Petroimperialism

Sunday, March 20, 2022

Washington Persuades Turkey to Deliver S-400 to Ukraine

On Wednesday, March 16, President Biden announced an unprecedented package of $800 million in addition to $200 million previously pledged in military assistance to Ukraine, which includes 800 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, 2,000 anti-armor Javelins, 1,000 light anti-armor weapons, 6,000 AT-4 anti-armor systems and 100 Switchblade kamikaze drones.

Texas Rep. Mike McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Politico [1]: “The U.S. was working with allies to send more S-300 surface-to-air missile systems to Ukraine. The country has had the S-300 for years, so troops should require little-to-no training on how to operate the Soviet-era anti-aircraft equipment. CNN reported that Slovakia had preliminarily agreed to transfer their S-300s to Ukraine.

“A Western diplomat familiar with Ukraine’s requests said Kyiv specifically has asked the U.S. and allies for more Stingers and Starstreak man-portable air-defense systems, Javelins and other anti-tank weapons, ground-based mobile air-defense systems, armed drones, long-range anti-ship missiles, off-the-shelf electronic warfare capabilities, and satellite navigation and communications jamming equipment.

“To further help, there is a push to get Eastern European allies to send new air defense systems to Ukraine that the U.S. doesn’t have. At the top of the list are mobile, Russian-made missile systems such as the SA-8 and S-300. Like the S-300, Ukraine also possesses SA-8s. The SA-8 is a mobile, short-range air defense system still in the warehouses of Romania, Bulgaria and Poland. The larger, long-range S-300 is still in use by Bulgaria, Greece and Slovakia.

“Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s trip to Europe this week will include not only NATO headquarters in Brussels, but also stops in Bulgaria and Slovakia — countries that own S-300s and SA-8s — before heading back to Washington.”

Slovakia’s defense minister said Thursday, March 17, that the country was willing to give Ukraine its S-300 surface-to-air missile defense systems if it receives a “proper replacement.” At a press conference in Slovakia with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Slovak Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad said Slovakia was discussing the S-300s [2] with the US and Ukraine. “We’re willing to do so immediately when we have a proper replacement. The only strategic air defense system that we have in Slovakia is S-300 system,” he said.

As with the Slovak defense minister asking for “proper replacement” in return for handing over its S-300 air defense system to Ukraine, Secretary of State Tony Blinken similarly suggested that Poland could hand over its entire fleet of 28 Soviet-era MiG-29s to Ukraine, and in return, the United States government would “backfill” the Polish Air Force with American F-16s.

“We are looking actively now at the question of airplanes that Poland may provide to Ukraine, and looking at how we might be able to backfill it should Poland decide to supply those planes,” Blinken told a briefing in Chisinau on March 6.

The transfer might have been possible if the deal was kept under wraps, but that became impossible after Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign affairs and security policy chief, declared unequivocally to reporters on Feb. 27 that the bloc would provide Ukraine with fighter jets.

The Ukrainian government heard the proposal and ran with it, producing infographics claiming they were about to receive 70 used Russian fighter jets from Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria. A Ukrainian government official told Politico [3] that Ukrainian pilots had even traveled to Poland to wrap up the deal and bring the planes back over the border.

Upon getting wind of the shady deal, Russian defense spokesman Igor Konashenkov issued a stark warning that any attempt by an outside power to facilitate a no-fly zone over Ukraine, including providing aircraft to Kyiv, would be considered a belligerent in the war and treated accordingly.

Hours after the Russian warning, the Polish Foreign Ministry issued an emphatic denial, saying providing aircraft to Ukraine was out of question as the MiG-29 fleet constituted the backbone of the Polish Air Force.

The deal was categorically scuttled on March 3 by Polish President Andrzej Duda: “We are not sending any jets to Ukraine because that would open military inference in the Ukrainian conflict. We are not joining that conflict. NATO is not party to that conflict,” Duda said [4].

In a bizarre turn of events overriding its own president’s categorical statement, Poland announced on March 8 that it was ready to transfer the aircraft to the Ramstein Air Base in Germany at the disposal of the United States which could then hand them over to Ukraine.

But the denouement of the diplomatic fiasco came on March 9, after the United States, occupying a high moral ground, unequivocally rejected the “preposterous” Polish offer, initially made on Warsaw’s behalf by the EU’s foreign affairs head and the US secretary of state.

The prospect of flying combat aircraft from NATO territory into the war zone “raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance,” the Pentagon sanctimoniously revealed on March 9. “It is simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby dignifiedly added.

The only conclusion that could be drawn from the reluctant Polish offer of transferring its entire fleet of MiG-29s to Ramstein at the disposal of the United States is that it was simply a humbug designed to provide face-saving to its NATO patron while it was already decided behind the scenes that Washington would spurn Poland’s nominal offer.

The New York Times reported Saturday [5], March 19: “American officials have floated the idea of Turkey’s government providing Ukraine with the sophisticated S-400 antiaircraft system. It is the very system, made by Russia, that American officials punished Turkey — a NATO ally — for buying from Moscow several years ago. Now American diplomats see a way to pull Turkey away from its dance with Russia and give the Ukrainians one of the most powerful, long-range antiaircraft systems in existence.

“The proposal for Turkey to supply Ukraine with Russian-made S-400 antiaircraft systems would also test what Mr. Putin is willing to accept from NATO — and how far a NATO ally that in recent years often appeared to be building bridges to Moscow is willing to go in reiterating its commitment to the alliance and backing Ukraine.

“The idea came up when Wendy R. Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, visited Turkey two weeks ago. Ms. Sherman declined to talk about her discussions. A different senior American official said the United States knew the proposal would anger Mr. Putin. Ukraine already uses Turkish-made drones, but Turkey is worried that providing the antiaircraft systems could make the country a target of Russia’s wrath.

“At the same time, the upside for Turkey could be substantial: It was suspended by the Trump administration from the F-35 fighter program — in which it was both a buyer and a manufacturer of parts for the advanced aircraft — after its purchase of the Russian S-400s. A deal to send the antiaircraft systems to Ukraine could open the door to re-entry into the F-35 program.”

Notwithstanding, private military contractors in close co-ordination and consultation with covert operators from CIA and Western intelligence agencies are not only training Ukraine’s conscript military and allied neo-Nazi militias in the use of caches of MANPADS and anti-armor munitions provided by the US, Germany and the rest of European nations as a military assistance to Ukraine but are, in fact, directing the whole defense strategy of Ukraine.

The Intercept reported [6] Thursday, March 17, the US military had deployed extensive ISR, or intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, assets to countries neighboring Ukraine to monitor developments within the embattled nation. The aircraft include MQ-9 Reaper drones, Boeing RC-135 Rivet Joints, and Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS, which have been used to eavesdrop on communications and collect imagery intelligence.

“‘The U.S. is using a variety of drone and fixed-wing collection assets to obtain tactical information of the battlefield,’ the official said, adding that the intelligence is then passed on to the Ukrainians through a liaison officer. On Sunday, a Russian drone briefly crossed into Poland, a NATO member, leading to a warning from the alliance that it could respond with force — an alarming threat of direct confrontation with Russia.

“An MQ-9 drone pilot with the U.S. military also told The Intercept that Reapers had been deployed to the region. He said the U.S. was using MQ-9 services leased from private contractors before withdrawing them and replacing with government assets, which he said have been slower to stand up.

“The U.S. has particular experience with this type of indirect weapons and intelligence assistance against Russia, having previously sent arms to Syrian rebels combating the Russian-backed regime of President Bashar al-Assad.”

In many ways, the proxy war in Ukraine resembles the CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore and the Pentagon’s $500 million train-and-equip program to provide guerrilla warfare training and lethal weaponry to rebels battling the Syrian government in the training camps located at border regions of Turkey and Jordan during Syria’s decade-long conflict.

In fact, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last month was only a logical culmination of a long-simmering, eight-year war of attrition initiated by NATO powers against Russia in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region after the 2014 Maidan coup toppling Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and consequent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia.

In an explosive scoop [7], Zach Dorfman reported for the Yahoo News on March 16: “As part of the Ukraine-based training program, CIA paramilitaries taught their Ukrainian counterparts sniper techniques; how to operate U.S.-supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles and other equipment; how to evade digital tracking the Russians used to pinpoint the location of Ukrainian troops, which had left them vulnerable to attacks by artillery; how to use covert communications tools; and how to remain undetected in the war zone while also drawing out Russian and insurgent forces from their positions, among other skills, according to former officials.

“When CIA paramilitaries first traveled to eastern Ukraine in the aftermath of Russia’s initial 2014 incursion, their brief was twofold. First, they were ordered to determine how the agency could best help train Ukrainian special operations personnel fight the Russian military forces, and their separatist allies, waging a grinding war against Ukrainian troops in the Donbas region. But the second part of the mission was to test the mettle of the Ukrainians themselves, according to former officials.”

Besides the CIA’s clandestine program for training neo-Nazi militias in eastern Donbas and the US Special Forces program for training Ukraine’s security forces at Yavoriv Combat Training Center in the western part of the country bordering Poland that was hit by a barrage [8] of 30 cruise missiles launched from Russian strategic bombers killing at least 35 militants on March 13, Zach Dorfman claims in a separate January report [9] that the CIA also ran a covert program for training Ukraine’s special forces at an undisclosed facility in the southern United States.

“The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials.

“While the covert program, run by paramilitaries working for the CIA’s Ground Branch — now officially known as Ground Department — was established by the Obama administration after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and expanded under the Trump administration, the Biden administration has further augmented it.

“By 2015, as part of this expanded anti-Russia effort, CIA Ground Branch paramilitaries also started traveling to the front in eastern Ukraine to advise their counterparts there. The multiweek, U.S.-based CIA program has included training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, tactics like cover and move, intelligence and other areas.

“One person familiar with the program put it more bluntly. ‘The United States is training an insurgency,’ said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how ‘to kill Russians.’ Going back decades, the CIA has provided limited training to Ukrainian intelligence units to try and shore up an independent Kyiv and prevent Russian subversion, but cooperation ramped up after the Crimea invasion, said a former CIA executive.”

After perusing these informative reports, not only the defensive rationale for Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine on Feb. 24 becomes abundantly clear but it also shines light on the fact that Russia’s intervention in Syria was actually in retaliation for the CIA arming and training mercenaries and neo-Nazi militias in east Ukraine in order to destabilize Russia.

Following the Maidan coup in 2014 after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula and the CIA initiated the covert program to train and arm neo-Nazi militias in order to provoke Russia, the Kremlin’s immediate response to the escalation by Washington was that it jumped into the fray in Syria in September 2015, after a clandestine visit to Moscow by General Qassem Soleimani, the slain commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force who was assassinated in an American airstrike on a tip-off from the Israeli intelligence at the Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.

When Russia deployed its forces and military hardware to Syria in September 2015, the militant proxies of Washington and its regional clients were on the verge of driving a wedge between Damascus and the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia, which could have led to the imminent downfall of the Bashar al-Assad government.

With the help of Russia’s air power and long-range artillery, the Syrian government has since reclaimed most of Syria’s territory from the insurgents, excluding Idlib in the northwest occupied by Turkish-backed militants and Deir al-Zor and the Kurdish-held areas in the east, thus inflicting a humiliating defeat on Washington and its regional allies, Israel, Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf States.

Karl Marx presciently said: “History repeats itself, first as a tragedy and then as a farce.” Those who don’t learn from traumatic experiences are bound to repeat their calamitous mistakes.

Citations:

[1] US sends Switchblade drones to Ukraine:

[2] Slovakia Says It Will Give Ukraine S-300 If It Gets Replacement:

[3] How Biden scuttled Polish aircraft deal:

[4] Poland will not send fighter jets into Ukraine, Andrzej Duda:

[5] For the U.S., a Tenuous Balance in Confronting Russia:

[6] U.S. quietly assists Ukraine with intelligence:

[7] CIA training program in Ukraine helped Kyiv prepare for Russian invasion:

[8] Pentagon push to send more trainers to Ukraine was scrapped:

[9] CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades:

About the author:

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Af-Pak and Middle East regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to alternative news media.

20 March 2022.

Thursday, March 17, 2022

Servant of the Deep State: Is Zelensky a Double Agent?

Amidst Russia’s impending Ukraine invasion last month while the rest of the world was panicking, there was one man with nerves made of steel who was as stoically calm and nonchalant as a monk meditating amidst an earthquake. Ironically, the Zen monk urging Western policymakers not to exaggerate the Russia invasion threat lest foreign investors and tourists flee the country was none other than the credulous president of Ukraine.

Either President Zelensky was too naïve to understand the consequences of the imminent invasion or he not only had forewarning but in fact had a vital role in orchestrating the Russo-Ukraine War during his three-year presidency in order to accomplish the top-secret mission assigned to him by his mentors in Western intelligence agencies.

Born to Jewish parents in a town in central Ukraine in Jan. 1978, his early life remains shrouded in mystery. Volodymyr Zelensky was groomed by covert CIA operatives in Ukraine since his student life while he was studying law at the Kryvyi Rih National University.

Instead of pursuing legal career, he chose acting as a profession at the behest of his influential patrons to gain nationwide publicity, particularly through comedy television series “Servant of the People” in which Zelensky “prophetically played” the role of the Ukrainian president.

In fact, his production company Kvartal 95, which produces films, cartoons and television shows, was generously funded by deep pockets of Western security agencies. Comically exposing corruption and sleazy dealings of Ukraine’s politician and oligarch, the series “Servant of the People” aired from 2015 to 2019 and struck a chord with Ukrainian masses.

Western security agencies not only lavishly funded his obscure media organization but also introduced him to a clandestine cabal of illustrious Hollywood producers and directors adept in psychological warfare and public relationing. The media success of “Servant of the People” is attributed as much to the efforts of the employees of Kvartal 95 as to the skill of international media organizations specializing in global opinion-making.

Riding on the wave of media publicity, Zelensky won a landslide presidential election in 2019. Later, his political party, which he “coincidentally” named “Servant of the People,” won an overwhelming victory in a snap legislative election held shortly after his inauguration as president.

Since 2019, after being elected president through questionable methods, Zelensky has surreptitiously been working on a clandestine project to foment a crisis with Russia on a flimsy pretext. Any other political leader with an iota of rational faculties, even somebody as rogue as his predecessor Petro Poroshenko, would promptly have agreed to the Kremlin’s reasonable proposal that Kyiv must give a solemn pledge it won’t join transatlantic NATO military alliance.

Not only did he scornfully rebuff the Russian proposal but he also let Ukraine’s security forces stage joint military exercises and naval drills alongside NATO forces in the Black Sea right under Russia’s nose. His reckless disregard for the suffering of Ukrainian masses and suicidally provoking Russia into an armed confrontation aside, he is merely a pawn in the grand scheme of things.

Although alleged to be a Jew, the real faith of Zelensky and his associates is Satanism. That’s why he didn’t hesitate in collaborating with Ukraine’s infamous Azov Battalion, officially part of the National Guard of Ukraine, that has been widely acknowledged as a neo-Nazi volunteer paramilitary force connected with foreign white supremacist organizations.

Azov Battalion was initially formed as a volunteer group in May 2014 out of the ultra-nationalist Patriot of Ukraine gang, and the neo-Nazi Social National Assembly (SNA) group. As a battalion, the group fought on the front lines against pro-Russia separatists in Donbas, the eastern region of Ukraine.

A few months after recapturing the strategic port city of Mariupol from the Russia-backed separatists, the unit was officially integrated into the National Guard of Ukraine on November 12, 2014, and exacted high praise from then-President Petro Poroshenko. “These are our best warriors,” he said at an awards ceremony in 2014. “Our best volunteers.”

The unit was led by Andriy Biletsky, who served as the leader of both the Patriot of Ukraine (founded in 2005) and the SNA (founded in 2008). In 2010, Biletsky said Ukraine’s national purpose was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [inferior races].” Biletsky was elected to parliament in 2014. He left Azov as elected officials cannot be in the military or police force. He remained an MP until 2019.

These forces were privately funded by oligarchs – the most known being Igor Kolomoisky, an energy magnate billionaire and then-governor of the Dnipropetrovska region. In addition to Azov, Kolomoisky funded other volunteer battalions such as the Dnipro 1 and Dnipro 2, Aidar and Donbas units.

The Mint Press News recently reported [1]: “Zelensky’s presidential bid in 2019, which saw him win 73% of the vote, was successful on the basis that he was running in order to combat corruption and create peace in the country but, as the leaked documents known as the Pandora Papers revealed, he himself was storing funds in offshore bank accounts. Zelenskyy’s campaign was at the time boosted and bankrolled by Israeli-Ukrainian billionaire Igor Kolomoisky – who was himself accused of stealing $5.5 billion from his own bank.

“Muslims seem to be a major issue for the Azov Battalion. The Islamophobia present not only in Azov, but also in the National Guard of Ukraine, came through strongly on social media as the official National Guard site glorified the Azov Battalion as they dipped their bullets in pig fat. The video was directed at Muslim soldiers from Chechnya who are fighting on the side of Russia and were described as orcs by the National Guard on Twitter.”

In June 2015, both Canada and the United States announced they will not support or train the Azov regiment, citing its neo-Nazi connections. The following year, however, the US lifted the ban under pressure from the Pentagon. In October 2019, 40 members of the US Congress led by Representative Max Rose signed a letter unsuccessfully calling for the US State Department to designate Azov as a “foreign terrorist organization” (FTO).

In Feb. 2019, The Nation Magazine published a detailed think piece: “Neo-Nazis and the Far Right are on the March in Ukraine” [2], elaborating Ukraine’s far-right militant groups’ xenophobic and white supremacist political ideology.

“Then-Speaker of Parliament Andriy Parubiy cofounded and led two neo-Nazi organizations: the Social-National Party of Ukraine (later renamed Svoboda), and Patriot of Ukraine, whose members would eventually form the core of Azov.

“Even more disturbing is the far right’s penetration of law enforcement. Shortly after the Maidan coup in 2014, the US equipped and trained the newly founded National Police, in what was intended to be a hallmark program buttressing Ukrainian democracy. The deputy minister of the Interior—which controls the National Police—is Vadim Troyan, a veteran of Azov and Patriot of Ukraine.

“In 2015, the Ukrainian parliament passed legislation making two WWII paramilitaries—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—heroes of Ukraine, and made it a criminal offense to deny their heroism. The OUN had collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust, while the UPA slaughtered thousands of Jews and 70,000-100,000 Poles on their own volition.”

Notwithstanding, despite “heroically staying” in Kyiv and “valiantly mounting” the public-relationing offensive on the Western media while the city is being surrounded by Russian forces, there is no risk to Zelensky’s personal safety. The Washington Post reported [3] on March 5:

“The possible Russian takeover of Kyiv has prompted a flurry of planning at the State Department, Pentagon and other U.S. agencies in the event that the Zelensky government has to flee the capital or the country itself. ‘We’re doing contingency planning now for every possibility,’ including a scenario in which Zelensky establishes a government-in-exile in Poland, said a U.S. administration official.

“Zelensky, who has called himself Russia’s target No. 1, remains in Kyiv and has assured his citizens he’s not leaving. He has had discussions with U.S. officials about whether he should move west to a safer position in the city of Lviv, closer to the Polish border. Zelensky’s security detail has plans ready to swiftly relocate him and members of his cabinet, a senior Ukrainian official said. ‘So far, he has refused to go.’”

It’s obvious from reading between the lines the security detail of Zelensky not only includes operatives of Ukraine's domestic security service, the SBU, but also highly skilled special-ops professionals of several Western security agencies, including the formidable CIA and NSA, who would whisk him away across the border to Poland as soon as it becomes clear the capital is about to fall to advancing Russian forces.

In fact, private military contractors in close co-ordination and consultation with covert operators from CIA and Western intelligence agencies are not only training Ukraine’s conscript forces in the use of caches of MANPADS and anti-armor munitions provided by the US, Germany and rest of European nations as a military assistance to Ukraine but are also directing the whole defense strategy of Ukraine by taking active part in combat operations in some of the most hard fought battles against Russia’s security forces north of Kyiv and at Kharkiv and Donbas.

Famous for hosting CIA’s black sites where alleged al-Qaeda operatives were water-boarded and tortured before being sent to Guantanamo Bay in early years of the war on terror, in Poland alone the US military footprint now exceeds 10,000 troops as the majority of 15,000 troops sent to Europe last month went to Poland to join the 4,000 US troops already stationed there. The airfields and training camps in the border regions of Poland have a become a hub for transporting weapons and militants to Lviv in west Ukraine, which then travel to battlefields at Kyiv and in east Ukraine.

The Washington Post report further notes: “During an official visit, a Ukrainian special operations commander told Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and other lawmakers that they were shifting training and planning to focus on maintaining an armed opposition, relying on insurgent-like tactics.

“Ukrainian officials told the lawmakers that they were frustrated that the United States had not sent Harpoon missiles to target Russian ships and Stinger missiles to attack Russian aircraft, Moulton and Waltz said in separate interviews.

“As the Russian military struggles with logistical challenges — including fuel and food shortages — Waltz anticipates that the Ukrainians will repeatedly strike Russian supply lines. To do that, they need a steady supply of weapons and the ability to set improvised explosive devices, he said. ‘Those supply lines are going to be very, very vulnerable, and that’s where you really literally starve the Russian army.’

“‘You can’t ship them to Ukraine at the last minute and expect some national guardsman to pick up a Stinger and shoot down an aircraft,’ he said. Continuing a resistance campaign will require continued clandestine shipments of small arms, ammunition, explosives and even cold-weather gear. ‘Think about the kinds of things that would be used by saboteurs as opposed to an army repelling a frontal invasion,’ Moulton said.”

Clearly, planning and preparations are well underway to lure Russia into NATO’s “bear trap project,” a term borrowed from the Soviet-Afghan War of the eighties when Western powers used Pakistan’s security forces and generous funding from the oil-rich Gulf States for providing guerrilla warfare training and lethal weaponry to Afghan jihadists to “bleed the security forces” of former Soviet Union in the protracted war.

The impending fall of Kyiv in the face of Russian blitz is a forgone conclusion that even Western policymakers acknowledge that Ukraine’s conscript military and allied irregular militias are simply not a match for Russia’s professional security forces in regular warfare.

The tumultuous last three weeks since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24 were only the prelude to a long and sordid saga of ensuing war of attrition mounted by myriad heavily armed militant outfits nurtured by Western powers against global and regional adversaries, as happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Zelensky is being prepared as a “charismatic savior” to lead a protracted and bloody insurgency against Russian security forces in Ukraine. Although cutting a dashing figure sporting military fatigues and urging compatriots to rise up in arms against “Russian invaders” in sentimental addresses while at the same time pandering to NATO patrons to provide military assistance and impose harshest sanctions on the Kremlin, what exceptional act of valor has Volodymyr Zelensky performed thus far? Has he ever been in the line of fire on the frontlines of the Russo-Ukraine War?

Taking advantage of gullible audience’s innate predilection for hero worship, the mainstream media is projecting Zelensky as a messiah waging a crusade against a rival power that dared to stand up to NATO’s further eastward expansion into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence. The public-relationing rationale of live-broadcasting his hateful and violent speeches to the parliaments of Europe and the United States is as much to give publicity to an expendable stooge as to vilify and internationally isolate an arch-foe on the global stage.

Citations:

[1] Israel’s Links to Ukraine’s Thriving Neo-Nazi Movement:

[2] Neo-Nazis and the Far Right are on the March in Ukraine:

[3] U.S. prepares for a Ukrainian government-in-exile and a long insurgency:

Opportunistic Diplomacy: Biden Embraces Rivals to Isolate Russia

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, two British-Iranian nationals held in Iran since 2016 and 2017, respectively, were unexpectedly set free and were permitted immediately to travel [1] to the United Kingdom today. In return, the British government, in what gave the impression of a ransom payment, triumphantly announced it had settled a £400m debt owed to Iran from the seventies.

The thaw in the frosty relations between the Western powers and Iran signals that a tentative understanding on reviving the Iran nuclear deal has also been reached behind the scenes, particularly in the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis and the Western efforts to internationally isolate Russia. After sanctioning Russia’s 10 million barrels daily crude oil output, the industrialized world is desperately in need of Iran’s 4 million barrels oil production to keep the already inflated oil price from causing further pain to consumers.

Last week, Venezuela similarly released [2] two incarcerated US citizens in an apparent goodwill gesture toward the Biden administration following a visit to Caracas by a high-level US delegation, despite the fact that Washington still officially recognizes Nicolas Maduro’s detractor Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s “legitimate president.” Nonetheless, Venezuela is one of Latin America’s largest oil producers and opening the international market to its heavy crude might provide a welcome relief in the time of global oil crunch.

Niftily forestalling the likelihood of strengthening of mutually beneficial bonds between China and Russia when the latter is badly in need of economic relief, the United States pre-emptively accused China of pledging to sell military hardware to Russia, when the latter, itself one of the world’s leading arms exporters, arguably didn’t even make any such request to China.

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan held an intense seven-hour meeting in Rome with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi yesterday, March 15, and warned China of “grave consequences” of evading Western sanctions on Russia. Besides wielding the stick of economic sanctions, he must also have dangled the carrot of ending trade war against China initiated by the Trump administration.

Despite vowing to treat the Saudi kingdom as a “pariah” in the run-up to Nov. 2020 presidential elections, the Wall Street Journal reported [3] last week the White House unsuccessfully tried to arrange calls between President Biden and the de facto leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as the US was working to build international support for Ukraine and contain a surge in oil prices.

“Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the U.A.E.’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan both declined U.S. requests to speak to Mr. Biden in recent weeks, the officials said, as Saudi and Emirati officials have become more vocal in recent weeks in their criticism of American policy in the Gulf.

“‘There was some expectation of a phone call, but it didn’t happen,’ said a U.S. official of the planned discussion between the Saudi Prince Mohammed and Mr. Biden. ‘It was part of turning on the spigot [of Saudi oil].’

“But the Saudis and Emiratis have declined to pump more oil, saying they are sticking to a production plan approved by OPEC. Both Prince Mohammed and Sheikh Mohammed took phone calls from Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, after declining to speak with Mr. Biden.”

To add insult to the injury, Saudi Arabia has reportedly invited [4] Chinese President Xi Jinping for an official visit to the kingdom that could happen as soon as May, and is also considering pegging its vast oil reserves in yuan, a move that could spell end to the petrodollar hegemony.

Trump aptly observed: “Now Biden is crawling around the globe on his knees begging and pleading for mercy from Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela.” It appears quite plausible in its relentless efforts to internationally isolate Russia, the Biden administration is likely to unravel the whole neocolonial economic order imposed on the world after the signing of the Bretton Woods Accord following the Second World War in 1945.

The Intercept reported [5] March 11 that despite staging a massive military buildup along Russia’s border with Ukraine for nearly a year, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not make a final decision to invade until just before he launched the attack in February, according to senior current and former US intelligence officials. It wasn’t until February that the agency and the rest of the US intelligence community became convinced that Putin would invade, the senior official added.

“Last April, US intelligence first detected that the Russian military was beginning to move large numbers of troops and equipment to the Ukrainian border. Most of the Russian soldiers deployed to the border at that time were later moved back to their bases, but US intelligence determined that some of the troops and materiel remained near the border.

“In June 2021, against the backdrop of rising tensions over Ukraine, Biden and Putin met at a summit in Geneva. The summer troop withdrawal brought a brief period of calm, but the crisis began to build again in October and November, when US intelligence watched as Russia once again moved large numbers of troops back to its border with Ukraine.”

Extending the hand of friendship, Russia significantly drawdown its forces along the western border before the summit last June. Instead of returning the favor, however, the conceited leadership of supposedly world’s sole surviving super power turned down the hand of friendship and haughtily refused to concede reasonable security guarantees demanded by Russia at the summit that would certainly have averted the likelihood of the war.

In the 2001 census, a third of Ukraine’s over 40 million population registered Russian as their first language. In fact, Russian speakers constitute a majority in urban areas of industrialized eastern Ukraine and socio-culturally identify with Russia. Ukrainian speakers are mainly found in sparsely populated western Ukraine and in rural areas of east Ukraine.

Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian together belong to East Slavic family of languages and share a degree of mutual intelligibility. Thus, Russians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians are one nation and one country whose shared history and culture goes all the way back to the golden period of 10^th century Kyivan Rus’.

In addition, Russians and Ukrainians share Byzantine heritage and together belong to the Greek Orthodox Church, one of the oldest Christian denominations whose history goes all the way back to the Christ and his apostles. Protestantism and Catholicism are products of the second millennium after a Roman bishop of the Byzantine Empire declared himself pope following the 1054 schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.

In comparison, what do Ukrainians have in common with NATO powers, their newfound patrons, besides the fact that humanitarian imperialists are attempting to douse fire by pouring gasoline on Ukraine’s proxy war by providing caches of lethal weapons to militant forces holding disenfranchised Ukrainian masses hostage.

CNN’s national security correspondent Jim Sciutto tweeted [6] today: “US & NATO allies are sending several surface-to-air missiles systems to Ukraine. A senior US official tells me these systems include Soviet-era SA-8, SA-10, SA-12 and SA-14 mobile air defense systems, w/range higher than Stingers, giving capability to hit cruise missiles.”

Only in the last year, which was incidentally the maiden year of the purportedly “pacifist and noninterventionist” albeit manifestly Russophobic Biden presidency, the US has reportedly provided [7] over 600 Stinger surface-to-air missiles and approximately 2,600 Javelin anti-armor systems to Ukraine, along with an assortment of radar systems, helicopters, grenade launchers, guns and ammunition, and $650 million worth military equipment.

One of Europe’s supposedly “most progressive nations” since the fall of the Third Reich albeit still a US client, Germany alone has proudly bragged [8] of dispatching 500 US-made surface-to-air Stinger missiles and 2,700 Soviet-era, shoulder-fired Strela missiles to Ukraine’s conscript military and allied irregular militias.

Although the mainstream media has publicly acknowledged NATO member states have provided a total of 2,000 surface-to-air missiles, including Stingers, and 17,000 anti-armor munitions, including Javelins and NLAWs, to Ukraine’s security forces, the actual number of weapons sent to Ukraine is many times the number that has officially been admitted.

In an interview with CBC News [9] on March 8, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned that a Russian attack on the supply lines of allied nations supporting Ukraine with arms and munitions would be a dangerous escalation of the war raging in Eastern Europe. “Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine is defending itself. If there is any attack against any NATO country, NATO territory, that will trigger Article 5.”

Reminiscent of the Three Musketeers’ motto “all for one and one for all,” Article 5 is the self-defense clause in NATO's founding treaty which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all 30 member nations. “I'm absolutely convinced President Putin knows this and we are removing any room for miscalculation, misunderstanding about our commitment to defend every inch of NATO territory,” Stoltenberg said.

NATO chief said there's a clear distinction between supply lines within Ukraine and those operating outside its borders. “There is a war going on in Ukraine and, of course, supply lines inside Ukraine can be attacked,” he said. “An attack on NATO territory, on NATO forces, NATO capabilities, that would be an attack on NATO.”

Besides deploying 15,000 additional troops in Eastern Europe last month, total number of US troops in Europe is now expected to reach 100,000. “We have 130 jets at high alert. Over 200 ships from the high north to the Mediterranean, and thousands of additional troops in the region,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told CNN [10].

The Russian military had not targeted weapons shipments once they entered Ukraine, a US official told CNN, but there was some concern Russia could begin targeting the deliveries as its assault advances.

On Sunday, March 13, Russian forces launched a missile attack [11] at Yavoriv Combat Training Center in the western part of the country. The military facility, less than 25 km from the Polish border, is one of Ukraine's biggest and the largest in the western part of the country. Since 2015, US Green Berets and National Guard troops had been training Ukrainian forces at the Yavoriv center before they were evacuated alongside diplomatic staff in mid-February.

The training center was hit by a barrage of roughly 30 cruise missiles launched from Russian strategic bombers, killing at least 35 people, though Russia's defense ministry claimed up to 180 foreign mercenaries [12] and a large number of foreign weapons were destroyed at the training center. The Ukraine conflict is clearly spiraling out of control and has the potential of dragging NATO powers into direct confrontation with Russia, which could then lead to a catastrophic Third World War.

Citations:

[1] Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori on way to UK:

[2] Venezuela frees two Americans after talks with US:

[3] Saudi, Emirati leaders decline calls with Biden amid Ukraine Crisis:

[4] Saudi Arabia invites China's Xi to visit:

[5] US intel says Putin made a last-minute decision to invade Ukraine:

[6] NATO sending advanced surface-to-air missile systems to Ukraine:

[7] US provided 600 Stingers and 2,600 Javelins to Ukraine:

[8] Germany to ship anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine:

[9] NATO chief warns Russia away from attacking supply lines:

[10] Pentagon shores up its NATO defenses in Europe:

[11] Pentagon push to send more trainers to Ukraine was scrapped:

[12] Russian airstrike killed 180 foreign mercenaries at Yavoriv:

Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Jewish Zelensky and Zionist Plot to Provoke Russia

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky took to Twitter [1] Sunday to express heartfelt gratitude to Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg for taking a clear stand on the Ukraine crisis and letting users violate rules against hate speech: “War is not only a military opposition on UA land. It is also a fierce battle in the informational space. I want to thank @Meta and other platforms that have an active position that help and stand side by side with the Ukrainians.”

“As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders.’ We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement [2] March 11.

It naturally piques the curiosity why the social media behemoth is bending over backwards to violate its own longstanding regulations against hate speech to let Zelensky win the propaganda war in “the informational space” unless one takes into account the obvious fact that both Zuckerberg and Zelensky are Zionist Jews and take orders from Israel’s clandestine security agencies.

Born to Oleksandr Zelensky and Rymma Zelenska, both Russian-speaking Jews, in Jan. 1978, Volodymyr Zelensky was groomed by covert Mossad operatives in Ukraine since his student life while he was studying law at the Kryvyi Rih National University.

In fact, his production company Kvartal 95, which produces films, cartoons and television shows, was generously funded by deep pockets of Zionist billionaires. Comically exposing corruption and sleazy dealings of Ukraine’s politician and oligarch, the series “Servant of the People” aired from 2015 to 2019 and struck a chord with Ukrainian masses.

What do Ukrainians have in common with NATO powers, their newfound patrons, besides the fact that humanitarian imperialists are attempting to douse fire by pouring gasoline on Ukraine’s proxy war by providing caches of lethal weapons to militant forces holding disenfranchised Ukrainian masses hostage.

Russians and Ukrainians share Byzantine heritage and their longstanding dispute with Zionist Jews goes back to the medieval era. Byzantine emperors regarded Jewish subjects as gentiles and were particularly wary of wealthy Jewish merchants maintaining a stranglehold over banking and commerce sectors of the empire.

In addition, Russians and Ukrainians together belong to the Greek Orthodox Church, one of the oldest Christian denominations whose history goes all the way back to the Christ and his apostles. Protestantism and Catholicism are products of the second millennium after a Roman bishop of the Byzantine Empire declared himself pope following the 1054 schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.

Not only did he scornfully rebuff the Russian proposal but he also let Ukraine’s security forces stage joint military exercises and naval drills alongside NATO forces in the Black Sea right under Russia’s nose. His reckless disregard for suffering of Ukrainian masses with whom he does not identify being a Zionist himself and suicidally provoking Russia into an armed confrontation aside, he is merely a pawn in the grand scheme of things.

Israel’s Zionist regime, to whom not only Ukrainian but also American presidents bow, has a score to settle with Russia. Donald Trump literally forced four Arab states, the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, to sign so-called Abraham Accords lending official recognition to Israel at the coaxing of his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner and in order to canvass Zionist lobbies for support in the run-up to Nov. 2020 presidential elections.

Washington’s principal objective in Syria’s proxy war was ensuring Israel’s regional security. The United States Defense Intelligence Agency’s declassified report [3] of 2012 clearly spelled out the imminent rise of a Salafist principality in northeastern Syria – in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor which were occupied by the Islamic State from 2014 to October 2017 – in the event of an outbreak of a civil war in Syria.

Under pressure from the Zionist lobbies in Washington, however, the Obama administration deliberately suppressed the report and also overlooked the view in general that a proxy war in Syria would give birth to radical Islamic jihadists.

The hawks in Washington were fully aware of the consequences of their actions in Syria, but they kept pursuing the ill-fated policy of nurturing militants in the training camps located in Syria’s border regions with Turkey and Jordan in order to weaken the anti-Zionist Bashar al-Assad government.

The single biggest threat to Israel’s regional security was posed by the Iranian resistance axis, comprising Iran, Syria and Lebanon-based Hezbollah. During the course of 2006 Lebanon War, Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets into northern Israel and Israel’s defense community realized for the first time the nature of threat that Hezbollah posed to Israel’s regional security.

Those were only unguided rockets but it was a wakeup call for Israel’s military strategists that what would happen if Iran passed the guided missile technology to Hezbollah whose area of operations lies very close to the northern borders of Israel.

Therefore, the Zionist lobbies in Washington persuaded the Obama administration to orchestrate a proxy war against Damascus and Lebanon-based Hezbollah in order to dismantle the Iranian resistance axis against Israel.

But following the beginning of the Ukraine crisis in 2014 after Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula and Washington imposed sanctions on Russia, the Kremlin’s immediate response to the escalation by Washington was that it jumped into the fray in Syria in September 2015, after a clandestine visit to Moscow by General Qassem Soleimani, the slain commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force who was assassinated in an American airstrike on a tip-off from the Israeli intelligence at the Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.

When Russia deployed its forces and military hardware to Syria in September 2015, the militant proxies of Washington, the Zionist regime and their regional clients were on the verge of driving a wedge between Damascus and the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia, which could have led to the imminent downfall of the Bashar al-Assad government.

With the help of Russia’s air power and long-range artillery, the Syrian government has since reclaimed most of Syria’s territory from the insurgents, excluding Idlib in the northwest occupied by Turkish-backed militants and Deir al-Zor and the Kurdish-held areas in the east, thus inflicting a humiliating defeat on Washington, the Zionist regime and their regional allies, Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf States.

Over the years, Israel has not only provided material support to militant groups battling Damascus – particularly to various factions of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate al-Nusra Front in Daraa and Quneitra bordering the Israel-occupied Golan Heights – but Israel’s air force has virtually played the role of the air force of the terrorists and mounted hundreds of airstrikes in Syria during the decade-long conflict.

In an interview to New York Times [4] in January 2019, Israel’s former Chief of Staff Lt. General Gadi Eisenkot confessed that the Netanyahu government approved his recommendations in January 2017 to step up airstrikes in Syria. Consequently, more than 200 Israeli airstrikes were launched on the Syrian targets in 2017 and 2018, as revealed [5] by Israeli Intelligence Minister Israel Katz in September 2018.

In 2018 alone, Israel's air force dropped 2,000 bombs in Syria. The purported rationale of the Israeli airstrikes in Syria has been to degrade Iran’s guided missile technology provided to Damascus and Lebanon-based Hezbollah, which poses an existential threat to Israel’s regional security.

Though after Russia provided S-300 air defense system to the Syrian military after a Russian surveillance aircraft was shot down by Syrian air defenses during an Israeli incursion into the Syrian airspace on September 2018, killing 15 Russians onboard, Israeli airstrikes in Syria have been significantly scaled down.

Following the friendly-fire incident, though Israel has mounted occasional airstrikes at the capital Damascus, in Daraa and Quneitra in southern Syria and Deir al-Zor in eastern Syria, Israeli airstrikes in northwest Syria, including Aleppo, Hamah and Homs, which is within the range of advanced missile defense systems deployed at Khmeimim Air Base near coastal Latakia, have almost entirely ceased.

Last month, the Kremlin issued an unequivocal condemnation [6] of recent Israeli airstrikes in Syria as “crude violation” of Syria's sovereignty that up until now were reluctantly tolerated by the Russian forces based in Syria’s Tartus naval base and Khmeimim airbase southeast of Latakia, and also pledged that the Russian Air Force would conduct joint air patrols alongside the Syrian Air Force that would pre-empt the likelihood of further Israeli airstrikes.

“Israel’s continuing strikes against targets inside Syria cause deep concern,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said. “They are a crude violation of Syria’s sovereignty and may trigger a sharp escalation of tensions. Also, such actions pose serious risks to international passenger flights.”

Although Israel claims its air campaign in Syria is meant to target Iran-backed militias, the airstrikes often kill Syrian soldiers. Syrian state media said one soldier was killed and five more were wounded in one of the latest Israeli attacks at Damascus, which occurred on Feb. 9.

Russia has held talks with Israel on Syria, and said last month it would begin joint air patrols with Syria. The patrols will include areas near the Golan Heights in southern Syria bordering Israel, a frequent site of the Israeli airstrikes, and Israel is said to be considering discontinuing the strikes altogether or slowing them down significantly.

The Times of Israel noted that this marked a momentous change in policy for Russia: “Following the patrol, Ynet reported that Israeli military officials were holding talks with Russian army officers to calm tensions.”

The report added, “Israeli officials were struggling to understand why Russia, which announced that such joint patrols were expected to be a regular occurrence moving forward, had apparently changed its policy toward Israel.” The report claimed that Israel might limit its air campaign in Syria as a result of Russia’s inexplicable policy reversal in Syria.

In conclusion, it favored Israel’s strategic objectives to escalate the conflict in Ukraine in order to divert Russia’s attention and military resources to Eastern Europe, as the Zionist regime would then get a free hand to mount airstrikes in Syria and Lebanon with impunity, and might even attempt to rekindle decade-long proxy war alongside its Gulf Arab, Turkish and Jordanian allies in order to eliminate security threat posed by Iran-led resistance axis comprising Syria and Lebanon-based Hezbollah once and for all.

Citations:

[1] Zelensky tweet thanking Facebook for allowing hate speech:

[2] Facebook allows posts urging violence against Russian invaders:

[3] US Defense Intelligence Agency’s declassified report of 2012:

[4] An interview with Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, Israel’s chief of staff:

[5] Israel Katz: Israel conducted 200 airstrikes in Syria in 2017 and 2018:

[6] Russia cites ‘deep concern’ over ongoing Israeli strikes in Syria:

Monday, March 14, 2022

Make No Mistake: Putin Will Use Nukes First

At the height of the Cold War in the sixties when Russia exploded the world’s largest 50-megaton thermonuclear Tsar Bomba in October 1961 and 400,000 US forces were deployed in Europe that were still outnumbered by Soviet troops, the Soviet leadership made repeated requests for signing “no first use” nuclear treaty precluding the likelihood of pre-emptive nuclear strike, but the United States balked at the proposal due to conventional warfare superiority of the USSR in Europe.

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev even unilaterally pledged against the first use of nuclear weapons in 1982, though Russia has since dropped the pledge [1] in 1993 following the break-up of the Soviet Union and consequent tilting of balance of power in favor of the United States. After European powers developed their own military capacity following the devastation of the Second World War, NATO now holds conventional warfare superiority over Russia with a significantly larger number of ground troops and combat aircraft.

Quoting acclaimed Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy before the Biden-Putin summit at Geneva last June, the Russian leader uttered an ominous warning: “There is no true happiness in life, only flashes, a mirage of it is on the horizon — cherish those.” But the mainstream media mocked the stark warning as nothing more than rants and raves of a deranged mind.

Despite staging a massive military buildup along Russia’s border with Ukraine for nearly a year, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not make a final decision to invade until just before he launched the attack in February, according to senior current and former US intelligence officials, as reported by The Intercept [2] on March 11. It wasn’t until February that the agency and the rest of the US intelligence community became convinced that Putin would invade, the senior official added.

Extending the hand of friendship, Russia significantly drawdown its forces along the western border before the summit last June. Instead of returning the favor, however, the conceited leadership of supposedly world’s sole surviving super power turned down the hand of friendship and haughtily refused to concede security guarantees demanded by Russia at the summit that would certainly have averted the likelihood of the war.

A visibly anxious and panicked Biden tweeted [3] Friday, March 11: “I want to be clear: We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO. But we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.”

The string of rambling tweets betrayed the apprehensive mental state of a raving executive who was under tremendous pressure from certain quarters to significantly escalate the conflict with the arch-foe and wanted to console himself and the listeners that by not committing American ground and air forces to Ukraine, specifically for enforcing the no-fly zone, he was making the right decision.

Despite Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal, several Pentagon officials, full of hubris and evidently suffering from misplaced superiority complex, have recently made their misconceived institutional logic public that they no longer regard Russia as an equal military power, instead they contemptuously dubbed it “a second-rate regional power,” and if given an opportunity, they wouldn’t hesitate to take Russia head-on, even if the risk is as perilous as the conflict spiraling into a catastrophic nuclear war.

The Politico reported [4] March 8 “Putin was angry” and the US intelligence heads warned before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during the panel’s annual hearing on worldwide threats that Russia could “double down” in Ukraine.

The remarks by Director National Intelligence Avril Haines and four fellow intelligence agency leaders — Defense Intelligence Agency Director Scott Berrier, CIA Director William Burns, National Security Agency Director Paul Nakasone and FBI Director Christopher Wray — represented some of the most candid assessments of Moscow’s thinking by US officials since the start of the security crisis late last month.

“The nuclear saber-rattling by Putin was extremely unusual, Haines said, and US officials assess that his current posturing in this arena is probably intended to deter the West from providing additional support to Ukraine as he weighs an escalation of the conflict. On a personal level, Haines said US officials assess that Putin ‘feels aggrieved the West does not give him proper deference and perceives this is a war he cannot afford to lose.’

“Burns, the CIA director, portrayed for lawmakers an isolated and indignant Russian president who is determined to dominate and control Ukraine to shape its orientation. Putin has been ‘stewing in a combustible combination of grievance and ambition for many years. That personal conviction matters more than ever,’ Burns said.

“Burns also described how Putin had created a system within the Kremlin in which his own circle of advisers is narrower and narrower — and sparser still because of the Covid-19 pandemic. In that hierarchy, Burns said, ‘it’s proven not career-enhancing for people to question or challenge his judgment.’”

Clearly, the US intelligence assessment before the House Permanent Select Committee painted the picture of “an angry and frustrated statesman” who, if cornered in the battlefield with the back against the wall due to conventional warfare superiority of the NATO powers wouldn’t hesitate for a moment before pressing “the big red button” as a method of last resort in order to deter adversaries from smugly gloating on impending downfall of the nemesis, even if that entails creating a doomsday scenario not only for belligerents but for the world at large.

CNN reported March 6 [5] Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley visited a week before an undisclosed airfield near the Ukraine border that has become a hub for shipping weapons. The airport's location remains a secret to protect the shipments of weapons, including anti-armor missiles, into Ukraine. Although the report didn’t name the location, the airfield was likely in Poland along Ukraine’s border.

“US European Command (EUCOM) is at the heart of the massive shipment operation, using its liaison network with allies and partners to coordinate ‘in real time’ to send materials into Ukraine, a Defense official said. EUCOM is also coordinating with other countries, including the United Kingdom, in terms of the delivery process ‘to ensure that we are using our resources to maximum efficiency to support the Ukrainians in an organized way,’ the official added.”

In an interview with CBC News [6] on March 8, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned that a Russian attack on the supply lines of allied nations supporting Ukraine with arms and munitions would be a dangerous escalation of the war raging in Eastern Europe. “Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine is defending itself. If there is any attack against any NATO country, NATO territory, that will trigger Article 5.”

Article 5 is the self-defense clause in NATO's founding treaty which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all 30 member nations. “I'm absolutely convinced President Putin knows this and we are removing any room for miscalculation, misunderstanding about our commitment to defend every inch of NATO territory,” Stoltenberg said.

On Sunday, March 13, Russian forces launched a missile attack [8] at Yavoriv Combat Training Center in the western part of the country. The 360 square-km facility less than 25 km from the Polish border is one of Ukraine's biggest and the largest in the western part of the country.

Since 2015, US Green Berets and National Guard troops had been training Ukrainian forces at the Yavoriv center before they were evacuated alongside diplomatic staff in mid-February. The training center was hit by a barrage of roughly 30 cruise missiles launched from Russia strategic bombers, killing at least 35 people.

Total number of nuclear warheads across the world currently stands at roughly 13,000: Russia has 5977; NATO has 5943, including 5428 in the US, 290 in France and 225 in the United Kingdom; China has 350, Pakistan 165, India 160, Israel 90 and North Korea has 20 nuclear weapons, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

At the height of the Cold War in the sixties, Russia exploded the world’s largest 50-megaton thermonuclear Tsar Bomba in October 1961. A Tupolev Tu-95V aircraft took off with the bomb weighing 27 tons. The bomb was attached to a large parachute, which gave the release and observer planes time to fly about 45 km away from ground zero, giving them a 50 percent chance of survival.

The bomb was released from a height of 10,500 meters on a test target at Sukhoy Nos cape in the Barents Sea. The bomb detonated at the height of 4,200 meters above ground. Still, the shock wave caught up with the Tu-95V at a distance of 115 km and the Tu-16 at 205 km. The Tu-95V dropped 1 kilometer in the air because of the shock wave but was able to recover and land safely.

The 8-km-wide fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane and was visible at almost 1,000 km away. The mushroom cloud was about 67 km high. A seismic wave in the earth’s crust, generated by the shock wave of the explosion, circled the globe three times. Glass shattered in windows 780 km from the explosion in a village on Dikson Island.

All buildings in the village of Severny, both wooden and brick, located 55 km from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometers from ground zero, wooden houses were destroyed, stone ones lost their roofs, windows, and doors. Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland.

In conclusion, the Ukraine conflict is clearly spiraling out of control and has the potential not only of dragging NATO powers into the war but might also spell end to the human civilization by raising the apocalyptic specter of a catastrophic nuclear war between two formidable nuclear powers that hold between themselves over 90% of the world’s devastating nuclear arsenal.

Citations:

[1] Russia drops the pledge against first use of nuclear weapons:

[2] US intel says Putin made a last-minute decision to invade Ukraine:

[3] Biden: Confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III:

[4] Putin is angry: US intel heads warn Russia could double down in Ukraine:

[5] Mark Milley visited an undisclosed airfield near the Ukraine border:

[6] NATO chief warns Russia away from attacking supply lines:

[7] Pentagon shores up its NATO defenses in Europe:

[8] Pentagon push to send more trainers to Ukraine was scrapped:

Sunday, March 13, 2022

Is Deep State Pushing Biden to Start Third World War?

A visibly anxious and panicked Biden tweeted [1] yesterday, March 11: “I want to be clear: We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO. But we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.”

It’s noteworthy the national security and defense policies of the United States are formulated by the all-powerful civil-military bureaucracy, dubbed the deep state, whereas the president, elected through heavily manipulated electoral process with disproportionate influence of corporate interests, political lobbyists and billionaire donors, is only a figurehead meant to legitimize militarist stranglehold of the deep state, not only over the domestic politics of the United States but also over the neocolonial world order dictated by the self-styled global hegemon.

All the militaries of the NATO member states operate under the integrated military command led by the Pentagon. Before being elected president, General Dwight Eisenhower was the first commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).

The commander of Allied Command Operations has been given the title Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), and is always a US four-star general officer or flag officer who also serves as the Commander US European Command, and is answerable to the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff.

CNN reported March 6 [2] Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley visited a week before an undisclosed airfield near the Ukraine border that has become a hub for shipping weapons. The airport's location remains a secret to protect the shipments of weapons, including anti-armor missiles, into Ukraine. Although the report didn’t name the location, the airfield was likely in Poland along Ukraine’s border.

“US European Command (EUCOM) is at the heart of the massive shipment operation, using its liaison network with allies and partners to coordinate ‘in real time’ to send materials into Ukraine, a second Defense official said. EUCOM is also coordinating with other countries, including the United Kingdom, in terms of the delivery process ‘to ensure that we are using our resources to maximum efficiency to support the Ukrainians in an organized way,’ the official added.”

In Europe, 400,000 US forces were deployed at the height of the Cold War in the sixties, though the number has since been brought down [3] to almost 100,000 after European powers developed their own military capacity following the devastation of the Second World War. The number of American troops deployed in Europe now stands at 50,000 in Germany, 15,000 in Italy and 10,000 in the United Kingdom.

During the last year, the United States has substantially ramped up US military footprint in the Eastern Europe by deploying thousands of additional NATO troops, strategic armaments, nuclear-capable missiles and air force squadrons aimed at Russia, and NATO forces alongside regional clients have been provocatively exercising so-called “freedom of navigation” right in the Black Sea and conducting joint military exercises and naval drills.

The Biden administration approved on Feb. 24 an additional 7,000 US troops [4] to be deployed to Germany, bringing the total number of American forces sent to Europe to 15,000 this month, including troops previously deployed to Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. In Poland alone, the US military footprint now exceeds 10,000 troops as the majority of 15,000 troops sent to Europe last month went to Poland to join the 4,000 US troops already stationed there.

“We have 130 jets at high alert. Over 200 ships from the high north to the Mediterranean, and thousands of additional troops in the region,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told CNN [5].

A spokesman for US European Command told CNN the United States was sending two Patriot missile batteries to Poland, and was also considering deploying THAAD air defense system, a more advanced system equivalent in capabilities to Russia’s S-400 air defense system.

Besides providing 2,000 surface-to-air missiles and 17,000 anti-armor munitions, including Javelins and NLAWs, to Ukraine’s security forces and allied militias, British Defense Minister Ben Wallace said [6] that the UK was considering sending the laser-guided Starstreak shoulder-fired anti-aircraft system, a significant upgrade from the Stinger missiles sent by the US, Germany and other allies. The weapon has a range of over four miles and can take down fighter planes more effectively than the Stinger.

Although NATO powers did provide Stingers to their jihadist proxies that helped turning the tide in the Soviet-Afghan war in the eighties, since then, despite providing anti-tank munitions and rest of weapons to militant groups in the proxy wars in Libya and Syria, Western powers have consistently avoided providing MANPADS to proxy forces, because such deadly anti-aircraft munitions could become a long-term threat not only to military aircraft but also to civilian airlines.

In the sheer desperation to inflict maximum material damage on Russia’s security forces, however, NATO appears to have breached its own long-standing convention of curbing the proliferation of anti-aircraft munitions. Following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, Germany alone has proudly bragged [7] of dispatching caches of 500 US-made surface-to-air Stinger missiles and 2,700 Soviet-era, shoulder-fired Strela missiles to Ukraine’s conscript military.

Who would be responsible for the myopic and vindictive policy of providing anti-aircraft munitions to Ukraine’s irregular militias once Kyiv falls and those MANPADS are found in black markets posing grave risk to civilian airlines across the globe? In fact, Russia’s seasoned Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov alluded to the grave risk posed by the proliferation of anti-aircraft munitions in the peace talks with the Ukrainian counterpart in Turkey.

Russia’s reluctant and delayed military intervention in Ukraine is fundamentally a war of power projection, a shot across the bow to perfidious former allies, the East European states, who’ve been joining the EU and NATO in droves since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, that the collective security of Eurasian nations is a shared responsibility, and NATO’s eastward expansion along Russia’s western flank not only imperils the security of resurgent Russia but also compromises the balance of power in the multipolar world.

It’s worth recalling that before the Biden-Putin summit at Geneva last June, Russia had a similar troop build-up along Ukraine’s borders. Extending the hand of friendship, Russia significantly drawdown its forces along the western border before the summit last year. Instead of returning the favor, however, the conceited leadership of supposedly world’s sole surviving super power turned down the hand of friendship and even snubbed Putin.

Despite losing the empire in the nineties, as far as military power is concerned, Russia with its enormous arsenal of conventional as well as nuclear weapons still more or less equals the military power of the United States, as is obvious from the unfolding Ukraine war where all the NATO could do is watch it from distance, and not even attempting to enforce a no-fly zone lest the conflict spirals into a mutually destructive nuclear war.

But it’s the much more subtle and insidious tactic of economic warfare for which Russia has no antidote, as the global neocolonial order is being led by the United States and its Western European clients since the signing of the Bretton Woods Accord in 1945 following the Second World War. Because any state, particularly those pursuing socialist policies, that dares to challenge the Western monopoly over global trade and economic policies is internationally isolated and its national economy goes bankrupt over a period of time.

Despite having immense firepower at its disposal that could readily turn the tide in conflicts as protracted as Syria’s proxy war, the Russian advance in Ukraine has been slower than expected according to most estimates because Russia is only targeting military infrastructure and doing all it can to minimize collateral damage, particularly needless civilian losses in the former Soviet republic whose majority population is sympathetic to Russia.

Rather than mitigating suffering of Ukraine’s disenfranchised masses held hostage by the Zelensky regime, the self-styled champions of human rights are doing all they can to lure Russia into their “bear trap project,” a term borrowed from the Soviet-Afghan War of the eighties when Western powers used Pakistan’s security forces and generous funding from the oil-rich Gulf States for providing guerrilla warfare training and lethal weaponry to Afghan jihadists to “bleed the security forces” of former Soviet Union in the protracted irregular warfare.

The Congress’ recently announced [8] $1.5 trillion package to fund the federal government through September would boost national defense coffers to $782 billion, about a 6 percent increase. On top of the hefty budget increase, the package is set to deliver $13.6 billion in emergency funding to help Ukraine, nearly twice the assistance package initially proposed, including $3 billion for US forces and $3.5 billion for military equipment to Ukraine, plus more than $4 billion for US humanitarian efforts.

Of the $13.6 billion humanitarian and military assistance for Ukraine announced by the Biden administration, the top brass of the Pentagon is reportedly making preparations for disbursing $3.5 billion for providing military training and arms to millions of refugees who have fled Ukraine following the war.

The Machiavellian plan of NATO’s military strategists is to establish refugee settlements with the “humanitarian assistance” in the border regions of Ukraine’s neighboring countries Poland and Romania, and then provide guerrilla warfare training and lethal arms to all able-bodied men of military age in order to mount a war of attrition against Russia’s security forces.

Although NATO’s military strategists are drawing parallels with the Soviet-Afghan War of the eighties and the two-decade occupation of Afghanistan by the US forces from Oct. 2001 to August 2021 when the ragtag Afghan insurgents defeated two super powers of the era, and are betting on the success of Ukraine’s potential insurgency against Russian forces from border regions of Poland and Romania, those were two very different wars.

The former Soviet Union and the US never lacked resources to subdue insurgency in Afghanistan. What they lacked was the will to pour infinite military and economic resources into a meaningless war lacking clear strategic objectives over an indefinite period of time.

By contrast, the Vladimir Putin government is fully committed and Russia’s national security establishment regards Ukraine as an integral part of Russia, eastern Ukraine with its large Russian-speaking population in particular, and would go to any extent to integrate Ukraine into Russia’s sphere of influence and forestall NATO’s further eastward expansion along Russia’s vulnerable western flank.

If we take a cursory look at the insurgency in Afghanistan, the Bush administration toppled the Taliban regime with the help of the Northern Alliance in October 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attack. Since the beginning, however, Afghanistan was an area of lesser priority for the Bush administration.

The number of US troops deployed in Afghanistan did not exceed beyond 30,000 during George Bush’s tenure as the American president, and soon after occupying Afghanistan, Washington invaded Iraq in March 2003 to expropriate its 140 billion barrels proven oil reserves, and American resources and focus shifted to Iraq.

It was the ostensibly “pacifist and noninterventionist” Obama administration that made the Afghanistan conflict the bedrock of its foreign policy in 2009 along with fulfilling then-President Obama’s electoral pledge of withdrawing American forces from Iraq in December 2011, only to be redeployed a couple of years later when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014.

At the height of the surge of the US troops in Afghanistan in 2010, the American troops numbered around 100,000, with an additional 40,000 troops deployed by the rest of the NATO members, but they still could not manage to have a lasting impact on the relentless Taliban insurgency.

Citations:

[1] Biden: Confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III:

[2] Mark Milley visited an undisclosed airfield near the Ukraine border:

[3] What the US Gets for Defending Its Allies and Interests Abroad?

[4] An additional 7,000 US troops to be sent to Germany:

[5] Pentagon shores up its NATO defenses in Europe:

[6] How Biden scuttled Polish aircraft deal:

[7] Germany to ship anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine:

[8] $13.6 billion military and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine: