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A useful background to understand the present conflict in Ukraine...

Started by almarh0m, March 17, 2022, 09:15:44 PM

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almarh0m

The Timing of the Pipeline Attack
September 28, 2022
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The U.S. had already forced Germany to shut down Nord Stream 2 but there are signs that an end to the Ukraine war would have put it back online, writes Joe Lauria.


Biden calling for overthrow of Putin in Warsaw in March. (Office of the President)

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News



President Joe Biden, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz by his side, promised a White House press conference in early February that the U.S. was "able" to shut down the German-Russian Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea if Russia invaded Ukraine.

A reporter asked Biden, "But how will you do that, exactly, since...the project is in Germany's control?" Biden said: "I promise you, we will be able to do that."

When Russia indeed invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Washington was able to get Berlin to suspend the pipeline project that was about to go online, even though it wasn't in Germany's interests.

The pipeline has remained closed ever since. Why then did someone attack the pipeline on Monday, releasing the gas it contained into the Baltic Sea? As long as the war continues, the U.S. has what it wants regarding the pipeline.

Evidently, the fear in Washington is that the war might not continue for as long as it wants. I argued on Feb. 4, twenty days before the invasion, that the U.S. was setting a trap for Russia and needed it to invade Ukraine in order to unleash an information, economic and proxy war with the ultimate aim of regime change in Moscow. All that was confirmed by March 27.

Since then the U.S. and Britain have done everything it can to keep the war going, and the economic sanctions in place.  But those sanctions on Russia are devastating the European economy, driving energy prices up and shutting businesses down.  Ordinary Europeans are facing a winter in which they may not be able to afford to heat their homes.

This has led to growing popular unrest and pressure on European governments to end the war, lift the sanctions and save their economies.  Ending the war and lifting sanction would lead to the reopening of Nord Stream 2 (and the turbine repair of Nord Stream 1, which was also attacked).


Site of the Nord Stream 2 attack. (Danish Defense Ministry)

Offer to Resume Shipments

Three weeks ago, President Vladimir Putin told a press conference in Samarkand that Russia was ready to resume supplying natural gas to Germany if Germany lifted its economic sanctions against Russia.   Putin said:

"After all, if they need [gas] urgently, if things are so bad, just go ahead and lift sanctions against Nord Stream 2, with its 55 billion cubic metres per year – all they have to do is press the button and they will get it going. But they chose to shut it off themselves; they cannot repair one pipeline and imposed sanctions against the new Nord Stream 2 and will not open it. Are we to blame for this? Let them think hard about who is to blame and let none of them blame us for their own mistakes. Gazprom and Russia have always fulfilled and will fulfil all obligations under our agreements and contracts, with no failures ever."

So the offer is there to return normal gas supplies to Europe if the sanctions are lifted. With the war having passed into its most dangerous phase, there is a growing urgency to stop the war, including talk of a Saudi-led peace process in which Ukraine would cede territory to Russia in exchange for peace.

If momentum grows for a peace deal of any kind it would ruin Washington's long-term plans to weaken Russia. It would mean Nord Stream 2 would reopen, which would help Germany and Russia, but crush U.S. aims at regime change and making Europe dependent on U.S. energy.

"I promise you, we will be able" to shut down Nord Stream 2, Biden vowed. But how would the U.S. do that if Germany became poised to reopen it?

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times.  He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe 

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"He who Created me, it is He who Guides me"

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The United States declares war on Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and France
by Thierry Meyssan
While the international press treats the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines as a news item, we analyze it as an act of war against Germany and the European Union. Indeed, the three gas supply routes to Western Europe have been cut off simultaneously, while at the same time a new gas pipeline has been opened to Poland.
Just as Mikhail Gorbachev saw in the Chernobyl disaster the inevitable break-up of the USSR, so we believe that the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines marks the beginning of the economic collapse of the Union.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | PARIS (FRANCE) | 4 OCTOBER 2022
DEUTSCH ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΆ ESPAÑOL FRANÇAIS ITALIANO NEDERLANDS PORTUGUÊS РУССКИЙ


Russian satellite photograph of the boiling water after the sabotage of Nord Stream.
The United States' fight to maintain its global hegemony has reached its third stage.
After the expansion of Nato to the East in violation of Western commitments not to station US weapons in Central Europe, Russia, which cannot defend its huge borders, is under direct threat.
In violation of its World War II commitments, Washington has put "hardcore nationalists" ("Nazis" in Kremlin terminology) in power in Kiev. They banned their Russian-speaking compatriots from speaking their native language, deprived them of public services, and ultimately bombed those in the Donbass. Russia had no choice but to intervene militarily to put an end to their ordeal.
The third round is the authoritarian change of energy supply to Western and Central Europe. On the same day, the Baltic Pipeline came into operation, the two Nord Stream pipelines were shut down, while the maintenance of Turkish Stream was interrupted.

This is the most destructive sabotage in history. An act of war against both Russia (51%) and Germany (30%), co-owners of these huge investments, but also against their partners, the Netherlands (9%) and France (9%). For the moment, none of the victims has reacted puclicly.

To carry out this considerable destruction, it was necessary to have submarines in the area, which the powers that be in the region have identified. If there are officially no clues, in the police sense of the term, the "surveillance cameras" (sonar) have already spoken. The states concerned know with certainty who the culprit is. Either they do not react, and they will be politically wiped out, or they prepare their reactions to this secret action in secret, and they will become real political actors when they do.

Let us remember the coup d'état in Algiers in 1961 and the subsequent assassination attempts against the President of the French Republic, Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle pretended to believe that they were carried out by the Secret Army Organization (OAS), a group of Frenchmen opposed to Algerian independence. But his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maurice Couve de Murville, publicly mentioned the role of the Spanish Opus Dei and the U.S. CIA in organizing and financing them. De Gaulle sought out and identified the traitors, reorganized the police and the army, and suddenly, five years later, announced France's withdrawal from the integrated command of NATO. He gave the latter two weeks to close its headquarters in Paris-Dauphine and move to Belgium; a little more time to close the 29 NATO military bases in the country. Then he began traveling abroad to denounce U.S. hypocrisy, especially the Vietnam War. France instantly became a leading power in international relations. These events have never been explained in public, but all political leaders of the time can confirm them [1].

Since the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the United States has developed a map of the world that disrupts international relations, leading it to overthrow governments and wage wars in order to build transportation routes for energy sources. This was the main activity of Vice President Al Gore for eight years, today it is the activity of Special Advisor Amos Hochstein. We remember the war in Transnistria to get hold of a pipeline hub [2], then the war in Kosovo to build a communication route through the Balkans, the « 8th corridor ». Now all the other pieces of the puzzle are coming to light.

It is particularly difficult to understand the evil that has just hit the European Union and will, in all likelihood, cause its economic collapse, because the Union itself has made some of the decisions necessary for its bankruptcy.

Until September 26, 2022, the Union was mainly supplied with gas by Russia. This was delivered either through the Brotherhood pipeline through Ukraine, the Nord Stream pipeline or the Turkisch Stream. The United States, which guarantees the security of the Union, has just cut off these three routes in succession. Of course the Brotherhood pipeline is still functioning, but it can be interrupted at any time by Kiev's will, Nord Stream has been sabotaged and Turkisch Stream can no longer be maintained because of the sanctions that the Union has taken at the request of the USA.


Eleven years ago, Europeans were celebrating their union with Russia. They believed they were building a peaceful and prosperous world.
Until September 26, the economy of the Union was mainly based on the production of German industry. By cutting off Nord Stream, the United States destroyed German industry. In the famous words of Lord Ismay, the first Secretary General of NATO, the aim of the Anglo-Saxons was "to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans under control".


Ronald Reagan opposed the delivery of Russian gas to France and Germany. After imposing unsuccessful sanctions against companies in both countries, he ordered William Casey, the director of the CIA, to sabotage the Yamal gas pipeline in Poland. This was done.
This policy has been pursued by all US administrations without interruption since the 1950s. Nord Stream was built by 9 states, 4 of which own it. It started operating in 2011. Starting with Donald Trump's term in office, in 2017, the US Congress threatened sanctions against the companies involved in the operation of Nord Stream 1 and those involved in the Nord Stream 2 project. President Trump himself has mocked Germany's vassalage of Russian gas. A number of legal obstacles have been put in place to block Russian gas to Western Europe, not only by the United States, but also by Poland. From this point of view, the new US administration has not changed anything. Germany was wrong to believe that it was more benevolent.

It is true that in July 2021, an agreement was reached whereby Nord Stream 2 would have been replaced by hydrogen produced in Ukraine and transported, from 2024 (the date of the end of the Russian-Ukrainian contract), through the converted Brotherhood pipeline.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who was elected in December 2021, has made two serious mistakes in a few months. On December 7, he went to the White House where he tried to resist the United States' demand that he stop accepting Russian gas. Back home, he chose to maintain Nord Stream and block Nord Stream 2, while seeking renewable sources. He thought, wrongly, that he was balancing the warmongering of US strategic thinking, the needs of his industry and the doctrine of the Greens, members of his government coalition.

The Chancellor had had a close call: during his press conference with the US President, Joe Biden said that his country could destroy Nord Stream 2 and that if Russia invaded the Ukraine, he would do so. It was absolutely frightening for Scholz to hear his overlord spit in his face that he could destroy a tens of billions of dollars investment if a third party acted without regard to his dictates. We do not know whether President Biden also mentioned the destruction of Nord Stream 1 during the closed-door talks, but it is not impossible. In any case, according to the German journalists who followed him, the chancellor returned to Germany pale.

His second mistake was made on September 16, 2022. His country wanted to get out from under the Anglo-Saxon umbrella and ensure its own security as well as that of the entire European Union. « As the most populous nation, with the greatest economic power and located at the center of the continent, our army must become the pillar of conventional defence in Europe, » the chancellor said. By specifying that he was only talking about "conventional defence", he intended to spare the susceptibility of his French neighbor, the only nuclear power in the Union. He did not realize that he was violating the Straussian doctrine by imagining that he was escaping from the US military protectorate. In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz signed the Defense Policy Guidance, excerpts of which were published in the New York Times. He indicated that the United States would consider any desire for European emancipation as a cassus belli [3].

Six days later, Navy Seals blew up the two gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, setting Germany back eleven years.


At the same time, the Baltic Pipe pipeline was inaugurated with great fanfare, a few hours after the sabotage, by the Polish president, the Danish prime minister and the Norwegian energy minister. It does not have at all the same capacities as Nord Stream, but it will be enough to change the times. Once the European Union was dominated by German industry using Russian gas, now it will be dominated by Poland using Norwegian gas. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki triumphantly declared at the inauguration ceremony: "The era of Russian gas domination is coming to an end; an era that was marked by blackmail, threats and extortion. »

The act of war committed against Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and France forces us to rethink the events in Ukraine. It is much more important than what has gone before insofar as the United States has attacked its allies. I have explained at length in previous articles what the Straussians were looking for with their provocations in Ukraine. What has just happened shows us why Washington, as a state, supports the Straussian project, and that its "grand strategy" has not changed since the 1950s.


In 2017, a U.S. president, Donald Trump, came to participate in the launch of the Three Seas Initiative. Washington often wins because it sees further ahead than its allies.
In practice, the European Union will collapse economically, with the exception of Poland and its eleven Central European allies, members of the Three Seas Initiative (Intermarium) [4]. The tide is turning. From now on, Warsaw is running ahead.

The big losers will be Western Europe and Russia, but also Ukraine, which will have been destroyed only to allow this game of massacre.

Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Roger Lagassé
Printable version RSS Facebook Twitter WhatsApp Viber
STAY IN TOUCH
"He who Created me, it is He who Guides me"

almarh0m

The United States declares war on Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and France
by Thierry Meyssan
While the international press treats the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines as a news item, we analyze it as an act of war against Germany and the European Union. Indeed, the three gas supply routes to Western Europe have been cut off simultaneously, while at the same time a new gas pipeline has been opened to Poland.
Just as Mikhail Gorbachev saw in the Chernobyl disaster the inevitable break-up of the USSR, so we believe that the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines marks the beginning of the economic collapse of the Union.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | PARIS (FRANCE) | 4 OCTOBER 2022
DEUTSCH ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΆ ESPAÑOL FRANÇAIS ITALIANO NEDERLANDS PORTUGUÊS РУССКИЙ


Russian satellite photograph of the boiling water after the sabotage of Nord Stream.
The United States' fight to maintain its global hegemony has reached its third stage.
After the expansion of Nato to the East in violation of Western commitments not to station US weapons in Central Europe, Russia, which cannot defend its huge borders, is under direct threat.
In violation of its World War II commitments, Washington has put "hardcore nationalists" ("Nazis" in Kremlin terminology) in power in Kiev. They banned their Russian-speaking compatriots from speaking their native language, deprived them of public services, and ultimately bombed those in the Donbass. Russia had no choice but to intervene militarily to put an end to their ordeal.
The third round is the authoritarian change of energy supply to Western and Central Europe. On the same day, the Baltic Pipeline came into operation, the two Nord Stream pipelines were shut down, while the maintenance of Turkish Stream was interrupted.

This is the most destructive sabotage in history. An act of war against both Russia (51%) and Germany (30%), co-owners of these huge investments, but also against their partners, the Netherlands (9%) and France (9%). For the moment, none of the victims has reacted puclicly.

To carry out this considerable destruction, it was necessary to have submarines in the area, which the powers that be in the region have identified. If there are officially no clues, in the police sense of the term, the "surveillance cameras" (sonar) have already spoken. The states concerned know with certainty who the culprit is. Either they do not react, and they will be politically wiped out, or they prepare their reactions to this secret action in secret, and they will become real political actors when they do.

Let us remember the coup d'état in Algiers in 1961 and the subsequent assassination attempts against the President of the French Republic, Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle pretended to believe that they were carried out by the Secret Army Organization (OAS), a group of Frenchmen opposed to Algerian independence. But his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maurice Couve de Murville, publicly mentioned the role of the Spanish Opus Dei and the U.S. CIA in organizing and financing them. De Gaulle sought out and identified the traitors, reorganized the police and the army, and suddenly, five years later, announced France's withdrawal from the integrated command of NATO. He gave the latter two weeks to close its headquarters in Paris-Dauphine and move to Belgium; a little more time to close the 29 NATO military bases in the country. Then he began traveling abroad to denounce U.S. hypocrisy, especially the Vietnam War. France instantly became a leading power in international relations. These events have never been explained in public, but all political leaders of the time can confirm them [1].

Since the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the United States has developed a map of the world that disrupts international relations, leading it to overthrow governments and wage wars in order to build transportation routes for energy sources. This was the main activity of Vice President Al Gore for eight years, today it is the activity of Special Advisor Amos Hochstein. We remember the war in Transnistria to get hold of a pipeline hub [2], then the war in Kosovo to build a communication route through the Balkans, the « 8th corridor ». Now all the other pieces of the puzzle are coming to light.

It is particularly difficult to understand the evil that has just hit the European Union and will, in all likelihood, cause its economic collapse, because the Union itself has made some of the decisions necessary for its bankruptcy.

Until September 26, 2022, the Union was mainly supplied with gas by Russia. This was delivered either through the Brotherhood pipeline through Ukraine, the Nord Stream pipeline or the Turkisch Stream. The United States, which guarantees the security of the Union, has just cut off these three routes in succession. Of course the Brotherhood pipeline is still functioning, but it can be interrupted at any time by Kiev's will, Nord Stream has been sabotaged and Turkisch Stream can no longer be maintained because of the sanctions that the Union has taken at the request of the USA.


Eleven years ago, Europeans were celebrating their union with Russia. They believed they were building a peaceful and prosperous world.
Until September 26, the economy of the Union was mainly based on the production of German industry. By cutting off Nord Stream, the United States destroyed German industry. In the famous words of Lord Ismay, the first Secretary General of NATO, the aim of the Anglo-Saxons was "to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans under control".


Ronald Reagan opposed the delivery of Russian gas to France and Germany. After imposing unsuccessful sanctions against companies in both countries, he ordered William Casey, the director of the CIA, to sabotage the Yamal gas pipeline in Poland. This was done.
This policy has been pursued by all US administrations without interruption since the 1950s. Nord Stream was built by 9 states, 4 of which own it. It started operating in 2011. Starting with Donald Trump's term in office, in 2017, the US Congress threatened sanctions against the companies involved in the operation of Nord Stream 1 and those involved in the Nord Stream 2 project. President Trump himself has mocked Germany's vassalage of Russian gas. A number of legal obstacles have been put in place to block Russian gas to Western Europe, not only by the United States, but also by Poland. From this point of view, the new US administration has not changed anything. Germany was wrong to believe that it was more benevolent.

It is true that in July 2021, an agreement was reached whereby Nord Stream 2 would have been replaced by hydrogen produced in Ukraine and transported, from 2024 (the date of the end of the Russian-Ukrainian contract), through the converted Brotherhood pipeline.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who was elected in December 2021, has made two serious mistakes in a few months. On December 7, he went to the White House where he tried to resist the United States' demand that he stop accepting Russian gas. Back home, he chose to maintain Nord Stream and block Nord Stream 2, while seeking renewable sources. He thought, wrongly, that he was balancing the warmongering of US strategic thinking, the needs of his industry and the doctrine of the Greens, members of his government coalition.

The Chancellor had had a close call: during his press conference with the US President, Joe Biden said that his country could destroy Nord Stream 2 and that if Russia invaded the Ukraine, he would do so. It was absolutely frightening for Scholz to hear his overlord spit in his face that he could destroy a tens of billions of dollars investment if a third party acted without regard to his dictates. We do not know whether President Biden also mentioned the destruction of Nord Stream 1 during the closed-door talks, but it is not impossible. In any case, according to the German journalists who followed him, the chancellor returned to Germany pale.

His second mistake was made on September 16, 2022. His country wanted to get out from under the Anglo-Saxon umbrella and ensure its own security as well as that of the entire European Union. « As the most populous nation, with the greatest economic power and located at the center of the continent, our army must become the pillar of conventional defence in Europe, » the chancellor said. By specifying that he was only talking about "conventional defence", he intended to spare the susceptibility of his French neighbor, the only nuclear power in the Union. He did not realize that he was violating the Straussian doctrine by imagining that he was escaping from the US military protectorate. In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz signed the Defense Policy Guidance, excerpts of which were published in the New York Times. He indicated that the United States would consider any desire for European emancipation as a cassus belli [3].

Six days later, Navy Seals blew up the two gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, setting Germany back eleven years.


At the same time, the Baltic Pipe pipeline was inaugurated with great fanfare, a few hours after the sabotage, by the Polish president, the Danish prime minister and the Norwegian energy minister. It does not have at all the same capacities as Nord Stream, but it will be enough to change the times. Once the European Union was dominated by German industry using Russian gas, now it will be dominated by Poland using Norwegian gas. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki triumphantly declared at the inauguration ceremony: "The era of Russian gas domination is coming to an end; an era that was marked by blackmail, threats and extortion. »

The act of war committed against Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and France forces us to rethink the events in Ukraine. It is much more important than what has gone before insofar as the United States has attacked its allies. I have explained at length in previous articles what the Straussians were looking for with their provocations in Ukraine. What has just happened shows us why Washington, as a state, supports the Straussian project, and that its "grand strategy" has not changed since the 1950s.


In 2017, a U.S. president, Donald Trump, came to participate in the launch of the Three Seas Initiative. Washington often wins because it sees further ahead than its allies.
In practice, the European Union will collapse economically, with the exception of Poland and its eleven Central European allies, members of the Three Seas Initiative (Intermarium) [4]. The tide is turning. From now on, Warsaw is running ahead.

The big losers will be Western Europe and Russia, but also Ukraine, which will have been destroyed only to allow this game of massacre.

Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Roger Lagassé
Printable version RSS Facebook Twitter WhatsApp Viber
STAY IN TOUCH
"He who Created me, it is He who Guides me"

almarh0m

SCOTT RITTER: A 'Dangerous, Bloody & Dirty Game'
November 3, 2022
Save
Vladimir Putin's address at the Valdai Club last week, coming on the heels of the Biden administration's release of its  National Security Strategy, shows how the battle lines have been drawn. 



Russian President Vladimir Putin addressing the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow on Oct. 27. (Kremlin)

By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News

Russian President Vladimir Putin's keynote address at the Valdai Club last Thursday appears to have put Russia on a collision course with the U.S.-led "Rules Based International Order" (RBIO).

The Biden administration two weeks earlier released its 2022 National Security Strategy (NSS), a full-throated defense of the RBIO which all-but declares war on "autocrats" who are "working overtime to undermine democracy."

These two visions of the future of the world order define a global competition that has become existential in nature. In short, there can be only one victor.

Given the fact that the main players in this competition comprise the five declared nuclear powers, how the world manages the defeat of the losing side will, in large part, determine whether humanity will survive into the next generation.

"We are now in the early years of a decisive decade for America and the world," U.S. President Joe Biden wrote in the introduction to the 2022 NSS. "The terms of geopolitical competition between the major powers will be set ... the post-Cold War era is definitively over, and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next."

The key to winning this competition, Biden declared, is American leadership: "The need for a strong and purposeful American role in the world has never been greater."

The 2022 NSS laid out the nature of this competition in stark terms. Biden claimed:"Democracies and autocracies are engaged in a contest to show which system of governance can best deliver for their people and the world."

American goals in this competition are clear:

"[W]e want a free, open, prosperous, and secure international order. We seek an order that is free in that it allows people to enjoy their basic, universal rights and freedoms. It is open in that it provides all nations that sign up to these principles an opportunity to participate in, and have a role in shaping, the rules."


President Joe Biden conferring with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, at left, during a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Aug. 25. (White House, Adam Schultz)

Standing in the way of the accomplishment of these goals, Biden says, are the forces of autocracy, led by Russia and the People's Republic of China (PRC). "Russia," he declared,

"poses an immediate threat to the free and open international system, recklessly flouting the basic laws of the international order today, as its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine has shown. The PRC, by contrast, is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective."

Russia & China

Of course, Russia and China take umbrage at Biden's world view, and in particular their role in it. This objection was voiced back on Feb. 4, when Putin met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, where the two leaders released a joint statement that served as a veritable declaration of war against the RBIO.

"The sides [i.e., Russia and China] intend to resist attempts to substitute universally recognized formats and mechanisms that are consistent with international law [i.e., the Law Based International Order (LBIO)]," the joint statement read, "for rules elaborated in private by certain nations or blocs of nations [i.e., the RBIO], and are against addressing international problems indirectly and without consensus, oppose power politics, bullying, unilateral sanctions, and extraterritorial application of jurisdiction."


Russian President Vladimir Putin holding talks in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Feb. 4. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Far from seeking confrontation, Russia and China, in their joint statement, went out of their way to emphasize the need for cooperation among nations:

"The sides reiterate the need for consolidation, not division of the international community, the need for cooperation, not confrontation. The sides oppose the return of international relations to the state of confrontation between major powers when the weak fall prey to the strong."

Russia and China believe the problems confronting the world come from pressures brought on by the collective West, led by the United States. This point was emphasized by Putin in his Valdai address.

"t can be said," Putin noted, "that in recent years, and especially in recent months, this West has taken a number of steps toward escalation. Strictly speaking, it always relies on escalation; that is not new. These are the instigation of the war in Ukraine, the provocations around Taiwan, and the destabilization of global food and energy markets."

According to Putin, there is little that can be done to avoid this escalation, since the root of the problem is the very nature of the West. He said:

"The Western model of globalization, neocolonial at its core, was also built on standardization, on financial and technological monopolism, and on the erasure of all differences. The task was clear: to strengthen the unconditional domination of the West in the world economy and politics, and to this end to put at its service the natural and financial resources, the intellectual, human, and economic capacities of the entire planet, under the guise of the so-called new global interdependence."

Western Supremacy

There can be no longer any concept of cooperation between Russia and the West, Putin said, because the American-dominated West steadfastly adheres to the supremacy of its own values and systems, at the exclusion of all others.

Putin took aim at this exclusivity. "Western ideologists and politicians," he said, "have been telling the whole world for many years: There is no alternative to democracy. However, they talk about the Western, so-called liberal model of democracy. They reject all other variants and forms of democracy with contempt and – I would like to emphasize this – arrogance."

Moreover, Putin noted, "[T]he arrogant pursuit of world domination, of dictating or maintaining leadership by dictation, is leading to the decline of the international authority of the leaders of the Western world, including the United States."


U.S. President Joe Biden meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, June 14, 2021. (NATO)

The solution, Putin declared, is to reject the exclusivity of the American RBIO model. "The unity of humanity is not based on the command 'do it like me' or 'become like us,'" Putin said, noting rather that "it is formed taking into account and based on the opinion of all and with respect for the identity of each society and nation. This is the principle on which long-term engagement in a multipolar world can be built."

Battle Defined by Ideas

The battle lines have been drawn — American-led singularity on one side, and a Russian-Chinese led multipolarity on the other.

A direct military-on-military clash between the proponents of the RBIO and those backing the LBIO would, literally, go nuclear, destroying the very world they are competing to control.

As such, the looming Armageddon won't be a battle defined by military power, but rather of ideas — of which side can sway the opinion of the rest of the world to come over to its side. Herein lies the key to determining who will win — the established RBIO, or the up-and-coming LBIO?

The answer increasingly seems clear — it's the LBIO by a long shot.

America is in decline. The American model of democracy is failing at home, and as such is incapable of being responsibly projected on the world stage as something worthy of imitation. The RBIO is coming apart at the seams.

On every front, it is being confronted by organizations which embrace the LBIO vision and failing. The G-7 is losing against BRICS; NATO is fracturing while the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is expanding. The European Union is collapsing, while the Russian-Chinese vision for a trans-Eurasian economic union is thriving.


Map of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, December 2021. (Firdavs Kulolov, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

"Power over the world," Putin declared at Valdai, "is exactly what the so-called West has been betting on. But this game is certainly a dangerous, bloody and, I would say, dirty game."

There can be no avoiding the coming conflict. But, as Putin noted, paraphrasing the Biblical passage from Hosea 8:7, "He who sows the wind will, as the saying goes, reap the storm. The crisis has indeed become global; it affects everyone. There is no need to be under any illusions."

To this should be added Matthew 24:6: "And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet."

All things must come to pass.

But the end is not yet.

The decline of American hegemony in global affairs does not require the four horsemen of the apocalypse to be unleashed on the planet.

America has had its moments. As Paul Simon sang in his classic song, American Tune, "We [America] come in the age's most uncertain hour."

History will never forget the American Century, where the strength of its industry and people not once, but twice, came to the aid of the world "in its most uncertain hour."

But the age of American supremacy has passed, and it's time to move on to what the future holds — a new age of multi-polarity where America is but one among many.

We can, of course, decide to resist this transition. Indeed, Biden's 2022 NSS is literally a roadmap of such a resistance. We can, as the poet Dylan Thomas penned, opt not to "go gentle into that good night", but rather "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

But at what cost? The end of American singularity does not have to mean the end of America. The American dream, once removed from the need to dominate the world to sustain it, can be an attainable possibility.

The alternative is grim. Should the U.S. opt to resist the tides of history, the temptation to use the final weapon of existential survival — America's nuclear arsenal — will be real.

And no one will survive.

In the end, the decision of whether to "burn the village in order to save it" is up to the American people.

We can buy into the flawed "democracy versus autocracy" suicide pact inherent in the 2022 NSS, or we can insist that our leaders use what remains of American leadership and authority to help guide the planet into a new phase of multilateralism where our nation exists as one among equals.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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"He who Created me, it is He who Guides me"

almarh0m

War, propaganda, and blindness
by Thierry Meyssan
Propaganda makes you stupid. We know that the Ukrainian integral nationalists have committed abominable massacres, especially during the Second World War. But we don't know what they have been doing on our doorstep for the last thirty years, including the civil war they have been waging for the last eight years. Our own stupidity allows us to endure the war cries of our political leaders on the side of these criminals.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | PARIS (FRANCE) | 27 OCTOBER 2022
DEUTSCH ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΆ ESPAÑOL FRANÇAIS ITALIANO NEDERLANDS NORSK PORTUGUÊS РУССКИЙ


Slava Stetsko, the widow of Nazi Prime Minister Yaroslav Stetsko, opened the 1998 and 2002 sessions of the Verkhovna Rada.
When war comes, governments always believe that they must boost the morale of their people by showering them with propaganda. The stakes are so high, life and death, that debates get tougher and extremist positions become popular. This is exactly what we are witnessing, or rather how we are being transformed. In this game, the ideas defended by some and others have nothing to do with their ideological presuppositions, but with their proximity to power

In the etymological sense, propaganda is just the art of convincing, of propagating ideas. But in modern times, it is an art that aims at reconstructing reality in order to denigrate the adversary and magnify one's own troops.

Contrary to a widespread idea in the West, it was not the Nazis or the Soviets who invented it, but the British and the Americans during the First World War [1].

Today, Nato coordinates efforts in this area from its Strategic Communication Centre in Riga, Latvia [2]. It identifies the points on which it wants to act and organizes international programs to carry them out.

For example, NATO has identified Israel as a weak point: while former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a personal friend of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, his successor, Naftali Bennett, recognized the validity of Russian policy. He even advised the return of Crimea and Donbass and, above all, the denazification of Ukraine. The current Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, is more hesitant. He does not want to support the fundamentalist nationalists who massacred a million Jews shortly before and during the Second World War. But he also wants to stay on good terms with the West.

To bring Israel back into line, Nato is trying to persuade Tel Aviv that in case of a Russian victory, Israel would lose its position in the Middle East [3]. To this end, it is spreading the lie that Iran is Russia's military ally as widely as possible. The international press is constantly claiming that Russian drones are Iranian on the battlefield, and soon the medium-range missiles will be too. Yet Moscow knows how to manufacture these weapons and has never asked Tehran for them. Russia and Iran have repeatedly denied these allegations. But Western politicians, relying on the press and not on mere reflection, have already imposed sanctions on Iranian arms dealers. Soon Yair Lapid, son of the president of the Yad Vashem memorial, will be surrounded and forced to side with the criminals.

The British, on the other hand, traditionally excel in activating networked media and enlisting artists. MI6 relies on a group of 150 news agencies working within the PR Network [4]. They convince all these companies to take up their imputations and slogans.


The founder of Ukrainian integral nationalism, Dmytro Dontsov, had an obsessive hatred of Jews and Gypsies. During the World War, he left Ukraine to become a director of the Reinhard Heydrich Institute. It was this institution, based in Czechoslovakia, that was responsible for planning the extermination of all Jews and Gypsies at the Wannsee Conference. He ended his days peacefully in the United States.
They are the ones who successively convinced you that President Vladimir Putin was dying, then that he had gone mad, or that he was facing strong opposition at home and that he would be overthrown by a coup. Their work continues today with cross interviews with soldiers in Ukraine. You hear Ukrainian soldiers say they are nationalists and Russian soldiers say they are afraid but must defend Russia. You hear that Ukrainians are not Nazis and that Russians, living under a dictatorship, are forced to fight. In reality, most Ukrainian soldiers are not "nationalists" in the sense of defenders of their homeland, but "integral nationalists" in the sense of two poets, Charles Maurras and Dmytro Dontsov [5]. This is not the same thing at all.

It was only in 1925 that Pope Pius XI condemned "integral nationalism". At that time Dontsov had already written his Націоналізм (Nationalism) (1921). Maurras and Dontsov defined the nation as a tradition and thought their nationalism against others (Maurras against Germans and Dontsov against Russians). Both abhorred the French Revolution, the principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity and denounced Jews and Freemasons relentlessly. They consider religion as useful for the organization of society, but seem agnostic. These positions lead Maurras to become a Petainist and Dontsov a Hitlerian. The latter will sink into a varègue (Swedish Viking) mystical delirium. The next pope, Pius XII, repealed the condemnation of his predecessor, just before the war broke out. At the liberation, Maurras was condemned for intelligence with the enemy (he was a Germanophobe), but Dontsov was recuperated by the Anglo-Saxon secret services and exiled to Canada, then to the USA.

As for the Russian soldiers we see interviewed on our TV news, they do not tell us that they are forced to fight, but, unlike the integral nationalists, they are not fanatics. For them, war, even when defending their own, is always a horror. It is because we are repeatedly told that Russia is a dictatorship that we understand something else. We do not accept that Russia is a democracy because, for us, a democracy cannot be an authoritarian regime. Yet, for example, the Second French Republic (1848-1852) was both a democracy and an authoritarian regime.

We are easy to convince because we know nothing about Ukrainian history and culture. The most we know is that Novorossia was ruled by a French aristocrat, Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis de Richelieu, a personal friend of Tsar Alexander I. He continued the work of the Prince of Ukraine. He continued the work of Prince Grigori Potemkin who wanted to build this region on the model of Athens and Rome, which explains why today Novorossia is still of Russian culture (and not Ukrainian) without ever having known serfdom.


The Bibi Yar memorial in Kiev. 33 771 Jewish Ukrainians were shot in two days, on September 29 and 30, 1941, by the Ukrainian Waffen SS and Reinhard Heydrich's Einsatzgruppen. This massacre was celebrated as a victory by the mainstream nationalists. Today, the Ukrainian government has named the main avenue leading to it after the integral nationalist Stepan Bandera, "in honor" of the greatest criminal in its history.

A few months after his election, on May 6, 1995, Leonid Kushma, the second president of the new Ukraine, went to Munich to meet with Slava Stetsko, the widow of the Ukrainian Nazi prime minister. He agreed to the introduction of an explicit reference to Nazism in the new constitution: "preserving the genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people is the responsibility of the state" (sic).
We in Ukraine are unaware of the atrocities of the interwar period and the Second World War, and have a vague idea of the violence of the USSR. We ignore that the theoretician Dontsov and his disciple Stepan Bandera did not hesitate to massacre all those who did not correspond to their "integral nationalism", first the Jews in this Khazar country, then the Russians and the Communists, the anarchists of Nestor Makhno, and many others. The "integral nationalists", who had become admirers of the Führer and deeply racist, returned to the forefront with the dissolution of the USSR [6]. On May 6, 1995, President Leonid Kuchma went to Munich (to the CIA offices) to meet with the leader of the integral nationalists, Steva Stesko, the widow of the Nazi prime minister. She had just been elected to the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament), but had not been able to take her seat because she had been stripped of her Ukrainian citizenship. A month later, Ukraine adopted its current constitution, which states in its Article 16 that "preserving the genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people is the responsibility of the state" (sic). Subsequently, the same Steva Stetsko twice opened the session of the Rada, concluding her speeches with the war cry of the integral nationalists: "Glory to Ukraine!

Modern Ukraine has patiently built its Nazi regime. After proclaiming the "genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people", it enacted various laws. The first one grants the benefit of human rights by the state only to Ukrainians, not to foreigners. The second defines who the majority of Ukrainians are, and the third (enacted by President Zelensky) who the minorities are. The trick is that no law speaks about Russian speakers. Therefore, by default, the courts do not recognize them the benefit of human rights.

Since 2014, a civil war has pitted the integral nationalists against the Russian-speaking populations, mainly those of Crimea and Donbass. 20,000 deaths later, the Russian Federation, applying its "responsibility to protect," launched a special military operation to implement Security Council Resolution 2202 (Minsk Agreements) and end the martyrdom of Russian speakers.

President Zelensky and his friend, Benjamin Netanyahu. The latter is now making support for Ukraine his main election campaign theme. Netanyahu is the son of the private secretary of Zeev Jabotinsky, a Ukrainian figure who allied with the mainstream nationalists against the Bolsheviks. He tried to put the Ukrainian Jewish community at the service of these anti-Semites, but was unanimously denounced within the World Zionist Organization, of which he became a director.

Nato propaganda tells us about the real sufferings of the Ukrainians, but it does not mention the eight years of torture, murder and massacres that preceded it. It talks about "our common values with Ukrainian democracy", but what values do we share with the integral nationalists and where is the democracy in Ukraine?

We do not have to choose between one or the other, but only to defend peace and therefore the Minsk Agreements and resolution 2202.

War drives us crazy. There is a reversal of values. The most extremist triumph. Some of our ministers speak of "stifling Russia" (sic). We do not see that we are supporting the very ideas we believe we are fighting against.

Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Roger Lagassé
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"He who Created me, it is He who Guides me"

almarh0m

 Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists ?
by Thierry Meyssan
Who knows the history of the Ukrainian "integral nationalists", "Nazis" according to the terminology of the Kremlin? It begins during the First World War, continues during the Second, the Cold War and continues today in modern Ukraine. Many documents have been destroyed and modern Ukraine forbids under penalty of imprisonment to mention their crimes. The fact remains that these people massacred at least four million of their compatriots and conceived the architecture of the Final Solution, that is, the murder of millions of people because of their real or supposed membership in the Jewish or Gypsy communities of Europe.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | PARIS (FRANCE) | 15 NOVEMBER 2022
DEUTSCH ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΆ FRANÇAIS ITALIANO NEDERLANDS


Like most Western political analysts and commentators, I was unaware of the existence of Ukrainian neo-Nazis until 2014. When the president-elect was overthrown, I was living in Syria at the time and thought they were violent groupings that had burst onto the public scene to assist pro-European elements. However, since the Russian military intervention, I have gradually discovered a lot of documents and information on this political movement which, in 2021, represented one third of the Ukrainian armed forces. This article presents a synthesis of it.

At the very beginning of this story, that is to say before the First World War, Ukraine was a large plain which had always been tossed between German and Russian influences. At the time, it was not an independent state, but a province of the tsarist empire. It was populated by Germans, Bulgarians, Greeks, Poles, Rumanians, Russians, Czechs, Tatars and a very large Jewish minority supposedly descended from the ancient Khazar people.

A young poet, Dmytro Dontsov, was fascinated by the avant-garde artistic movements, believing that they would help his country to escape from its social backwardness. Since the Tsarist Empire had been immobile since the death of Catherine the Great, while the German Empire was the scientific center of the West, Dontsov chose Berlin over Moscow.

When the Great War broke out, he became an agent of the German secret service. He emigrated to Switzerland, where he published, on behalf of his masters, the Bulletin of the Nationalities of Russia in several languages, calling for the uprising of the ethnic minorities of the Tsarist Empire in order to bring about its defeat. This model was chosen by the Western secret services to organize the "Forum of Free Peoples of Russia" this summer in Prague [1].

In 1917, the Bolshevik revolution turned the tables. Dontsov's friends supported the Russian revolution, but he remained pro-German. In the anarchy that followed, Ukraine was divided de facto by three different regimes: the nationalists of Symon Petliura (who imposed themselves in the area held today by the Zelensky administration), the anarchists of Nestor Makhno (who organized themselves in Novorosssia, the land that had been developed by Prince Potemkin and that had never known serfdom), and the Bolsheviks (especially in the Donbass). The war cry of Petliura's followers was "Death to the Jews and Bolsheviks". They perpetrated numerous murderous pogroms.

Dmytro Dontsov returned to Ukraine before the German defeat and became the protégé of Symon Petliura. He participated briefly in the Paris peace conference but, for some unknown reason, did not remain in his delegation. In Ukraine, he helped Petliura to ally with Poland to crush the anarchists and Bolsheviks. After the capture of Kiev by the Bolsheviks, Petliura and Dontsov negotiated the Treaty of Warsaw (April 22, 1920): the Polish army undertook to push back the Bolsheviks and to liberate Ukraine in exchange for Galicia and Volhynia (exactly as the Zelensky administration is negotiating today the entry of Poland into the war against the same lands [2]). This new war was a fiasco.


To strengthen his side, Petliura secretly negotiated with the founder of the Jewish battalions in the British army (the "Jewish Legion") and now administrator of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), Vladimir Jabotinsky. In September 1921, the two men agreed to unite against the Bolsheviks in exchange for Petliura's commitment to forbid his troops to continue their pogroms. The Jewish Legion was to become the "Jewish Gendarmerie. However, despite his efforts, Petliura did not succeed in pacifying his troops, especially as his close collaborator Dontsov was still encouraging the massacre of Jews. Finally, when the agreement was revealed, the World Zionist Organization rebelled against the Petliura regime. On January 17, 1923, the WZO set up a commission to investigate Jabotinsky's activities. Jabotinsky refused to come and explain himself and resigned from his position.


Petliura fled to Poland and then to France, where he was murdered by a Jewish anarchist from Bessarabia (now Transnistria). During the trial, the latter assumed his crime and pleaded to have avenged the hundreds of thousands of Jews murdered by the troops of Petliura and Dontsov. The trial had a great impact. The court acquitted the murderer. The League against Pogroms, later Licra (International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism), was founded on this occasion.
Not only were the nationalists defeated, but the anarchists as well. Everywhere the Bolsheviks triumphed and chose, not without debate, to join the Soviet Union.

Dmytro Dontsov published literary magazines that fascinated the youth. He continued to promote a Central Europe dominated by Germany and became closer to Nazism as it rose. He soon referred to his doctrine as Ukrainian "integral nationalism ". In doing so, he referred to the French poet, Charles Maurras. Indeed, the logic of both men was initially identical: they sought in their own culture the means to affirm a modern nationalism. However, Maurras was a Germanophobe, while Dontsov was a Germanophile. The expression "integral nationalism" is still claimed today by Dontov's followers, who, after the fall of the Third Reich, are careful to refute the term "Nazism" with which the Russians describe it, not without reason.

According to him, "Ukrainian nationalism" is characterized by:
"the affirmation of the will to live, power, expansion" (it promotes "The right of strong races to organize peoples and nations to strengthen the existing culture and civilization")
"the desire to fight and the awareness of its extremity" (he praises the "creative violence of the initiative minority").

Its qualities are:
"fanaticism" ;
" immorality".

Finally, turning his back on his past, Dontsov became an unconditional admirer of the Führer, Adolf Hitler. His followers had founded, in 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) around Colonel Yevhen Konovalets. Konovalets called Dontsov "the spiritual dictator of the youth of Galicia". However, a quarrel arose between Dontsov and another intellectual about his extremism that led to war against all, when Konovalets was suddenly murdered. The OUN (financed by the German secret service) then split in two. The "integral nationalists" reserved for themselves the OUN-B, named after Dontsov's favorite disciple, Stepan Bandera.

In 1932-33, the Bolshevik political commissars, who were mostly Jewish, levied a tax on crops, as in other regions of the Soviet Union. Combined with significant and unpredictable climatic hazards, this policy caused a huge famine in several regions of the USSR, including the Ukraine. It is known as "Holodomor". Contrary to what the nationalist historian Lev Dobrianski says, it was not a plan for the extermination of Ukrainians by the Russians, since other Soviet regions suffered, but an inadequate management of public resources in times of climate change. Lev Dobrianski's daughter, Paula Dobrianski, became one of President George W. Bush's aides. She led a merciless struggle to have historians who did not adhere to her father's propaganda excluded from Western universities [3].

In 1934, Bandera organized, as a member of the Nazi secret service and head of the OUN-B, the assassination of the Polish Minister of the Interior, Bronisław Pieracki.

From 1939, members of the OUN-B, forming a military organization, the UPA, were trained in Germany by the German army, and then still in Germany, but by their Japanese allies. Stepan Bandera offered Dmytro Dontsov to become the leader of their organization, but the intellectual refused, preferring to play the role of a leader rather than an operational commander.

The "integral nationalists" admired the invasion of Poland, in application of the German-Soviet pact. As Henry Kissinger, who could not be suspected of pro-Sovietism, demonstrated, it was not a question of the USSR annexing Poland, but of neutralizing part of it in order to prepare for the confrontation with the Reich. On the contrary, for Chancellor Hitler, it was a question of beginning the conquest of a "vital space" in Central Europe.

From the beginning of the Second World War, under the guidance of Dmytro Dontsov, the OUN-B fought alongside the Nazi armies against the Jews and the Soviets.

The collaboration between the Ukrainian "integral nationalists" and the Nazis continued with constant massacres of the majority of the Ukrainian population, accused of being Jews or Communists, until the "liberation" of Ukraine by the Third Reich in the summer of 1941 to the cry of "Slava Ukraїni!" (Glory to Ukraine), the war cry used today by the Zelensky administration and the US Democrats. At that time, the "integral nationalists" proclaimed "independence" from the Soviet Union in the presence of Nazi representatives and Greek Orthodox clergy, not in Kiev, but in Lviv, on the model of the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia and the Ustasha in Croatia. They formed a government under the leadership of Providnyk (guide) Stepan Bandera, whose friend Yaroslav Stetsko was Prime Minister. Their support in Ukraine is estimated at 1.5 million people. That is, the "integral nationalists" have always been in the minority.


The Nazis were divided between the Reich Commissioner for the Ukraine, Erich Koch, for whom the Ukrainians were subhuman, and the Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, for whom the "integral nationalists" were true allies. Finally, on July 5, 1941, Bandera was deported to Berlin and placed under Ehrenhaft (honorable captivity), i.e., under house arrest as a high-ranking official. However, after the members of OUN-B murdered the leaders of the rival faction, OUN-M, the Nazis sanctioned Stepan Bandera and his organization on September 13, 1941. 48 of their leaders were deported to a prison camp in Auschwitz (which was not yet an extermination camp, but only a prison). The OUN-B was reorganized under German command. At that time all Ukrainian nationalists took the following oath: "Faithful son of my Fatherland, I voluntarily join the ranks of the Ukrainian Liberation Army, and with joy I swear that I will faithfully fight Bolshevism for the honor of the people. This fight we are waging together with Germany and its allies against a common enemy. With loyalty and unconditional submission I believe in Adolf Hitler as the leader and supreme commander of the Liberation Army. At any time I am prepared to give my life for the truth.


The Nazis announced that many bodies had been discovered in the prisons, victims of "Bolshevik Jews. So the "integral nationalists" celebrated their "independence" by murdering more than 30,000 Jews and actively participating in the roundup of Jews from Kiev to Babi Yar, where 33,771 of them were shot in two days, on September 29 and 30, 1941, by the Einsatzgruppen of SS Reinhard Heydrich.

In this tumult, Dmytro Dontsov disappeared. In reality, he had gone to Prague and placed himself at the service of the architect of the Final Solution, Reinhard Heydrich, who had just been appointed vice-governor of Bohemia-Moravia. Heydrich organized the Wannsee Conference, which planned the "Final Solution of the Jewish and Gypsy Questions" [4]. He then created the Reinard Heydrich Institute in Prague to coordinate the systematic extermination of all these populations in Europe. The Ukrainian Dontsov, who now lived in Prague in great luxury, immediately became its administrator. He was one of the main architects of the largest massacre in history. Heydrich was assassinated in June 1942, but Dontsov retained his functions and privileges.


Stepan Bandera and his deputy Yaroslav Stetsko were placed under house arrest at the headquarters of the General Inspectorate of Concentration Camps in Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen (30 km from Berlin). They wrote letters to their supporters and to the Reich leadership in complete freedom and were not deprived of anything. In September 1944, as the Reich army retreated and Bandera's followers began to rebel against it, the two leaders were released by the Nazis and reinstated in their previous positions. Bandera and Stetsko resumed the armed struggle, among the Nazis, against the Jews and the Bolsheviks.

But it was already too late. The Reich collapsed. The Anglo-Saxons got Dontsov, Bandera and Stetsko. The theorist of integral nationalism was transferred to Canada, while the two practitioners of mass murder were transferred to Germany. MI6 and the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) rewrote their biographies, making their Nazi involvement and responsibility for the "Final Solution" disappear.


Bandera and Stetsko were installed in Munich to organize the Anglo-Saxon stay-behind networks in the Soviet Union. From 1950 onwards, they had an important radio station, Radio Free Europe, which they shared with the Muslim Brotherhood of Said Ramadan (the father of Tariq Ramadan). The radio station was sponsored by the National Committee for a Free Europe, a CIA offshoot of which its director Alan Dulles was a member, as well as future president Dwight Eisenhower, newspaper magnate Henry Luce and film director Cecil B. DeMilles. Psychological warfare specialist and future patron of the Straussians, Charles D. Jackson, was chairman.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, for his part, after living in Palestine, took refuge in New York. He was joined by Benzion Netanyahu (the father of the current Israeli Prime Minister). The two men wrote the doctrinal texts of "revisionist Zionism" and the Jewish Encyclopedia.

Bandera and Stetsko moved around a lot. They organized sabotage operations throughout the Soviet Union, particularly in the Ukraine, and parachuted leaflets. For this purpose, they created the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), which brought together their Central European counterparts [5]. The British double agent, Kim Philby, informed the Soviets in advance about the actions of the Bandera. Bandera met with Dontsov in Canada and asked him to take the lead in the struggle. Once again, the intellectual refused, preferring to devote himself to his writing. He then drifted into a mystical delirium inspired by Viking myths. He announced the final battle of the Ukrainian knights against the Russian dragon. As for Bandera, he allied himself with the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek whom he met in 1958. But he was assassinated the following year by the KGB in Munich.



Yaroslav Stetsko continued the struggle through Radio Free Europe and the ABN. He went to the United States to testify before Senator Joseph MacCarthy's Commission on Un-American Activities. In 1967, he and Chiang Kai-shek founded the World Anti-Communist League [6]. The League included many pro-US dictators from around the world and two schools of torture, in Panama and Taiwan. Klaus Barbie, who assassinated Jean Moulin in France and Che Guevara in Bolivia, was a member. In 1983, Stetsko was received at the White House by President Ronald Reagan and participated, along with Vice President George Bush Sr., in Lev Dobrianski's "Captive Nations" (i.e., peoples occupied by the Soviets) ceremonies. He finally died in 1986.

But the story does not end there. His wife, Slava Stetsko, took over the leadership of these organizations. She too travelled the world to support any fight against the "communists", or rather, if we refer to Dontsov's writings, against the Russians and the Chinese. When the USSR was dissolved, Mrs. Stetsko simply changed the title of the League to the World League for Freedom and Democracy, a name it still has today. She then devoted herself to regaining a foothold in Ukraine.

Slava Stetsko ran in the first elections of the independent Ukraine in 1994. She was elected to the Verkhovna Rada, but having been stripped of her nationality by the Soviets, she could not sit. However, she brought the Ukrainian president, Leonid Kuchma, to the CIA offices in Munich and dictated parts of the new constitution to him. Even today, Article 16 of the new constitution states: "Preserving the genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people is the responsibility of the state. Thus, Nazi racial discrimination is still proclaimed by modern Ukraine as in the worst moments of World War II.


Slava Stetsko was re-elected at the next two sessions. She solemnly presided over the opening sessions on March 19, 1998 and on May 14, 2002.

In 2000, Lev Dobriansky organized a large symposium in Washington with many Ukrainian officials. He invited Straussian Paul Wolfowitz (a former collaborator of Charles D. Jackson). During this meeting, the "integral nationalists" put themselves at the service of the Straussians to destroy Russia [7].


On May 8, 2007, in Ternopol, on the initiative of the CIA, the "integral nationalists" of the Ukrainian People's Self-Defense and Islamists created an anti-Russian "Anti-Imperialist Front" under the joint chairmanship of the Emir of Itchkeria, Dokka Umarov, and Dmytro Yarosh (the current special adviser to the head of the Ukrainian army). The meeting was attended by organizations from Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and Russia, including Islamist separatists from Crimea, Adygea, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachaevo-Cherkessia, Ossetia and Chechnya. Dokka Umarov, who was unable to go there due to international sanctions, had his contribution read out. In retrospect, the Crimean Tatars are unable to explain their presence at this meeting, if not their past service to the CIA against the Soviets.

The pro-US president, Viktor Yushchenko, created a Dmytro Dontsov Institute, following the "Orange Revolution". Yushchenko is an example of Anglo-Saxon whitewashing. He has always claimed to have no connection with the mainstream nationalists, but his father, Andrei, was a guard in a Nazi extermination camp [8]. The Dmytro Dontsov Institute would be closed in 2010, and then reopened after the 2014 coup.

President Viktor Yushchenko, shortly before the end of his term of office, elevated the criminal against humanity Stepan Bandera to the title of "Hero of the Nation".

In 2011, the mainstream nationalists succeeded in passing a law banning the commemoration of the end of World War II because it was won by the Soviets and lost by the Banderists. But President Viktor Yanukovych refused to enact it. Enraged, the "integral nationalists" attacked the procession of Red Army veterans, beating up old men. Two years later, the cities of Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk abolished the Victory Day ceremonies and banned all manifestations of joy.

In 2014, Ukrainians in Crimea and Donbass refused to recognize the coup government. Crimea, which had declared itself independent before the rest of Ukraine, reaffirmed its independence a second time and joined the Russian Federation. The Donbass sought a compromise. The "Ukrainian nationalists," led by President Petro Poroshenko, stopped providing public services there and bombed its population. In eight years, they murdered at least 16,000 of their fellow citizens in general indifference.

It was also from the 2014 coup that the full nationalist militias were incorporated into the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In their internal regulations, they enjoin each fighter to read the works of Dmytro Dontsov, including his master book, Націоналізм (Nationalism).

In April 2015, the Verkhovna Rada declared members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) "independence fighters." The law was enacted, in December 2018, by President Poroshenko. Former Waffen SS were retrospectively entitled to a pension and all sorts of benefits. The same law criminalized any claim that OUN militants and UPA fighters collaborated with the Nazis and practiced ethnic cleansing of Jews and Poles. Published in Ukraine, this article would send me to jail for writing it and you for reading it.


On July 1, 2021, President Volodymyr Zelenski enacted the Law "On Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine" which places them under the protection of Human Rights. By default, citizens of Russian origin can no longer invoke them in court.

In February 2022, the "full nationalist" militias, which made up one-third of the country's armed forces, planned a coordinated invasion of Crimea and the Donbass. They were stopped by the Russian military operation to implement UN Security Council Resolution 2202 to end the suffering of the people of Donbass.


In March 2022, Israeli Prime Minister Nafatali Bennett, breaking with the "revisionist Zionism" of Benjamin Netanyahu (the son of Jabotinsky's secretary), suggested to President Volodymyr Zelensky that he should agree with Russian demands and denazify his country [8]. Emboldened by this unexpected support, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dared to mention the case of the Jewish Ukrainian president, saying: "The Jewish people in their wisdom have said that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews. Every family has its black sheep, as they say." This was too much for the Israelis, who always worry when someone tries to divide them. His counterpart at the time, Yair Lapid, recalled that the Jews themselves never organized the Holocaust of which they were victims. Caught between its conscience and its alliances, the Hebrew state repeated its support for Ukraine, but refused to send it any weapons. In the end, the General Staff decided and the Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz, closed any possibility of support to the successors of the mass murderers of Jews.

Ukrainians are the only nationalists who are not fighting for their people or their land, but for one idea: to annihilate the Jews and the Russians.

Main sources:
Ukrainian Nationalism in the age of extremes. An intllectual biography of Dmytro Dontsov, Trevor Erlacher, Harvard University Press (2021).
Stepan Bandera, The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist. Fascism, Genocide, and Cult, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Ibidem (2014).

Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Roger Lagassé
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"He who Created me, it is He who Guides me"

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Caitlin Johnstone: Ukraine as Weapons Testing Site
November 18, 2022
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In addition to advancing longstanding U.S. geo-strategic aims, it seems the proxy war in Ukraine is also being used to sharpen the imperial war machine's claws for a looming hot war with China and/or Russia.


U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin welcoming Ukraine President Volodymr Zelensky to a meeting at the Pentagon, Aug. 31, 2021. (DoD, Jack Sanders)

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

Listen to a reading of this article.

A surprisingly frank article in The New York Times, "Western Allies Look to Ukraine as a Testing Ground for Weapons" describes how the imperial war machine is capitalising on the U.S. proxy war to test its weapons for future use.

"Ukraine has become a testing ground for state-of-the-art weapons and information systems, and new ways to use them, that Western political officials and military commanders predict could shape warfare for generations to come," writes Lara Jakes.

Jakes says "new advances in technology and training in Ukraine are being closely monitored for the ways they are changing the face of the fight."

These new technological advancements include an information system known as Delta, as well as "remote-controlled boats, anti-drone weapons known as SkyWipers and an updated version of an air-defense system built in Germany that the German military itself has yet to use."

A former Lithuanian president is quoted as saying, "We're learning in Ukraine how to fight, and we're learning how to use our NATO equipment," adding, "It is shameful for me because Ukrainians are paying with their lives for these exercises for us."


At some point The New York Times article was re-headlined, going from "Western Allies Look to Ukraine as a Testing Ground for Weapons" to the slightly less obvious "For Western Weapons, the Ukraine War Is a Beta Test."

[Related: Caitlin Johnstone: Blame the Managers of Empire]

News that the West is using Ukraine to test weapons systems for future wars aligns with recent comments by the commander of the U.S. nuclear arsenal that the proxy war is a test run for a much bigger conflict that's on its way.

"This Ukraine crisis that we're in right now, this is just the warmup,"  U.S. STRATCOM head Charles Richard told a naval conference earlier this month. "The big one is coming. And it isn't going to be very long before we're going to get tested in ways that we haven't been tested [in] a long time."

So in addition to being used to advance longstanding U.S. geo-strategic objectives, apparently this war is also being used to sharpen the imperial war machine's claws for a looming hot war with China and/or Russia. The U.S. would certainly have an advantage in military test runs over the years in such a conflict.

As an aside, it's probably worth noting that all the testing of new Western weapons technology would likely explain reports from Ukrainian astronomers that the skies over Kiev have been "swarming with unidentified flying objects (UFOs)."

The aforementioned New York Times article quotes Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov as saying that the weapons testing he's seen has convinced him that "the wars of the future will be about maximum drones and minimal humans."


One of the many reasons the U.S. and its complex network of allies, partners and assets are always fighting so many wars is because new weapons technology needs to be tested in battle before it can be deemed effective.

What this means in practice is using human bodies as test subjects, the way a scientist uses laboratory rats or guinea pigs.

The U.S.-centralized empire pretends to care about Ukrainian lives, but in reality it only cares about them to the extent that a researcher cares about his lab rats. And for exactly the same reason.

What could be more sinister than that? Well, the agendas for which they are running those tests as preparation, I suppose.

Caitlin Johnstone's work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes.  For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she's trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.

This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com and re-published with permission.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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Tags: armed drones Caitlin Johnstone Charles Richard STRATCOM The New York Times
"He who Created me, it is He who Guides me"

almarh0m

Zelensky trapped by Moscow and Washington
by Thierry Meyssan
The evolution of the balance of power on the Ukrainian battlefield and the tragic episode of the G20 in Bali mark a reversal of the situation. If the West still believes that it will soon defeat Moscow, the United States has already begun secret negotiations with Russia. They are preparing to let go of Ukraine and to put the blame solely on Volodymyr Zelensky. As in Afghanistan, the awakening will be brutal.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | PARIS (FRANCE) | 22 NOVEMBER 2022
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The Ukrainian president addressing the G20.
Iwas talking to an open-minded leader of the European Parliament in Brussels ten days ago, and I listened to him tell me that the Ukrainian conflict was certainly complex, but that the most obvious thing was that Russia had invaded that country. I replied by observing that international law obliged Germany, France and Russia to implement resolution 2202, which Moscow alone had done. I continued by reminding him of the responsibility to protect the populations in case of failure of their own government. He cut me off and asked me: "If my government complains about the fate of its citizens in Russia and attacks that country, will you find that normal? Yes," I said, "if you have a Security Council resolution. Do you have one? » Disconcerted, he changed the subject. Three times I asked him if we could talk about the Ukrainian "integral nationalists". Three times he refused. We parted courteously.

The question of the responsibility to protect should have been nuanced. This principle does not allow for a war, but for a police operation, conducted with military means. That is why the Kremlin is careful not to refer to this conflict as a "war", but as a "special military operation". Both terms refer to the same facts, but "special military operation" limits the conflict. As soon as his troops entered Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin made it clear that he did not intend to annex this territory, but only to liberate the people persecuted by the Ukrainian "Nazis". In a previous long article, I pointed out that, if the expression "Nazis" is correct in the historical sense, it does not correspond to the way these people call themselves. They use the expression: "integral nationalists". Let's remember that Ukraine is the only state in the world with an explicitly racist constitution.

The fact that international law gives Russia the upper hand does not mean that it has a blank check. Everyone must criticize the way it applies the law. Westerners still find Russia "Asian", "savage" and "brutal", even though they themselves have been far more destructive on many occasions.

REVERSAL OF THE SITUATION
Now that the Russian and Western points of view have been clarified, it is clear that several events have prompted a Western shift.

We are entering winter, a harsh season in Central Europe. The Russian population is aware, since the Napoleonic invasion, that it cannot defend such a large country. Therefore, they learned to use the vastness of their territory and the seasons to defeat their attackers. With winter, the front is frozen for several months. Everyone can see that, contrary to the discourse that the Russians are defeated, the Russian army has liberated the Donbass and part of Novorussia.

Before winter fell, the Kremlin withdrew the liberated population living north of the Dnieper, and then withdrew its army, abandoning the part of Kershon located on the north bank of the Dnieper. For the first time, a natural border, the Dnieper River, marks a border between the territories controlled by Kiev and those controlled by Moscow. However, during the interwar period, it was the absence of natural borders that brought down all successive powers in Ukraine. Now Russia is in a position to hold on.

Since the beginning of the conflict, Ukraine has been able to count on unlimited aid from the United States and its allies. However, the mid-term elections in the USA have removed the majority of the Biden administration in the House of Representatives. From now on, Washington's support will be limited. Similarly, the European Union is also finding its limits. Its populations do not understand the rising cost of energy, the closure of certain factories and the impossibility of heating normally.

Finally, in some circles of power, after admiring the talents of the actor Volodymyr Zelensky as a communicator, they begin to wonder about the rumors about his sudden fortune. In eight months of war, he became a billionaire. The imputation is unverifiable, but the scandal of the Pandora Papers (2021), makes it credible. Is it necessary to bleed to the four veins not to see the donations arrive in Ukraine, but disappear in offshore companies?

The Anglo-Saxons (i.e. London and Washington) wanted to turn the G20 in Bali into an anti-Russian summit. They had first lobbied for Moscow to be excluded from the Group, as they had succeeded in doing at the G8. But if Russia had been absent, China, by far the world's largest exporter, would not have come. So it was Frenchman Emmanuel Macron who was responsible for convincing the other guests to sign a bloody declaration against Russia. For two days, Western news agencies assured that the matter was in the bag. But in the end, the final statement, while summarizing the Western point of view, closed the debate with these words: "There were other points of view and different assessments of the situation and the sanctions. Recognizing that the G20 is not the forum to resolve security issues, we know that security issues can have significant consequences for the global economy. » In other words, for the first time, the West has failed to impose its worldview on the rest of the planet.

THE TRAP
Worse: the West imposed a video intervention by Volodymyr Zelensky as they had done on August 24 and September 27 at the United Nations Security Council. However, while Russia had tried in vain to oppose it in September in New York, it accepted it in November in Bali. At the Security Council, France, which held the presidency, violated the rules of procedure to give the floor to a head of state by video. On the contrary, at the G20, Indonesia held an absolutely neutral position and was not likely to accept giving him the floor without Russian authorization. This was obviously a trap. President Zelensky, who does not know how these bodies work, fell into it.

After having caricatured Moscow's action, he called for its exclusion from the... "G19". G19 ". In other words, the little Ukrainian gave an order on behalf of the Anglo-Saxons to the heads of state, prime ministers and foreign ministers of the 20 largest world powers and was not heard. In reality, the dispute between these leaders was not about Ukraine, but about whether or not to submit to the American world order. All the Latin American, African and four Asian participants said that this domination was over; that the world is now multipolar.

The Westerners must have felt the ground shake under their feet. They were not the only ones. Volodymyr Zelensky saw, for the first time, that his sponsors, until now absolute masters of the world, were letting him down without hesitation in order to maintain their position for a while longer.
It is likely that Washington was in league with Moscow. The United States realizes that things are turning against it on a global scale. It will have no hesitation in blaming the Ukrainian regime. William Burns, director of the CIA, has already met Sergei Narychkin, the director of the SVR, in Turkey. These meetings follow those of Jake Sullivan, the US National Security Advisor, with several Russian officials. However, Washington has nothing to negotiate in Ukraine. Two months before the conflict in Ukraine, I explained that the core of the problem had nothing to do with this country, nor with NATO. It is essentially about the end of the unipolar world.

So it is not surprising that a few days after the G20 slap in the face, Volodymyr Zelensky contradicted his American sponsors for the first time in public. He accused Russia of having launched a missile at Poland and maintained his words when the Pentagon indicated that he was wrong, it was a Ukrainian counter-missile. The idea, for him. was to continue to act in line with the Treaty of Warsaw, concluded on April 22, 1920, by Symon Petlioura's integral nationalists with the regime of Piłsudski; to push Poland to go to war against Russia. This was the second time Washington rang a bell in his ears. He did not hear it.

Probably, these contradictions will no longer manifest themselves in public. Western positions will soften. Ukraine has been warned: in the coming months it will have to negotiate with Russia. President Zelensky can plan his escape now, because his bruised compatriots will not forgive him for deceiving them.

Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Roger Lagassé
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"He who Created me, it is He who Guides me"

almarh0m

SCOTT RITTER: The Back Channel
November 22, 2022
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Communications between the U.S. and Russia are essential for preventing an out-of-control crisis and a conduit exists for ongoing, high-level dialogue. But what is it really for?


U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, center, with NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoana, left, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, October 2021. (NATO)

By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News

According to The Wall Street Journal, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has been involved with a secretive "back channel" line of communication with top Russian officials as part of an effort by the U.S. and Russia to prevent the war in Ukraine from escalating into a nuclear conflict.

Among the officials named as representing the Russian conduit for this "back channel" are Yuri Ushakov, a senior foreign policy adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia's security council.

In comments made shortly after the WSJ article appeared, Sullivan confirmed that he has been working to keep communication channels between the United States and Russia open despite the war in Ukraine, adding that it was "in the interests" of the White House to maintain contact with the Kremlin.

Speaking at the Economic Club of New York, Sullivan didn't say that he himself has been engaged in the talks reported by the WSJ, only that the U.S. has "channels to communicate with the Russian Federation at senior levels."

Sullivan has publicly availed himself of such channels in the past, conducting telephone calls with both Ushakov and Patrushev about European security and Ukraine on Dec. 20, 2021, and on March 16. Sullivan alluded to the existence of a "back channel" with Moscow in September when speculation was rampant about the possibility of Russia using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine.

Sullivan publicly declared then that the Biden administration had "communicated directly, privately at very high levels to the Kremlin that any use of nuclear weapons will be met with catastrophic consequences for Russia."

Sullivan has a history of being personally involved in sensitive "back channel" contacts. In July 2012, Sullivan, then director of policy planning at the State Department, flew to Muscat, Oman, for secret meetings with Iran about a possible nuclear deal.

In March 2013, while serving as the national security adviser to then-Vice President Joe Biden, Sullivan was a member of a small delegation of U.S. diplomats who flew to Oman for a series of secret meetings with Iranian officials which culminated in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA — better known as the Iran nuclear deal.

William Burns

But the key to who might be taking the lead in the current Russian "back channel" lies with the man who headed up the March 2013 delegation in Oman — William Burns, a career diplomat who at the time served as deputy secretary of state and is now director of Central Intelligence.

His name is synonymous with "back channel."

It was Burns who, based on these secret Oman meetings, hammered out the initial draft of the JCPOA. The background story, described by Burns in his autobiography, aptly titled The Back Channel, is what made the long-time diplomat an attractive choice for Biden to head the C.I.A.

When the Biden administration wanted to discuss the escalating crisis surrounding Ukraine in the fall of 2021, it was Burns who was dispatched. In addition to meeting with Patrushev, Ushakov and other senior Russian security officials (including his Russian counterpart, Sergei Naryshkin, the director of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR) Burns had a conversation with Putin by telephone.

This kind of high-level access is what makes Burns the ideal conduit for a substantive "back channel" between the U.S. and Russia.

In July, Burns flew to Armenia in a visit that was not only unannounced, but also the first ever by a C.I.A. director to that nation. Prior to Burns' arrival, teams of U.S. and Russian security officials arrived in Yerevan where they engaged in confidential discussions about the Ukrainian conflict — in particular on measures that could be taken to avoid escalation leading to nuclear war.

Burns' visit appeared timed to these discussions, as did the visit of the head of the Russian SVR, Sergei Naryshkin, three days later. According to Russian media sources, Naryshkin was cryptic about the purpose of his visit. "My visit to Yerevan is definitely not connected with the arrival of my American colleague. But I don't exclude that his visit is on the contrary connected with mine." And it looks like the Burns-Naryshkin "back channel" is still active as just last week they met in Ankara, Turkey.

'Only About Nukes'


William Burns speaking in a session on the "new global narrative for Europe" in January 2020, while he was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (World Economic Forum, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Significantly, senior Biden administration officials quickly quashed any notion that Burns was engaged in "back channel" diplomacy regarding an end to the Ukraine conflict. The Washington Post reported:

"'He is not conducting negotiations of any kind. He is not discussing settlement of the war in Ukraine,' the NSC spokesman stressed. Instead, said the spokesman, 'we have channels to communicate with Russia on managing risk, especially nuclear risk and risks to strategic stability.'"

The U.S. mainstream media had been enthralled with the narrative of a Sullivan-run back channel seeking an early end to the conflict.


U.S. President Joe Biden with his national security team, August 2021. From left: C.I.A. Director William Burns, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Vice President Kamala Harris, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is on right. (Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons)

Russia will not negotiate a settlement on U.S./Ukrainian terms, only Russian terms. Russian terms will be dictated by the arrival of 220,000 fresh troops, organized into 10-15 divisions, starting next month.

Burns' job is only to keep what will be a major escalation of the war from spinning out of control – to keep it from going nuclear. That has been his job from the start.

Based upon the critical state of communications between the U.S. and Russia, and the necessity of maintaining a channel for ongoing dialogue, one can expect that the Ankara meeting between Burns and Naryshkin will not be the last between these two individuals.

Despite this, the notion of a separate Sullivan-run "back channel," one focused on finding a diplomatic off-ramp to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, lingers, promoted in part by the self-serving attitude of a Biden administration that believes itself somehow in control of events in Ukraine.

The conditions for a settlement on U.S. and Ukrainian terms — such as Russia withdrawing from the four territories it recently annexed as well as Crimea, paying reparations and turning over senior military and civilian leaders for prosecution as war criminals — have almost no chance of happening.


From left: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov; President Vladimir Putin; Alexander Bortnikow, director of Federal Secret Service; Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, December 2016. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Such thinking only underscores the hubris-laced fantasy world Washington has crafted for itself. The notion that Russia is somehow losing its military conflict with NATO-backed Ukraine, and its economic war with the West, is belied by the increasing desperation inherent in the growing calls for a negotiated settlement by senior U.S. officials.

General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has argued that now is the time for negotiations, given the fact that, according to him, there is neither a way for Russia to win nor for Ukraine to regain its lost territory.  "So, if there's a slowdown in the tactical fighting, that may become a window — possibly, it may not — for a political solution, or at least the beginnings, for talks to initiate a political solution," Milley said.

Milley's pro-negotiation stance, however, is opposed by many of America's European partners, whose position is perhaps best captured by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who on Nov. 14, while speaking to the heads of the foreign and defense ministries of the Netherlands, declared:

"The only way to achieve a solution to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is on the battlefield. Many conflicts are resolved at the negotiating table, but this is not the case, and Ukraine must win, so we will support it for as long as it takes."

Russia, it appears, fully agrees — this conflict will be settled on the battlefield. At the moment, Russia is shutting down the Ukrainian economy and Ukrainian society by destroying large sectors of Ukraine's electrical power grid, throwing much of Ukraine into a cold darkness just as winter sets in.

Russia has stabilized the battlefield, withdrawing from untenable terrain while pouring 87,000 recently mobilized troops into the front lines to solidify its defenses. Meanwhile, it continues to undertake offensive operations in the Donbass, destroying Ukrainian forces while capturing territory that is part of the Donetsk.

Ukrainian casualties have been horrific, and overwhelmingly lop-sided — in the month of October alone, in the Kherson front, Ukraine lost some 12,000 men, while Russian casualties were around 1,500, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. Ukraine has released no figures, but the U.S. says 100,000 soldiers on both sides have been killed or wounded in the conflict, a figure impossible to verify.

Over the horizon, in combat training centers throughout Russia, more than 200,000 additional troops are finalizing their combat training and preparations. Sometime next month they will begin arriving on the battlefield, organized into 10-15 division equivalents.

When they arrive, Ukraine will have no response, having squandered its NATO-trained and equipped forces on pyrrhic political victories. The photo opportunities on the city square in Kherson will fade into memory once Russia unleashes this new force.

And there's nothing either NATO or Ukraine can do to stop them.

While Russia engaged in negotiations with Ukraine at the beginning of the war and offered a deal to Kiev, which was stopped by the West, the facts on the ground have since changed.

Anyone attempting to breathe life into the concept of a Sullivan-driven "back channel" designed to bring Russia to the negotiating table must first discount Russia's improving military posture. Russia simply will not be drawn to a negotiation designed to negate the advantages it has been accruing on the battlefield and beyond.

The Sullivan "back channel" is little more than the collective West negotiating with itself.

Russia's negotiation will be on the battlefield.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

"He who Created me, it is He who Guides me"

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It would be wise to only post the referenced links instead of copy and paste to flood the site.
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