News round-up from the war zones

 

 

• The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded on April 4th, 1949. NATO was originally formed as  military vehicle to 'protect' western Europe from the former Soviet Union (and its Warsaw Pact). The Warsaw Pact was a collective defense treaty between the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern Bloc socialist republics of Central and Eastern Europe in May 1955, during the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact was created in reaction to the integration of West Germany into NATO. The Warsaw Pact was disbanded in 1991 following the collapse of the former Soviet Union. NATO though (without a real purpose at that point) continued to expand eastward toward Russian borders in spite of promises made to Moscow that it would not do so. Since then NATO has been used as a tool to force regime change in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, and attempted to do so in Syria as well. And now Ukraine is turning out to be one of NATO's most aggressive operations yet.
  

• Aldi (Albrecht Discounters) is a large European food retail chain.  It has 10,000 stores in 20 Countries.  In the US, Aldi owns Trader Joe's. They have just announced massive price increases due to the war and sanctions. Meat, sausage and dairy products sold from Monday, April 4th should become "significantly more expensive", confirmed the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ). According to the newspaper, a surcharge of around 30 percent is planned for butter. The companies from Mülheim and Essen justify the price increases with the exploding costs on the producer side, especially for wheat, energy and animal feed in the course of the Ukraine war.  One can't but wonder if there is some 'corporate profiteering' going on these days?
  

• Ukraine’s military budget has grown from $1.7 billion in 2014 to $8.9 billion in 2019 (5.9% of the country’s GDP). For comparison, the 2021 Ukraine budget allocated only $84 million. (0.5% of the  GDP) for culture. The US unsuccessfully demands military spending of 2% of GDP from NATO members. And rapidly impoverished Ukraine, barely holding on loans from the IMF and the EU, spent three times more for military purposes than the developed countries of the West. Hundreds of instructors from the United States and other NATO countries participated in training of the Army. Ukraine was preparing for war under the supervision of the United States. Since 2014 Ukraine become a proxy army for US-NATO and they finally got their war with Russia.
  

 

• Bucha propaganda?   Gonzalo Lira proves without doubt that four different Ukrainian propaganda clips with different actors were all filmed at the exact same location, a 'battlefield' with several long destroyed Ukrainian tanks. Then on Saturday evening a Ukrainian station showed a video of Ukrainian troops driving through Bucha, north of Kiev, with several 'dead' people lying in the street allegedly 'killed by Russians'. There are two difficulties with these claims: (A) One of the dead appears to move his arm in this video.  (B) Bucha was declared 'completely liberated' of Russian troops by its mayor on Thursday, March 31. Are we to believe it would take three days for such an 'incriminating' video to come out? Or that those 'dead' were lying there for three days with no one bothering?
  

• Poland's Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has stated that Warsaw is ready to consider hosting American nuclear weapons if such an opportunity presents itself. The moment came in an interview with Germany's Welt am Sonntag."If the US asked us to deploy nuclear weapons in Poland, we would be open to this option. Such a step would boost deterrence against Moscow", Kaczynski said. Kaczynski also called on NATO to create a new command centre in Poland akin to the one located in Brunsume, in the Netherlands, where the alliance's joint operations are planned. He believes that it would send a signal to Moscow that NATO's command level is present in the alliance's eastern flank. This is massively provocative but reveals the greater ambitions of US-NATO to keep the war in Ukraine festering on Moscow's doorstep. It screams 'regime change'!
  

• Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has declared himself the winner of Sunday’s presidential election, as polls closed and an early projection placed him far enough ahead to avoid a runoff election. Analysis by the Center for Free Elections and Democracy has given Vucic 59% of the votes, a comfortable margin of victory. Speaking from his party headquarters, the incumbent leader declared “Serbia will remain on the European and reformist path, but also friends with Russia and China.” The country is currently in the process of joining the EU, but has declined to cut off all relations with Moscow amid the conflict in Ukraine, unlike many of its NATO-member neighbors. US-NATO really wanted Vucic to lose - badly.
  

• Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban has also declared himself the winner of Sunday’s elections in Hungary as his conservative Fidesz-KDNP party holds on to a comfortable lead amid the vote-counting. As of 9pm local time, the party was ahead with 59.99% of the votes, with 23.03% of party-list ballots counted. Despite the six leading opposition parties uniting [under US-NATO orchestration] to try to knock out Orban’s government under its banner, United for Hungary had only 28.89% of the vote thus far, with right-wing nationalist party Our Home (Mi Hazánk) trailing in third at 6.58%. The US-EU worked hard to defeat Orban in Hungary and Vucic in Serbia as they both refuse to capitulate to demands to break relations with Russia and China. This is a real embarrassment for Washington and Brussels as it underscores their fading power on the world stage. Thus they turn to busting knee-caps as mobsters and fascists always do.