De-mining the Donbass

 

Russian troops de-mining the Donbass region where the Ukrainian army has retreated from.....

A few words from India...

 

 

The whole world is watching.

Photo below from peace protest in Visakhapatnam, India today.

 

A look back: Mariupol in 2014

 

Below is a blog post I did in 2016. In the 2nd to last paragraph below I refer to a video showing Nazis attacking Mariupol residents on May 9, 2014 as they peacefully remembered the May 9 victory of the former Soviet Union over Hitler's Nazi regime. The video is no longer available on YouTube. I searched this morning for a series of videos I posted in 2014-2015 of Azov battalion attacks on the residents of Mariupol but they are all taken down. Following the US orchestrated coup in Kiev in 2014 peaceful protests calling for a 'federated Ukraine' (where people could speak the Russian language without attacks from Kiev) swept throughout the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. Mariupol, being a port city, was one of the most strategic cities in the region. The Nazis were sent there by the US-NATO war project to suppress the public. They've been in control of Mariupol since then. Today Mariupol is about 70% liberated from the Nazis. As refugees are fleeing Mariupol on corridors opened by Russia, they are reporting mass graves in the city where people murdered by the Nazis during the past eight years were thrown. Why have so many people around the world been silent about these atrocities since 2014? Was it because they were Russian-ethnics?

Bruce

 

Obama's US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt on Friday [April 2016] made a trip to Mariupol in eastern Ukraine to essentially praise the May 9, 2014 neo-Nazi battalion shooting of unarmed people in Mariupol.

Pyatt is the other person in the now famous phone call with Victoria Nuland (Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs) when she told the ambassador who the US was supporting to lead the 'new' Ukrainian government after the US sponsored coup d'etat in Kiev.  Nuland told Pyatt, "Fuck the EU". 

The events in Mariupol, Donetsk region (when neo-Nazi Azov fighters shot at a peaceful demonstration of residents on May 9, 2014) were hailed by Pyatt as an example of the struggle against the 'Russian world' for all of Donbass during his meeting with representatives of the local government.

 

 

 

May 9 is a holiday that commemorates the capitulation of Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union at the end of Second World War, known in the Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War.  (27 million Soviet citizens were killed at the hands of the Hitler Army.) It's obvious that the US is trying to erase this history inside of Ukraine by encouraging the current US sponsored puppet regime in Kiev to use their neo-Nazi battalions to suppress any peaceful marches or assemblies that gather to remember the defeat of Hitler's forces.

Below is a short video [no longer available on YouTube] that shows a bit of the May 9, 2014 events in Mariupol where the neo-Nazis broke up peaceful holiday events.  When the unarmed residents tried to chase the Nazis (from western Ukraine) out of town they turned and fired on the peaceful people wounding and killing some unknown number of them.  

 

 

Amazingly these are the very events that Pyatt was celebrating with the 'authorities' in Mariupol.  The US ambassador, appointed under the Democrat administration of Obama, is giving the green light to Kiev to continue this violent suppression of the people both on May 2 in Odessa and throughout the country on May 9 when people attempted to publicly remember the defeat of Hitler. 

Pentagon Drops Truth Bombs to Stave Off War With Russia

Two leaked stories from the Pentagon have exposed the lies of mainstream media about how Russia is conducting the Ukraine war in a bid to counter propaganda intended to get NATO into the conflict.

By Joe Lauria (Consortium News)

The Pentagon is engaged in a consequential battle with the U.S. State Department and the Congress to prevent a direct military confrontation with Russia, which could unleash the most unimaginable horror of war.

President Joe Biden is caught in the middle of the fray. So far he is siding with the Defense Department, saying there cannot be a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine fighting Russian aircraft because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”

“President Biden’s been clear that U.S. troops won’t fight Russia in Ukraine, and if you establish a no-fly zone, certainly in order to enforce that no-fly zone, you’ll have to engage Russian aircraft. And again, that would put us at war with Russia,” said U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin earlier this month. (The administration plan is to bring down the Russian government through a ground insurgency and economic war, not a direct military one.)

But pressure on the White House from Congress and the press corps is unrelenting to recklessly bring NATO directly into the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, hailed as a virtual superhero in Western media, has vacillated between openness to negotiating a peace settlement with Russia and calling for NATO to “close the skies” above Ukraine. To save his country he appears willing to risk endangering the entire world.  

Meanwhile, Western corporate media, depending almost exclusively on Ukrainian sources, report that Russia is losing the war, with its military offensive “stalled,” and in frustration has deliberately targeted civilians and flattened cities.

Biden has bought into this part of the story, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal.” He has also said that Russia is planning a “false flag” chemical attack to pin on Ukraine.

But on Tuesday, the Pentagon took the bold step of leaking two stories to reporters that contradict those tales. “Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Vladimir Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader’s strategic balancing act,” reported Newsweek in an article entitled, “Putin’s Bombers Could Devastate Ukraine But He’s Holding Back. Here’s Why.”

The piece quotes an unnamed analyst at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) saying, “The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets.”

A retired U.S. Air Force officer now working as an analyst for a Pentagon contractor, added: “We need to understand Russia’s actual conduct. If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict.”

The article says:

    “As of the past weekend, in 24 days of conflict, Russia has flown some 1,400 strike sorties and delivered almost 1,000 missiles (by contrast, the United States flew more sorties and delivered more weapons in the first day of the 2003 Iraq war). …

    A proportion of those strikes have damaged and destroyed civilian structures and killed and injured innocent civilians, but the level of death and destruction is low compared to Russia’s capacity.

    ‘I know it’s hard … to swallow that the carnage and destruction could be much worse than it is,’ says the DIA analyst. ‘But that’s what the facts show. This suggests to me, at least, that Putin is not intentionally attacking civilians, that perhaps he is mindful that he needs to limit damage in order to leave an out for negotiations.'”

These Pentagon sources confirm what Putin and the Russian Ministry of Defense have been saying all along: that instead of being “stalled,” Russia is executing a methodical war plan to encircle cities, opening humanitarian corridors for civilians, leaving civilian infrastructure like water, electricity, telephony and internet intact, and trying to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible.

Until these Pentagon leaks it was difficult to confirm that Russia was entirely telling the truth and that corporate media were publishing fables cooked up by Ukraine’s publicity machine.

No Evidence of Chemicals

The second article directly undermines Biden’s dramatic warning about a false flag chemical attack. Reuters reported: “The United States has not yet seen any concrete indications of an imminent Russian chemical or biological weapons attack in Ukraine but is closely monitoring streams of intelligence for them, a senior U.S. defense official said.”

It quoted the Pentagon official as saying, “There’s no indication that there’s something imminent in that regard right now.” Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post published the Reuters article, which appeared in the more obscure U.S. News and World Report.

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story — even if it could lead to the most devastating consequences in history.

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

Biden's 'suggestions' for Serbia: Part 2

 

Good thing no one listened to him at the time......
 

Biden's new world odor.....

 

 

New 'liberal world order'?

 

Call it a new global fascist/mobster/capitalist odor.....

Biden says the US must lead the 'free world'. 

Free to do what? Plunder, destroy, manipulate, lie and much more. It's a modern day version of  piracy.

All nonsense.

I'll never buy it.

Bruce

Food for thought

 

 

 

By Dr. Vladimir Kozin

What does it mean – neo-Nazism in contemporary Ukraine?

• Not only marches with swastika and portraits of Hitler’s supporters, like Bandera.
• Not only the glorification of fascism.
• Not only adoption of national laws prohibiting Russian language almost everywhere. 
  

Current neo-Nazism in Ukraine means: 

• Creation of ultra-nationalist battalions that torture POW and kill Ukrainian citizens who would like to find safe heaven and asylum in Russia and in other states.
• Continuous shelling of Donbass residential areas without military significance from 2014 till today with heavy artillery fire, ballistic missiles Tochka-U with 15,000 pieces of shrapnel each and MRLS one salvo of which can destroy everything on 20 hectrares.
• Barbaric destruction of all that is left when Ukrainian troops retreat: living quarters, schools, hospitals, etc.
• Permanent destruction of the civilian life support systems in Donbass and in liberated areas.
• Uninterrupted destruction of coal mines’ electric equipment with the aim to trap dozens of coal miners underground.
• Refusal to offer humanitarian assistance to Ukrainian citizens who are in trouble, and using them as human shields.
• Blocking water canal with fresh water to Crimea from 2014 till 2022.

And the collective West is still helping Ukrainian neo-Nazis by lethal weapons, ammunition, mercenaries and blood money? What for? To create an all-out war in Europe?

~  Dr. Vladimir Kozin Member, Russian Academy of Military Sciences; Member, Russian Academy of Natural Sciences; Vice President, Russian National Institute for Global Security Research

NATO Has Been In Ukraine Since 2014, “Stay Behind” Is Operational In Kiev

 

 

Written by Piero Messina

Kiev organized an operational defense of the territory similar to that which had been created in NATO territories and in neutral European territories such as Switzerland, Austria and Sweden, based on a NATO ”Stay behind“ structure, what we call ‘Gladio’. The analysis by General Carlo Jean, university professor and military adviser to the former president of the Italian Republic Francesco Cossiga is concrete proof of NATO’s operational presence in Ukraine, starting from 2014.

Stay Behind was a paramilitary operational structure linked to the Atlantic Pact [NATO] which in the period of the Cold War had the mission of preventing the strength of left-wing political movements, directly or indirectly linked to the Warsaw Pact, from growing in Western countries.

“Stay Behind“, to remember, is precisely a paramilitary operation born of NATO and funded by the CIA which in the post-war period, through secret military sabotage activities, became the author of massacres, murders, attacks, destabilizations of all kinds and types in every corner of Europe.

In Italy, as said by the general, the code name of Stay Behind was 'Gladio' and it was revealed to the public for the first time by Giulio Andreotti only in 1990 and only to avoid the magistrates investigating black terrorists. In the meantime, 'Gladio', through neo-fascists, would have orchestrated – or so some of the most competent magistrates believe on the basis of investigations and confessions of former mafiosi and former terrorists – the worst blood events of the first Republic, starting from the strategy of tension.

The same structure therefore, in addition to having operated in Western Europe as in Italy or Greece  that would have led to the dictatorship of the Colonels, would have been present, and still would be, in Eastern Europe, in Ukraine.

Moreover, a similar structure appeared in 2014 when the country was crossed by a bloody civil war and Nazi-inspired military groups emerged that carried out massacres in Kiev. Under US-NATO direction, through the CIA and other secret services, the nostalgic Nazi militants who stormed government buildings in the capital and were then institutionalized as “national guards” have been recruited, financed, trained and armed for years.

It was they [Nazi death squads] who destroyed party headquarters in 2014, during the coup d’état [in Kiev]. It was they – while a large part of the press acclaimed the riots in Kiev as “revolutionaries” – who lynched executives, tortured and killed journalists, burned activists alive, as in the Odessa Chamber of Labor, and slaughtered civilians as in Mariupol, bombed with white phosphorus in Slaviansk, Lugansk, Donetsk. Not to forget, then, the massacre of Maidan square, where snipers belonging to the extremist groups “Svoboda” and “Pravij Sektor”, stationed on the buildings of the Conservatory and the Ukraine hotel, massacred demonstrators. A “false flag operation”, aimed at blaming the police.

A bit like what happened in Italy in the “years of Lead”. The story of Stay Behind’s presence in Ukraine was told in 2014 by the Italian journalist Manlio Dinucci, according to which Ukrainian neo-Nazi militants of “Una-Unso” had been trained in 2006 in Estonia by NATO instructors, who taught them fighting techniques, urban warfare and use of explosives for sabotage and attacks. It is the same strategy that NATO made in Italy during the Cold War to form the secret paramilitary structure 'Gladio'.

Discussing the U.S. strategy

 

 

 Lavrov explains regime change strategy targeting Russia & China. Kherson adopts ruble. 

Alex reports from the busy streets of Athens, Greece.

 

This is a must watch....

 

 

In an unprecedentedly dimwitted conversation, the hosts on The View all expressed agreement that prominent individuals expressing skepticism about all-out war on Russia like Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard are traitors who need to be investigated and possibly even arrested for their thought crimes. 

The hosts all outdo one another in trotting out McCarthyite smears and denunciations of Russian propaganda while spreading their own form of NATO propaganda and misinformation. 

Jimmy Dore and The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal discuss whether this clip is the most smooth-brained segment of television in history.

U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, Japan

 

By Makiko Sato

This US base in Iwakuni has a long history. It became a US Air Force base in 1952. Then in 1962, it officially became a US Marine Corp military facility.

A lot of numbers of MV-22 and CV-22 (Osprey) has been deployed here in Iwakuni since 2012. 

Iwakuni residents bear the blunt of  'sharing' the burden of Okinawa.

This video above was taken by a newspaper company. A US fighter jet F-35 plays an acrobatic flight in the sky around the Iwakuni base. Unbearable noise to local residents.

That USMF Iwakuni base is overlooked and is convenient for keeping on justifying the never-ending Futenma relocation project to Henoko in Okinawa.

Iwakuni is located 300 miles west of Osaka and 30 miles from Hiroshima. Tokyo is 600 miles east of Iwakuni.

The total US troops deployed in Japan now far exceeds 40,000. 

I hope US citizens know about Iwakuni. 

Talking with refugees fleeing Mariupol

 

 

Donbass Insider

 

While conducting a humanitarian mission near Sartana in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, we met a large number of people who had just fled Mariupol. 

Among these civilians was Nikolay, who agreed to tell us on camera what happened with the maternity hospital and the theatre in Mariupol, and how the fighters of the Azov regiment behaved with the inhabitants.

Mariupol SitRep

 

The Ukie-Nazi's were hiding under this commercial mall building. They were storing military equipment and ammunition there and were hit by a Russian missile (Click on image for a better view)

  Situation over Mariupol is unresolved

 

By Dr. Vladimir Kozin

In Mariupol, which has become a base of operation for the “Azov” battalion, nationalists are preventing the evacuation of local residents and using civilians as human shields while they launch counterattacks at advancing Russian Forces from hospitals, schools, and other civilian infrastructure. The rescued residents of Mariupol, finding themselves in complete safety in Russia, openly talk about all the mass outrages and crimes committed by neo-Nazis.

A severe humanitarian disaster has developed in the city of Mariupol as a result of the outrage created by Ukrainian nationalists. The desperate and mindless extremists, realizing the refusal for providing any assistance from Kiev, staged mass terror in those quarters of the city that they still control. At the same time, the reliable information received by the Russian side testifies to the terrible atrocities of the militants who were distraught from despair. The tone of their active negotiations with officials in Kiev, which is recorded daily in radio intercepts, speaks of their extreme anger towards the Ukrainian authorities because they were simply abandoned, while being forced to strictly follow the order: stand to death, and the status of martyrs of Mariupol has already been assigned to them.

According to available data, up to 130 thousand civilians and 184 foreign citizens from six countries are currently being held hostage in the city.

It has been objectively established that over the past three days, 80 to 235 innocent civilians who are trying to leave the city on their own have been killed by the Nazis.

At the same time, the formations of the Donetsk People's Republic with the support of the Russian Armed Forces, realizing that the neo-Nazis are closed by a human shield of innocent people, are forced to carry out measures to unblock Mariupol only point-by-point, house by house, block by block, without using heavy weapons, thereby avoiding civilian casualties.

Russia called on UAF, territorial defence battalions and foreign mercenaries to cease hostilities, lay down their weapons and withdraw to Kiev-controlled territories using humanitarian corridors agreed with the Ukrainian side. In this case, we guarantee the safe exit from Mariupol and the preservation of life for all those who have laid down their arms. The commanders of the units of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Russian Armed Forces will be prepared for such a scenario and will ensure their safe exit, but only without weapons and ammunition, to any area they so desire. Russia called on official Kiev for prudence and the cancellation of earlier instructions that obliged the fighters to sacrifice themselves and become "martyrs of Mariupol".

For the strict fulfillment of this task, in addition, Russia sent an official appeal to the United Nations, the OSCE, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international organizations, whose representatives are invited to accompany the practical measures of this humanitarian operation, as it is called directly on the ground, that is, in Mariupol, while necessarily as part of humanitarian convoys of both Russian and Ukrainian sides.

The Russian Armed Forces strictly observe the ceasefire on all routes without exception, including those declared by Kiev. At the same time, the Ukrainian side continues systematic shelling of humanitarian convoys and attempts to shift responsibility for its own inhumane acts to the units of the Russian troops, as well as the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics.

The Russian side still keeps a sufficient number of vehicles ready at the checkpoints, including comfortable buses for transporting refugees to selected destinations, as well as to temporary accommodation points, where all citizens arriving on the territory of Russia are provided with three hot meals a day and medical assistance is provided around the clock. 

Over the past day, without the participation of the Kiev authorities, 16,434 people were evacuated from dangerous areas of Ukraine, Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics to Russia, including 2,389 children, in total, 330,686 people, of which 68,983 children, have already been evacuated since the beginning of the special military operation.

A total of 1,815 private motor vehicles crossed the state border of Russia, and a total of 38,525.

~ Dr. Vladimir Kozin Member, Russian Academy of Military Sciences; Member, Russian Academy of Natural Sciences; Vice President, Russian National Institute for Global Security Research

US Armament Spree in Ukraine - Last Ditch Effort to Preserve Washington's Dominance

Sputnik International

The US has sent billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Ukraine amid Russia's special operation to demilitarise and de-Nazify the country. Switchblade killer drones are part of an additional $800 million military aid package announced by Washington on 16 March. Who is benefiting from the armament spree?

"One reason for the continued transfer of weapons from NATO nations to Ukraine is to keep the profits of the military industrial complex flowing", says Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. "The US will 'replace' these weapons to the particular donor country by either charging them for new military equipment or having the US taxpayers pay the bill. Either way, the weapons industry profits big time".

Western defence and cybersecurity stocks began to climb at the end of February as Washington and its NATO allies vowed to step up weapons supplies to Ukraine after the beginning of the Russian special operation, according to Gagnon.

The stocks made substantial progress in slightly over a week and are continuing to rally. Thus, between 24 February and 4 March, defence stocks broadly soared, with shares of Raytheon Technologies rising nearly 8%, General Dynamics 12%, Huntington Ingalls Industries 14%, Lockheed Martin 18%, and Northrop Grumman 22%, according to Fortune. Gagnon notes that Lockheed Martin currently tops the list, followed by other corporations like General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and BAE.

However, even before the Russian operation, major US defence contractors started to benefit from Ukraine, with the Biden administration having increased lethal aid to the Eastern European country since the beginning of his presidency. "In his first year in office, Biden approved more military aid to Ukraine — some $650 million — than the US had ever provided", The Intercept remarked on 10 March.

The US weapons supplies to Ukraine soared substantially in the second half of 2021 amid the Ukrainian military buildup along the contact line with the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics. On 9 March, the Russian Ministry of Defence released secret documents of the command of the National Guard of Ukraine, confirming preparation by Kiev authorities for an offensive operation in Donbass in March 2022.

The US defence contractors are the major beneficiaries of US-NATO warmongering, according to Gagnon.

"All of these weapons corporations have huge numbers of lobbyists who daily walk the halls of Congress", the scholar says. "They also make sure to give Congress members (from both parties) generous campaign donations. So, essentially, the war machine has the political system tightly under their control. During the Iraq War, one Bush administration agent stated during a presentation that the US role under corporate globalisation of the world economy would be 'security export'. That means endless war".

 

US troops in Lviv, western Ukraine, where the Nazis predominate

'Overextending and Unbalancing Russia'

Ukraine has long been in the focus of US politicians and the military industrial complex, according to the scholar. Gagnon cites a 2019 RAND Corporation study entitled "Overextending and Unbalancing Russia", co-authored by ex-State Department and White House adviser James Dobbins and military intelligence branched lieutenant colonel and Iraq War veteran, Raphael Cohen. "Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability", the study emphasised.

"It appears obvious to me that the US is using Ukraine as a tool to destabilise Russia's borderlands and thus forcing Moscow to spend more on the military which takes away from domestic priorities", says Gagnon. "Western sanctions being placed on Russia is even more evidence of this US-NATO plan to 'Overextend and Unbalance' Russia. The US-NATO wants regime change in Moscow. Washington and the EU don't give a damn about the people in Ukraine".

According to The Intercept, the Obama administration provided a wide range of "nonlethal military and intelligence assistance" to Ukraine, including training, while under Donald Trump, "Washington began a relatively modest flow of weapons shipments". Under Biden, arms supplies to Ukraine have already become "unprecedented", according to the media outlet.

Furthermore, the US political class and defence contractors have become intertwined through Washington's "revolving door" politics, notes Gagnon.

"The swinging door between the weapons industry and staff positions inside military and foreign policy institutions is strong evidence of this reality", he says. "There is no democracy in the US. WWII Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini defines fascism as 'the wedding of corporations and government'. This is exactly what we have in the US today - and throughout much of Europe as well".

West's 'Achilles Heel'

Ironically, it is Joe Biden who declared an end to "an era of major military operations to remake other countries" following the US' hasty Afghanistan withdrawal, and stressed that the president’s job is to protect and defend the "fundamental national security interest of the United States of America". According to Gagnon, Washington's Ukraine armament spree is caused by the US' unwillingness to completely lose its fading unipolar leadership.

"The US and NATO fear the coming multi-polar world being led by Russia and China", says the scholar. "Washington, and its puppet allies in Europe, understand that their 'window of opportunity' to destroy Russia and China is closing - thus their desperation. The recent threat by the Biden administration to China (that if Beijing did not renounce Russia it would get sanctioned as well) reveals just how much this new growing economic detachment from Western control is driving US-NATO policy".

However, firm rejection of anti-Russian sanctions by nations throughout the Global South indicates that the West's efforts "will not be successful", says the scholar. The Wall Street Journal's recent report saying that Saudi Arabia is considering selling some oil to China using yuan instead of the "petro-dollar" shows the demise of the Western-centric world order, according to Gagnon.

"The West's arrogance, greed and sense of exceptionalism are their Achilles' heel", the scholar concludes.

Let the truth be spoken....

 

 

Recently, the audience of a Europa League last-16 match in Belgrade, capital of Serbia, unfurled banners with the names of countries and regions that suffered from wars launched by the US and NATO over the last few decades and chanted an anti-war song.

Chinese spokesperson of Ministry of Foreign Affairs Wang Wenbin states: 

I also took note of the relevant report. Football fans at the match unveiled five huge banners to list countries and regions that suffered from the scourge of war waged by the US and NATO over the last few decades. Guatemala, Cuba, Vietnam, the Congo, Nicaragua, Iraq, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. The list goes on. People all over the world who see these banners revisit the wars launched by the US and NATO in the past few decades and set us thinking. 

Shouldn’t the countries who claim to oppose war avoid starting wars in the first place? Shouldn’t the countries who claim to advocate peace refrain from undermining peace? Shouldn’t the countries who want to uphold their own security respect the security of other countries too? 

This war has been in the works for many years....

 

 

US Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in Ukraine, December 2016. Preparing for a proxy war with Russia.

Lindsey Graham has recently on two occasions called for the assassination of Vladimir Putin. In the video he says, "2017 will be a year of offense." Graham is a fascist without a doubt - as was McCain.

Note just at the end of the video on the left side of the screen next to John McCain in yellow is Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH).  This has always been a bi-partisan war mongering plan against Russia inside the US Congress. 

They were meeting with the Ukrainian Special Forces that the US-NATO created - they brought the Nazi battalions into this new unit as a way to hide them from public scrutiny.

 

Beyond the US-NATO hype: the inside story of Ukraine's war on the Donbass

 

 

One viewer commented on this documentary film:

Watching this in March 2022.  Wow, this guy is a real oracle!  Saw 5 years into the future.  Of course, now the death toll stands at over 14,000 people, over 500 of them children.  
This film is masterfully made, may be even better than the Oliver Stone's Ukraine trilogy.  I am surprised I have not heard about it until just now. 

Still another wrote in the comments about this film:

As a Ukrainian from the donbass region more specifically kramatorsk, I never thought I’d see the day someone covers it from our point of view, from the truth that’s been suppressed, love this!

And one more comment:

This film needs to be shared.  Far too many ppl have the entirely wrong idea about what's happening in Ukraine and Crimea. 

 

This important and moving documentary was created by German filmmaker Mark Bartalmai. 

Near the end of the film Baralmai reveals the depth of US-NATO involvement in pushing the Ukranian army harder in their war against the Donbass. The US understood that at some point Russia would be forced to become directly involved in order to protect the Russian-ethnic population in Ukraine near its border.

Please help share the film with others. 

Zelensky's lies exposed by refugees

 

 

English subtitles are on the video

People can now begin to leave Mariupol after Russian army opens humanitarian corridors. 

Ukraine's Azov battalion death squads have been using the Russian-ethnic civilians in the city as human shields and have refused to allow them to escape.

The people tell these truths in this video.

US Recklessly Eyes China as Target in Economic War

Western officials say Russia is asking China for military help — denied by Beijing — in what is clearly an effort to build a case to include China in its economic war against Moscow.

By Joe Lauria (Consortium News)

The United States is setting up China as a second target of its intense economic war against Russia in what could have cataclysmic effects on the world economy, including the West.

The U.S. could not impose the most stringent sanctions on Moscow without the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and now the U.S. is trying to link China to the war.

Washington’s move to frame Beijing emerged Monday when unnamed U.S. officials told its allies that Russia had asked China for military aid in Ukraine. Reuters reported: “The message, sent in a diplomatic cable and delivered in person by intelligence officials, also said China was expected to deny those plans, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.”  China indeed denied it.

Importantly, Reuters added: “The U.S. government offered no public evidence to back its assertions of China’s willingness to provide such aid to Russia.”

On that same day Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, led a delegation to Rome to meet with Yang Jiechi, a member of the Chinese politburo. After the meeting, an unnamed senior U.S. official in Rome told reporters: “We have deep concerns about China’s alignment with Russia at this time, and the national security adviser was direct about those concerns and the potential implications and consequences of certain actions.”  

The next day NATO Secretary-General Jen Stoltenberg remarked:

    “China should join the rest of the world condemning strongly the brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia. So China has an obligation as a member of the U.N. Security Council to actually support and uphold international law. And the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a blatant violation of international law so we call on [China] to clearly condemn the invasion and of course not support Russia. And we are closely monitoring any signs of support from China to Russia.”

The English-language, government-owned, Chinese newspaper Global Times accused Stoltenberg of trying to accuse China of being an “accomplice” with Russia in Ukraine and dismissed NATO as a “puppet” of the United States.

After these statements it seemed clear the U.S. was trying to lay the groundwork for a truly reckless idea: to tie China to the war so it could sanction it perhaps along the lines of what the West has already laid on Russia.

Then on Thursday U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spelled it out: “We believe China in particular has a responsibility to use its influence with President Putin and to defend the international rules and principles that it professes to support. Instead, it appears that China is moving in the opposite direction by refusing to condemn this aggression, while seeking to portray itself as a neutral arbiter.” He added: “We will not hesitate to impose costs.”

In retrospect, evidence that the U.S. is trying to open a second front in its economic war first surfaced just before Russia intervened in Ukraine’s civil war, when Blinken implored China to stop Russia from invading. It was portrayed in Western media as a desperate last chance at peace from a concerned United States.

Of course China rebuffed Blinken. It seemed like a ridiculous gambit at the time. But in hindsight it may well have been the first U.S. step in constructing a case for sanctions against China. It allows Washington to say China was given every opportunity to try to stop the invasion and failed to do so and therefore was somehow complicit.

Biden Threatens Xi

All this was preparation for President Joe Biden’s video-call on Friday with Chinese President Xi Jinping, in which Biden warned Chinese President Xi Jinping not to help Russia’s war effort in Ukraine or there would be “consequences” to pay. 

 

Biden “detailed the implications and consequences” if Beijing were to give “material support to Russia” in the war, the White House said in a readout. While the White House didn’t spell out what those consequences would be, it said Biden went into detail about the severe sanctions the U.S. had imposed on Russia, including on its central bank and a number of imports, including oil. In other words, he read China the riot act. Biden was in essence threatening Xi with similar sanctions if China helped Russia.

Xi, however, warned Biden that the U.S. sanctions on Russia could trigger a worldwide economic crisis, apparently implying that that crisis would be far worse if the sanctions were extended to China.  Commodities prices, especially in energy and food, have already soared. The U.S. imported $506 billion in Chinese goods in 2021, according to the U.S. Census Department, an amount that would be extremely difficult for the US to replace.

Before the summit, Global Times wrote in an editorial on Friday: “The close relationship between China and Russia has been a thorn in the US’ side, especially against the backdrop of the ongoing Ukraine crisis. With the simmering of the situation, it couldn’t be any clearer that Washington is eager to exploit the Russia-Ukraine conflict to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow.”

The U.S. recognizes that its economic war against Russia could well fail because of the close and expanding economic and financial ties between Moscow and Beijing. But it is too late for the United States. Since the invasion, China is buying more oil and other commodities from Russia, Beijing has allowed Russia to use its Union Pay banking system, replaced Russia’s use of SWIFT with China’s Interbank System (CIPS), and China and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), which Russia is a part of, are designing a new monetary and financial system that would bypass the U.S. dollar, threatening it as the world’s reserve currency.  

The Global Times added:  “It’s the US that should put out the fire it lit in Ukraine. Ridiculously, it is demanding Beijing to do this job at the cost of damaging China-Russia relations. This is unreasonable and insidious.”

Russia has committed only a fraction of its military to Ukraine. Other than ordnance to replace, it is not clear what military aid Russia would need from China.  

 

Substitute War and Economic Catastrophe

The U.S. already has sanctions on China, as it had earlier on Russia. However, if the United States is seriously planning similar types of sanctions on Beijing that it has leveled on Moscow — against its major banks, against the central bank, removing it from SWIFT and cutting off key exports — the impact on the world economy — including on Europe and the United States — would be catastrophic.  

The U.S. national security strategy for several years has been aimed at both Russia and China. Knowing it must avoid a direct military confrontation against either, given the potential consequences, the U.S. is turning to economic warfare to ultimately attempt to bring down both governments through popular uprisings. Washington wants to replace them with Western-friendly leaders who would open up their economies to Western exploitation — just like Boris Yeltsin did in the 1990s.   

The United States is acting as though the whole world is the West and that this is the China of 30 years ago. In its bull-headed effort to impose its unilateral rule on the world, while its domestic social problems mount, the U.S. has not only driven Russia and China closer together than ever, but it has now brought in India, much of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, all of which have refused to sanction Russia and continues to trade with it, into a new bloc with economic power that exceeds the West.  

The U.S. has turned the majority of the world’s population against it. And it is now threatening to blow up the world economy. Cutting off trade and finance to Russia has already boomeranged on Western countries, driving up prices, especially at the pump. Instead of prompting a popular uprising in Russia as a result of its sanctions, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s popularity has actually risen since the invasion.

Adding China as a target of its economic war could drive the populations of the U.S. and Europe against their own governments instead.  

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

Updating Ukraine

 

 

 Regis Tremblay interviews Bruce Gagnon on the latest from the war zone in Ukraine.

Warmonger profile: Biden was just 'suggesting'

 

At the time of Bill Clinton's US-NATO bombing of Belgrade and the break-up of Yugoslavia into smaller nations in 1999, it became quite clear to Russia that they were on the list for the same treatment at some point.

Thus what is happening today in Ukraine is just one more step in the US-NATO foolhardy plan for regime change in Moscow and the balkanization of Russia into smaller nations. This would enable the western fossil fuel corporations to have access and control of the vast resource base of the Russian Federation.

Nuclear war is now a distinct possibility as the US-NATO makes this move on Russia. As you can see in the video, a crazed Biden is indicative of the insanity of those currently running the US 'supposed' democratic government.

Oops, we used the wrong map, sorry China

On May 7, 1999, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (Operation Allied Force), five U.S. Joint Direct Attack Munition guided bombs hit the People's Republic of China embassy in the Belgrade district of New Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists and outraging the Chinese public. According to the U.S. government, the intention had been to bomb the nearby Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement (FDSP). President Bill Clinton apologized for the bombing, stating it was an accident. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet testified before a congressional committee that the bombing was the only one in the campaign organized and directed by his agency, and that the CIA had identified the wrong coordinates for a Yugoslav military target on the same street. The Chinese government issued a statement on the day of the bombing, stating that it was a "barbarian act".

Back in 1999, similar to the situation today, the peace movement in the US was reluctant to protest against Clinton's war on Yugoslavia because he was a Democrat. Few peaceniks were willing to hit the streets with those of us who did. It is now known that the US used depleted uranium bombs causing major cancer clusters around Belgrade.

Bruce

Sunday song