Re: Blues for Europa
Posted: Wed Mar 06, 2024 3:11 pm
Politico Helped Launder Ukraine’s Emerging Anti-Polish Propaganda Narratives
ANDREW KORYBKO
MAR 6, 2024
The combined effect is to prompt pro-Ukrainian protests inside Poland to pressure Prime Minister Tusk from the bottom-up into cracking down on the farmers’ protests in parallel with prompting the EU to do the same from the top-down.
Politico just published a piece claiming that “Putin the only winner as Poland’s Tusk flounders over Ukraine border fight”, which came after “Ukraine Tried To Discredit Poland By Hyping Up Its Import Of Russian Agricultural Products”. Prior to both information warfare provocations, Lvov’s mayor smeared the protesting Polish farmers as “pro-Russian provocateurs”, which was followed by Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Agency alleging that Russia is exploiting the protests to weaken support for Kiev.
Ukraine’s emerging anti-Polish propaganda campaign clearly aims to discredit the protesters as either “Russian agents” or that country’s “useful idiots” while questioning Warsaw’s commitment to Kiev by hyping up its import of Russia’s agricultural products. The combined effect is to prompt pro-Ukrainian protests inside Poland to pressure Prime Minister Tusk from the bottom-up into cracking down on the farmers’ protests in parallel with prompting the EU to do the same from the top-down.
Politico’s participation in this campaign internationalizes it and preconditions the Western audience to expect the aforementioned scenarios. Readers are left with the impression that President Putin is meddling in Poland via “agents of influence” and/or “useful idiots” as part of his supposedly long-running attempts to divide the West from within via information warfare. The truth, however, is that the preceding narrative is actually a form of information warfare that’s intended to manipulate Westerners.
For starters, the farmers’ protests are a legitimate grassroots movement that’s supported by a whopping 78% of Poles according to an Ipsos poll from late February. Neither the participants nor their sympathizers are operating under Russian influence or as agents of that country. It’s incredibly insulting to imply that either or both of them are, and this malicious smear – which is all the more disrespectful in the Polish context – can backfire by provoking Poles to double down on their support for this movement.
About that, the second point to make is that the farmers’ protesters could morph into a modern-day form of the Old Cold War-era Solidarity movement, which could further undermine Tusk’s rule. The totalitarian tactics that he’s employed to impose his liberal-globalist vision onto Poland has plunged the country into its worst political crisis since the 1980s. His foreign patrons think that forcefully dispersing the protests could nip this movement in the bud, but that could backfire by making them more popular.
And finally, the influx of cheap Ukrainian grain onto the Polish market has endangered farmers’ livelihoods, while the low-quality thereof has enraged society’s many health-conscious members. By comparison, Russian agricultural imports are approximately one-tenth of Ukrainian ones, and their quality is much higher since they have to meet EU standards unlike Kiev. These facts comprehensively discredit the most emotive part of Ukraine’s emerging anti-Polish propaganda campaign.
Nevertheless, Politico predictably omitted them from their report, which laundered these false claims in order to mislead their targeted Western audience about the situation. It remains unclear whether Tusk will capitulate to the forthcoming pressure, but there’s no doubt that Ukraine and the West will soon pressure him like never before. They should be careful what they wish for, however, since turning the farmers’ protests into a modern-day Solidarity movement could lead to unpredictable consequences.
https://korybko.substack.com/p/politico ... r-ukraines
******
Latest European Propaganda: Russia Is Flooding Europe With Illegal Migrants
Robert Bridge
March 5, 2024
The threat of a right-wing takeover appears imminent, and Europe has only itself to blame for that, Robert Bridge writes.
Western media is in full-blown hysteria mode, asserting that Vladimir Putin is ‘weaponising’ the flow of migrants in an effort to destabilize upcoming European elections.
Right up there with ridiculous claims of “little green men” and “tractor protests from Moscow,” Europe is now accusing Russia of fielding paramilitary forces and private mercenaries for the purpose of directing waves of migrants from Africa across the Mediterranean Sea and into the heart of Europe, an apparent effort to ratchet up the spring fever just in time for general elections across the continent.
With no loss of irony, Western propagandists are disseminating allegations that the Kremlin is in the process of agitating those African nations that for so long suffered from European colonial rule, namely Burkina Faso, Mali, Sudan, Ghana, Central African Republic and Libya, a formerly highly developed country that was destroyed by a U.S.-led attack in 2011.
The Telegraph would have its British readers believe it has “seen” intelligence documents detailing plans for “Russian agents” to create a “15,000-man strong border police force” comprising former militias in Libya to control the flow of migrants. Anyone hoping to review something like photographic evidence of this massive army would be advised not to hold their breath. Apparently, the thousands of Russian recruits are so technologically advanced they are invisible to spy satellites.
While it stands to reason that millions of desperate refugees from these turbulent nations would seek shelter in Europe, or possibly even in the United States, risking a trans-Atlantic journey to reach the wide-open U.S.-Mexican border, Brussels simply hopes to deflect attention away from its immigration failures onto Moscow, a sham that is transparent to anyone with even a half-functioning brain.
Let’s not forget that we’ve heard such allegations before.
Without so much as a single apprehended trespasser, Moscow was accused of trying to foment a refugee crisis by transferring asylum seekers to its border with Finland, thus prompting the new NATO lackey to close its land crossings with Russia in contravention of all diplomatic norms. The truth of the matter is that Helsinki was aggravating Russophobia to make the bitter pill of increased spending on Western-made (read: American) armaments go down smoother for Nordic voters.
Belarus, Russia’s closest ally, has also been accused – once again, without a shred of evidence – of sending immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa to its borders with Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
The latest wave of Russophobia to strike the European capitals comes at a time when migration is set to be a key issue in general elections on the continent, as well as in the UK, where the drumbeat about Russian-sponsored migrant invasion parties resonates the loudest.
An unidentified security source reportedly told the Telegraph: “If you can control the migrant routes into Europe then you can effectively control elections, because you can restrict or flood a certain area with migrants in order to influence public opinion at a crucial time.”
“A failure to control the number of migrants coming to the UK is already seen as a major weakness for Rishi Sunak who is struggling to push through a scheme to deport illegal migrants to Rwanda to stop the flow of small boats across the Channel,” the British daily continued.
Sunak made “stopping the boats” one of his top priorities as Prime Minister, though a survey of British sentiment earlier this year showed that three-quarters of voters believe the pledge has not gone well.
Since June 2023, over 52,000 illegal migrants were recorded as entering the UK, up 17 percent on the previous year. Data released last month revealed that the number of illegal migrants granted asylum in the UK hit a record high in 2023 as border guards waved through thousands of applications “in an attempt to clear a huge post-pandemic backlog.” What is even more laughable, albeit totally predictable, is that the people doing the “waving through” were British border officials, not secret “Russian agents.”
With EU elections in June, the European parliament looks set to shift hard to the right, with migration already proving to be a key issue for voters. Who best to blame for this approaching debacle? Certainly not Angela Merkel, who is personally responsible for much of the mess. Once again, Russia serves as a convenient bogeyman for the blockheaded decision-making processes coming out of the EU, and we’ve heard such accusations before.
In February 2016, one year after Merkel opened the floodgates to some 2 million migrants, many of them Muslims from Syria, U.S. General Philip Breedlove, Head of NATO forces in Europe, blamed Russia for working to exacerbate the refugee flows in a dastardly ploy to destabilize and destroy the EU. In a testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, he said, “Together, Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately weaponizing migration from Syria. In an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.”
Nearly a decade later, the same reckless utterances are being made, although this time around the European public, more skeptical about ‘Russia the enemy’ narrative following the Nord Stream fallout, is prepared to express its anger at the ballot box come June during elections for European Parliament. Far-right populist parties are polling well in several EU countries, notably in Austria, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. This terrifies Brussels, as the threat of a right-wing takeover appears imminent, and Europe has only itself to blame for that.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... -migrants/
******
SCOTT RITTER: The Minds of Desperate Men
March 5, 2024
Save
France’s Emmanuel Macron last week suggested the suicidal idea of sending NATO troops to Ukraine to confront Russia militarily.
French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, right, in 2022. (NATO, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
“O mischief, thou art swift, to enter in the thoughts of desperate men!”
—Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 1
With these words, William Shakespeare, the immortal bard, captures the psychology of men who, believing they are confronted with a situation for which there is no hope of resolving, undertake actions that will inevitably lead to their death.
Although set in 14th century Mantua, Italy, Shakespeare’s tragedy could easily have been transported in time to present day France, where French President Emmanuel Macron, in the role of a modern Romeo, after learning of the demise of his true love, Ukraine, decides to commit suicide by encouraging the dispatch of NATO troops to Ukraine to confront Russia militarily.
Macron was hosting a crisis meeting last week, convened to discuss the deteriorating conditions on the battlefield in Ukraine following the Russian capture of the fortress city of Adviivka. The meeting was attended by senior representatives from NATO member states, including the U.S. and Canada.
“We should not exclude that there might be a need for security that then justifies some elements of deployment,” Macron said during a press conference convened after the meeting. “But I’ve told you very clearly what France maintains as its position, which is a strategic ambiguity that I stand by.”
The other participants of the meeting immediately rushed forward to announce that, from their perspective, there was no “strategic ambiguity” — the dispatch of NATO forces to Ukraine was not on the table.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who attended the Paris talks, rejected Macron’s proposal out of hand. “What was agreed from the beginning among ourselves and with each other also applies to the future,” Scholtz declared, “namely that there will be no soldiers on Ukrainian soil sent there by European states or NATO states.”
Scholz’s statement was echoed by other NATO leaders, leaving France standing alone to bear the consequences of Macron’s “strategic ambiguity.”
Even as NATO rushed forward to bring clarity to Macron’s stance, Russia made it quite clear what the consequences of any precipitous deployment of NATO forces to Ukraine would be. Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, declared that, in the event of any NATO deployment into Ukraine,
“we should not talk about the probability but about the inevitability [of a direct war with NATO]. That’s how we assess it.”
Peskov noted that most NATO nations participating in the Paris conference “maintain a fairly sober assessment of the potential dangers of such an action and the potential danger of being directly involved in a hot conflict, involving them on the battlefield.”
He also noted Macron’s stance regarding “the need to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia,” an objective shared by the U.S. and the NATO secretary general.
Putin Responds
In his annual address to the Russian Parliament, delivered a few days after Macron gave his press conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin removed any ambiguity as to what the consequences of any NATO intervention in Ukraine would be.
“We remember the fate of those who once sent their contingents to the territory of our country,” Putin said, referring to the past invasions of Russia by Hitler and Napoleon. “But now the consequences for potential interventionists will be much more tragic.”
And, just to drive the point home, Putin went on to describe Russia’s most recent advances in the field of strategic nuclear weapons — a new nuclear-powered cruise missile, the Burevestnik, which is in the final stages of development, and the deployment of Sarmat heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles and Avangard hypersonic warheads that are immune to Western anti-missile defenses.
Putin pointed out that two of these new Russian weapons — the Zircon and Kinzhal —have seen combat duty in the Ukrainian conflict.
The NATO leaders “must grasp that we also have weapons capable of striking targets on their territory,” Putin said. “Everything they are inventing now, spooking the world with the threat of a conflict involving nuclear weapons, which potentially means the end of civilization — don’t they realize this?”
The clearest evidence available that NATO leaders do not realize the consequences of their actions comes in the form of a transcript of a conversation, released by the editor-in-chief of RT, Margarita Simonyan, on her page on the VK social network, which has four senior German military officers discussing how they planned to implement instructions given to them by German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius regarding the delivery of the Taurus cruise missile to Ukraine.
Putin presenting RT’s Simonyan with an award in May 2019. (Kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
As the transcript shows, the assurances given by German Chancellor Scholz that Germany would not become directly involved in the Ukraine conflict were little more than a lie.
In addition to discussing the logistical issues involving the transfer of these weapons, the German officers discussed their possible employment, including how they could be used to attack the Crimea Bridge connecting the Crimean Peninsula with southern Russia.
“The [Crimean] bridge in the east is hard to hit, as that’s quite a narrow target, but the Taurus can do that, and it can also hit ammo depots,” one of the German officers noted, prompting a reply by another, who declared that “there is an opinion that the Taurus will handle that (hit the Crimean Bridge) if the French Dassault Rafale fighter jet is used.”
The Crimean or Kerch Strait Bridge connecting the Taman Peninsula of Krasnodar Krai in Russia with the Kerch Peninsula of Crimea. (Rosavtodor.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
Scholz has been reticent about joining Britain and France, which have transferred Storm Shadow and Scalp long-range missiles, respectively, to Ukraine.
“What is being done in the way of target control and accompanying target control on the part of the British and the French can’t be done in Germany,” Scholz said after the Paris gathering, referring to the indirect role played by Britain and France in enabling Ukrainian pilots to launch the Storm Shadow and Scalp missiles from modified SU-24 aircraft.
“Everyone who has dealt with this system knows that,” Scholz noted, implying the need for a direct role by German military personnel in the targeting and operation of the Taurus missile.
“German soldiers must at no point and in no place be linked to targets this (Taurus) system reaches,” Scholz said, adding “not in Germany either.”
Scholz, it appears, understands the potential consequences of German involvement in the targeting and operation of any Taurus missiles used by Ukraine against Russia.
“This clarity is necessary,” Scholz said. “I am surprised that this doesn’t move some people, that they don’t even think about whether, as it were, a participation in the war could emerge from what we do.”
Clearly there is a disconnect between the German chancellor and his defense minister.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Pistorius in June 2023. (NATO, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
In case the German officers and their minister failed to “realize” the potential consequences of their actions, the Russian military, a day after Putin’s address to the Russian Parliament, carried out what it called “a combat training launch of a mobile-based solid-propellant intercontinental ballistic missile PGRK Yars, equipped with multiple warheads.”
The Yars missile, launched from the Plesetsk test facility located south of Saint Petersburg, can carry between three and six independently targetable nuclear warheads.
According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, “The training warheads arrived at the designated area at the Kura training ground on the Kamchatka Peninsula” after flying a range of nearly 4,200 miles.
When I was a weapons inspector, back in 1988-1990, working at the Votkinsk missile production facility, we inspected the SS-25 “Topol” intercontinental ballistic missile, the predecessor of the “Yars” missile recently tested by Russia.
When the first three missiles inspected exited the factory, the U.S. inspectors took to naming them after American cities that could ostensibly be their targets — Pittsburgh, Des Moines and Chicago. The powers that be, back in Washington, D.C., quickly discouraged this practice, given the sensitivity that accrues to the issue of thermonuclear war.
One must wonder if the Russian soldiers responsible for launching the Yars missile took the time to name their warheads, and if they did, which cities would have been chosen to christen them.
There is no doubt that had the Russian soldiers turned to former President Dmitri Medvedev for advice after he received news about the intercepted conversation, the warheads would likely have been named after German cities — Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Nuremburg, Dusseldorf.
“The eternal enemies, the Germans, have become our archenemies again,” Medvedev fumed in a post on his Telegram channel.
The Germans would be well advised to reflect long and hard on their actions, actions which could precipitate a conflict that, as Putin has noted, “potentially means the end of civilization — don’t they realize this?”
Don’t they?
“O mischief, thou art swift, to enter in the thoughts of desperate men!”
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/03/05/s ... erate-men/
ANDREW KORYBKO
MAR 6, 2024
The combined effect is to prompt pro-Ukrainian protests inside Poland to pressure Prime Minister Tusk from the bottom-up into cracking down on the farmers’ protests in parallel with prompting the EU to do the same from the top-down.
Politico just published a piece claiming that “Putin the only winner as Poland’s Tusk flounders over Ukraine border fight”, which came after “Ukraine Tried To Discredit Poland By Hyping Up Its Import Of Russian Agricultural Products”. Prior to both information warfare provocations, Lvov’s mayor smeared the protesting Polish farmers as “pro-Russian provocateurs”, which was followed by Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Agency alleging that Russia is exploiting the protests to weaken support for Kiev.
Ukraine’s emerging anti-Polish propaganda campaign clearly aims to discredit the protesters as either “Russian agents” or that country’s “useful idiots” while questioning Warsaw’s commitment to Kiev by hyping up its import of Russia’s agricultural products. The combined effect is to prompt pro-Ukrainian protests inside Poland to pressure Prime Minister Tusk from the bottom-up into cracking down on the farmers’ protests in parallel with prompting the EU to do the same from the top-down.
Politico’s participation in this campaign internationalizes it and preconditions the Western audience to expect the aforementioned scenarios. Readers are left with the impression that President Putin is meddling in Poland via “agents of influence” and/or “useful idiots” as part of his supposedly long-running attempts to divide the West from within via information warfare. The truth, however, is that the preceding narrative is actually a form of information warfare that’s intended to manipulate Westerners.
For starters, the farmers’ protests are a legitimate grassroots movement that’s supported by a whopping 78% of Poles according to an Ipsos poll from late February. Neither the participants nor their sympathizers are operating under Russian influence or as agents of that country. It’s incredibly insulting to imply that either or both of them are, and this malicious smear – which is all the more disrespectful in the Polish context – can backfire by provoking Poles to double down on their support for this movement.
About that, the second point to make is that the farmers’ protesters could morph into a modern-day form of the Old Cold War-era Solidarity movement, which could further undermine Tusk’s rule. The totalitarian tactics that he’s employed to impose his liberal-globalist vision onto Poland has plunged the country into its worst political crisis since the 1980s. His foreign patrons think that forcefully dispersing the protests could nip this movement in the bud, but that could backfire by making them more popular.
And finally, the influx of cheap Ukrainian grain onto the Polish market has endangered farmers’ livelihoods, while the low-quality thereof has enraged society’s many health-conscious members. By comparison, Russian agricultural imports are approximately one-tenth of Ukrainian ones, and their quality is much higher since they have to meet EU standards unlike Kiev. These facts comprehensively discredit the most emotive part of Ukraine’s emerging anti-Polish propaganda campaign.
Nevertheless, Politico predictably omitted them from their report, which laundered these false claims in order to mislead their targeted Western audience about the situation. It remains unclear whether Tusk will capitulate to the forthcoming pressure, but there’s no doubt that Ukraine and the West will soon pressure him like never before. They should be careful what they wish for, however, since turning the farmers’ protests into a modern-day Solidarity movement could lead to unpredictable consequences.
https://korybko.substack.com/p/politico ... r-ukraines
******
Latest European Propaganda: Russia Is Flooding Europe With Illegal Migrants
Robert Bridge
March 5, 2024
The threat of a right-wing takeover appears imminent, and Europe has only itself to blame for that, Robert Bridge writes.
Western media is in full-blown hysteria mode, asserting that Vladimir Putin is ‘weaponising’ the flow of migrants in an effort to destabilize upcoming European elections.
Right up there with ridiculous claims of “little green men” and “tractor protests from Moscow,” Europe is now accusing Russia of fielding paramilitary forces and private mercenaries for the purpose of directing waves of migrants from Africa across the Mediterranean Sea and into the heart of Europe, an apparent effort to ratchet up the spring fever just in time for general elections across the continent.
With no loss of irony, Western propagandists are disseminating allegations that the Kremlin is in the process of agitating those African nations that for so long suffered from European colonial rule, namely Burkina Faso, Mali, Sudan, Ghana, Central African Republic and Libya, a formerly highly developed country that was destroyed by a U.S.-led attack in 2011.
The Telegraph would have its British readers believe it has “seen” intelligence documents detailing plans for “Russian agents” to create a “15,000-man strong border police force” comprising former militias in Libya to control the flow of migrants. Anyone hoping to review something like photographic evidence of this massive army would be advised not to hold their breath. Apparently, the thousands of Russian recruits are so technologically advanced they are invisible to spy satellites.
While it stands to reason that millions of desperate refugees from these turbulent nations would seek shelter in Europe, or possibly even in the United States, risking a trans-Atlantic journey to reach the wide-open U.S.-Mexican border, Brussels simply hopes to deflect attention away from its immigration failures onto Moscow, a sham that is transparent to anyone with even a half-functioning brain.
Let’s not forget that we’ve heard such allegations before.
Without so much as a single apprehended trespasser, Moscow was accused of trying to foment a refugee crisis by transferring asylum seekers to its border with Finland, thus prompting the new NATO lackey to close its land crossings with Russia in contravention of all diplomatic norms. The truth of the matter is that Helsinki was aggravating Russophobia to make the bitter pill of increased spending on Western-made (read: American) armaments go down smoother for Nordic voters.
Belarus, Russia’s closest ally, has also been accused – once again, without a shred of evidence – of sending immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa to its borders with Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
The latest wave of Russophobia to strike the European capitals comes at a time when migration is set to be a key issue in general elections on the continent, as well as in the UK, where the drumbeat about Russian-sponsored migrant invasion parties resonates the loudest.
An unidentified security source reportedly told the Telegraph: “If you can control the migrant routes into Europe then you can effectively control elections, because you can restrict or flood a certain area with migrants in order to influence public opinion at a crucial time.”
“A failure to control the number of migrants coming to the UK is already seen as a major weakness for Rishi Sunak who is struggling to push through a scheme to deport illegal migrants to Rwanda to stop the flow of small boats across the Channel,” the British daily continued.
Sunak made “stopping the boats” one of his top priorities as Prime Minister, though a survey of British sentiment earlier this year showed that three-quarters of voters believe the pledge has not gone well.
Since June 2023, over 52,000 illegal migrants were recorded as entering the UK, up 17 percent on the previous year. Data released last month revealed that the number of illegal migrants granted asylum in the UK hit a record high in 2023 as border guards waved through thousands of applications “in an attempt to clear a huge post-pandemic backlog.” What is even more laughable, albeit totally predictable, is that the people doing the “waving through” were British border officials, not secret “Russian agents.”
With EU elections in June, the European parliament looks set to shift hard to the right, with migration already proving to be a key issue for voters. Who best to blame for this approaching debacle? Certainly not Angela Merkel, who is personally responsible for much of the mess. Once again, Russia serves as a convenient bogeyman for the blockheaded decision-making processes coming out of the EU, and we’ve heard such accusations before.
In February 2016, one year after Merkel opened the floodgates to some 2 million migrants, many of them Muslims from Syria, U.S. General Philip Breedlove, Head of NATO forces in Europe, blamed Russia for working to exacerbate the refugee flows in a dastardly ploy to destabilize and destroy the EU. In a testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, he said, “Together, Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately weaponizing migration from Syria. In an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.”
Nearly a decade later, the same reckless utterances are being made, although this time around the European public, more skeptical about ‘Russia the enemy’ narrative following the Nord Stream fallout, is prepared to express its anger at the ballot box come June during elections for European Parliament. Far-right populist parties are polling well in several EU countries, notably in Austria, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. This terrifies Brussels, as the threat of a right-wing takeover appears imminent, and Europe has only itself to blame for that.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... -migrants/
******
SCOTT RITTER: The Minds of Desperate Men
March 5, 2024
Save
France’s Emmanuel Macron last week suggested the suicidal idea of sending NATO troops to Ukraine to confront Russia militarily.
French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, right, in 2022. (NATO, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
“O mischief, thou art swift, to enter in the thoughts of desperate men!”
—Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 1
With these words, William Shakespeare, the immortal bard, captures the psychology of men who, believing they are confronted with a situation for which there is no hope of resolving, undertake actions that will inevitably lead to their death.
Although set in 14th century Mantua, Italy, Shakespeare’s tragedy could easily have been transported in time to present day France, where French President Emmanuel Macron, in the role of a modern Romeo, after learning of the demise of his true love, Ukraine, decides to commit suicide by encouraging the dispatch of NATO troops to Ukraine to confront Russia militarily.
Macron was hosting a crisis meeting last week, convened to discuss the deteriorating conditions on the battlefield in Ukraine following the Russian capture of the fortress city of Adviivka. The meeting was attended by senior representatives from NATO member states, including the U.S. and Canada.
“We should not exclude that there might be a need for security that then justifies some elements of deployment,” Macron said during a press conference convened after the meeting. “But I’ve told you very clearly what France maintains as its position, which is a strategic ambiguity that I stand by.”
The other participants of the meeting immediately rushed forward to announce that, from their perspective, there was no “strategic ambiguity” — the dispatch of NATO forces to Ukraine was not on the table.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who attended the Paris talks, rejected Macron’s proposal out of hand. “What was agreed from the beginning among ourselves and with each other also applies to the future,” Scholtz declared, “namely that there will be no soldiers on Ukrainian soil sent there by European states or NATO states.”
Scholz’s statement was echoed by other NATO leaders, leaving France standing alone to bear the consequences of Macron’s “strategic ambiguity.”
Even as NATO rushed forward to bring clarity to Macron’s stance, Russia made it quite clear what the consequences of any precipitous deployment of NATO forces to Ukraine would be. Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, declared that, in the event of any NATO deployment into Ukraine,
“we should not talk about the probability but about the inevitability [of a direct war with NATO]. That’s how we assess it.”
Peskov noted that most NATO nations participating in the Paris conference “maintain a fairly sober assessment of the potential dangers of such an action and the potential danger of being directly involved in a hot conflict, involving them on the battlefield.”
He also noted Macron’s stance regarding “the need to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia,” an objective shared by the U.S. and the NATO secretary general.
Putin Responds
In his annual address to the Russian Parliament, delivered a few days after Macron gave his press conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin removed any ambiguity as to what the consequences of any NATO intervention in Ukraine would be.
“We remember the fate of those who once sent their contingents to the territory of our country,” Putin said, referring to the past invasions of Russia by Hitler and Napoleon. “But now the consequences for potential interventionists will be much more tragic.”
And, just to drive the point home, Putin went on to describe Russia’s most recent advances in the field of strategic nuclear weapons — a new nuclear-powered cruise missile, the Burevestnik, which is in the final stages of development, and the deployment of Sarmat heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles and Avangard hypersonic warheads that are immune to Western anti-missile defenses.
Putin pointed out that two of these new Russian weapons — the Zircon and Kinzhal —have seen combat duty in the Ukrainian conflict.
The NATO leaders “must grasp that we also have weapons capable of striking targets on their territory,” Putin said. “Everything they are inventing now, spooking the world with the threat of a conflict involving nuclear weapons, which potentially means the end of civilization — don’t they realize this?”
The clearest evidence available that NATO leaders do not realize the consequences of their actions comes in the form of a transcript of a conversation, released by the editor-in-chief of RT, Margarita Simonyan, on her page on the VK social network, which has four senior German military officers discussing how they planned to implement instructions given to them by German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius regarding the delivery of the Taurus cruise missile to Ukraine.
Putin presenting RT’s Simonyan with an award in May 2019. (Kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
As the transcript shows, the assurances given by German Chancellor Scholz that Germany would not become directly involved in the Ukraine conflict were little more than a lie.
In addition to discussing the logistical issues involving the transfer of these weapons, the German officers discussed their possible employment, including how they could be used to attack the Crimea Bridge connecting the Crimean Peninsula with southern Russia.
“The [Crimean] bridge in the east is hard to hit, as that’s quite a narrow target, but the Taurus can do that, and it can also hit ammo depots,” one of the German officers noted, prompting a reply by another, who declared that “there is an opinion that the Taurus will handle that (hit the Crimean Bridge) if the French Dassault Rafale fighter jet is used.”
The Crimean or Kerch Strait Bridge connecting the Taman Peninsula of Krasnodar Krai in Russia with the Kerch Peninsula of Crimea. (Rosavtodor.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
Scholz has been reticent about joining Britain and France, which have transferred Storm Shadow and Scalp long-range missiles, respectively, to Ukraine.
“What is being done in the way of target control and accompanying target control on the part of the British and the French can’t be done in Germany,” Scholz said after the Paris gathering, referring to the indirect role played by Britain and France in enabling Ukrainian pilots to launch the Storm Shadow and Scalp missiles from modified SU-24 aircraft.
“Everyone who has dealt with this system knows that,” Scholz noted, implying the need for a direct role by German military personnel in the targeting and operation of the Taurus missile.
“German soldiers must at no point and in no place be linked to targets this (Taurus) system reaches,” Scholz said, adding “not in Germany either.”
Scholz, it appears, understands the potential consequences of German involvement in the targeting and operation of any Taurus missiles used by Ukraine against Russia.
“This clarity is necessary,” Scholz said. “I am surprised that this doesn’t move some people, that they don’t even think about whether, as it were, a participation in the war could emerge from what we do.”
Clearly there is a disconnect between the German chancellor and his defense minister.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Pistorius in June 2023. (NATO, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
In case the German officers and their minister failed to “realize” the potential consequences of their actions, the Russian military, a day after Putin’s address to the Russian Parliament, carried out what it called “a combat training launch of a mobile-based solid-propellant intercontinental ballistic missile PGRK Yars, equipped with multiple warheads.”
The Yars missile, launched from the Plesetsk test facility located south of Saint Petersburg, can carry between three and six independently targetable nuclear warheads.
According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, “The training warheads arrived at the designated area at the Kura training ground on the Kamchatka Peninsula” after flying a range of nearly 4,200 miles.
When I was a weapons inspector, back in 1988-1990, working at the Votkinsk missile production facility, we inspected the SS-25 “Topol” intercontinental ballistic missile, the predecessor of the “Yars” missile recently tested by Russia.
When the first three missiles inspected exited the factory, the U.S. inspectors took to naming them after American cities that could ostensibly be their targets — Pittsburgh, Des Moines and Chicago. The powers that be, back in Washington, D.C., quickly discouraged this practice, given the sensitivity that accrues to the issue of thermonuclear war.
One must wonder if the Russian soldiers responsible for launching the Yars missile took the time to name their warheads, and if they did, which cities would have been chosen to christen them.
There is no doubt that had the Russian soldiers turned to former President Dmitri Medvedev for advice after he received news about the intercepted conversation, the warheads would likely have been named after German cities — Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Nuremburg, Dusseldorf.
“The eternal enemies, the Germans, have become our archenemies again,” Medvedev fumed in a post on his Telegram channel.
The Germans would be well advised to reflect long and hard on their actions, actions which could precipitate a conflict that, as Putin has noted, “potentially means the end of civilization — don’t they realize this?”
Don’t they?
“O mischief, thou art swift, to enter in the thoughts of desperate men!”
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/03/05/s ... erate-men/