The build-up to war on Russia

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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Feb 10, 2016 6:15 pm

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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 10, 2016 6:25 pm

seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 09, 2016 4:17 pm wrote:
The Obama Administration Recklessly Escalates Confrontation With Russia
By quadrupling military spending on NATO’s forces on Russia’s border, Washington risks turning the new Cold War into a hot one.
By Stephen F. CohenTODAY 5:00 AM
Image
NATO exercise
US Army soldiers deployed in Estonia take part in Operation Atlantic Resolve, aimed at demonstrating commitment to NATO allies. (Reuters / Ints Kalnins)

The Obama administration has just recklessly escalated its military confrontation with Russia. The Pentagon’s announcement that it will more than quadruple military spending on the US-NATO forces in countries on or near Russia’s borders pushes the new Cold War toward actual war—possibly even a nuclear one.

The move is unprecedented in modern times. With the exception of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Western military power has never been positioned so close to Russia. The Obama administration’s decision is Russian roulette Washington-style, making the new Cold War even more dangerous than the preceding one. Russia will certainly react, probably by moving more of its own heavy weapons, including advanced missiles, to its Western borders, possibly along with a number of tactical nuclear weapons. Indeed, a new and more dangerous US-Russian nuclear arms race has been under way for several years, which the Obama administration’s latest decision can only intensify.

The decision will also have other woeful consequences. It will undermine ongoing negotiations between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the Ukrainian and Syrian crises, and it will further divide Europe itself, which is far from united on Washington’s increasingly hawkish approach to Moscow.

Astonishingly, these potentially fateful developments have barely been reported in the US media, and there’s been no public discussion, not even by the current presidential candidates during their debates. Never before in modern times has such a dire international situation been so ignored in an American presidential campaign. The reason may be that everything related to the new Cold War in US-Russian relations since the Ukrainian crisis erupted in November 2013 has been attributed solely to the “aggression” of Russian President Vladimir Putin or to “Putin’s Russia”—a highly questionable assertion, but long the media’s standard policy narrative.

Every presidential candidate and the other leaders of both parties, as well as the editors and writers in the mainstream media who profess to be covering the 2016 campaign, the state of our nation, and world affairs are professionally and morally obliged to bring these dire developments to the fore. Otherwise, they will be harshly judged by history—if anyone is still around to write it.


seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 09, 2016 4:30 pm wrote:
FEBRUARY 8, 2016
Privatization: the Atlanticist Tactic to Attack Russia
by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS – MICHAEL HUDSON

Two years ago, Russian officials discussed plans to privatize a group of national enterprises headed by the oil producer Rosneft, the VTB Bank, Aeroflot, and Russian Railways. The stated objective was to streamline management of these companies, and also to induce oligarchs to begin bringing their two decades of capital flight back to invest in the Russia economy. Foreign participation was sought in cases where Western technology transfer and management techniques would be likely to help the economy.

However, the Russian economic outlook deteriorated as the United States pushed Western governments to impose economic sanctions against Russia and oil prices declined. This has made the Russian economy less attractive to foreign investors. So sale of these companies will bring much lower prices today than would have been likely in 2014.

Meanwhile, the combination of a rising domestic budget deficit and balance-of-payments deficit has given Russian advocates of privatization an argument to press ahead with the sell-offs. The flaw in their logic is their neoliberal assumption that Russia cannot simply monetize its deficit, but needs to survive by selling off more major assets. We warn against Russia being so gullible as to accept this dangerous neoliberal argument. Privatization will not help re-industrialize Russia’s economy, but will aggravate its turn into a rentier economy from which profits are extracted for the benefit of foreign owners.

To be sure, President Putin set a number of conditions on February 1 to prevent new privatizations from being like the Yeltsin era’s disastrous selloffs. This time the assets would not be sold at knockdown prices, but would have to reflect prospective real value. The firms being sold off would remain under Russian jurisdiction, not operated by offshore owners. Foreigners were invited to participate, but the companies would remain subject to Russian laws and regulations, including restrictions to keep their capital within Russia.

Also, the firms to be privatized cannot be bought with domestic state bank credit. The aim is to draw “hard cash” into the buyouts – ideally from the foreign currency holdings by oligarchs in London and elsewhere.

Putin wisely ruled out selling Russia’s largest bank, Sperbank, which holds much of the nation’s retail savings accounts. Banking evidently is to remain largely a public utility, which it should because the ability to create credit as money is a natural monopoly and inherently public in character.

Despite these protections that President Putin added, there are serious reasons not to go ahead with the newly-announced privatizations. These reasons go beyond the fact that they would be sold under conditions of economic recession as a result of the Western economic sanctions and falling oil prices.

The excuse being cited by Russian officials for selling these companies at the present time is to finance the domestic budget deficit. This excuse shows that Russia has still not recovered from the disastrous Western Atlanticist myth that Russia must depend on foreign banks and bondholders to create money, as if the Russian central bank cannot do this itself by monetizing the budget deficit.

Monetization of budget deficits is precisely what the United States government has done, and what Western central banks have been doing in the post World War II era. Debt monetization is common practice in the West. Governments can help revive the economy by printing money instead of indebting the country to private creditors which drains the public sector of funds via interest payments to private creditors.

There is no valid reason to raise money from private banks to provide the government with money when a central bank can create the same money without having to pay interest on loans. However, Russian economists have been inculcated with the Western belief that only commercial banks should create money and that governments should sell interest-bearing bonds in order to raise funds. The incorrect belief that only private banks should create money by making loans is leading the Russian government down the same path that has led the eurozone into a dead end economy. By privatizing credit creation, Europe has shifted economic planning from democratically elected governments to the banking sector.

There is no need for Russia to accept this pro-rentier economic philosophy that bleeds a country of public revenues. Neoliberals are promoting it not to help Russia, but to bring Russia to its knees.

Essentially, those Russians allied with the West—“Atlanticist Integrationists”— who want Russia to sacrifice its sovereignty to integration with the Western empire are using neoliberal economics to entrap Putin and breach Russia’s control over its own economy that Putin reestablished after the Yeltsin years when Russia was looted by foreign interests.

Despite some success in reducing the power of the oligarchs who arose from the Yeltsin privatizations, the Russian government needs to retain national enterprises as a countervailing economic power. The reason governments operate railways and other basic infrastructure is to lower the cost of living and doing business. The aim of private owners, by contrast, is to raise the prices as high as they can. This is called “rent extraction.” Private owners put up tollbooths to raise the cost of infrastructure services that are being privatized. This is the opposite of what the classical economists meant by “free market.”

There is talk of a deal being made with the oligarchs. The oligarchs will buy ownership in the Russian state companies with money they have stashed abroad from previous privatizations, and get another “deal of the century” when Russia’s economy recovers by enough to enable more excessive gains to be made.

The problem is that the more economic power moves from government to private control, the less countervailing power the government has against private interests. From this standpoint, no privatizations should be permitted at this time.

Much less should foreigners be permitted to acquire ownership of Russian national assets. In order to collect a one-time payment of foreign currency, the Russian government will be turning over to foreigners future income streams that can, and will be, extracted from Russia and sent abroad. This “repatriation” of dividends would occur even if management and control remains geographically in Russia.

Selling public assets in exchange for a one-time payment is what the city of Chicago government did when it sold the 75 year revenue stream of its parking meters for a one-time payment. The Chicago government got money for one year by giving up 75 years of revenues. By sacrificing public revenues, the Chicago government saved real estate and private wealth from being taxed and also allowed Wall Street investment banks to make a fortune.

It also created a public outcry against the giveaway. The new buyers sharply raised street parking fees, and sued Chicago’s government for damages when the city closed the street for public parades or holidays, thereby “interfering” with the rentiers’ parking-meter business. Instead of helping Chicago, it helped push the city toward bankruptcy. No wonder Atlanticists would like to see Russia suffer the same fate.

Using privatization to cover a short-term budget problem creates a larger long-term problem. The profits of Russian companies would flow out of the country, reducing the ruble’s exchange rate. If the profits are paid in rubles, the rubles can be dumped in the foreign exchange market and exchanged for dollars. This will depress the ruble’s exchange rate and raise the dollar’s exchange value. In effect, allowing foreigners to acquire Russia’s national assets helps foreigners to speculate against the Russian ruble.

Of course, the new Russian owners of the privatized assets also could send their profits abroad. But at least the Russian government realizes that owners subject to Russian jurisdiction are more easily regulated than are owners who are able to control companies from abroad and keep their working capital in London or other foreign banking centers (all subject to U.S. diplomatic leverage and New Cold War sanctions).

At the root of the privatization discussion should be the question of what is money and why should it be created by private banks instead of central banks. The Russian government should finance its budget deficit by having the central bank create the necessary money, just as the US and UK do. It is not necessary for the Russian government to give away future revenue streams in perpetuity merely in order to cover one year’s deficit. That is a path to impoverishment and to loss of economic and political independence.

Globalization was invented as a tool of American Empire. Russia should be shielding itself from globalization, not opening itself to it. Privatization is the vehicle to undercut economic sovereignty and increase profits by raising prices.

Just as Western-financed NGOs operating in Russia are a fifth column operating against Russian national interests, so are Russia’s neoliberal economists, whether or not they realize it. Russia will not be safe from Western manipulation until its economy is closed to Western attempts to reshape Russia’s economy in the interest of Washington and not in the interest of Russia.


seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 09, 2016 4:46 pm wrote:
The risk of an unintended war with Russia in Europe, explained in one map
Updated by Max Fisher on February 9, 2016, 11:00 a.m. ET

Russia's aggression in Europe — its invasion of Ukraine, its military flights up the noses of NATO states, its nuclear saber rattling — has faded from the news. But it's still very much a threat, which is why the US is planning to quadruple its military spending in Europe, something NATO's European members have welcomed, to deter Russia.

In other words, the dynamics that brought Cold War–style military tension to Europe in 2015 are still with us. And that tension can be dangerous.

This summer, I wrote about a small but alarmed community of analysts and experts in the US, Europe, and Russia who earnestly worried that the risk of an unintended war had grown unacceptably high. A survey of 100 policy experts yielded an aggregate assessment of 11 percent odds of war and 18 percent odds that such a war would include nuclear weapons. (A subsequent, larger survey backed this up.)

Since then, my informal check-ins with my sources have led me to believe that this concern has not dissipated. And, in late January, scholars with the Zurich-based Center for Security Studies produced a map, as part of a longer report that you can read here, that helps show why this is still a real issue:


Image

Martin Zapfe and Benno Zogg, Center for Security Studies
The map shows military exercises held by Russia and by NATO in 2014 and 2015. Each circle represents an exercise, and the larger circles mean more troops participated.

Obviously, both Russia and European states have been holding military exercises since before tensions spiked last year. And that's exactly the point: Military volatility is baked into Eastern Europe, such that when tensions do spike it has the capability to make the continent suddenly much more precarious.

I want to call your attention to the Baltic Sea, the body of water tucked between Sweden and the NATO-allied Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. (Recall that all NATO members, including the US, have pledged to go to war to defend any other NATO member that is attacked.) That little region is the focus of all this.

The geography of the Baltics make it enormously insecure for both Russia and for NATO, and this is why nearly every expert I spoke to warned that it is a potential tinderbox, where some unforeseen accident, miscalculation, or provocation could, in an unlikely but real worst-case scenario, send both sides careening into a conflict that neither wants.

The Kaliningrad problem

Look at the little red spot sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania: That's a part of Russia called Kaliningrad, which Russia took over after World War II. Kaliningrad is heavily militarized, partly because Russia uses it as a base for projecting power and partly because Moscow's conspiratorial-minded leaders fear that Europe is bent on retaking Kaliningrad.

Russia worries that in the case of any conflict small or large, Europe and the US would exploit it as an excuse to seize and pacify Kaliningrad. (If that sounds crazy to you, it doesn't to Russian leaders, who after all just seized and annexed part of a foreign country, and who earnestly believe the US is bent on Russia's destruction.) So it has built up Kaliningrad's defenses.

But Kaliningrad is completely isolated from the rest of Russia; it's surrounded by NATO states. And after Ukraine, NATO began putting a lot more troops and tanks in those NATO states. This was meant to defend the Baltics from a possible Ukraine-style provocation, but it also ended up cutting off Kaliningrad even more. There's other stuff happening as well — for example, the Baltics are moving onto a separate power grid, which could make Kaliningrad more reliant on Europe to power itself.

Russia clearly feels it needs a plan to defend Kaliningrad in the case of a conflict. So it's done two things, which are likely meant as defensive but also have offensive capability — hence their destabilizing danger.

First, Russia has installed a kind of weapon that it's been very good lately at developing: area-denial weapons, such as anti-air missiles, that give Russia the ability to shut down an entire region and prevent NATO from moving in. These are indicated on the map with blue-line circles around Kaliningrad.

Second, Russia has conducted exercises near the Baltics that look at least potentially like they're designed to, if necessary, open a ground corridor from mainland Russia to Kaliningrad. This includes, for example, Russian military flights across or into Baltic airspace, which appear meant to test NATO response times.

The idea would be to prevent NATO from overrunning or isolating Kaliningrad by opening basically a giant military highway to it. But that would mean cutting through the Baltic states that separate them. In other words, it would mean invading them.

The Baltics problem

The dynamic here is that even if Russia's agenda here is purely a worst-case-scenario defensive plan to protect Kaliningrad, it also looks exactly like a plan to invade and seize the Baltic states. As NATO sees Russia building up around the Baltics, it is doing the same.

It's not that US and European leaders think Moscow is going to just up and occupy Latvia out of the blue. Rather, they are in the same situation as Russia is with Kaliningrad: The Baltic states are insecure in ways that require NATO to build them up, and this looks offensive to Russia.

The Baltic states are physically isolated from the rest of Europe. Baltic militaries are very weak compared with Russia's much larger force. And Baltic leaders are convinced, not without reason, that Moscow has designs to launch some sort of Ukraine-style hybrid quasi-war against them — not an all-out invasion, but some sort of potentially violent meddling.

This is why the US has been conducting military exercises in the Baltics and part of why it is quadrupling military investment in Europe: to build up the Baltics as a deterrent against Russia. But the effect of this buildup is to further isolate Kaliningrad, potentially increasing Moscow's paranoia and helping to motivate its own buildup, and so on.

The Eastern Europe security dilemma and the potential for war

These Baltics dynamics are, taken together, a classic example of what political scientists call a security dilemma, in which each side feels insecure and builds up to reach parity, which prompts the other side to do the same.

Because neither side can know the other's intentions for sure, defensive measures are seen as at least potentially offensive, and buildups lead to buildups, which can lead to war.

This is especially dangerous in Eastern Europe because both sides are developing not just stronger but faster military measures, such as air-launched cruise missiles, meant to fight and win any conflict as quickly as possible. This drastically reduces response time, meaning that in case of some provocation or accident that could be misread as something bigger, both sides could have only minutes to decide whether to escalate or deescalate.

The scenarios that could lead to war are discussed in greater depth here. But an accident or misstep is not impossible, given that Russian military jets are already flying in or near NATO airspace with some regularity.

And, yes, this is made all the more dangerous by the presence of nuclear weapons — particularly given Russia's development of small-scale "battlefield" or "tactical" nuclear weapons, and its nuclear doctrine that sets a lower bar for launching warheads than does America's.

To be clear, it is not remotely the case that war is likely. Russian and NATO leaders all want very badly to avoid war, and this is by far the most determinative factor in whether war happens. But this map helps to illustrate how this possibility, while remote, is not unthinkable, either. That, after all, is why the buildup is happening to begin with.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby Sounder » Wed Feb 10, 2016 6:27 pm

Ah yes, Free thinking since 1913.

That was a very good year for some. :wallhead:
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 10, 2016 6:28 pm

BBC whips up anti-Russia hysteria to apocalyptic levels
Robert Bridge
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist based in Moscow, Russia. His articles have been featured in many publications, including Russia in Global Affairs, The Moscow Times, Russia Insider and Rethinking Russia. Bridge is the author of the book on corporate power, “Midnight in the American Empire”, which was released in 2013.
Published time: 7 Feb, 2016 18:09
Edited time: 7 Feb, 2016 18:11

Once again, Russia is being featured as Dr. Evil Incarnate, the villain that regularly plays opposite peace-loving NATO nations, in a BBC program that has Moscow initiating an invasion on Latvia followed up with a nuclear strike on Britain.
And just in time for the military-industrial shopping season.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has failed Western analysts and political pundits in spectacular fashion. Despite a full-court effort to portray Russia as a barbaric, land-grabbing nation obsessed with the idea of restoring imperial real estate, Russia has stubbornly refused to play along.

Why, even dangling the fat bait of Ukraine before Russia's nose could not get Moscow to react the way NATO had hoped it would.

In fact, while NATO has been hot on the warpath against a number of shell-shocked nations across the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa, Russia has gone to war on just one (1) occasion, and that was against Georgia, and only after the egomaniacal leader of that tiny Caucasian country tempted fate by stupidly poking the Russian bear first.

Thus, the BBC has apparently found it necessary to contrive an altered state of reality, a veritable twilight zone, to convince its audience of Russia’s ‘real’ intentions: The result is a military contractor’s wet dream, an apocalyptic bunker buster, unsubtly entitled ‘World War Three: Inside the War Room,’ that depicts a sweat-inducing showdown between Russia and NATO and the beginning of WWIII.

It's probably safe to say I would not be playing plot spoiler by revealing here that Russia has been typecast as the aggressor.


To briefly summarize: After the Russian military rolls over little Latvia for no good strategic reason whatsoever, British military commanders and graying bureaucrats with furrowed brows huddle themselves in a bunker, deciding whether to launch Trident missiles at Russia in response.

The Daily Mail breathlessly described the tax-payer paid performance as “an utterly realistic 'war game'” which presents “deeply troubling questions, not least with the current political row over Government plans to spend £100 billion replacing our fleet of Trident submarines.”

Eureka! At the very same time UK military contractors are salivating over the prospect of winning billion-dollar contracts to replace the Queen’s collection of Trident nuclear-armed submarines, along comes a state-funded scaremongering film, starring arch-villain Russia to lend some credence to the initiative.

Russian lawmaker Frants Klintsevich told the Russian News Service radio station the film will give NATO an opportunity to remind member states that they should crack open their tattered purses and boost their military spending.

"They [West] have always demonized Russia trying to show that it is uncontrolled and non-European. As for what happens recently… we qualified this a long time ago as an information war, a very serious and a profound one," said Klintsevich, the first deputy chairman of Federation Council’s committee on defense and security.

"Today the US has a very serious problem of rearmament, the military and industrial sector needs to get financing. A mechanism of the corrupt American elite has been launched. This was in Iraq, is in Syria and around Europe," the senator said.

"Unfortunately, our colleagues from the BBC have lately resorted to making public products, of quite low-quality. Therefore, we haven't always been in a hurry to familiarize ourselves with them," Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters when asked whether the Kremlin has stayed up late to catch the film.

"It's simply not worth the time it takes to watch," Peskov said.

On the same day the BBC thriller was released, a report by the totally unbiased Rand Corporation – invoking sexed-up memories of Saddam Hussein’s alleged ability to strike the UK in 45 minutes - said that it would take just 60 hours for Russia to occupy Estonia and Latvia, and that's not taking into account Riga's rush-hour traffic.

"Across multiple games using a wide range of expert participants in and out of uniform playing both sides, the longest it has taken Russian forces to reach the outskirts of the Estonian and/or Latvian capitals of Tallinn and Riga, respectively, is 60 hours," Rand said in its report.


"Such a rapid defeat would leave NATO with a limited number of options, all bad."

It might be worth noting in closing that former RAND chief strategist, Herman Kahn, once forwarded the insane idea of a "winnable" nuclear exchange in his 1960 book ‘On Thermonuclear War.’

This led to Kahn being the inspiration for the title character of Stanley Kubrick's black comedy satire Dr. Strangelove.

As far as the BBC's latest anti-Russia production goes, well, it's just plain strange.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby conniption » Thu Feb 11, 2016 8:42 am

RT

US A-10s bombed city of Aleppo on Wednesday, shifted blame onto Moscow – Russian military


Published time: 11 Feb, 2016

Two US Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II assault warplanes carried out airstrikes on Aleppo Wednesday, destroying nine facilities, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported. The same day, the Pentagon accused Moscow of bombing two Aleppo hospitals, while there were no Russian flights over the city.

“Yesterday, at 13:55 Moscow time (10:55 GMT), two American A-10 assault aircraft entered Syrian airspace from Turkey, flew right to the city of Aleppo and bombed targets there,” Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said Thursday.

Also on Wednesday, Konashenkov recalled, the Pentagon’s spokesman, Colonel Steven Warren claimed that Russian warplanes allegedly bombed two hospitals in Aleppo.

“In his words, some 50,000 Syrian have been allegedly deprived of vital services,” Konashenkov said, pointing out that Warren forgot to mention either hospitals’ coordinates, or the time of the airstrikes, or sources of information. “Absolutely nothing.”

“No Russian warplanes carried out airstrikes in Aleppo city area yesterday. The nearest target engaged was over 20km away from the city,” Konashenkov stressed, adding that on the contrary, airplanes from the US-led anti-ISIS coalition were active over Aleppo, “both aircrafts and UAVs.”

“I’m going to be honest with you: we did not have enough time to clarify what exactly those nine objects bombed out by US planes in Aleppo yesterday were,” Konashenkov said. “We will look more carefully."

"The situation in and around Aleppo has become, in our view, increasingly dire," Col. Steve Warren, Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman, said Wednesday. "With the destruction of the two main hospitals in Aleppo by Russian and regime attacks, over 50,000 Syrians are now without any access to live-saving assistance."

Warren added, "There's little or no ISIL in the Aleppo area, so they're kind of, at this point, separate fights."

The spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry drew attention to the stunning similarity of the situation with the American airstrike on the Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, and the US bombing of the positions of the Iraqi army in Fallujah.

“What they do first is make unfounded accusations against us – to deflect blame away from themselves. If it goes on like this, we’re going to make two media briefings: one for ourselves, another for those coalition guys,” Konashenkov said.

Western countries never bothered to share intelligence on terrorists in Syria with Moscow, although they did accept Russian maps with terrorists’ positions marked, the Russian MoD’s spokesman said.

“Now they criticize us, saying we fly wrong way and bomb wrong places. Should we send them more maps?” Konashenkov questioned.

He recalled what the Russian Defense Ministry had pointed out earlier – the more terrorists Russia destroys the more it is being accused of indiscriminate airstrikes.

“If you look at how Western media presents information, it looks like the cities not controlled by the Syrian government are full of peaceful opposition and human rights activists,” the spokesman said.

The Russian Defense Ministry and its partners in Syria operate multilevel intelligence, maintaining unimpeachable target spotting, the MoD representative said, adding that all airstrikes are delivered only after repeated verification of a target to avoid civilian casualties. Konashenkov said intelligence also comes from the armed units of the Syrian opposition.

Konashenkov accused Western TV channels of presenting the ruins of the city of Aleppo, devastated long before the Russian Air Force was deployed to Syria, as the results of recent Russian airstrikes.

“An experienced orchestrator has a finger in this pie,” the spokesman said. “The obvious trend is to trumpet about alleged Russia sins and be silent about the ‘effectiveness’ of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition in Syria.”

The Russian Air Force has performed over 500 sorties, eliminating nearly 1,900 terrorist facilities in Syria between February 4 and February 11. The Defense Ministry reports that two senior terrorist field commanders have been killed.

“Over the past week, February 4-11, the planes of Russia's aviation group in Syria made 510 sorties during which 1,888 facilities of terrorists were destroyed in the provinces of Aleppo, Latakia, Hama, Deir ez-Zor, Daraa, Homs, Al-Hasakah and Raqqah,” Konashenkov said.

The MoD spokesman shared with the media about wholesale desertion among the terrorists in Aleppo. The jihadists intimidate local civilians and force them to walk en masse towards the Turkish border, while the militants try to melt into the crowd.

“They know for sure that neither the Russian Air Force nor the Syrian government troops ever deliver strikes on non-combatants,” Konashenkov said.

Elaborating on some details of the latest Russian airstrikes in Syria, he related how Sukhoi Su-25 ground-support fighters eliminated three terrorist convoys on the highway connecting Homs and Al-Qaryatayn. A reconnaissance check revealed that airstrikes destroyed nine trucks loaded with munitions, two armored vehicles and over 40 jihadists.

In Daraa province, a Sukhoi Su-34 bomber wiped out a hardened terrorist position near Ghariyah settlement. The strike that destroyed the fortified strong point also eliminated two armored vehicles parked nearby.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 11, 2016 11:25 am

Russia’s Gazprom: Baltic Sea Gas Pipeline Controversy Set To Split EU Over Russia Policy — Again
BY CARTER DOUGHERTY @CARTERD ON 02/09/16 AT 5:08 PM

If a group of big European energy companies and Russian giant Gazprom have their way, a controversial new natural gas pipeline will one day lie on the floor of the Baltic Sea. It will sit right next to an existing natural gas pipeline that a virtually identical group of European energy firms and Gazprom officially proposed and built a decade ago.

The prospect of ever-greater dependence on Russian gas has produced a split in Europe that’s even nastier than the last time around, and it has generated new friction with the United States.

This week, the vice president of the European Commission, Maroš Šefčovič, will propose new rules for gas users that aim to curb the bloc’s appetite for Gazprom’s product by setting boundaries for how gas producers and transmitters interact. The initiative comes despite pressure from Germany, where the bulk of the energy companies are headquartered, for Brussels to keep politics out of the pipeline.

But politics are ever-present in European energy debates, and Russia, to a great extent, put them there. Since the first pipeline was built, Russia reduced gas supplies to Ukraine, fostered an insurgency on the country’s eastern border and even sent menacing signals toward EU and NATO members Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

“There’s a Russia that invaded Ukraine. And there’s a Russia that is threatening the Baltic states,” said András Simonyi, managing director of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University. “That’s the Russia we are dealing with now.”


The new pipeline, named Nord Stream 2 after the first version, is a project of Gazprom and E.ON and BASF/Wintershall of Germany, OMV of Austria, Engie of France and Royal Dutch Shell of the Netherlands. Like its older sibling, Nord Stream 2 would bring gas from a terminal near St. Petersburg to the northern German coast.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her economy minister, Sigmar Gabriel, have portrayed the venture in strictly commercial terms, a deal to deliver Russia’s natural gas to an energy-hungry European public.

The stance has produced outrage in Central and Eastern Europe, especially in Poland, which has accused Berlin of wanting to outflank its ostensible partners in the EU for the sake of a lucrative venture with the Russians. They insist the project should be considered in the context of the political situation with Russia, especially in Ukraine, and that it should face a review in Brussels, since the EU is committed to a more integrated energy market.

They have an ally in Šefčovič, an energetic Slovak diplomat who is also top EU official for promoting its “Energy Union.” Šefčovič wants to use the leverage of the EU’s internal rules, which promote competition by preventing operators of gas distribution networks from reducing competition among suppliers.

“This project has a lot of very, I would say, complex political ramifications and it has a lot of also regulatory questions,” Šefčovič said at a recent event in Washington. “Because it’s quite clear that if it comes to the project of this magnitude, it’s our duty in the European Commission to make sure that the European law is fully respected.”


Ukraine Overview | FindTheData
European law is generally about competition and use of interconnected networks that can’t easily be replicated. They’ve been aimed at ensuring that competing gas providers can get the product where it needs to go. Šefčovič wants to go further and examine any intergovernmental agreements involved in pipelines.

When it comes to Russia, however, things get complicated.

Russia already tried reducing the gas it sends through Ukraine and on into Western Europe after the so-called Orange Revolution of 2004 and 2005, in which the country sought a more westward orientation after years of fealty to Russia. The Russian move triggered depictions of nightmare scenarios in Europe where radiators would go cold during winter, and the idea that Russia could “freeze out” Ukraine and Poland, through which pipelines run, has lurked over European energy debates.

That scenario is unlikely. The liquid natural gas industry allows gas to be transported to places where pipelines don’t go. And so-called “reverse flow” technology enables Western European operators to move gas back toward Eastern Europe if Russia ever squeezed supplies.

But reduced Russian usage of the pipelines in Ukraine could still hurt in other ways. European countries, and the United States, have invested heavily in the revival of the Ukrainian economy since 2014, when Russia backed separatists in its eastern province, resulting in a de facto partition of the country.


Russia Overview | FindTheData
Ukraine gets about $2 billion in transit fees from Russian companies for use of its pipelines. Nord Stream 2 would, like Nord Stream 1 before it, cost Ukraine by outflanking it, a point the United States has made as well.

“This would significantly decrease Ukraine’s revenues and undermine the economics of investments in Ukrainian infrastructure that are badly needed for proper functioning of the system,” said Agata Łoskot-Strachota, a senior fellow for energy policy at the Center for Eastern Studies in Warsaw.

The hardest part of the new Nord Stream pipeline might simply be the message it sends to Moscow about the EU’s ability to speak with one voice, Simonyi said.

The 28 EU members have resolved to improve the functioning of their own natural gas market, and bind it more tightly together to ensure consumers get the best possible prices and the bloc as a whole has secure sources.

“It’s not that the lights will go out. But Europe would be circumvented,” Simyoni said. “You don’t want that. You want an integrated energy market.”
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby semper occultus » Thu Feb 11, 2016 11:45 am

...uh-huh...as if the elite driving the EU to the brink actually require any external assistance from Mr Putin...

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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 11, 2016 6:35 pm

Watch Ash Carter Lie About Why He Let Turkey Supply ISIL with Oil
One of the most embarrassing things to come out of the Russian military venture in Syria is the huge convoy supply lines of oil moving between Turkey and ISIS positions.

Watch America's finest mumble their way through explanations of why they have let this go on for two years.

Priceless. Carter deserves an Academy Award.

McCain, Carter and the rest of the Washington insiders clearly knew about ISIS oil trading all along.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MAmeAtzKms
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Feb 17, 2016 2:45 pm



From the same Fabian lightship, last year already:

Image

Lenin and Stalin are operating Putin from beyond the grave! Vladimir Putin is their wind-up toy!! Installing a capitalist nationalist billionaire as Russian head of state is all part of a SECRET POSTHUMOUS COMMUNIST PLOT TO STEAL OUR STUFF OMG OMFG!!!

To call it infantile would be an insult to infants.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 24, 2016 7:36 pm

Obama’s Russian Rationale for $1 Trillion Nuke Plan Signals New Arms Race

Alex Emmons
Feb. 23 2016, 9:00 a.m.
The Obama administration has historically insisted that its massive $1 trillion nuclear weapons modernization program does not represent a return to Cold War-era nuclear rivalry between Russia and the United States.

The hugely expensive undertaking, which calls for a slew of new cruise missiles, ICBMs, nuclear submarines, and long-range bombers over the next three decades, has been widely panned by critics as “wasteful,” “unsustainable,” “unaffordable,” and “a fantasy.”

The administration has pointed to aging missile silos, 1950s-era bombers, and other outdated technology to justify the spending, describing the steps as intended to maintain present capabilities going forward — not bulking up to prepare for a future confrontation.

Last year, speaking to NATO allies, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter insisted that “the Cold War playbook … is not suitable for the 21st century.”

But President Obama’s defense budget request for 2017 includes language that makes it clear that nuclear “modernization” really is about Russia after all.

The budget request explicitly cites Russian aggression, saying, “We are countering Russia’s aggressive policies through investments in a broad range of capabilities … [including] our nuclear arsenal.”

In December, Brian McKeon, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, testified before Congress: “We are investing in the technologies that are most relevant to Russia’s provocations … to both deter nuclear attacks and reassure our allies.”

The public acknowledgement that Russia is the impetus for U.S. modernization has critics concerned the Cold War-era superpowers are now engaged in a “modernization” arms race.

“Both Russia and the United States are now officially and publicly using the other side as a justification for nuclear weapons modernization programs,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project, in a statement emailed to The Intercept.

Early in his presidency, Obama was an outspoken advocate of nuclear disarmament. In April 2009, he pledged his commitment “to achieving a nuclear free world,” together with former Russian President Dimitri Medvedev. Later that month, Obama delivered a celebrated speech in Prague, saying he sought “the security of a world without nuclear weapons.” And he negotiated a 2011 nuclear treaty with Russia, which required both countries to reduce their arsenals to 1,550 operational warheads each.

But according to Obama’s advisers, Russia’s invasion of Crimea halted his disarmament efforts. In a 2014 interview with the New York Times, Gary Samore, one of Obama’s top first-term nuclear advisers, said, “The most fundamental game changer is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. That has made any measure to reduce the stockpile unilaterally politically impossible.”

Former officials have proposed ways of trimming the trillion-dollar budget. In December, former Defense Secretary William Perry called for the Pentagon not to replace its aging ICBMS, arguing that submarines and bombers were enough to deter nuclear threats.

Retired Gen. Eugene Habiger, the former head of U.S. Strategic Command, which overseas the Pentagon’s nuclear weapons, has argued that U.S. nuclear forces have little to no deterrent effect on Russia and China, and that the U.S. can safely reduce its active arsenal to 200-300 weapons.

Last year, in an effort to cut the costs of nuclear modernization, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., introduced a bill that would reduce the number of planned missile-bearing submarines from 14 to eight. The bill, which would save an estimated $4 billion per submarine, was co-sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Democrat who is now running for president.

When asked about nuclear modernization at a campaign event in Des Moines, Iowa, Hillary Clinton responded, “Yeah, I’ve heard about that, I’m going to look into that, it doesn’t make sense to me.” Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, on the other hand, supported the expense, saying, “Deterrence is a friend to peace.”

Religious groups have also voiced opposition to nuclear modernization. “We were pleased with the president’s statement calling for a world without nuclear weapons,” said Mark Harrison, director of the Peace with Justice program at the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society.

David Culp, a legislative representative at the Quaker-affiliated Friends Committee on National Legislation, said, “The increased spending on U.S. nuclear weapons is already provoking similar responses from Russia and China. We are slowly slipping back into another Cold War, but this time on two fronts.”

Contracts are already being signed. In October, the Pentagon awarded Northrop Grumman the contract for the new long-range bomber. The total cost is secret, but expected to exceed $100 billion.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby conniption » Fri May 27, 2016 7:17 pm

RT

Silencing America as it prepares for war


John Pilger
Journalist, film-maker and author, John Pilger is one of two to win British journalism’s highest award twice. For his documentary films, he has won an Emmy and a British Academy Award, a BAFTA. Among numerous other awards, he has won a Royal Television Society Best Documentary Award. His epic 1979 Cambodia Year Zero is ranked by the British Film Institute as one of the ten most important documentaries of the 20th century.

Published time: 27 May, 2016

Image
A view shows the command center for the newly opened ballistic missile defense site at Deveselu air base, Romania, May 12, 2016 © Octav Ganea / Reuters

Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him.

It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Party’s rigged convention. The great counter revolution had begun.

The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, had dared link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of America’s victims in faraway places.

“We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom. Now don’t you forget it.” So said a National Parks Service guide as I filmed last week at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. He was addressing a school party of young teenagers in bright orange T-shirts. As if by rote, he inverted the truth about Vietnam into an unchallenged lie.

The millions of Vietnamese who died and were maimed and poisoned and dispossessed by the American invasion have no historical place in young minds, not to mention the estimated 60,000 veterans who took their own lives. A friend of mine, a marine who became a paraplegic in Vietnam, was often asked, “Which side did you fight on?”

A few years ago, I attended a popular exhibition called “The Price of Freedom” at the venerable Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The lines of ordinary people, mostly children shuffling through a Santa’s grotto of revisionism, were dispensed a variety of lies: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved “a million lives”; Iraq was “liberated [by] air strikes of unprecedented precision.” The theme was unerringly heroic: only Americans pay the price of freedom.

The 2016 election campaign is remarkable not only for the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders but also for the resilience of an enduring silence about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. A third of the members of the United Nations have felt Washington’s boot, overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and boycotts. Most of the presidents responsible have been liberal – Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

The breathtaking record of perfidy is so mutated in the public mind, wrote the late Harold Pinter, that it “never happened …Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. It didn’t matter … “. Pinter expressed a mock admiration for what he called “a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

Take Obama. As he prepares to leave office, the fawning has begun all over again. He is “cool”. One of the more violent presidents, Obama gave full reign to the Pentagon war-making apparatus of his discredited predecessor. He prosecuted more whistleblowers – truth-tellers – than any president. He pronounced Chelsea Manning guilty before she was tried. Today, Obama runs an unprecedented worldwide campaign of terrorism and murder by drone.

In 2009, Obama promised to help “rid the world of nuclear weapons” and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No American president has built more nuclear warheads than Obama. He is “modernizing” America’s doomsday arsenal, including a new “mini” nuclear weapon, whose size and “smart” technology, says a leading general, ensure its use is “no longer unthinkable”.

James Bradley, the best-selling author of Flags of Our Fathers and son of one of the US marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, said, “[One] great myth we’re seeing play out is that of Obama as some kind of peaceful guy who’s trying to get rid of nuclear weapons. He’s the biggest nuclear warrior there is. He’s committed us to a ruinous course of spending a trillion dollars on more nuclear weapons. Somehow, people live in this fantasy that because he gives vague news conferences and speeches and feel-good photo-ops that somehow that’s attached to actual policy. It isn’t.”

On Obama’s watch, a second cold war is under way. The Russian president is a pantomime villain; the Chinese are not yet back to their sinister pig-tailed caricature – when all Chinese were banned from the United States – but the media warriors are working on it.

Neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders has mentioned any of this. There is no risk and no danger for the United States and all of us. For them, the greatest military build-up on the borders of Russia since World War Two has not happened. On May 11, Romania went “live” with a NATO “missile defense” base that aims its first-strike American missiles at the heart of Russia, the world’s second nuclear power.

In Asia, the Pentagon is sending ships, planes and special forces to the Philippines to threaten China. The US already encircles China with hundreds of military bases that curve in an arc up from Australia, to Asia and across to Afghanistan. Obama calls this a “pivot”.

As a direct consequence, China reportedly has changed its nuclear weapons policy from no-first-use to high alert and put to sea submarines with nuclear weapons. The escalator is quickening.

It was Hillary Clinton who, as Secretary of State in 2010, elevated the competing territorial claims for rocks and reef in the South China Sea to an international issue; CNN and BBC hysteria followed; China was building airstrips on the disputed islands. In its mammoth war game in 2015, Operation Talisman Sabre, the US practiced “choking” the Straits of Malacca through which pass most of China’s oil and trade. This was not news.

Clinton declared that America had a “national interest” in these Asian waters. The Philippines and Vietnam were encouraged and bribed to pursue their claims and old enmities against China. In America, people are being primed to see any Chinese defensive position as offensive, and so the ground is laid for rapid escalation. A similar strategy of provocation and propaganda is applied to Russia.

Clinton, the “women’s candidate”, leaves a trail of bloody coups: in Honduras, in Libya (plus the murder of the Libyan president) and Ukraine. The latter is now a CIA theme park swarming with Nazis and the frontline of a beckoning war with Russia. It was through Ukraine – literally, borderland - that Hitler’s Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, which lost 27 million people. This epic catastrophe remains a presence in Russia. Clinton’s presidential campaign has received money from all but one of the world’s ten biggest arms companies. No other candidate comes close.

Sanders, the hope of many young Americans, is not very different from Clinton in his proprietorial view of the world beyond the United States. He backed Bill Clinton’s illegal bombing of Serbia. He supports Obama’s terrorism by drone, the provocation of Russia and the return of special forces (death squads) to Iraq. He has nothing to say on the drumbeat of threats to China and the accelerating risk of nuclear war. He agrees that Edward Snowden should stand trial and he calls Hugo Chavez – like him, a social democrat – “a dead communist dictator”. He promises to support Clinton if she is nominated.

The election of Trump or Clinton is the old illusion of choice that is no choice: two sides of the same coin. In scapegoating minorities and promising to “make America great again”, Trump is a far right-wing domestic populist; yet the danger of Clinton may be more lethal for the world.

“Only Donald Trump has said anything meaningful and critical of US foreign policy,” wrote Stephen Cohen, Emeritus Professor of Russian History at Princeton and NYU, one of the few Russia experts in the United States to speak out about the risk of war.

In a radio broadcast, Cohen referred to critical questions Trump alone had raised. Among them: why is the United States “everywhere on the globe”? What is NATO’s true mission? Why does the US always pursue regime change in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine? Why does Washington treat Russia and Vladimir Putin as an enemy?

The hysteria in the liberal media over Trump serves an illusion of “free and open debate” and “democracy at work”. His views on immigrants and Muslims are grotesque, yet the deporter-in-chief of vulnerable people from America is not Trump but Obama, whose betrayal of people of color is his legacy: such as the warehousing of a mostly black prison population, now more numerous than Stalin’s gulag.

This presidential campaign may not be about populism but American liberalism, an ideology that sees itself as modern and therefore superior and the one true way. Those on its right wing bear a likeness to 19th century Christian imperialists, with a God-given duty to convert or co-opt or conquer.

In Britain, this is Blairism. The Christian war criminal Tony Blair got away with his secret preparation for the invasion of Iraq largely because the liberal political class and media fell for his “cool Britannia”. In the Guardian, the applause was deafening; he was called “mystical”. A distraction known as identity politics, imported from the United States, rested easily in his care.

History was declared over, class was abolished and gender promoted as feminism; lots of women became New Labour MPs. They voted on the first day of Parliament to cut the benefits of single parents, mostly women, as instructed. A majority voted for an invasion that produced 700,000 Iraqi widows.

The equivalents in the US are the politically correct warmongers on the New York Times, the Washington Post and network TV who dominate political debate. I watched a furious debate on CNN about Trump’s infidelities. It was clear, they said, a man like that could not be trusted in the White House. No issues were raised. Nothing on the 80 percent of Americans whose income has collapsed to 1970s levels. Nothing on the drift to war. The received wisdom seems to be “hold your nose” and vote for Clinton: anyone but Trump. That way, you stop the monster and preserve a system gagging for another war.


~

The Kremlin Stooge
(embedded links)

Red Hot Jingoism, With a Side of Apple Pie


Posted on May 23, 2016
by marknesop



Peruse, if you will, this sabre-rattling pile of poop. Coming on the heels of recent articles which warn that the west sees a nuclear war as both winnable and possible, even probable, and the conviction that a new western strategy is the attempt to initiate a Kremlin palace coup by Russian nationalist hardliners fed up with Putin’s squishiness because he will not respond more aggressively to NATO provocations on Russia’s doorstep, it’s hard not to conclude that the west has lost its mind. If the fear of a planet-devastating nuclear war – in which the two major world nuclear powers pull out all the stops in an unrestricted attempt to annihilate one another – no longer holds our behaviors in check…what’s scarier than that?

We seriously need to persuade our leaders, in the strongest terms, that they cannot talk smack like that.

Do the leaders of the free world need a refresher course in nuclear explosions? Hiroshima 1945, before and after what was, at the time, the greatest destructive force in the world fell upon it. The bomb which flattened Hiroshima had a yield of 15 kilotons, or 15 thousand tons of TNT. Modern Russian ICBM’s typically carry MIRV warheads, Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles, of up to 250 kilotons yield; more than 16 times the destructive power – each – of the Hiroshima bomb. A MIRV carrier releases its warheads individually, post-boost-phase, and they reenter the atmosphere independently and not necessarily proceeding to the same target. Their accuracy is a few hundred feet CEP (Circular Error Probability); in the case of the RS 24 Yars, about 150 feet. Increased accuracy means less necessity for huge warheads, so more can be carried. At about the same time, the missile releases decoys, to make it more difficult to establish which are the real warheads. Finally, the payload accelerates to 15,000 mph for the sprint to the target. Anyone who tells you the missile shield can take care of a target traveling at 15,000 mph in any profile except coming directly at the missile shield’s launcher could probably sell you a bridge, if you believe them. The crossing rate is just too high.

Alternatively, the Topol M can carry a single 800 kiloton warhead – more than 53 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb.

But there’s US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, looking quite a bit like an earless bloodhound, strutting and talking tough.

“Despite the progress we’ve made together since the end of the Cold War, Russia has in recent years appeared intent to erode the principled international order that has served us, our friends and allies, the international community, and Russia itself so well for so long…We do not seek a cold, let alone a hot war with Russia. We do not seek to make Russia an enemy. But make no mistake, we will defend our allies, the rules-based international order, and the positive future it affords us.”

It might seem funny to you to hear a senior government official from the country that fabricated a case for war so it could destroy its old enemy, Saddam Hussein, and lay waste to his country and people, prattling on about ‘the rules-based international order’, just as if the United States recognizes any limitations on its application of raw power, anywhere on the globe, in its own interests. It’s quite true that whenever the USA wants to start a war with someone, it first makes out a case that this is a situation in which it must act. And even its critics would have to acknowledge that it is damned good at this sort of fakery, and has come a long way since one of its premiere PR firms – Hill & Knowlton – coached the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States through her performance as a make-believe Kuwaiti nurse devastated by Saddam’s forces’ make-believe plundering of a Kuwaiti hospital, something which did not happen. It did, however, strike precisely the right responsive chord in public anger and disgust to kick off Gulf War I. Both wars against Iraq got off the ground on entirely fabricated scenarios calculated to get the rubes all in a lather to do the right thing. To hear a self-righteous assrocket like Ashton Carter maunder on about the rules-based international order, considering the United States encouraged the military campaign by the Ukrainian government to kill its own citizens in a blatant violation of the very core principles of the imaginary rules-based international order…why, it’s a little like listening to Imelda Marcos teaching a seminar on how to take care of your shoes so they’ll last a long time and you won’t have to buy more. I have to say, it just… it makes me mad.

What has really brought us to this point in the history of the Big Blue Marble is that despite the progress we’ve made together since the end of the Cold War, the indispensable and exceptional nation has in recent years tried by various means to overthrow the government of Russia, without success. It has tried incentivizing and supporting opposition movements, and got most of its NGO’s kicked out of the country for its pains. It has tried sexual politics, hoping to mobilize the world’s homosexuals against ‘Putin’s draconian anti-gay laws’, only to have the effort fall flat. It has tried open economic warfare, which worked just long enough for President Obama to take credit for it, then Russian counter-sanctions made European businesses wish they had never heard of President Obama. Shortly after that, Russia began to muscle in on US agricultural markets; a startlingly lifelike performance for a dying country. It looks like everything that has been tried in the effort to send Russia down for a dirtnap has failed. What’s left? They’re running out of war-alternative regime-change efforts.

And what has made Washington suddenly so cocky with the nuclear stick? Could it be that its European-based missile defense system has just gone live? After all Obama’s waffling, after his backing away from the missile defense the hawks wanted, in the winding-down days of his presidency he re-committed to it, and the site in Romania has started up, with great fanfare. Washington continues to insist, tongue in cheek, that the system is not and cannot be targeted against Russia’s nuclear deterrent, but for what other purpose could it be there? The rogue-missiles-from-Iran canard is pretty much played out. It seems pretty clear that Washington figures its interceptors (the Standard series SM3) give it a potential first-strike capability, which would – in theory – see Washington’s unalerted launch taking out most of Russia’s ICBM’s in their silos, and the forward-based interceptors taking out the few missiles that avoided Washington’s hammer-blow. If they don’t believe that, why the sudden nuclear-weapons nose-thumbing?

If they do believe that, it’s a big mistake. First of all, where the USA relies on a nuclear triad deterrent – land-based, air-deployable and seaborne nuclear missiles – Russia adds a fourth leg; mobile Transporter/Erector/Launcher (TEL) vehicles which have a demonstrated off-road capability, so that they could be most anywhere. The USA could not be sure of hitting all Russia’s land-based missiles before launch. Then there is the sea-based component, in SSBN’s, ballistic-missile submarines. The BOREI Class carries the Bulava missile. Each of the 20 missiles can carry up to 10 MIRV warheads of 150 kilotons yield. The USA is already worried that it is falling behind Russia and China in submarine capability. Finally, Russia has the ‘dead hand’ system, which is an automatic program that will launch all undestroyed fixed-site missiles even if everyone in Russia is dead.planet-of-the-apes-ending

Image

Could the interceptors be sure of getting all the landbased missiles a first strike did not take out? Well, how sure do you want to be? The interceptor has a range of about 100 miles, and an altitude capability of around 65,000 feet. That’s enough to catch a ballistic missile in the boost phase, before the warheads separate. Once the reentry vehicles accelerate to their terminal velocity of 15,000 mph, the SM3 has a speed disadvantage of about 4000 mph. But the reentry warheads would be much too far away by that point anyway, and it would be the job of interceptors protecting US cities to stop them. Could they do it? I’d suggest that anyone who is 100% confident plans to be somewhere else when it happens.

This is an existential battle for Russia. No amount of conciliatory gestures will buy it peace, and the United States is determined to push it off the edge of the world. With NATO surrounding it, even if it disbanded its military and plowed all its croplands into flowerbeds, the west would still pretend to see it as a threat, and would foment internal discord until it broke apart. Russia’s leaders know this. Its people know this. Strutting up and down the border and waving the NATO flag is not going to make Russia get scared about ‘consequences’, and kneel in the dirt. NATO’s fundamental problem is that it understands neither the Russian character or the true circumstances in the country, preferring to rely on rosy estimates presented by its think tanks.

The biggest ‘consequence’ of this dick-waving and posturing is that we are back where we were in 1947.

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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby SonicG » Fri May 27, 2016 8:56 pm

The Pilger piece is great...This is more for the war on China thread, but Russia will get sucked into anything that occurs in east Asia...Obama just visited Vietnam and Hiroshima, oddly my two adopted countries, where he lifted the US embargo on arms sales to Vietnam (poking China in the eye) and gave some vague pithies about the horrors of war in Hiroshima...Of course, the Drumpfers go ballistic about a non-existent apology, which even the few remaining survivors don't really care about, and about what strong, robust foreign policy the Donald will have...
Addressing a large Donald Trump campaign rally in downtown San Diego, Palin accused Obama of “dissing our vets” with his visit to Hiroshima — the first by a sitting U.S. president and one designed to honor the memory of all who were lost in the war.

Palin said Obama’s visit suggested that the president believes that “the greatest generation was perpetuating the evil of World War II.” She added, “Our commander in chief suggesting – actually, lying in suggestions – to the world that we were wrong to prove that we would eradicate evil in World War II.”

Thousands of Trump supporters cheered Palin and booed the president. The former Alaska governor-turned-reality TV star and tea party heroine said Trump would be a president “who knows how to win.”

“You mess with our freedom,” she said, “we’ll put a boot in your ass. It’s the American way.” At that, the crowd chanted, “USA! USA! USA!”

Palin was the warm-up act at Trump’s large rally, speaking on stage before the candidate arrived in San Diego. She took issue with Obama’s statement overseas this week that other world leaders have been “rattled” by the rise of Trump.

“Rattled, are they now?” Palin said. “Well, maybe it’s time that things get rattlin’.” She pointed out that the yellow Gadsden flag flown at tea party rallies depicts a rattlesnake “coiled, prepared, ready to strike.”

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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby JackRiddler » Sun May 29, 2016 12:24 pm

Wow, has The New Statesman always been this Neocon? (Trostkyite division, presumably.) Those would be shocking even as covers of The New Republic, which went that way like 35 years ago.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 06, 2016 9:28 pm

NATO Begins Largest War Game Since Cold War
The move heightens tensions between the U.S. and Russia.
By Curt Mills | Staff Writer June 6, 2016, at 6:29 p.m.

The largest war game in Eastern Europe since the conclusion of the Cold War has begun in Poland, a NATO member and former Warsaw Pact country.

The move is further evidence of concern from the West and its allies about aggression from Moscow.

Russian officers attend the Victory Day military parade rehearsals at Alabino polygon, 40 km April 11, 2016 in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Russia Hikes Border Troop Levels to Counter NATO
It will be a 10-day military exercise, featuring 31,000 troops and thousands of vehicles from 24 countries, and has been celebrated by NATO member nations weary of an ever-encroaching Russia.

The war gaming follows a mutual escalation of NATO and Russian troops in border regions and an expansion of the defense shield last month.

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter has been particularly keen on keeping Russian President Vladimir Putin within his national boundaries.

"We do not seek to make Russia an enemy," Carter said in May. "But make no mistake: We will defend our allies, the rules-based international order, and the positive future it affords us."

"Moscow's nuclear saber-rattling raises troubling questions about Russia's leaders' commitment to strategic stability, their respect for norms against the use of nuclear weapons, and whether they respect the profound caution that nuclear-age leaders showed with regard to brandishing nuclear weapons," Carter said.

After the U.S. expanded the Romanian wing of the missile defense shield last month, Putin reacted with hostility.

"NATO fend us off with vague statements that this is no threat to Russia… That the whole project began as a preventive measure against Iran's nuclear program. Where is that program now? It doesn't exist," Putin said, referencing the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal. Russia's government and Iran are allies, particularly in the Syrian civil war. “We have been saying since the early 2000s that we will have to react somehow to your moves to undermine international security. No one is listening to us."



Commentary: How NATO really provoked Putin
BY LUCIAN KIM

Poland is about to host the largest multinational military exercises on its territory in more than a decade. The “Anakonda-16” exercises, involving 31,000 troops from more than 20 countries, are intended to showcase the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s unity and speed one month before the alliance’s summit in Warsaw. The U.S. Army will play a key role, with a mechanized regiment based in Germany simulating a mission to rescue the Baltic states from a Russian attack.

The exercises come just weeks after the United States inaugurated the first of two controversial missile-defense installations in Eastern Europe. Next year, the Pentagon plans to quadruple military spending in Europe to $3.4 billion and begin rotating an armored brigade through Eastern Europe — in addition to extra NATO forces to be deployed to Poland and the Baltics.

The Kremlin’s response to Anakonda-16 is predictable. Russian President Vladimir Putin has already threatened Romania for participating in the U.S. missile shield. The large-scale maneuvers will only fuel the Kremlin narrative that Russia is being encircled by hostile forces. European peaceniks, too, won’t have to look far for new evidence of American war-mongering.

The escalating standoff resembles the chicken-egg conundrum. NATO argues that a return to containment and deterrence is the regrettable result of Putin’s 2014 attack on Ukraine. The Kremlin and its apologists answer that military intervention was necessary to forestall the U.S.-led alliance’s inexorable eastward encroachment. All debates over the Ukraine conflict start and end with NATO’s role.

In the case of Ukraine, NATO is a red herring. The former Soviet republic was never under serious consideration for membership, and barely a fifth of Ukrainians supported joining the alliance in polls taken before the Russian invasion.

NATO actually bowed to the Kremlin when Germany and France blocked a straight path to membership for Georgia and Ukraine in 2008. Months later, Russia occupied two breakaway regions in Georgia in a prelude to the annexation of Crimea and the creation of two puppet states in eastern Ukraine. To be accepted into NATO, an applicant country may not have any outstanding territorial disputes.

It’s easy to forget that it was reunified Germany that initially pushed for NATO enlargement after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Far from being a diabolical Pentagon plot, the issue was hotly debated on both sides of the Atlantic. Although dismayed by Western triumphalism after the Cold War, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev called it a “myth” that Western leaders had promised not to enlarge NATO.

After being situated on the Cold War frontline for more than four decades, Germans were eager to extend the NATO security bubble as far east as possible. The West was operating on the naive assumption that Russia had a shared interest in seeing the newly independent countries of Eastern Europe turn into stable, flourishing democracies. In fact, the Kremlin — even before Putin — preferred a buffer zone of weak, divided kleptocracies that had no chance of joining Western institutions or serving as an example for Russia.

“Expansion” is not the best word to describe NATO’s enlargement because it implies that the 12 Eastern European nations who have joined since 1999 were somehow passively involved. Having been trapped in the Soviet sphere of influence after World War Two, Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, and Hungarians went for the best insurance policy around. Ultimately the decision to join NATO was taken by sovereign, democratic states incapable of defending themselves but for whom neutrality was not an option.

Moscow is not doomed to antagonism with the West. Russia has allied itself with Western European powers for more than two centuries. As he was running for his first presidential term in 2000, Putin said that he neither viewed NATO as an enemy, nor would he rule out joining the alliance — as an equal. Those last three words are key to understanding his anger with NATO today.

From the Kremlin’s point of view, it’s infinitely worse to be ignored than to be considered a worthy rival. Unfortunately, Putin’s rise coincided with the presidency of George W. Bush, who ran roughshod over the sensibilities of friend and foe alike. Putin’s outreach was rebuffed. In the face of Bush’s militant unilateralism, Moscow’s membership in the United Nations Security Council, the Group of Eight and the NATO-Russia Council proved useless.

Bush’s interest in Eastern Europe was primarily to reward nations that had participated in his “coalition of the willing” during the war in Iraq by bestowing NATO membership or promising to base elements of a planned U.S. system to shoot down missiles originating in the Middle East.

When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, he first had to dig himself out of the rubble of Bush’s disastrous foreign policy. The new president declared a “reset” in relations with Russia and froze missile defense plans for Eastern Europe, arguably the most contentious issue between Washington and Moscow.

In the end, Obama approved a pared-down version of the Bush missile shield because it would have been politically difficult to abandon a project involving Eastern European allies. Although the laws of physics prohibit the new installations from targeting Russia’s strategic nuclear weapons, missile defense serves the Kremlin well as an example of NATO encirclement.

Obama originally wanted to cooperate with Putin on issues of common concern and continue to ignore him wherever else possible. The American president failed to appreciate the post-imperial phantom pains still plaguing Russia.

When Obama spoke about a future without nuclear weapons, Putin heard him say Russia should be stripped of its only credible deterrent. When the White House pivoted to Asia and withdrew the last U.S. tank from Germany in 2013, the Kremlin saw it as waning American commitment to Europe.

Putin’s lightning occupation of Crimea and manufactured insurrection in eastern Ukraine took NATO by surprise. Even if Eastern Europeans remained wary of Moscow’s intentions, the rest of the alliance had come to view Russia as a grumpy neighbor rather than a stealthy adversary.

NATO’s efforts to reassure eastern allies with rotational forces from the United States or Germany are a crucial first step to restoring balance in Europe. But missile defense is a political football that poses no real threat to Russia. Eastern Europeans are using it to get U.S. boots on the ground, while the Kremlin can raise it as the hobgoblin of encirclement.


The United States may have provoked Putin through ignorance, arrogance or negligence — but not belligerence. That’s why NATO is in such a mad scramble to catch up.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 07, 2016 9:11 am

Europe Sleepwalks toward World War III
June 6, 2016

The West’s scary new catch phrase for anything the diabolical Russians do is “hybrid war,” accusing Moscow of spreading propaganda and funding NGOs, pretty much what the West has been doing for decades, as Gilbert Doctorow explains.

By Gilbert Doctorow

The momentum into a new Cold War – and possibly toward World War III – is growing stronger, a process in Europe that has the look of a brain-dead continent sleepwalking toward the abyss, unwilling or unable to resist the accumulation of harsh propaganda against Russia.

Indeed, the new buzz word in the West — directed against anyone who challenges whatever extreme charge is made against Moscow — is that you’re part of Russia’s “hybrid war” against the West. In other words, silencing these few voices of dissent is portrayed as a defensive measure against “Russian aggression.”


Of course, this intimidation of those speaking up against a new Cold War is reminiscent of the old Cold War when people who urged peaceful coexistence were smeared as communist stooges. Now, you can expect to be dismissed as a fifth columnist serving your Kremlin masters as they wage “hybrid war,” a vague concept that suggests that criticizing the West’s policies is just one element of a hostile strategy hatched in Moscow.

A microcosm of this benighted attitude could be seen in an otherwise humdrum conference last week before the European Parliament, which aside from its quasi-legislative functions is host to numerous informational events in its conference rooms and auditoriums.

The organizer of the event was Anna Fotyga, a European parliamentarian (or MEP) from Poland who has had a very high profile in that country’s domestic politics within what is now the ruling party in Warsaw, the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS in Polish). During 2006-2007, she was the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the first government of the Kaczynski brothers, PiS’ founders.

The foreign policy of PiS both then and today is marked by Euroskepticism and hostile rhetoric directed against Poland’s big neighbors, Germany and Russia, although today the emphasis is one of Russophobia and a full-scale resurrection of a Cold War in which Poland plays a unique role as America’s advance military post and bastion against Russia.

For Fotyga, serving in the European Parliament (EP), is by no means a political exile, as is often assumed to be the case when speaking about high-flying politicians who are sent to Brussels. On the contrary, the EP has provided her with an excellent platform to continue on a pan-European scale the policies she worked on from Warsaw.

Fotyga has been a leading member of the group of 75 MEPs from Poland and the Baltic States, accounting for just 10 percent of the parliamentary seats, who have been the driving force behind a succession of virulently anti-Russian resolutions that were approved with ever greater frequency by the European Parliament in the past couple of years.

Demonizing Russia

From her words last week, it was clear that she is now working on a new effort to pass a law through the EP that requires European non-governmental organizations (or NGOs) receiving funding from abroad to report the details to the authorities. It was not clear, however, whether the application would be universal or just concern funding coming from Russia, though the context of the meeting suggests such selective application is likely what is intended.

Surely it would not be in the interests of the sponsors of the bill to publicize the extent to which European civil society is being funded and directed by proxies of the U.S. government.

As Fotyga told us, the model for such a law is the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, which served also as the model for the Kremlin a couple of years ago when it introduced such a requirement amid concerns that U.S.-funded operations such as the National Endowment for Democracy might try to initiate a “color revolution” in Moscow, similar to what has occurred in other ex-Soviet states and other countries on Washington’s “regime change” list.

At the time, Moscow was denounced in Europe and the U.S. for this measure, which was alleged to be part of a crackdown on civil society, i.e., forcing NGOs operating in Russia to acknowledge their foreign backers and exposing them to ridicule from patriots or be shut down for failing to file. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Why Russia Shut Down NED Fronts.”]

Screen shot of the fatal fire in Odessa, Ukraine, on May 2, 2014. (From RT video)
Screen shot of the fatal fire in Odessa, Ukraine, on May 2, 2014, which killed several dozen ethnic Russians opposing the post-coup regime in Kiev. (From RT video)
The report, presented at the conference last week, was directed against the agents of Russian “soft power,” and in particular, the Kremlin-funded NGO “Russkiy Mir” (The Russian World) which serves the Russian diaspora abroad. Such a report was a useful exhibit for Fotyga in her proposed new anti-Russian campaign.

The author and presenter of the report was Orysia Lutsevych, a Ukrainian national based in London, where she works as manager of the Ukraine Forum in the Russia and Eurasia Programme of the British think tank Chatham House, which was the publisher of her report.

Though Chatham House has had a long and distinguished history, today it is not the salon of aristocrats and intellectuals as it was perhaps once upon a time. A large majority of its experts on Russia and the former Soviet Union are clearly aligned with the Liberals who had the run of Russia in the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin when insiders expropriated much of the country’s wealth, creating a small caste of billionaires and a wide chasm of Russians falling into poverty. These Chatham experts are fiercely critical of Vladimir Putin’s Russia today.

Secondly, Lutsevych’s résumé as posted on the Chatham House website set off alarm bells for anyone expecting unbiased academic research on Russia. Her Masters degree in international relations was taken at Lviv State University, in the heartland of the Maidan movement of radical Ukrainian nationalism.

Her second MS is said to have been in “public administration” from the University of Missouri-Columbia, which boasts about its skills at public relations, saying “Students come to us with the desire to change the world.[bold type theirs]. We give them the practical knowledge and skills to make a difference for people, organizations and communities.” That sounds a lot like an advanced degree in propaganda and organizing “color revolutions.”

Her employment record backs up this interpretation of her skills. Her professional career began in 2005-07 as Deputy Director of the PAUCI Foundation, an acronym for the Polish Ukrainian Cooperation Foundation. From there she moved to the position of Executive Director of the newly founded Open Ukraine Foundation of Arseniy Yatsenyuk (the same “Yats” whom U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland promoted in 2014 to be the premier of post-coup d’état Ukraine).

In 2009, Lutsevych served as Head of Development at Europe House Georgia. And in 2012 she finally found her niche in the West, becoming a fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme, Chatham House, where we find her today.

Seeing Russian ‘Agents’

Given where Lutsevych is coming from, her report entitled “Agents of the Russian World. Proxy Groups in the Contested Neighbourhood” is rather bland and seemingly inoffensive. Russia’s perspective on relations with the West as a defense against ever increasing encroachments is set out with reasonable accuracy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin taking the presidential oath at his third inauguration ceremony on May 7, 2012. (Russian government photo)
Russian President Vladimir Putin taking the presidential oath at his third inauguration ceremony on May 7, 2012. (Russian government photo)
The problem is the very British logic of “you would say that, wouldn’t you,” meaning that Russian perceptions remain just that – perceptions – which implicitly, by default, do not correspond to reality, though that assumption is never tested or proven.

Yet, the record shows unequivocally that the Kremlin’s foreign policy follows one principle only, Realism, meaning defense of national strategic interests, and is not subject to Romantic nationalist visions of any kind. But the author repeats the convenient deception that Russian policy is guided by the obscurantist philosophy of former Moscow State professor Alexander Dugin, currently in official disgrace, with his Eurasianism and antipathy to the values of the West. Imperial ambitions are attributed to “the current Russian leadership” without the slightest attempt to provide proof.

If we cut to the quick, what is missing in this report is any attempt to place Russian state policies, supposedly aimed at developing soft power abroad, in an historical or geographical context. Historical analysis, with play-by-play recounting of who did what to whom, would make it plain that Russia built NGOs to further its language, culture and political interests abroad as a delayed response to the realities of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1992.

Because of that collapse, Russian speakers and/or ethnic Russians overnight became the world’s single largest national group living outside the political borders of its own ethnos. They became subject to treatment as second-class citizens or, as in the case of the Baltic States, to revocation of civil rights. They numbered perhaps 25 million, though estimates range as high as 40 million.

The delay in official Russian state response to this reality may be explained by Russia’s own self-absorption with its severe economic problems in the turbulent 1990s when the great mass of the population fell below the poverty line. The emergence of Russia from its “time of troubles” early in the new millennium under President Putin made it possible finally to deal with the sad fate of Russia’s former compatriots living abroad.

And it has done so in the most circumspect way, especially when compared to the currently fashionable principle in Western international relations asserting a “responsibility to protect” threatened minorities. “R2P” apparently justifies military interventions in countries governed by U.S. adversaries, such as Libya and Syria, but not in, say, Ukraine where the endangered civilians are ethnic Russians.

Russia’s ‘Soft Power’

The report’s author Lutsevych correctly indicated that nearly all of Russia’s ‘’soft power” investments in supporting its language, culture and identity abroad is invested in former Soviet Union space, especially Ukraine and Kazakhstan, which happen to be where the greatest number of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers — left adrift in 1992 — happen to live.

The neo-Nazi Wolfsangel symbol on a banner in Ukraine.
The neo-Nazi Wolfsangel symbol on a banner in Ukraine.
In fact, the only area where Russian support for compatriots through state-financed NGOs has relevance to the European Union is the Baltic States of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. There this issue is conflated by Russia’s detractors in the European Parliament with the very emotive notion of “hybrid warfare” that Russia is said to have waged in its takeover of Crimea in March 2014 and in the Donbass conflict in eastern Ukraine (where ethnic Russians were under threat of violent attack).

It is also symptomatic of the entire anti-Russian narrative to ignore similar NGO activities by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and even Spain through a great variety of platforms that they have established around the world, with an emphasis on former colonies or territories of historical interest.

Put in this context, the Russian efforts are exceedingly modest and would never justify the attention that they are receiving from Moscow’s detractors. But the broader lesson is that the authors of such reports never look in the mirror and ask what they themselves are doing. Everything Russia is doing is taken to be unique, calculating and sinister whereas the West’s actions set a gold standard for selflessness, generosity and good governance.

In this same connection, it is more than ironic that the Acknowledgements page of the report thanks the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Robert Bosch Stiftung for financing that made its publication possible. Both entities fit perfectly Lutsevych’s remarks on how state-funded agents and loyal business interests fund modern state propaganda, a system that the United States and the West, in general, have pioneered. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Victory of Perception Management.”]

At the seminar, we were told by Lutsevych that she would not go over the entire thesis of the research because her 43-page brochure-report was handed out to all attendees. And so we were treated to what she considered highlights and to a free exchange with the audience.

This, in fact, is what justifies going to such events, because when away from their editors and handlers, the rapporteurs and politician-hosts can give free expression to their fantasies and share some memorable and very telling indications of what they really have in mind. Such was the case on May 31.

They do this in full confidence that the audience or participants are either meek underlings or colleagues who are like-minded to themselves. MEPs tend not to show up. Assistants and researchers will not pose hostile questions. And the general public has been screened in advance by the registration process.

Selecting the Audience

In this regard, possibly hostile members of the general public are weeded out in advance. I note that my request for registration by email in which I identified my institutional affiliation was rejected by Fotyga’s assistant on the morning of the event. Very likely she googled me before responding that the registration list was already closed.

Ukraine's Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk
Ukraine’s now-former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk
And yet, when the session opened, perhaps 10 percent of the seats were vacant. So, I got in with the help of a kindly administrative assistant who works for an MEP with whom Fotyga is at odds. During the whole session, both Fotyga and Lutsevych stared pointedly at me much of the time, as if expecting some protest flag to be unfurled.

The highlight — and a good indication of the mental abilities of the author of the report — came at the end of Q&A when Lutsevych chose to explain the nature of Putin’s distortions of our Western political concepts that his agents supposedly are spreading in our midst.

According to Lutsevych’s account, democracy, as Putin understands it, is rule by majority and referendums whereas for the West democracy is protection of minorities, meaning proportional representation, etc. The context for Lutsevych’s thinking was surely the referendum in Crimea in which some 96 percent of the voters favored leaving Ukraine and rejoining Russia or possibly it was the recent Dutch referendum opposing ratification of the European Union-Ukraine association agreement.

There were very few questions from the audience and, in fact, the session broke up a half an hour early. But there was one question that deserves careful attention. It came in response to remarks by Lutsevych at the start of her presentation.

Lutsevych opened her talk citing an interview recently given by Svetlana Alekseevich, in which the Nobel prize-winning author from Belarus said that Russians want to live in a “great country” rather than a “normal country.” In Lutsevych’s estimation, Russia’s neo-imperial ambitions are behind its creation of a Russkiy Mir ideology and its seeking to obstruct the integration process of its shared neighborhood, namely Ukraine and Moldova, with the European Union. Hence, too, the strongly anti-American narrative which Russian proxy agents supposedly disseminate abroad in the information (or hybrid) war.

These words, which were among the very few observations which went off script from the report, elicited a “question” or, more properly speaking, a comment from the one MEP in attendance, Eugen Freund, an Austrian member of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, the center-left half of the coalition that effectively controls the European Parliament.

Freund remarked that he was initially uncertain which country with a known belief in its “exceptionalism” the speaker was talking about, the United States of America or Russia. Said Freund, there was nothing very unusual in Russia’s soft power agenda.

To this Lutsevych responded that while similarities may seem to exist, the content was utterly different. To be sure, America’s Freedom House and National Endowment for Democracy are both largely funded by the U.S. Treasury, but they have independent governing boards and congressional oversight by bipartisan committees, she said. Moreover, she added, their employees are genuinely dedicated to doing good works in a charitable spirit. To whom she was addressing these fairy tales from Cold War mythology is not at all clear.

Brain-dead and the Abyss

The conference also underscored another problematic element in the way European politicians tend to address the darkening storm clouds of a new Cold War. There is timidity about challenging the emerging “group think” that exaggerates the evils of Russia and ignores Moscow’s understandable worries and concerns.


While individual countries in Europe have reputations for ingrained individualism and divergence of opinion, Europe as a whole has a reputation for consensus or going with the flow, even if the flow is heading over the cliff.

I have little doubt that MEP Freund’s views on the intellectual merit of the presentation and presenters on May 31 differed little from my own, but he contented himself with one critical remark rather than deconstructing the arguments as a whole.

And, there is the nub. Without open debate on the key issues of European security including relations with Russia, we all are losers. We, in the minority who are warning about the dangers and the mindlessness of a new Cold War, are busy shadow boxing because no one invites us into the ring. When we do speak out, our loyalty is questioned. We are accused of advancing Russia’s “hybrid war.”

And those in the ring, like Fotyga and Lutsevych, produce specious arguments in favor of the reckless policies pushing Europe toward an ill-considered and very expensive conflict, one that could veer out of control into a hot war, even a nuclear war. This is what I mean when I describe a brain-dead continent sleepwalking toward the abyss.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
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Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
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