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

[almarh0m]

 

 
















 
Comment PolicyDIANA JOHNSTONE: For Washington, War Never Ends
March 16, 2022
Save
The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the rearmament of Germany confirmed that for the United States, the war in Europe was not entirely over. It still isn't.


(Pixabay)

By Diana Johnstone
in Paris
Special to Consortium News



It goes on and on. The "war to end war" of 1914-1918 led to the war of 1939-1945, known as World War II. And that one has never ended either, mainly because for Washington, it was the Good War, the war that made The American Century: why not the American Millenium?

The conflict in Ukraine may be the spark that sets off what we already call World War III.

But this is not a new war. It is the same old war, an extension of the one we call World War II, which was not the same war for all those who took part.

The Russian war and the American war were very, very different.

Russia's World War II

For Russians, the war was an experience of massive suffering, grief and destruction. The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was utterly ruthless, propelled by a racist ideology of contempt for the Slavs and hatred of "Jewish Bolsheviks." An estimated 27 million died, about two thirds of them civilians. Despite overwhelming losses and suffering, the Red Army succeeded in turning the Nazi tide of conquest that had subdued most of Europe.

This gigantic struggle to drive the German invaders from their soil is known to Russians as the Great Patriotic War, nourishing a national pride that helped console the people for all they had been through. But whatever the pride in victory, the horrors of the war inspired a genuine desire for peace.

America's World War II

America's World War II (like World War I) happened somewhere else. That is a very big difference. The war enabled the United States to emerge as the richest and most powerful nation on earth. Americans were taught never to compromise, neither to prevent war ("Munich") nor to end one ("unconditional surrender" was the American way). Righteous intransigence was the fitting attitude of Good in its battle against Evil.

The war economy brought the U.S. out of the depression. Military Keynesianism emerged as the key to prosperity. The Military-Industrial-Complex was born. To continue providing Pentagon contracts to every congressional constituency and guaranteed profits to Wall Street investors, it needed a new enemy. The Communist scare – the very same scare that had contributed to creating fascism – did the trick.

The Cold War: World War II Continued

In short, after 1945, for Russia, World War II was over. For the United States, it was not. What we call the Cold War was its voluntary continuation by leaders in Washington. It was perpetuated by the theory that Russia's defensive "Iron Curtain" constituted a military threat to the rest of Europe.

At the end of the war, the main security concern of Stalin was to prevent such an invasion from ever happening again. Contrary to Western interpretations, Moscow's ongoing control of Eastern European countries it had occupied on its way to victory in Berlin was not inspired so much by communist ideology as by determination to create a buffer zone as an obstacle to repeated invasion from the West.

Stalin respected the Yalta lines between East and West and declined to support the life and death struggle of Greek communists. Moscow cautioned leaders of large Western European Communist Parties to eschew revolution and play by the rules of bourgeois democracy. The Soviet occupation could be brutal but was resolutely defensive. Soviet sponsorship of peace movements was perfectly genuine.

The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the rearmament of Germany confirmed that for the United States, the war in Europe was not entirely over. The lackadaisical U.S. "de-Nazification" of its sector of occupied Germany was accompanied by an organized brain drain of Germans who could be useful to the United States in its rearmament and espionage (from Wernher von Braun to Reinhard Gehlen).


West Germany joined NATO in 1955, which led to the formation of the rival Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. (Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

America's Ideological Victory

Throughout the Cold War, the United States devoted its science and industry to building a gigantic arsenal of deadly weapons, which wreaked devastation without bringing U.S. victory in Korea or Vietnam. But military defeat did not cancel America's ideological victory.

The greatest triumph of American imperialism has been in spreading its self-justifying images and ideology, primarily in Europe. The dominance of the American entertainment industry has spread its particular blend of self-indulgence and moral dualism around the world, especially among youth. Hollywood convinced the West that World War II was won essentially by the U.S. forces and their allies in the Normandy invasion.

America sold itself as the final force for Good as well as the only fun place to live. Russians were drab and sinister.

In the Soviet Union itself, many people were not immune to the attractions of American self-glorification. Some apparently even thought that the Cold War was all a big misunderstanding, and that if we are very nice and friendly, the West will be nice and friendly too. Mikhail Gorbachev was susceptible to this optimism.

Former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock recounts that the desire to liberate Russia from the perceived burden of the Soviet Union was widespread within the Russian elite in the 1980s. It was the leadership rather than the masses who accomplished the self-destruction of the Soviet Union, leaving Russia as the successor state, with the nuclear weapons and U.N. veto of the U.S.S.R. under the alcohol-soaked presidency of Boris Yeltsin – and overwhelming U.S. influence during the 1990s.

The New NATO

Russia's modernization over the past three centuries has been marked by controversy between "Westernizers" – those who see Russia's progress in emulation of the more advanced West – and "Slavophiles," who consider that the nation's material backwardness is compensated by some sort of spiritual superiority, perhaps based in the simple democracy of the traditional village.

In Russia, Marxism was a Westernizing concept. But official Marxism did not erase admiration for the "capitalist" West and in particular for America. Gorbachev dreamed of "our common European home" living some sort of social democracy. In the 1990s, Russia asked only to be part of the West.

What happened next proved that the whole "communist scare" justifying the Cold War was false. A pretext. A fake designed to perpetuate military Keynesianism and America's special war to maintain its own economic and ideological hegemony.

There was no longer any Soviet Union. There was no more Soviet communism. There was no Soviet bloc, no Warsaw Pact. NATO had no more reason to exist.

But in 1999, NATO celebrated its 50th anniversary by bombing Yugoslavia and thereby transforming itself from a defensive to an aggressive military alliance. Yugoslavia had been non-aligned, belonging neither to NATO nor the Warsaw Pact. It threatened no other country. Without authorization from the Security Council or justification for self-defense, the NATO aggression violated international law.

At the very same time, in violation of unwritten but fervent diplomatic promises to Russian leaders, NATO welcomed Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic as new members. Five years later, in 2004, NATO took in Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic Republics. Meanwhile, NATO members were being dragged into war in Afghanistan, the first and only "defense of a NATO member" – namely, the United States.

Understanding Putin – Or Not



Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin had been chosen by Yeltsin as his successor, partly no doubt because as a former KGB officer in East Germany he had some knowledge and understanding of the West. Putin pulled Russia out of the shambles caused by Yeltsin's acceptance of American-designed economic shock treatment.

Putin put a stop to the most egregious rip-offs, incurring the wrath of dispossessed oligarchs who used their troubles with the law to convince the West that they were victims of persecution (example: the ridiculous Magnitsky Act).

On Feb. 11, 2007, the Russian Westernizer Putin went to a center of Western power, the Munich Security Conference, and asked to be understood by the West. It is easy to understand, if one wants to. Putin challenged the "unipolar world" being imposed by the United States and emphasized Russia's desire to "interact with responsible and independent partners with whom we could work together in constructing a fair and democratic world order that would ensure security and prosperity not only for a select few, but for all."

The reaction of the leading Western partners was indignation, rejection, and a 15-year media campaign portraying Putin as some sort of demonic creature.

Indeed, since that speech there have been no limits to Western media's insults directed at Putin and Russia. And in this scornful treatment we see the two versions of World War II. In 2014, world leaders gathered in Normandy to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings by U.S. and British forces.

In fact, that 1944 invasion ran into difficulties, even though German forces were mainly concentrated on the Eastern front, where they were losing the war to the Red Army. Moscow launched a special operation precisely to draw German forces away from the Normandy front. Even so, Allied progress could not beat the Red Army to Berlin.

However, thanks to Hollywood, many in the West consider D-Day to be the decisive operation of World War II. To honor the event, Vladimir Putin was there and so was German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Then, in the following year, world leaders were invited to a lavish victory parade held in Moscow celebrating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Leaders of the United States, Britain and Germany chose not to participate.

This was consistent with an endless series of Western gestures of disdain for Russia and its decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany (it destroyed 80 percent of the Wehrmacht.) On Sept. 19, 2019, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on "the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe" which jointly accused the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany of unleashing World War II.

Vladimir Putin responded to this gratuitous affront in long article on "The Lessons of World War II" published in English in The National Interest on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the end of the war. Putin answered with a careful analysis of the causes of the war and its profound effect on the lives of the people trapped in the murderous 872-day Nazi siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), including his own parents whose two-year-old son was one of the 800,000 who perished.


The siege of Leningrad, 1942. (Av Boris Kudojarov/RIA Novosti arkiv. Lisens: CC BY SA 3.0)

Clearly, Putin was deeply offended by continual Western refusal to grasp the meaning of the war in Russia. "Desecrating and insulting the memory is mean," Putin wrote. "Meanness can be deliberate, hypocritical and pretty much intentional as in the situation when declarations commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War mention all participants in the anti-Hitler coalition except for the Soviet Union."

And all this time, NATO continued to expand eastward, more and more openly targeting Russia in its massive war exercises on its land and sea borders.

The U.S. Seizure of Ukraine

The encirclement of Russia took a qualitative leap ahead with the 2014 seizure of Ukraine by the United States. Western media recounted this complex event as a popular uprising, but popular uprisings can be taken over by forces with their own aims, and this one was. The elected president Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown by violence a day after he had agreed to early elections in an accord with European leaders.

Billions of U.S. dollars and murderous shootings by extreme right militants enforced a regime change openly directed by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland ("F___ the EU") producing a leadership in Kiev largely selected in Washington, and eager to join NATO.

By the end of the year, the government of "democratic Ukraine" was largely in the hands of U.S.-approved foreigners. The new minister of finance was a U.S. citizen of Ukrainian origin, Natalia Jaresko, who had worked for the State Department before going into private business. The minister of economy was a Lithuanian, Aïvaras Arbomavitchous, a former basketball champion. The ministry of health was taken by a former Georgian minister of health and labor, Sandro Kvitachvili.

Later, disgraced former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili was called in to take charge of the troubled port of Odessa. And Vice President Joe Biden was directly involved in reshuffling the Kiev cabinet as his son, Hunter Biden, was granted a profitable position with the Ukrainian gas company Barisma.

The vehemently anti-Russian thrust of this regime change aroused resistance in the southeastern parts of the country, largely inhabited by ethnic Russians. Eight days after more than 40 protesters were burned alive in Odessa, the provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk moved to secede in resistance to the coup.



The U.S.-installed regime in Kiev then launched a war against the provinces that continued for eight year, killing thousands of civilians.

And a referendum then returned Crimea to Russia. The peaceful return of Crimea was obviously vital to preserve Russia's main naval base at Sebastopol from threatened NATO takeover. And since the population of Crimea had never approved the peninsula's transfer to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954, the return was accomplished by a democratic vote, without bloodshed. This was in stark contrast to the detachment of the province of Kosovo from Serbia, accomplished in 1999 by weeks of NATO bombing.

But to the United States and most of the West, what was a humanitarian action in Kosovo was an unforgivable aggression in Crimea.

The Oval Office Back Door to NATO

Russia kept warning that NATO enlargement must not encompass Ukraine. Western leaders vacillated between asserting Ukraine's "right" to join whatever alliance it chose and saying it would not happen right away. It was always possible that Ukraine's membership would be vetoed by a NATO member, perhaps France or even Germany.

But meanwhile, on Sept. 1, 2021, Ukraine was adopted by the White House as Washington's special geo-strategic pet. NATO membership was reduced to a belated formality. A Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership issued by the White House announced that "Ukraine's success is central to the global struggle between democracy and autocracy" – Washington's current self-justifying ideological dualism, replacing the Free World versus Communism.

It went on to spell out a permanent casus belli against Russia:

"In the 21st century, nations cannot be allowed to redraw borders by force. Russia violated this ground rule in Ukraine. Sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances. The United States stands with Ukraine and will continue to work to hold Russia accountable for its aggression. America's support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity is unwavering."

The Statement also clearly described Kiev's war against Donbass as a "Russian aggression." And it made this uncompromising assertion: "The United States does not and will never recognize Russia's purported annexation of Crimea..." (my emphasis). This is followed by promises to strengthen Ukraine's military capacities, clearly in view of recovery of Donbass and Crimea.

Since 2014, the United States and Britain have surreptitiously transformed Ukraine into a NATO auxiliary, psychologically and militarily turned against Russia. However this looks to us, to Russian leaders this looked increasingly like nothing other than a buildup for an all-out military assault on Russia, Operation Barbarossa all over again. Many of us who tried to "understand Putin" failed to foresee the Russian invasion for the simple reason that we did not believe it to be in the Russian interest. We still don't. But they saw the conflict as inevitable and chose the moment.

Ambiguous Echoes


Putin explaining his reasons for going to war. (AP screenshot from YouTube)

Putin justified Russia's February 2022 "operation" in Ukraine as necessary to stop genocide in Lugansk and Donetsk. This echoed the U.S.-promoted R2P, Responsibility to Protect doctrine, notably the U.S./NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, allegedly to prevent "genocide" in Kosovo. In reality, the situation, both legal and especially human, is vastly more dire in Donbass than it ever was in Kosovo. However, in the West, any attempt at comparison of Donbass with Kosovo is denounced as "false equivalence" or what-about-ism.

But the Kosovo war is much more than an analogy with the Russian invasion of Donbass: it is a cause.

Above all, the Kosovo war made it clear that NATO was no longer a defensive alliance. Rather it had become an offensive force, under U.S. command, that could authorize itself to bomb, invade or destroy any country it chose. The pretext could always be invented: a danger of genocide, a violation of human rights, a leader threatening to "kill his own people". Any dramatic lie would do. With NATO spreading its tentacles, nobody was safe. Libya provided a second example.

Putin's announced goal of "denazification" also might have been expected to ring a bell in the West. But if anything, it illustrates the fact that "Nazi" does not mean quite the same thing in East and West. In Western countries, Germany or the United States, "Nazi" has come to mean primarily anti-Semitic. Nazi racism applies to Jews, to Roma, perhaps to homosexuals.

But for the Ukrainian Nazis, racism applies to Russians. The racism of the Azov Battalion, which has been incorporated into Ukrainian security forces, armed and trained by the Americans and the British, echoes that of the Nazis: the Russians are a mixed race, partly "Asiatic" due to the Medieval Mongol conquest, whereas the Ukrainians are pure white Europeans.

Some of these fanatics proclaim that their mission is to destroy Russia. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, the United States supported Islamic fanatics, in Kosovo they supported gangsters. Who cares what they think if they fight on our side against the Slavs?


Conflicting War Aims

For Russian leaders, their military "operation" is intended to prevent the Western invasion they fear. They still want to negotiate Ukrainian neutrality. For the Americans, whose strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted of having lured the Russians into the Afghanistan trap (giving them "their Vietnam"), this is a psychological victory in their endless war. The Western world is united as never before in hating Putin. Propaganda and censorship surpass even World War levels. The Russians surely want this "operation" to end soon, as it is costly to them in many ways. The Americans rejected any effort to prevent it, did everything to provoke it, and will extract whatever advantages they can from its continuation.

Today Volodymyr Zelensky implored the U.S. Congress to give Ukraine more military aid. The aid will keep the war going. Anthony Blinken told NPR that the United States is responding by "denying Russia the technology it needs to modernize its country, to modernize key industries: defense and aerospace, its high-tech sector, energy exploration."

The American war aim is not to spare Ukraine, but to ruin Russia. That takes time.

The danger is that the Russians won't be able to end this war, and the Americans will do all they can to keep it going.

Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her other books include Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

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

[Abdun Nur]

Amity,

the view expressed is heavily coloured by statist belief and worship, without that mental dogma it is not correct, war is nothing to do with defence or invasion, it is always to do with control, the owners of humanity wish to impose a new level of slavery, labelled the new world order or great reset, and war is a powerful tool to achieve such ends, the corporations of Govern mental mafia controlling fiefdoms are subservient to these owners, which are represented by thirteen families of soulless jinn.

This is how they can invent a fictional virus pandemic globally, and how they can manufacture wars, poverty, and ignorance, the reality is four mega corporations control 96% of all corporations globally, which is why they can shut down production in enter regions and move it to other regions, they shut down industrial manufacturing of machinery in Europe and the USA and concentrated it in china which now produce the bulk of such production, with a far lower quality, much so poor it is not fit for purpose. they moved the micro electronics manufacturing base out of the USA to Israel.

[almarh0m]

Ukraine : the great manipulation
by Thierry Meyssan
While revelations are multiplying about the exactions committed by Ukrainian banditry over the past eight years, Westerners continue to perceive only the suffering of the Ukrainian civilian population. They are unaware of the root causes of the war, as well as the events that led the Kremlin to unleash it. No matter, the banditry is losing and the great powers are preparing for peace.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | PARIS (FRANCE) | 22 MARCH 2022
ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΆ ESPAÑOL FRANÇAIS ITALIANO NEDERLANDS


President Putin exposes himself. He gathered 80,000 people in a stadium to celebrate the reunification with Crimea and the fight against Ukrainian neo-Nazis. Meanwhile, in Kiev, no crowds take to the streets to support President Zelensky, who is in hiding.
This article is a follow-up to :
1. "Russia wants to force the US to respect the UN Charter," January 4, 2022.
2. "Washington pursues RAND plan in Kazakhstan, then Transnistria," January 11, 2022.
3. "Washington refuses to hear Russia and China," January 18, 2022.
4. "Washington and London, deafened", February 1, 2022.
5. "Washington and London try to preserve their domination over Europe", February 8, 2022.
6. "Two interpretations of the Ukrainian affair", 16 February 2022.
7. "Washington sounds the alarm, while its allies withdraw", 22 February 2022.
8. "Russia declares war on the Straussians", by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 5 March 2022.
9. "A gang of drug addicts and neo-nazis", 5 March 2022.
10 "Israel stunned by Ukrainian neo-Nazis", 8 March 2022.

Military operations continue in Ukraine with two radically different narratives depending on whether one listens to the Western or Russian media. These two versions diverge not only in describing the war, but more importantly in describing the goals of the war.

In the West, the public is convinced that the Russian army has enormous logistical problems and cannot fuel its tanks. Its planes strike indiscriminately at military and civilian targets, indiscriminately destroying entire cities. Dictator Putin will not be done until he crushes Kiev and kills elected President Zelensky. In his eyes, Ukraine is guilty of having chosen democracy in 2014 instead of reconstituting the Soviet Union. Until then, he sows death and desolation on a civilian population, while his soldiers are killed on a large scale.

On the contrary, in Russia, it is believed that the fighting is limited to specific areas, the Donbass, the coast of the Sea of Azov and military targets everywhere else. Certainly, there have been some casualties, but not a massacre. One observes with amazement the support that the former allies of the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War) give to the Banderists, the Ukrainian neo-Nazis. We wait until they are all neutralized so that peace can return.

In the background, the West has launched an economic and financial war against Russia. Many Western companies are leaving the country and are immediately replaced by others from countries not involved in this war. For example, McDonald's restaurants will be replaced by the Turkish chain Chitik Chicken, while the United Arab Emirates welcome the oligarchs driven out of Europe. China and the Eurasian Economic Community are planning to set up an economic and financial system parallel to the Bretton Woods system. In short, the world is being split in two.

Who is telling the truth?


The Russian secret services are convinced that President Volodymyr Zelensky has fled from Kiev and that he makes his video interventions from a studio. They scrutinize all his messages to locate where he is hiding.
THE WAR ITSELF
According to observers of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), that is, the intergovernmental forum created by the Helsinki Accords (1973-75), the front of Donbass was stable for several months, when the bombing resumed from Wednesday, February 16, 2022 to reach their peak on Friday 18 (more than 1,400 explosions heard).The local governments of Donestk and Lugansk then withdrew more than 100,000 people to protect them from this deluge of fire.

On the evening of the 18th, the annual meeting of Nato elites, the "Munich Security Conference", began. One of the most prominent guests was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. On the 19th, he took the floor and declared that his country had ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons against Russia. On the 20th, the Duma was in turmoil in Moscow and voted a motion asking President Putin to recognize the two Donbass republics as independent, which he did in a hurry on the evening of the 21st. There were not even any flags of the two new nations in the Kremlin.

On the 24th, the Russian military operation began with a massive bombardment of anti-aircraft systems, then of the arms factories and barracks of the Banderists (Ukrainian neo-Nazis). The Russian military strategy was improvised, as was the diplomatic recognition of the Donbass republics. The troops deployed were already exhausted by the maneuvers they had just carried out in Belarus.

The White House and the Western press, on the other hand, ignoring the war in Donbass and the statements of President Zelenski, claimed that all this had been planned for a long time and that the Russian troops had been positioned in advance. The dictator Putin, not supporting the choice of Ukrainians for democracy, forced them to reintegrate his Empire as Leonid Brezhnev had forced the Czechoslovakians into line in 1968. This reading of events caused panic among all the former members of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union (who forgot that Brezhnev was not Russian, but Ukrainian).

Since then, applying the technique developed by Jamie Shea during the Kosovo war, Nato has been writing a new edifying story about Russia's crimes every day. It ranges from the irresponsible bombing of a Ukrainian nuclear power plant on the Russian border to the touching anecdote of a young child who reaches freedom alone by crossing Europe to Berlin. All of this is ridiculous and appalling, but widely reported without reflection or verification by the Western media.


Joel Lion, then ambassador in Kiev, warned against the banditry. He is now working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Israel.
THE DIPLOMATIC WAR
With things going badly for the Ukrainian army and its Banderist (or "neo-Nazi" in Russian terminology) supporters, President Zelenski asked the Chinese embassy in Kiev to send a request for negotiations to the Kremlin on the second day of the conflict. The United States initially objected, but then allowed it to happen. During the contacts, France and Germany took initiatives before being replaced by Turkey and Israel. This is quite normal. Indeed, France and Germany failed in their responsibilities by allowing Kiev to massacre 13,000 to 22,000 people in violation of the Minsk agreements of which they were the guarantors. While Turkey supported the Ukrainian Tatars without taking any action in Ukraine, and Israel suddenly became aware that the Bandarist (i.e. "neo-Nazi") danger that its ambassador in Kiev was denouncing was real.

These negotiations are going well, despite the murder by Ukrainian banditry of a delegate from their own country, the banker Denis Kireev, guilty in their eyes of having claimed that Ukrainians and Russians were Slavic brothers. Despite the blunder of the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, who thought it was clever to remind them that France is a nuclear power, causing Russia to go on nuclear alert.

These negotiations could end in a way that is difficult to imagine: Ukraine, which had included 102,000 banditry troops in its territorial defense forces, could be disarmed and placed under the protection of the United States and the United Kingdom (i.e., in practice, Nato). This is the only way to comply with the treaties, including the Istanbul (1999) and Astana (2010) declarations. Ukraine has the right to choose its allies, but not to receive foreign weapons in its country. It can therefore sign defense agreements, but not be placed in an integrated command. This is a very Gaullian position: Charles De Gaulle kept France's signature to the North Atlantic Treaty, but withdrew the French army from the integrated command of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) and drove the US soldiers out of French soil.

Russia should permanently occupy, or even annex, the coast of the Sea of Azov (including Mariupol) in order to join Crimea to the Donbass. In addition, it should occupy, or even annex, the North Crimean Canal, which supplies drinking water to the Crimean peninsula. Finally, it could occupy or even annex the Black Sea coast (including Odessa) in order to join Crimea to Transnistria. The Hungarian minority, also a victim of the Banderists who closed their schools, could be attached to Hungary. However, the best is the enemy of the good: Ukraine's loss of access to the sea could be a cause of future conflict.

The only thing that is certain is that Russia will continue its action until all the banditry has been neutralized and that Israel will support it in this, but not beyond. From this point of view, the meeting that President Putin called in Moscow "against the Nazis" is not a simple message of determination to his public opinion, it is already a victory cry. All monuments to Stepan Bandera and the Nazis must be destroyed. The other nations that supported the neo-Nazis, including Latvia, should take it for granted.


Sergey Glazyev is making a comeback. After playing a role in the privatization of Soviet public assets, he could build a new global financial system.
THE ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL WAR
This is where everything is at stake for the United States. In a few days, it has managed to make all its allies take unilateral measures (and therefore illegal under international law). But these measures, described as "sanctions" although without judgement, are not tenable in the medium term. They have already led to unbridled speculation on energy and an immediate rise in prices in Europe. The big European companies are leaving Russia with a heavy heart. They assure the Kremlin that they have no choice and hope to return as soon as possible.

President Vladimir Putin is putting forward the liberals who were accused not long ago of being sold out to foreigners. Former president Dmitry Medvedev is back in favor. The head of the Russian Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, who was chosen at the time of the romance with the West, was presented to the Duma to succeed herself, but now to work with other partners. Sergey Glazyev, whose name is associated with the privatizations of the Yelstin era, has been entrusted with the creation of a new economic and financial system to replace the one conceived by the Anglo-Saxons in 1944, Bretton Woods. All is forgiven as long as they guarantee the Chinese and the Eurasian Economic Community (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan) that they will not be statist.


Pope Francis has agreed to awaken the old demons of the crusades. On March 25, he will consecrate Ukraine and Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, according to the vows transmitted by the visionaries of Fatima during the Russian revolution.
THE IDEOLOGICAL WAR
The peace in Ukraine will not solve the Russian-US conflict opened since December 17, 2021. It will continue with other confrontations. For their part, the Straussians, who have used and abused religious arguments to attack Russia in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Afghanistan, Chechnya and the wider Middle East, intend to use them on a global scale.

Let us remember that the Straussian orientalist Bernard Lewis (former British intelligence officer, then member of the US National Security Council, then adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu) had devised a way to mobilize the Arabs, instead of the West, against the Russians. It was the strategy of the "clash of civilizations". He explained that in Afghanistan, Muslim believers had to fight against the atheistic Soviets. This vision was realized by Osama bin Laden's Arab-Afghans. The same strategy was used successfully in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Chechnya. In the first theater of operation, Nato relied on the Saudi army and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (as well as some elements of the Lebanese Hezbollah). A Staussian, Richard Perle, even became the diplomatic adviser to Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović, for whom Osama bin Laden was the military adviser. Later, during the Second Chechen War, the Straussians organized the alliance between Ukrainian Banderists and Chechen Islamists (Ternopol Congress, 2007), with logistical support from the Milli Görüş (then led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan). All fought side by side for the Islamic Emirate of Itchkeria (Chechnya). Ultimately, Bernard Lewis' strategy was popularized by his assistant, Samuel Huntington. However, he no longer presented it as a military plan, but as an inevitability that conveniently explained the attribution of the 9/11 attacks to Muslims in general.

Considering that nothing stops people who fight in the belief that they are serving God, the Straussians decided four years ago to reactivate the schism that separated the Catholics from the Orthodox in the 11th century. They first set out to split the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from the Moscow Patriarchate. They succeeded with the help of Turkey, which put pressure on the Patriarch of Constantinople. It is now a matter of unleashing passions by resurrecting the Fatima prophecies. In 1917, just after the Russian revolution, Portuguese visionaries had apparitions of the Virgin Mary. She entrusted them with various messages, one of which implicitly denounced the overthrow of the Tsar by divine right. Russia was presented as choosing evil and trying to spread it. Therefore, the National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, went to Rome, on the occasion of a meeting with China, in fact to convince Pope Francis. He succeeded.

A timetable was worked out. President Zelenski will address the French parliament, then President Biden will come to Europe to preside over an extraordinary NATO summit, and finally Pope Francis, fulfilling the prayer of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, will consecrate Ukraine and Russia to the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin. This montage may appear artificial, but its effect should be powerful. For many Catholics, fighting Russia will become a religious duty.

CONCLUSION
In the coming weeks, President Joe Biden will have to try his hand at a new speech. It will be to present the peace in Ukraine as a victory of wisdom. It does not matter that the Ukrainians gambled and lost. It doesn't matter that the Banditos are prisoners or dead. It does not matter that Ukraine loses its access to the sea. The Allies will be asked to increase their military spending and pay with their own money for all this carnage.

PS. My column of last week was illustrated by mistake with a photograph of Reinhard Gehlen instead of one of Stepan Bandera. We apologize for this.

Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Roger Lagassé

[almarh0m]

Information Warfare From Pre-History to Ukraine
April 18, 2022
Save
The Ukraine war is rife with information warfare from both sides, rising to a ubiquity and sophistication perhaps never seen before, says Joe Lauria.


Lions from Babylon's Ishtar Gate. (Jami430/Wikimedia Commons)

The following is an update of an address presented last Thursday to an academic conference organized by the University of Johannesburg's Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation (IPATC) and the Centre for Media, Democracy, Peace and Security (CMDPS) at the Rongo University in Kenya. The topic was "The Uses and Abuses of Information Warfare."

By Joe Lauria



The first thing to keep in mind is that information warfare is war. War by other means, but war nonetheless. The object is to win. To defeat your opponent. Information Warfare, as it is now called but known as propaganda earlier, has been around in rudimentary form from the beginning of humanity, evolving over millennia largely by the advancement of technology, political systems and the education of populations.

In pre-history, we can see a kind of information warfare in the culture of war, sending a message both to the domestic group and to the enemy. This took the form of beating drums, for instance, which remains with us today in the expression of "beating the drums of war." But also in dance, and chant, and decoration of the warrior. All this prepared the people for war and was intended to instill fear in the enemy.

With settlement in cities, and the development of writing – the start of so-called civilization – new technologies were used in what we call today information warfare. Architecture played an important role to inspire awe in both the ruler's subjects and in his enemies. The lions on the gates of Babylon, the pyramids at Zoser and Giza and the triumphal arches of Rome sent messages of grandeur and power to friend and foe alike.

During the European medieval crusades against Islam, Christian ideology and iconography, as well as anti-Muslim propaganda preached from the pulpit, played a major role in mobilizing the masses to support the wars of conquest in what would later be called the Middle East.


Detail of a miniature of Philip Augustus arriving in Palestine, after 1332 , before 1350. ( Mahiet, Master of the Cambrai Missal/British Library Royal MS/Wikimedia Commons)

The Printing Press & Information War

Modern information warfare in Europe began with the development of the printing press and increased literacy. Rulers no longer had to rely only on visual arts or public speeches to prepare populations for war and to send messages to the enemy. They would soon have pamphlets and then daily newspapers to shape information in a time of war.

This is still made possible by newspaper proprietors' closeness to governing circles with whom they shared common interests, commercial or political. Central to the history of war and information from the 19th century until today is how governments have used the supposedly independent press to conduct information warfare against foreign enemies and reluctant populations at home.

The press played a critical role building support at home for European colonialism abroad, in both glorifying empire and dehumanizing its victims. It still performs this function as the voices of victims of U.S. targeting, such as Iraqis, Iranians and Palestinians, are rarely heard in U.S. media. It makes it easier to go to war against a people whom Americans know next to nothing about.

Deception is an essential part of information war, mostly of the enemy, but also of the domestic populations if the motives for war are hidden; for instance America's claims that it goes to war to spread democracy rather than for economic and political dominance.

By the end of the 18th Century and in the 19th, intelligence gathering closer to the battlefield and its dissemination by governments through the media became an increasingly sophisticated part of information warfare. The Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz warned that "many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain [...] the reports turn out to be lies, exaggerations, errors, and so on. In short, most intelligence is false, and the effect of fear is to multiply lies and inaccuracies."

And yet these lies and exaggerations made their way into the newspapers and later radio, television and today on social media.

Radio and Cinema


Still from Reifensthal's Triumph des Willens.

A major breakthrough in information war technology was the wireless radio, which could broadcast the voice of human speakers over vast distances, way beyond outdoor gatherings in city squares to hear a ruler speak from a balcony. Nazi Germany made tremendous use of the radio in its information war to rally its own people and to demonize the Allies. It made English language propaganda broadcasts just as the Japanese did.

The Nazis and the Americans made the cinema a major part of their information war efforts as well, with the propaganda films of Leni Riefensthal in Germany, and with Hollywood, which produced particularly racist films that depicted the Japanese as subhuman, much as the Nazis in their films had portrayed Jews. Newsreels in cinemas spread each side's narrative of the war to their domestic audiences.

Television

Post-war conflicts, such as in Vietnam, made use of the more powerful tool of transmitting images through television in information war, though critical war reporting bringing the violence into American homes helped turn the U.S. population against the conflict. This was remedied, from American rulers' perspectives, by the embedding of the media into the military in the 1991 invasion of Iraq.

Presentation of the bombing of Baghdad, particularly on CNN, and televised briefings by Pentagon officials about the course of the war (including some of the earliest cockpit videos of bombs striking buildings) became a vital weapon in the information war against Iraq.

This was repeated with more sophistication in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, in which the U.S. media was used to whip the American population into a frenzy of war enthusiasm, surpassed only by the current mania over the war in Ukraine, fueled in large part now by social media.

Social Media

The Ukraine war is rife with information warfare from both sides, rising to a ubiquity and sophistication perhaps never seen before. Once again, technology plays a leading role. Beyond the powerful tool of television in information warfare, the internet, and particularly social media, has changed the game, though newspapers and TV still play their part.

In fact, the conflict in Ukraine may be said to be the first major war in the social media era. It has opened new opportunities to steer the public's perception of a war. Social media has introduced new forms of information warfare:  bots, trolls and troll farms. Social media has allowed citizens to enter the fray, many of whom have been turned into individual propagandists regurgitating official deceptions from either side of a war. Social media helps propaganda spread faster than radio, television or newspapers ever could.

The technology of facial recognition has teamed up with social media to form what The Washington Post reports as ""classic psychological warfare" in Ukraine. The newspaper said: "Ukrainian officials have run more than 8,600 facial recognition searches on dead or captured Russian soldiers in the 50 days since Moscow's invasion began, using the scans to identify bodies and contact hundreds of their families in what may be one of the most gruesome applications of the technology to date." The aim is to stir dissent against the war in Russia, the Post reported.

While the internet and social media began with great promise for the democratization of information, it has become an arena of government-by-proxy control, with the enforcement in the West of a single narrative of the Ukraine war. Twitter users who challenge the Western government and media telling of this war are being increasingly kicked off the service, while pro-Western messaging is amplified.

Total control of the narrative is being sought and the word "total" is in totalitarian.

Remember information warfare is war. It is about winning. It is not about being truthful or even factual. It is about convincing your domestic populations and damaging your enemy.

The Importance of Ignorance in Info Wars


(CNN screenshot)

There is fertile ground to wage information warfare in the U.S. on Ukraine. In all of America's wars, ignorance of foreign affairs plays a big role. Americans' lack of knowledge of other countries is compounded by the fact that the U.S. has never been invaded, except briefly by the British in 1812, and that the U.S. itself began as an invasion by Europeans in which they wiped out the indigenous population, and then later invaded Mexico and then Spanish possessions and frankly, have never stopped invading other nations.

The lack of knowledge of this history makes Americans vulnerable to propaganda cloaking American expansionism. In the context of the Ukraine war this ignorance plays an important part in the susceptibility of the American public to war propaganda.

Americans generally don't understand the psyche of Russia, which was invaded numerous times, particularly by the biggest European powers in the 19th and 20th centuries. They generally do not know, because they are never told, that the Soviet Union destroyed 80 percent of the Wehrmacht in WWII. They do not know what a revival of Nazism means to the Russian people or even that there is a revival of Nazism in Ukraine because it is whitewashed out of the corporate media story.

Under the guise of respectability and objectivity, the news media of the U.S. and Europe, which is closely aligned with their governments, has played an important role in the information war by deliberately omitting three crucial facts from their Ukraine war narrative, which completely changes the picture.

Media is leaving out the role of U.S. in the 2014 coup in Kiev; that an 8-year civil war has been fought in the eastern Donbass region against Russian-speaking Ukrainians who resisted the coup (Russia's help at the time was falsely portrayed as an invasion); and that Neo-Nazi fighters, now incorporated into the Ukrainian state military, played a big role in the coup, in the civil war and in the current fighting in the Russian invasion.

There is abundant evidence that the U.S. was behind the violent overthrow of Ukraine's democratically-elected president in 2014, especially a leaked phone conversation between a high-ranking State Dept. official and the American ambassador in Kiev discussing weeks before the coup who would make up the new government. There is more than abundant evidence about the influence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

There was also little emphasis in the media's information war on diplomatic moves that could have prevented the Russian invasion: namely the seven-year-old Minsk accords that could have ended the civil war if the U.S., Germany and France pressured Kiev to implement it.

Also deemphasized were the draft treaty proposals Russia presented to the U.S. and NATO last December that would have rolled back NATO troops from Eastern Europe (where NATO broke its promise not to expand) and removed missiles from there to create a new arrangement in Europe taking Russia's security interests into account. Russia threatened a "technical/military" response if the treaties were rejected. They were and Russia invaded.

By ignoring diplomacy, the U.S. appears to have wanted the invasion in order to unleash their information and economic war against Russia, with the aim of overthrowing Vladimir Putin, which Joe Biden admitted to. By leaving all this out of the Ukraine story, the West has portrayed Putin as simply a cartoon character madman.

Another term in vogue for information war is psychological operations, or psy-ops, such as the Ukrainian facial recognition offensive. The U.S. government through its compliant private media can be said to have performed a psy-op on the American people. The same can be said for Europe. Virtually none of the context for this war has been explained to them. How can it be with former intelligence and defense officials now working as TV analysts?

It has been the role of independent media, such as Consortium News, which I edit, that have tried to fill the gaps.

On the Battlefield


Former NATO Supreme Allied Supreme Commander Gen. Wesley Clark explains what Russia's objectives are in eastern Ukraine and how Ukraine can stop them. (CNN screenshot)

Where the information war is most intense is about events on the Ukrainian battlefield. It has become impossible to tell what is going on there. Two totally different stories emerge. In the Western view, Ukraine is winning the war. Russia says their operation is succeeding as planned.

Western governments and media, relying almost entirely on what Kiev and Washington are telling them, said for weeks that Russia was "stalled" on its way to conquer Kiev and then was defeated there and had to withdraw. Russia said it never had any intention of attacking Kiev and had parked its forces near the city as a diversionary tactic to keep Ukraine forces defending Kiev while Russia attacked Mariupol, seat of the Neo-Nazi Azov Regiment. Russia says it has now moved those forces to the Donbass.

Ukraine and the Western media blame high profile attacks in Mariupol on a theater and a maternity ward, a massacre outside Kiev and the bombing of a crowded railway station on Russia, while Russia says Ukraine was responsible for all those attacks. A U.N.-led investigation is needed. But we may never know the truth about these incidents.

Ukraine and the West say Russia is deliberately killing civilians, while Russia says it is deliberately avoiding targeting civilians and only returns fire to attacks coming from civilian areas. So far the U.N. reports as of Monday only 2,072 civilian deaths since the Feb. 24 invasion, seven weeks ago, ignoring a Ukrainian official who said last week that 10,000 people were killed in Mariupol alone. Of course both sides fire in a war but in the West it's only the Russians who are killing people.

Very rarely a dissenting voice comes through. A Pentagon official told Newsweek magazine that Russia had frankly not killed many civilians and could have killed many more if it wanted too.

The Neo-Nazi Azov Regiment has claimed that Russia had used chemical weapons in the war. Western media dutifully reported it, without mentioning Azov's Nazi affiliation. Now the story has gone away.

The Pentagon by the way has been acting as something of a brake against the U.S. info war.

The Pentagon said it couldn't determine who was responsible for the Bucha massacre, even though Biden said Russia was; it said it could not confirm the Azov's tale of chemical weapons use; and it firmly opposed a no-fly zone and sending Polish jets to Ukraine, even after Secretary of State Antony Blinken supported it — all to prevent a NATO-Russia war and the unimaginable consequences that could bring. The Pentagon is saving us. So far.

Russian Information War

It has become very difficult to understand how Russia is conducting its information warfare because the English language RT television network and Sputnik radio have been banned in the West. The Kremlin and other government websites have been hacked. These are key tactic's in the West's info war.

One can only get Russia's side of the story largely on Telegram, where one can read mundane statements from the Ministry of Defense on the exact number of Ukrainian military equipment destroyed, figures that must be taken with a grain of salt. At home Russia has also crushed dissent, shutting down media outlets, banning protests and even outlawing the word "war" to describe what Russia is doing.

This is where we are in the information landscape of the Ukrainian conflict.

Since the beginning of time victims of war are not only those who are killed but those who are lied to.

It's an old saying but it's still true: the first casualty of information warfare is the truth.

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 

7076
Tags: Ancient Rome Babylon Baghdad Carl von Clausewitz CNN Colonialism Crusades Islam Joe Lauria Middle Ages Pre-history Vietnam War

Post navigation← Labor & Oligarchy: Two Tales from Buffalo, NYChris Hedges: American Commissars →
Hide Comments

[almarh0m]

Chris Hedges: No Way Out But War
May 24, 2022
Save
Permanent war has cannibalized the country. It has created a social, political, and economic morass. Each new military debacle is another nail in the coffin of Pax Americana.


Original illustration for ScheerPost by Mr. Fish — "No Guts No Glory."

By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost.com

The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism.

No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old.

No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings.

No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.

The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the U.S. debt to $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year.

We spent more on the military, $813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions.

Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world's reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.

Bi-Partisan Rot

Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d'état of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of "national security." The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, is only the beginning.

Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion.

Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide.


Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressing U.S. Congress on March 16. (C-Span still)

There were three restraints to the avarice and bloodlust of the permanent war economy that no longer exist. The first was the old liberal wing of the Democratic Party, led by politicians such as Senator George McGovern, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator J. William Fulbright, who wrote The Pentagon Propaganda Machine.

The self-identified progressives, a pitiful minority, in Congress today, from Barbara Lee, who was the single vote in the House and the Senate opposing a broad, open-ended authorization allowing the president to wage war in Afghanistan or anywhere else, to Ilhan Omar now dutifully line up to fund the latest proxy war.

The second restraint was an independent media and academia, including journalists such as I.F Stone and Neil Sheehan along with scholars such as Seymour Melman, author of The Permanent War Economy and Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War.

Third, and perhaps most important, was an organized anti-war movement, led by religious leaders such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Phil and Dan Berrigan as well as groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They understood that unchecked militarism was a fatal disease.

None of these opposition forces, which did not reverse the permanent war economy but curbed its excesses, now exist. The two ruling parties have been bought by corporations, especially military contractors. The press is anemic and obsequious to the war industry.

Donate to Consortium News'

2022 Spring Fund Drive

Propagandists for permanent war, largely from right-wing think tanks lavishly funded by the war industry, along with former military and intelligence officials, are exclusively quoted or interviewed as military experts.

NBC's Meet the Press aired a segment May 13 where officials from Center for a New American Security (CNAS) simulated what a war with China over Taiwan might look like. The co-founder of CNAS, Michèle Flournoy, who appeared in the Meet the Press war games segment and was considered by Biden to run the Pentagon, wrote in 2020 in Foreign Affairs that the U.S. needs to develop "the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China's military vessels, submarines and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours."

The handful of anti-militarists and critics of empire from the left, such as Noam Chomsky, and the right, such as Ron Paul, have been declared persona non grata by a compliant media. The liberal class has retreated into boutique activism where issues of class, capitalism and militarism are jettisoned for "cancel culture," multiculturalism and identity politics.

Liberals are cheerleading the war in Ukraine. At least the inception of the war with Iraq saw them join significant street protests. Ukraine is embraced as the latest crusade for freedom and democracy against the new Hitler.

There is little hope, I fear, of rolling back or restraining the disasters being orchestrated on a national and global level.  The neoconservatives and liberal interventionists chant in unison for war. Biden has appointed these war mongers, whose attitude to nuclear war is terrifyingly cavalier, to run the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the State Department.

"Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide."

Since all we do is war, all proposed solutions are military. This military adventurism accelerates the decline, as the defeat in Vietnam and the squandering of $8 trillion in the futile wars in the Middle East illustrate. War and sanctions, it is believed, will cripple Russia, rich in gas and natural resources. War, or the threat of war, will curb the growing economic and military clout of China.

These are demented and dangerous fantasies, perpetrated by a ruling class that has severed itself from reality. No longer able to salvage their own society and economy, they seek to destroy those of their global competitors, especially Russia and China. Once the militarists cripple Russia, the plan goes, they will focus military aggression on the Indo-Pacific, dominating what Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, referring to the Pacific, called "the American Sea."

The Economic Interest


Tents for homeless people in Portland, Oregon, August 2020. (drburtoni, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

You cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The U.S., whose growth rate has fallen to below 2 percent, while China's growth rate is 8.1 percent, has turned to military aggression to bolster its sagging economy. If the U.S. can sever Russian gas supplies to Europe, it will force Europeans to buy from the United States.

U.S. firms, at the same time, would be happy to replace the Chinese Communist Party, even if they must do it through the threat of war, to open unfettered access to Chinese markets. War, if it did break out with China, would devastate the Chinese, American, and global economies, destroying free trade between countries as in World War I. But that doesn't mean it won't happen.

Washington is desperately trying to build military and economic alliances to ward off a rising China, whose economy is expected by 2028 to overtake that of the United States, according to the U.K.'s Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). The White House has said Biden's current visit to Asia is about sending a "powerful message" to Beijing and others about what the world could look like if democracies "stand together to shape the rules of the road." The Biden administration has invited South Korea and Japan to attend the NATO summit in Madrid.

But fewer and fewer nations, even among European allies, are willing to be dominated by the United States. Washington's veneer of democracy and supposed respect for human rights and civil liberties is so badly tarnished as to be irrecoverable. Its economic decline, with China's manufacturing 70 percent higher than that of the U.S., is irreversible.

War is a desperate Hail Mary, one employed by dying empires throughout history with catastrophic consequences. "It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable," Thucydides noted in The History of the Peloponnesian War.

Running Out of Troops


U.S. sailors on Feb. 2 participate in a gun shoot aboard amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli in the Pacific Ocean. (U.S. Navy, Maci Sternod)

A key component to the sustenance of the permanent war state was the creation of the All-Volunteer Force. Without conscripts, the burden of fighting wars falls to the poor, the working class, and military families. This All-Volunteer Force allows the children of the middle class, who led the Vietnam anti-war movement, to avoid service. It protects the military from internal revolts, carried out by troops during the Vietnam War, which jeopardized the cohesion of the armed forces.

The All-Volunteer Force, by limiting the pool of available troops, also makes the global ambitions of the militarists impossible. Desperate to maintain or increase troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military instituted the stop-loss policy that arbitrarily extended active-duty contracts. Its slang term was the backdoor draft.

The effort to bolster the number of troops by hiring private military contractors, as well, had a negligible effect. Increased troop levels would not have won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the tiny percentage of those willing to serve in the military (only 7 percent of the U.S. population are veterans) is an unacknowledged Achilles heel for the militarists.

"As a consequence, the problem of too much war and too few soldiers eludes serious scrutiny," writes historian and retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich in After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed.

"Expectations of technology bridging that gap provide an excuse to avoid asking the most fundamental questions: Does the United States possess the military wherewithal to oblige adversaries to endorse its claim of being history's indispensable nation? And if the answer is no, as the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq suggest, wouldn't it make sense for Washington to temper its ambitions accordingly?"

This question, as Bacevich points out, is "anathema." The military strategists work from the supposition that the coming wars won't look anything like past wars. They invest in imaginary theories of future wars that ignore the lessons of the past, ensuring more fiascos.

Self-Delusion


From left: U.S. President Joe Biden, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, meeting on June 14, 2021. (NATO, Flickr)

The political class is as self-deluded as the generals. It refuses to accept the emergence of a multi-polar world and the palpable decline of American power. It speaks in the outdated language of American exceptionalism and triumphalism, believing it has the right to impose its will as the leader of the "free world."

In his 1992 Defense Planning Guidance memorandum, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz argued that the U.S. must ensure no rival superpower again arises. The U.S. should project its military strength to dominate a unipolar world in perpetuity.

On Feb. 19, 1998, on NBC's Today Show, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave the Democratic version of this doctrine of unipolarity. "If we have to use force it is because we are Americans; we are the indispensable nation," she said. "We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future."

This demented vision of unrivaled U.S. global supremacy, not to mention unrivaled goodness and virtue, blinds the establishment Republicans and Democrats. The military strikes they casually used to assert the doctrine of unipolarity, especially in the Middle East, swiftly spawned jihadist terror and prolonged warfare. None of them saw it coming until the hijacked jets slammed into the World Trade Center twin towers. That they cling to this absurd hallucination is the triumph of hope over experience.

"Washington's veneer of democracy and supposed respect for human rights and civil liberties is so badly tarnished as to be irrecoverable."

There is a deep loathing among the public for these elitist Ivy League architects of American imperialism. Imperialism was tolerated when it was able to project power abroad and produce rising living standards at home. It was tolerated when it restrained itself to covert interventions in countries such as Iran, Guatemala, and Indonesia. It went off the rails in Vietnam.

The military defeats that followed accompanied a steady decline in living standards, wage stagnation, a crumbling infrastructure and eventually a series of economic policies and trade deals, orchestrated by the same ruling class, which de-industrialized and impoverished the country.

The establishment oligarchs, now united in the Democratic Party, distrust Donald Trump. He commits the heresy of questioning the sanctity of the American empire. Trump derided the invasion of Iraq as a "big, fat mistake." He promised "to keep us out of endless war." Trump was repeatedly questioned about his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Putin was "a killer," one interviewer told him. "There are a lot of killers," Trump retorted. "You think our country's so innocent?" Trump dared to speak a truth that was to be forever unspoken, the militarists had sold out the American people.

Noam Chomsky took some heat for pointing out, correctly, that Trump is the "one statesman" who has laid out a "sensible" proposition to resolve the Russia-Ukraine crisis. The proposed solution included "facilitating negotiations instead of undermining them and moving toward establishing some kind of accommodation in Europe ... in which there are no military alliances but just mutual accommodation."

Trump is too unfocused and mercurial to offer serious policy solutions. He did set a timetable to withdraw from Afghanistan, but he also ratcheted up the economic war against Venezuela and re-instituted crushing sanctions against Cuba and Iran, which the Obama administration had ended. He increased the military budget.

Trump apparently flirted with carrying out a missile strike on Mexico to "destroy the drug labs." But he acknowledges a distaste for imperial mismanagement that resonates with the public, one that has every right to loath the smug mandarins that plunge us into one war after another. Trump lies like he breathes. But so do they.

Steep Price to Pay


Waiting for her bottle. (Bradley Gordon, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

The 57 Republicans who refused to support the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, along with many of the 19 bills that included an earlier $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine, come out of the kooky conspiratorial world of Trump. They, like Trump, repeat this heresy. They too are attacked and censored.

But the longer Biden and the ruling class continue to pour resources into war at our expense, the more these proto-fascists, already set to wipe out Democratic gains in the House and the Senate this fall, will be ascendant. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during the debate on the aid package to Ukraine, which most members were not given time to closely examine, said: "$40 billion dollars but there's no baby formula for American mothers and babies."

"An unknown amount of money to the C.I.A. and Ukraine supplemental bill but there's no formula for American babies," she added. "Stop funding regime change and money laundering scams. A U.S. politician covers up their crimes in countries like Ukraine."

Democrat Jamie Raskin immediately attacked Greene for parroting the propaganda of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Greene, like Trump, spoke a truth that resonates with a beleaguered public. The opposition to permanent war should have come from the tiny progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which unfortunately sold out to the craven Democratic Party leadership to save their political careers. Greene is demented, but Raskin and the Democrats peddle their own brand of lunacy. We are going to pay a very steep price for this burlesque.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.  He is the host of show "The Chris Hedges Report."

Author's Note to Readers: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waiver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, "The Chris Hedges Report."

[almarh0m]

SCOTT RITTER: Phase Three in Ukraine
May 30, 2022
Save
No amount of western military aid has been able to prevent Russia from achieving its military objective of liberating the entire territories of both Lugansk and Donetsk as Phase Three begins.


Donbass (2015–2022).svg by Goran tek-en and RGloucester (Wikimedia Commons)

By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News



Russia's "Special Military Operation", which began on Feb. 24, is entering its fourth month. Despite stiffer than expected Ukrainian resistance (bolstered by billions of dollars of western military assistance and accurate, real-time battlefield intelligence by the U.S. and other NATO members) Russia is winning the war on the ground, and in a big way.

After more than ninety days of incessant Ukrainian propaganda, echoed mindlessly by a complicit western mainstream media that extolls the battlefield successes of the Ukrainian armed forces and the alleged incompetence of the Russian military, the Russians are on the cusp of achieving the stated goal of its operation, namely the liberation of the newly independent Donbass Republics of Lugansk and Donetsk, which Russia recognized two days before its invasion.

The Russian victory in Donbass comes after weeks of intensive combat that saw the Russian military shift gears away from what has become known as Phase One. That was the month-long opening act which, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin in his Feb. 24 address, was tasked with taking "actions throughout the territory of Ukraine with the implementation of measures for its demilitarization and denazification."

Putin said the purpose was to restore "the DPR [Donetsk People's Republic] and the LPR [Lugansk People's Republic] within the administrative borders of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, which is enshrined in the constitutions of the republics."

On March 25, the head of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Colonel General Sergei Rudskoy, declared that "the main objectives of the first phase of the operation have been achieved. The combat capabilities of Ukraine's Armed Forces have been significantly reduced, which allows us, once again, to concentrate our main efforts on achieving the main goal – the liberation of Donbass."

According to Rudskoy, Phase One's objectives were to cause:

"Such damage to military infrastructure, equipment, personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the results of which allow not only to shackle their forces and do not give them the opportunity to strengthen their grouping in the Donbass, but also will not allow them to do so until the Russian army completely liberates the territories of the DPR and LPR. All 24 formations of the Land Forces that existed before the start of the operation suffered significant losses. Ukraine has no organized reserves left."

Russia has completed Phase One despite the efforts of the U.S., NATO, and the E.U. to supply Ukraine with a significant amount of lethal military assistance, primarily in the form of light anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. "We consider it a vast mistake," Rudskoy concluded, "for Western countries to supply weapons to Kiev. This delays the conflict, increases the number of victims and will not be able to influence the outcome of the operation."

'Extremely Bad'

The history of the conflict so far has proven Rudskoy correct — no amount of western military aid has been able to prevent Russia from achieving its military objective of liberating the entire territories of both Lugansk and Donetsk.

As Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba admitted at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, "I don't want anyone to get the feeling that the war is more or less OK. The situation in Donbass is extremely bad."

Gone are the bold pronouncements made on the eve of the May 9 Victory Day celebrations, when Russia's many detractors proclaimed that Rudskoy's Phase Two offensive in the Donbas had stalled, and that Russia would, in short order, be compelled to transition from the attack to a defensive posture, signally the beginning of a retreat that the Ukrainians claimed would culminate not only in the recapture of all territory lost so far, but Crimea as well.

Such fanciful thinking has given way to the kind of hard reality that ignores propaganda and favors the dirty task of destroying the enemy through firepower and maneuver. Complicating this task, however, was that during the eight years of incessant conflict in the Donbass, which precipitated Russian's invasion, the Ukrainian military had prepared a defensive belt that was, General Rudskoy noted in his March 25 briefing, "deeply echeloned and well-fortified in engineering terms, consisting of a system of monolithic, long-term concrete structures."

Donate to Consortium News'

2022 Spring Fund Drive

According to Rudskoy, offensive operations against this defensive belt were, by necessity, "preceded by a heavy fire attack on the enemy's strongholds and their reserves."

The Russian advantage in artillery was a key factor in the victorious outcome of its Phase Two operations, pulverizing the Ukrainian defenses and opening the way for the infantry and armor to finish off the survivors.

According to the daily briefings provided by the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Ukrainians are losing the equivalent of a battalion's worth of manpower every two days, not to mention scores of tanks, armored fighting vehicles, artillery pieces, and trucks.

Indeed, several observers of this conflict, myself included, projected that based upon predictive analysis drawn from the basic military math regarding actual and projected casualty levels, there was a real expectation that Russia, upon completion of Phase Two, would have been able to claim, with justification, that it had accomplished most, if not all the political and military objectives set out at the start of the operation.

Logic dictated that the Ukrainian government, stripped of a viable military, would have no choice but a modern-day version of the surrender of France in June 1940, following decisive battlefield victories by the German army.

While Russia continues to position itself for a decisive military victory in eastern Ukraine, it may likely confine itself to the liberation of the Donbass, seizures of the land bridge connecting Crimea with the Russian Federation mainland (via Donbass), and the expansion of the Kherson bridgehead to secure fresh water resources to Crimea which had been cut off by the Ukrainian government since 2014.

The State of Russia's Objectives

In his classic treatise, On War, Prussian military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz penned what has become one of the ultimate truisms of conflicts involving nations, namely that "war is a continuation of politics by other means." This holds as true today as when it was published in 1832.

Putin articulated two principle political objectives for the military operation: to keep Ukraine out of NATO and to create the conditions for NATO to agree to Russia's demands set forth in a pair of draft treaties presented to the U.S. and NATO on Dec. 17, 2021. Those treaty proposals set out a new European security framework by demanding the withdrawal of NATO military power back to the borders that existed in 1997. Both NATO and the U.S. rejected Russia's demands.

When it comes to military objectives, in addition to the liberation of Donbass, Putin declared in his Feb. 24 speech, announcing the invasion, that Russia "will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation."

While the defeat of the Azov Regiment and other neo-Nazi formations during the Battle of Mariupol represented a decisive step toward the accomplishment of that goal, several thousand neo-Nazi fighters, organized into a variety of military and paramilitary formations, continue to fight on the frontlines in eastern Ukraine and carry out security operations in Ukrainian rear areas.

Denazification, however, has an important political component that, at the moment, is not being addressed by Russia's military operation, namely the continued existence of Ukraine's far-right and neo-Nazi political parties at a time when all other political activity has been shut down under martial law.

If anything, the "Nazification" of Ukrainian political life has expanded exponentially since Russia's invasion, with Ukraine more under the influence of the ideology of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist whose followers killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and Russians while fighting alongside Nazi Germany in World War Two.

Whereas Russia may have earlier been able to conceive a political settlement that saw the Ukrainian government right-wing political parties and their militarized progeny, the fact is today the Ukrainian government has increasingly aligned itself with the neo-Nazi movement to strengthen its rule in the face of growing domestic political opposition to war with Russia.

True denazification, in my view, would require Russia to remove the Zelensky government from power and replace it with a new political leadership that will aggressively sustain the Russian objective of an eradication neo-Nazi ideology in Ukraine. So far there is no indication that that is a Russian objective.

Re-Militarization

Likewise, demilitarization has become much more difficult since the invasion of Feb. 24. While military aid provided to Ukraine by the U.S. and NATO before that date could be measured in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars, since Phase Two operations began this aid has grown to the point where total military aid provided to Ukraine by the U.S. alone approximates $53 billion.

Not only has this aid had a measurable impact on the battlefield in terms of Russian military personnel killed and equipment destroyed, but it has also enabled Ukraine to reconstitute combat power, which had been previously destroyed by Russian forces.

While this massive support will not be able to reverse the tide of inevitability concerning the scope and scale of the Russian military victory in the Donbass, it does mean that once Russia has fulfilled its stated objective of liberating the breakaway republics, demilitarization will still not have taken place. Moreover, given the fact that demilitarization is premised on Ukraine being stripped of all NATO influence, including equipment, organization, and training, one can make a case that Russia's invasion has succeeded in making Ukraine a closer partner of NATO than before it began.

The Legal Questions

If Russia were the United States, operating under the notion of a "rules based international order," the issue of outstripping the legal justification for a conflict would not represent a problem — one only needs look at how a succession of U.S. presidential administrations abused the Congressional authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) passed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks by wrongfully using it to justify operations that fell outside its legal authorities.

A party can get away with such inconsistencies if they are responsible, like the United States, for making and implementing the rules of the game (i.e., the so-called "rules-based international order.") However, Vladimir Putin, when meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping during the opening of the Winter Olympic games, committed himself on a policy course which sees Russia, together with China, rejecting the rules based international order that defines the vision of a unipolar world dominated by the U.S., and instead replace it with a multi-polar "law based international order" grounded in the United Nations Charter.

Putin was very careful in trying to link Russia's military operation to the legal authorities that existed under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter governing self-defense. The specific construct involved — which cited what amounts to a claim of preemptive, collective self-defense — hinges on Russian claims that "the Armed Forces of Ukraine were completing the preparation of a military operation to take control of the territory of the people's republics."

It is the imminent threat posed by this alleged Ukrainian military operation that gives legitimacy to Russia's claim. Indeed, both Phase One and Phase Two of Russia's operation were specifically tailored to the military requirements necessary to eliminate the threat posed to Lugansk and Donetsk by the buildup of Ukrainian military power in eastern Ukraine.

A problem, however, emerges when Russia completes its task of destroying, dismantling, or dispersing the Ukrainian military in the Donbass region. While one could have previously argued that an imminent threat would continue to exist so long as the Ukrainian forces possessed sufficient combat power to retake Donbass region, such an argument cannot be made today.

At some point soon, Russia will announce that it has defeated the Ukrainian military forces arrayed in the east and, in doing so, end the notion of the imminent threat that gave Russia the legal justification to undertake its operation.

That came about because of the major battlefield successes of the Russian military. But it will leave Russia with a number of unfulfilled political objectives, including denazification, demilitarization, permanent Ukrainian neutrality, and NATO concurrence with a new European security framework along the lines drawn up by Russia in its December 2021 treaty proposals. If Russia were to call a halt to its military operation at this juncture, it would be ceding political victory to Ukraine, which "wins" by not losing.

Phase Three

The challenge facing Russia going forward, therefore, is how to define the scale and the scope of Phase Three so that it retains the kind of legal authority it asserted for the first two phases, while assembling sufficient combat power to accomplish its tasks. Among these would appear to me to include overthrowing the Zelensky government and replacing it with one willing and able to outlaw the ideology of Stepan Bandera. It might also entail launching a military operation into central and western Ukraine to completely destroy the reconstituted elements of the Ukrainian military along with the surviving neo-Nazi affiliated forces.

As things currently stand, Russia's actions are being implemented upon the limited legal authorities granted to Putin by the Russian Duma, or parliament. One of the most constraining aspects of these authorities is that it limits Russia's force structure to what can be assembled under peacetime conditions. Most observers believe Russia is reaching the limit of what can be asked of these forces.

Any large-scale expansion of Russian military operations in Ukraine,which seeks to push beyond the territory conquered by Russia during Phase One and Phase Two, will require additional resources which Russia may struggle to assemble under the constraints imposed by a peacetime posture. This task would become virtually impossible if the Ukrainian conflict were to spread to Poland, Transnistria, Finland and Sweden.

Only Russia's leaders can decide what is best for Russia, or what is deemed to be viable militarily. But the combination of an expired legal mandate, unfulfilled political objectives, and the possibility of a massive expansion of the scope and the scale of combat operations, which could possibly include one or more NATO members, points to an absolute need for Russia to articulate the mission of Phase Three and why it needs one.

Failure to do so opens the door to the possibility that Russia puts itself in a position where it is unable to successfully conclude a conflict that it opted to initiate at the end of February.

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.

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

Help Us Beat the

[almarh0m]

SCOTT RITTER: Turkey Rains on NATO's Parade
June 13, 2022
Save
In opposing the application of Finland and Sweden, Erdogan has disrupted the military alliance's effort to further provoke Russia with even more expansion. 


Letters of application to NATO from Finland and Sweden, presented to Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on May 18. (NATO)

By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News

On May 18, the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a Norwegian named Jen Stoltenberg, stood on a stage, flanked by the ambassadors to NATO of Finland and Sweden, Klaus Korhonen and Axel Wernhoff, respectively.

It was one of those made-for-television moments that politicians dream of — a time of high drama, where the ostensible forces of good are faced off against the relentless assault of evil, which necessitates the intervention of like-minded friends and allies to help tip the scales of geopolitical justice toward those who embrace liberty over tyranny.

"This is a good day," Jen Stoltenberg announced, "at a critical moment for our security."

Left unsaid was the harsh reality that hundreds of miles to the east the military forces of Russia and Ukraine were locked in deadly combat on Ukrainian soil. Also left unsaid was the role played by NATO in facilitating that conflict.

But the gathering had not been convened for the purpose of self-reflection on the part of the civilian head of NATO. Instead, it was to commemorate the furtherance of the very same policy of expansion of the alliance which had helped trigger the ongoing fighting between Ukraine and Russia.

"Thank you so much for handing over the applications for Finland's and Sweden's membership in NATO," Stoltenberg continued. "Every nation has the right to choose its own path. You have both made your choice, after thorough democratic processes. And I warmly welcome the requests by Finland and Sweden to join NATO."


NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, center, after receiving letters of application from Klaus Korhonen, ambassador of Finland and Axel Wernhoff, ambassador of Sweden on May 18. (NATO)

The day prior, May 17, Finland's parliament voted 188-8 to join NATO, breaking its multi-decade tenure as a neutral country. Finland's actions followed a similar debate and vote on the part of the Swedish legislative body, the Riksdag.

Both nations cited Russia's invasion of Ukraine as their respective motivation to transition from neutrality to membership in an alliance whose behavior has itself transitioned over the years. From an exclusively defensive identity, NATO has embraced expansion both in terms of its own size and in its scope — by undertaking military operations outside of the confines of Europe that were both offensive and designed to promote political change in the targeted countries.

Historical Ignorance

The historical ignorance captured in the actions of Finland and Sweden was astounding regarding the role played by NATO in triggering the very conflict political leaders cited as the reason to seek the protection of alliance membership. It was as if a family whose house had been set afire sought shelter in the home of the arsonist in order to shield itself from the services of the fire department.

There was also an absolute ignorance of their own respective histories. The idea that Finland would cite Russia's special military operation in Ukraine as the trigger for breaking its decades-long pledge of neutrality is particularly troublesome. It is as if Finland forgot its own troubled past, in particular its role in the so-called War of Continuation in 1941-1944, where Finland allied itself with Nazi Germany in its war of subjugation against the Soviet Union, following the 1939 Soviet attack on Finland.

Finnish troops participated in the siege of Leningrad, where over a million Soviet civilians lost their lives. Only by pledging to become neutral in perpetuity did Finland avoid the logical consequences of its actions, namely dismemberment and elimination as a sovereign state. The Soviet Union and later Russia both were adamant in making sure Finnish soil would never again be used as a launching pad for foreign aggression against Russian territory. Finland appears to have forgotten both the pledge it had made, and the reasons behind that pledge.


NATO ambassadors Klaus Korhonen of Finland and Axel Wernhoff of Sweden, with letters of application on May 18. (NATO)

Sweden, too, cites the Russian military invasion of Ukraine as the reason for ending centuries of neutrality. But the Swedish politicians behind this decision have yet to explain what exactly it is about the Russian action that sets it apart from, say, the behavior of Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

If the slaughter of tens of millions of civilians and the destruction of nations were not enough to push Sweden off its neutral perch between 1939-1945, it is hard to see how Russia's actions, which did not take place in a vacuum, but rather in the context of eight years of conflict in the Donbass which killed over 14,000 people and the threat to Russian security posed by an expanding NATO, could be cited in good faith as a legitimate cause of action.

"You are our closest partners," Stoltenberg continued. "And your membership in NATO would increase our shared security." That he said this with no apparent recognition of the irony contained in those words, and that the ambassadors of Finland and Sweden were able to avoid shuffling in embarrassment, is a testimony to either hubris-driven self-delusion, collective ignorance of historical context, or both.

Donate to Consortium News'

2022 Spring Fund Drive

Stoltenberg moved on to the final scene in this one-act drama.

"The applications you have made today are an historic step," he told the Nordic ambassadors.

"Allies will now consider the next steps on your path to NATO. The security interests of all Allies have to be taken into account. And we are determined to work through all issues and reach rapid conclusions. Over the past few days, we have seen numerous statements by Allies committing to Finland's and Sweden's security. NATO is already vigilant in the Baltic Sea region, and NATO and Allies' forces will continue to adapt as necessary."

Stoltenberg closed the made-for-television family special with words that would soon come back to haunt him. "All Allies agree on the importance of NATO enlargement. We all agree that we must stand together. And we all agree that this is an historic moment, which we must seize."

Enter Erdogan


Turkey's President Recep Erdogan addressing a North Atlantic Council meeting in 2019. (NATO)

A happy ending? Not so fast. Enter Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who decided he would crash Stoltenberg's scripted moment. Not all NATO members were in accordance with the bid by Finland and Sweden to join the alliance. Since NATO is a consensus-driven organization, all it takes to ruin this made-for-TV moment was one disaffected member. That member was Turkey.

"As all NATO allies accept Turkey's critical importance to the alliance," Erdogan wrote in a guest essay he penned for The Economist on May 30,

"it is unfortunate that some members fail fully to appreciate certain threats to our country. Turkey maintains that the admission of Sweden and Finland entails risks for its own security and the organization's future. We have every right to expect those countries, which will expect NATO's second-largest army to come to their defense under Article 5, to prevent the recruitment, fundraising and propaganda activities of the PKK [the Kurdish People's Party], which the European Union and America consider a terrorist entity."

Erdogan called for the extradition from Sweden of "members of terrorist organizations" as a pre-condition for Turkey considering its application for NATO membership. Erdogan also demanded that both Sweden and Finland end their respective arms embargoes against Turkey, imposed in 2019 in response to Turkey's incursion into northern Syria that targeted Kurdish groups affiliated with the PKK.

"Turkey stresses that all forms of arms embargoes — such as the one Sweden has imposed on my country — are incompatible with the spirit of military partnership under the NATO umbrella. Such restrictions not only undermine our national security but also damage NATO's own identity."


Kurdish PKK guerillas in Kirkuk, Iraq, April 24,2016. (Kurdishstruggle via Flickr)

As things stand, neither Finland nor Sweden appears prepared to accede to Erdogan's demands. Despite high-level meetings between delegations from both Finland and Sweden with Turkish officials, no headway appears to have been made.

According to Fahrettin Altun, an adviser to Erdogan, neither Finland nor Sweden have put anything discernable on the table. Turkey, Altun told a Swedish newspaper, needs more than just words. "It is not right that Finland and Sweden waste NATO's time at this critical moment," Altun declared.

Complicating matters further is the fact that Turkey appears to be on the cusp of launching a major military operation into northern Syria specifically targeting the very Kurdish group — the People's Protection Units, or YPG — that Erdogan accuses both Finland and Sweden of supporting.

A similar incursion in 2019 triggered the arms embargo against Turkey that Erdogan now demands be lifted. And the hue and cry that can be anticipated from human rights groups if Turkey follows through with its threat to invade northern Syria will not only make it virtually impossible for either Sweden or Finland to give Erdogan the concessions he is demanding, but also further strain Turkish relations with other NATO members, such as the United States, France and Great Britain, all of whom view Turkey's presence in northern Syria as complicating their ongoing operations inside Syria targeting the Islamic State (IS). The fact that the U.S., France and the U.K. have allied themselves with the YPG in this effort only muddies the waters.

Stoltenberg will convene the annual NATO summit in Madrid on June 29. NATO has much on its plate, with trying to craft a viable response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine topping the list.

Stoltenberg had hoped that he could use the applications of Finland and Sweden as a foundation from which he could project an atmosphere of strength and optimism around which NATO could plot a path forward.

Instead, the NATO secretary general will preside over an organization at war with itself, unsure of its future and unable to provide a cohesive answer to the problems with Russia which originated from the very policies of expansion Stoltenberg was trying to continue through the now abortive membership applications of Finland and Sweden.

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.

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

[almarh0m]

5 Jun, 2022 19:45
HomeRussia & FSU
Ivan Timofeev: It's about more than Ukraine, Russia is staging a rebellion against the West and its liberal world order
Moscow has been unwilling to accept the secondary role assigned to it by the West and now the consequences are being felt
By Ivan Timofeev, Valdai Club Programme Director & one of Russia's leading foreign policy experts.

Ivan Timofeev: It's about more than Ukraine, Russia is staging a rebellion against the West and its liberal world order
Russian flag on the deck of Khersones sailboat in Crimea. © Sputnik / Alexey Malgavko © Sputnik
The military conflict in Ukraine today is the central flashpoint in relations between Russia and the West, and largely sets the tone for security policy in the Euro-Atlantic region. It also has many global implications. In the ideological sphere, it is increasingly presented as a struggle between the liberal world order and the "mutiny of the malcontents." It is Russia that today has assumed the role of the vanguard of such a rebellion, openly challenging its Western rivals.

The use of the concept of a revolt here is not accidental. The West is promoting a liberal world order based on clear ideological assertions. These include the market economy; the globalization of standards, trade and technologies; liberal democracy as the only acceptable political form for the organization of states; an open society and a diversity of cultures and ways of life; and its interpretation of human rights. 

In practice, the implementation of these principles varies from country to country and changes over time. However, the diversity of practice has little effect on the integrity of the ideology. Unlike the West, Russia does not offer an alternative ideological menu. So, Moscow, today, differs from the Soviet Union, which at one time adopted another modernist creed –socialism– and actively promoted it as a global alternative.

At the same time, both liberalism and socialism are Western doctrines. The pair are based on the ideas of progress, rationality and emancipation. There are more similarities between them than you might think. Socialists offer a different view of private property, pointing to the excesses of the uncontrolled market. Already in the twentieth century, however, there was a convergence of liberal and socialist ideas in the form of a combination of state regulation and the market. With regards to their political ideation, democracy and the power of the people are no less important for socialism than for liberalism. Traces of the idea of globalisation could be found in the concept of international worker solidarity. Liberation from prejudices and the rationalisation of all spheres of life are expressed as clearly in socialism as in liberalism.

Petr Akopov: Why George Soros and Francis Fukuyama are 'Putin's useful idiots'
Read more Petr Akopov: Why George Soros and Francis Fukuyama are 'Putin's useful idiots'
The problem with the Soviet Union was that the implementation of socialist ideas eventually turned into an imitation. The principles of democracy remained on paper, but in reality they were crushed by an authoritarian (and at certain stages totalitarian) state. In the initial rationalisation of the economy and industrialisation, the USSR achieved amazing success, but later it ran into stagnation, unable to adapt its system to rapidly changing world realities. The weakness of the economy, with its raw-material bias, was identified back in the Brezhnev era. Emancipation, at first, proved unprecedented, but was also ultimately hobbled by the increasingly rigid social structure of the Soviet state. At the end of the Cold War, the picture was completed by double standards and a cynical attitude towards the ideology of Soviet society itself and its elite.

Despite the collapse of the Soviet project, the policy of the USSR could hardly be called a rebellion. Throughout its history, the state still offered a systemic alternative. Relations with the bourgeois environment could be called an attempt at revolution, and then rivalry and competition, but not a revolt. Soviet policy had a positive agenda, offering a holistic picture of the world.

The current "Russian rebellion" is based on dissatisfaction with the established status quo of the liberal world order, or rather, its individual consequences for Russia.

There are reasons for such a posture. Scepticism about democracy has been fuelled by the practical possibilities for foreign states to 'hack' democratic institutions. Colour revolutions in the post-Soviet space have only strengthened this attitude. 

The flip-side of democracy is the possibility of interference in democratic institutions from the outside in order to 'correct' the political course. The US, not without reason, was considered a key 'hacker' of national sovereignty through the manipulation of democratic institutions abroad. All the more ironic was the indignation of Washington itself, after Russia itself allegedly also tried to interfere in American democracy.

Russia's greatest annoyance was its secondary role in the unipolar world order, the disregard for its interests, and that system's increasingly clear refusal to perceive it as an equal partner. Interestingly, economic factors were secondary for the 'Russian rebellion.'

Alexander Nepogodin: What does the future hold for the regions of Ukraine now controlled by Russia?
Read more Alexander Nepogodin: What does the future hold for the regions of Ukraine now controlled by Russia?
In theory, Russia can be considered dissatisfied with its peripheral status in the global economy and its role as a raw materials appendage. In practice, Russia has become very deeply integrated into the international division of labour. However, compared to the stories about democracy, sovereignty and foreign policy, Russia's concern with its place in the world economy was articulated in a very weak way. Liberal emancipation can hardly be considered the main political problem for Moscow. In some aspects, the Russian narrative has distanced itself from the Western mainstream. This concerns such topics as multiculturalism and sexual minorities; although in the West itself, perceptions of these remains extremely heterogeneous. At the same time, in terms of lifestyle, Russia is a European and Western country, so culture, like the economy, can hardly be considered a key source of the problem.

Given the concentration of Russian discontent in the political sphere, it is hardly surprising that it was the Ukrainian issue that became the trigger for the"Russian rebellion." The Maidans and the change of power were seen by Moscow as a cynical hack into the country's political system, and a harbinger of a potential hack eventually targeting Russia itself. 

In addition, at the doctrinal level, Ukraine was increasingly positioned as a fundamentally different project, drifting further and further towards Western values. From the point of view of foreign policy, it was with regards to the Ukrainian issue that Russian interests in the field of security were discriminated against in the most acute form. Economic issues here also acquired political overtones: Moscow could put pressure on Kyiv with gas prices and threats to diversify its transit, but it was clearly losing to the European Union and other Western players in the very model of economic integration. It is not surprising that all those contradictions that had accumulated after the Cold War made themselves known in Ukraine.

Realising that the game was being played according to fundamentally unfavourable and discriminatory rules from the Russian point of view, Moscow not only slammed the table with its fist and brushed the pieces off the board, it also decided, figuratively speaking, to hit its opponents hard on the head with this board. Rivalry 'according to the rules' turned into a fight, the field of which is Ukraine. At the same time, on the part of the West itself, there is a degree of irritation, discontent and rejection of Russia, proportional to its own discontent or even surpassing it. 

The West is frustrated by the very fact of a decisive rebellion, its senselessness in terms of the balance of benefits and losses, and the ruthlessness of Russian pressure. Hence the obvious non-selectivity and emotionality of retaliatory strikes, a bizarre mixture of sanctions bombings, plans to confiscate Russian property, defeat the 'oligarchs' (the most pro-Western wing of Russian high society) and equally senseless bullying of the Russian cultural, sports and intellectual elite, and of the citizenry as a whole. Only the threat of a direct military confrontation with Moscow keeps them from using military force.

The West has every reason to fear the "Russian rebellion." Worries about the liberal world order arose long before 2022 and even before 2014. Compared to Russia, China poses a far greater danger. If the 'Russian rebellion' is successful, it will become clear that China's ambitions will be even more difficult to contain. Moreover, unlike Russia, China can offer an alternative economic model, and its own view of democracy, as well as a different ethic of international relations.

The success of the 'Russian rebellion' may become a prologue to much more systemic challenges. Therefore, the pacification of Russia for the West has become a task that clearly goes beyond the boundaries of the post-Soviet and even the Euro-Atlantic space.

Meanwhile, in the actions of Moscow, there have been signs of progress that are unpleasant for the West. Yes, the Western blockade will increase the lag and backwardness of the economy. Yes, military operations are costly. Yes, they can cause unpredictable social reactions and even present a challenge to political stability. None of these challenges, however, are capable of knocking Russia off its political course from now on. Moscow is slowly developing an offensive and seems to be determined to integrate the occupied Ukrainian territories into its political, informational and economic space. 

Ukraine faces not only colossal economic and human losses, but also the threat of losing territory. Large-scale Western aid is having an effect, making it difficult for Russia to act. Apparently, however, it is not able to stop Moscow: infusions of military equipment are simply ground up by military operations. The longer the conflict drags on, the more territory Ukraine could lose. This presents the West with the unpleasant realisation that it is necessary to reach at least a temporary agreement with Russia. It will be preceded by an attempt to reverse the military situation. However, if it fails, Ukraine will simply not be able to stop the further loss of its statehood.

In other words, the 'Russian rebellion' has a chance to end in success in the sense that it may end in a fundamental reformatting of a large post-Soviet state that has recently been hostile to Russia. It will show the readiness and ability on the part of Russia to back up its claims with the most radical actions.

Will the success of the rebellion mean its victory? This will depend on two factors. The first is the international political implications. A military success in Ukraine could set off a chain of global consequences leading to the decline of the West. However, such a scenario is far from predetermined. The West's margin of safety is high, despite its apparent vulnerability. The readiness of other non-Western players to give up the benefits of globalisation for the sake of abstract and vague political guidelines like a multipolar world is not completely obvious. 

It is likely that the West will have to endure the new status quo in Ukraine, but this does not mean the defeat of its model. Russia does not systematically challenge this system and does not have a complete picture of how to change it. In Moscow, perhaps, they believe that the structure has become obsolete and expect it to collapse by itself, but this conclusion is far from certain.

The Russian language in post-Soviet Ukraine: 30 years of discrimination against the country's most popular tongue
Read more The Russian language in post-Soviet Ukraine: 30 years of discrimination against the country's most popular tongue
The second factor is the consequences for Russia itself. By avoiding promoting a global alternative to the liberal order, Russia will at least have to decide on a programme for its own development. So far, its contours are also built mainly around the denial of the West and its models in certain areas. Nevertheless, the vast majority of other non-Western countries, while defending their sovereignty, are actively developing and cultivating Western practices that benefit them. These include the organisation of industry, developments in the field of science and education, and participation in the international division of labour. 

The rejection of such practices, just because they are conditionally Western, as well as the 'cosplay' of Soviet attitudes created amid different historical conditions and left in the distant past, can only increase the difficulties that Russia is currently facing. The preservation and development of a market economy as well as an open and mobile society remain among the most important tasks.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent ....

[almarh0m]

SCOTT RITTER: The Fantasy of Fanaticism
June 25, 2022
Save
Despite what some "defense analysts" may be telling Western media, the longer the war continues, the more Ukrainians will die and the weaker NATO will become.


Main square of Severodonetsk, Ukraine, February 2018. (Visem, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News

For a moment in time, it looked as if reality had managed to finally carve its way through the dense fog of propaganda-driven misinformation that had dominated Western media coverage of Russia's "Special Military Operation" in Ukraine.

In a stunning admission, Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former senior adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and Intelligence Services, noted that the optimism that existed in Ukraine following Russia's decision to terminate "Phase One" of the SMO (a major military feint toward Kiev), and begin "Phase Two" (the liberation of the Donbass), was no longer warranted. "The strategies and tactics of the Russians are completely different right now," Danylyuk noted. "They are being much more successful. They have more resources than us and they are not in a rush."

"There's much less space for optimism right now," Danylyuk concluded.

In short, Russia was winning.

Danylyuk's conclusions were not derived from some esoteric analysis drawn from Sun Tzu or Clausewitz, but rather basic military math. In a war that had become increasingly dominated by the role of artillery, Russia simply was able to bring to bear on the battlefield more firepower than Ukraine.


Oleksandr Danylyuk in 2015. (YouTube, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Ukraine started the current conflict with an artillery inventory that included 540 122mm self-propelled artillery guns, 200 towed 122mm howitzers, 200 122mm multiple-rocket launch systems, 53 152mm self-propelled guns, 310 towed 152mm howitzers, and 96 203mm self-propelled guns, for approximately 1,200 artillery and 200 MLRS systems.

For the past 100-plus days, Russia has been relentlessly targeting both Ukraine's artillery pieces and their associated ammunition storage facilities. By June 14, the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that it had destroyed "521 installation of multiple launch rocket systems" and "1947 field artillery guns and mortars."

Even if the Russian numbers are inflated (as is usually the case when it comes to wartime battle damage assessments), the bottom line is that Ukraine has suffered significant losses among the very weapons systems — artillery — which are needed most in countering the Russian invasion.

But even if Ukraine's arsenal of Soviet-era 122mm and 152mm artillery pieces were still combat-worthy, the reality is that, according to Danylyuk, Ukraine has almost completely run out of ammunition for these systems and the stocks of ammunition sourced from the former Soviet-bloc Eastern European countries that used the same family of weapons have been depleted.

Ukraine is left doling out what is left of its former Soviet ammunition while trying to absorb modern Western 155mm artillery systems, such as the Caesar self-propelled gun from France and the U.S.-made M777 howitzer.

But the reduced capability means that Ukraine is only able to fire some 4,000-to-5,000 artillery rounds per day, while Russia responds with more than 50,000. This 10-fold disparity in firepower has proven to be one of the most decisive factors when it comes to the war in Ukraine, enabling Russia to destroy Ukrainian defensive positions with minimal risk to its own ground forces.

Casualties

This has led to a second level of military math imbalances, that being casualties.

Mykhaylo Podolyak, a senior aid to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, recently estimated that Ukraine was losing between 100 and 200 soldiers a day on the frontlines with Russia, and another 500 or so wounded. These are unsustainable losses, brought on by the ongoing disparity in combat capability between Russia and Ukraine symbolized, but not limited to, artillery.

In recognition of this reality, NATO Secretary General Jen Stoltenberg announced that Ukraine will more than likely have to make territorial concessions to Russia as part of any potential peace agreement, asking,

"what price are you willing to pay for peace? How much territory, how much independence, how much sovereignty...are you willing to sacrifice for peace?"

Stoltenberg, speaking in Finland, noted that similar territorial concessions made by Finland to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War was "one of the reasons Finland was able to come out of the Second World War as an independent sovereign nation."


NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on June 22 discussing the alliance's Madrid summit at the end of the month. (NATO)

To recap — the secretary general of the trans-Atlantic alliance responsible for pushing Ukraine into its current conflict with Russia is now proposing that Ukraine be willing to accept the permanent loss of sovereign territory because NATO miscalculated and Russia —instead of being humiliated on the field of battle and crushed economically — is winning on both fronts.

Decisively.

That the secretary general of NATO would make such an announcement is telling for several reasons.

Stunning Request

First,  Ukraine is requesting 1,000 artillery pieces and 300 multiple-launch rocket systems, more than the entire active-duty inventory of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps combined. Ukraine is also requesting 500 main battle tanks — more than the combined inventories of Germany and the United Kingdom.

In short, to keep Ukraine competitive on the battlefield, NATO is being asked to strip its own defenses down to literally zero.

More telling, however, is what the numbers say about NATO's combat strength versus Russia. If NATO is being asked to empty its armory to keep Ukraine in the game, one must consider the losses suffered by Ukraine up to that point and that Russia appears able to sustain its current level of combat activity indefinitely. That's right — Russia just destroyed the equivalent of NATO's main active-duty combat power and hasn't blinked.

One can only imagine the calculations underway in Brussels as NATO military strategists ponder the fact that their alliance is incapable of defeating Russia in a large-scale European conventional land war.

But there is another conclusion that these numbers reveal — that no matter what the U.S. and NATO do in terms of serving as Ukraine's arsenal, Russia is going to win the war. The question now is how much time the West can buy Ukraine, and at what cost, in a futile effort to discover Russia's pain threshold in order to bring the conflict to an end in a manner that reflects anything but the current path toward unconditional surrender.

The only questions that need to be answered in Brussels, apparently, is how long can the West keep the Ukrainian Army in the field, and at what cost? Any rational actor would quickly realize that any answer is an unacceptable answer, given the certainty of a Russian victory, and that the West needs to stop feeding Ukraine's suicidal fantasy of rearming itself to victory.

Enter The New York Times, stage right. While trying to completely reshape the narrative regarding the fighting in the Donbass after the damning reality check would be a bridge too far for even the creative minds at the Gray Lady — the writing equivalent of trying to put toothpaste back in the tube. But the editors were able to interview a pair of erstwhile "military analysts" who cobbled together a scenario that transformed Ukraine's battlefield humiliation.

'Military Analysts'

They described a crafty strategy designed to lure Russia into an urban warfare nightmare where, stripped of its advantages in artillery, it was forced to sacrifice soldiers in an effort to dig the resolute Ukrainian defenders from their hardened positions located amongst the rubble of a "dead" city — Severodonetsk. [Ukraine forces withdrew from the city  Friday.]


Gustav Gressel in Berlin in February 2020.  (Politikwissenschaftlerin, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

According to Gustav Gressel, a former Austrian military officer turned military analysts, "If the Ukrainians succeed in trying to drag them [the Russians] into house-to-house combat, there is a higher chance of inducing casualties on the Russians they cannot afford."

According to Mykhailo Samus, a former Ukrainian naval officer turned think-tanks analyst, the Ukrainian strategy of dragging Russia into an urban combat nightmare is to buy time for rearming with the heavy weapons provided by the West, to "exhaust, or reduce, the enemy's [Russia's] offensive capabilities."

The Ukrainian operational concepts in play in Severodonetsk, these analysts claim, have their roots in past Russian urban warfare experiences in Aleppo, Syria and Mariupol.  What escapes the attention of these so-called military experts, is that both Aleppo and Mariupol were decisive Russian victories; there were no "excessive casualties," no "strategic defeat."

Had The New York Times bothered to check the resumes of the "military exerts" it consulted, it would have found two men so deeply entrenched into the Ukrainian propaganda mill as to make their respective opinions all but useless to any journalistic outlet possessing a modicum of impartiality. But this was The New York Times.

Gressel is the source of such wisdom as:

"If we stay tough, if the war ends in defeat for Russia, if the defeat is clear and internally painful, then next time he will think twice about invading a country. That is why Russia must lose this war."

And:

"We in the West...all of us, must now turn over every stone and see what can be done to make Ukraine win this war."

Apparently, the Gressel playbook for Ukrainian victory includes fabricating a Ukrainian strategy from whole cloth to influence perceptions regarding the possibility of a Ukrainian military victory.

Samus likewise seeks to transform the narrative of the Ukrainian frontline forces fighting in Severodonetsk. In a recent interview with the Russian-language journal Meduza, Samus declares that:

"Russia has concentrated a lot of forces [in the Donbass]. The Ukrainian armed forces are gradually withdrawing to prevent encirclement. They understand that the capture of Severodonetsk doesn't change anything for the Russian or the Ukrainian army from a practical point of view. Now, the Russian army is wasting tremendous resources to achieve political objectives and I think they will be very difficult to replenish...[f]or the Ukrainian army, defending Severodonetsk isn't advantageous. But if they retreat to Lysychansk they'll be in more favorable tactical conditions. Therefore, the Ukrainian army is gradually withdrawing or leaving Severodonetsk, and upholding the combat mission. The combat mission is to destroy enemy troops and carry out offensive operations."


Mykhailo Samus on March 27. (YouTube still)

The truth is, there is nothing deliberate about the Ukrainian defense of Severodonetsk. It is the byproduct of an army in full retreat, desperately trying to claw out some defensive space, only to be crushed by the brutal onslaught of superior Russian artillery-based firepower.

To the extent Ukraine is seeking to delay the Russian advance, it is being done by the full-scale sacrifice of the soldiers at the front, thousands of people thrown into battle with little or no preparation, training, or equipment, trading their lives for time so that Ukrainian negotiators can try to convince NATO countries to mortgage their military viability on the false promise of a Ukrainian military victory.

This is the ugly truth about Ukraine today — the longer the war continues, the more Ukrainians will die, and the weaker NATO will become. If left to people like Samus and Gressel, the result would be hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians, the destruction of Ukraine as a viable nation-state, and the gutting of NATO's front-line combat capability, all sacrificed without meaningfully altering the inevitability of a strategic Russian victory.

Hopefully sanity will prevail, and the West will wean Ukraine off the addiction of heavy weaponry, and push it to accept a peace settlement which, although bitter to the taste, will leave something of Ukraine for future generations to rebuild.

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.

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

[almarh0m]

     

    PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Imaginary War
July 13, 2022
Save
It began when the Biden regime and the press misrepresented Russian aims in Ukraine. All else has flowed from it.



U.S. President Joe Biden after delivering remarks on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Feb. 24. (White House, Adam Schultz)

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

What were the policy cliques, "the intelligence community" and the press that serves both going to do when the kind of war in Ukraine they talked incessantly about turned out to be imaginary, a Marvel Comics of a conflict with little grounding in reality? I have wondered about this since the Russian intervention began on Feb. 24. I knew the answer would be interesting when finally we had one.

Now we have one. Taking the government-supervised New York Times as a guide, the result is a variant of what we saw as the Russiagate fiasco came unglued: Those who manufacture orthodoxies as well as consent are slithering out the side door.

I could tell you I don't intend to single out the Times in this wild chicanery, except that I do. The once-but-no-longer newspaper of record continues to be singularly wicked in its deceits and deceptions as it imposes the official but imaginary version of the war on unsuspecting readers.

As Consortium News's properly suspecting readers will recall, Vladimir Putin was clear when he told the world Russia's intentions as it began its intervention. These were two: Russian forces went into Ukraine to "demilitarize and de–Nazify" it, a pair of limited, defined objectives.

An astute reader of these commentaries pointed out in a recent comment thread that the Russian president had once again proven, whatever else one may think of him, a focused statesman with an excellent grasp of history. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the Allied Control Council declared its postwar purpose in Germany as "the four D's."  These were de–Nazification, demilitarization, democratization and decentralization.

Let's give David Thompson, who brought this historical reference to my attention, a deserved byline here:

"Putin's reiteration of the de–Nazification and demilitarization principles established from the Potsdam Conference is not just some quaint tip of the hat to history. He was laying down a marker to the United States and the United Kingdom that the agreement reached at Potsdam in 1945 is still relevant and valid ...."

The Russian president, whose entire argument with the West is that a just and stable order in Europe must serve the security interests of all sides, was simply restating objectives the trans–Atlantic alliance had once signed on to accomplish. In other words, he was pointing out said alliance's gross hypocrisy as it arms the ideological descendants of German Nazis.


From left, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President Harry S. Truman and Soviet leader Josef Stalin during the Potsdam Conference, 1945. (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Wikimedia Commons)

I dwell on this matter because the imaginary war began with the Biden regime's and the press's quite irresponsible misrepresentations of the Russian Federation's aims in Ukraine. All else has flowed from it.

You remember: Russian forces were going to "conquer" the whole of the nation, wipe out the Kiev regime, install a puppet government and then drive on to Poland, the Baltic states, Transnistria and the rest of Moldova, and who could imagine what after that. De–Nazification, we can now read, is a phony Kremlin dodge.

Next Edition

Having lied outright on this score, the next edition of the comic went onto the market. Russia is failing to achieve its imaginary objectives. Low morale, desertions, poorly trained troops with not enough to eat, logistical failures, lousy artillery, inadequate ordnance, incompetent officers: The Russians were riding for a fall on Ukrainian soil. 

The corollary here was the heroism, courage and battlefield grit of Ukrainian troops, least of all, the Azov Battalion, who were not any longer neo–Nazis.  Never mind the Times, The Guardian, the BBC and various other mainstream publications and broadcasters had earlier told us about these ideological fanatics. That was then, this is now.

The problem at this point was there were no battlefield successes to report. The defeats, indeed, had begun. In May, roughly when the Azov Battalion, heroic and democratic as it is, was forced to surrender in Mariupol, it was time for — this just had to be — Russian atrocities.

We had the theater and the maternity hospital in Mariupol, we had the infamous slaughter in Bucha, the Kiev suburb; various others have followed. Just what happened in these cases has never been established by credible, disinterested investigators; plentiful evidence that Ukrainian forces bear responsibility is dismissed out of hand. But who needs investigations and evidence when the brutal, criminal, indiscriminately ruthless Rrrrusssians, must be culpable if the imaginary war is to proceed?

My unchallenged favorites in this line come courtesy of CNN, which went long this spring on allegations — Ukrainian allegations, of course — that Russian soldiers were raping young girls and young boys right down to months-old infants. Three such specimens are here, here and here. 

The network abruptly dropped this line of inquiry after the senior Ukrainian official disseminating these allegations was removed from office because the charges are fabrications. A wise move on CNN's part, I think: Propaganda does not have to be very subtle, as history shows, but it does have its limits.

Just after the atrocities narrative had ripened, the Russians-are-stealing-Ukrainian-grain theme began. The BBC offered an especially wonderful account of this. Look at this video and text presentation and tell me it isn't the cutest thing you've ever seen, as many holes in it as my Irish grandma's lace curtains.

But at this point, problems. Russian forces, with their desertions, antiquated guns, and dumb generals, were taking one city after another in eastern Ukraine. These were not — the fly in the ointment — imaginary victories.

Out with the war-is-going-well theme and in with the brutal Russians' indiscriminate use of artillery. This was a "primitive strategy," the Times wanted us to know. In the awfulness of war, you simply don't shell an enemy position as a preliminary to taking it. Medieval.


The New York Times building. (Thomas Hawk, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Lately, there's another problem for the conjurors of imaginary war. This is the death toll. The U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission reported May 10 that the casualty count to date was in excess of 3,380 civilian fatalities, bumped up in June to 4,509, and 3,680 civilians injured. (And both sides shoot and kill in a war.)

Goddamn it, they exclaimed on Eighth Avenue.  That is nowhere near enough in the imaginary war. Desperate for a gruesomely high death toll, the Times, on June 18, published "Death in Ukraine: A Special Report." What a read. There is nothing in it other than innuendo and weightless surmise. But the imaginary war must grind on.

The Times's "special report"— dum-da-da-dum — rests on phrases such as "witness testimony and other evidence" and "the thousands believed killed." The evidence, to be noted, derives almost entirely from Ukrainian officials — as does an inordinate amount of what the Times publishes.

There is a great quotation:  "People are killed indiscriminately or suddenly or without rhyme or reason." Wow. Is this damning or what?

But another problem. This observation comes from one Richard Kohn, who is emeritus at the University of North Carolina. I hope the professor is having a good summer down in Chapel Hill.

In late June, Sievierodonetsk fell — or rose, depending on your point of view — and in short order so did Lysychansk and the whole of Luhansk province. Now come the 'fessing up stories, here and there. The Ukrainian forces are so discombobulated they are shooting one another, we read. They can't operate their radios and — an artful back flip here — they are running out of food and ammunition and morale. Untrained soldiers who signed up to patrol their neighborhoods are deserting the front lines. 

Holdouts


(raw pixel, CCO)

There are the holdouts. The Times reported last week that the Ukrainians, done for in Luhansk, are planning a counteroffensive in the south to reclaim lost territory. We all need our dreams, I suppose.

To the surprise of many, Patrick Lang, the ordinarily astute observer of military matters, published "Unable to even fix its own tanks, Russia's humiliation is now complete" on his Turcopolier last Friday. The retired colonel predicts the Russians are in for "a sudden reversal of fortunes." No, I'm not holding my breath.

Have you had enough of the imaginary war? I have. I read this junk daily as a professional obligation. Some of it I find amusing, but in the main it sickens when I think of what the American press has done to itself and to its readers.

For the record, it is hard to tell exactly what occurs on Ukraine's tragic fields of war. As noted previously in this space, we have very little coverage from professional, properly disinterested correspondents. But I offer here my surmise, and it is nothing more.

This war has proceeded, more or less inexorably, in one direction: In the real war, the Ukrainians have been on a slow march to defeat from the first. They are too corrupt, too mesmerized by their fanatical Russophobia to organize an effective force or even to see straight.

This is not a grinding war of attrition, as we are supposed to think. It has proceeded slowly because Russian forces appear to be taking care to limit casualties — their own and among Ukrainian civilians. I put more faith in the U.N.'s numbers than in that silly, nothing-in-it "special report" the Times just published.

I do not know why Russian forces approached the outskirts of Kiev from the north early in the conflict and then withdrew, but there is no indication they intended to take the capital. There were battles, but they were certainly not "beaten back." That is sheer nonsense.

I await proper investigations — admittedly unlikely — of the atrocities that have certainly occurred but without, so far, any conclusive indication of culpability.

Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, remarked recently Russia's objective remains to take most of Ukraine. In a speech at the end of June in Ashgabat, the Turkmenistan capital, Putin appeared notably at ease and asserted, "Everything is going according to plan. Nothing has changed." The objective, he said, remained "to liberate Donbass, to protect these people, and to create conditions that would guarantee the safety of Russia itself. That's it."

Putting these two statements side by side, there is vastly more evidence supporting Putin's than there is for Haines.

Intentionally or otherwise — and I often have the impression the Times does not grasp the implications of what it publishes — the paper put out a story Sunday headlined, "Ukraine and the Contest of Global Stamina." The outcome of this conflict, it reported, now depends on "whether the United States and its allies can maintain their military, political and financial commitments to holding off Russia."

Can they possibly not understand down on Eighth Avenue that they have just described Ukraine as a basket-case client? Do they know they have just announced that the imaginary war they have waged these past four and some months is ending in defeat, given there is no one in Ukraine to win it?

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.

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