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JerusalemCats Comments: The majority of the world wants nothing to do with this mess. Countries sanctioning Russia 2022
 Waldgänger-tweet-17August2022-85% of the world’s population has not imposed sanctions against Russia |
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Military biological activities of the United States in UkraineThis is why Russia and her allies are fighting the Nazis and their Western NNATO backers!
iEarlGrey: Inside Pfizer and AstraZeneca’s UKRAINIAN BIOLAB! [Bio-Warfare Lab]
iEarlGrey: Russia REVEALS ALL in Bombshell BioLabs Briefing – Inside Russia ReportPosted 11May2022: |
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Briefing on the results of the analysis of documents related to the military biological activities of the United States on the territory of Ukrainehttps://telegra.ph/Briefing-on-the-results-of-the-analysis-of-documents-related-to-the-military-biological-activities-of-the-United-States-on-the-t-05-11 The Russian Defence Ministry continues to study materials on the implementation of military biological programs of the United States and its NATO allies on the territory of Ukraine.
We have already mentioned Robert Pope, director of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Programme and author of the idea of the Central Depository of Highly Dangerous Microorganisms in Kiev.
In his statement of April 10, 2022, Pope said that “…there is no reason to claim that research related to the development of biological weapons is taking place in Ukraine…”. He previously claimed that “…the Americans did not find biological weapons when they first started working with Ukraine, and they still haven’t. In addition, Ukraine lacks the infrastructure to develop and produce biological weapons…”.
I would like to recall that the term “biological weapons” includes biological formulations that contain pathogenic micro-organisms and toxins, as well as the means of delivery and use of said formulations.
While the priority for Ukrainian healthcare is socially significant diseases such as HIV, poliomyelitis, measles and hepatitis, US customers are interested in a completely different nomenclature: cholera, tularemia, plague and hantaviruses.
As a result of the special military operation on the territory of Ukraine, facts of work with the specified pathogens, which are potential agents of biological weapons, have been revealed. At the same time, it was noted that Ukraine had sent a request to the manufacturing company regarding the possibility of equipping the Bayraktar drones with aerosol equipment.
In addition on March 9, three unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with 30-litre containers and equipment for spraying formulations were detected by Russian reconnaissance units in Kherson region. At the end of April, 10 more were found near Kakhovka.
All this information calls into question the statements of American experts.
We have previously provided a scheme for US coordination of biological laboratories and research institutes in Ukraine. Its preliminary analysis suggests that Ukraine is essentially a testing ground for the development of biological weapons components and the testing of new samples of pharmaceuticals.
The Russian Ministry of Defence was able to clarify the said scheme.
It should be noted that the ideologues of US military-biological activities in Ukraine are the leaders of the Democratic Party.
Thus, through the US executive branch, a legislative framework for funding military biomedical research directly from the federal budget was formed. Funds were raised under state guarantees from NGOs controlled by the Democratic Party leadership, including the investment funds of the Clintons, Rockefellers, Soros and Biden.
The scheme involves major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Moderna, Merck and the US military-affiliated company Gilead. U.S. experts are working to test new medicines that circumvent international safety standards. As a result, Western companies are seriously reducing the cost of research programmes and gaining a significant competitive advantage.
The involvement of controlled nongovernmental and biotechnological organisations, and the increase in their revenues, allows the leaders of the Democratic Party to generate additional campaign finance and hide its distribution.
In addition to US pharmaceutical companies and Pentagon contractors, Ukrainian state agencies are involved in military bioweapons activities, whose main tasks are to conceal illegal activities, conduct field and clinical trials and provide the necessary biomaterial.
Thus, the US Department of Defence, using a virtually internationally uncontrolled test site and the high-tech facilities of multinational companies, has greatly expanded its research capabilities, not only in the field of biological weapons, but also in gaining knowledge about antibiotic resistance and the antibodies to specific diseases in populations in specific regions.
It should be noted that not only the US, but also a number of its NATO allies are implementing their military-biological projects in Ukraine.
The German government has decided to launch a national biosafety programme independent of Washington, D.C., starting in 2013. Twelve countries, including Ukraine, are involved in the Programme.
On the German side, the programme involves the Institute for Armed Forces Microbiology (Munich), the Robert Koch Institute (Berlin), the Loeffler Institute (Greifswald) and the Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (Hamburg).
New documents reveal that between 2016 and 2019 alone, three and a half thousand blood serum samples of citizens living in 25 regions of Ukraine were taken by military epidemiologists from the Bundeswehr Microbiology Institute.
The involvement of institutions subordinate to the Bundeswehr confirms the military orientation of biological research carried out in Ukrainian laboratories and raises questions about the goals pursued by the German armed forces in collecting biomaterials of Ukrainian citizens.
The documents obtained also show the involvement of Poland in Ukrainian biolaboratories. The participation of the Polish Institute of Veterinary Medicine in research aimed at assessing the epidemiological threats and spread of the rabies virus in Ukraine has been confirmed. Characteristically, the research in question was carried out jointly with the US-based Battelle Institute, a key contractor for the Pentagon.
In addition, Polish funding for the Lvov Medical University, which includes a member of US military biology projects, the Institute of Epidemiology and Hygiene, has been documented. The organisation has been running a retraining programme for specialists with experience of working with dual-use materials and technologies since 2002.
The special military operation by Russian troops succeeded in obtaining additional information about bio-incidents in Ukraine.
For example, materials indicating the intentional use of a multidrug-resistant tuberculosis pathogen in 2020 to infect the population of the Slavyanoserbsky district of the LPR were examined.
The flyers, made in the form of counterfeit currency notes, were infected with the tuberculosis agent and distributed to minors in Stepovoe village. The organisers of this crime took into account the behaviour of children, who have a habit of “putting everything in their mouths” and taking food with unwashed hands.
The results of bacteriological studies have confirmed the resistance of the isolated bacteria to first- and second-line anti-TB drugs, meaning that the disease caused by them is much more difficult to treat and the cost of treatment is much higher.
According to the conclusion of the Lugansk Republican Sanitary and Epidemiological Station, “…the contamination of the notes was most likely carried out artificially, as the material contains extremely dangerous strains of the pathogen in concentrations capable of ensuring infection and development of the tuberculosis process…”.
In his conclusion, the chief doctor of the Lugansk Republican TB Dispensary also notes that “…there are all signs of deliberate, man-made contamination of the flyers with highly pathogenic biomaterial…”.
We previously reported on trials of potentially dangerous biological drugs on one of the least protected categories of people – patients of the Kharkov Regional Clinical Psychiatric Hospital No 3.
We have received new information revealing details of the Pentagon’s inhuman experiments on Ukrainian citizens in Psychiatric Hospital No 1 (Streleche village, Kharkov region). The main category of subjects was a group of male patients aged 40-60 years with a high stage of physical exhaustion.
In order to conceal their US affiliation, the biological research experts travelled via third countries. Here is a photograph of Florida native Linda Oporto, who was directly involved in these works.
In January 2022, the foreign nationals conducting the experiments were evacuated in an emergency and the equipment and drugs they were using were taken to western Ukraine.
Russian Defence Ministry specialists have carried out work directly in two biolaboratories in Mariupol.
Evidence of emergency destruction of documents confirming work with the US military establishment was obtained. A preliminary analysis of extant documentation indicates the use of Mariupol as a regional centre for cholera pathogen collection and certification. The selected strains were sent to the Public Health Centre in Kiev, which is responsible for the onward shipment of biomaterials to the United States. These activities have been carried out since 2014, as evidenced by the transfer of strains.
An act of destruction of the pathogen collection dated February 25, 2022, according to which cholera, tularemia and anthrax pathogens were handled there, was found in the sanitary and epidemiological laboratory.
Part of the collection of the veterinary laboratory was not destroyed in a hurry. In order to ensure safety and secure storage, 124 strains were exported by Russian specialists and their study was organised.
The presence in the collection of pathogens that are uncharacteristic of veterinary medicine, such as typhoid, paratyphoid fever and gas gangrene, is a cause for concern. This could indicate the laboratory’s misuse and involvement in a military biological programme.
We will continue to examine the full volume of material received from the Mariupol biolaboratories and will inform you about the results.
The Russian Ministry of Defence has information that provocations are being prepared to accuse the Russian Armed Forces of using weapons of mass destruction, followed by a “Syrian scenario” investigation to fabricate the necessary evidence and assign blame.
The high likelihood of such provocations is confirmed by requests from the Kiev administration for personal skin and respiratory protection equipment that provides protection against toxic chemicals and biological contaminating agents. The supply to Ukraine of organophosphorus poisoning antidotes raises concerns. In 2022 alone, more than 220,000 ampoules of atropine, as well as preparations for special treatment and disinfection, were delivered from the USA at the request of the Ukrainian Ministry of Health.
Thus, the information obtained confirms that the United States is implementing an offensive military-biological programme in Ukraine to study the possibility of forming controlled epidemics in specific territories.
The special military operation of the Russian Armed Forces has crossed the US military-biological expansion in Ukraine and stopped criminal experiments on civilians. |
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 NBCP Briefing Slide (1)  NBCP Briefing Slide (2)  NBCP Briefing Slide (3)  NBCP Briefing Slide (4)  NBCP Briefing Slide (5)  NBCP Briefing Slide (6)  NBCP Briefing Slide (7) |
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Background briefing: Canadian General Trevor Kadeer, who headed the bio lab No. 1, where 18 people worked with deadly viruses, was arrested while trying to escape from the territory of Azovstal in Mariupol This is a really important witness to the crimes of the United States and its allies against humanity, now it will be difficult for Washington and Ottawa not to recognize the fact of conducting research in the field of super-lethal biological weapons on the territory of Ukraine.” Alexander Shumkin  iEarlGrey-YouTube Post-3May2022 In Azovstal, the Russian military arrested a Canadian general who led a biological laboratory |
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The War of Gog and Magog is Starting!Dr. Steve Turley: BOMBSHELL Senate Testimony Confirms BIOLABS In Ukraine!!! [Obama Ukraine coup d’état]]Full Background Details: Military biological activities of the United States in Ukraine |
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As shock and awe of war wears off, U.S. quietly resumes biolabs program in Ukraine13April2023 by: Ethan Huff https://www.naturalnews.com/2023-04-13-us-quietly-resumes-biolabs-program-in-ukraine.html This article may contain statements that reflect the opinion of the author
(Natural News) The latest news about the situation on the ground in Ukraine is that the United States deep state has resumed operations at its dozens of Pentagon-funded biological weapons laboratories.
Igor Kirillov, the commander of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Forces, announced in a media briefing this week that the secretive facilities are once again becoming operational – and new ones are still being built with American taxpayer dollars.
Kirillov presented a trove of new documents outlining the biological weapons programs that the U.S. is funding and performing at these biolabs. As you may recall, the U.S. initially denied the existence of these biolabs, but now claims that they exist but are used for non-nefarious purposes.
Citing the U.S. protocol as outlined at a meeting dated Oct. 20, 2022, which was attended by representatives from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and multiple Ukrainian officials, as well as members of the Jacobs / CH2M engineering company, Kirillov provided detailed evidence showing that the biolabs were temporarily “paused” during Russia’s special operation, but are now being un-paused.
“Now, the project has been resumed with focus on renewal of legislative support, revision of training schedule, as well as conclusion and resumption of construction work,” reads the Ukrainian-language protocol citing Jacobs / CH2M’s David Smith.
(Related: The purpose behind the Ukrainian biolabs, which are funded in part by the Biden Crime Family, is to build bioweapons targeting certain ethnic groups, i.e., an ethnic cleansing genocide.)
Remember when America used to claim to be against weapons of mass destruction? Now the U.S. is funding their development in UkrainePreviously known as “Joint biological research,” the ongoing bioweapons program in Ukraine has since been rebranded as “Biological control research,” according to the same documents that Kirillov presented.
The reason for this rebranding has to do with what the documents describe as a “Russian disinformation campaign” concerning the program’s purpose.
Meanwhile, the Financial Times is reporting that an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has stated that his country is “ready to give up” Crimea to the Russians.
According to RT, the U.S. is now engaging in extensive damage control efforts to try to prevent any further details about its bioweapons programs in Ukraine from getting leaked to the public.
“Hiding from responsibility for participating in military biological projects, many suspects left the territory of Ukraine,” Kirillov said. “To prevent a possible leak of information about the illegal activities of the Pentagon, the U.S. administration is taking emergency measures to search for and return them.”
These damage control attempts first began back in February 2022 right after Russia invaded Ukraine. A draft memo about this, entitled “Reducing the Threat of Ukrainian Expertise Proliferating to U.S. Adversaries” and written by Laura Denlinger, a senior counterproliferation advisor with the U.S. State Department, was obtained by the Russian military as evidence.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine has resulted in … the exodus of highly capable technical experts from Ukrainian facilities that produce missile components and advanced conventional weapons (ACW), as well as those with expertise that could be redirected and exploited by others for a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapon,” that memo, dated March 11, 2022, reads.
The U.S. has come a really long way from the days of George W. Bush and the fight to eliminate “weapons of mass destruction.” It turns out the U.S. is the world’s biggest proliferator of WMDs, at least according to the mountains of evidence being obtained by the Russian military in Ukraine.
The U.S. deep state will not stop until it is forced to stop. To learn more, visit DeepState.news. Sources for this article include: |
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Speaking about military biological activities
Something very strange is going on and ‘health experts’ are baffled: Monkeypox was weaponized in the deep state’s Ukraine labs, another sign the depopulation agenda is in full swing30May2022 by: News Editors https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-05-30-something-very-strange-is-going-on.html This article may contain statements that reflect the opinion of the author (Natural News) The twitter hashtag #BillGatesBioTerrorist was trending for a good part of the day Saturday after people in America and around the world put 2 + 2 together and realized Gates recently warned of a ‘pox‘ outbreak being the next big deal to come at the world, right before Monkeypox broke out in the West.
(Article by Stefan Stanford republished from AllNewsPipeline.com) And as numerous people pointed out in that twitter thread, we’re now witnessing a perfect example of the Hegelian Dialectic at play in 2022, with the life-hating globalists once again launching a contagion upon the world which the dumbed down masses will ‘demand‘ a ‘solution to‘, that ‘solution‘ already pre-planned well in advance, though it certainly won’t ‘solve the problem‘.
With the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists putting out a story back on February 21st of 2020 titled “A biotech firm made a smallpox-like virus on purpose. Nobody seems to care” within which they reported that the smallpox-causing variola virus had been eradicated from nature with the only known samples of it have been held in two high-security facilities in the United States and Russia, as it also warned, developments in synthetic biology, a field which includes the art and science of constructing viral genomes, have made it possible to create the smallpox virus in a lab.
Reporting also within that story that evidence indicated back in 2020 that researchers are inching incredibly close to that line, their story also warned “the re-introduction of the disease—through negligence or malice—would be a global health disaster” with Smallpox responsible for the deaths of 300 million+ in the 20th Century.
With Monkeypox another such ‘pox virus‘, and very strong evidence emerging that this latest ‘outbreak‘ that is spreading quickly into the Western world was ‘manufactured‘, we’ll be taking a long look at that possibility in the next section of this story below but first, let’s listen to what the ‘scientific experts‘ who’ve been studying Monkeypox have to say and as you’ll see, something very strange is going on.
From this story over at Time titled “Monkeypox Spreads in West, Baffling African Scientists.”:
Scientists who have monitored numerous outbreaks of monkeypox in Africa say they are baffled by the disease’s recent spread in Europe and North America.
Cases of the smallpox-related disease have previously been seen only among people with links to central and West Africa. But in the past week, Britain, Spain, Portugal, Italy, U.S., Sweden and Canada all reported infections, mostly in young men who hadn’t previously traveled to Africa.
France, Germany, Belgium and Australia confirmed their first cases of monkeypox on Friday. “I’m stunned by this. Every day I wake up and there are more countries infected,” said Oyewale Tomori, a virologist who formerly headed the Nigerian Academy of Science and who sits on several World Health Organization advisory boards.
“This is not the kind of spread we’ve seen in West Africa, so there may be something new happening in the West,” he said.
So as we’ll explore in the next section of this story below, with Bill Gates asking for money back in November of 2021 while warning of a future ‘pox terror attack‘ that he claimed could be much bigger than naturally occurring epidemics showing what twitter users claimed was some kind of ‘pre-knowledge‘, part of the reason why #BillGatesBioTerrorist was trending, we get huge new information from multiple sources that the US ‘deep state‘ has been working on just such a terrorist weapon in their once-secret Ukraine bioweapons laboratories. Is anyone surprised?
Imagine waking up one morning in the near future and turning on your favorite morning news shows to hear the big story of the day, it had recently been discovered that Russia had put a series of bioweapons labs in Cuba, Mexico and scattered about, hidden throughout Canada.
Learning in those shows that they were using those labs to create bioweapons banned by international law, right on our own borders, it wouldn’t be too difficult to see 10’s of millions of Americans demanding an immediate response of some kind from those who are supposed to be our ‘public servants in the United States government‘, such deadly and banned weapons so close to our own homes.
And while thankfully, that’s not the scenario that we are dealing with this very moment here in the US, it’s apparently exactly what the Russian people are now dealing with according to numerous sources.:
The US researched Ebola and smallpox viruses in Ukraine, says Irina Yarovaya, Co-Chair of the Parliamentary Commission on Investigation of US Biological Laboratories in Ukraine.
“Today, we presented an analysis of which pathogens the US was particularly interested in in Ukraine,” she told reporters Friday. “Aside from the pathogens that are territorially bound to Ukraine, [the laboratories] researched viruses and pathogens that are endemically very far from Ukraine, such as Ebola and smallpox.”
According to the legislator, the information obtained indicates “aggressive goal-setting that underpins the foundation of these programs, de facto implemented by US Department of Defense on Ukrainian soil.”
“Unfortunately, it is necessary to particularly emphasize that the betrayal that the Ukrainian regime carried out against its own people has effectively left Ukrainian citizens defenseless in the face of these manipulations, experiments and clandestine research that the US is carrying out on Ukrainian territory,” Yarovaya underscored.
She noted that Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Director Sergey Naryshkin spoke as the main expert at Friday’s commission meeting.
“I would like to underscore that the dialogue that we had with the SVR chief today, combined with the proof obtained by the commission, fully confirms the US-created network of biological intelligence worldwide and the implementation of active military-biological exploitation of the globe, and Ukraine in particular. This essentially poses a serious global threat,” Yarovaya warned.
According to the lawmaker, Russia’s main goal today is to guarantee the protection of its national interests and the security of the Russian people.
“But at the same time, [it should] urge the global community to seriously get to the bottom of this secret and dangerous military biological activity, implemented by the US. So that comprehensive measures pertaining to common, equal and indivisible security could be developed. Given the distinction between peaceful and non-peaceful use of bacteriological research and the study of toxins, it must be completely transparent and controlled. And there simply must not be any bacteriological weapons in the world, this is Russia’s principal position,” Yarovaya stressed.
And while like an abusive spouse, a child beater or a career criminal, we’d never expect ‘terrorist government‘ to just admit to their crimes upon humanity, as we’ll explore in the final section of our story below, all of this is right on par for the globalists and their ‘depopulation agenda‘.
With ANP proving years ago that ‘Western nations‘ were being heavily targeted for ‘elimination‘ as seen on the De@gle report forecast for a USA with less than 100 million living here by the year 2025, a huge drop of more than 227 million in population, we certainly won’t be ‘running to the hills’ over Monkeypox but we urge everyone to look at the ‘bigger picture‘. Particularly with the Biden cabal allegedly pre-ordering ‘a vax’ in mass numbers while he recently claimed ‘everybody should be concerned about Monkeypox‘ despite the fact that it’s largely known as a ‘gay disease’ that is spreading through sex with this Daily Mail story reporting:
“The UK Health Security Agency has said a notable proportion of recent cases in Britain and Europe have been found in gay and bisexual men.” Read more at: AllNewsPipeline.com |
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Prominent doctors urge calm over monkeypox, a treatable disease spread mainly through intimate homosexual contact29May2022 by: Cassie B. https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-05-29-prominent-doctors-calm-monkeypox.html This article may contain statements that reflect the opinion of the author (Natural News) The media hysteria surrounding monkeypox is largely leaving out one very important part of the story: The disease poses very little risk to most people and is being spread largely through men having sex with men.
This is something that even the World Health Organization has quietly admitted. In confirming around 200 cases of the virus on Monday, WHO officials said that while anyone can technically contract it, the recent surge has been tied to homosexual men.
In fact, Dr. David Heymann, who served as the chair of a meeting of the WHO’s advisory group on infectious disease, said that the leading theory explaining the spread was sexual transmission at events recently held in Spain’s Canary Islands and Belgium. In the past, monkeypox has not triggered widespread outbreaks outside of Africa, where the disease is endemic in animals.
Heymann told The Associated Press: “We know monkeypox can spread when there is close contact with the lesions of someone who is infected, and it looks like sexual contact has now amplified that transmission.
“It’s very possible there was somebody who got infected, developed lesions … and then spread it to others when there was sexual or close, physical contact.”
Of course, if they drew attention to that fact, it would make it harder for them to convince the masses to line up for the monkeypox vaccine that will inevitably be pushed on the population much in the same way that people are being bullied into getting COVID-19 vaccines.
Belgian officials have already announced a mandatory 21-day quarantine for people who contract the disease, while Germany has confirmed four cases of monkeypox stemming from exposure at “party events … where sexual activity took place.”
Doctor labels hysteria over monkeypox a “gross overreaction”Speaking on Real America’s Voice, former WHO Consultant and Senior Advisor to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for the COVID-19 response, Dr. Paul Alexander called the hysteria a “gross overreaction” to a disease that is much milder than smallpox. He said that there is a small chance of droplet infection but the risk to the general population is low overall. While it’s prudent to keep an eye on it for public health reasons, there is no reason to overreact.
Epidemiologist Dr. Peter McCullough echoed this sentiment, calling for people to keep calm as the disease has a low risk of spreading and is relatively easy to treat with proper medical care.
Speaking on The Alex Jones Show, he noted: “There should be absolutely no panic. It’s almost analogous to chickenpox and someone having lots of pustular vesicular lesions is readily identified. We can manage this. The treatment is actually very well tolerated. TPOXX drug taken twice a day is perfectly fine.”
To illustrate its limited spread, he pointed out that there have been just 700 reported cases of monkeypox in the last half century, nearly all of them in the Congo. Moreover, it has plenty of symptoms, making it easy to identify people who have the disease so its spread can be limited. He added that governments buying up millions of vaccine doses was a “hyperbolic response.”
According to experts, monkeypox does not spread as easily among humans as Covid because it requires close intimate contact and mainly enters the body through broken skin via bodily fluids. It’s a self-limiting illness, and most people will recover within a few weeks, even without treatment.
Unfortunately, as long there is money to be made on vaccines, there will be no end to the fearmongering over this and other diseases. The Covid pandemic has demonstrated just how much money there is to make from disease outbreaks, and now everyone is looking for the next cash cow. Sources for this article include: |
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Officials Warn Of Monkeypox Resurgence Ahead Of Summer LGBT Festivalsby Tyler Durden, 21May2023 – https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/officials-warn-monkeypox-resurgence-ahead-summer-lgbt-festivals Authored by Naveen Anthrapully via The Epoch Times, The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a warning that incidents of monkeypox (mpox) infections could rise in the coming months as LGBT festivals attract large crowds.
In its May 17 risk assessment, the CDC warned that there is a “substantial” risk of renewed monkeypox outbreaks across the United States, given the recent uptick in cases in Chicago, which began in mid-April. At present, gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM) account for the majority of monkeypox cases in the United States.
Between April 17 and May 5, a total of 12 confirmed cases and one probable case of monkeypox were reported to the Chicago Department of Public Health. All cases were among symptomatic men.
CDC advised MSM and transgender people who engage in sex with men to remain updated about the latest monkeypox news.
The agency asked LGBT individuals to get vaccinated in case they are at risk of monkeypox exposure, follow safer sex and social gathering practices, and avoid close, skin-to-skin contact with individuals who have a new or unexplained rash. Monkeypox VaccineIn a May 18 tweet, Demetre Daskalakis, deputy head of the White House monkeypox task force, said, “If you are a gay bisexual or other same gender loving man or a transgender or gender-diverse person who could benefit, get vaccinated.”
Currently, two doses of the Jynneos vaccine are being recommended for monkeypox. According to the CDC, Jynneos is “highly effective” at preventing and reducing the severity of monkeypox.
However, the vaccine is “not 100 percent effective.” CDC expects cases after vaccination to have “less severe illness” compared to unvaccinated individuals, based on data from the United States.
However, the agency also points out that it has observed “an increasing proportion of fully vaccinated individuals among cases over the last several months, including the majority of cases in two recent small clusters in Chicago and France.
Daskalakis insists that even if the vaccine does not prevent infection, “it prevents #mpox complications.” He advised LGBTQ people to get both doses of the vaccine.
According to the CDC, the Jynneos vaccine effectively prevents monkeypox 95 percent of the time. However, the vaccine’s effectiveness is unknown when it comes to individuals whose immune systems have been compromised.
This is critical since more than 50 percent of monkeypox cases in the United States have been among people identified as HIV positive.
Serious health conditions have been reported among the vaccinated at the rate of 22 per 1 million individuals. Such conditions include myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, and pericarditis, an inflammation of the fluid around the heart. Monkeypox in USIn the United States, 30,401 monkeypox cases and 42 deaths have been recorded as of May 17. At present, daily infections average in the single digits, a far cry from the peak of July-August last year when there used to be 300 to 400 cases and even more every day.
The vast majority of cases have been identified among men aged 21 to 55 years, with females accounting for only a small number, according to the CDC.
California tops the list of states with the highest number of monkeypox infections, accounting for 5,759 cases, nearly 19 percent of the total number of cases in the country.
New York comes second with 4,250 cases, Texas at third with 3,007, followed by Florida, Georgia, and Illinois. Twenty-six states had cases in triple digits.
In the United States, roughly 1.2 million Jynneos vaccines have been administered since the outbreak, which began in May 2022. The CDC estimates that 23 percent of the estimated population at risk for monkeypox have been fully vaccinated. |
What will be the effect of the sanctioning of Russia and Belarus on Food and Gas?
 Russia no longer accepts Dollars or Euros from Unfriendly States I Probably Shouldn’t Tell You About the Next Shortages That Are BeginningPosted 25March2022 Adapt 2030: |
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Which Nations Are On Russia’s “Unfriendly” List?by Tyler Durden 04April2022 – https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/which-nations-are-russias-unfriendly-list On May 13, 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law the List of Unfriendly Nations, which included the United States and the Czech Republic. On March 5, 2022, as Russia’s military operation in Ukraine progressed, the list was updated to include 45 more nations and jurisdictions. The countries and territories mentioned in the list have imposed or joined the sanctions against Russia.  Which Nations Are On Russia’s “Unfriendly” List? |
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Over 90% Of Firms Have Remained In Russiaby Tyler Durden, 24January2023 – https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/over-90-firms-have-remained-russia Authored by Grzegorz Adamczyk via Remix News, Only 8.5 percent of all EU and G7 companies have actually left Russia, according to research from the University of St. Gallen and the IMD business school in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Before the outbreak of war, there were more than 2,400 company branches and 1,400 companies from the EU and G7 operating in Russia. By the end of November last year, only 120 companies had left Russia or sold their company there.
The research indicates that the news of a mass exodus of Western firms from Russia has been largely exaggerated.
In fact, businesses have resisted calls from governments, media, and civil society, according to the Belgian daily newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws.
Companies remain skeptical and reluctant about leaving Russia over fears of losing their business and staff. Those who have left have ended up transferring assets into Russian hands, even for a single symbolic ruble or euro, as was the case with Renault and Nissan.
According to Forbes, the biggest beneficiary was oligarch Wladimir Potanin, whose Interros company bought Rosbank from Societe Generale, making nearly 50 billion rubles (€667 million) in the process.
The second-biggest earner was Vladyslav Sviblov, whose Highland Gold Mining bought the assets of Canada’s Kinross corporation, which netted him almost 40 billion rubles.
Not far behind was Ivan Tirishkin from SPB, who bought 49.5 percent of the shares in HKF-Bank LLC, making over 35 billion rubles.
Fourth on the list was the state research center FSUE NAMI, which took over the plants owned by Renault and Nissan, gaining assets worth just under 35 billion rubles. |
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Gazprom Halts Gas Shipments To Europe Via Critical Pipelineby Tyler Durden 02April2022 – https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/gazprom-halts-gas-shipments-europe-critical-pipeline After European nations imported the most gas from Russian sources yesterday in months, scrambling to stock up on supplies as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s deadline to either pay for gas in rubles (or be cut off) came and went, Russian gas giant Gazprom has officially halted all deliveries to Europe via the Yamal-Europe pipeline, a critical artery for European energy supplies.
 zerohedge-tweet-2April2022-GAZPROM HAS STOPPED DELIVERIES OF RUSSIAN GAS TO GERMANY VIA YAMAL EUROPE PIPELINE Instead of flowing toward Germany and the EU, gas supplies on Friday and Saturday started flowing in the opposite direction, according to Gascade, the network operator. In recent months, the EU has already boosted imports of LNG from the US…
 US monthly exports to Europe of LNG Jan 2019 -Feb 2022 …and despite President Biden’s promise to bolster to exports to the EU (although he stipulated that not all of this additional capacity would come from the US), researchers at Goldman Sachs have already shown that US exports of LNG are already at capacity.
 US gas price volatatility Sept 2021 – March 2022 Another problem for pipeline-dependent Europe: the continent presently doesn’t have the infrastructure to allow it to rapidly ramp up imports of LNG, which must be carefully processed and “regassified” before it can be distributed to utilities and other distributors of energy. A map below illustrates the level of dependence that various European economies have on Russia.
 EU gas risk map 2022 But it’s not just the Germans who must now make due without Russian gas supplies. British energy major Shell is being cut off from Russian supplies in response to the UK’s economic sanctions on Russia, said Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
So far, the UK is the only country to have imposed sanctions on Russia’s Gazprombank, through which payments for Russian natural gas are made. The measure effectively denies Britain the ability to pay for the commodity, and has forced Gazprom to walk away from the sales and trading arm. In accordance with Putin’s decree that Russian gas be paid for in rubles, Gazprom has set up foreign-currency accounts for customers where their currencies can be converted into rubles on the Moscow exchange.
Now that Putin is turning up the pressure, the European nations have a difficult choice ahead: either they can play ball and demonstrate to the world that their efforts to wean themselves off of their dependence on Russian energy have been mostly in vain. Or they can face a “catastrophic” economic crisis as energy prices soar, leading to rationing, blackouts and other measures that will make the 1970s oil crisis in the US look like child’s play. |
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Russia To Ban Fertilizer Exports To ‘Not Friendly’ Countries; China Warns US Against Retaliationby Tyler Durden 10March2022 – https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-considers-temporary-ban-agricultural-products-countries-outside-eurasia Russia’s war on Ukraine is continuing to boost food prices. While the US and European countries are engaged in economic warfare against Moscow, it appears Russia’s turn to strike back has emerged.
On Thursday, Russian Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov said Russia decided to suspend fertilizer exports. This comes when global food prices are at record highs, and European fertilizer makers are struggling to produce nutrients ahead of the spring growing season, increasing global food inflation risks.
President Vladimir Putin said the fertilizer export ban was a move to ensure stable domestic food prices. This is another sign of growing protectionism worldwide as countries grapple with soaring food prices. Putin said fertilizer markets are deteriorating, making food a lot more expensive.
Notably, Putin added that Russia has agreements with “friendly countries” on fertilizers. Making matters worse, Interfax, an independent Russian news agency, reported earlier that Moscow is considering retaliatory economic measures to ban exports of certain agricultural products to countries outside the Eurasian Economic Union.
Interfax said Moscow could temporarily ban grain exports to the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and ban sugar exports beyond the EEU. This may result in declining food supplies for those countries and soaring food costs. Add this to the fertilizer ban and Europe and maybe the West is headed for a major food crisis.  Eurasian Economic Union
Possible Russian retaliatory measures follow a series of Western sanctions on Russia, which have collapsed the ruble, locked the central bank out of a large chunk of its foreign-currency savings, and crushed its ability to trade with the outside world by removing certain Russian banks from SWIFT.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been quoted well before the invasion of Ukraine of the need to strengthen an emerging multipolar world order.
It’s early to declare if Western sanctions will paralyze Russia, but what appears to be happening is that the global economy is becoming more fractured than ever as a great power struggle between the West and East flourishes.
Earlier this week, Russian banks that were cut off from SWIFT turned to China’s state-owned UnionPay system. Also, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Thursday its oil and gas firms have other buyers as many Western nations halt or wind down purchases for energy products.
The global economy is splintering, and Russia could be inclined to unleash retaliatory economic measures outside the Eurasian Economic Union. This area in Eastern Europe, Western Asia, and Central Asia, is also home to some of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, also known as One Belt One Road… and likely includes numerous so-called “friendly countries” including China. Meanwhile, China FM Spokesperson, Zhao Lijian was quoted earlier today as saying Beijing will retaliate with a “serious response” if the US hits sanctions on China over Ukraine.
Things are getting a little bit out of control.
To sum up, Russia banning fertilizer and the possibility of certain agricultural products to the West will result in elevated food prices. At the same time, we see a multipolar world order emerging that is bringing Moscow and Beijing closer by the day. |
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Fertilizer Markets Roiled by Belarus Potash Force MajeureTighter supplies for the key crop nutrient could mean further price hikes By Elizabeth Elkin, Jen Skerritt, and Tarso Veloso Ribeiro 17 February 2022, Updated on 18 February 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-17/belarus-potash-maker-roils-fertilizer-markets-with-force-majeure?sref=QV0pAzKC
A Belarusian potash miner that accounts for a major chunk of global supply has declared force majeure, shaking up a market that’s already contending with soaring prices.
Belaruskali said around Feb. 16 that it won’t be able to meet its contracts, according to a letter from an exporter addressed to clients seen by Bloomberg. Shipments have been halted as a result of U.S. and European sanctions.
The absence of Belarusian supplies will have big consequences. Potash is a key nutrient for major commodity crops like corn and soybeans, as well as produce. Fertilizer prices have already skyrocketed as soaring natural gas costs forced some European plants to halt or curtail production, and U.S. spot prices for potash in the Corn Belt have nearly doubled in the last year. Expensive fertilizer is making food more costly to produce and contributing to rising global inflation for consumers.
“This is a fairly unprecedented situation in the potash market,” CRU Group analyst Humphrey Knight said by phone. “It could take many months if not longer for that supply to recover.” Fertilizer GiantsCanada, Russia were the top potash producers in 2021  Fertilizer Giants Source: USGS 2022 Mineral Commodity Summary Note: Volumes are USGS estimates. Belarus exports about 10-12 million tons annually, according to Green Markets data. The country accounts for about a fifth of global supply. It’s a major shipper to Brazil, as well as to India and China.
“Global potash contracts have settled at the highest price since 2008, ensuring another year of pricey inputs for farmers and strong earnings for producers,” Alexis Maxwell, an analyst Green Markets, a company owned by Bloomberg, said in an email. “U.S. sanctions on Belarus eliminated a key competitor” with no readily available alternative supplier.
The U.S. sanctions against Belaruskali, Belarus’s only potash miner, came into force in December, while penalties against Belarusian Potash Co., which exports all the potash from the country, should become effective April 1.
The sanctions may result in shifting trade flows and some demand rationing, Nutrien Ltd. interim Chief Executive Officer Ken Seitz said in an interview. Customers who have historically purchased from Belarus are trying to secure supplies elsewhere. For example, Russia is doubling fertilizer quantities offered to Brazil, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said during an interview to Radio Jovem Pan Thursday. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko discussed the potash sanctions with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, he said during a televised joint news conference in Moscow. Putin ordered a port to be built near St. Petersburg for exports of the nutrient, Lukashenko said, adding that Belarus expects to start loading “millions” of tons of cargo there within 1 to 1 ½ years.
CRU’s Knight said that Russian ports were likely the only option left for Belarusian Potash Co. to export, but most are already operating at capacity. While some Belarusian potash could be rerouted to the Russian market, pushing Russian companies to export more, the volumes would be small, he said.
Nutrien has an additional half million tons of capacity that would be available in the latter half of 2022 if needed, Seitz said. Grower margins are strong, so higher potash prices won’t result in less demand.
The company could also ramp up potash output, but first, it would need to see a prolonged impact on the market for “years” to bring on additional sustained capacity, Seitz said. Nutrien increased its potash capacity by 1 million tons in 2021 and additional volumes are expected to come online in 2022 from other companies, he said.
“We’re not standing around saying we’re not doing anything,” Seitz said, noting the company doesn’t want to be left with additional cost if supply challenges go away quickly. “We are bringing on volumes.”
Nutrien anticipates global potash shipments will be between 68 million tons and 71 million tons in 2022.
The potash situation in Belarus is bleak, Scotiabank analyst Ben Isaacson said in a note. Nutrien will benefit not only from the higher prices, but also from being able to leverage their volume of the crop nutrient.
“Nutrien is now in the driver’s seat for how high potash prices go this year, while Belaruskali will determine how low they go,” Isaacson said. — With assistance by Aliaksandr Kudrytski, Yuliya Fedorinova, Dominic Carey, Chloe Whiteaker, and Aine Quinn |
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Farmers On The Brinkby Tyler Durden 27March2022 – https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/farmers-brink Authored by Doomberg via doomberg.substack.com, It was a spooky time to be out at sea off the US East Coast on Halloween in 1991. A strong storm system over the maritime provinces in Canada merged with the remnants of Hurricane Grace, forming a new, epic, and dangerous Nor’easter. The winds of this new storm breached 70 miles per hour and a wave as high as 100 feet was measured off the coast of Nova Scotia, but the storm was not renamed as either a tropical storm or a hurricane – instead, it is known only colloquially as simply the Perfect Storm. Six fishermen from Massachusetts perished when their vessel Andrea Gail sunk in open waters, and the story of the storm and of that tragedy became the subject of a best-selling book and a blockbuster feature film.
While the concept of a perfect storm is often too casually assigned in popular culture, it is difficult to find a more apt description of what has been unfolding in the global agriculture markets over these past several months. The tempest caused by the European energy disaster has merged with the hurricane of consequences flowing from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, forming the genesis of a generational crisis in food that will leave few unaffected. While we’ve been warning about just such a scenario for some time, after spending the past two weeks traveling across the US Midwest and conferring with our contacts in the agricultural sector, even we are a little spooked by what we’ve learned. In a financial crash, the correlation between all asset classes converges to one. The coming crash in global food supply will be driven by a similar phenomenon across virtually every input into farming – they are all spiking to historic highs simultaneously, supply availability is diminishing across the spectrum, and the time to reverse the worst of the upcoming consequences is rapidly running short.
Other than that, things are great. We begin with the price of fertilizer, which has been soaring to record highs across the globe. Key sources of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous – important inputs into soil fertility, crop yield, and plant maintenance – have all gone vertical. Ammonia is derived directly from natural gas, and the price of natural gas outside of the US has gone vertical. It’s no surprise that the price of ammonia has tripled over the past twelve months. Belarus is the third-largest supplier of potash in the world and its state-owned miner, Belaruskali, declared force majeure after sanctions were imposed by the US and Europe. The number two supplier of potash globally? Russia. Perhaps front-running the Russian move on Ukraine, China halted phosphate exports last fall in an effort to ensure adequate domestic supply. The combined impact of these events can be seen in the Green Markets North American Fertilize Index, which tracks a blend of fertilizer prices globally:  Green Markets NA Fertilizer price Index 18March2022 Weed control is an important element of farming, and herbicides are an irreplaceable tool in the farmer’s repertoire. The most heavily used herbicide in the world is the controversial molecule glyphosate, known widely by its retail brand name Roundup. Invented by Monsanto (which is now owned by Bayer) in the 1970s, glyphosate has been linked to certain blood cancers and is targeted for elimination by many environmental groups. Despite these concerns, glyphosate remains a systemically important molecule – many seeds have been genetically modified to be resistant to it, allowing for its widespread use while minimizing damage to crops, and generics have expanded the market as it came off Monsanto’s patent.
Glyphosate is effectively little more than an elegantly modified fertilizer, containing both phosphorous and nitrogen. It is derived from similar starting materials – including ammonia – and, as such, its price has soared amid chronic supply shortages. This has caused the price of other herbicides to rise as farmers desperately seek substitutes, as described by this article in The Western Producer (emphasis added throughout):
If farmers skimp on herbicides to get by this season, it only makes dealing with weeds more challenging in the future. As one expert warned us, it only takes one year of negligence to do several years of damage to a field.
 Glyphosate Market Price in China 20March2022 Diesel is another significant input into farming, and it too is facing a global supply crunch. Javier Blas, an energy and commodities columnist at Bloomberg whose Twitter account is an absolute must-follow, recently published an editorial sounding the alarm:
Once again, we discover the vital role natural gas plays in many downstream verticals, a key theme of many Doomberg pieces. With inventories at record lows and supplies constrained, the retail price of diesel in the US smashed previous record highs. In Europe, which depends heavily on Russian imports for both diesel and its semi-processed oil precursor, the wholesale market is on the verge of breaking. Here’s an updated version of the chart in Blas’ editorial:  European Wholesale Diesel 2017 – 2022 As expensive as it is to fuel the field equipment needed to farm, keeping them operational at all is becoming an ever-growing challenge. The same chip shortage constraining automobile production has struck the farming equipment industry, making new equipment and spare parts harder to come by. Farmers in Iowa recently vented their frustration at a Republican forum on agriculture:
Compounding these challenges with machinery is a burgeoning labor shortage that is rapidly adding pressure to this brewing catastrophe. Although the labor issues in the US span well beyond agriculture, there are aspects that exacerbate the impact on farmers, including the physical labor intensity and seasonality of many roles, as well as the reliance on foreign laborers to fill key positions US citizens have historically shunned. This is especially challenging in light of vaccine mandates at border crossings. Here’s a recent report from Wisconsin Public Radio which describes the challenges well:
Farmers are also competing with other sectors for a limited pool of labor. The gap between job openings and unemployed but willing workers across the entire US continues to widen:  US Unemployment 28February2022 Even generously assuming farmers can cobble together enough fertilizer, herbicide, machinery, and labor to produce a good harvest this fall, they may be left to deal with yet another crisis of supply that few off the field have on their radar: propane. As Tracy Schuchart – yet another absolute must-follow on Twitter – has been flagging for several months, the US exits the winter of 2021-2022 with concerningly low levels of propane inventory, well-below typical averages for this time of year:
 Tracy-tweet-20March2022-what industry relies on propane the most Farming Here is the supply situation in chart form, with the shaded region signifying the high- and low-inventory levels over the past seven years:
 Seasonal US Propane Storage 18March2022 What does propane supply have to do with farming? Grain drying. Here’s a primer on the importance of drying, from Wikipedia:
Many farms are located in rural areas without ready access to natural gas, and thus some 80% of grain dryers in the US, for example, rely on propane as a fuel. In a piece we wrote in December called An Urgent Call on Line 5, we chronicled how progressive politicians and environmental groups were targeting an important pipeline artery that runs from Canada, under the Straits of Mackinac, and across the State of Michigan. Line 5 is crucial to the stability of the US supply of propane, and yet – despite the catastrophic energy crisis we find ourselves in – the Attorney General of Michigan was recently captured on video spouting unserious nonsense:
 Progressive politicians and environmental groups were targeting an important propane pipeline We believe we are at the onset of a global famine of historic proportions. In a staggering defiance of logic, many US politicians are still attacking the lifeblood of our own energy production infrastructure, looking to score political points against “the other team,” blaming price-taking producers of global commodities for gouging, threatening producers of energy with windfall profits taxes, resisting calls to remove bureaucratic hurdles to new production, and refusing to open an introductory physics textbook to help guide them through the suite of policy choices that require true leadership to get right. They remain stuck in an endless loop of platitudes, blamestorming, corruption, and ignorance.
As Eisenhower aptly identifies in our opening quote, distance has an anesthetizing effect on the observer of any occurrence. One wonders how many people will starve before our politicians get serious. The populations most at risk of falling off the edge are half a world away and we worry that that number is uncomfortably high.
At Doomberg, we pride ourselves on seeing patterns early and being months ahead of the news flow. We are consistently human-centric. Never have we been more certain in our beliefs while fervently wishing that we are wrong. A global famine is no joke, and correctly forecasting one would bring no joy.
If you support the work of Team Doomberg and have not yet signed up to receive new articles directly to your inbox, we encourage you to subscribe below. Thank you for being a reader!
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Sanctions hurt US more than Russia – pollMost Americans focused on economic woes at home, more than two in five of respondents indifferent to Ukraine’s fate10 May, 2022 14:17 https://www.rt.com/news/555252-biden-sanctions-hurt-america/ A new poll has found that 53% of Americans believe that sanctions on Moscow hurt the US more than Russia. Amid soaring gas prices and rising living costs, voters are losing confidence in US President Joe Biden’s leadership, and 43% say they’re “OK” with Ukraine losing its ongoing conflict with Russia.
With inflation at a 40-year peak and gas prices near record highs, the Democracy Institute/Express.co.uk poll revealed that Biden is polling negatively in all policy areas, with foreign policy the worst. Some 56% disapprove of his handling of foreign matters, compared to 40% approving. On Ukraine specifically, only 38% approve of his stewardship, while 52% disapprove.
The Biden administration has attempted to blame Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, for the rising cost of living at home, with his officials repeatedly referring to “Putin’s price hike.” However, living costs were rising for months before Russia sent troops into Ukraine, and voters are pointing the finger at Biden for their economic woes.
Some 50% said they’d back Republicans in November’s midterm elections, compared with 42% saying they’d vote Democrat. In addition to more voters being “OK” than “not OK” with Ukraine losing the conflict with Russia (43% to 41%), a majority of Americans think it would be better for Biden to leave office than for Putin to step down, by 53% to 44%.
Biden has sanctioned the Russian banking and energy sectors, and his administration has sent nearly $4 billion worth of weapons to Ukraine, with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin promising last month to “move heaven and earth” to finance Kiev’s fighting. The US president has also asked Congress to approve another $33 billion aid package for Ukraine – of which $20 billion would be earmarked for military aid – and on Monday signed the Lend-Lease Act of 2022, allowing Washington to send unlimited quantities of arms to Kiev.
In the eyes of the Kremlin, this deluge of weapons plus the US and NATO’s intelligence-sharing arrangements with Kiev mean that the West is “essentially going to war with Russia through a proxy.”
American voters, however, are not as earnest as the Biden administration in fuelling this war. According to the latest poll, they consider Russia the fourth biggest threat to the US at 16%, behind North Korea (18%), Iran (20%), and China (40%). READ MORE: Biden’s economic approval rating revealed
This difference between expectation and reality has made people cynical, he claimed, comparing the apparent loss of trust to public disillusionment with coronavirus policies throughout the West.
“The problem [now] is that at least half of the country in America thinks they were hoodwinked over a lot of the Covid stuff, so they are even more cynical about government and media than they were two years ago,” he said. |
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Majority Of Americans Make “Lifestyle Changes” As Gas Prices Hit Record Highsby Tyler Durden 11March2022 – https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/majority-americans-make-lifestyle-changes-gas-prices-hit-record-highs President Biden’s disastrous economy shows signs of stagflation as growth wanes, and commodity prices stage the largest weekly gain ever. Today’s inflation printed at a 40-year high as soaring commodity costs hit the working poor the hardest, who have been forced to make lifestyle changes to offset additional costs.
First, let’s begin with a new report from LendingClub. It shows a staggering 64% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, up from 61% in December. As costs skyrocket, the working poor see their wages stripped away by inflation.
New research from Yardeni Research estimates the average household will spend an additional $2,000 per year in gasoline on top of an extra $1,000 in food expenses. Adding this all up, the typical household will spend $3,000 less this year on other things.
This means that people living paycheck to paycheck with no savings or other safety nets will have to make abrupt lifestyle changes.
According to American Automobile Association (AAA), 59% of Americans are making lifestyle changes as the national average for regular gasoline at the pump hits a new record high of $4.318. If gas hit $5, three-quarters of the respondents said they would need to make lifestyle changes to offset the spike at the pump.
Among the respondents who said they would make changes in response to higher gas prices, 80% of them said they would drive fewer miles, with some differences among different generations:
Prices in some parts of the country have spiked to just under $8 a gallon.
 CBS Los Angeles-tweet-10March2022-Gas prices $8 a gallon. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, gas prices have risen more than 74 cents to $4.318 per gallon, a record high. The Biden administration has launched a media blitz to blame soaring prices on Putin.
 Gas prices in the US 10March2022 However, when Biden was elected, gas prices averaged around $2.30 and jumped $1.230 over the last year before the attack several weeks back. That means prices jumped 53% even before the invasion, but the administration insists in their messaging that President Putin is responsible for why prices of everything are rising.
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The Three Phases of the Ukrainian War11July 11, 2024 https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/07/the_three_phases_of_the_ukrainian_war.html NATO’s war against Russia is progressing through three distinct phases: euphoria, apprehension, and despair. Phase I. Euphoria The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, caused a sense of euphoria in Washington and at NATO headquarters. The tactic of escalating Moscow’s anxiety about Ukraine’s impending NATO membership had proven successful. As NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told a European Parliament joint committee meeting: “So he (Putin) went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders….”
Stoltenberg inadvertently unveiled the truth. The conflict did not begin because Putin sought to resurrect the Soviet Union or out of fear of Ukrainian democracy. Stoltenberg and the leadership of NATO were fully aware that Russia would eventually be compelled to act according to its security imperatives and invade Ukraine to alleviate the NATO threat at its borders.
The cunning aspect of this plan was a deception. NATO never had any intention of granting membership to Ukraine. Therefore, even the most fervent supporters of NATO cannot deny that it was NATO’s deliberate provocation that ignited the war.
The next steps appeared pretty straightforward. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, informed lawmakers during closed-door briefings before the invasion on February 2 and 3, 2022, that an anticipated full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine might lead to Kyiv’s capture in just 72 hours.
The strategy entailed deliberately allowing Ukraine to collapse, which would prompt the West to impose devastating economic sanctions. The objectives were the destruction of the Russian economy, the resignation of Putin, and, ultimately, the elimination of Russia as a European power
After Russia’s unsuccessful attempt to capture Kiev, there was a surge of wild optimism within NATO circles. There was a prevailing notion that Russia’s military strength was not as formidable as previously believed. Thus, NATO saw an opportunity not only to destroy the Russian economy but also to defeat Russia militarily.
The US and its NATO allies decided to set aside any pretenses and fully engage in the conflict, providing Ukraine with modern weaponry, intelligence, training, financing, and all necessary resources to bolster NATO’s chances of prevailing, all while upholding a facade of plausible deniability. Ukraine was supposed to bear the brunt of battle and pay the cost in blood and destruction.
The plan held considerable plausibility, and the data supported it. In 2022, NATO’s defense budget exceeded Russia’s by 13-fold (NATO’s one trillion dollars versus Russia’s $75 billion). The combined GDP of all 31 members amounted to a staggering $46 trillion. In comparison, Russia’s GDP was a mere two trillion dollars. The population of NATO countries was 1.2 billion, while Russia had 145 million. Judging by the numbers, Russia appeared to be an easy target. Phase II. Apprehension Despite the numbers, the multibillion-dollar investment, the massive supply of modern weaponry, the hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, and the massive destruction of Ukraine’s infrastructure, none of the NATO objectives have been achieved two and a half years later. Putin’s grip on power remains unshaken, and the sanctions have failed to significantly affect the Russian economy. Moreover, Russia is successfully building a formidable military-industrial complex, engineering and producing weapons that often surpass Western designs in capability and innovation.
This sobering reality forced NATO to reshape the conflict and develop a new strategy. The new approach revolved around a protracted war of attrition aimed at debilitating Russia both economically and militarily.
It is becoming exceedingly evident that America and its Western allies became a hostage of sanctions and found themselves trapped between the continuation of war and economic and military realities. From this untenable situation, they could see no exit and continued doing the same things, expecting different results. The European Union has now enforced its 14th set of sanctions, prompting one to question what this latest round can achieve that the previous 13 could not. Meanwhile, NATO is in the process of organizing the provision of F-16s and other advanced weaponry to Ukraine. Phase III. Despair The conflict has now escalated to its most critical stage when desperate people do desperate things. As the tables turned in favor of Russia, NATO is running out of options. The situation led to a series of reckless and incendiary remarks from Western officials and NATO leaders advocating for a significant escalation of the conflict beyond Ukraine’s borders by launching attacks on Russia territory using long-range missiles supplied by NATO countries.
The US and its NATO partners are delusional and fail to realize that they are facing an unwinnable situation. It is the immutable fact that a nuclear-armed state cannot be defeated. If Ukraine loses, it will be perceived as NATO’s defeat. Conversely, if Russia falters, it will inevitably result in a nuclear war. Two and half years ago, NATO leaders provoked the Russian invasion, leading to a tragic outcome. Now, as to validate their lack of sanity, they are frantically escalating the conflict, which may lead to a catastrophe. Clearly, regardless of how we analyze the situation, it is becoming increasingly dire for the US and its allies militarily and geopolitically.
During the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe on December 5, 1994, Russia’s president, Boris Yeltsin, vehemently accused Clinton of “trying to split [the] continent again through NATO’s eastward expansion.” President Biden has taken it a step further; he is, by inciting conflict with Russia, on a mission to split the world.
The conflict has facilitated the creation of a formidable anti-Western coalition currently consisting of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Other countries will likely join it in the future as the war continues. And it will, as NATO has been better at starting wars than at knowing how to finish them. If the coalition evolves into an alliance, it will surpass NATO in terms of human and natural resources, economic power, and military capabilities. Ultimately, it might be America’s most critical geopolitical blunder ever, as this rival may weaken America’s dominance and diminish its influence.
In his essay “Perpetual Peace,” philosopher Immanuel Kant argued three centuries ago that humanity’s path to universal peace would be through human insight or catastrophic conflict.
Regretfully, as long as we are led by untutored people who lack moral and strategic foresight and fail to grasp the perilous nature of the policies they promote, and as long as we have a military alliance that, after fulfilling its original purpose, seeks out new adversaries to justify its existence, peace by way of human insight appears increasingly remote.
Alexander G. Markovsky is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, a conservative think tank that examines national security, energy, risk analysis, and other public policy issues. He is the author of Anatomy of a Bolshevik and Liberal Bolshevism: America Did Not Defeat Communism, She Adopted It. Mr. Markovsky is the owner and CEO of Litwin Management Services, LLC. He can be reached at alex.g.markovsky@gmail.com |
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 Nefesh B’Nefesh: Live the Dream US & CAN 1-866-4-ALIYAH | UK 020-8150-6690 or 0800-085-2105 | Israel 02-659-5800 https://www.nbn.org.il/ info@nbn.org.il It’s time to come home! Nefesh B’Nefesh: Live the Dream 1-866-4-ALIYAH |
Urgent Call From Chief Rabbi of IsraelThe Rishon Lezion Chief Rabbi of Israel HaRav Yitzchak Yosef wrote a letter to Jews in Ukraine, and ALL JEWS LIVING IN THE DIASPORA, to understand the threat of war as a call to quickly MOVE TO ERETZ YISRAEL. Rishon Lezion HaRav Yitzchak Yosef Posted on 26February2022 https://breslev.com/3067039/  Urgent Call From Chief Rabbi of Israel for Aliyah Kol Koreh to all Acheinu Beis Yisrael in UkraineTo our Jewish brothers in foreign lands, especially Ukraine: During these times, when the sounds of war are heard, it’s appropriate for every Jew with yirat Shamayim (fear of heaven) to hasten his way to Holy Land, as promised by the prophet Ovadia (1:17): וּבְהַר צִיּוֹן תִּהְיֶה פְלֵיטָה וְהָיָה קֹדֶש … On Mount Zion there will be refuge, and it will be holy… And although it’s not clear if there will be a war and only Hashem has the solutions and we must daven for peace throughout the entire world, in any event, ascending to the Holy Land is always a very great and important mitzvah, and at all times, we must strive to reach the Holy Land and especially the holy city of Jerusalem. And now that there are sounds and fears of war, the issues are unfolding in a way as to see it as a type of call from Shamayim, to ascend to the Holy Land from all the foreign lands in the entire Diaspora, and especially the holy city of Jerusalem, because these are the places where the Schechina (the Divine Presence) rests, and they have more protection.
And the main thing is to strengthen one’s emuna and tefillah (prayer), and to know that there is nothing that can stop Hashem from providing a yeshuah (salvation) from every situation in any manner. Just like we witnessed miracles and wonders during the exodus from Egypt that were above all the laws of nature, and there was also a great amount of Divine help during Kriyat Yam Suf (crossing the Sea of Reeds) to save each and every Jew from the dangerous sea, in the same way, a Jew that exerts himself for Hashem with emuna by saying “Shema, Yisrael, Hashem Elokeinu Hashem Echad” (Hear, Oh Israel, Hashem is our G-d, Hashem, the One and Only”) twice a day – Hashem will protect him and save him.
And yet there is a sacred obligation on each and every Jew who has fear of Heaven in all the lands of the Diaspora to make every effort to hurry and hasten his footsteps to Eretz Yisrael, and to make aliyah quickly to our Holy Land, and not to delay this at all, and to hurry to arrange a plane ticket. And Hashem, May He be blessed, who feeds and sustains everyone will, with heavenly assistance, provide everyone with a good place to live, and food and adequate income.  Harav Yosef aliyah message-Feb-2022 Now that there are sounds and fears of war, the issues are unfolding in a way as to see it as a type of call from Shamayim, to ascend to the Holy Land from ALL the foreign lands in the ENTIRE DIASPORA. |
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The Godfather Theme Song
Countries sanctioning Russia 2022
The Rest of the World wants nothing to do with this mess!
JerusalemCats Comments: The following is for your information.
Azov-patch-2022-5-17 Ukraine Nazi Azov Battalion – source https://thedreizinreport.com/2022/05/17/the-fall-of-the-azov/
Ukraine Nazi Azov Battalion
The Dreizin Report – 2022-05-17 – The Fall of the Azov
Posted 17May2022 The Dreizin Report:
How did the Azov come about? Why were they never a part of the Ukrainian army? Why are almost all of them bearded? What is their place in history? What is the significance of their downfall? And everything else you ever wanted to know about the Azov! Stepan Bandera
-https://thedreizinreport.com/2022/05/17/the-fall-of-the-azov/
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Why the War? Cui bono? Who benefits? :
Ukraine is a proxy war between the US Military Industrial Complex/Corrupt Deep State and Russia
The Truth about Russian Ukraine War
23February2023 Brachaim’s:
The truth about the war with Russian and Ukraine: The same corrupt Elite Globalists who orchestrated the Pandemic and Covid-19 are now pushing the world into World War 3.
https://reesereport.com/
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The Russian do a lot to let the Ukrainians know how to get help to surrender but this video is as powerful and truthful as they come
Parsin_5_25-tweet-29August2023-The Russian do a lot to let the Ukrainians know how to get help to surrender
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Inside Russia’s Military Operation
Posted 09Novembe2022 iEarlGrey:
The West is shipping arms to Ukraine, and American and EU leaders keep discussing more supplies of tanks and planes instead of peaceful solutions. Military aid provided to Ukraine don’t change the course of the conflict and only increases the number of deaths among civilians and soldiers. Why the ongoing fighting in Ukraine is the fault of a years-long policy of the West and a boon for the American defence industry – in this documentary.
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Kyiv Seizes Assets Of Russian Orthodox Clerics
by Tyler Durden, 14December2022 – 10:30 AM https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/kyiv-seizes-assets-russian-orthodox-clerics
Authored by Kyle Anzalone via The Libertarian Institute,
Ukraine has ratcheted up its campaign against a branch of the Eastern Orthodox church with ties to Russia. On the order of President Volodymyr Zelensky, seven senior clerics from the Russian Orthodox church will have their assets seized and face bans on a range of economic and legal activities.
During his nightly video address on Sunday, the Ukrainian president said “by decision of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, sanctions were applied against seven people,” adding that his administration is “doing everything to ensure that the aggressor state does not have a single string of Ukrainian society to pull.”
St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kiev, Ukraine. Wikipedia image
According to Reuters, the new penalties mean that the seven clerics will have “their assets seized and are subject to a ban on a range of economic and legal activities as well as a de facto travel ban.”
The vast majority of Ukrainians belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church, with many worshiping in parishes that take direction from the Moscow Patriarchate. On December 1, Zelensky announced that Kiev would attempt to expel all religious institutions with ties to Russia, arguing the move would make it “impossible for religious organizations affiliated with centers of influence in the Russian Federation to operate in Ukraine.”
The president went on the claim that the Russian Orthodox Church poses a threat to Ukrainian culture, saying “we will never allow anyone to build an empire inside the Ukrainian soul.”
He additionally denounced Ukrainians who continue to attend the allegedly Russia-controlled parishes as succumbing to “the temptation of evil.”
Orthodox Christianity-tweet-13December2022-Ukraine sanctions five more hierarchs
Kiev has conducted a series of raids on Russian Orthodox parishes and claims to have uncovered clerics attempting to subvert the Ukrainian government, though has provided little evidence to support its assertions.
Nonetheless, Kiev sanctioned 10 top clerics of the church last week, suggesting they threatened “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”
Max Blumenthal-tweet-11December2022-Ukraine Russian books music banned
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Nuclear Blackmail | The shelling of Zaporozhye power plant puts intl safety at risk (the shelling by Ukraine)
Posted 07Novmeber2022 iEarlGrey “Nuclear Blackmail | The shelling of Zaporozhye power plant puts intl safety at risk”:
The Zaporozhye nuclear plant in Energodar is the largest in Europe. Since March 2022 it has been under Russian control and Zaporozhye Region recently voted in a referendum to join Russia. In the meantime, Kiev continues to attack the plant, putting Europe at risk of a disaster six times bigger than the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Despite IAEA warnings and the referendum, Kiev continues to use the Zaporozhye plant as a blackmail tool. The documentary shows the timeline of the attacks and focuses on potential risks of Ukrainian provocations.
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Donbass: I’m Alive! | Mariupol survivors of Ukrainian attacks find shelter
Posted 15November2022 iEarlGreyTV: These are the NAZI Terrorist that Biden and the Neocon Democrats have installed in Ukraine and are supporting. Thank you, Victoria Nuland for the needless death and destruction, May you roast in Hell.
“It’s the Azov battalion. They forced people out of their houses and into basements. Then tanks started shooting from here, from there,” a Mariupol resident shared her story with the film crew. Over 400,000 people in Mariupol had to go underground because they couldn’t leave the city. The film tracks stories of people who had to survive in Mariupol under Ukrainian shelling. Sheltering in cellars and watching Ukrainian tanks firing at residential buildings. They have all gone through hell and back. Now they’re happy to be alive and hope for a new beginning.
A Russian military officer drives across shelled Mariupol to distribute humanitarian aid. A volunteer from Texas, who came to Donbass eight years ago, as he refused to believe American propaganda, helps reunite families separated during the evacuation. A hieromonk who was taken hostage by Azov members and tortured miraculously survived and dedicated his life to studying the origins of nazism in Ukraine. A courageous OB-GYN who runs a maternity ward helped give birth to 25 women during the bombing.
Hundreds of people who got a chance to be evacuated lost connections with the rest of their families who stayed. With no cell service and internet connection, their only hope was to get a word through Russian soldiers who would find relatives and friends and relay their messages.
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Is the West aiding and supporting the Hamas Nazis like it is supporting the Ukrainian Nazis?
Hamas Child suicide Bomb Terrorist
Shmuel HaNavi bus bombing From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Shmuel HaNavi bus bombing was the suicide bombing of a crowded public bus (Egged bus 2) in the Shmuel HaNavi quarter in Jerusalem, Israel, on August 19, 2003. Twenty-four people were killed and over 130 wounded. Many of the victims were children, some of them infants. The Islamist militant group Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.
Gaza “protesters” loft molotov cocktail on swastika kite over Israeli border
International Neo Nazi Fund
Victoria Nulland meets with Svoboda neo-nazis
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Stockman: No More Ukraines
by Tyler Durden, 28February, 2023 – 11:45 PM https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/stockman-no-more-ukraines
Authored by David Stockman via LewRockwell.com,
Joe Biden must think that he’s the world’s Rich Uncle. In a meeting with the so-called Bucharest Nine today he promised these former Warsaw Pact nations—which should never have been admitted to NATO in the first place—unlimited economic and military support.
Nine more Ukraines if need be.
Biden conveyed reassurances that the United States is prepared to speed to their defense if they come under offensive action by Moscow. These nations include Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.
For want of doubt, here’s the just-in-case-you-missed-the-message amplification from NSC spokesman John Kirby. Said the Deep State’s favorite shill, who is apparently serving the national security complex in endless rotation, having moved from State to DOD and then to the National Security Council during the last decade, with a stop in between at CNN:
He said the president’s purpose in the meeting is to “reaffirm the United States’ unwavering support for the security of that alliance and trans-Atlantic unity.” It’s also meant to send a message to Putin that his country can’t intimidate these democracies, some of them relatively new and fragile.
Well, let’s see. Where is it documented that Putin has ever threatened Bulgaria or Hungary or Slovakia or Lithuania or any of the others for that matter? As it transpired, Hungary’s leader even refused to attend this pointless Biden photo op.
After all, what in the world could Putin gain by attacking these nations and occupying what would be hostile populations and damaged economies? A tremendous fiscal drain on his already beleaguered finances would be the only certainty.
The fact is, Washington has become so crazed with anti-Putin war fever that it doesn’t even ask, let alone answer, these foundational questions. Instead, it has just lapsed into grade school reasoning by analogy. If Putin attacked the government of Ukraine, why then it’s a sure bet that the nine yellow dominoes highlighted in the map below are next on the list to fall.
Bucharest Nine NATO European Countries
No, not at all. Ukraine is sui generis. It’s a hodge-podge of variant histories, ethnicities and religious traditions that never belonged under the roof of a single state.
Moreover, its propinquity to things Russian is an unassailable matter of history. Prior to the arrival of communist rule after WWI, its various regions had marinated for centuries as vassals under the tutelage of Czarist Russia. Ukraine’s historically meandering boundaries, in fact, were only finally frozen in current form by the brutal dictates of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev.
During the long amalgamated history of these neighboring, mainly Slavic populations the eastern and southern portions of the current Ukraine map became populated and economically developed by Russian speaking migrants. At length, they converted the largely empty, herder-dominated steppes into the flourishing bread basket, mining district and industrial work shop of old Russia.
This arrangement was essentially continued by the communist commissars after they consolidated control in 1922, save only for an arbitrary administrative re-arrangement which put the old “Novorossiya” (New Russia) of Catherine the Great’s time into a wholly unnatural state rechristened as the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine.
These artificial borders and the ethnic hodge-podge within them were held together at the gun point of Ukraine’s local communist rulers until 1991, when the scourge of Soviet Communism perished from the earth. And almost immediately thereafter, the elections showed that the state confected by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev had never been built to last; and that the verdict of Ukraine’s nascent democracy was that partition would someday be the only answer.
As it happened, Viktor Yanukovych was the last democratically elected politician before Washington essentially took-over the country. Of course, by the writ of the Ukraine’s de facto rulers on the Potomac he was illegally deposed and driven out of the country via the coup d’ etat in February 2014.
Needless to say, Yanukovych had been the champion of the Russian speaking populations of the Donbas and southern rim of the Black Sea. He ran on what was called the “Regions” party platform in both 2004 and 2010, against vehemently pro-Ukrainian candidates, whose bases of support were in the central and west geographies.
As shown in the two maps below, both elections were a case of red state versus blue state electoral division on steroids. Except unlike the US where a GOP gubernatorial candidate actually got a 47% showing in the deep blue state of New York this past election, the vote split in the most hard core of the respective regions (dark red and dark blue) was upwards of 90/10 in many localities.
In the 2004 election, Yanukovych narrowly lost the overall count, even as he dominated overwhelmingly in the east and south.
2004 Election Results in Ukraine
2004 Election Results in Ukraine
By contrast, in 2010 Yanukovych retraced the same massive domination of his own Russian-speaking regions while striking out in the west. But this time with the help of Washington-based election consultants (i.e. the infamous Paul Manafort) he managed to accumulate enough incremental votes to come out on top in the nation-wide tally.
2010 Election Results in Ukraine
2010 Election Results in Ukraine
Needless to say, when the foolish neocons led by the detestable Victoria Nuland, who surrounded then Vice-President Joe Biden, fomented the coup against Yanukovych in February 2014 they had no clue as to the tenuous political balance they were upending.
But it didn’t take long to strike the match. In short order the followers of the WWII Hitler ally, Stephan Bandera, who dominated the unelected, Washington-installed government in Kiev, made two destructive moves that amounted to a signal to “let the partition begin”.
The first of these was to abolish Russian as an official language in the Donbass and elsewhere. And the second was the massacre by fire of pro-Russian trade unionists in a building in Odessa by supporters of the Kiev government.
It was only a matter of time, therefore, before most of the red-colored territories on the maps above declared their independence. It was also in short order that the people of what had been the Russian province of Crimea after Catherine the Great purchased it from the Ottoman’s in 1783 voted overwhelmingly to re-join the Russian Federation. That ended their brief sojourn in the Ukrainian state, which had been Khrushchev’s 1954 gift to the communist thugs in Kiev who had helped him seize power after Stalin’s death.
Also, in short order the new proto-Fascist government in Kiev moved to deeply antagonize its historic neighbor and former fealty overlord in Moscow by seeking to join NATO and launching a brutal, unrelenting war on the breakaway Republics of the Donbas. This onslaught ended up killing upwards of 15,000 civilians during the eight year run-up to Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
Needless to say, Putin was no more interested in having nuclear missiles planted even closer to his own border than was President John Kennedy in October 1962. Nor was he about to countenance the continued slaughter of Russian speakers in the Donbass after Kiev launched a drastically stepped up shelling and bombing campaign on these beleaguered areas one week before the February 24th invasion.
Below, we will amplify further on the overwhelming reasons why the Ukraine situation is a one-off civil war situation and the unfinished and unstable residue of a state which was never built to last.
Accordingly, it is not a case at all of legitimate sovereign borders being violated. Nor does it involve an assault on the hypocritical notion of a “liberal international order” that has not actually ever existed and which, instead, has been a cover for Washington’s global hegemony all along.
But the lessons are nonetheless profound. History accumulates and eventually leads to destructive, but wholly unnecessary outcomes.
That is the case today with the utterly foolish action of Washington during the 1990s and 2000s to bring former Warsaw Pact Nations, and even breakaway Soviet Republics into a NATO alliance whose mission was over and done in 1991.
It should have been dismantled then and there. When the old Soviet monster with its 50,000 tanks and 7,000 nuclear warheads posed along-side the Bucharest Nine pictured above disappeared into the dustbin of history, there was no longer a threat to the east. There was no “front line” to defend.
At that point Washington should have and easily could have led the world to disarmament and to a revival of the lasting peace that had disappeared in the “Guns of August” in 1914.
But now the NATO section 5 mutual defense commitment to these nations is equivalent to a stupid charity that the nearly bankrupt Federal government cannot afford in any case.
There is absolutely nothing in it for the enhancement of America’s homeland security, and huge incentives for the politicians of these nations to caterwaul against Russia rather than seek peaceful accommodation.
But Sleepy Joe is a captive of the Dems “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and cannot think rationally for a moment about the Russian President.
Still, the latter most definitely did not cause the Dems to loose the 2016 election. They brought Trump’s freakish victory upon themselves by their choice of candidate and embrace of policies that much of Flyover America found deeply repugnant.
When Washington began its foolish campaign to expand NATO to Russia’s doorstep in 1997, there was one American who actually possessed more knowledge, experience and analytical savvy about Russia and eastern Europe than the entire treaty-ratifying US Senate combined.
We are referring, of course, to Ambassador George F. Kennan. The latter was the intellectual father of the post-war containment policy against the Soviet Union and had spent decades in the US embassies of Europe and the Soviet Union, before going on to hold high rank in the State Department during the crucial years after WWII when the Cold War was born. Thereafter he joined academia at Princeton, where he produced a prodigious flow of scholarly work on national security policy, including a ringing dissent on the folly of LBJ’s war on Vietnam.
So by the time he penned a New York Times op ed upon the initial expansion of NATO in 1997, which he succinctly entitled “A Fateful Error”, the 93-year old Kennan had decades and decades of wisdom under his belt as a policy-maker and historian. And almost all of it was directly pertinent to the disorder left behind in the wake of the sudden collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991.
Kennan pulled no punches on the matter of NATO expansion:
A fair share of the script readers and stenographers who comprise today’s mainstream media, of course, have a faint knowledge of George Kennan and his unequivocal stance against NATO expansion, if any at all. Their blinders are simply the product of a quarter-century of accumulated recency bias—a process by which the once unthinkable becomes the unchallenged status quo.
The fact is, once the Soviet Union with its 50,000 tanks, 40,000 nuclear warheads, 5 million men under arms and frightfully militarized economy disappeared into the dustbin of history there was no purpose whatsoever for the perpetuation of NATO.
In that sense, Kennan’s “containment” policy had achieved 100% of its goal. The fearsome enemy on the eastern flank of Europe had literally vanished, meaning that what had been a one-time expedient of the Cold War could and should have been disbanded. In the rubble of the dismembered Soviet Union there was no threat left and nothing to defend or contain.
NATO’s warranted interment didn’t happen, however, and for the immensely trivial reason that the utterly unprincipled Bill Clinton determined to make hay one more time in the political posturing grounds of the “Captive Nations”. And with respect to this long forgotten matter your editor happened to have held a front row seat.
When we went to work on Capitol Hill for a GOP congressman at the peak of the Cold War in 1970 our first assignment was drafting a resolution during Captive Nations Week calling for the liberation of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania etc from yoke of Soviet tyranny. Such resolutions had nothing to do with actual policy, of course, which was to leave the Great Russian Bear undisturbed in his lair called the Warsaw Pact. But as a home-front politicking matter such resolutions were catnip to the eastern European constituencies.
After eastern Europe was peacefully liberated in 1991, however, this Captive Nations gambit became self-evidently obsolete, but the Clinton Administration soon had a handy PR substitute. Namely, NATO membership for the woebegone remnants of the Warsaw Pact—a seemingly harmless gesture that had no real purpose other than to express solidarity with back home constituencies of eastern European descent.
NATO expansion, in effect, was a way for Washington politicians to say: We are still with you!
Indeed, since there was no plausible reason for maintaining a war alliance against an enemy that didn’t exist, NATO became the equivalent of a diplomatic American Legion hall. It was a place for bureaucratic veterans of the Cold War to swap combat stories and to pretend they still had something worthwhile to do.
Unfortunately, it didn’t stay that harmless. The military-industrial complex soon realized that it needed a tangible enemy to justify current procurement and new weapons systems and also that the former Captive Nations comprised an expanded market for its wares.
So the 14 new NATO nations formed a ready-made shopping mall for additional weapons sales.
new NATO nations by Date
That all might have been harmless enough, save for two untoward developments. The first was the designation of Russia and Putin as enemy #1 by the neocons after their adventures against “terrorism” in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the middle east came a cropper a few years after the memory of 9/11 had dimmed.
The demonization of Putin became especially urgent in late 2013 when he deftly put the kibosh on the neocon’s plan for regime change in Syria. By convincing Assad to give up his chemical weapons under international supervision, the case for military removal of the Syrian president quickly evaporated.
In short order, however, these same neocons got their revenge by fomenting a coup d’ etat on Putin’s doorstep in Ukraine. And it was led by Washington’s hand-picked proto-fascists who detested all things Russian, including the considerable populations and regions of Ukraine which were Russian-speaking.
As it happened, you don’t need a tinfoil hat to recognize the near-conspiracy on the banks of the Potomac that sent the fragile politics of the artificial state of Ukraine into a tail-spin, and which at length paved the way to the catastrophe underway there at present.
The fact is, the detestable Kagan family comprises the high preisthood of the neocon synod that has infiltrated the foreign policy establishment of both parties. And it just so happens that the very high priest of that lamentable synod, Robert Kagan, is married to Victoria Nuland, a war-mongering national security apparatchik who has served every administration since Bush the Younger, and who was the archetict of the Maidan coup on the streets of Kiev in February 2014.
From that moment on, Putin was transformed from a mere bad guy into the incarnation of evil itself in the neocon narrative. And his rational actions after the coup to reclaim Moscow’s centuries old naval bases in Russian Crimea and to offer succor to the imperiled Russian-speaking populations of the Donbas only added fuel to the fire.
But then came the deluge. In a word, the freakish election of Donald Trump in 2016 was falsely laid at Putin’s doorstep, even as Washington’s bipartisan ruling elites and their henchman in the mainstream media went berserk against the Donald.
At length, it turned into a a full-fledged mania—a Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) that pales into insignificance prior outbreaks of American political irrationality, such as the McCarthyism of the 1950s and the Red Hunts of 1919.
In a word, the TDS has utterly destroyed Washington’s foreign policy compass. The demonization of Putin has become so extreme and un-moored from reality that Washington is literally possessed by a ghost of the old Soviet Union. That is, it imagines a ferocious and powerful enemy on the “eastern front” that simply does not exist.
For crying out loud, GDP is a measure of latent capacity to make war, but the GDP of NATO is 26 times larger than that of Russia. Likewise, defense budgets are a measure of actual current military capacity, of which NATO’s war spending is 15 times larger. And that’s in the here and now.
Moreover, from the point of view of Vlad Putin leaping over the Atlantic and Pacific ocean moats to invade the American shores, the question recurs: How many aircraft carriers does he have compared to America’s 20 aircraft and heliocraft carriers?
One!
And it’s 38 years old!
In a word, the absurdity of Washington’s proxy war against Russia and this week’s meeting of the so-called Bucharest Nine is the product of a foreign policy compass that has been shattered by two decades worth of myths and lies that served the short-term interests of Washington’s career politicians and their Deep State masters.
But go back to the fact that George Kennan was right 26 years ago and the truth that nothing has changed in the interim to alter his judgement.
In that context, what would a president not entombed in the false narrative of the past quarter century actually do?
Here are a few possible starters:
That would be a start. It would put America back on the road toward rational homeland security, and enable a global future not imperiled by the threat of Nuclear Armageddon.
* * *
Originally posted at David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
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Fast Forward to Fascism [Ukraine today]
Posted 12November2022 iEarlGreyTV:
The nationalist movement in Ukraine didn’t just happen; it took years to build. It’s been growing for years, nurtured by western curators and supported by western funds. By the beginning of the Maidan, an entire network of neo-nazi units had already been up and running in Ukraine, but the Ukrainian government didn’t prosecute them. Ready and able military and terrorist units dispersed and showed up at anti-Maidan meetings in Ukraine’s cities. The years 2019 and 2020 saw meetings and protests in Kiev demanding the denial of special status for the DNR and LNR breakaway regions.
One of its main goals was to form an ideology that would dehumanize Russians and break all ties that existed for decades before. Initially, Russians weren’t seen as a minority in Ukraine, but the anti-Russian sentiment gradually became overwhelming. Nationalists have been taught how to lead a war on social media, eventually launching a guided communication battle against the Russian people.
Stepan Bandera was the head of the Ukrainian nationalist organisation in 1929. In 1934, the Gestapo accepted the Berlin chapter of the organization — he organized terrorist acts, killing officials. In 1941, the Ukrainian nationalist organization was responsible for the biggest Jewish pogrom in Lvov, killing about 7,000 people. Yet, in 2010, Stepan Bandera was pronounced a national hero, with torch-lit marches in his honour ever since.
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Zelensky awards Right Sector commander Dmytro Kotsyubaylo the ‘Hero of Ukraine’ award
How Ukraine’s Jewish president Zelensky made peace with neo-Nazi paramilitaries on front lines of war with Russia
Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal, March 4, 2022 https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/04/nazis-ukrainian-war-russia/
While Western media deploys Volodymyr Zelensky’s Jewish heritage to refute accusations of Nazi influence in Ukraine, the president has ceded to neo-Nazi forces and now depends on them as front line fighters.
Back in October 2019, as the war in eastern Ukraine dragged on, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Zolote, a town situated firmly in the “gray zone” of Donbas, where over 14,000 had been killed, mostly on the pro-Russian side. There, the president encountered the hardened veterans of extreme right paramilitary units keeping up the fight against separatists just a few miles away.
Elected on a platform of de-escalation of hostilities with Russia, Zelensky was determined to enforce the so-called Steinmeier Formula conceived by then-German Foreign Minister Walter Steinmeier which called for elections in the Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Lugansk.
In a face-to-face confrontation with militants from the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion who had launched a campaign to sabotage the peace initiative called “No to Capitulation,” Zelensky encountered a wall of obstinacy.
With appeals for disengagement from the frontlines firmly rejected, Zelensky melted down on camera. “I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons,” Zelensky implored the fighters.
Liveuamap-tweet-26October2019-Zelensky has visited disengaging area in Zolote today
Once video of the stormy confrontation spread across Ukrainian social media channels, Zelensky became the target of an angry backlash.
Andriy Biletsky, the proudly fascist Azov Battalion leader who once pledged to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen”, vowed to bring thousands of fighters to Zolote if Zelensky pressed any further. Meanwhile, a parliamentarian from the party of former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko openly fantasized about Zelensky being blown to bits by a militant’s grenade.
Though Zelensky achieved a minor disengagement, the neo-Nazi paramilitaries escalated their “No Capitulation” campaign. And within months, fighting began to heat up again in Zolote, sparking a new cycle of violations of the Minsk Agreement.
By this point, Azov had been formally incorporated into the Ukrainian military and its street vigilante wing, known as the National Corps, was deployed across the country under the watch of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, and alongside the National Police. In December 2021, Zelensky would be seen delivering a “Hero of Ukraine” award to a leader of the fascistic Right Sector in a ceremony in Ukraine’s parliament.
A full-scale conflict with Russia was approaching, and the distance between Zelensky and the extremist paramilitaries was closing fast.
This February 24, when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukrainian territory on a stated mission to “demilitarize and denazify” the country, US media embarked on a mission of its own: to deny the power of neo-Nazi paramilitaries over the country’s military and political sphere. As the US government-funded National Public Radio insisted, “Putin’s language [about denazification] is offensive and factually wrong.”
In its bid to deflect from the influence of Nazism in contemporary Ukraine, US media has found its most effective PR tool in the figure of Zelensky, a former TV star and comedian from a Jewish background. It is a role the actor-turned-politician has eagerly assumed.
But as we will see, Zelensky has not only ceded ground to the neo-Nazis in his midst, he has entrusted them with a front line role in his country’s war against pro-Russian and Russian forces.
The president’s Jewishness as Western media PR device
Hours before President Putin’s February 24 speech declaring denazification as the goal of Russian operations, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “asked how a people who lost eight million of its citizens fighting Nazis could support Nazism,” according to the BBC.
Raised in a non-religious Jewish family in the Soviet Union during the 1980’s, Zelensky has downplayed his heritage in the past. “The fact that I am Jewish barely makes 20 in my long list of faults,” he joked during a 2019 interview in which he declined to go into further detail about his religious background.
Today, as Russian troops bear down on cities like Mariupol, which is effectively under the control of the Azov Battalion, Zelensky is no longer ashamed to broadcast his Jewishness. “How could I be a Nazi?” he wondered aloud during a public address. For a US media engaged in an all-out information war against Russia, the president’s Jewish background has become an essential public relations tool.
Alex Rubinstein-tweet-28February2022-Watch left & right wing factions of MSM unite
A few examples of the US media’s deployment of Zelensky as a shield against allegations of rampant Nazism in Ukraine are below (see mash-up above for video):
Behind the corporate media spin lies the complex and increasingly close relationship Zelensky’s administration has enjoyed with the neo-Nazi forces invested with key military and political posts by the Ukrainian state, and the power these open fascists have enjoyed since Washington installed a Western-aligned regime through a coup in 2014.
In fact, Zelensky’s top financial backer, the Ukrainian Jewish oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, has been a key benefactor of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and other extremists militias.
The Azov Battalion marches with Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel flags in Mariupol, August 2020
Backed by Zelensky’s top financier, neo-Nazi militants unleash a wave of intimidation
Incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard, the Azov Battalion is considered the most ideologically zealous and militarily motivated unit fighting pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Donbass region.
With Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel insignia on the uniforms of its fighters, who have been photographed with Nazi SS symbols on their helmets, Azov “is known for its association with neo-Nazi ideology…[and] is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing US-based white supremacy organizations,” according to an FBI indictment of several US white nationalists that traveled to Kiev to train with Azov.
Igor Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian energy baron of Jewish heritage, has been a top funder of Azov since it was formed in 2014. He has also bankrolled private militias like the Dnipro and Aidar Battalions, and has deployed them as a personal thug squad to protect his financial interests.
In 2019, Kolomoisky emerged as the top backer of Zelensky’s presidential bid. Though Zelensky made anti-corruption the signature issue of his campaign, the Pandora Papers exposed him and members of his inner circle stashing large payments from Kolomoisky in a shadowy web of offshore accounts.
President Zelensky (C) meets with billionaire oligarch and business associate Ihor Kolomoisky on September 10, 2019
When Zelensky took office in May 2019, the Azov Battalion maintained de facto control of the strategic southeastern port city of Mariupol and its surrounding villages. As Open Democracy noted, “Azov has certainly established political control of the streets in Mariupol. To maintain this control, they have to react violently, even if not officially, to any public event which diverges sufficiently from their political agenda.”
Attacks by Azov in Mariupol have included assaults on “feminists and liberals” marching on International Women’s Day among other incidents.
In March 2019, members of the Azov Battalion’s National Corps attacked the home of Viktor Medvedchuk, the leading opposition figure in Ukraine, accusing him of treason for his friendly relations with Vladimir Putin, the godfather of Medvedchuk’s daughter.
Zelensky’s administration escalated the attack on Medvedchuk, shuttering several media outlets he controlled in February 2021 with the open approval of the US State Department, and jailing the opposition leader for treason three months later. Zelensky justified his actions on the grounds that he needed to “fight against the danger of Russian aggression in the information arena.”
Next, in August 2020, Azov’s National Corps opened fire on a bus containing members of Medvedchuk’s party, Patriots for Life, wounding several with rubber-coated steel bullets.
The Eurasianist-tweet-27August2020-bus carrying members of Ukraine’s opposition party was attacked by Ukrainian National Corps
Zelensky failed to rein in neo-Nazis, wound up collaborating with them
Following his failed attempt to demobilize neo-Nazi militants in the town of Zolote in October 2019, Zelensky called the fighters to the table, telling reporters “I met with veterans yesterday. Everyone was there – the National Corps, Azov, and everyone else.”
A few seats away from the Jewish president was Yehven Karas, the leader of the neo-Nazi C14 gang.
Zelensky meets with “veterans” including Yehven Karas (far right) and Dmytro Shatrovsky, an Azov Battalion leader (bottom left).
During the Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” that ousted Ukraine’s elected president in 2014, C14 activists took over Kiev’s city hall and plastered its walls with neo-Nazi insignia before taking shelter in the Canadian embassy.
As the former youth wing of the ultra-nationalist Svoboda Party, C14 appears to draw its name from the infamous 14 words of US neo-Nazi leader David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
By offering to carry out acts of spectacular violence on behalf of anyone willing to pay, the hooligans have fostered a cozy relationship with various governing bodies and powerful elites across Ukraine.
C14 neo-Nazi gang offers to carry out violence-for-hire: “C14 works for you. Help us keep afloat, and we will help you. For regular donors, we are opening a box for wishes. Which of your enemies would you like to make life difficult for? We’ll try to do that.”
A March 2018 report by Reuters stated that “C14 and Kiev’s city government recently signed an agreement allowing C14 to establish a ‘municipal guard’ to patrol the streets,” effectively giving them the sanction of the state to carry out pogroms.
As The Grayzone reported, C14 led raid to “purge” Romani from Kiev’s railway station in collaboration with the Kiev police.
Alex Rubinstein-tweet-28February2022-C14 Nazi terror gang carrying out a pogrom against a Romani camp
Not only was this activity sanctioned by the Kiev city government, the US government itself saw little problem with it, hosting Bondar at an official US government institution in Kiev where he bragged about the pogroms. C14 continued to receive state funding throughout 2018 for “national-patriotic education.”
Karas has claimed that the Ukrainian Security Serves would “pass on” information regarding pro-separatist rallies “not only [to] us, but also Azov, the Right Sector and so on.”
“In general, deputies of all factions, the National Guard, the Security Service of Ukraine and the Ministry of Internal Affairs work for us. You can joke like that,” Karas said.
Throughout 2019, Zelensky and his administration deepened their ties with ultra-nationalist elements across Ukraine.
Then-Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk onstage at the neo-Nazi “Veterans Strong” concert
After Prime Minister attends neo-Nazi concert, Zelensky honors Right Sector leader
Just days after Zelensky’s meeting with Karas and other neo-Nazi leaders in November 2019, Oleksiy Honcharuk – then the Prime Minister and deputy head of Zelensky’s presidential office – appeared on stage at a neo-Nazi concert organized by C14 figure and accused murderer Andriy Medvedko.
Zelensky’s Minister for Veterans Affairs not only attended the concert, which featured several antisemitic metal bands, she promoted the concert on Facebook.
Also in 2019, Zelensky defended Ukrainian footballer Roman Zolzulya against Spanish fans taunting him as a “Nazi.” Zolzulya had posed beside photos of the World War II-era Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and openly supported the Azov Battalion. Zelensky responded to the controversy by proclaiming that all of Ukraine backed Zolzulya, describing him as “not only a cool football player but a true patriot.”
In November 2021, one of Ukraine’s most prominent ultra-nationalist militiamen, Dmytro Yarosh, announced that he had been appointed as an advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Yarosh is an avowed follower of the Nazi collaborator Bandera who led Right Sector from 2013 to 2015, vowing to lead the “de-Russification” of Ukraine.
Dmytro Yarosh poses with Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces
A month later, as war with Russia drew closer, Zelensky awarded Right Sector commander Dmytro Kotsyubaylo the “Hero of Ukraine” commendation. Known as “Da Vinci,” Kosyubaylo keeps a pet wolf in his frontline base, and likes to joke to visiting reporters that his fighters “feed it the bones of Russian-speaking children.”
Zelensky awards Right Sector commander Dmytro Kotsyubaylo the ‘Hero of Ukraine’ award
Zelensky awards Right Sector commander Dmytro Kotsyubaylo the ‘Hero of Ukraine’ award
Ukrainian state-backed neo-Nazi leader flaunts influence on the eve of war with Russia
On February 5, 2022, only days before full-scale war with Russia erupted, Yevhen Karas of the neo-Nazi C14 delivered a stem-winding public address in Kiev intended to highlight the influence his organization and others like it enjoyed over Ukrainian politics.
Alex Rubinstein-tweet-27February2022-Yevhen Karas the leader of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi terror gang C14’s speech
“LGBT and foreign embassies say ‘there were not many Nazis at Maidan, maybe about 10 percent of real ideological ones,’” Karas remarked. “If not for those eight percent [of neo-Nazis] the effectiveness [of the Maidan coup] would have dropped by 90 percent.”
The 2014 Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” would have been a “gay parade” if not for the instrumental role of neo-Nazis, he proclaimed.
Karas went on to opine that the West armed Ukrainian ultra-nationalists because “we have fun killing.” He also fantasized about the balkanization of Russia, declaring that it should be broken up into “five different” countries.
Yevhen Karas delivering the Nazi salute
“If we get killed…we died fighting a holy war”
When Russian forces entered Ukraine this February 24, encircling the Ukrainian military in the east and driving towards Kiev, President Zelensky announced a national mobilization that included the release of criminals from prison, among them accused murderers wanted in Russia. He also blessed the distribution of arms to average citizens, and their training by battle-hardened paramilitaries like the Azov Battalion.
With fighting underway, Azov’s National Corps gathered hundreds of ordinary civilians, including grandmothers and children, to train in public squares and warehouses from Kharviv to Kiev to Lviv.
Max Blumenthal-tweet-1March2022-Azov Battalion’s fighters training and passing out arms to residents of Kharkiv
On February 27, the official Twitter account of the National Guard of Ukraine posted video of “Azov Fighters” greasing their bullets with pig fat to humiliate Russian Muslim fighters from Chechnya.
НГУ-tweet-27February2022-Azov fighters of the National Guard greased the bullets with lard against the Kadyrov orcs
A day later, the Azov Battalion’s National Corps announced that the Azov Battalion’s Kharkiv Regional Police would begin using the city’s Regional State Administration building as a defense headquarters. Footage posted to Telegram the following day shows the Azov-occupied building being hit by a Russian airstrike.
Besides authorizing the release of hardcore criminals to join the battle against Russia, Zelensky has ordered all males of fighting age to remain in the country. Azov militants have proceeded to enforce the policy by brutalizing civilians attempting to flee from the fighting around Mariupol.
According to one Greek resident in Mariupol recently interviewed by a Greek news station, “When you try to leave you run the risk of running into a patrol of the Ukrainian fascists, the Azov Battalion,” he said, adding “they would kill me and are responsible for everything.”
Footage posted online appears to show uniformed members of a fascist Ukrainian militia in Mariupol violently pulling fleeing residents out of their vehicles at gunpoint.
Deus Abscondis-tweet-26February2022-Ukrainian NAZI are preventing people from leaving Mariupol and are shooting at them
Other video filmed at checkpoints around Mariupol showed Azov fighters shooting and killing civilians attempting to flee.
On March 1, Zelensky replaced the regional administrator of Odessa with Maksym Marchenko, a former commander of the extreme right Aidar Battalion, which has been accused of an array of war crimes in the Donbass region.
Meanwhile, as a massive convoy of Russian armored vehicles bore down on Kiev, Yehven Karas of the neo-Nazi C14 posted a video on YouTube from inside a vehicle presumably transporting fighters.
“If we get killed, it’s fucking great because it means we died fighting a holy war,” Karas exclaimed. ”If we survive, it’s going to be even fucking better! That’s why I don’t see a downside to this, only upside!”
Alex Rubinstein
Alexander Rubinstein
Alex Rubinstein is an independent reporter on Substack. You can subscribe to get free articles from him delivered to your inbox here. If you want to support his journalism, which is never put behind a paywall, you can give a one-time donation to him through PayPal here or sustain his reporting through Patreon here.
Max Blumenthal
Max Blumenthal
Editor-in-Chief
The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
The Real Politick with Mark Sleboda
Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief is an Open Banderite Fascist
Mark Sleboda
Mark Sleboda, 14January2023 https://marksleboda.substack.com/p/ukraines-commander-in-chief-is-an?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
The Real Politick with Mark Sleboda – Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief is an Open Banderite Fascist
Since the openly West-backed Maidan Putsch in 2014, January 1st has been proclaimed a national holiday in Ukraine, celebrating the birthday of the genocidal WW2-era West Ukrainian fascist and anti-semite ideologue, terrorist insurgent leader, Nazi collaborator, and Holocaust perpetrator, Stepan Bandera.
Nazi Stepan Bandera
celebration of Stepan Bandera
For the last eight years it has been marked by horrifying torchlit nighttime parades of the regime’s NeoNazi deathsquads and brownshirts goose-stepping through the streets of the capital, Kiev.
Ukraine: march for Bandera’s birthday
This year the Kiev Putsch regime’s Parliamentary body the Rada, celebrated the fascist holiday with a tweet, now deleted, on Twitter showing the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the 4 star general Valery Zaluzhny, standing smiling smugly, in front of a portrait of Stepan Bandera, accompanied by one of Bandera’s quotes,
“The complete and final victory of Ukrainian nationalism will come when the Russian empire ceases to exist.” And then added, “A fight against the Russian empire is currently underway. And the precepts of Stepan Bandera are well known to the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.”
Christopher Lash-tweet-2January2023-tweet commemorating Stepan Bandera
This is hardly the first such revelation. Zaluzhnyi is infamously known as open ideological supporter of Stepan Bandera, now officially glorified by the West-backed Kiev Putsch regime as a hero and “founding father” of the new Ukraine under their rule and vision.
This is almost certainly one of the criteria for which he was chosen to lead the Kiev regime’s military forces.
In 2021, right after becoming the Kiev regime’s Commander-In-Chief, Zaluzhny officially appointed Dmitry Yarosh, the head and founder of the NeoNazi & white supremacist paramilitary group, the Right Sector, as his personal “senior military advisor”.
Ukraine appoints former neo-Nazi paramilitray leader to senior army advisory role
And Zaluzhny obviously loves throwing around pr photo shoots of himself brazenly displaying his Banderite fascist bona fides. Yes –despite the fact that his President, Zelenskiy, has a Jewish daddy.
This year, the Kiev regime’s Commander-in-Chief posted to his own Twitter account a “frontline” photo of him striding in uniform, with assault rifle in hand, prominently displaying a bracelet carved with swastikas.
Lamely the Western MSM echoed every crypto-NeoNazi ever by claiming, “Its not a swastika, its just an ancient Viking symbol”. Seriously?
Yeah, I’m sure the Bandera-worshipping head of the Ukrainian military was wearing swastikas just because he’s secretly a Norse pagan.
Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine-tweet-6October2022
Ukrainian army’s commander-in-chief poses with swastika bracelet
In another photo from this year, Zaluzhnyi is shown in uniform standing in a military office with several other soldiers in front of a desk adorned with busts of OUN-B leaders and Nazi-collaborators Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych. Photos of both Shukhevych and Bandera are also prominently hanging on the wall in the background along with the red and black Banderite flag.
Zaluzhnyi is shown in uniform standing in a military office
A separate photo taken of Zaluzhnyi’s office also has a bust of Bandera displayed prominently for all to see on a table against the wall.
Zaluzhnyi’s office also has a bust of Bandera
In a recent interview with the Economist, Zaluzhny said flat out-
“We’ve been at war since 2014… And the most important experience we had and the one which we have practiced almost like a religion is that Russians and any other enemies must be killed, just killed, and most importantly, we should not be afraid, not hesitate, to do it. And this is what we are doing.”
Yes they have been indeed killing Russians since 2014.
In a civil conflict in country where 20% of the population is ethnic Russian and a significant proportion of the rest, particularly in the East, are Russian-speaking and regard Russians as a brother people, not as “the enemy”.
Percentage of Ethnic Russian in Ukraine by region in 2001 Ukrainian census
Ukraine and Crimea by ethnic identity
This is the Banderite fascist Commander-in-Chief of a military armed, trained, given C4ISR, directed and puppeted by NATO and funded to the cost of now hundreds of billions of Western taxpayer dollars in a proxy war on Russia. He’s celebrated in Western media reports, magazine covers, and newspaper front pages as a hero!
How can this be?
The grim reality is that as long as Zaluzhny’s hatred and violence, and that of his NeoNazi hordes, are directed, for the moment, primarily against ethnic Russians, “pro-Russian Eastern Ukrainians” and leftists, then his brand of Banderite fascism is geopolitically useful to the West, and thus “kosher”.
Indeed the US and Canada have a long documented history of supporting Banderite fascists in Ukraine, and their analoques in the Baltics, back to the immediate aftermath of WW2.
Zaluschny…Hey – the bastard may be a fascist, but he’s OUR fascist, god-damn it!
Ukraine’s Commander in Chief is an Open Fascist
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PRRESS – Trending Italian News
Here’s what the Azov Battalion tattoos are hiding
Here’s what the Azov Battalion tattoos are hiding
by Alex Viajaenmoto https://prress.com/world/heres-what-the-azov-battalion-tattoos-are-hiding/
[EDD: Original Post:
Ecco cosa nascondono i tatuaggi del Battaglione Azov
23 Maggio 2022 – 08:57
Il ministero della Difesa russo mostra le immagini dei prigionieri del Battaglione Azov, accusato di simpatie neonaziste. Abbiamo analizzato i tatuaggi dei militari ucraini: cosa rappresentano
Matteo Carnieletto
23May2022 Matteo Carnieletto https://www.ilgiornale.it/news/mondo/ecco-cosa-nascondono-i-tatuaggi-battaglione-azov-2036447.html ]
The soldiers of the Azov Battalion they are called one by one. A nod from the Russian soldiers, who ask
the surrendered to lift their shirt and put on their underwear, is enough. The men of the Kremlin scan the militiamen in search of tattoos that, in some way, recall the Nazi symbolism. And they find many.
After all, the president Vladimir Putin – announcing the start of the “special operation”, as the Kremlin called it – he promised he would “denazify“ Ukraine.
And these images, released by the Ministry of Defense and aimed primarily at the Russian people, prove it. What the soldiers of Moscow are fighting is a war against the new Nazism.
The most common symbol is that of the Battalion, wrapped in the yellow and blue colors of the Ukrainian flag. As we have already explained, it is the Wolfsangel the love of the wolves, which was the first coat of arms of the party founded by Adolf Hitler then also entered the iconography of SS.
Other soldiers wear the black Sun used before by the Thule company one of the esoteric organizations that contributed to the thought and rise of Nazism, and then from the Schutzstaffel, the aforementioned SS.
Here’s what the Azov Battalion tattoos are hiding 2
Another frequently recurring element is the Totenkrof, the “death’s head”. It is a skull from whose nape emerge some crossbones. Starting in 1809, this symbol was widely used in German military and political iconography. But it is during the Third Reich that the use of the Totenkrof reaches its peak. It is used by the SS and, in particular, by SS-Totenkopfverbände. Founded in 1936, after the annexation of Austria by Germany, Hitler entrusted them with the custody of the concentration camps.
Here’s what the Azov Battalion tattoos are hiding 3
Runes are widely used by Battalion soldiers. In particular the Ôþalan, literally “heritage, inheritance”. Symbol of iron, in ancient times it was worn to protect against trolls and, in general, evil influences. Under the Nazis, this rune was used by the Seventh Mountain Division “Prinz Eugen”, a unit of the SS that was used on the Yugoslav front during the Second World War.
Here’s what the Azov Battalion tattoos are hiding 4
In addition to the Ôþalan, some soldiers of the Battalion were branded with the Lebensrune used by the SS used in the (insane) Lebensborn eugenics project strongly supported and supported by Heinrich Himmler, to defend the Aryan race. Tattooed swastikas seem widespread. And it is hard to believe – as stated by Michail Pirog, chief of the 4th Azov Battalion stationed in Zaporizhzhia – whether it is just an “ancient Slavic, pan-European, even Indian symbol”.
Here’s what the Azov Battalion tattoos are hiding 5
Also because there are those who have had the Sigrunea symbol that indicated the sun but which was then associated with victory (in German Siegin fact) and then at the initials of the SS. These images were recorded outside the Azovstal factory, as can be guessed from the background and the long avenue behind the soldiers of the Azov Battalion.
Here’s what the Azov Battalion tattoos are hiding 6
However, the Russian Defense Ministry has also released other photos, taken in an indoor location, impossible to identify. So we don’t know if they are pictures of Azov prisoners or not. But they are significant, as long as they are taken with some caution (like all the images that come from this conflict). In the first weeks of the war, in fact, various Russian media released some carefully edited videos and photographs in which Nazi flags and copies of the Mein Kampf, strangely intact
among the incinerated walls. More recently, the same media also showed a helmet, fresh from green paint, on which the Sigrune of the SS stands out. It is difficult to say where the documentation ends and where the propaganda. Having made this necessary premise, among the frame widespread by the Russians we see a soldier with a large tattoo on his
chest that depicts a hooded man who seems to be holding a torch or, perhaps, a Molotov cocktail. A scene depicting a stadium curve (a man with a megaphone is also present) or an image celebrating the Euromaidan? Impossible to say. But one cannot fail to notice the great one Celtic cross that dominates the chest of man. A little further up, two digits: 14 And 88. The site ofAnti defamation league explains the meaning of these numbers: “It is a combination of two popular white supremacist number symbols. 14 is short for the slogan 14 words: we must guarantee the existence of our people and a future for white children. “88 instead represents the exclamation Heil Hitler (the H is in fact the eighth letter of the alphabet).
Here’s what the Azov Battalion tattoos are hiding 7
Yet another soldier preferred to immortalize Hitler, with swastika in the arm. Another one, Stepan Bandera the
leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Oun) who collaborated – in a very turbulent way – with the Nazis against the Soviets and was one of the ones responsible for the extermination of Jews in Ukraine.
Here’s what the Azov Battalion tattoos are hiding 8
Then there is a last vein that the Azov soldiers have decided to represent on their bodies, that one esoteric,
obviously also present in the runes that have, in fact, a hidden meaning. Some militiamen have tattoos with goats, mythological animals and pentacles which recall Satanism. After all, Nazism, even before being a political movement, was first of all an (esoteric) culture born in the undergrowth of German circles between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, as the political scientist Giorgio has documented in detail.
Gauls.
Here’s what the Azov Battalion tattoos are hiding 9
Putin is not fighting to “denazify” Ukraine. Just look at the numbers to figure it out. The Ukrainian army can count on about 200,000 troops, which can reach 900,000 if we consider reservists. The Azov Battalion, which in 2014 had a few hundred followers, today can count on a few thousand men. A minimal percentage if you compare it to the armed forces of Kiev. Yet the tattoos on the body of Ukrainian volunteers demonstrate the link between them and the Third Reich. A bond that, in these eighty days of conflict, has been forgotten for too long to justify their resistance to the troops of Moscow.
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Here’s what the Azov Battalion tattoos are hiding
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Interview with a Stormtrooper
Published bydreizinreport on https://thedreizinreport.com/2022/07/01/interview-with-a-stormtrooper/
Star Wars Stormtrooper
If the Star Wars rebels took as prisoner an Imperial stormtrooper clone, and sat him down for an on-camera interview, without his armor, with a cigarette, he would come across much like this.
This Azov prisoner was recently interviewed in captivity. Among other things:
He is supernaturally calm and confident, cocky at times, knows he won’t be mistreated, says he is safe because he is on Russian territory (i.e. not in Donetsk.)
He says about five times that he is a soldier and not a war criminal, his unit was ethical, his unit was ethical, Russia has nothing to charge him with, “I am a prisoner of war, I am not a criminal, I am a soldier”, his unit was ethical, basically you got nothin’ on me, detective. He’s obviously repeating a short script that was drilled into him and all his comrades before the Azov’s surrender.
He claims that his sniper squad (in which he was the number two in rank) didn’t know if they actually killed anyone; they absolutely never kept any records of how many they shot, they never even talked about it. (LOL, this is fantastical, but at least he’s not claiming to have been just a cook or mechanic.)
He says, OK sure there were Azov guys with swastika tattoos, but not in his squad. He’s not a Nazi, the Azov are not Nazis. All the guys with Swastikas, checked out of the Azov by late 2015 (which contradicts the first sentence of this paragraph.) In fact, he knows a guy in Russia with a swastika tattoo, so what’s the big deal about all this Ukraine Nazi stuff?
(If you didn’t know, ticky-tacky Viking-ism is a quasi-religion among “ultranationalist” young Ukrainian men of low intelligence. It was likely introduced by more intelligent people as an “acceptable”—to foreign sponsors—alternative to Nazism, although many of its adherents do have Nazi tattoos and/or collect Nazi paraphernalia.)
He claims the Azov never shot any Russian prisoners, the infamous video from the Azov’s Kharkov affiliate is fake, or they’re lying when they say there’s a video, whatever.
He says Bandera is THE national hero of the Ukraine. Bandera couldn’t have been a bad guy, because the Germans locked him up at one point.
He claims to know Ukrainian history very well. Claims that Kharkov was founded by a Cossack named Kharko (this is a folk story or sort of a joke, not historical.)
He claims that his squad released 11 Russian/Donetsk prisoners for no particular reason—just didn’t feel like bringing them to the bunkers when the Azov was retreating into the steel plant. (LOL. As I said, this guy has been “coached.”)
One of the Russian prisoners, whom he so much enjoyed talking to, and with whom he really hit it off, was a Caucasus guy with the given name of Shakh (which means Shah, as in the Shah of Persia—literally no one in Russia, or perhaps anywhere, has this name.) There are family names like Shakhnazarov and other derivatives, but Shakh by itself, as a given or family name, is fantastical.)
He is grateful for the protection that the vakk-seenz continue to provide. (Haha, just kidding, he didn’t say that, but surely this guy has much in common with people you know!)
(1) The Azov is a cult. Literally.
(2) The Azov’s zampolits (political officers) are/were operating on a very high level.
(3) The practice of inculcating dumb “talking points” into the broad population, is as well developed in the Ukraine as it is in the USA—indeed, Russia lags far behind in this capacity.
Just remember please, since 2015, the Azov was the main “behind the scenes but not always” authority in Mariupol, and operated a business empire in the city, also setting up affiliates in Kharkov and Kiev, as well as running the Ukraine’s single largest politically-oriented youth organization.
At its peak (just prior to the Russian invasion), the Azov had likely close to 10,000 uniformed personnel and civilian employees. It was by far the single largest military component within the Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, and also the only one that was essentially also a political organization in its own right.
The Azov is not marginal in the Ukraine, the Azov is the Ukraine, or one of the Ukraines, anyway—the dominant one.
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The Azov Battalion: Laboratory of Nazism
The Alternative World 23 May2022 https://thealtworld.com/thealtworld/the-azov-battalion-laboratory-of-nazism
The Azov Battalion
Western propaganda continues to present the defenders of Mariupol as heroic martyrs, but every day it becomes harder to do so. They have been involved in the murder and brutal torture of women and children. The Azov Battalion is a symbol of hell and years of terror for the people of Donbass.
On 30 October 2014, Ganja was detained in Mariupol by five men in military uniform with Azov Battalion chevrons and balaclavas. Already in a car, they beat her with their guns and urinated on her. They took her out of her car, kicked her, and fired a volley of shots over her head. They took her to Mariupol airport, where they carried on torturing her until 8 November. After that, they took her to court and a pre-trial detention centre.
Tatiana was a member of the Communist Party of Ukraine, now outlawed in the country. She took part in protest rallies in Mariupol and the 11 May referendum over the future of the Donetsk region. She was not even aware that she was blacklisted as an “intransigent separatist”.
In March 2019 during a press conference in Moscow, former officer of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) Vasily Prozorov spoke about “The Library”: a secret prison at Mariupol airport, a city controlled by the Azov Battalion. The “Library” contained “books”, the name given to captured DPR militiamembers and ordinary citizens “suspected of separatism”. They were tortured there. The place had two disconnected refrigerated cells with sealed doors and no furniture. Prozorov showed photographs of nine prisoners from the “Library” – among them were a teenager in a khaki t-shirt and two old men. All of them showed signs of beatings.
Former SBU Lieutenant-Colonel Vasily Prozorov shows a picture of one of the “Library” prisoners at a press conference in Moscow.
© Sputnik / Vladimir Astapkovich
Former SBU Lieutenant-Colonel Vasily Prozorov shows a picture of one of the “Library” prisoners at a press conference in Moscow.
© Sputnik / Vladimir Astapkovich
Azov survivors also confirmed his declarations to Sputnik
Former “Library” inmate Tatiana Ganja described the prison as a “real hell and place of death”.
On 8 November 2014, Ganja was taken from the airport for investigative actions. She was released following a prisoner exchange between Ukraine and the Donetsk People’s Republic on 26 December. Since then, she has been living in Donetsk in one of the dormitories for refugees. Azov looted her home in Mariupol.
One day, Elena Blokha, a journalist from Mariupol, also found herself in the “Library’s ‘fridge’”.
They detained Blokha along with her son and placed him in a male cell with several other prisoners.
Azov: The Beginning
In April 2014, after the Maidan triumph and when a street war between supporters and opponents [of Maidan] broke out in all major cities in southeastern Ukraine, the then-Acting President Oleksandr Turchynov announced an Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) in Donbass. While the NATO was started in order to form “volunteer battalions”, these batallions later became infamous for their atrocities against civilians and captured militiamembers.
The Azov Battalion was officially established on 5 May 2014 in the Kharkov neo-Nazi organisation Patriots of Ukraine*, the power wing of the Social-National Assembly. The “patriots” opened their first congress in 1999 with a torchlit procession similar to the marches seen in Hitler’s Germany.
The unit of 50-60 fighters possessed several smooth bore rifles and traumatic pistols. The head of the press service, Stepan Baida, described the Azov’s level of equipment at the time as “reinforced troops”.
The Black Corps patches, which directly allude to Reichsführer SS Himmler’s military (“Das Schwarze Korps”, translated from the German as “Black Corps”, the official printed media of the SS), continued to be used by the Azov even after its incorporation into legalranks commanded by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
At first, it was a deemed a volunteer battalion in the Special Tasks Patrol Police of Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs. Then, in October 2014, it became a regiment of the National Guard. As a military unit, Azov was authorised to acquire artillery and tanks.
Azov Battalion cadets deployed in the conflict zone in southeastern Ukraine, 2014.
© Sputnik / Alexander Maksimenko / Go to the photo bank
Azov Battalion cadets deployed in the conflict zone in southeastern Ukraine, 2014.
© Sputnik / Alexander Maksimenko / Go to the photo bank
Mariupol Massacre
The presence of Azov became fatal for the residents of Mariupol long before 2022. What happened there in the spring of 2014 was the most important episode of the Donbass conflict.
The Victory Day demonstration on 9 May 2014 ended in clashes near the city police headquarters. According to Kiev’s official information, 13 people were killed, including police officers, National Guard members and Azov Battalion fighters, as well as civilians.
The local police were sympathetic to the Donetsk People’s Republic, but did not take any action against their own superiors or the Ukrainian authorities in general.
Former SBU Lieutenant-Colonel Vasily Prozorov addressing the situation in Ukraine after the coup at a press conference in Moscow.
© Sputnik / Vladimir Trefilov / Go to the photo bank
Former SBU Lieutenant-Colonel Vasily Prozorov addressing the situation in Ukraine after the coup at a press conference in Moscow.
© Sputnik / Vladimir Trefilov / Go to the photo bank
A referendum on the independence of the Donetsk People’s Republic was scheduled for 11 May 2014. According to Former SBU Lieutenant-Colonel Prozorov, Mariupol police officers received orders to prevent the voting by blocking polling stations and detaining election commission members. However, the majority refused to obey, as they wanted to avoid conflicts with their fellow compatriots, including relatives.
Flowers and candles in memory of those killed at Mariupol police headquarters in May 2015.
© Sputnik / Natalia Seliverstova
Flowers and candles in memory of those killed at Mariupol police headquarters in May 2015.
© Sputnik / Natalia Seliverstova
The list of those killed in Mariupol that day include only police officers, security forces and civilians.
‘White Leader’
Andriy Biletsky, the leader of the National Corps political party.
© Sputnik / Stringer
Andriy Biletsky, the leader of the National Corps political party.
© Sputnik / Stringer
Andriy Biletsky, a neo-Nazi known as White Leader (a nickname that a civilised person would find absurd which was given to him by his supporters before the Maidan), became Azov’s leader. That same year, 2014, he was elected to the Verkhovna Rada [Ukrainian parliament].
So what did White Leader do before Azov? Shortly before heading the battalion, Biletsky was released from prison. He was freed from the Kharkov pre-trial detention centre in late February 2014 thanks to Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, who favoured Azov and admitted that he had “special plans” for the unit.
Biletsky and his accomplices were imprisoned on charges of assaulting Sergei Kolesnik, who, as a result of an incident, sustained open skull and brain injuries and multiple stab wounds. The case was opened under the article of “robbery”.
The reason for the attack stemmed from an online argument in which the victim had been careless in speaking out against fascism. Biletsky was arrested and immediately became a “martyr” to the victorious Euromaidan; his detention was seen as political repression.
Biletsky has never concealed his Nazi views. Here are some of his most striking quotes.
On his mission and Jews:
On blood purity:
On his perception of Nazi collaborators the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA, an extremist organisation banned in Russia):
According to Kharkov journalists, Biletsky’s supporters began holding more or less visible actions in the fall of 2005. As early as 14 April 2006, on the anniversary of Koliivshchyna (the Cossack uprising of 1768, which led to a mass slaughter of Poles and Jews), they organised a xenophobic “Ukraine against the occupation” march in the city’s centre. According to various estimates, between 100 and 200 people took part in the rally. This event was followed by actions against the Vietnamese hostels in Kharkov.
Biletsky’s unit skillfully recruited or attracted representatives of far-right youth subcultures to join its ranks. The young neo-Nazis were drawn by their focus on violent methods of struggle: beatings, raids and pogroms.
The “vyshkols” – training camps – of the Patriots of Ukraine organisation were completely different from, for example, the [far-right paramilitary organisations] Tryzub of Stepan Bandera (another extremist organisation banned in Russia), the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists or the Youth Nationalist Congress. In these camps, the organisation held activities for schoolchildren shooting air rifles, marching through forests and singing songs around a campfire. Biletsky, in turn, taught how to storm buildings or “remove” a guardsman from behind (how to strangle and stab him in the heart).
The Kharkov branch alone had between 200 and 300 fighters in the early 2010s, some of whom lived permanently in the barracks at the organisation’s premises.
Radicals protest outside Russian banks in Kiev
© Sputnik / Stringer / Go to the photo bank
Radicals protest outside Russian banks in Kiev
© Sputnik / Stringer / Go to the photo bank
Where Did the Money Come From?
The Azov was funded – at least partially – by oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, as was the case with the other volunteer battalions operating in the ATO. Furthermore, Svetlana Zvarich, director of the Ukrainian National Information Service (one of the largest companies in the local information collection, transmission and processing market), provided assistance.
On 16 April 2015, Ukrayinska Pravda mentioned the charity foundation for educational innovations, which officially “works with Azov and provides it with everything it needs” in a report from Azov’s base at the ATEK engineering plant in Kiev , citing a comment by “the chairman of the supervisory board of the foundation, Svetlana Zvarich”.
But that is not the whole story. On 15 July 2016, the public learned that Azov had links to criminals when SBU Special Forces liquidated a group of Azov officers armed with assault rifles and a grenade launcher in Zaporozhye . They had attacked a money collectors’ car, a raid that was clearly not their first.
Radicals protest outside Russian banks in Kiev
© Sputnik / Alexei Vovk / Go to the photo bank
Radicals protest outside Russian banks in Kiev
© Sputnik / Alexei Vovk / Go to the photo bank
SBU Chief Vasyl Hrytsak said at the time that the Secret Service was checking Azov’s involvement in at least ten similar crimes.
There is also knowlegde of a bribe of two million hryvnias ($68,000) extorted from a Kiev businessman by the battalion’s head of manning Vladimir Brzezinski and former Azov Chief of Staff Vadym Troyan under threats of reprisals.
In other words, the Azov militiamembers were simply engaged in racketeering. According to the owner of one of the gambling halls, the so-called patriots showed up in mid-2015. Couriers from local radical organisations visited all the gambling halls, offering to “negotiate”.
‘Laboratory of Nazism’
The Azov Battalion stands out for its strong ideological background. Neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and racists are at the forefront of the unit. Its symbols contain elements that refer to the emblems of Third Reich military units.
Fighters of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion take the oath of allegiance to Ukraine in Sophia Square in Kiev before being sent to Donbass. Members of the Nazi battalion have committed hundreds of war crimes against the population of Donbass over eight years. The Azov flag has an inverted image of the runic symbol “Wolfsangel”, which was used by the Nazis.
© Sputnik / Alexander Maksimenko
Fighters of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion take the oath of allegiance to Ukraine in Sophia Square in Kiev before being sent to Donbass. Members of the Nazi battalion have committed hundreds of war crimes against the population of Donbass over eight years. The Azov flag has an inverted image of the runic symbol “Wolfsangel”, which was used by the Nazis.
© Sputnik / Alexander Maksimenko
The photo shows Azov fighters taking the oath of allegiance before being sent to Donbass in July 2014. The regiment’s flag bears a black Wolfsangel (“wolf’s hook” in German). This sign was the emblem of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). Subsequently, the Wolfsangel became the tactical mark of the SS Panzer Division “Das Reich”, and was also used in other SS and Wehrmacht units, in particular, the 34th SS Volunteer Grenadier Division “Landstorm Nederland”.
Over time, representatives of the Social National Assembly, Automaidan and Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists activists, ultras (hooligans) of the Dynamo (Kiev) and Shakhtar football clubs, members of Dmytro Korchynsky’s Bratstvo party* and the Cossack Rifle Brotherhood joined Azov.
The open demonstration of misanthropy attracted radicals and neo-Nazis from all over the world to join the Azov Battalion.
Biletsky said in an interview that there were representatives of three dozen nationalities in Azov, but “not once did a Chinese or a Nigerian come to them”.
The Azov expanded, fought against the Donbass militia, and attracting new volunteers, including foreigners.
A series of video interviews with foreigners associated with the regiment were published on the page of the National Corps and National Druzhina units, both projects set up in 2016 by the Azov.
Alexei Levkin from Tver, Russia, is one of the typical characters. He is a neo-Nazi fugitive convicted of being part of a gang that committed numerous ethnic murders. He is also the lead singer of the band M8L8TH, which glorifies fascism, the SS and the concentration camps of the Third Reich.
Quotes from Levkin’s diary hit the internet in 2008.
Another volunteer, Joachim Fürholm from Norway, calls himself a “national socialist revolutionary” and “admires” what [2011 far-right Norway bomber Anders] Breivik did. In an interview with the Nazi radio Radio Wehrwolf, found by Bellingcat (an organisation recognised as a foreign agent in Russia), Fürholm considers Azov to be a “laboratory of fascism”.
Beat the Dog Before the Lion
From the outset, all of the volunteer battalions were haunted by scandals: looting and sexual violence (Shakhtersk and Tornado Battalions were the most prominent), kidnapping and killing of civilians (by the notorious Donbass Battalion) and the seizure of businesses.
There was less talk about the Azov. After all, it was an extremely closed unit and the strict hierarchy and the constant threat of reprisals against one’s own people played a role.
However, some who joined Azov as volunteers without right-wing radical ideas could not get along in the Nazi environment and revolted. They were the ones who made the White Leader’s unpleasant juicy details public.
From ‘Hateful’ to ‘Heroes’
Now, almost 80 years after the demise of the Third Reich, Nazi battalions openly marching through the streets of European cities with their symbols which are banned in the civilized world, the unpunished killing of civilians, looting, extortion, reprisals and punitive operations are again a reality.
Back in 2015, the US Congress banned the Pentagon from supplying portable anti-aircraft missile systems to Ukraine and from training and equipping the Azov Battalion. Congressional representatives called it a “disgusting Nazi formation”. This was a reaction to a number of publications in the US press in which shocked journalists wrote about the openly Nazi views of both the leadership and fighters of Azov.
But seven years later, the world is witnessing how the “hideous Nazi formation” began to be fashioned into valiant heroes, the “defenders of Mariupol”.
https://sputniknews.com/20220522/the-azov-battalion-laboratory-of-nazism-1095700345.html
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This is who the West/EU/NATO is supporting
The following is a “People to Kill List” put out by the NAZI Ukraine SBU
Security Service of Ukraine
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Service_of_Ukraine
The Security Service of Ukraine (Ukrainian: Служба безпеки України, romanized: Sluzhba bezpeky Ukrayiny) or SBU (Ukrainian: СБУ) is the law enforcement authority and main intelligence and security agency of the Ukrainian government, in the areas of counter-intelligence activity and combating terrorism.
Ukraine SBU Hitlist-myrotvorets.center-Banner
source: https://rumble.com/v1gxbrr-live-stream-monday-august-22nd-2022-news-from-saint-petersburg.html
JerusalemCats Comments: If an Antisemite such as Roger Waters is on the Ukraine SBU Azov Hitlist (People to Kill List), what about Jew who want to visit Rebbe Nachman’s Kever In Uman, Ukraine?
https://myrotvorets.center/criminal/uoters-rodzher/
Roger Waters added to Ukraine Myrotvorets SBU-Hitlist-Chrome
The Homepage of the Ukrainian Security Service SBU Kill list Warning Graphic
https://myrotvorets.center/
screenshots – website of Ukraine SBU Hitlist myrotvorets center https://myrotvorets.center/
Ukrainian Nazis Celebrate Independance Day With PoW ISIS Video
Posted 25August2022 iEarlGreyTV:https://rumble.com/v1hatx5-ukrainian-nazis-celebrate-independance-day-with-pow-isis-video.html
Journalists who challenge NATO narratives are now ‘information terrorists’: https://beeley.substack.com/p/journalists-who-challenge-nato-narratives
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Stepan Bandera
Stepan Bandera
In this name that follows Eastern Slavic naming conventions, the patronymic is Andriyovych and the family name is Bandera.
Stepan Andriyovych Bandera (Ukrainian: Степа́н Андрі́йович Банде́ра, romanized: Stepán Andríyovyč Bandéra, IPA: [steˈpɑn ɐnˈd⁽ʲ⁾r⁽ʲ⁾ijoʋɪt͡ʃ bɐnˈdɛrɐ]; Polish: Stepan Andrijowycz Bandera; 1 January 1909 – 15 October 1959) was an Ukrainian nationalist leader, politician and theorist of the militant wing (OUN-B), served as head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,[1][2] organization responsible for ethnic cleansings and also implicated in collaboration with Nazi Germany.[1][3]
Born in the economically backward Galicia (officially Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, created after the first partition of Poland) into the family of a priest of Eastern Catholic Church.[4] After the Empire disintegrated in the wake of World War I, Galicia briefly became a West Ukrainian People’s Republic; following the Polish–Ukrainian War of 1918–1919, it was again integrated into eastern Poland. In this period, Bandera became radicalized. He enrolled at the Lviv Polytechnic, where he organized Ukrainian nationalist organizations. For orchestrating the 1934 assassination of Poland’s Minister of the Interior Bronisław Pieracki, Bandera was sentenced to death but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In September 1939, as a result of the invasion of Poland, he was freed from Bereza Kartuska prison, and moved to Kraków, in the German-occupied zone, where he maintained close connections with Abwehr and Wehrmacht.[5][6]
For a time, Bandera collaborated with Nazi Germany. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, he prepared the 30 June 1941 Proclamation of Ukrainian statehood in Lviv, pledging to work with Nazi Germany.[7][5] For his refusal to rescind the decree, Bandera was arrested by the Gestapo and on 5 July 1941 held under house arrest.[8] After January 1942 Bandera was transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp but kept in special, comparatively comfortable detention.[9][10][11] In 1944, with Germany rapidly losing ground in the war in the face of the advancing Allied armies, Bandera was released in the hope that he would be instrumental in deterring the advancing Soviet forces. He set up the headquarters of the re-established Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council, which worked underground. After the war, Bandera with his family settled in West Germany where he remained the leader of the OUN-B and worked with several anti-communist organizations such as the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations[12] as well as with the US and British intelligence agencies.[12][4] Fourteen years after the end of the war, Bandera was assassinated in 1959 by KGB agents in Munich, West Germany.[13][14]
On 22 January 2010, the President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko awarded Bandera the posthumous title of Hero of Ukraine.[15] The European Parliament condemned the award, as did Russia, Poland and Jewish politicians and organizations.[16][17][18][19][20] President Viktor Yanukovych declared the award illegal, since Bandera was never a citizen of Ukraine, a stipulation necessary for getting the award. This announcement was confirmed by a court decision in April 2010.[21] In January 2011, the award was officially annulled.[22][23] A proposal to confer the award on Bandera was rejected by the Ukrainian parliament in August 2019.[24]
Bandera remains a highly controversial figure in Ukraine,[25][26][27] with some Ukrainians hailing him as a liberator who fought against the Soviet Union, Poland and Nazi Germany trying to establish an independent Ukraine, while other Ukrainians condemn him as a fascist[28] and a war criminal[28] who was, together with his followers, largely responsible for the massacres of Polish civilians[29] and partially for the Holocaust in Ukraine.[30][31][32][33]
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BURNT ALIVE IN ODESSA. Documentary | 2May2014 Odessa, Ukraine firebombed by Nationalist
Posted 27December2021 Bonanza Media: May 2, 2014 people of Ukrainian Odessa were trapped in a building and set on fire. Because they protested against new nationalist government that came to power in Kiev as a result of a coup d’état. Officially, 42 were announced dead, including 7 women and 1 minor. No one has been held responsible for this massacre. Alexander, one of the few survivors, shares his memories of what really happened and new battles he has to fight in the aftermath.
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The Uman Massacre
What really happened in Uman? Why did Rebbe Nachman want to be buried there? Tal Rotem gives an historical overview of a monumental “Kiddush Hashem”. Uman and Emuna go together…
Tal Rotem Posted on 31.05.08 https://breslev.com/307327/
The Massacre of Uman took place in the year 1768, a mere four years before the birth of Rebbe Nachman of Breslev. 33,000 Jews from Uman and the surrounding villages who took refuge from the murderous Jew-hating Ivan Gonta, the Ukrainian rebel that led the revolution against Poland, who then governed the Ukraine and was relatively decent to the Jews.
Uman and the Haidameks
Uman was a well-fortified city where a major part of Polish troops in the Ukraine were stationed. This fact made Uman one of the primary objectives of the Kolivivschyna movement, known popularly as the “Haidameks”, the organization of bitterly anti-Semitic Ukrainian Cossacks and their peasant supporters who revolted against Poland. Commanded by cut-throat Ivan Gonta who prided himself that he drank a fresh glass of his enemies’ blood every morning, the Cossacks began their siege on Uman.
In early June of 1768, on the way to Uman, the Ukrainian rebels by Gonta and Maxim Zalizniak razed a number of Jewish cities in one of history’s most cruel pogroms. As Zalizniak openly encouraged the slaughter of Jews, Uman filled with refugees from all over the Podolia region of the Central Ukraine in the Jewish Pale of Settlement.
A large camp filled with Polish nobility and their private militia, regular soldiers and Jewish refugees was stationed outside the city walls. The Cossacks routed the Polish encampment on June 14th and tried to take the city by surprise but to no avail. After this first unsuccessful attempt, the siege on Uman began on June 17th. The very first day large number of Ukrainians deserted the ranks of Polish forces and joined the rebel Cossacks when the city was surrounded.
After three days of the siege the city fell to Zalizniak in spite of a courageous defense in which the Jews also played an active role. The tragic point occurred during the peace negotiation on the third day of the siege that concluded in a combat and subsequent takeover of the city. It is unclear whether the resulting fight was initiated by Ukrainian or Polish side as the accounts of the event differ. What we do know is that the Jewish fighters led by Leib Shargorodski and Moses Menaker in an attempt to defend themselves, and barricaded themselves in one of Uman’s synagogues, but they were destroyed by cannon fire. All but a handful of Uman’s 33,000 Jews were subsequently killed by Gonta and his henchmen.
Martyrs in “Kiddush Hashem”
Gonta set up a tremendous cross in a lot in front of a church. He then set up a low canopy in front of the cross. After his men rouned up all the Jews that weren’t slaughtered in the fierce hand-to-hand and house-to-house fighting, he told them that anyone who passed through the canopy would be spared. But, in order to do so, one would have to prostrate oneself before the cross. Not a single Jewish man, woman, or child agreed to do so, despite the fact that parents were slaughtered in front of their children and children were brutally maimed in front of their parents. This became the greatest sanctification of Hashem’s name in history.
Gonta’s Execution
Fearing that the rebellion would spread into her domain, Catherine the Great, then Empress of Russia, dispatched a regiment of her best soldiers to help Poland suppress the rebellion. The commander of the Russian unit, Guriev, made the Haidameks believe he was siding with them against Poland and managed to capture approximately 900 of them without firing a single shot. He siezed Ivan Gonta and handed him over to the irate Poles and was tried for high treason. Sentenced to a bitter and agonizing death by grand, Gonta’s nailed to gallows and exhibited in 14 towns of Podolia.
The Ukranian View of Gonta
Although an arch-criminal and murderer, Gonta is a Ukrainian folk hero, immortalized in songs, legends, and poetry, such as Shevchenko’s controversial epic poem “Haidamaki”.
As a whole, the Cossacks and the haidameks are respected and worshipped in Ukraine, considered defenders of their motherland who fought against invaders. Ukrainians believe that the rowdy, brutal, and bloodthirsty insurgents defended social freedoms, the Ukrainian Orthodox faith and Ukraine’s independence. They view the Haidameks as paragons of courage, patriotism and dignity. Ukrainian many parents used to bring up their children. One Ukrainian history book. To this day, Ukrainians believe that the Haidameks fought against “Polish occupiers and Jewish landlords,” as one high school teacher in Uman told me, but this is of course a falsity since Jews were not allowed to own land in the Ukraine.
Why Uman?
Why did Rebbe Nachman choose Uman as his place of eternal rest?
Once, on the way from eastern Ukraine to his new home in Brelev, he passed by the mass grave of Uman’s Jews. He stopped the wagon driver, pondered, took a deep breath and said, “Here is the scent of Heaven. This is a good place to lay in rest.” He chose Uman because of its many holy martyrs who gave their lives for their “emuna”, their pure and complete faith in Hashem. Uman is therefore an eternal monument of emuna, may the holy martyrs lay in eternal peace, amen.
(Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Gonta)
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Statue of Ivan Gonta, Cossack murderer of Uman’s 33,000 Jews in 1768
Ivan Gonta
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Gonta
Ivan Gonta (Ukrainian: Іван Ґонта; died 1768) was one of the leaders of the Koliivshchyna, an armed rebellion of peasants and Ukrainian Cossacks against Bar confederation in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Born in Rożyszki (modern Rozsishky) near Uman’ in Bracław Voivodship, Gonta served as a sotnik (captain) of Cossack household militia of Franciszek Salezy Potocki, the Voivode of Kiev, and commanded a small unit in the garrison of Uman since 1757. During the Koliivshchyna he was ordered to fight the approaching haidamaka forces of Maksym Zalizniak. Instead, he and his militia joined the rebels, and the joint forces captured and ravaged the town of Uman on June 21, 1768. In what became known as the Massacre of Uman, thousands of local Polish szlachta, Jews, Uniates and other people were slaughtered. After that, Gonta was proclaimed colonel and commanded the garrison of Uman.
When Gonta sent a detachment to spread rebellion into the Ottoman Empire, Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia, dispatched a regiment of Don Cossacks fighting against Bar confederation to help Poland suppress the rebellion to prevent Ottomans from waging a war against Russia. The commander of the Russian unit, Guriev, made the rebels believe he was siding with them for the joint trip against Bar confederation and managed to capture approximately 900 of them without a single shot. After that, Ivan Gonta was handed over to the Poles and was tried for high treason. Sentenced to death by grand Crown Hetman Franciszek Ksawery Branicki, he was then executed in the village of Serby (modern Gontivka) in the Podolian Voivodship. As an added measure, his body was partitioned and nailed to gallows in 14 towns of Podolia.
Although largely non-notable during his life, after his death he became a hero of countless folk songs and legends that portrayed him as a hero and a martyr. He was immortalized in Taras Shevchenko‘s controversial epic poem Haidamaky though Gonta had never killed his Roman Catholic sons, because his wife and children were of Orthodox faith and in fact he had never initiated the massacre of Uman himself.
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UKRAINE: DONBASS. YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW (Warning: Graphic)
4March2022 TruthFreedom
WARNING: Not for the faint of heart. Learn some background about Ukraine. It’s been almost eight years since a US-inspired coup divided Ukraine and war erupted in the country’s east. The Donetsk and Lugansk republics, next to Russia’s border, are collectively known as Donbass, a coal-mining industrial centre. The two declared independence from Kiev in 2014, and civil war erupted.
There are mass graves scattered across Donbass, from which bodies of civilians are regularly exhumed. Yet, while the shelling and killings continued, Western media remained silent. According to UN estimates, over 13,000 people have been killed in the conflict.
The Donbass people call it a ‘genocide of the Russian-speaking population’. Kiev outlawed the Russian language from everyday life, endeavouring to limit its use, despite Russian being the native language in large areas of the country.
Donbass. Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow takes a look back at events that unfolded before the start of the crisis in 2014. Historians and journalists share their views on the conflict, players and motives, while ordinary citizens from the Donetsk and Lugansk regions describe the horrors of war.
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From Rabbi Lazer Brody’s Lazer Beams website:
Donetsk: Nuremburg Laws with a Russian Accent
17 April 2014 http://lazerbrody.typepad.com/lazer_beams/2014/04/donetsk-nuremburg-laws-with-a-russian-accent.html
Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20140424135614/http://lazerbrody.typepad.com/lazer_beams/2014/04/donetsk-nuremburg-laws-with-a-russian-accent.html
Ukraine-Donetsk Jewish property registration fee
Donetsk. This is a name that could end up being Nuremburg revisited.
Suppose you’re watching a boxing match between a rapist and a murderer. Who do you cheer for? I would cheer for both, hoping that they’d knock each other out simultaneously…
One cannot walk a single meter in the Ukraine without stepping on ground that’s soaked with Jewish blood. A third of our people lost there lives in the uprisings of 1648-49, the Cossack rebellion of 1768 and intermittent pogroms that continued until the Soviet Revolution.
Hitler could not have accomplished what he did without the cooperation of the vehemently anti-Semitic Ukraine population.
So, don’t shed a tear for the Ukraine, which is on the verge of a civil war. Before Moshiach comes, Hashem is systematically giving each nation what it deserves.
As for the Russians, maybe they didn’t kill Jewish bodies like Hitler and the Ukrainian Cossacks did, but they killed millions of Jewish souls, waging their seventy-year war against Torah and Judaism while the Communists were in power from 1921-1991. Don’t think the Russian on the street loves Jews any more than the Communists did.
The Russian nationalists who have taken over the Donetsk region in the Eastern Ukraine yesterday disturbed the sanctity of Pesach prayers in the local synagogue to pass an official leaflet demanding Donetsk Jews to register, declare their property, or be deported. This is something that the civilized world should not tolerate for a moment, yet it’s no surprise. We now see the pro-Russian militias – none other than KGB operatives – in all their disgusting ugliness. The Russians and the Ukraines deserve each other.
We pray for the welfare of our Jewish brethren in Donetsk. I for one call them to make Aliya immediately and not wait until they’re herded into a ghetto.
Historically, whenever there was war between Poland, the Ukraine and Russia, the Jews were caught in the middle and killed by both sides.
Gunte, the Cossack who murdered Uman’s 33,000 Jewish martyrs in 1768, is celebrated as a Ukrainian national hero.
The Jews of the Ukraine should leave en masse and come to Israel immediately. Donetsk is only the beginning. Brothers and sisters, it’s time to come home and be free. Time is running out. Don’t stay in your 21st Century version of Egypt. No wonder this is happening during Pesach. We’re waiting for you with open arms.
– See more at: http://lazerbrody.typepad.com/lazer_beams/2014/04/donetsk-nuremburg-laws-with-a-russian-accent.html#sthash.DR28edE7.dpuf
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From Rabbi Lazer Brody’s Lazer Beams website:
Svoboda: Another State Department Bad Bet
24April2014 http://www.lazerbrody.typepad.com/lazer_beams/2014/04/svoboda-another-state-department-bad-bet.html Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20140503105533/http://www.lazerbrody.typepad.com/lazer_beams/2014/04/svoboda-another-state-department-bad-bet.html
Ukraine Svoboda-neo-Nazi leader Oleh Tyahnybok
The Israeli media reports that the USA is really pieved about Israel’s failure to condemn Russia about the Crimean annexation and recent tension in Eastern Ukraine.
I’m sharply critical about our current government in Israel for a long list of reasons, but they did do one thing right: they didn’t vote in favor of the USA’s condemnation of Russia in the UN.
The facts on the ground are that, according to the highly authoratative Global Research Center, the USA has spent over $5 billion to install an extreme right-wing government in the Ukraine, while giving support and legitimacy to the neo-Nazi Svoboda Party. This is not hearsay, for the facts have been confirmed by US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland.
Don’t shed a tear for the Ukraine. Antisemitism there is getting worse by the minute. In recent days alone, the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s brother has been desecrated and a synagogue firebombed. Try Googling “Ukraine Antisemitism”, and see how many millions of results you get in less than a quarter of a second. What’s so disgusting is that the current forces behind the perpetrators of hate crimes against the Ukrainian Jews is the United States State Department. This is the same State Department that supported the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt and supports Al Qaida in Syria. How do you like where your tax dollars are going, America?
Yet, we look at everything in the world through eyes of emuna. Like everything else in the world, the chaos in the Ukraine is also from Hashem. How much more must Hashem shout at our brethern in the Jew-hating Ukraine to leave there right away? Why a Ukrainian Jew remains for another 5 minutes in the Ukraine is beyond my comprehension. It’s time to get out of there and to come home to the only true home a Jew has on earth – the Land of Israel.
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From Rabbi Lazer Brody’s Lazer Beams website:
Uman, Ukraine and Geula
06 May 2014 http://lazerbrody.typepad.com/lazer_beams/2014/05/ukraine-and-geula.html
Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20140509131414/http://lazerbrody.typepad.com/lazer_beams/2014/05/ukraine-and-geula.html
According to Breslever tradition, the annual gathering of Breslever Chassidim in Uman on Rosh Hashana and the Geula, the full and final redemption of our people, are closely intertwined. Hashem gave Rebbe Nachman both secrets. Consequently, Rebbe Nachman said before his death that we should all come to Uman on Rosh Hashana. He also said that his fire shall burn until the coming of Moshiach. That could be ever so close, as many of today’s spiritual leaders are saying.
Let’s see what’s happening now in the Ukraine:
Map: Ukraine 9 May 2014
Double-click on the above map of the Ukraine to view it enlarged and more clearly
The red circle in the center of the map is Uman, the site where Rebbe Nachman of Breslev is buried. Uman is slightly north of the imaginary line, which I drew in blue, that separates the northwestern pro-Ukraine half of the Ukraine from the southeastern pro-Russia side of the Ukraine. The purple box at the bottom right is the Crimean Peninsula, which has already been annexed by Russia. The black boxes indicate places where violence has already erupted on a large scale.
According to Reuters, the Ukraine is quickly slipping into a civil war. Few would have believed that several days ago, but since 42 people were killed in Odessa this past Friday, violence has been spreading fast. Odessa is a mere 2.5 hour drive from Uman.
People have been writing and asking what will be with Uman this Rosh Hashana. As it is, the USA and Germany have already issued travel restrictions to the Ukraine. Israel has not at this point. Flights are on schedule between Kiev and Tel Aviv, and every day, new immigrants from the Ukraine are arriving in Israel in growing numbers.
I can’t verbally explain how, but my heart tells me that the unrest in the Ukraine is closely tied to the Geula. Interestingly, Uman is the pivot point between the two sides. If the hostilities blow over, then we’ll certainly be in Uman on Rosh Hashana. And if the Ukraine is ablaze, with travel there impossible, then it means that we’ll hopefully celebrate this coming Rosh Hashana in our rebuilt Holy Temple in Jerusalem, amen!
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Is the West aiding and supporting the Hamas Nazis like it is supporting the Ukrainian Nazis?
Hamas Child suicide Bomb Terrorist
Shmuel HaNavi bus bombing From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Shmuel HaNavi bus bombing was the suicide bombing of a crowded public bus (Egged bus 2) in the Shmuel HaNavi quarter in Jerusalem, Israel, on August 19, 2003. Twenty-four people were killed and over 130 wounded. Many of the victims were children, some of them infants. The Islamist militant group Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.
Gaza “protesters” loft molotov cocktail on swastika kite over Israeli border
International Neo Nazi Fund
Victoria Nulland meets with Svoboda neo-nazis
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Explosive Report Confirms Expansive CIA ‘Stealth Network’ Of Spies & Commandos Inside Ukraine
by Tyler Durden 27June2022 – 02:00 AM https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/explosive-report-confirms-expansive-cia-stealth-network-spies-commandos-inside-ukraine
A fresh New York Times report has confirmed what many already suspected – that the CIA is still very active inside Ukraine – especially with training as well coordinating weapons among its Ukrainian allies. The Times report details “a stealthy network of commandos and spies rushing to provide weapons, intelligence and training,” based on US and European intelligence officials with knowledge of the operations. The report says Ukrainian forces are reliant on this Western clandestine network “more than ever” while outgunned by the Russians.
This comes months after investigative journalist Zach Dorfman’s bombshell expose in Yahoo News which detailed how a prior 8-year long CIA covert program to train Ukrainian fighters helped provoke the Russian invasion. The only question that remained after that March report was the extent to which the CIA was still active in the ongoing fight against the invading Russians.
Special operations file image via Sandboxx
The new Times reporting confirms that the US program is not only active and ongoing, but appears larger in scale than previously thought given the CIA’s close cooperation with the Ukrainians is happening both inside and outside the country, across multiple locations.
“Much of this work happens outside Ukraine, at bases in Germany, France and Britain, for example. But even as the Biden administration has declared it will not deploy American troops to Ukraine, some C.I.A. personnel have continued to operate in the country secretly, mostly in the capital, Kyiv, directing much of the vast amounts of intelligence the United States is sharing with Ukrainian forces, according to current and former officials,” the report indicates.
It appears much the CIA’s work in Ukraine is centered on coordinating intelligence with local intel services and counterparts. “Few other details have emerged about what the C.I.A. personnel or the commandos are doing, but their presence in the country — on top of the diplomatic staff members who returned after Russia gave up its siege of Kyiv — hints at the scale of the secretive effort to assist Ukraine that is underway and the risks that Washington and its allies are taking,” NY Times continues.
Over the weekend, Canada also has been reported to have special operations troops inside Ukraine. This was reported months ago, but with a separate NYT report offering further confirmation. “Both CTV and Global News reported in late January that Canadian special forces had been sent to Ukraine, but National Defence did not comment on that deployment,” Ottawa Citizen writes Sunday. Back in January, a full two months before the invasion, Yahoo News disclosed the following:
These details further seems to authenticate those voices which have been insisting NATO and Russia are in fact waging a proxy war inside Ukraine, a label which Biden administration officials have previously sought to deny and downplay.
Caitlin Johnstone-tweet-25June2022-Ukraine is full of CIA personnel.
Writes NY Times further of the international nature of Ukraine’s on-the-ground assistance, “At the same time, a few dozen commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine.”
But the report adds the caveat that “The United States withdrew its own 150 military instructors before the war began in February, but commandos from these allies either remained or have gone in and out of the country since then, training and advising Ukrainian troops and providing an on-the-ground conduit for weapons and other aid, three U.S. officials said.”
This strongly suggests the very scenario that many long suspected: that CIA operations which had gone on for eight years in Ukraine didn’t wind down or cease upon the Feb.24 start of the Russian invasion, but only increased and were ramped up. Of course, the same goes for the Pentagon’s special operations presence inside the country and along its Western borders, particularly in Poland.
On Sunday, the Kremlin underscored angrily that even as such clandestine programs are made public via deliberate “leaks” to the media, Washington has refused to answer simple questions regarding Western operatives and mercenaries inside Ukraine – also after a couple of American fighters were recently captured.
Michael Tracey-tweet-26June2022–CIA and NATO ‘boots on the ground’ in Ukraine
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Sunday:
She charged the West with only seeking to perpetuate the conflict, saying, “They are sparing no effort so that the conflict in Ukraine continued as long as possible. We remember what US 43rd President George Bush Jr said: Ukraine’s mission is to kill as many Russians as possible…. They have endowed Ukraine and the Kiev regime with this duty.
“They are using (Ukraine – TASS) as an instrument and the entire logistics are centered round that – weapons supplies, sending people, anything to keep the conflict burning, as [UK Prime Minister] Boris Johnson told [French President Emmanuel] Macron today, to prevent the settlement of this situation. Otherwise, their plan will fail,” Zakharova said according to TASS.
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Escobar: Megalopolis x Russia – Total War
by Tyler Durden 09May2022 – 04:00 AM https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/escobar-megalopolis-x-russia-total-war
Authored by Pepe Escobar,
After careful evaluation, the Kremlin is rearranging the geopolitical chessboard to end the unipolar hegemony of the “indispensable nation”.
Operation Z is the first salvo of a titanic struggle: three decades after the fall of the USSR, and 77 years after the end of WWII, after careful evaluation, the Kremlin is rearranging the geopolitical chessboard to end the unipolar hegemony of the “indispensable nation”. No wonder the Empire of Lies has gone completely berserk, obsessed in completely expelling Russia from the West-centric system.
Russian President Putin and a European chessboard – opinion
The U.S. and its NATO puppies cannot possibly come to grips with their perplexity when faced with a staggering loss: no more entitlement allowing exclusive geopolitical use of force to perpetuate “our values”. No more Full Spectrum Dominance.
The micro-picture is also clear. The U.S. Deep State is milking to Kingdom Come its planned Ukraine gambit to cloak a strategic attack on Russia. The “secret” was to force Moscow into an intra-Slav war in Ukraine to break Nord Stream 2 – and thus German reliance on Russian natural resources. That ends – at least for the foreseeable future – the prospect of a Bismarckian Russo-German connection that would ultimately cause the U.S. to lose control of the Eurasian landmass from the English Channel to the Pacific to an emerging China-Russia-Germany pact.
The American strategic gambit, so far, has worked wonders. But the battle is far from over. Psycho neo-con/neoliberalcon silos inside the Deep State consider Russia such a serious threat to the “rules-based international order” that they are ready to risk if not incur a “limited” nuclear war out of their gambit. What’s at stake is nothing less than the loss of Ruling the World by the Anglo-Saxons.
Mastering the Five Seas
Russia, based on purchasing power parity (PPP), is the 6th economy in the world, right behind Germany and ahead of both the UK and France. Its “hard” economy is similar to the U.S. Steel production may be about the same, but intellectual capacity is vastly superior. Russia has roughly the same number of engineers as the U.S., but they are much better educated.
The Mossad attributes Israel’s economic miracle in creating an equivalent of Silicon Valley to a base of a million Russian immigrants. This Israeli Silicon Valley happens to be a key asset of the American MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex), as indelibly named by Ray McGovern.
NATOstan media hysterically barking that Russia’s GDP is the size of Texas is nonsense. PPP is what really counts; that and Russia’s superior engineers is why their hypersonic weapons are at least two or three generations ahead of the U.S. Just ask the indispensable Andrei Martyanov.
The Empire of Lies has no defensive missiles worthy of the name, and no equivalents to Mr. Zircon and Mr. Sarmat. The NATOstan sphere simply cannot win a war, any war against Russia for this reason alone.
The deafening NATOstan “narrative” that Ukraine is defeating Russia does not even qualify as an innocuous joke (compare it with Russia’s “Reach Out and Touch Someone” strategy). The corrupt system of SBU fanatics intermingled with UkroNazi factions is kaput. The Pentagon knows it. The CIA cannot possibly admit it. What the Empire of Lies has sort of won, so far, is a media “victory” for the UkroNazis, not a military victory.
Gen Aleksandr Dvornikov, of Syria fame, has a clear mandate: to conquer the whole of Donbass, totally free up Crimea and prepare the advance towards Odessa and Transnistria while reducing a rump Ukraine to the status of failed state without any access to the sea.
The Sea of Azov – linked to the Caspian by the Don-Volga canal – is already a Russian lake. And the Black Sea is next, the key connection between the Heartland and the Mediterranean. The Five Seas system – Black, Azov, Caspian, Baltic, White – enshrines Russia as a de facto continental naval power. Who needs warm waters?
Moving “at the speed of war”
The pain dial, from now on, will go up non-stop. Reality – as in facts on the ground – will soon become apparent even to the NATOstan-wide LugenPresse.
The woke Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Mark Milley, expects Operation Z to last years. That’s nonsense. The Russian Armed Forces may afford to be quite methodical and take all the time needed to properly demilitarize Ukraine. The collective West for its part is pressed for time – because the blowback from the real economy is already on and bound to become vicious.
Defense Minister Shoigu has made it quite clear: any NATO vehicles bringing weapons to Kiev will be destroyed as “legitimate military targets”.
A report by the scientific service of the Bundestag established that training of Ukrainian soldiers on German soil may amount, under international law, to participation in war. And that gets even trickier when coupled with NATO weapons deliveries: “Only if, in addition to the supply of weapons, the instruction of the conflict party or training in such weapons were also an issue would one leave the secure area of non-warfare.”
Now at least it’s irretrievably clear how the Empire of Lies “moves at the speed of war” – as described in public by weapons peddler turned Pentagon head, Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin. In Pentagonese, that was explained by the proverbial “official” as “a combination of a call center, a watch floor, meeting rooms. They execute a battle rhythm to support decision-makers.”
The Pentagonese “battle rhythm” offered to a supposedly “credible, resilient and combat-capable Ukraine military” is fed by a EUCom system that essentially moves weapons orders from Pentagon warehouses in the U.S. to branches of the Empire of Bases in Europe and then to the NATO eastern front in Poland, where they are trucked across Ukraine just in time to be duly incinerated by Russian precision strikes: the wealth of options include supersonic P-800 Onyx missiles, two types of Iskander, and Mr. Khinzal launched from Mig-31Ks.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has stressed Moscow is perfectly aware the U.S., NATO and UK are transferring not only weapons but also loads of intel. In parallel, the collective West turns everything upside down 24/7 shaping a new environment totally geared against Russia, not caring for even a semblance of partnership in any area. The collective West does not even consider the possibility of dialogue with Russia.
Hence talking to Putin is “a waste of time” unless a “Russian defeat” in Ukraine (echoing strident Kiev P.R.) would make him “more realistic”. For all his faults, Le Petit Roi Macron/McKinsey has been an exception, on the phone with Putin earlier this week.
The neo-Orwellian Hitlerization of Putin reduces him, even among the so-called Euro-intelligentzia, to the status of dictator of a nation chloroformed into its 19th century nationalism. Forget about any semblance of historical/political/cultural analysis. Putin is a late Augustus, dressing up his Imperium as a Republic.
At best the Europeans preach and pray – chihuahuas yapping to His Master’s Voice – for a hybrid strategy of “containment and engagement” to be unleashed by the U.S., clumsily parroting the scribblings of denizens of that intellectual no-fly zone, Think Tankland.
Yet in fact the Europeans would rather “isolate” Russia – as in 12% of the world’s population “isolating” 88% (of course: their Westoxified “vision” completely ignores the Global South). “Help” to Russia will only come when sanctions are effective (as in never: blowback will be the norm) or – the ultimate wet dream – there’s regime change in Moscow.
The Fall
UkroNazi P.R. agent Ursula von der Lugen presented the sixth sanction package of the Europoodle (Dis)Union.
Top of the bill is to exclude three more Russian banks from SWIFT, including Sberbank. Seven banks are already excluded. This will enforce Russia’s “total isolation”. It’s idle to comment on something that only fools the LugenPresse.
Then there’s the “progressive” embargo on oil imports. No more crude imported to the EU in six months and no more refined products before the end of 2022. As it stands, the IEA shows that 45% of Russia’s oil exports go to the EU (with 22% to China and 10% to the U.S.). His Master’s Voice continues and will continue to import Russian oil.
And of course 58 “personal” sanctions also show up, targeting very dangerous characters such as Patriarch Kirill of the Orthodox Church, and the wife, son and daughter of Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov.
This stunning display of stupidity will have to be approved by all EU members. Internal revolt is guaranteed, especially from Hungary, even as so many remain willing to commit energy suicide and mess up with the lives of their citizens big time to defend a neo-Nazi regime.
Alastair Crooke called my attention to a startling, original interpretation of what’s goin’ on, offered in Russian by a Serbian analyst, Prof. Slobodan Vladusic. His main thesis, in a nutshell: “Megalopolis hates Russia because it is not Megalopolis – it has not entered the sphere of anti-humanism and that is why it remains a civilization alternative. Hence Russophobia.”
Vladusic contends that the intra-Slav war in Ukraine is “a great catastrophe for Orthodox civilization” – mirroring my recent first attempt to open a serious debate on a Clash of Christianities.
Yet the major schism is not on religion but culture: “The key difference between the former West and today’s Megalopolis is that Megalopolis programmatically renounces the humanistic heritage of the West.”
So now “it is possible to erase not only the musical canon, but also the entire European humanistic heritage: the entire literature, fine arts, philosophy” because of a “trivialization of knowledge”. What’s left is an empty space, actually a cultural black hole, “filled by promoting terms such as ‘posthumanism’ and ‘transhumanism’.”
And here Vladusic gets to the heart of the matter: Russia fiercely opposes the Great Reset concocted by the “hackable”, self-described “elites” of Megalopolis.
Sergey Glazyev, now coordinating the draft of a new financial/monetary system by the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) in partnership with the Chinese, adapts Vladusic to the facts on the ground (here in Russian, here in an imperfect English translation).
Glazyev is way more blunt than in his meticulous economic analyses. While noting the Deep State’s aims of destroying the Russian world, Iran and block China, he stresses the U.S. “will not be able to win the global hybrid war”. A key reason is that the collective West has “put all independent countries in front of the need to find new global currency instruments, risk insurance mechanisms, restore the norms of international law and create their own economic security systems.”
So yes, this is Totalen Krieg, Total War – as Glazyev spells it out with no attenuation, and how Russia denounced it this week at the UN: “Russia needs to stand up to the United States and NATO in its confrontation, bringing it to its logical conclusion, so as not to be torn between them and China, which is irrevocably becoming the leader of the world economy.”
History may eventually register, 77 years after the end of WWII, that neocon/neoliberalcon psychos in Washington silos instigating an inter-Slavic war by ordering Kiev to launch a blitzkrieg against Donbass was the spark that led to the Fall of the U.S. Empire.
Map: Ukraine 9 May 2014
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The real reasons why Ukraine is so important To Biden, Clinton and their ‘global crime cabal’: Ukraine is their ‘little crime playground’ where their devastating secrets are hidden
04March2022 by: News Editors https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-03-04-reasons-ukraine-important-biden-clinton-crime-cabal.html
This article may contain statements that reflect the opinion of the author
(Natural News) If anyone needed to see the ‘bigger picture‘ of everything now happening in Ukraine, Russia, here in America and all across the world, we get it in numerous new stories out recently, and some time ago, across the internet.
Summed up perfectly in this new story over at The Week titled “REMEMBER AFGHANISTAN: U.S. and Britain reportedly believe the Ukraine war could last 10-20 years, become a Russian quagmire”, the ‘military industrial complex‘ we were warned of over 61 years ago by then President Dwight Eisenhower NEEDS new wars to fill the coffers with the 20-year war/occupation of Afghanistan having come to an end.
(Article by Stefan Stanford republished from AllNewsPipeline.com)
And while we could never see what’s happening in Ukraine going on for 10 to 20 years with Russia’s unstoppable hypersonic nuclear missiles and the potential of an EMP or two that sends America and Europe back to the dark ages thrown into the mix, we get several HUGE pieces of the puzzle into what is REALLY going on in Ukraine, and why, if we look back at news stories over the past several years.
As we’ll explore within this ANP story, Ukraine is nothing less than the ‘Playground‘ of the ‘global elite crime cabal‘ that ‘runs the world‘, with huge amounts of drugs and human trafficking being run out of the country, along with their ‘world disinfo/control‘ operation, and Ukraine also gives them a ‘front doorstep‘ into Russia, not a word of any of this reported by their ‘controlled‘ mainstream media.
Each of the videos at the bottom of this story take looks at various aspects of that ‘Ukrainian cabal playground‘ that Joe Biden is risking America’s nuclear annihilation over, with the 1st video below featuring US Army Colonel Doug MacGregor joining former US Senator Trey Gowdy on Fox News and telling him and America that the Ukrainian government is deeply corrupt, and Biden and America definitely shouldn’t help them.
Yet it appears another one of the ‘real reasons‘ that Biden will most likely get America involved in the ‘quagmire‘ there is because there are some absolutely devastating ‘Biden family secrets‘ hidden in Ukraine, as well as secrets held by the ‘global crime cabal‘, secrets that Russia could possibly get ahold of if they take Ukraine if they haven’t all been destroyed by then.
And just listen to the desperation and panic in the voices of Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi as heard in these linked twitter videos. What are they hiding? After everything that’s now happening we can surely see that the globalist crime cabal playground runs deep in Ukraine.
So are you ready to financially support a US ‘war‘ in Ukraine that lasts for 10 to 20 years as this new story over at The Week suggests is a very real possibility? Reporting within it that ‘lawmakers‘ at the US Capitol had been told on Monday that this mess that just recently restarted will likely last 10, 15, or 20 years, although ultimately in their minds, Russia will lose, just think about how much TAXPAYER money a long, drawn-out quagmire would bring in to that military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned us about 61 years ago!
And while Joe Biden, Democrats, the mainstream media and the ‘globalist cabal‘ attempt to paint Ukraine as a ‘democracy‘ and a ‘free country‘ which ‘freely elected‘ their President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, anybody paying attention to ‘real history‘ remembers that Ukraine’s government consists of very real neo-Nazi’s, many who were ‘installed‘ as ‘puppets‘ by the globalists cabal.
And while this story is certainly no attempt to paint Vladimir Putin as a ‘hero‘, as we hear in the 1st video below, Ukraine is one of the most corrupt, globalist-owned countries in the entire world, quite literally the ‘headquarters‘ of the globalist crime cabal.
One of the only countries in the world that they can fully control that has had the stability and infrastructure to be used for money laundering, bioweapons research and fully controlled by the ‘puppets‘ of the ‘cabal‘ itself, Ukraine in 2022 is also much like America in 2022, a country where nearly all the govt movers and shakers are totally compromised so there’s a big fat ZERO PERCENT chance of anything being investigated.
100% proven by none other than Joe Biden himself as seen in the 3rd video at the bottom of this story when he was talking to the “Council on Foreign Relations” and he quite literally bragged about how he’d hold back a Billion Dollars in aid to Ukraine unless a Ukrainian prosecutor stopped investigating him and his sons dealings, then laughed about it as the crowd joined in, let that sink in for a moment.
Read more at: AllNewsPipeline.comTOP
Regardless Of Who’s Elected, Imperial Corruption Rules The Nation
by Tyler Durdeny, Nov 10November2022 – 12:00 AM https://www.zerohedge.com/political/regardless-whos-elected-imperial-corruption-rules-nation
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
But in the meantime, enjoy the political theatrics down on the sand-strewn floor of the Coliseum.
Are you not Entertained-Roman Coliseum
While the much-touted differences between America’s political parties get obsessive, hysterical attention, the sameness of Imperial corruption, waste and squalor regardless of who’s in power gets little notice.
Scrape away the differences–mostly in domestic issues–and we see the dead hand of Imperial Corruption is on the tiller.
The core of Imperial Corruption is the disconnect between the nation’s ideals of representational democracy and open markets and the sordid reality: elites serve their interests by corrupting both democracy and open markets.
Unfettered democracy and markets cannot be controlled by a tiny, self-serving elite.
Stripped of corruption, democracy and markets are free-for-alls that are constantly evolving, as highly adaptive islands of coherence coalesce that influence the quasi-chaos, competing with other islands of coherence but never gaining dominance due to the open-ended dynamism of collaboration-competition that is the beating heart of both democracy and open markets.
The only way to control democracy and markets to serve the interests of the few at the expense of the many is to corrupt them completely by destroying the dynamism of collaboration-competition.
Democracy is replaced by an auction of political power to the highest bidder that rewards cronies and devotes all its resources not to solving the nation’s problems but to whipping up conflagrations of divisiveness and partisan hysteria that wash away the middle ground where problems can actually be addressed.
This crippling of the nation’s ability to actually solve difficult problems serves the interests of self-serving elites whose sole interest is accumulating personal wealth and power. Their proclaimed interest in solving the nations’ real-world problems are fraudulent tissues designed to hide the putrid reality that all their so-called “solutions” distill down to sluicing huge sums of state money to cronies and campaign contributors under the guise of “solving problems.”
The only “problem” America’s elites know how to solve is the “problem” of how to get personally richer while tightening their control of the nation-state’s vast flood of (taxed / borrowed) money.
Cronies and contributors get tax breaks hidden in 1,000-page legislation and overflowing rivers of money (here’s looking at you, Big Pharma, Big Defense, Higher Education, Sickcare, et al.).
America’s elites are masters at misdirection and distraction: it’s always the other side’s fault that the nation is sliding down the wrong side of the S-Curve.
The Lifecycle of States and Empires-Expansion and Collapse
The elites don’t really care which side is in power, as they control them both to serve their own interests.
But something funny happens on the way to gaining control of complex emerging systems: that control destroys the system’s self-correcting mechanisms and adaptability.
Rigging the system to serve one’s own interests destroys the system’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances and selective pressures.
Once a system has been crippled to serve the interest of an elite, when forced to adapt or die, it can only die as its mechanisms of adaptation were destroyed by the power-grab of elites.
An economy dominated by a handful of cartels and quasi-monopolies is an economy that is doomed to slide into the dustbin of history, as cartels and monopolies “win” by crushing competition and competing islands of coherence, as competition threatens their profits and control of markets and governance, a.k.a. “democracy.”
Any system that serves the interests of the few by choking off adaptability and the dynamisms of a free-for-all churn lacks the tools needed to avoid systemic collapse.
By enabling elites to organize the nation to serve their personal interests, America has been stripped of the dynamics needed to adapt. Without these dynamics, collapse is the only possible outcome.
But in the meantime, enjoy the political theatrics down on the sand-strewn floor of the Coliseum. While Imperial Corruption undermines what’s left of the nation’s ability to adapt fast enough and successfully enough to survive what lies ahead, we can cheer the “winners” of the bloodsport and ignore the winds of disorder sweeping the land.
* * *
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Escobar: How Russia Will Counterpunch The US/EU Declaration Of War
by Tyler Durden 05MarchMar 05, 2022 – https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/escobar-how-russia-will-counterpunch-useu-declaration-war
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog,
Only self-sufficiency affords total independence. And the Big Picture has also been keenly understood by the Global South…
One of the key underlying themes of the Russia/Ukraine/NATO matrix is that the Empire of Lies (copyright Putin) has been rattled to the core by the combined ability of Russian hypersonic missiles and a defensive shield capable of blocking incoming nuclear missiles from the West, thereby ending Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.)
This has led the Americans to nearly risk a hot war to be able to place hypersonic missiles that they still don’t have on Ukraine’s western borders, and so be within three minutes of Moscow. For that, of course, they need Ukraine, as well as Poland and Romania in Eastern Europe.
In Ukraine, the Americans are determined to fight to the last European soul – if that’s what it takes. This may be the last roll of the (nuclear) dice. Thus the next-to-last gasp at coercing Russia into submission by using the remaining, workable American weapon of mass destruction: SWIFT.
Yet this weapon can be easily neutralized by rapid adoption of self-sufficiency.
With essential input by the inestimable Michael Hudson I have outlined possibilities for Russia to weather the sanction storm. That didn’t even consider the full extent of Russia’s “black box defense” – and counter-attack – as outlined by John Helmer in his introduction to an essay that heralds no less then The Return of Sergei Glaziev.
Glaziev, predictably detested across Atlanticist circles, was a key economic adviser to President Putin and is now the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). He has always been a fierce critic of the Russian Central Bank and the oligarch gang closely linked to Anglo-American finance.
His latest essay, Sanctions and Sovereignty, originally published by expert.ru and translated by Helmer, deserves serious scrutiny.
This is one of the key takeaways:
De-offshore or bust
Glaziev essentially recommends:
The Russian Central Bank seems to be listening. Most of these measures are already in place. And there are signs that Putin and the government are finally ready to grab the Russian oligarchy by the balls and force them to share risks and losses at an extremely difficult for the nation. Goodbye to stockpiling funds taken out of Russia offshore and in Londongrad.
Glaziev is the real deal. In December 2014 I was at a conference in Rome, and Glaziev joined us on the phone. Reviewing a subsequent column I wrote at the time, between Rome and Beijing, I was stunned: it’s as if Glaziev was saying these things literally today.
Allow me to quote two paragraphs:
Gotta pay the “tax on independence”
A consensus seems to be emerging in Moscow that the Russian economy will stabilize quickly, as there will be a shortage of personnel for industry and a lot of extra hands will be required. Hence no unemployment. There may be shortages, but no inflation. Sales of – Western – luxury goods have already been curtailed. Imported products will be placed under price controls. All the necessary rubles will be available though price controls – as happened in the U.S. in WWII.
A wave of nationalization of assets may be ahead. ExxonMobil announced it will withdraw from the $4 billion Sakhalin-1 project (they had bailed out on Sakhalin-2, deemed too expensive), producing 200,000 barrels of oil a day, after BP and Norway’s Equinor announced they were withdrawing from projects with Rosneft. BP was actually dreaming of taking all of Rosneft’s participation.
According to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, the Kremlin is now blocking asset sales by foreign investors looking to divest. In parallel, Rosneft, for instance, is bound to raise capital from China and India, who are already minority investors in several projects, and buy them out 100%: an excellent opportunity for Russian business.
What could be construed as the Mother of All Counter-Sanctions has not yet been announced. Deputy Chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev himself hinted all options are on the table.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, channeling the patience of 10,000 Taoist monks, still expecting the current hysteria to fade away, describes the sanctions as “some kind of a tax on independence”, with countries barring their companies from working in Russia under “huge pressure.”
Lethal counterpunches though are not excluded. Apart from completely de-dollarizing – as Glaviev recommends – Russia may ban the export of titanium, rare earth, nuclear fuel and, already in effect, rocket engines.
Very toxic moves would include seizing all foreign assets of hostile nations; freeze all loan repayments to Western banks and place the funds in a frozen account in a Russian bank; completely ban all hostile foreign media, foreign media ownership, assorted NGOs and CIA fronts; and supply friendly nations with state of the art weapons, intel sharing and joint training and exercises.
What’s certain is that a new architecture of payment systems – as discussed by Michael Hudson and others – uniting the Russian SPFS and the Chinese CHIPS, may soon be offered to scores of nations across Eurasia and the Global South – several among them already under sanctions, such as Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, the DPRK.
Slowly but surely, we are already on the way to the emergence of a sizeable Global South bloc immune to American financial warfare.
The RIC in BRICS – Russia, India and China – are already increasing trade in their own currencies. If we look at the list of nations at the UN that voted against Russia or abstained from condemning Operation Z in Ukraine, plus those that did not sanction Russia, we have at least 70% of the whole Global South.
So once again is the West – plus satrapies/colonies such as Japan and Singapore in Asia – against the Rest: Eurasia, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America.
The coming European collapse
Michael Hudson told me, “the U.S. and Western Europe expected a Froelicher Krieg (“happy war”). Germany and other countries haven’t begun to feel the pain of gas and mineral and food deprivation. THAT’S going to be the real game. The aim would be to break Europe away from U.S. control via NATO. This will involve “meddling” by creating a New World Order political movement and party, like Communism was a century ago. You could call it a new Great Awakening.”
A possible Great Awakening certainly will not involve the NATOstan sphere anytime soon. The collective West is rather in serious Great Decoupling mode, its entire economy weaponized with the aim, expressed in the open, of destroying Russia and even – the perennial wet dream – provoking regime change.
Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the SVR, succinctly described it:
Arguably the apex of Western hysteria is the onset of a 2022 Neo-Nazi Jihad: a 20,000-strong mercenary army being assembled in Poland under CIA supervision. The bulk comes from private military companies such as Blackwater/Academi and DynCorp. Their cover: “return of Ukrainians from the French Foreign Legion.” This Afghan remix comes straight from the only playbook the CIA knows.
Back in reality, facts on the ground will eventually lead entire economies in the West to become roadkill – with chaos in the commodities sphere leading to skyrocketing energy and food costs. As an example, up to 60% of German and 70% of Italian manufacturing industries may be forced to shut down for good – with catastrophic social consequences.
The unelected, uber-Kafkaesque EU machine in Brussels has chosen to commit a triple hara-kiri by grandstanding as abject vassals of the Empire, destroying any remaining French and German sovereignty impulses and imposing alienation from Russia-China.
Meanwhile, Russia will be showing the way: only self-sufficiency affords total independence. And the Big Picture has also been keenly understood by the Global South: one day someone had to stand up and say, “That’s Enough”. With maximum raw power to back it up.
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Test Of Russia-Iran-India Trade Route Highlights Shifting Geopolitics
by Tyler Durden 14June2022 – 12:20 AM https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/test-russia-iran-india-trade-route-highlights-shifting-geopolitics
Forty-one tons of wood laminate sheeting is on its way from Russia to India. The cargo isn’t newsworthy, but the fact that it’s traveling through Iran absolutely is—potentially marking the opening of a significant new trade corridor that strengthens Iran’s relationship with India…with big geopolitical implications.
On Saturday, Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) announced that a pilot run for the new trade route was underway, with the wood laminate’s transit being managed by the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines Group. The shipping arrangement enables the use of one bill of lading for the entire journey, which reduces transport costs, red tape and wait times, reports IRNA.
Testing the ease of logistics, customs and other processes, two 40-foot shipping containers will first make their way from Saint Petersburg to the Caspian Sea. After arriving by ship at the northern Iranian port of Anzali, they’ll be trucked across Iran to the Persian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas, and then shipped to the Indian port of Nhava Sheva. The trip is expected to take 25 days, according to an Iranian official.
IRNA portrayed the pilot as a partial realization of the long-brewing International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC). That 22-year old initiative aspires to link the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf via Iran—connecting major ports and dramatically reducing transit times compared to alternative routes through the Suez Canal, Mediterranean Sea, Atlantic Ocean and North Sea.
Russia-Iran-India – International North-South Transport Corridor map
Initiated by India, Russia and Iran in 2000, the INSTC association now includes Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, Oman and Syria.
Iran’s INSTC aspirations include building a rail line from the Caspian Sea to the southeastern Iranian port of Chabahar. A far more ambitious vision calls for the construction of a canal directly linking the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf. Spanning 750 miles from north to south, the Caspian Sea is the world’s largest inland water body, covering an area larger than Japan.
The INSTC pilot comes on the heels of a friendly official visit to India by Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who was granted meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India’s national security advisor.
The Indian government’s official statement summarizing the visit said the countries “share close historical and civilizational ties. Our bilateral relations are marked by strong linkages across institutions, culture and people-to-people ties.” India lauded Iran for facilitating India’s medical assistance to Afghanistan, and the provision of Covid-19 vaccines to Afghan citizens living in Iran.
India also noted the value of Iran’s Persian Gulf port of Chabahar, which “has provided much needed sea-access to landlocked Afghanistan and has also emerged as a commercial transit hub for the region, including for Central Asia.”
At The Diplomat, Rajeev Agarwal argues that India-Iran ties are ripe for a reset:
Caving to U.S. pressure, India stopped buying Iranian oil in mid-2019. Before that, India was Iran’s second-biggest customer, behind China. With negotiations to resume the Iran nuclear deal at an impasse, Agarwal speculates that India’s calculations could change:
India is the world’s sixth-largest economy. If it were to opt out of the Iran sanctions regime, other countries might follow its lead.
Note that India has been building stronger economic links to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. In what could be a complementary development, Iran has been entertaining reconciliation with Saudi Arabia, via five rounds of talks hosted by Iraq.
In May, Saudi foreign minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud said, “We continue to encourage our neighbors in Iran to lean into what can be a very, very important sea change in our region…a new era of cooperation” could be beneficial to everyone.
All these developments point to the potential for a significant geopolitical shift, writes Argawal:
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India’s Largest Cement Maker “Circumventing The Dollar” In Russian-Coal-For-Yuan Deal
by Tyler Durden 29June2022 – 11:20 PM https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/indias-largest-cement-maker-circumventing-dollar-russian-coal-yuan-deal
The Russian economy is currently experiencing unprecedented pressure from a group of countries led by the United States, with more than 10,000 sanctions imposed on the country, its citizens, and companies.
Despite all the amplification of sanctions threats by the media, and vilification of anything Russian by western leaders, many of the world’s largest nations (by population and economy), are continuing to adjust to current conditions, ignoring the virtue-signaling, and sending Russia’s currency and current account balance soaring.
But, in yet another example of the far-less-unified-than-Biden-claims new world order, it appears Indian industrialists have no problem dealing with Putin for their key materials.
UltraTech Cement – India’s biggest cement producer
The latest example comes from India as Reuters reports that UltraTech Cement – India’s biggest cement producer – is importing a cargo of Russian coal and paying for it using Chinese Yuan.
UltraTech is bringing in 157,000 tonnes of coal from Russian producer SUEK that loaded on the bulk carrier MV Mangas from the Russian Far East port of Vanino, the document showed. It cites an invoice dated June 5 that values the cargo at 172,652,900 yuan ($25.81 million).
The increasing use of the yuan to settle payments could help insulate Moscow from the effects of western sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and bolster Beijing’s push to further internationalise the currency and chip away at the dominance of the U.S. dollar in global trade.
India has explored setting up a rupee payment mechanism for trade with Russia, but that has not materialized. Chinese businesses have used the yuan in trade settlements with Russia for years.
An Indian government official familiar with the matter said the government was aware of payments in yuan.
Finally, we are reminded of what First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) told The Financial Times earlier in the year: that the recent financial sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine are threatening to weaken the dominance of the U.S. Dollar as the world currency,
Russia had been planning for years to reduce its dependence on the petrodollar since the United States imposed sanctions in retaliation for its annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The current crisis in Ukraine has only accelerated those plans… and it now seems the entire BRICS group may be ready to cross the chasm as Bretton Woods III begins to form.
The implications, needless to say, are staggering (and, worse, while Zoltan Poszar does not explicitly state it, he clearly believes that world war is coming):
A BRICS-based payment system would be the ultimate challenge to the dollar-hegemon-based system in place today.
At a BRICS summit earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the bloc, consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, is currently working on setting up a new global reserve currency that would be based on the currency basket of the five nations. Earlier, the bloc said it was working on establishing a joint payment network to abate the reliance on the Western financial system.
BRICS 14th Summit-2022-06-29_Country Leaders
Even if this is nothing but talk, it underscores the fact that the dollar is on shaky ground. US policymakers would be wise to consider future dollar weaponization carefully.
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Escobar: Everybody Wants To Hop On The BRICS Express
by Tyler Durden 29October2022 – 07:00 AM https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/escobar-everybody-wants-hop-brics-express
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,
Eurasia is about to get a whole lot larger as countries line up to join the Chinese and Russian-led BRICS and SCO, to the detriment of the west…
Russia and Chinas BRICS and SCO lead the Global South
Let’s start with what is in fact a tale of Global South trade between two members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). At its heart is the already notorious Shahed-136 drone – or Geranium-2, in its Russian denomination: the AK-47 of postmodern aerial warfare.
The US, in yet another trademark hysteria fit rife with irony, accused Tehran of weaponizing the Russian Armed Forces. For both Tehran and Moscow, the superstar, value-for-money, and terribly efficient drone let loose in the Ukrainian battlefield is a state secret: its deployment prompted a flurry of denials from both sides. Whether these are made in Iran drones, or the design was bought and manufacturing takes place in Russia (the realistic option), is immaterial.
The record shows that the US weaponizes Ukraine to the hilt against Russia.
The Empire is a de facto war combatant via an array of “consultants,” advisers, trainers, mercenaries, heavy weapons, munitions, satellite intel, and electronic warfare. And yet imperial functionaries swear they are not part of the war. They are, once again, lying.
Welcome to yet another graphic instance of the “rules-based international order” at work. The Hegemon always decides which rules apply, and when. Anyone opposing it is an enemy of “freedom,” “democracy,” or whatever platitude du jour, and should be – what else – punished by arbitrary sanctions.
In the case of sanctioned-to-oblivion Iran, for decades now, the result has been predictably another round of sanctions. That’s irrelevant. What matters is that, according to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), no less than 22 nations – and counting – are joining the queue because they also want to get into the Shahed groove.
Even Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gleefully joined the fray, commenting on how the Shahed-136 is no photoshop.
The race towards BRICS+
What the new sanctions package against Iran really “accomplished” is to deliver an additional blow to the increasingly problematic signing of the revived nuclear deal in Vienna. More Iranian oil on the market would actually relieve Washington’s predicament after the recent epic snub by OPEC+.
A categorical imperative though remains. Iranophobia – just like Russophobia – always prevails for the Straussians/neo-con war advocates in charge of US foreign policy and their European vassals.
So here we have yet another hostile escalation in both Iran-US and Iran-EU relations, as the unelected junta in Brussels also sanctioned manufacturer Shahed Aviation Industries and three Iranian generals.
Now compare this with the fate of the Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drone – which unlike the “flowers in the sky” (Russia’s Geraniums) has performed miserably in the battlefield.
Kiev tried to convince the Turks to use a Motor Sich weapons factory in Ukraine or come up with a new company in Transcarpathia/Lviv to build Bayraktars. Motor Sich’s oligarch President Vyacheslav Boguslayev, aged 84, has been charged with treason because of his links to Russia, and may be exchanged for Ukrainian prisoners of war.
In the end, the deal fizzled out because of Ankara’s exceptional enthusiasm in working to establish a new gas hub in Turkey – a personal suggestion from Russian President Vladimir Putin to his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
And that bring us to the advancing interconnection between BRICS and the 9-member SCO – to which this Russia-Iran instance of military trade is inextricably linked.
The SCO, led by China and Russia, is a pan-Eurasian institution originally focused on counter-terrorism but now increasingly geared towards geoeconomic – and geopolitical – cooperation. BRICS, led by the triad of Russia, India, and China overlaps with the SCO agenda geoeconomically and geopoliticallly, expanding it to Africa, Latin America and beyond: that’s the concept of BRICS+, analyzed in detail in a recent Valdai Club report, and fully embraced by the Russia-China strategic partnership.
The report weighs the pros and cons of three scenarios involving possible, upcoming BRICS+ candidates:
And then there’s Iran, which has already already shown interest in joining BRICS.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has recently confirmed that “several countries” are absolutely dying to join BRICS. Among them, a crucial West Asia player: Saudi Arabia.
What makes it even more astonishing is that only three years ago, under former US President Donald Trump’s administration, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MbS) – the kingdom’s de fact ruler – was dead set on joining a sort of Arab NATO as a privileged imperial ally.
Diplomatic sources confirm that the day after the US pulled out of Afghanistan, MbS’s envoys started seriously negotiating with both Moscow and Beijing.
Assuming BRICS approves Riyadh’s candidacy in 2023 by the necessary consensus, one can barely imagine its earth-shattering consequences for the petrodollar. At the same time, it is important not to underestimate the capacity of US foreign policy controllers to wreak havoc.
The only reason Washington tolerates Riyadh’s regime is the petrodollar. The Saudis cannot be allowed to pursue an independent, truly sovereign foreign policy. If that happens, the geopolitical realignment will concern not only Saudi Arabia but the entire Persian Gulf.
Yet that’s increasingly likely after OPEC+ de facto chose the BRICS/SCO path led by Russia-China – in what can be interpreted as a “soft” preamble for the end of the petrodollar.
The Riyadh-Tehran-Ankara triad
Iran made known its interest to join BRICS even before Saudi Arabia. According to Persian Gulf diplomatic sources, they are already engaged in a somewhat secret channel via Iraq trying to get their act together. Turkey will soon follow – certainly on BRICS and possibly the SCO, where Ankara currently carries the status of extremely interested observer.
Now imagine this triad – Riyadh, Tehran, Ankara – closely joined with Russia, India, China (the actual core of the BRICS), and eventually in the SCO, where Iran is as yet the only West Asian nation to be inducted as a full member.
The strategic blow to the Empire will go off the charts. The discussions leading to BRICS+ are focusing on the challenging path towards a commodity-backed global currency capable of bypassing US dollar primacy.
Several interconnected steps point towards increasing symbiosis between BRICS+ and SCO. The latter’s members states have already agreed on a road map for gradually increasing trade in national currencies in mutual settlements.
The State Bank of India – the nation’s top lender – is opening special rupee accounts for Russia-related trade.
Russian natural gas to Turkey will be paid 25 percent in rubles and Turkish lira, complete with a 25 percent discount Erdogan personally asked of Putin.
Russian bank VTB has launched money transfers to China in yuan, bypassing SWIFT, while Sberbank has started lending out money in yuan. Russian energy behemoth Gazprom agreed with China that gas supply payments should shift to rubles and yuan, split evenly.
Iran and Russia are unifying their banking systems for trade in rubles/rial.
Egypt’s Central Bank is moving to establish an index for the pound – through a group of currencies plus gold – to move the national currency away from the US dollar.
And then there’s the TurkStream saga.
That gas hub gift
Ankara for years has been trying to position itself as a privileged East-West gas hub. After the sabotage of the Nord Streams, Putin has handed it on a plate by offering Turkey the possibility to increase Russian gas supplies to the EU via such a hub. The Turkish Energy Ministry stated that Ankara and Moscow have already reached an agreement in principle.
This will mean in practice Turkey controlling the gas flow to Europe not only from Russia but also Azerbaijan and a great deal of West Asia, perhaps even including Iran, as well as Libya in northeast Africa. LNG terminals in Egypt, Greece and Turkiye itself may complete the network.
Russian gas travels via the TurkStream and Blue Stream pipelines. The total capacity of Russian pipelines is 39 billion cubic meters a year.
Turkey and Russia proposed pipelines
Map of Russian gas route via Turkey
TurkStream was initially projected as a four-strand pipeline, with a nominal capacity of 63 million cubic meters a year. As it stands, only two strands – with a total capacity of 31,5 billion cubic meters – have been built.
So an extension in theory is more than feasible – with all the equipment made in Russia. The problem, once again, is laying the pipes. The necessary vessels belong to the Swiss Allseas Group – and Switzerland is part of the sanctions craze. In the Baltic Sea, Russian vessels were used to finish building Nord Stream 2. But for a TurkStream extension, they would need to operate much deeper in the ocean.
TurkStream would not be able to completely replace Nord Stream; it carries much smaller volumes. The upside for Russia is not being canceled from the EU market. Evidently Gazprom would only tackle the substantial investment on an extension if there are ironclad guarantees about its security. And there’s the additional drawback that the extension would also carry gas from Russia’s competitors.
Whatever happens, the fact remains that the US-UK combo still exerts a lot of influence in Turkey – and BP, Exxon Mobil, and Shell, for instance, are actors in virtually every oil extraction project across West Asia. So they would certainly interfere on the way the Turkish gas hub functions, as well on determining the gas price. Moscow has to weigh all these variables before committing to such a project.
NATO, of course, will be livid. But never underestimate hedging bet specialist Sultan Erdogan. His love story with both the BRICS and the SCO is just beginning.
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Breaking China: A rupture looms between Israel and the United States
For years, Israel has been working to dramatically expand trade with China. Now, that push is running up against strong opposition from the White House.
By RON KAMPEAS/JTA
Published: 3JUNE2020 https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/breaking-china-a-rupture-looms-between-israel-and-the-united-states-630101
PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands ahead of their talks in China in March 2017 (photo credit: ETIENNE OLIVEAU/POOL/REUTERS)
Israel’s announcement last week that an Israeli consortium would build Sorek 2, the world’s largest desalination plant, surprised many who had been watching the deal: The contract had been expected to go to a Hong Kong-based company.
But that was before the Trump administration ramped up pressure on Israel to diminish its ties to China.
For years, Israel has been working to dramatically expand trade with China, one of the world’s largest markets. That push is suddenly running up against strong opposition from the White House, as the Trump administration pivots from the decades-old policy of increasing US engagement with China to treating the country as an increasingly bitter rival.
The Sorek 2 deal was widely seen as a bow to pressure from the Trump administration, which is pushing Israel and other key allies to curtail trade with China. But observers of this deepening dynamic say it may not be enough to head off a US-Israel crisis over China.
A Chinese company, SIPG, is building a major port in Haifa and will control it for 25 years. The Trump administration, according to multiple insiders, wants Israel to roll back at least part of that deal. The Israelis consider it a done deal, even if they may have regrets over it.
“It’s a bit of a shock to the system,” Jonathan Schanzer, the vice president of a think tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, that has close ties with the Trump administration and with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said of the looming crisis. “We had been hearing from the administration officials and even some Israeli diplomats about some of the complications arising from the intensification of the great power competition between the U.S. and China.”
In mid-May, the Trump administration unveiled a 16-page revised approach for relating to China amid American fury with the Chinese for obfuscating the origins of the coronavirus and failing to contain the pandemic. The US has not publicly spelled out potential consequences for countries that do not go along with its anti-China push.
But those with ties to both the Israeli and US government said there is a real risk of diminished security cooperation if Israel does not accede to American pressure to stringently review any commercial deals with China and nix those that might impinge on Israeli and US security interests.
Doug Feith, a top Pentagon official under President George W. Bush who helped resolve the last US-Israel crisis over China — over Israel’s weapons sales to China in the mid-2000s — said the Trump administration was poised to act unless Israel took steps to alleviate US concerns.
Feith pointed to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s brief trip to Israel in mid-May — only his second visit abroad since the coronavirus pandemic shut down the United States — to make sure Jerusalem got the message. During his one-day visit, Pompeo openly accused China of “obfuscating” and “hiding” information related to the pandemic. (China’s ambassador to Israel responded by calling the accusations “absurd,” saying China “has never covered up the outbreak.” He died of an apparent heart attack in his apartment in Israel less than a week later.)
Pompeo had warned Israel earlier in the month “that further Israeli economic linkage with China will hurt relations with the US,” Feith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, wrote in a May 15 Wall Street Journal op-ed.
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Feith said he learned of Pompeo’s warning from Israeli and American officials. (Requests for comment from the State Department and from Israel’s embassy here were not returned.)
Israel is not alone, Feith said, noting similar recent warnings issued by Trump administration officials to Britain and Australia.
“What the government is saying is that it applies to Israel in the same way that it would apply to other countries, including very close friends,” he said.
Those warnings could rupture the close relationship between President Donald Trump and Netanyahu, who have been joined at the hip on policy and politics, ranging from Israel’s claims to territories won in the 1967 Six-Day War, to heightening confrontation with Iran, to disdain for the Democratic Party’s left wing.
“This administration likely feels particularly empowered to have tachlis discussions with Israel about limitations since it [rightly] views itself as having provided Netanyahu and the last government with wall-to-wall support,” said Scott Lasensky, a visiting professor at the University of Maryland and an adviser on Israel policy to the Obama administration.
A resolution to the crisis could sink in Haifa’s port
The biggest deal Israel has signed with a Chinese company was in December: The Shanghai International Port Group, or SIPG, is to build and operate a port in Haifa for 25 years. The agreement followed years of negotiations.
The Trump administration wants controls in place to limit Chinese malfeasance, if not a complete abrogation of the deal. Breaking the contract is unlikely, as Israel does not want to risk alienating its trade relationship with China. Those ties, according to an analysis last year by the Rand Corp., a think tank that advises the Pentagon, was worth $8 billion in Chinese exports to Israel and $3 billion in Israeli exports to China in 2016.
Netanyahu has made his cultivation of ties with China a feather in his cap, and China has already warned Israel against acquiescing to “US bullying.”
SIPG’s control of the port allows the Chinese intelligence-gathering proximity to Israeli naval bases, and to information that flows from the port, as well as the ability to frustrate access in an emergency.
“Ports are high-tech,” Gary Roughead, a retired U.S. Navy admiral who last year co-authored with Feith a Hudson Institute report on US-Israel cooperation in the eastern Mediterranean, said in an interview. Port operators “have control systems and the data that goes with it.”
Roughead said that could give China eyes into Israeli-US communications and, more broadly, into Israel’s military, which would raise concerns for its allies.
“It would be important to know, do [Israel’s] security services have access to the port to monitor for the capabilities that are focused on your naval base, is that allowed, or does Shanghai say, ‘No, you can’t sweep the port, or peer into the types of activity or intercept the communications,’” he said.
Other concerns Roughead noted: US military vessels that stop in Haifa for servicing and whether China would be able to intervene in U.S. assistance to Israel during a military crisis.
Feith said that Israeli officials have endeavored to reassure Americans that they have checks in place at the port, but the Americans remain wary.
Shaul Chorev, a retired rear admiral in the Israeli Navy and a co-author with Feith and Roughead of the Hudson Institute report, said the port deal was a mistake on national security grounds, but Israel was not about to substantially retreat.
“If Israel goes to China and says let’s roll back, we will lose face, we will lose our economic relations,” said Chorev, who directs the Haifa Research Center for Maritime Policy and Strategy.
The crisis has come on suddenly
Until around 2018, few in Israel or the United States saw this crisis coming. Dealing with China, with its deep pockets and resources, had been a no-brainer across the planet for years. Its Belt and Road initiative, bringing infrastructure on the cheap to developing countries, is transforming Africa.
But then some critics began to claim that Chinese information technology companies were allowing China’s government to spy on countries that use their cellular technology. And Beijing also began facing claims that it was using Belt and Road to squeeze diplomatic concessions from participating countries. In 2018, Trump administration officials began to aggressively warn allies against deals with China. Lawmakers from both parties have issued similar warnings.
Those concerns were simply not on anyone’s radar in 2015, said Daniel Shapiro, then the US ambassador to Israel. Yisrael Katz, then Israel’s transportation minister, approached Shapiro seeking US contractors to redo Haifa’s port. That never eventuated, in part because the project was seen as too small by US contractors, so Israel turned to the Shanghai International Port Group.
“They went ahead with their process, they signed a deal with the firm,” Shapiro said. “No one in the US government — not in the Navy, not in the Defense Department — called me and said ‘Hey, we have a problem.’”
A renewed process to vet Israel’s international deals
Last year, Israel launched a foreign investment review board at the behest of John Bolton, then Trump’s national security adviser and one of Israel’s closest-ever friends in US government. The goal of the board is to ensure that agreements are vetted with national security concerns in mind — and avoid a situation like the Haifa port deal, where negotiations took place for several years, yet parts of Israel’s security establishment were caught off-guard by the agreement.
The review board is seen as feckless and ineffectual, in part because it was formed under Israel’s interim government and lacked a mandate. Now that Netanyahu has set up a government, the Americans expect him to strengthen the mechanism.
“The first thing that Israel should do for its own sake, even if America and China were not on this collision path, is to have a real foreign investment screening mechanism,” said Shira Efron, a visiting fellow at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies who co-authored the 2019 Rand report.
Efron said the mechanism should be legislated — the committee last year was a Cabinet decision — which would give it the power to compel compliance. Its scope should be extended to the technological sector, she said, and it should be an independent entity.
The Israeli government should make clear that strengthening the mechanism is in Israel’s interest and not at the behest of the United States, Efron added.
“If it’s in response to US pressure, it’s insulting to China,” she said.
It’s not about 5G
Trump administration officials have formally warned Britain and Australia that allowing Huawei, the Chinese communications giant, to help establish 5G communications networks in their countries would adversely affect intelligence sharing. The US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network.
Democrats and Republicans alike see Chinese communications companies as arms of China’s intelligence network.
There were concerns last year that Israel was considering similar contracts, but Israel has put them to rest, said a March report by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies.
“In view of the absence of Chinese technology from previous generations of communications infrastructure in Israel, and despite the lack of clear official announcements by the Israeli government on the matter, the likelihood of its 5G infrastructure being built with Chinese technology is low to nonexistent,” the report said.
But there’s a lot more to talk about
China has been building infrastructure in Israel since at least 2007, when the China Civil Engineering Construction Corp. brought in 300 workers to build the tunnel system linking the southern entrance to Haifa with the suburbs to the city’s north. That success has led to a thirst for Chinese construction, and there was talk of China building new rail links in Israel. China’s Bright Food Group owns a controlling stake in Tnuva, Israel’s preeminent dairy.
Decoupling from China won’t be easy. And China appears prepared to place its own pressure on Israel.
After Pompeo’s visit last month, the Chinese embassy’s spokesman declared that his country trusted that its “Jewish friends are not only able to defeat the coronavirus but also the ‘political virus,’ and choose the course of action that best serves their interests.”
Still, Israel’s willingness last week to cut China out of the Sorek 2 desalination deal shows it is ready to roll back engagement on some fronts.
The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies released a paper last month outlining how to avert a deeper crisis. Its recommendation: “The United States should work with Israel and other allies to facilitate alternatives to help Israel pivot away from China.
“Other Indo-Pacific countries, such as Japan, Canada, India, Australia, South Korea, and Taiwan, already invest in Israel and may be eager to increase their engagement to replace Chinese investment,” the paper said.
There are other spheres in which Israel will be under US pressure to apply greater scrutiny, including Chinese investment in Israel’s high-tech sector, said Vance Serchuk, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and once a foreign policy adviser to former US Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.
“In many cases on the surface, the companies that are working in these areas are not primarily focused on military applications, but the capabilities themselves have the potential to be leveraged for strategic impact,” Serchuk said. “Both Israelis and Americans agree that Israeli capabilities should never be leveraged or weaponized against the United States, but figuring out exactly what that means is very tricky.”
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The Sultan 2.0 will heavily tilt east
It’s not that Erdogan has a scheme to head east at the west’s expense. It’s just that the world’s grandest infrastructure, development, and geopolitical projects are all in the east today.
By Pepe Escobar
31May2023 https://thecradle.co/article-view/25429/the-sultan-20-will-heavily-tilt-east
Pepe Escobar on Erdogan and the Turkish elections Photo Credit: The Cradle
The collective west was dying to bury him – yet another strategic mistake that did not take into account the mood of Turkish voters in deep Anatolia.
In the end, Recep Tayyip Erdogan did it – again. Against all his shortcomings, like an aging neo-Ottoman Sinatra, he did it “my way,” comfortably retaining Turkiye’s presidency after naysayers had all but buried him.
The first order of geopolitical priority is who will be named Minister of Foreign Affairs. The prime candidate is Ibrahim Kalin – the current all-powerful Erdogan press secretary cum top adviser.
Compared to incumbent Cavusoglu, Kalin, in theory, may be qualified as more pro-west. Yet it’s the Sultan who calls the shots. It will be fascinating to watch how Turkiye under Erdogan 2.0 will navigate the strengthening of ties with West Asia and the accelerating process of Eurasia integration.
The first immediate priority, from Erdogan’s point of view, is to get rid of the “terrorist corridor” in Syria. This means, in practice, reigning in the US-backed Kurdish YPG/PYD, who are effectively Syrian affiliates of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – which is also the issue at the heart of a possible normalization of relations with Damascus.
Now that Syria has been enthusiastically welcomed back to the Arab League after a 12-year freeze, a Moscow-brokered entente between the Turkish and Syrian presidents, already in progress, may represent the ultimate win-win for Erdogan: allowing control of Kurds in north Syria while facilitating the repatriation of roughly 4 million refugees (tens of thousands will stay, as a source of cheap labor).
The Sultan is at his prime when it comes to hedging his bets between east and west. He knows well how to profit from Turkiye’s status as a key NATO member – complete with one of its largest armies, veto power, and control of the entry to the uber-strategic Black Sea.
And all that while exercising real foreign policy independence, from West Asia to the Eastern Mediterranean.
So expect Erdogan 2.0 to remain an inextinguishable source of irritation for the neocons and neoliberals in charge of US foreign policy, along with their EU vassals, who will never refrain from trying to subdue Ankara to fight the Russia-China-Iran Eurasia integration entente. The Sultan, though, knows how to play this game beautifully.
How to manage Russia and China
Whatever happens next, Erdogan will not hop on board the sanctions-against-Russia sinking ship. The Kremlin bought Turkish bonds tied to the development of the Russian-built Akkuyu nuclear power plant, Turkiye’s first nuclear reactor. Moscow allowed Ankara to postpone nearly $4 billion in energy payments until 2024. Best of all, Ankara pays for Russian gas in rubles.
So an array of deals related to the supply of Russian energy trump possible secondary sanctions that might target the steady rise in Turkiye’s exports. Still, it’s a given the US will revert to its one and only “diplomatic” policy – sanctions. The 2018 sanctions did push Turkiye into recession after all.
But Erdogan can easily count on popular support across the Turkish realm. Early this year, a Gezici poll revealed that 72.8 percent of Turkish citizens privilege good relations with Russia while nearly 90 percent rate the US as a “hostile” nation. That’s what allows Interior Minister Soylu to remark, bluntly, “we will wipe out whoever is causing trouble, including American troops.”
China-Turkiye strategic cooperation falls under what Erdogan defines as “turning to the East” – and is mostly about China’s multi-continent infrastructure behemoth, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The Turk Silk Road branch of the BRI focuses on what Beijing defines as the “Middle Corridor,” a prime cost-effective/secure trade route that connects Asia to Europe.
The driver is the China Railway Express, which turned the Middle Corridor arguably into BRI’s backbone. For instance, electronics parts and an array of household items routinely arriving via cargo planes from Osaka, Japan are loaded onto freight trains going to Duisburg and Hamburg in Germany, via the China Railway Express departing from Shenzhen, Wuhan, and Changsha – and crossing from Xinjiang to Kazakhstan and beyond via the Alataw Pass. Shipments from Chongqing to Germany take a maximum of 13 days.
It’s no wonder that nearly 10 years ago, when he first unveiled his ambitious, multi-trillion dollar BRI in Astana, Kazakhstan, Chinese President Xi Jinping placed the China Railway Express as a core BRI component.
Direct freight trains from Xian to Istanbul are plying the route since December 2020, using the Baku-Tblisi-Kars (BTK) railway with less than two weeks travel time – and plans afoot to increase their frequency. Beijing is well aware of Turkiye’s asset as a transportation hub and crossroads for markets in the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, West Asia, and North Africa, not to mention a customs union with the EU that allows direct access to European markets.
Moreover, Baku’s victory in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war came with a ceasefire deal bonus: the Zangezur corridor, which will eventually facilitate Turkiye’s direct access to neighbors from the Caucasus to Central Asia.
A pan-Turkic offensive?
And here we enter a fascinating territory: the possible incoming interpolations between the Organization of Turkic States (OTS), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the BRICS+ – and all that also linked to a boost in Saudi and Emirati investments in the Turkish economy.
Sultan 2.0 wants to become a full member of both the Chinese-led SCO and multipolar BRICS+. This means a much closer entente with the Russia-China strategic partnership as well as with the Arab powerhouses, which are also hopping on the BRICS+ high-speed train.
Erdogan 2.0 is already focusing on two key players in Central Asia and South Asia: Uzbekistan and Pakistan. Both happen to be SCO members.
Ankara and Islamabad are very much in sync. They express the same judgment on the extremely delicate Kashmir question, and both backed Azerbaijan against Armenia.
But the key developments may lie in Central Asia. Ankara and Tashkent have a strategic defense agreement – including intel sharing and logistics cooperation.
The Organization of Turkic States (OTS), with a HQ in Istanbul, is the prime energizer of pan-Turkism or pan-Turanism. Turkiye, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan are full members, with Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Hungary, and Ukraine cultivated as observers. The Turk-Azeri relationship is billed as “one nation, two states” in pan-Turkic terms.
The basic idea is a still hazy “cooperation platform” between Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. Yet some serious proposals have already been floated. The OTS summit in Samarkand late last year advanced the idea of a TURANCEZ free trade bloc, comprising Turkiye, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and as observers, Hungary (representing the EU) and Northern Cyprus.
Meanwhile, hard business prevails. To fully profit from the status of the energy transit hub, Turkiye needs not only Russian gas but also gas from Turkmenistan feeding the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) as well as Kazakh oil coming via the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline.
The Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) is heavy on economic cooperation, active in a series of projects in transportation, construction, mining, and oil and gas. Ankara has already invested a whopping $85 billion across Central Asia, with nearly 4,000 companies scattered across all the “stans.”
Of course, when compared to Russia and China, Turkiye is not a major player in Central Asia. Moreover, the bridge to Central Asia goes via Iran. So far, rivalry between Ankara and Tehran seems to be the norm, but everything may change, lightning fast, with the simultaneous development of the Russia-Iran-India-led International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), which will profit both – and the fact that the Iranians and Turks may soon become full BRICS+ members.
Sultan 2.0 is bound to boost investment in Central Asia as a new geoeconomic frontier. That in itself encapsulates the possibility of Turkiye soon joining the SCO.
We will then have a “turning to the East” in full effect, in parallel to closer ties with the Russia-China strategic partnership. Take note that Turkiye’s ties with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan are also strategic partnerships.
Not bad for a neo-Ottoman who, until a few days ago, was dismissed as a has-been.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
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Failures Of An Economic Hitman In Turkey: Erdogan Re-elected
by Tyler Durden, 04June2023 – https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/failures-economic-hitman-turkey-erdogan-re-elected
Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,
President Erdogan’s re-election in Turkey is a monumental failure of Western pressure. Because of it, it’s time to take our eyes off Ukraine and look at a different theater of World War III with equal if not bigger implications.
Turkey is another in a now long string of failed Economic Hitman operations cum Color Revolutions. The last big one to fail was in Belarus in 2020 following the re-election of Alexander Lukashenko.
Turkey has been the subject of a seven-year campaign to be rid of Erdogan, beginning with the 2016 coup attempt organized out of the NATO airbase at Incerlik. Turkey’s been through a persistent five-year brutal devaluation of its currency, the lira, seeing it drop from less than 2 versus the US dollar to nearly 21 this week in the wake of Erdogan’s victory.
I’ve covered this story in detail (see my Turkey archives here) being one of the lone voices out there trying to parse Erdogan’s monetary policy actions which I’ve argued sought to de-dollarize Turkey’s foreign exchange liabilities and forge an independent path.
Erdogan, wily as a fox, has been deftly playing the US and Russia/China off each other for years, positioning Turkey simultaneously as a member of NATO, the gatekeeper to the Black Sea, and the financial and trade crossroads linking East and West.
The West’s campaign to overthrow President Assad in Syria beginning in 2011 couldn’t have gone forward without Erdogan’s help. He went along with it very willingly having been promised Turkey claiming Idlib province in the West and taking most of the north. Vladimir Putin accepting Assad’s invitation for assistance in fighting ISIS and Erdogan’s pets in Idlib (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham or HTS) began the unraveling of those plans.
Turkey shooting down a Russian SU-31 in November 2015 was supposed to push Putin to war against Turkey, giving NATO every reason to engage the Russians directly. But Putin and Erdogan came to an understanding over this incident, implying that it wasn’t on Erdogan’s orders the Russian plane was shot down, but rather the usual suspects at Foggy Bottom, Langley, GCHQ in London who did.
If you wonder why I’m never worried by the latest lame attempt to draw Russia into a wider conflict in Ukraine by events like the Nordstream or Kerch Strait bridge bombings it was Putin’s handling of this moment with Erdogan and then later the shooting down of the Russian IL-20 ELINT plane over Syria by someone who definitely wasn’t Syria, who took the blame to avert WWIII.
These were moments where Russia and NATO were being pressed into conflict and Putin refused to follow the ready-made Tom Clancy script prepared for him by the spooks who never seem to run out of at-bats no matter how many times they strike out.
It is against this background that we have to analyze the complete failure that is the West’s campaign to unseat Erdogan and his AKP party from power in Turkey.
The ZIRP years in the West coincided with the big degradation of Turkey’s finances as Erdogan invited Western investment into the country to support his territorial ambitions. But, Erdogan, as pointed out by Baris Doster of Marmara University noted:
I agree. In effect, Erdogan’s pragmatism led him to nearly every move he’s made over the past decade, going along with NATO when they were on the offensive, but quickly pivoting and cutting bait on a policy the minute they were put on the defensive, c.f. my above comments about Syria.
In fact, it’s easy to argue that Erdogan’s breaking point with the West over Syria is what has dominated geopolitical headlines for the past seven years. He relishes the role as the guy with the leverage over all NATO policy in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, whose access he controls thanks to the 1936 Treaty of Montreaux.
He’s still holding Sweden’s entry hostage, something I get the feeling the new government in Stockholm prefers.
With his re-election and Turkey’s finances improving Turkey’s importance will only grow. He will not leave NATO willingly, instead using his veto power to slow the roll of the neocons, Eurocrats, and globalists who have betrayed not only him but Turkey. For all of his aspirations, Erdogan is a Turkish nationalist through and through.
He will now throw more sand in the gearworks of NATO’s plans for wider conflict in the region from Ukraine to Iran and Armenia until the West kicks Turkey out or someone assassinates him.
All the while he will continue to invite Russian, Iranian and Chinese money into Turkey with the goal of lowering its dependence on foreign energy trades settled in the dollar.
The Turkish people have given him another five years to complete this transition away from the West to an independent trade hub. If the West is smart they will not antagonize him further.
I was asked by Sputnik News for my thoughts earlier this week on these issues directly. You can find my comments in these two articles (here and here). As always, I am publishing the full Q&A below the break in the interests of transparency and to ensure that the context of my comments haven’t been lost.
In the run-up to election day on 28 May, the Turkish lira came under unprecedented pressure from major financial giants. For example, analysts of Western banks JPMorgan Chase and HSBC Holdings began to spread information about the inevitable weakening of the lira to levels of 24-25 lire per dollar. We also saw many other Western financial investors short selling the Turkish lira.
Here are the questions we were thinking about:
Why do you think that Western financial giants have taken these moves against the lira in recent days? Could this be an effort to influence the Turkish election?
Yes, absolutely. The US has made no bones about their unhappiness with the way President Erdogan has conducted foreign policy in recent years. I’ve felt and published previously that the lira has been under consistent foreign actor attack since the summer of 2018, when this issue first reared its ugly head.
Back then only the admission that Italian and French banks had loaded up on dollar-denominated Turkish corporate debt, putting their balance sheets at risk ended that round of pressure. Erdogan, for his part, saw the situation for what it was and took control over the central bank to wrest control of monetary policy from the IMF.
There was little option and the lira was destined for this hyper-devaluation versus the dollar. Turkey’s net foreign exchange liability position, which in 2018 was over $240 billion, was its Achilles heel.
Today that number is down to ~$80 billion, according to recent Bank of Turkey data. So, while the situation is improving, it is still the vector on which Erdogan is most vulnerable. To fix this Erdogan has rightly invited Chinese and Russian capital into Turkey and cut major energy deals with Putin to mitigate their chronic current account and trade deficits as a major energy importer.
So, yes, financial and monetary instability, crushing hyperinflation of the lira, and questionable geopolitical interventions have undermined Erdogan’s popular support putting him in today’s runoff election.
The recent notes from US banks are simply pushing the situation to the extreme. Turkey has few options but to continue to de-dollarize.
Who do you think the Biden admin and Western financial giants prefer in this election? Why?
Clearly not Erdogan. They have put considerable support behind his opponent Kemal Kilicdaroglu, cobbling together a Not-Erdogan “Table of Six” coalition which is the only thing they agree on. It is reminiscent of last year’s Not-Orban coalition in Hungary.
The results there were far more embarrassing for the EU/US neoliberals because Orban wasn’t dealing with the chronic currency issues plaguing Erdogan. That said, Erdogan’s victory wasn’t really in doubt after the general election which he nearly won outright.
Biden and Europe want a Turkey loyal to NATO and their program to maximally confront the Russia/China/Iran axis. Erdogan has been a thorn in that program since late 2015 and Russia’s intervention in Syria laid bare both his and NATO’s complicity in balkanizing it.
He has played both sides against each other to forge an independent path for Turkey. Many of his moves have been questionable but viewed through that lens the pattern of his behavior is quite clear. His attempts to forge a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia last year was likely the last straw for the West.
Turkey is the lynchpin to the Eastern Mediterranean and continued US presence in the Middle East. Despite the economic troubles of Turkey, he was able to communicate them as continued US anti-Arab behavior. From here, with him in power for another four years (and likely the last four), he has a big task in front of him to stabilize Turkey’s finances. He’s already made the case successfully that NATO turned its back on Turkey, now he’s going to have to turn that into a definitive policy.
Erdogan’s unorthodox monetary policy has been the topic of extensive discussion among Western economists. What is your assessment of it?
I’ve written about this in detail in the past here. Erdogan’s ‘unconventional’ monetary policy was the basis for his exit strategy from the West for Turkey. Erdogan challenged conventional IMF policy of raising interest rates to attract foreign investors.
Why would you want to attract the same people who previously pulled their money out of your country, destabilizing it. Foreign capital inflow under this model is just blackmail, leaving the government dependent on foreign largesse.
If they don’t like your policies, they pull their money out, crash the currency and hope to effect political reform more to their liking. What Erdogan did at the end of 2021 when the lira hit a peak of 18.2 versus the dollar was to use Turkey’s relatively clean balance sheet (less than 40% debt-to-GDP) to encourage Turks to save and invest in lira (which I went into detail in the article linked above) while encouraging Russian and Chinese investment in Turkish sovereign debt and infrastructure/trade projects.
Those have been excellent investments for those investors. In November 2021, Turkish 10-year debt was yielding more than 23%. Today that number is 9.2%. The lira depreciated from an average of 15 to today’s 20 versus the dollar. Even accounting for the exchange rate losses, these have been excellent returns. Remember bond prices rise as yield falls.
Now, with his re-election, Erdogan and Turkey are on the other side of political risk of new leadership changing the course. Turkey isn’t out of the woods yet, but the economic data is improving, in some areas like Manufacturing Confidence (108) and Capacity Utilization (75.4%) quite rapidly.
Political stability is what is needed now. Militaristic adventurism isn’t. Erdogan has been given another four years to complete the turnaround and reimagining of the Turkish economy.
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5 Reasons Why Much Of The Global South Isn’t Automatically Supporting The West In Ukraine
by Tyler Durden, 27February2023 – https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/5-reasons-why-much-global-south-isnt-automatically-supporting-west-ukraine
Authored by Krishen Mehta via EurAsiaReview.com,
In October 2022, about eight months after the war in Ukraine started, the University of Cambridge in the UK harmonized surveys conducted in 137 countries about their attitudes towards the West and towards Russia and China.
The findings in the study, while not free of a margin of error, are robust enough to take seriously.
These are:
Sentiments of this nature have caused some ire, surprise, and even anger in the West. It is difficult for them to believe that two-thirds of the world’s population is not siding with the West.
What are some of the reasons or causes for this?
global chess
I believe there are five reasons as explained in this brief essay.
1. The Global South does not believe that the West understands or empathizes with their problems.
India’s foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, summed it up succinctly in a recent interview: “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.” He is referring to the many challenges that developing countries face whether they relate to the aftermath of the pandemic, the high cost of debt service, the climate crisis that is ravaging their lives, the pain of poverty, food shortages, droughts, and high energy prices. The West has barely given lip service to the Global South on many of these problems. Yet the West is insisting that the Global South join it in sanctioning Russia.
The Covid pandemic is a perfect example—despite the Global South’s repeated pleas to share intellectual property on the vaccines, with the goal of saving lives, no Western nation was willing to do so. Africa remains to this day the most unvaccinated continent in the world. Africa had the capability to make the vaccines but without the intellectual property they could not do it.
But help did come from Russia, China, and India. Algeria launched a vaccination program in January 2021 after it received its first batch of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccines. Egypt started vaccinations after it got China’s Sinopharm vaccine at about the same time. South Africa procured a million doses of AstraZeneca from the Serum Institute of India. In Argentina, Sputnik became the backbone of their vaccine program. All of this was happening while the West was using its financial resources to buy millions of doses in advance, and often destroying them when they became outdated. The message to the Global South was clear—your problems are your problems, they are not our problems.
2. History Matters: Who stood where during colonialism and after independence?
Many countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia view the war in Ukraine through a different lens than the West. Many of them see their former colonial powers regrouped as members of the Western alliance. The countries that have sanctioned Russia are either members of the European Union and NATO or the closest allies of the United States in the Asia Pacific region. By contrast, many countries in Asia, and almost all countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America have tried to remain on good terms with both Russia and the West, and to shun sanctions against Russia. Could it be because they remember their history at the receiving end of the West’s colonial policies, a trauma that they still live with but which the West has mostly forgotten.
Nelson Mandela often said that it was the Soviet Union’s support, both moral and material, that helped inspire Southern Africans to overthrow the Apartheid regime. It is because of this that Russia is still viewed in a favorable light by many African countries. And once Independence came for these countries, it was the Soviet Union that supported them even though it had limited resources itself. The Aswan Dam in Egypt which took 11 years to build, from 1960 to 1971, was designed by the Moscow based Hydro project Institute and financed in large part by the Soviet Union. The Bhilai Steel Plant in India, one of the first large infrastructure projects in a newly independent India, was set up by the USSR in 1959. Other countries also benefited from the support provided by the former Soviet Union, both political and economic, including Ghana, Mali, Sudan, Angola, Benin, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Mozambique.
On February 18, 2023, at the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the foreign minister of Uganda, Jeje Odongo, had this to say, “We were colonized and forgave those who colonized us. Now the colonizers are asking us to be enemies of Russia, who never colonized us. Is that fair? Not for us. Their enemies are their enemies. Our friends are our friends.”
Rightly or wrongly, present day Russia is seen by many countries in the Global South as an ideological successor to the former Soviet Union. These countries have a long memory that makes them view Russia in a somewhat different light. Given the history, can we blame them?
3. The war in Ukraine is seen by the Global South as mainly about the future of Europe rather than the future of the entire world.
The history of the Cold War has taught developing countries that getting embroiled in great power conflicts generates few benefits for them yet carries enormous risks. And they view the Ukraine proxy war as one that is more about the future of European security than the future of the entire world. Furthermore, the war is seen by the Global South as an expensive distraction from the most pressing issues that they are dealing with. These include higher fuel prices, food prices, higher debt service costs, and more inflation, all of which have become more aggravated because of the Western sanctions that have been imposed on Russia.
A recent survey published by Nature Energy states that up to 140 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty due to the higher energy prices that have come about over the past year.
Soaring energy prices not only directly impact energy bills, but they also lead to upward price pressures on all supply chains and consumer items, including food and other necessities. This hurts the developing countries even more than it hurts the West.
The West can sustain the war “as long as it takes” since they have the financial resources and the capital markets to do so. But the Global South does not have the same luxury. A war for the future of European security has the potential of devastating the security of the entire world.
The Global South is also alarmed that the West is not pursuing negotiations that could bring this war to an early end. There were missed opportunities in December 2021 when Russia proposed revised security treaties for Europe that could have prevented the war and which were rejected by the West. The peace negotiations of April 2022 in Istanbul were also rejected by the West in part to “weaken” Russia. And now the entire world is paying the price for an invasion that the Western media like to call “unprovoked” and which could have been avoided.
4. The world economy is no longer American dominated or Western led and the Global South does have other options.
Several countries in the Global South increasingly see their future tied to countries that are no longer in the Western sphere of influence. Whether this is their perception of how the power balance is shifting away from the West, or wishful thinking as part of their colonial legacy, let us look at some metrics that may be relevant.
The U.S. share of global output declined from 21 percent in 1991 to 15 percent in 2021, while China’s share rose from 4 percent to 19 percent during the same period. China is the largest trading partner for most of the world, and its GDP in purchasing power parity already exceeds that of the United States. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa) had a combined GDP in 2021 of $42 trillion compared with $41 trillion in the G7. Their population of 3.2 billion is more than 4.5 times the combined population of the G7 countries, at 700 million.
The BRICS are not imposing sanctions on Russia nor supplying arms to the opposing side. While Russia is the biggest supplier of energy and foodgrains for the Global South, China remains the biggest supplier of financing and infrastructure projects to them through the Belt and Road Initiative. And now Russia and China are closer than ever before because of the war. What does it all mean for developing countries?
It means that when it comes to financing, food, energy, and infrastructure, the Global South must rely more on China and Russia more than on the West. The Global South is also seeing the Shanghai Cooperation Organization expanding, more countries wanting to join the BRICS, and many countries now trading in currencies that move them away from the dollar, the Euro, or the West. They also see a deindustrialization taking place in some countries in Europe because of higher energy costs, along with higher inflation. This makes quite apparent an economic vulnerability in the West that was not so evident before the war. With developing countries having an obligation to put the interests of their own citizens first, is it any wonder that they see their future tied more to countries that are not Western led or American dominated?
5. The “rule based international order” is lacking in credibility and is in decline.
The “rule based international order” is a concept that is seen by many countries in the Global South as one that has been conceived by the West and imposed unilaterally on other countries. Few if any non-Western countries ever signed on to this order. The South is not opposed to a rule-based order, but rather to the present content of these rules as conceived by the West.
But one must also ask, does the rule based international order apply even to the West?
For decades now, for many in the Global South, the West is seen to have had its way with the world without regard to anyone else’s views. Several countries were invaded at will, mostly without Security Council authorization. These include the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. Under what “rules” were those countries attacked or devastated, and were those wars provoked or unprovoked? Julian Assange is languishing in prison, and Ed Snowden is in exile, for having the courage (or perhaps the audacity) to expose the truths behind these actions.
Sanctions imposed on over 40 countries by the West impose considerable hardship and suffering. Under what international law or “rules-based order” did the West use its economic strength to impose these sanctions? Why are the assets of Afghanistan still frozen in Western banks while the country is facing starvation and famine? Why is Venezuelan gold still held hostage in the UK while the people of Venezuela are living at subsistence levels? And if Sy Hersh’s expose is true, under what “rules-based order” did the West destroy the Nord Stream pipelines?
There appears to be a paradigm shift that is taking place away from a Western dominated world and into a more multipolar world. And the war in Ukraine has made more evident those differences or chasms that are part of this paradigm shift. Partly because of its own history, and partly because of the economic realities that are emerging, the Global South sees a multipolar world as a preferable outcome in which their voices are more likely to be heard.
President Kennedy ended his American University speech in 1963 with the following words: “We must do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless for its success. Confident and unafraid, we must labor on towards a strategy of peace.”
That strategy of peace was the challenge before us in 1963 and they remain a challenge for us today. And the voices for peace, including those of the Global South, need to be heard.
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