircraft to a conventional offensive across the Dnieper River. “Russia was forced to respond to the war the Ukrainian regime unleashed in Donbass,” Putin said. “We all had to respond by launching the special military operation. We are striking at the territory of Ukraine, but with long-range precision weapons, at military infrastructure facilities only, either at ammunition or fuel and lubricants warehouses used for combat operations. We have talked about the possibility of striking at decision-making centres. Of course, the headquarters of Ukrainian military intelligence is one of them, and a strike at this target was carried out two or three days ago. In response, the Kiev regime has chosen a different path – attempts to intimidate Russian citizens with strikes at residential buildings. This is an obvious terrorist approach.”
Read more analysis of what happens next for Odessa, Nikolaev and Kharkov.
Boris Rozhin’s (“Colonel Cassad”) analysis of the Russian method of operation in striking the GUR, the Ukrainian military intelligence agency, can be read here.
In a US interpretation of the operation, published on June 1, it is claimed that “the building appears damaged ‘from below’ rather than above, and does coincide with a huge ground-rumbling earthquake which was said to have come from some underground explosion. Rumors of NATO generals being ferried now abound, though I take those as low confidence… Now, of course, there are the obligatory rumors that GUR head Budanov is missing and some claiming he was killed in the strike. Just recently coming off from the Zaluzhny debacle, I remain skeptical. But it’s definitely possible and we’ll just have to wait for any further information and see. After all, aspiring Bond-villain Budanov is a camera whore that loves making idle threats and zinging Russians so it is very odd that he’s suddenly so quiet. Recall, that after the previous round of strikes, the righteously indignant Budanov immediately recorded a threatening video, which I posted last time, where he told Russia that something is coming ‘soon’ for them. One would think that after a hit completely burns out his HQ he would at least make some kind of retort, no?”
Left: the GUR headquarters building after the Russian strike. Right, GUR chief, Kirill Budanov.
To follow the Swedish hankering for imperial revenge on the Russians, start here.
For the recent polling of Swedish public opinion on the war in the Ukraine, read this piece from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. In the Ipsos opinion surveys reported from mid-2022, the Swedes rank far ahead of other west European countries in the attention they are paying to the war; in the risks to their country they see from the war; and in their support for supplying weapons to Kiev.
Follow the upward (red) line of voter support for the current Swedish coalition government’s anti-Russian line. According to de Noli, Swedish support for NATO has been dictated by the political and corporate elites, backed by the mainstream media, without a genuine referdendum test of public opinion. There are almost no alternative media, he adds.
Source: https://www.politico.eu/
A summary of the 2022 election can be read here. At the current 37% level of voter support recorded on May 21, the Social Democrats have gained 4 percentage points on last year’s election level.
For additional background on Swedish government discussions to provide the Ukraine with battlefield weapons like the CV90 infantry fighting vehicles and the MBT LAW anti-tank missiles, as well as the JAS39 Gripen aircraft, click to read.
In this US Defense News videoclip, produced this week, it is revealed that Ukrainian pilots are already training on the Gripen, and that NATO staff consider the Swedish fighter has many advantages over the US F-16, including its cost, ease of pilot training, and capability to land and take off from Ukrainian roads, after the regular airfields have been destroyed.
https://johnhelmer.net/sweden-wants-to- ... more-88081
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Patrick Lawrence: The War We’re Finally Allowed to See
June 1, 2023
After 15 months of conflict, The New Yorker’s reportage by Luke Mogelson and photographer Maxim Dondyuk shows us the war in Ukraine that the propaganda machine has been concealing.
Ceremony in Kiev on March 24 marking the ninth anniversary of the National Guard of Ukraine and the graduation of officers of the National Academy of the National Guard of Ukraine and the Kyiv Institute of the National Guard of Ukraine. (President of Ukraine, Public domain)
By Patrick Lawrence
Original to ScheerPost
Let us consider the following paragraphs, which appear in the May 29 edition of The New Yorker:
“While Tynda and his team were fighting from the trench, long and powerful fusillades had issued from another Ukrainian position, on a hilltop behind them. I later went there with Tynda. In a blind overlooking the no man’s land stood an improbably antique contraption on iron wheels: a Maxim gun, the first fully automatic weapon ever made. Although this particular model dated from 1945, it was virtually identical to the original version, which was invented in 1884: a knobbed crank handle, wooden grips, a lidded compartment for adding cold water or snow when the barrel overheated….
“In the course of the past year, the U.S. has furnished Ukraine with more than thirty-five billion dollars in security assistance. Why, given the American largesse, had the 28th Brigade resorted to such a museum piece? A lot of equipment has been damaged or destroyed on the battlefield. At the same time, Ukraine appears to have forgone refitting debilitated units in order to stockpile for a large-scale offensive that is meant to take place later this spring. At least eight new brigades have been formed from scratch to spearhead the campaign. While these units have been receiving weapons, tanks, and training from the U.S. and Europe, veteran brigades like the 28th have had to hold the line with the dregs of a critically depleted arsenal.”
The piece, from which this passage is drawn, carries the headline, “Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine” and is the work of Luke Mogelson, a magazine correspondent of a dozen or so years’ experience.
Mogelson’s text is accompanied by the photographs of Maxim Dondyuk, a Ukrainian of roughly Mogelson’s age, either side of 40, whose work focuses on history and memory, topics that suggest a lot of thought goes into those 1/1000ths of a second when Dondyuk clicks his shutter.
There are many things to think about and say as we read this piece. I will shortly have more to say about the excellence of Mogelson’s text and Dondyuk’s photographs. For now, the first thing to note is that, after 15 months of conflict, their work suggests Western media may at last begin to cover the Ukraine war properly.
I will stay with the conditional verb for now, but this could mark a significant turn not only for the profession — which could use a significant turn, heaven knows — but also in public support for the U.S.–NATO proxy war against the Russian Federation.
Luke Mogelson, on right, in a 2015 panel discussion of his coverage of political asylum seekers. (Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy University, Flickr, Attribution-NoDerivs, CC BY-ND 2.0)
As astute readers will already know, apart from a few staged forays near the front lines — officially controlled and monitored, never at the front lines — correspondents from The New York Times, the other big dailies, the wire services, and the broadcast networks have accepted without protest the Kiev regime’s refusal to allow them to see the war as it is.
Content these professional slovens have been to sit in Kiev hotel rooms and file stories based on the regime’s transparently unreliable accounts of events, all the while pretending their stories are properly reported and factual.
The exceptions here are Times correspondents such as Carlotta Gall, whose Russophobia seems reliably unbalanced enough to satisfy the Kyiv regime, and the two Andrews, Higgins and Kramer, who have an exquisite talent for stories that make absolutely no sense.
It was the two Andrews, you may recall, who had the Russians shelling the nuclear power plant they occupied and, later on, bombing their own prisoner-of-war camp in eastern Ukraine.
If correspondents cannot see the war and it makes no matter to them, we will not see it either. The result, as your columnist noted a while ago, has been two wars: There is the presented, the mythical war, and the real war.
“Our current brainwashing for war is similar to that preceding other wars,” John Pilger, the journalist and filmmaker, wrote in a Tweet the other day, “but never, in my experience as a war correspondent, as unrelenting or bereft of honest journalism.”
This is what makes Mogelson’s file so startling. In its graphic honesty it is a major step on from the gruel of propaganda corporate media have fed us since the Russian intervention began in February 2022. Those three Times correspondents just mentioned? They all have many years’ experience on Mogelson. None of them could change his typewriter ribbon, as we used to say.
Two Weeks in Trenches
Ukrainian trenchline at the Battle of Bakhmut, November 2022. (Mil.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Mogelson and Dondyuk spent two weeks this past March with a Ukrainian infantry battalion as it fought in trenches “at a small Army position in the eastern region of the Donbas, where shock waves and shrapnel had reduced the surrounding trees to splintered canes.”
This was just outside a village south of Bakhmut, the much-embattled city lately lost to Russian forces. I have no doubt these two journalists were officially embedded with the high command’s approval. That is the way the Kiev regime is running this war. But, for whatever reason — and I will get to this question in a sec — there is no whiff of inhibition or self-censorship in either the reportage or the photographs. Both are raw, unflattering, as unforgiving as the scenes they depict:
“By the time I joined the battalion, about two months had passed since it had lost the battle for the village, and during the interim, neither side had attempted a major operation against the other. It was all the Ukrainians could do to maintain the stalemate. Pavlo estimated that, owing to the casualties his unit had sustained, eighty percent of his men were new draftees. ‘They’re civilians with no experience,’ he said. ‘If they give me ten, I’m lucky when three of them can fight.’
We were in his bunker, which had been dug in the back yard of a half-demolished farmhouse; the constant rumble of artillery vibrated through the dirt walls. ‘A lot of the new guys don’t have the stamina to be out here,’ Pavlo said. ‘They get scared and they panic.’ His military call sign was Cranky, and he was renowned for his temper, but he spoke sympathetically about his weaker soldiers and their fears. Even for him, a career officer of twenty-three years, this phase of the war had been harrowing. On a road that passed in front of the farmhouse, a board had been nailed to a tree with the painted words ‘to moscow’ and an arrow pointing east. No one knew who’d put it there. Such optimistic brio seemed to be a vestige of another time.”
Mogelson then introduces us to others in the battalion:
“Just two of the soldiers who were rebuilding the machine-gun nest had been with the battalion since Kherson. One of them, a twenty-nine-year-old construction worker called Bison — because he was built on like one — had been hospitalized three times: after being shot in the shoulder, after being wounded by shrapnel in the ankle and knee, and after being wounded by shrapnel in the back and arm. The other veteran, code-named Odesa, had enlisted in the Army in 2015, after dropping out of college. Short and stocky, he had the same serene deportment as Bison. The uncanny extent to which both men had adapted to their lethal environment underscored the agitation of the recent arrivals, who flinched whenever something whistled overhead or crashed nearby.
‘I only trust Bison,’ Odesa said. ‘If the new recruits run away, it will mean immediate death for us.’ He’d lost nearly all his closest friends in Kherson. Taking out his phone, he swiped through a series of photographs: ‘Killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . wounded. . . . Now I have to get used to different people. It’s like starting over.’ Because the high attrition rate had disproportionately affected the bravest and most aggressive soldiers—a phenomenon that one officer called ‘reverse natural selection’ — seasoned infantrymen like Odesa and Bison were extremely valuable and extremely fatigued. After Kherson, Odesa had gone awol. ‘I was in a bad place psychologically,’ he said. ‘I needed a break.’ After two months of resting and recuperating at home, he came back. His return was prompted not by a fear of being punished — what were they going to do, put him in the trenches? — but by a sense of loyalty to his dead friends. ‘I felt guilty,’ he said. ‘I realized that my place was here.’”
Reporting and writing of this caliber makes Mogelson look the dazzling star next to the correspondent-reenactors in their Kiev hotel rooms. But for my money he also keeps pace with a lot of standout names from the past. I see in his copy a little Dexter Filkins, a little Bernard Fall, a little Michael Herr, a little Martha Gellhorn, and I’ll go so far as to say a little Ernie Pyle.
As for Dondyuk’s pictures, the way they leap off the page brings to mind Tim Page, Horst Faas, Robert Kapa, and some of the other great war fotogs of their day. If this piece portends a turn or return (however you want to think of it) to reporting with some integrity to it, the project could not have got off to a better start. But let us stay with “if” for now.
There are at bottom two kinds of journalists: There are the analysts, as I call them, who add an interpretive dimension to their coverage — understanding in addition to knowledge. And there are the reporters, empiricists in the just-the-facts vein who stay close to the ground and do not much dolly out for any kind of larger take.
Mogelson is of this latter type. Reporters of his sort invite us to infer from what they tell us. What shall we infer from superbly tactile, eye-of-the-camera reportage?
No Pretense of Victory
No Man’s Land between Russian and Ukraining forces during the Battle of Bakhmut, November 2022. (Mil.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Luke Mogelson is not telling us about an army on the way to victory — or an army that pretends to itself it is on the way to victory, or one that wants the world to think it is on the way to victory. There are no battlefield successes, no advances, no high expectations in Mogelson’s story. There is “holding the line,” although few seem to hold, and there is staying alive. This is a story more given to severe attrition among soldiers waiting for the end and wondering how distant in time the end will prove.
In Mogelson’s writing we meet conscripts sent to the front after little or no training. He describes one man who was kidnapped on a city sidewalk and was under Russian fire three days later. Paralyzing fright, exhaustion, demoralization, desertions, a sort of Beetle Bailey incompetence — these are rampant among the green draftees that now make up the majority of the AFU’s infantry. They fight with Vietnam-era vehicles shipped from the U.S., or muzzle-loaded mortars long out of production, or Soviet-era weapons left over from the pre–1991 days—and, withal, too little ammunition for this kind of matériel to make any difference at all.
A 1945 Maxim gun of 1884 design? Jeez. Mogelson is right to question, if too briefly, where may be all the weapons the U.S. and NATO allies are shipping into Ukraine. A great number of them have already been destroyed, he reports, which comes as no surprise. Being as close to the scene as he put himself earlier this spring, he would have done well to tell us something about the greedheads who run the regime and the military as they sell shocking amounts of arms into the black market as soon as they arrive across the Polish border.
At one point, Mogelson and Dondyuk spend a day in a dugout with a seasoned sergeant named Kaban and a 19–year-old codenamed Cadet, so young he hasn’t lost his baby fat. “Later, Kaban entertained us with stories about his past romantic escapades,” Mogelson recounts, “and Dondyuk, the photographer, asked him whether he’d imparted any lessons to Cadet.
“ ‘There’s no point,’ Kaban said. ‘He’ll be dead soon.’
Cadet laughed, but Kaban didn’t.”
These are the voices of the war Mogelson tells us about. Can’t you just cut the anxiety in Cadet’s laugh with a knife?
I have to mention some wonderful touches in Mogelson’s report because they are superlative writing of the kind that is too rare these days. Of the soldier firing that Maxim gun: “The gun’s operator, a rawboned soccer hooligan with brass knuckles tattooed on his hand, spoke of the Maxim like a car enthusiast lauding the performance of a vintage Mustang.” Describing an unwieldy personnel carrier of Vietnam vintage, Mogelson tells us: “It looked like a green metal box on tracks… The maxed-out machine sounded like a blender full of silverware.”
Did Gellhorn do any better as she covered the Spanish Civil War for Colliers?
Mogelson shows us the war a few independent journalists have written of but a war we have not heretofore read about in mainstream media. This is the war the propaganda machine has kept from us. And now we know that what correspondents reporting for independent media have been describing is by and large the war as it is.
Among much else we can now see the obvious indifference the Kiev regime and its Western backers display for those doing the fighting — who, Mogelson tells us, are now working-class Ukrainians, the more privileged having dodged the draft or otherwise avoided service.
Mogelson reported this piece in March, and we can justly assume conditions on the front line of this war are now three months’ worth of worse. His report makes me want to bang my shoe on the table, Khrushchev-style, in equal measure for the disgraceful conduct of mainstreamers reenacting the work of correspondents, for the senseless loss of Ukrainian lives in the service of the presented war and for the AFU soldiers — veterans and the untrained draftees they command — who the Kiev regime has not quite but nearly abandoned.
Why Now?
The New Yorker mascot Eustace Tilley by Tim Needles. (Flickr, Attribution CC BY 2.0)
The obvious question is why this piece appears now in The New Yorker, a magazine thoroughly committed to every liberal orthodoxy you can think of, including the wisdom of this war and the certainty of an AFU victory. Hell broke loose last year, you will recall, when Amnesty International and then CBS News lifted the lid on the realities of the Ukraine conflict. What is different now?
This is hard to say. But the larger picture suggests publication of this eye– and mind-opening piece reflects a creeping recognition in all sorts of places —among the policy cliques, at the Pentagon, in corporate media — that Ukraine is not going to win this war and the time has come to prepare for this eventuality.
The new drift on the vaunted counteroffensive is that it is not going to make much difference. There is more talk now about the conditions necessary to begin negotiations. NATO officials, per Steven Erlanger, the Times’ Brussels correspondent, are now thinking about doing in Ukraine what the allies did in postwar Germany: Divide it such that the West joins the alliance and the east is left to the East, so to say.
Mogelson’s intent, surely, was to do good work, full stop, and he has. But read in this larger context, its publication looks to me the start of an effort to get all those people with blue-and-yellow flags on their front porches ready for a dose of the reality from which they have been shielded all these months. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Business Insider, Forbes: They have all recently run pieces not nearly as good as Mogelson’s but in the let’s-get-real line.
If I am right, the real war and the presented war will eventually be one. About time, I would say. Not that mainstream media are about to ’fess up to their sins and disgraces in their pitiful coverage of this war. They never will. Let us not get carried away on this point.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His new book Journalists and Their Shadows, is forthcoming from Clarity Press. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
This article is from ScheerPost.
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/06/01/p ... ed-to-see/
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The imperialism-compatible left’s big lie: that being pro-Russia is a reactionary stance
BY RAINER SHEA
JUNE 2, 2023
Russiagate has impacted the thinking of leftists, and even many who call themselves communists, in more ways than they’d like to believe. Everyone with at least some awareness of the Democratic Party’s corruption and hypocrisy has recognized how deranged liberals have become about Russia during the last decade. So leftists have tried to distance themselves from Russiagate, with its embarassing conspiratorial thinking. Yet because the left is predominantly opportunistic, it hasn’t been willing to give up Russiagate’s core belief: that if somebody is serious about challenging U.S. imperialism, and thereby supports Russia’s actions to weaken Washington’s hegemony, then they’re a reactionary.
This was the idea that came from the effort to politically police Donald Trump, where the Democrats, the corporate media, and their neocon allies accused the Trump campaign of Russian collusion to pressure him into going along with the new cold war. When Trump’s opportunism incentivized him to comply, and he became a more dangerously anti-Russian president than Obama, the imperialist narrative managers kept promoting the collusion story. Because even though they had successfully made the new cold war bipartisan, they needed to maintain a myth that justified this and all their other vile policies. The idea that our “democratic institutions” are under threat from a foreign menace, and that these institutions therefore are genuinely worthy of being called democratic, was the perfect myth. One the narrative managers still haven’t let go of.
“The myth of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election provides a convenient escape hatch from the political, social, cultural and economic rot that plagues the U.S.,” wrote Chris Hedges this year. “The liberal class, by clinging to this conspiracy theory, is as disconnected from reality as the QAnon theorists and election deniers that support Trump. The retreat by huge segments of the population into non-reality-based belief systems leaves a polarized nation unable to communicate. Neither side speaks a language rooted in verifiable fact. This bifurcation, one I witnessed in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, fuels the distrust and hatred between antagonistic demographics. It accelerates political disintegration and dysfunction. It is used to justify, as was true with the F.B.I. investigation of Trump, gross abuses of power.”
Because the default liberal view has come to be that Russia is a globally subversive bad actor, one which couldn’t possibly have a good reason for wanting to demilitarize a modern Nazi state, the left opportunists have had to also adopt this neocon stance in order to effectively tail the Democrats. They’ve tacitly accepted the narrative that the GOP has “sold out to Putin,” and therefore that anyone who opposes U.S. hegemony is an asset for reactionary politics.
This narrative is supported by two notions. One, that Russia’s war against Ukrainian fascism and wider pattern of defying U.S. hegemony can be attributed to Vladimir Putin as a personality. The reactionary politicians and commentators who praise Putin as an anti-woke strongman provide the liberals with a rhetorical basis for this. Because both of the partisan sides Hedges talks about share that false perception about how Russia’s anti-American turn was Putin’s idea. When you look at the historical context behind Russia’s break from Washington, you see that Putin did not set out to do this. He was originally supposed to continue Yeltsin’s project to keep Russia a U.S. client state, and he for a time wanted Russia to join NATO. Then the circumstances mandated that he become an anti-American leader, or else become unpopular among a Russian society that’s overwhelmingly anti-imperialist. This isn’t Putin’s war, it’s the Russian people’s war, a war that he did everything to delay until he could avoid doing the responsible thing no longer.
The profit interests of the Russian bourgeoisie in this war only momentarily coincide with those of the wider Russian people, who seek to combat Nazism after it took 27 million of their relatives in World War II. In the long term, Operation Z is against the favor of the country’s capitalist class, as it’s accelerating class conflict and giving the communists more influence. Besides, if your priority is anti-imperialism, the correct stance is to support an action by a non-imperialist, non-fascist country that weakens U.S. hegemony. To engage with the shallow commentary from the reactionaries who reduce this conflict to Putin, and not repudiate this personality-focused narrative, is to frame the matter in a deceptively simplistic way. A way that makes it easy to create a dichotomy between “those who oppose Putin” and “those who support Putin.” Putin is not the point. What kind of person Putin is has no relevance to whether anti-imperialists should support the special operation, our concern is whether it represents a progressive historical event (which it does).
The other notion the imperialism-compatible left operates off of is that because the pro-Russia stance of us anti-imperialists overlaps with the views on Russia of many conservatives, particularly the libertarian kinds of conservatives, for us to take this stance is to create a “red-brown alliance.” This is the argument they used to try to discredit the Rage Against the War Machine coalition, whose communist organizations are appropriately all pro-Russian. What it comes from is the idea that only those who are on the left are worth reaching out to. That if somebody doesn’t share all the “right” ideas (which according to these left gatekeepers include many liberal ideas that aren’t even compatible with genuine Marxism), then they should be discarded.
By this logic, anybody who calls themselves a libertarian shouldn’t be worked with under any circumstances, as everyone in this category is supposedly a threat towards the socialist cause whatever the context. Which is ironic coming from the same types of left sectarians who work obsessively to harm anti-imperialists, something we haven’t seen from libertarians especially during recent times. By this logic, we should make no effort to distinguish between the culture war-obsessed types of conservatives, and the ones who’ve moreso been going in an anti-imperialist direction. Even though there are plenty of communists today who in 2016 would have voted Trump, as well as many who used to be libertarians. Bernie Sanders voters are not the only types of people who’ve been coming to Marxism throughout the last decade. To pretend like they are would be to willingly make the communist movement insular, and divided to an unnecessary degree.
What the imperialism-compatible left seeks to do is drive a wedge between those who came to socialism after being liberals, and the ones who came to it after being libertarians or conservatives. Bringing these two groups to unity, and adopting a shared synthesis that includes principled anti-imperialism, doesn’t have to mean tolerating the elements that refuse to give up their reactionary beliefs.
I’ll always denounce the anti-gay and anti-trans stances of these elements, for instance, as well as their blanket rejection of the concept of tribal sovereignty. What I’ve learned is that many of the types who’ve been won over by Parenti’s proletarian patriotism argument—an argument I don’t embrace, unless it’s a broader kind of “patriotism” that’s not tied to the USA—are also repulsed by these culture warrior edgelords. How can you create a red-brown alliance with people who, by any honest argument, aren’t fascist or fascist-adjacent? There’s a difference between a fascist, and someone who doesn’t share all of your ideas at the moment. To discard anyone who has contradictions is foolish from the perspective of wanting to win the people, yet this is what the left opportunists tell us to do.
The obstinate reactionaries are a fringe, one that’s not capable of winning the people. The pro-Russian element of the communist movement is predominantly made up of actually serious Marxists, ones who reject the culture war obsession of the reactionaries in favor of prioritizing anti-imperialism above all. Because it’s obvious to them that fighting the information war against the empire’s psyops is the most meaningful thing communists can do at this stage in the class struggle.
We in this ideological element have two key differences from the right-wingers who love Putin: one, we understand that Russia’s efforts to stand up to the war machine have been carried out in spite of Putin rather than because of him, meaning it doesn’t make sense from an anti-imperialist perspective to idolize him. Especially not for a communist, as Putin is a bourgeois leader. (Putin also accomodates the anti-gay politics of the Russian Orthodox Church, a kind of practice that most communists in the 21st century have rightly come to reject.) Two, we’re not fixated on the culture war, and we encourage anyone who still is to get out of that unhealthy mindset. Our foremost priority is to combat U.S. hegemony, which entails narratively aiding Russia’s efforts to weaken it.
This does not mean we view multipolarity as the end goal, that’s another strawman the imperialism-compatible left uses against us. We view multipolarity as one of the indispensable steps towards full global victory for the working class, based on how U.S. imperialism is the globe’s primary contradiction and has to be defeated as our foremost objective. We in the core can help realize this step by disrupting the war machine’s narrative management operations, thereby making Washington’s efforts to delay the rise of multipolarity untenable.
https://newswiththeory.com/the-imperial ... ry-stance/
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Ukraine, Human Rights, and International Law, With Alfred De Zayas
JUNE 3, 2023
MintCast thumbnail art featuring Mnar Adley (left), Alan MacLeod (center) and Alfred de Zayas (right). Photo: MintPress News.
By Alan MacLeod – Jun 1, 2023
You can indict Vladimir Putin over war crimes in Ukraine. But if you do, you’d better indict Joe Biden as well. That is the message that Professor Alfred de Zayas, world-renowned human rights and international law expert, gave “MintCast” host Alan MacLeod on today’s episode of the series.
A Swiss-American lawyer, academic and United Nations official with over 50 years’ experience in the field of human rights, de Zayas joins us for a wide-ranging discussion about international law and Ukraine, U.S. sanctions, whistleblowers, the successes and failures of the United Nations and its bodies, and the growth of a new and cynical “human rights industry” that weaponizes the concept to attack foreign governments.
“The double standards [with regard to Russia] are absolutely breathtaking” de Zayas said, noting how British International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan had discontinued all investigations into NATO war crimes in Afghanistan but continued those into the Taliban against NATO. Now the ICC has issued an arrest warrant against Putin, another one-sided decision that de Zayas claims has made the organization a joke:
“There is no question that here, the crime of aggression has been committed, and certainly Russian troops have committed crimes in Ukraine. But you cannot prosecute one side and let the other side off scot-free. If you are going to indict a serving head of state [like Putin], then you would have to indict Joe Biden.”
The United States and NATO, he says, have been carrying out dangerous provocations in Ukraine for years, supplying weapons to militias who use them against civilians, while also carrying out similar crimes to Russia in Afghanistan, meaning that anyone with a semblance of balance or neutrality would conclude that American leaders need to be held accountable, too.
After graduating from Harvard University in 1970, de Zayas practiced law in New York and Florida. For many years, he served in various human rights organizations and as a senior official at the United Nations. From 2010 to 2013 he was editor-in-chief of Ex Tempore, the United Nations’ literary journal. Until 2018, he was UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order. In addition to this, he has taught law at academic institutions across the world, including the University of Geneva, the University of Trier, the Human Rights Institute at the Irish National University and DePaul University.
De Zayas is also a prolific author and thinker attempting to construct the framework for a better world. Among his recent works include “Building a Just World Order” (2021), “Countering Mainstream Narratives,” (2022) and his latest book, “The Human Rights Industry” (2023).
De Zayas has been a leading international critic of U.S. sanctions, which, he points out, should really be referred to as “unilateral coercive measures,” as the former conveys some legitimacy to them. “It’s important not to use the term ‘sanctions,’ because ‘sanctions’ implies that the country imposing them somehow has a legal or moral authority to do so and the targeted country has somehow violated international law,” he told MacLeod. In fact, he notes, it is the U.S. that regularly flouts international law, and it can get away with it because its overwhelming power has allowed it a foster “culture of impunity” for its actions, internationally.
In 2020, after travelling to the country, de Zayas described U.S. sanctions against Venezuela as akin to a medieval siege and estimated that they had killed 100,000 innocent people.
From there, the esteemed diplomat casts his ire on the mainstream, corporate media, who he claims are complicit in Western war crimes, on the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which as “lost its credibility” going along with the U.S. on Syria and on those who keep Julian Assange in confinement because of his services to journalism.
https://orinocotribune.com/ukraine-huma ... -de-zayas/
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War in Ukraine. 06/04/2023
June 4, 22:38
War in Ukraine. 06/04/2023
1. During the day, the enemy made active attempts to conduct reconnaissance in force on a number of sectors of the Zaporozhye and South-Donetsk directions, using a large number of armored vehicles. The main attacks were carried out in the area of Gulyaipol, the Vremievsky ledge, in the area of Ugledar and in the area of \u200b\u200bAvdeevka.
2. Initially, the enemy managed to achieve small tactical successes in the area of the Vremyevskiy salient, including the occupation of two small villages on the border of the gray zone, but after suffering losses (more than 20 tanks and armored combat vehicles), the enemy was forced to retreat, even despite the introduction of his reserves into battle. In most other areas, the enemy had no success. The ratio of losses per day turned out to be strongly not in favor of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
3. Nevertheless, there is a concentration and regrouping of enemy forces in order to continue the offensive activity of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the area of the Vremievsky ledge, Vogledar and Vodyany. Probably tomorrow will be attempt number 2. It is possible that this activity is designed to distract our command from the Kamenskoye-Orekhov-Gulyaipole sector, where a blow could probably be struck in order to reach Tokmak and the subsequent movement to Melitopol, coupled with auxiliary landing forces across the Dnieper.
4. Under Artyomovsk as a whole, no changes. There is local enemy activity in the private sector to the southwest of the city, as well as to the northwest.
The RF Armed Forces cover the concentration of enemy forces in Slavyansk, Kramatorsk, Konstantinovka and Chasov Yar. Tomorrow the rotation of our group in Artemovsk will be completed.
5. In the Belgorod direction, the enemy today continued to actively shell the border areas, and also continued to attempt to break through the DRG into our territory. These actions are aimed primarily at solving information problems, as well as diverting attention from the main sectors of the front. Among the hopes of the enemy command is to provoke the RF Armed Forces to transfer additional forces here from the main directions. To do this, they try to inflate the panic as much as possible. Nevertheless, the situation requires the command to take more decisive measures to transfer hostilities to the northern regions of the Kharkos and Sumy regions in order to make it difficult for the enemy to implement his tactics.
Online broadcast of hostilities in Ukraine continues in telegram https://t.me/boris_rozhin (if you are interested, subscribe)
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8403709.html
The enemy launched a large-scale offensive on 5 sectors of the front
June 5, 1:33 am
The Ministry of Defense about the attempts of the enemy to go on the offensive in the Zaporozhye direction.
On the morning of June 4, the enemy launched a large-scale offensive in 5 sectors of the front in the YuzhnoDonetsk direction with the introduction of the 23rd and 31st mechanized brigades from the strategic reserves of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with the support of other military units and subunits.
In total, 6 mechanized and 2 enemy tank battalions were involved.
The enemy's goal was to break through our defenses on the most vulnerable, in his opinion, sector of the front. The enemy did not achieve his tasks, he had no success.
As a result of skillful and competent actions of the Eastern Group of Forces, the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine amounted to more than 250 personnel, 16 tanks, 3 infantry fighting vehicles, 21 armored fighting vehicles.
The commander of the united group of troops, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation Gerasimov during this period was at one of the forward command posts in this direction.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin/87934 - zinc
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8403826.html
Google Translator
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From Cassad's Telegram account:
Colonelcassad
Mass reconnaissance in combat in the Zaporozhye direction,
the situation by the end of June 4, 2023
Simultaneously with the activation of Ukrainian formations in the Kharkiv and South-Donetsk directions, today in the afternoon, the Armed Forces of Ukraine launched an attack from Malaya Tokmachka near Orekhov .
The assault detachment conducted a sortie to the positions of the RF Armed Forces with the support of several units of armored vehicles. According to some reports, the Armed Forces of Ukraine managed to break through, but subsequently the attack was repulsed, and control was restored.
On the Vremyevsky ledge , according to the Archangel of the Special Forces , in the Bolshaya Novoselka area, the enemy launched an attack with forces of 10 tanks and more than 20 AFVs , which was ultimately repulsed.
All these sorties are more like reconnaissance in combat and an assessment of the capabilities of both the Russian troops and the Ukrainian formations themselves, which operate as part of combined assault formations.
In the Marun tactical group , which, apparently, will form the backbone of the offensive forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the organization of communications and the combat control system between the air assault formations (46 oambr, 82 airborne brigade, 71 ebr and 132 reconnaissance battalions) is now being debugged.
Most likely, the next attempts, and more massive ones , will be made in the near future. Ukrainian formations at the forefront today were given additional batteries, ammunition and uniforms, they are ready for active hostilities.
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Colonelcassad
The situation in the South-Donetsk direction
as of 14.00 June 5, 2023
On the border of the Zaporozhye region and the DPR, in the area of the Vremievsky ledge, the Armed Forces of Ukraine resumed the assault on Russian positions. Yesterday, by the end of the day, the RF Armed Forces recaptured the lost territories, including Novodarovka .
Ukrainian formations (according to some reports, the forces of the 23rd and 31st Ombre are involved in the battles) attack in two directions: near Novodarovka and Rivnopol .
By noon, Russian units repelled an attack by six tanks and infantry at Novodarovka. And from the direction of Novoselka, the offensive continues - reserves are brought in two kilometers west of Neskuchny .
Also in the morning, there was an attempt to storm the positions of the RF Armed Forces near Neskuchnoye and Storozhevoy by marines of the new 37th Marine Brigade on several armored combat vehicles. The attack was repulsed.
The main fighting took place in the Novodonetsk region . This morning, a convoy of 30 AFVs of the 37th Marine Corps of the Ukrainian Navy, including Kirpi and MaxxPRO, attacked the positions of the Russian Armed Forces near the village. As a result, the enemy entrenched himself on the outskirts of the settlement.
Now the fighting continues under heavy artillery fire. Soldiers of the 36th Army of the RF Armed Forces are trying to drive out the Ukrainian marines. At the moment, about half of the village is under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. At the same time , a convoy of 20 armored vehicles is moving southeast
from the Bolshaya Novoselka area, most likely to strengthen positions in Novodonetskoye.
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Colonelcassad
Regarding messages from the enemy that "there is no offensive."
Since so far the enemy has not been able to capture significant settlements in the course of attacks, he has already laid a straw for himself in advance if he cannot take anything significant. In this case, after the failure of the offensive, it will be possible to say that we did not declare an offensive, therefore we did not capture anything. But if they can take something, then they will later declare that this is where the offensive took place.
The enemy simply does not want to step on the same rake as with the "counteroffensive near Artemovsk", which lasted from May 10 to June 1 and did not lead to the occupation of at least one village. Here, the Armed Forces of Ukraine turned out to be hostages of their own propaganda, which rattled incessantly for several weeks about the "counterattack near Bakhmut" and which later turned out to have nothing to show against the backdrop of defeat in the battles for the city.
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Colonelcassad
About the battles on the Vremievsky ledge by 12-00 06/05/2023
In the area of the Vremevsky ledge, the enemy is trying to conduct an offensive with the forces of 23 and 31 ombr, in three directions
: up to 2 tank platoons (up to 6 tanks).
2. The Novoselka line - the mound Grave Watchtower - 23 ombr is advancing, forces up to reinforced MPR, the goal is mastering the dominant height.
3. The OTF line - the Shaitanka River - was advancing by 37 infantry regiments, with forces up to a platoon, the first attack was repulsed, 3 AFVs were destroyed, 2 AFVs managed to retreat.
Also, in the Shakhtyorsk direction, the 37th infantry regiment with forces up to the RTGR storms our defenses along the Zolotaya Niva - Novodonetskoye line.
Previously, the enemy managed to gain a foothold on the northern outskirts of the settlement of Novodonetskoye, in this case the battle continues, artillery and the Russian Aerospace Forces strike at the enemy.
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