March 2024

Mar 30, 2024

Featured • Future of the SMO: Russian Army Think-Tank Breakdown + UGVs Enter the Fray, Simplicius, Mar 30, 2024
Really important in its explication of U.S. space-based "netcentric" warfare with its HUNDREDS of all-seeing eyes in low earth orbit over Ukraine and very rapid communication of battlefield ISR to weaponry.

Featured • The Crocus Concert Hall Atrocity: No Going Back, Alastair Crooke, Al Mayadeen, Mar 28, 2024
I am virtually certain from the information available that Ukraine was the sponsor of this, which is indeed an atrocity.

Featured • Patrick Lawrence: Imperium: Decline on the Way to Fall, Scheerpost, Mar 29, 2024

Turn off the tube and think about these developments. To take them together, as we should, they tell us two things. One, a new world order composed of multiple poles of power, however strenuously Washington seeks to undermine it, is breaking out all over and gains momentum as we speak. Two, Washington’s policy cliques, stupidly unwilling to accept 21st century realities, are likely to act with increasing desperation as U.S. primacy finally gives way to a global order worthy of the term. If you thought the past couple of decades have been violent, chaotic and destructive, brace yourself: There is almost certainly worse to come....

However long the Biden regime goes on saying the war in Ukraine is “at a stalemate,” and however faithfully our corporate media repeat this nonsense like ventriloquists’ dummies, if the Kyiv regime is losing ground daily and there is no realistic hope of regaining it, the word we are looking for is “lost.” The question it is time to ask: What will the U.S. and its European vassals do when the make-believe wears out and defeat, while never admitted on paper, is too obvious to deny?

Nothing good. As a negotiated peace on any terms acceptable to Moscow is out of the question, and as subverting “Putin’s Russia” remains the objective, the U.S. is likely to intensify the sorts of covert ops and “hybrid warfare” that have been on Washington’s menu for decades. This stands to get very dangerous very fast. Did we have a preview of messes to come with the shocking attack on the concert auditorium and shopping arcade near Moscow on Mar. 22? This is my read....

To me the Moon of Alabama piece is chilling precisely to the extent what it has to say is plausible. We are now invited to consider whether the West supports the Israelis’ barbarities in Gaza because barbarity is now policy. I cannot dismiss this argument.

Having lost its two main sources power, the rules based order as a (somewhat) soft power instrument and its military hard power superiority, the West is in need of a new instrument of deterrence, a new tool that allows it to press its interest against the will of other powers.

It found that in demonstrating utter savagery.

The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide. That it will do everything to prevent international organizations to intervene against this.

That it is willing to eliminate everyone and everything that resists it.

Those nations who commit themselves to multi-polarity should steel themselves for what might be visited on them.

The social contract in Ukraine provides that those in power are allowed to loot as long as they do not bother those below them. That is not a society that allows to draft people for aims which are only supported by a minority of the population. Out of six draft notices send out only one gets responded to. The new conscription law that is slowly creeping through parliament procedures will not be able to change that.

Noticeable is that The Economist is blaming Zelenski for this:

But in Ukraine attempts to raise fresh recruits are still stuck in the coils of the democratic process; more than 1,000 amendments have reportedly been tabled to a bill in Parliament that would give the government more scope to raise the army it needs. Short of cash and fearing unpopularity, President Volodymyr Zelensky has not tried hard enough to get his way.

There were in fact over 6,000 amendments to the bill of which some 4,300 have gone through the committee with more to come. It will still take months until that law is enacted. It is likely to have little effect.

The Ukrainian government had announced that in future the country itself would produce the weapons it needs for the war. The Russian response is a new campaign to de-energize those Ukrainian regions with the most industrial facilities:

Ukraine said on Friday it had imposed emergency blackouts on three regions after Russia fired dozens of missiles and drones at its power stations overnight.

Moscow has stepped up its aerial bombardment of Ukraine in recent weeks, targeting energy infrastructure in response to deadly Ukrainian assaults on Russia's border regions.

National grid operator Ukrenergo said its dispatch centre was "forced to apply emergency blackout schedules in the regions of Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kirovograd until the evening".

Restrictions were already in place in the major cities of Kharkiv and Kryvyi Rih following a Russian strike last week.

There are only a few air defense systems left in Ukraine. They are needed to cover the front, to protect energy facilities and political centers. Currently they can not do either. Even if the U.S. would resume its support for Ukraine there would not be enough systems available to keep Ukraine covered.

There are rumors of an upcoming big Russian offensive. I don't buy those yet. There is still enough of the Ukrainian army left to continue the slow grinding process that has already eliminated large parts of it.

Mar 29, 2024

Featured • Russia Says Moscow Terrorist Attack Has Connection to ‘Ukrainian Nationalists’, Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, Mar 28, 2024

“Investigators have verified information that large amounts of money and cryptocurrency that the perpetrators of the terrorist attack received trace back to Ukraine; the funds were used in preparing the crime,” Russia’s Investigative Committee said in a statement, according to Russia’s TASS news agency.

“Investigators’ work with the detained terrorists, the examination of technical equipment that was seized from them, and the analysis of information about financial transactions prove their connection to Ukrainian nationalists,” the statement added.

The ISIS affiliate based in Afghanistan, known as Islamic State – Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K, has taken credit for the shooting at Crocus City Hall, which killed over 140 people. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said “radical Islamists” carried out the attack but also suggested there was a link to Ukraine.

The US said from the very beginning that the attack was carried out by ISIS-K and dismissed the idea that Ukraine was involved. In response to the Russian Investigative Committee statement, the White House accused the Russians of being “manure salesman.”

“My uncle used to say… that the best manure salesmen often carry their samples in their mouths. Russian officials seem to be pretty good manure salesmen,” said White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby. He added that the statement was “nonsense propaganda.”

The CIA is working overtime to push the lie that they warned the Russians about the 22 March terrorist attack and the Russians ignored that warning. Simply not true. As I noted in my previous article, the USG warning issued on March 7 only specified 48 hours. I have no idea when that “clock” started but let’s assume it was Friday the 7th and ended on Sunday the 9th. Since the “predicted” action did not take place there are at least two possible explanations — 1) the intel was bogus or 2) the stepped up Russian security at the Crocus City Hall on March 8 thwarted the attack.

Unless the intel stipulated that if the attack did not occur in that 48 hour window it was moot, then it was incumbent on the U.S. State Department and the Embassy to re-issue a warning to AMCITs that the threat still existed. They did not do this. That’s the problem. If the US intel still thought this was a real threat then why did the USG go silent?

Which brings me to the fact that both Sy Hersh and The NY Times came out with articles in the last 24 hours attacking the Russians as inept and accusing them of ignoring the warnings. This sure smacks of a coordinated info op to me because the essence of the argument is based on false claims.

Mar 28, 2024

Featured • Yesterday’s remarkable statements to journalists by Alexander Bortnikov, director of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), Gilbert Doctorow, Mar 27, 2024

To the uninitiated, I explain first that the FSB is the successor organization to the Soviet Union’s well-known and much feared KGB. However, the FSB today might be better compared with the FBI in the United States. It deals with domestic criminality of all kinds and with threats to Russian civilians such as terrorism. The agency and its head are rarely in the news.

In this respect, the FSB is less visible both at home and abroad than the Foreign Intelligence Service headed by Sergei Naryshkin, a state figure who spent five years of this millennium as chairman of the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of the legislature, and also three years as head of the Presidential Administration. In both positions Naryshkin was very often seen on television performing his duties.

By contrast, Bortnikov spent the past 15 years in his FSB offices out of sight. However, the spectacular attack on the Crocus City Hall concert venue has propelled him to center stage and yesterday he met with the Russian state television journalist Pavel Zarubin for an interview and then allowed himself to be questioned further by a gaggle of other journalists on his way out along a corridor. This spontaneous Q&A was later broadcast on the television news. What Bortnikov had to say was extraordinary and bears directly on whether you and I should now be looking for bomb shelters. Regrettably you will not find any of it in the lead stories of today’s mainstream media. The Financial Times, for example, features an account of Xi’s meeting with CEOs of American businesses to mend ties: interesting, but not very relevant if we are at the cusp of WWIII.

*****
Bortnikov is by definition a member of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle of advisors. He, Putin and Naryshkin are all roughly the same age. At 72, Bortnikov is just several years older.

I was struck in particular by his poise and prudent, carefully weighed choice of words while setting out where the investigation is heading with transparency and a ‘let the chips fall where they may’ unaffected demeanor.

The journalists were all probing the question of who stood behind the terror attack. Bortnikov told them…and us: standing behind the terror act committed by Islamist extremists are the United States, Great Britain and Ukraine.

Bortnikov said that the preliminary findings indicate that the four perpetrators of the slaughter were headed by car to the border with Ukraine where they were awaited on the other side. He very calmly explained that the involvement of foreign powers is being clarified and that he will say nothing out of pure emotion now but will wait for the facts to be solidly collected before being presented.

Nonetheless, it was entirely newsworthy that he named the United States, Great Britain and Ukraine as the likely puppet masters of the terror act. Let us remember that following the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, the most significant attack on critical civilian infrastructure globally in the last 50 years, Russian officials did not point the finger directly at any country. There was innuendo but no direct accusations such as we heard from Bortnikov yesterday.

****
Meanwhile, quite apart from Mr. Bortnikov’s chat with journalists, a lot of new elements to the terror attack at Crocus City Hall were posted yesterday on the Russian state television news and analysis program Sixty Minutes. In particular, we learned that in the last days of February and first couple of days of March two of the four attackers were in Istanbul. The departure and arrival of one at a Moscow airport was recorded on video. We were told which hotels they stayed in, and the selfies and other photos taken by one in Istanbul were put up on the screen. It is still not clear with whom they met in Turkey. However, the timing itself is very important, because the point was made that they returned to Moscow to carry out a terror attack on 8 March, International Women’s Day, a sacred date on the Russian calendar. Had they done so on that day, the effect would have been catastrophic for the presidential elections in Russia one week later.

However, per Sixty Minutes, it was determined that Russian state security on 8 March was too tight for the terrorist mission to succeed and the United States decided to pull the plug on that operation. Note that this is approximately the time when Victoria Nuland tendered her resignation at the State Department (5 March). The possible causal link here surely deserves attention by my peers in the U.S. ‘dissident’ community.

In any case, the scenario which was explored later in the day on the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov talk show is that the Ukrainians decided to proceed with the terror attack a week after the Russian presidential elections, when it lost most of its rationale. They did so over the objections of Washington.

*****
From time to time, readers ask why I pay attention to talk shows like Vladimir Solovyov’s. These skeptics tend to ignore that Solovyov invites not just the usual irresponsible academics and journalists who can amuse the public but also some very serious statesmen who are close to the center of power in Russia and exert influence on the conduct of foreign and domestic policy, including in particular committee chairmen and other key personalities from the State Duma.

So it was last night when we heard from a member of the Committee on Relations with the Commonwealth of Independent States (Former Soviet Union). With reference to the never ending terror attacks on civilians in the Russian border region of Belgorod coming from nearby Kharkiv (Ukraine), he said it is time to raze Kharkov to the ground: issue a warning to the population to get in their cars and head West, then blow it all to bits. Kharkiv is, by the way, Ukraine’s second most populous city after Kiev.

In general, the mood of panelists and of the host Solovyov himself is now changing in a cardinal manner: Ukraine is seen as an enemy state and the sooner it is finished off the better. There was talk last night on the need for missile strikes to flatten the presidential palace in Kiev along with all military and other decision making government centers in the capital.

As we have observed repeatedly over the past two years. President Putin has been a voice for moderation and restraint, resisting actions that might precipitate WWIII. That is clearly coming to an end when his own FSB director names the United States and the UK as planners of the biggest terror attack in Russia in 20 years.

The 7 March warning from US Embassy Moscow was initiated in Washington, DC from State Department. Secretary of State Blinken signed off on it. And the nature of the warning shows that it was based on intelligence — i.e., from a human source and/or electronic intercept — that was considered “credible.” It also had a high degree of specificity not normally seen in these types of warnings (at least what I have seen starting in October 1985 thru October 2016).

The Embassy is monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts, and U.S. citizens should be advised to avoid large gatherings over the next 48 hours.

During the last 35 years I do not recall a single instance in which the State Department issued a warning like this specifying a specific time period for vigilance. The warning itself implies intelligence that provided a specific timeframe for the attack. So, when the attack does not happen, you need to go back to the analysts and ask, WTF!!! If the analysts had said, “Oh, wait, the Russians boosted security at the Crocus City Hall on 8 March and scared off the attack,” then the next question should have been, “Do you still believe there will be another attempt?” The analysts could have said yes, no or maybe.

So, if you believe the intelligence is credible then it was incumbent on the USG to issue another warning to continue to avoid large gatherings, such as concert halls. The USG did not do that.

It is “extremely unclear” how France can fulfill promises by President Emmanuel Macron to supply more military aid to Ukraine, as the government in Paris is currently struggling with plans for spending cuts, Le Monde has reported.

French authorities are looking to save €10 billion ($10.8 billion) this year amid a budget deficit of €144.5 billion ($156 billion) and a 2024 growth forecast reduced to just 1%.

The French government said last month that the €10 billion cut could, among other things, be achieved by reducing the expenses of all its ministries and slicing public policies, including development aid and subsidies for building renovation.

Mar 27, 2024

Featured • Reminiscence of the Future... : When Mr. Patrushev..., Andrei Martyanov, Mar 26, 2024

When Mr. Patrushev...

... says something, it means he has huge reasons to do so, unlike it is the case with spokespersons circus in the West who simply lie to your face. Same goes for Mr. Bortnikov--the Director of FSB [link moved here from omitted Russian text for brevity]....

Translation: MOSCOW, March 26 – RIA Novosti. The testimony of those detained in the case of the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall confirms the Ukrainian trace, FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov told journalist Pavel Zarubin, who posted the video on the Telegram channel. “The primary data that we received from the detainees confirms this. Therefore, we will further refine it information that should show us whether the presence and participation of the Ukrainian side is real or not. In any case, for now there is reason to say that this is exactly the case,” said the head of the special service.

Bortnikov also pointed out the obvious "interest" of Western special services in Crocus-City atrocity. So, as you can see--404 and Budanov are already being dealt with, now it is the matter of establishing the main "customer". This may take some time but we already know the circle of suspects and they are not in 404. As I pointed out not for once, at this stage neither Russia as a state nor Russians as people give a flying fuck about what West thinks or says, only what it does. Russia reacts appropriately. As Mr. Medvedev said (in Russian)--it would be good for France to send a couple of regiments to Russia to be annihilated. This is your answer in regards to the "direct conflict" with NATO. Russia will kill anyone who enters 404. It is one thing when Petr Tolstoy says it, however important MP he is, totally another when the deputy chair of Russia's Security Council says so. Medvedev is NOT a "bad cop" in tandem with "good cop" Putin--he is a genuine hawk who hates the West viscerally. He has some reasons for that. So, for NATO it is the time to exhale and praise the Lord that Vladimir Putin won these elections. Medvedev may yet run in the future and, believe me, he will win. Meanwhile, for French troops, if they ever make it--Welcome to Hell.

“Of course, the speed with which they were able to [come to such forthright conclusions] is astonishing. It took them only a few hours to get to a microphone, turn on the lights, summon the press and draw a conclusion about who is to blame for this horribly bloody terrorist attack,” Zakharova said. “I think they’ve boxed themselves into a corner, because as soon as they started screaming that it was ISIS, all those people who work in international relations, who are political scientists and experts, recalled and reminded everyone else what ISIS really is,” the diplomat said. “You are behind all those ISIS-type structures, you – the United States, Great Britain – yourselves brought them into being,” she concluded.

Malofeev and the Tsargrad [media] group are not alone in saying the Crocus City Hall attack should lead to intensification of the military operations in the Ukraine. “They struck at us, at our civilians, moreover, in the very center of our Homeland. This is an act of war. It needs to be answered as we have said many times. It must finally be answered with the massive real use of weapons that will allow us to win this war. We must give the civilian population [in the Ukraine] 48 hours to leave the cities and then strike with all our might. Then the war will end quickly, which means that the sponsorship of terrorist attacks will stop. No Americans and British, without the Armed Forces of Ukraine, without Kiev, without the current war, will sponsor terrorist attacks on the territory of Russia.”

For the time being, there has been no impact of the Crocus attack and the Moscow media debate on the operational or strategic plans under way in the Ukraine. The intensification of the General Staff’s offensive along the line of contact in the Donbass; in the electric war against Kharkov and other cities east of the Dnieper River; and in the missile attacks on targets from Kiev to Lvov – reported here — commenced before the Moscow events; they are continuing as planned.

“Those in political command who have been favouring an outcome to the war that falls short of regime change in Kiev and extension of demilitarization to the Polish border,” observes a Moscow political source, “have lost their voice since Saturday night.”

When asked whether the US, Britain and Ukraine could be behind the terrorist attack, the FSB chief responded: “We think that this is so. In any case, we are now talking about the information that we have. This is general information, but they [investigators] also have concrete results.”

Mar 26, 2024

Featured • Cut Off War Funds by Stopping the Congressional Discharge Petition, John V. Walsh, Antiwar.com, Mar 26, 2024

If a majority of House members sign a petition to bring a bill out of a committee where it is being considered (that is, “discharge” the committee of responsibility and put the matter in the hands of the entire House), then the bill comes to the floor for a vote. Thus, the Speaker can be bypassed if a majority signs such a petition.

Such a Discharge Petition has been initiated by the ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee, James McGovern. McGovern signed and began to circulate the Petition on March 12, and as of March 22, it had garnered 191 signatures, all but one of them Democrats!

Progressives for Genocide and War

The 191 Democrat signatures (out of 213 in the House) on the nefarious Discharge Petition is yet another body blow to the idea that the Democrat Party is a party of peace. But what about the Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus? Among their goals they list: “Ending our forever wars, cutting the bloated Pentagon budget, and prioritizing diplomacy.”

There are about 96 voting House members in the Progressive Caucus and 74 of these have signed on to the Discharge Petition! Only 22 members of the Progressive Caucus, a distinct minority, have not signed the pro-genocide, prowar Petition. We should encourage these 22 to stick to their position; without them the Discharge Petition may gather enough support to pass.

This is of such importance that it is worth providing a list of the courageous Representatives that deserve support in their opposition to the Discharge Petition. Here they are (in alphabetical order):

Bowman, Jamaal, (NY); Bush, Cori, (MO); Carson, Andre, (IN); Casar, Greg, (TX); Castro, Joaquín, (TX); Cherfilus-McCormack, Sheila, (FL); Dingell, Debbie, (MI); Frost, Maxwell, (FL); Garcia, Jesus G. “Chuy,” (IL); Grijalva, Raul, (CA); Gomez, Jimmy, (CA); Khanna, Ro, (CA); Lee, Barbara, (CA); Lee, Summer, (PA); Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandra, (NY); Omar, Ilhan (MN); Pocan, Mark, (WI); Presley, Ayanna, (MA); Ramirez, Delia, (IL); Tlaib, Rashida, (MI); Velazquez, Nydia, (NY); Watson-Coleman, Bonnie, (NJ).... If any of these is your Congressperson, contact them and tell them you respect and support their position on the Discharge Petition. But if your Congressional Rep is one of the 191 who have signed onto the petition, then tell them to remove their signature before it is too late.

CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES HERE

What about support for the Ukraine proxy war? Nothing can justify omnicide

Unfortunately, there are many inside and Congress and out who support the Ukraine proxy war. Some of them argue that they support the Senate bill because it has funding for arms to Ukraine. But because the same bill contains arms for Israel, this comes down to arguing that supporting a genocide is justified in order to get support for the Ukraine proxy war. Remember what we said at the very outset. Nothing can justify support for a genocide – and certainly support for another war cannot do so.

In fact, there is one thing that is worse than genocide and that is omnicide, the destruction or near destruction of the human species in a nuclear war. And the Ukraine proxy war puts us on the road to nuclear war with the world’s most powerful nuclear armed force, Russia. Similarly, arming of Taiwan against China puts us on the road to nuclear omnicide.

Ukrainian intel, SBU and GUR, have been using the “Islamic” terror galaxy as they please since the first Chechnya war in the mid-1990s. Milley and Nuland of course knew it, as there were serious rifts in the past, for instance, between GUR and the CIA. Following the symbiosis of any Ukrainian government post-1991 with assorted terror/jihadi outfits, Kiev post-Maidan turbo-charged these connections especially with Idlib gangs, as well as north Caucasus outfits, from the Chechen Shishani to ISIS in Syria and then ISIS-K. GUR routinely aims to recruit ISIS and ISIS-K denizens via online chat rooms. Exactly the modus operandi that led to Crocus. One “Azan” association, founded in 2017 by Anvar Derkach, a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, actually facilitates terrorist life in Ukraine, Tatars from Crimea included – from lodging to juridical assistance.

The FSB investigation is establishing a trail: Crocus was planned by pros – and certainly not by a bunch of low-IQ Tajik dregs. Not by ISIS-K, but by GUR. A classic false flag, with the clueless Tajiks under the impression that they were working for ISIS-K. The FSB investigation is also unveiling the standard modus operandi of online terror, everywhere. A recruiter focuses on a specific profile; adapts himself to the candidate, especially his – low – IQ; provides him with the minimum necessary for a job; then the candidate/executor become disposable. Everyone in Russia remembers that during the first attack on the Crimea bridge, the driver of the kamikaze truck was blissfully unaware of what he was carrying.

As for ISIS, everyone seriously following West Asia knows that’s a gigantic diversionist scam, complete with the Americans transferring ISIS operatives from the Al-Tanf base to the eastern Euphrates, and then to Afghanistan after the Hegemon’s humiliating “withdrawal”. Project ISIS-K actually started in 2021, after it became pointless to use ISIS goons imported from Syria to block the relentless progress of the Taliban. Ace Russian war correspondent Marat Khairullin has added another juicy morsel to this funky salad: he convincingly unveils the MI6 angle in the Crocus City Hall terror attack (in English here, in two parts, posted by “S”). The FSB is right in the middle of the painstaking process of cracking most, if not all ISIS-K-CIA/MI6 connections. Once it’s all established, there will be hell to pay.

Mar 25, 2024

Featured • Macron’s Psycho-Play to Keep Aloft the Punctured Balloon of a ‘Geo-Political EU’, Alastair Crooke, Mar 25, 2024

 • Dmitry Trenin: The American explanation for the Moscow terror attack doesn’t add up, RT, Mar 25, 2024

Russian foreign policy could change significantly, depending on the results of the investigation into the atrocity.

The heinous act of terrorism at the Crocus City Hall concert venue just outside Moscow on Friday night – which is confirmed to have killed more than 130 people at the time of writing – has perhaps shaken Russia more than anything since a similar attack on a theater in the capital in 2002.

This latest atrocity will certainly have a major impact on the Russian people’s consciousness and the nation’s public security. It could also lead to serious changes in Moscow’s foreign policy, depending on the results of the investigation into the source of the attack and its masterminds. Considering the enormously high stakes involved in its findings and conclusions, there is no doubt that the investigation will have to be incredibly thorough.

The US government’s version of an Islamic State connection to the attack has been met with skepticism by Russian officials and commentators. Firstly, they were surprised by how quickly – virtually within minutes – Washington pointed the finger at the group. What also drew the attention of Russian observers was the US reference to an IS-linked news site which had claimed responsibility for the crime. Normally, all such sources are subjected to thorough checks. But not this time. Figures in Russia have also noted that American spokesmen immediately, and without prompting, declared that Ukraine was in no way linked to the act of terror.

Other criticisms of the American version include the style of the attack (no political statements or demands were made); the admission by one of the captured attackers that he had shot innocent people for money; and the fact that this was not planned as a suicide operation....

The direction of Putin’s thinking was revealed by the two facts – not conjectures – he raised: that the terrorists, having fled the scene of the assault, had been apprehended not far (100km or so) from the Ukrainian border, and that “information” had been obtained that they intended to cross the border into Ukraine, where “they had contacts.”

At this point, nothing is firmly established. The results of the Russian investigation will be enormously important. If Moscow concludes that the attack was conceived, planned, and organized by the Ukrainians – say, the military intelligence agency GUR – Putin’s public warning would logically mean that the agency’s leaders will not just be “legitimate” targets, but priority ones for Russia. Since an attack of such gravity would almost certainly have required the approval of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, the “guarantee” that Putin informally gave to foreign leaders (including Israel’s then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett) that Russia would not target Zelensky personally, would presumably be lifted. If so, Moscow would be removing one of its most important self-imposed constraints – not to touch Kiev's senior leadership.

The Crocus City terrorist attack seemingly fits into a pattern...

Zakharova noted that a number of factors directly and indirectly indicate the US authorities’ involvement in sponsoring the Ukrainian terrorism.

"Billions of dollar and an unprecedented amount of weapons, invested without accountability and with use of corruption schemes into the Kiev regime, the aggressive rhetoric regarding Russia, the rabid nationalism, the ban for peace talks on Ukraine, the endless calls for a force resolution of the conflict, the refusal to condemn the years-long terror attacks, carried out by the Kiev regime, and the massive informational and political support of any, even the most atrocious actions of Zelensky," she listed.

The spokeswoman also noted that previously, the US intervention in Middle Eastern affairs has led to the emergence, strengthening and institutionalization of a number of radical and terrorist groups that remain active in the region even today.

"What is the logic, you may ask? Money and power. And, considering the international legal ban on direct interventions, it is also about sowing a ‘controlled chaos’ and reshaping the world order by the hands of terrorists," she continued. "Attention, a question for the White House: are you sure it was ISIS, won’t you change your mind later?"

Some Western banks are lobbying against an EU plan to use profits made by Russian central bank funds that are frozen in Europe to arm Ukraine, Reuters reported on Thursday.

The European Commission has proposed sending up to 3 billion euros to Ukraine per year using the revenue. About 90% would go to a fund called the “European Peace Facility” that can be used to buy weapons for Ukraine, and the remaining funds would go to the EU’s central budget for other types of aid.

Russia has slammed the plan and has vowed to respond. “This is outright banditry and theft. These actions are a gross and unprecedented violation of basic international norms. We said that we would respond, and so we shall,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday.

Sources told Reuters that banks fear they could be held liable by Russia in the future for being involved in the transaction. The report said once sanctions on Russia are eased or lifted, they could face decades of legal action.

The banks also worry the move would erode trust in the Western banking system. One source said it would set a bad precedent and that stealing the funds would amount to the “weaponization of foreign-held reserves and assets.”

Mar 24, 2024

Featured • Full-Spectrum Psyop: US Whips Up Fear of Russian Bugaboo to ‘Subjugate Europe’, Sputnik International, Mar 23, 2024

“For the United States, the war in Ukraine has failed as a means of weakening Russia so that they can proceed with preparations to fight China. But it has succeeded spectacularly as a means of subjugating Europe. Washington now firmly has its knees on the neck of Europe,” veteran international relations and Russian affairs expert Dr. Gilbert Doctorow told Sputnik.

Economically and politically, the US has been able to extract major concessions from the Europeans over the past two years, plucking hundreds of manufacturers from the continent thanks to an energy crisis sparked by the bloc’s “suicidal” decision to cut off Russian energy supplies, forcing the EU to purchase American LNG at four times the cost, and even trying to saddle Brussels with economic and military aid to Ukraine as Congress remains deadlocked over a $61 billion aid package.

“Here in Europe, the war is now being used to whip up popular enthusiasm for war mobilization of the domestic economies and subjugation of the populace to authoritarian and unlimited powers of the ruling elite,” Doctorow said.

“What remains of free speech and other freedoms can be snuffed out in war hysteria. Moreover, the war fever is being used by [European Commission President Ursula] von der Leyen and the EU Commission in a bid to draw more power into Brussels at the expense of the national governments,” Doctorow warned.

“Some countries are resisting, for example Prime Minister [Mark] Rutte of the Netherlands and even the mealy-mouthed German Chancellor [Olaf Scholz, ed.] are publicly opposed to the proposal of a European debt issuance to finance subsidies to the military production companies, all in spite of van der Leyen. Meanwhile, Macron is on the other side, pushing for greater European centralization for which is the proposed common investment in defense is a nice instrument,” the observer added.

Russia’s military buildup “has been reactive to new challenges from the West,” Doctorow stressed, pointing out, for example, that “until the decision of Finland and Sweden to join NATO, Russia had almost no troops on its northwest border. Now, in response to new threats from the northern neighbors, that is being rectified by a big military build-up on the Russian side.”

Something similar can be said of defense budgets, with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute recently estimating that Russia’s defense budget amounted to $65.9 billion in 2021 – a fraction of NATO spending of $1.16 trillion ($753.5 billion of that by the US alone) the same year. Even in 2024, with the proxy war with NATO in Ukraine raging and intensifying, Russia plans to spend the equivalent of $140 billion, still just a fraction of the Western bloc, which has again accounted for more than half of all military spending worldwide this year.

Ultimately, Dr. Doctorow emphasized, Western governments are following an old playbook.

“An aggressive foreign policy stand is almost always a convenient way of distracting attention away from domestic failures. And thanks to the boomerang of Western sanctions, European economies are doing very poorly as we go into the June elections” to the European Parliament, the observer summed up.

Strengthening nuclear deterrence could be the solution to the real problem of restoring strategic stability, which has been seriously disrupted by the ongoing and escalating conflict. To begin with, it is worth rethinking the concept of deterrence and, in the process, changing its name.

For example, instead of a passive, we should talk about an active form. The adversary should not remain in a state of comfort, believing that the war he is waging with the help of another country will not affect him in any way. In other words, it is necessary to put fear back into the minds and hearts of the enemy’s leaders. The beneficial sort of fear, it’s worth stressing.

It must also be recognized that the limits of purely verbal intervention have been exhausted at this stage of the Ukrainian conflict. Channels of communication all the way to the top must remain open around the clock, but the most important messages at this stage must be sent through concrete steps: doctrinal changes; military exercises to test them; underwater and aerial patrols along the coasts of the likely enemy; warnings about preparations for nuclear tests and the tests themselves; the imposition of no-fly zones over part of the Black Sea, and so on. The point of these actions is not only to demonstrate determination and readiness to use available capabilities to protect Russia’s vital interests, but –most importantly– to bring the enemy to a halt and encourage it to engage in serious dialogue.

The escalation ladder does not end here. Military-technical steps can be followed by real acts, warnings of which have already been given: for example, attacks on air bases and supply centers on the territory of NATO countries, and so on. There is no need to go further. We simply need to understand, and help the enemy to understand, that strategic stability in the real, not narrow, technical sense of the word is not compatible with armed conflict between nuclear powers, even if (for the time being) it is being waged indirectly.

It is unlikely that the enemy will accept this state of affairs easily and immediately. At the very least, they will need to realize that this is our position and draw the appropriate conclusions.

It is time for us to start revising the conceptual apparatus we use in matters of security strategy. We talk about international security, strategic stability, deterrence, arms control, nuclear non-proliferation and so on. These concepts emerged in the course of the development of Western – mainly American – political thought and found immediate practical application in US foreign policy. They are based on existing realities but adapted to American foreign policy objectives. We have tried to adapt them to our needs, but with mixed success.

It is time to move on and develop our own concepts that reflect Russia’s position in the world as well as its needs.

But we already know one thing for sure — that the West has been involved with facilitating a series of terrorist attacks against Russians since the start of the special military operation. What else do you call the artillery and missile strikes on Russian civilians in the Donbass,] and in Belgorod, with munitions that were supplied by the United States and other major NATO countries? At a minimum, that makes western powers an accessory to an act of terror.

...However, it is also important to note the President Joe Biden has said nothing, and has made no contact with Vladimir Putin to express sorrow or empathy. Quite a contrast with Biden’s actions in the wake of the news that Alexey Navalny, a political opponent of Vladimir Putin, had died. Biden was quick to express his fake grief for the death of Navalny....

The one thing I know for certain is that this attack is going to strengthen the will of President Putin, the Russian general staff, and Russia’s intelligence service to put an end to NATO meddling in Ukraine, and the ability of NATO proxies to attack the Russian people. Whoever approved this badly miscalculated and will pay a terrible, but well deserved, price.

Pointing out the fact that the terrorists were apprehended while fleeing towards Ukraine, Ritter remarked how “people of violence” have a tendency to “navigate towards their ‘true north’” at the end of the day.

“What I mean by that is, let's take a special forces team operating behind enemy lines: if they're compromised, they try to go home, they try to escape and evade towards the friendly lines,” he explained. “ISIS has loyalty to their perverted version of religion, God. Their ‘true north’ is to become martyrs, to navigate home to heaven.”

“But that's not what these terrorists did,” he continued. “Their true north was Ukraine, and they were navigating toward Ukraine. And that's all we need to know about this. This was an attack that was linked to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Who was behind this attack? Who are the masterminds? The Russian security services will find out. But whoever they are, they reside in Ukraine.”

The Putin administration is clearly wary of pointing a finger at Kiev for this outrage. But the Russian public is surely going to put enormous pressure on the Kremlin to face up to the facts and to do something more than just another ‘revenge attack’ on Ukrainian military infrastructure such as was carried out several days ago in response to the latest Ukrainian incursions and missile attacks in the Russian border province of Belgorod, near Ukraine’s second city of Kharkov.

There surely will be those Russian patriots who will call for a decapitating strike on Kiev to get rid of Zelensky and the neo-Nazis who de facto control his government at one blow. This has been achievable at any moment over the course of the past two years but was not done by the Kremlin for reasons that have nothing to do with its Christian faith guided humanitarian values.

No, the reason was to prevent what has been until recently a conventional war contained within certain rules of conduct degenerating into a partisan war without rules such as you commonly see in fratricidal military conflict.

The fact today is that with the upsurge of spectacular terrorist attacks on and inside Russia Ukraine is de facto already engaged in all-out ‘partisan’ style warfare. The fact is that with the threat of a French directed invasion force entering Ukraine set out in the past week, with the delivery of F-16s to Kiev approaching, and with the delivery of nuclear enabled German Taurus cruise missiles still under discussion, the time for end-game division of what remains of Ukraine among the interested parties is here and now.

The logic of the U.S. encouragement to Kiev to perpetrate exactly this kind of atrocity is obvious to anyone with eyes to see. It was precisely attacks like this, as for example during the Chechen wars and the Beslan school siege-massacre that Putin was enraged and responded violently. The decapitation of Kiev now will be very convenient also for Washington.

Mar 23, 2024

Featured • UPDATED: Four Terrorists Detained on their way to Ukraine, Number of Victims Growing in Moscow, SouthFront, Mar 23, 2024

The FSB confirmed that the terrorists had contacts on the Ukrainian side. According to the Russian special services, new weapons for the terrorists were prepared in advance in a cache near the border.

FSB Central Control Center: The terrorists tried to cross the Russian-Ukrainian border and had contacts with the Ukrainian side. The weapons for this purpose (to break through the border) were prepared in advance in a cache.

Most likely, Ukrainian special forces were waiting for the terrorists near the border. Army units are also involved in search activities near the border.

There is reportedly the second car with terrorists who are yet to be captured. More accomplices are yet to be detained.

The MSM, Ukraine and NATO states are waging an informational campaign to hide Ukrainian guilt and point on ISIS. However, the analysis of the attack raises a lot of suspicions. Indeed, the terrorist attack was well planned and competent actions of the attackers allowed them to execute the massacre and flee the scene (but not to hide in Ukraine); but the attack is not similar to the terror methods used by ISIS militants. Often, such mass terrorist attacks are carried out, in “one way”, no escape is planned in advance. Such terrorist attacks are usually accompanied by hostage-taking and political demands, gaining the maximum attention to the situation. But in the Crocus City Hall, the terrorists quickly executed as many people as possible, set the building on fire for the sake of distraction and hastily departed by car in the only possible direction for salvation – to Ukraine. Surrender alive is also unusual for ordinary terrorists. (emphasis in original)

Hungary looks like a completely normal country. We have a calm and rational mindset, and if you come to Brussels and talk to politicians, you will be surprised. There is a military mood, military language, military logic. The leaders talk as if they are waging their own war against Russia. And now they are saying that soldiers should be stationed in Ukraine. It is not clear exactly what they mean, where they should be stationed, with what weapons and for what purposes. But they have already begun to prepare for the fact that in this situation it will be quite natural if Western European countries deploy military posts on the territory of Ukraine, which shocks Hungarians. Therefore, I felt as if I had entered another galaxy, and we must be careful not to fall into the psychosis of these twenty or so state leaders. [How far are Western leaders willing to go in terms of supporting Ukraine? The most disturbing thing about this whole story is that two or three months ago it was unthinkable, now, two or three months later, it becomes an ordinary event." That's what I said - the worse, the better. Ukraine attacked the Belgorod region. Where is Ukraine's energy sector now? Russia has always needed a good kick in the ass for it to act. So, let NATO troops enter Ukraine. The war will end much faster then. And the West will get a lesson for memory that it is bad to fight with Russia.

Ukraine and the West have resorted to false flag operations to persuade everyone that ISIS was behind the terror attack in the Crocus City Hall concert venue near Moscow, said Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Sputnik's parent media group Rossiya Segodnya.

The head of the media group stressed that the names and faces of the perpetrators are already known to authorities and that the terrorists gave everything away during interrogation.

“It immediately became obvious why US media were claiming in unison that it was ISIS," she said.

Simonyan explained that the perpetrators were chosen to carry out the attack in a manner that would allow the West to persuade the international community that ISIS was behind the attack.

“Basic sleight of hand. The level of a railway thimble-rigger," she added." It has nothing to do with ISIS. It's Ukrainians."

She added that the enthusiasm displayed by Western media when they tried to persuade everyone that ISIS was responsible even before arrests were made gave them away completely.

“This is not ISIS. This is a well-coordinated team of several other, also widely known, abbreviations," Simonyan concluded.

The shooting occurred on Friday evening in the Crocus City Hall concert venue just outside Moscow and was followed by a massive fire, claiming at least 143 lives.

"We were on the verge of a reasonable negotiation several months ago before Putin's re-election and Zelensky's military degradation. The US leaders got wind of the possibility and gave Zelensky the ultimatum-'No negotiations or settlement or we won't support your government with the $45 billion in non-military funds [that Ukraine is now receiving annually],'" the source told the journalist.

According to Hersh's information, US intelligence community recognises that "Ukraine has little chance of winning..."

On the “Usual Suspects” list we have Ukraine and we have ISIS. A good case can be made for both. I am posting three videos — some of it is repetitive — that discusses the attack and the very odd behavior of the Biden Administration....

What makes the entire situation so bizarre and questionable in terms of what the United States knew, and when it knew it, is that the State Department issued a statement within two hours of the bombing — remember, we still did not know how many attackers, what kind of weapons, how many casualties, and whether or not, they were hostages — declaring that Ukraine was not responsible for this attack. How did State Department know that? It’s strongly suggests that the United States had intelligence, which did not share with Moscow....

Do you think that is just a happy coincidence that the Biden White House is bemoaning Ukraine taking “unauthorized brazen actions” on the same day there is a massive terrorist attack in Moscow? I don’t believe in coincidence. I think the Biden ministration was trying to get out ahead of an attack that they knew was coming.

Some claims have emerged late in the day with ISIS, allegedly, taking credit for the attack. What makes that interesting is that we have evidence that some members of ISIS have been fighting in Ukraine against Russia, so this does not necessarily exonerate, either Ukraine or the United States.

Anyway, I deal with these issues from different perspectives in the following videos [linked at the post]...

As US policy analyst Jeffrey Sachs explained in an interview this week with Russia-hating podcaster Piers Morgan, Putin’s popularity and reelection reflect the will of the Russian people. “It’s part of Russian culture,” said Sachs, who advised the Moscow and Kiev governments after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

“He’s a strong leader. The Russian people expect a strong leader, and we have to deal with a strong leader in Russia.” Therein lies the problem. Team America is unwilling to accept strong leadership of Russia with broad public support. Having failed to cripple Russia or its leadership through the proxy war in Ukraine, the US and its allies are in no mood to accept the political reality in Moscow. The political pouting was so bad in Berlin that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government refused to refer to Putin as Russia’s president. This is the same government that is mulling plans to ban one of Germany’s most popular opposition parties. However, for all the Western criticism of Putin and his policies, it’s not easy to argue that he doesn’t try to represent the interests of the Russian people. Unlike most Western leaders, Putin is on the side of his own citizens. He hit the nail on the head when he said Western attacks were directed not at him, but at “the forces that stand behind me, which seek to strengthen Russia – to improve its sovereignty, defense, and economic independence.”

Mar 22, 2024

Featured • Russian Strikes Paralyze Ukraine's Power Grid: Here's What Was Hit, Sputnik International, Mar 22, 2024
 • Ukraine's Energy System Subjected to Largest Attack of All Time - Ukrenergo Head, Sputnik International, Mar 22, 2024
 • Military Overview: Russian Massive Attack Ruins Ukraine's Energy System, SouthFront, Mar 22, 2024
 • WATCH Russian missile knock out Dnieper hydroelectric plant, RT, Mar 22, 2024
 • Total blackout in major Ukrainian city – mayor, RT, Mar 22, 2024
This attack is on a different, larger scale, hitting more expensive and hard-to-repair dual-use targets than before. Ukraine has no effective defense. Clearly, Russia seeks to bring down the Zelensky regime. The weather is warming up; there is less danger of civilians freezing to death. But daily life and the productivity of the remaining Ukrainian economy are taking a serious hits along with Ukraine's military capacity. Russia cannot tolerate the long-range attacks it is suffering and will eliminate Ukraine's ability to launch them, one way or another. Putin has an overwhelming popular mandate now. Learning is still slow in the West, so Ukrainians suffer.

Featured • Western Hatred of Russia Rooted in Support for Nazis and Bureaucratic Sclerosis, Larry Johnson, Mar 21, 2024
Doesn't everybody know this? Weiner's book is on our shelf; we read it years ago. None of this should surprise anyone, or frankly even need to be said. Where are our courageous academics and NGOs?

 • How the West Upended the World’s Best Figure Skater To Undermine Russia, Rick Sterling, Antiwar.com, Mar 22, 2024
Great detailed reporting on how Russophobia is engineered in one specific but very non-trivial incident.

 • Russia Says It Increased Artillery Shell Production By 150% in Past Year, Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, Mar 21, 2024

Mar 21, 2024

Featured • Scott Ritter: Russia Beats NATO; Israel Beating Itself, Judging Freedom, Mar 20, 2024
A wide-ranging, informed discussion. One topic is nuclear modernization, in the wider context of the new arms race. Ritter does not know the cost details and speaks loosely about both that and the prospects of modernization success, but the overall thrust of his argument is sound, IMO. As he emphasizes, the government lies about defense procurement all the time.

His points about Russia and Ukraine are very well-informed and important for most people to hear.

 • A Brief History of NATO and Ukraine, Larry Johnson, Mar 20, 2024

Mar 20, 2024

Featured • SITREP 3/19/24: French Military Openly Floats 20,000 Troop Deployment, Simplicius, Mar 20, 2024

I said this on X, but I’ll repeat it here: in many ways the Cold War was a far safer time because it had more serious, non-psychopathic people in charge who actually respected the dangers of nuclear holocaust. Today’s leaders are all totally immorally degraded puppets, likely placed in charge only on the basis of kompromat, and no longer have the necessary professional qualities or discretion of their forebears for the seriousness of the situation. Society, more stupefied by bread and circuses than ever, of course, is blind to their leaders’ total ignorance and dangerous provocations...

Here’s two new very good pieces from M.K. Bhadrakumar. The first entitled ‘Novorossiya’ rising from ashes like phoenix’, which summarizes a lot of the points discussed here, with Europe’s terminal agony regarding U.S.’s potential withdrawal amid the realization of their own inconsequentiality.

The second even more nourishingly erudite one is: ‘France all dressed up and nowhere to go’. If you have only time for one, I strongly recommend treating yourself to the second one.

Russian intelligence has alleged that France is preparing a military contingent of 2,000 troops to be deployed on the ground in Ukraine. The claim was made by Director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Sergey Naryshkin on Tuesday, and was quickly picked up in international headlines, also given it is rare for him to make statements like this.

"The current leadership of the country [France] does not care about the deaths of ordinary French people or about the concerns of the generals," Naryshkin said as translated in TASS. "According to information coming to the Russian SVR, a contingent to be sent to Ukraine is already being prepared. Initially, it will include around 2,000 troops."

The Russian intelligence chief further said the French military "fears that such a large military unit cannot be transferred and stationed in Ukraine unnoticed."

"It will thus become a legitimate priority target for attacks by the Russian armed forces. This means that it will suffer the fate of all the French who have ever come to the Russian world with a sword," Naryshkin emphasized. The past months have seen instances where Moscow claimed its forces took out French mercenaries in Kharkiv, but neither the Ukraine nor France ever verified this. Russia is now saying it will target foreign troops in Ukraine as a "priority".

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Ukraine has lost more than 71,000 soldiers and over 11,000 units of various weapons since the start of the year, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Wednesday.

"In general, the losses of the Ukrainian armed forces during this period, that is, since the beginning of this year, exceeded 71,000 people and 11,000 units of various weapons. This is almost three times higher than the same period last year," Shoigu said at a meeting with senior military.

Ukraine has also lost four Abrams tanks, five Leopard tanks, six HIMARS multiple rocket launcher systems and five Patriot complexes, the minister added.

The Ukrainian forces have lost 3,501 soldiers killed and injured during the attacks on Russian border settlements in Belgorod and Kursk regions, Shoigu added....

Russian air defenses struck down 419 drones and 67 missiles that were launched by Ukrainian troops against Russian targets during the three days of presidential voting, Shoigu said....

The Ukrainian armed forces targeted polling places across Russia during last week’s presidential election with tacit approval of their Western military advisers, Sergei Shoigu said.

"They intentionally targeted polling places and government institutions while civilians were present there. Both the command of the Ukrainian armed forces and their Western advisers knew it," Shoigu told a ministerial meeting in Moscow.

Mar 19, 2024

Featured • Ukraine's Demographics Again Dictate To End The Fight, Moon of Alabama, Mar 19, 2024

Neither Luttwak nor Graham seem to have any knowledge of Ukraine's demography. I pointed out six month ago that there are hardly a significant number of 18 to 25 year old left in Ukraine. If that cohort gets further diminished by senseless dying Ukraine's future will be even more bleak than it is now. Even the British nuts who earlier proposed to draft 18 year old Ukrainians have learned to shut up about it....

But the real population number in the areas under control of the Ukrainian government is by now only about 20 million, half of which are people of retirement age. Drafting the few men of age 18 to 25 will not help to win the war but will, over time, further depopulate Ukraine....

There are currently more daily losses in the Ukrainian army than newly mobilized men joining it. To surrender to the Russian forces is seen as a real opportunity.

It is high time for Ukraine to give up. Its supporters should urge it to do so.

As Vershinin closes:

Unfortunately, many in the West have a very cavalier attitude that future conflicts will be short and decisive. This is not true for the very reasons outlined above. Even middling global powers have both the geography and the population and industrial resources needed to conduct an attritional war. The thought that any major power would back down in the case of an initial military defeat is wishful thinking at its best. Any conflict between great powers would be viewed by adversary elites as existential and pursued with the full resources available to the state. The resulting war will become attritional and will favour the state which has the economy, doctrine and military structure that is better suited towards this form of conflict.

If the West is serious about a possible great power conflict, it needs to take a hard look at its industrial capacity, mobilisation doctrine and means of waging a protracted war, rather than conducting wargames covering a single month of conflict and hoping that the war will end afterwards. As the Iraq War taught us, hope is not a method.

Make peace you fools.

On Monday, Sputnik’s Critical Hour spoke to Ray McGovern, who served as a CIA analyst for 27 years and co-created Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. McGovern explained Putin’s approach to a possible battle with NATO, as French President Emmanuel Macron has toyed with the idea of putting boots on the ground—a sentiment his Western counterparts have vehemently rejected. “This business about Macron and some of the European leaders saying, ‘oh, my God, we can’t let Putin win in Ukraine,’ it doesn’t really square with what’s reality here because there is no way to prevent Russia from winning in Ukraine except by use of nuclear weapons,” said McGovern. “What [Putin] has done is just reminded people in NATO that if they send troops into Ukraine, there’s going to be a fight with Russia, and a fight with Russia would be very dangerous because they have weapons that NATO doesn’t have—such as hypersonic missiles,” McGovern explained, adding that Russia’s weapons are “fast” and “precise” and can cause a lot of damage without any “nuclear fallout, figuratively or literally”.

“The Western press has taken to accusing Putin of threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons,” McGovern added. “[But] he has not raised the issue of tactical nuclear weapons. It’s the US that is raising this, which makes me suspicious. Does the US realize that there’s no way they can stop Russia in Ukraine short of using tactical nuclear weapons, which in my view happens to be the case?” “And so, they are considering that and preparing the propaganda play by blaming the Russians and specifically Putin,” the former CIA analyst added. Putin spoke to reporters and journalists following his election victory, and said that at “some point” Russia could set up a buffer zone in Kiev-controlled territories in order to protect the Russian population from Ukrainian strikes.

The president explained that if and when Russia considers it appropriate, they will establish a “security zone that would be quite difficult for the adversary to overcome with its weapons, primarily of foreign origin.” “This went back a whole year,” said McGovern of the buffer zones. “[Sergey] Lavrov, the [Russian] Foreign Minister said they will be satisfied with the Donbass and those other two oblasts but, as long as there continues to be longer range artillery and missile range that much farther to the west, they’re going to have to go. “So Putin made that very clear just the other day saying, ‘look, there needs to be a cordon sanitaire. There needs to be a kind of buffer zone, a zone where if you have weapons that you’re aiming at us, it’s got to be that much more towards the West that we will draw this line,’” the analyst clarified.

“As far as what the Ukrainians are trying to do, they’re trying to show in one burst of energy that they really have the initiative, or at least they can take an initiative and they got slaughtered just over the weekend. They’re all trying to show the US Congress that there’s still life in the Ukrainian military—all they need is another $60 billion from Mike Johnson, the speaker of the [US] House,” McGovern added. “In my view, the whole name of the game is to keep it going without an obvious defeat until November, so that Biden has some reasonable prospect of not having to run having lost a war,” he said.

“Ever since its ignominious defeat in the Napoleonic wars, France is entrapped in the predicament of countries that get sandwiched between great powers,” began a provocative article recently published on the Indian Punchline blog. As other European countries have accepted the United States as the great power of the Western world, France has never fully given up its global aspirations, argues M.K. Bhadrakumar.

And what better leader to carry the torch than one who once confided France needs a king and sometimes, according to his critics, appears to see himself as one?

Columnist and political cartoonist Ted Rall joined Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program on Monday to discuss the case of Emmanuel Macron, his comments about the war in the Donbass, and whether the French president’s megalomania borders on the pathological.

“One of the things I used to say during the early days of the war on terror was that the United States should follow the example of France,’ said Rall. “Which back in the 2000s seemed to have accepted its fate as a post-colonial, post-imperialistic power, albeit still an important country in Europe.”

“France, at the time, seemed like it had… accepted that colonialism was a bad idea and that they needed to redirect their resources away from militarism and more toward their own people,” he continued. “Maybe he didn't read his history. Maybe he's too young to remember that glorious period when France, finally in the 80s and 90s, was able to start establishing a major social safety net that created free college and socialized health care and everything else for its people. But he seems to have forgotten all that and he's trying to go backwards.”

As much of the Western world moved towards neoliberalism in the 80s with leaders like US President Ronald Regan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, France went in the opposite direction, elevating Socialist Francois Mitterrand to power. The French leader left a lasting legacy in the country, investing in infrastructure, social programs and grand construction projects. His focus on domestic concerns was largely shared in the 2000s by President Jacques Chirac, who rejected French support for the war in Iraq.

Macron has broken from tradition in a number of ways, implementing neoliberal economic policy and promoting a strident French militarism. Fortunately, according to Rall, his ambitions aren’t shared by most of the French public.

“The good news is, I don't think that the French people – whether we're talking about the populist right, Marine Le Pen's party, or you're talking about the radical left represented by Jean-Luc Melenchon, or – not much of anyone else is in the mood to follow him down this path to destruction,” said the columnist. “And, for that matter, he doesn't really even seem to have much cooperation from other European powers in terms of direct involvement to go and fight in Ukraine, to fight the Russians in Ukraine.”

Rall insisted most French people are more worried about domestic concerns such as the economy, unemployment, and demographic issues rather than the conflict in the Donbass. And the last time the French military was directly involved in a major proxy war was in the 1960s, he noted.

Additionally, Rall claimed many French people are sympathetic to Russia’s position.

“Russia is not a distant country to them,” he claimed. “There are lots and lots of French people who are descended, who are related to Russians. There was a huge white Russian migration after the Russian Revolution to France and very close ties between Russia and France that go back to the Tsarist era.”

Meaningful negotiations between Moscow and Kiev effectively broke down in the spring of 2022, with both sides accusing each other of making unrealistic demands. Russian President Vladimir Putin subsequently said that Ukrainian negotiators had initially agreed to some of Russia’s terms, but then abruptly reneged on the deal. Kiev’s lead negotiator David Arakhamia revealed in November 2023 that his team’s main goal was to “buy time” for the Ukrainian military. Switzerland has proposed to host a major peace summit sometime this year. However, no specific date has been yet set, and no list of potential participants has been revealed.

Mar 18, 2024

Featured • Putin Has Won: What to Expect From His Next Six-Year Term?, Ekaterina Blinova, Sputnik International, Mar 17, 2024
Estafiev is optimistic, I would say, given the structural antagonism in the West, upheld among Western elites by what has become totalizing propaganda. That propaganda has fertilized a latent racism -- something none of us remember happening in the late Cold War -- and brought it to flower, even in much of the arms control and disarmament community which does not recognize it as such. Funding sources typically require buy-in to Russophobia, and anyone can see it in the shibboleths employed in NGO publications, where Russophobic falsities promulgated by propaganda sources such as the New York Times are repeated as if they were self-evident truths.

In today's world, for Western arms control and disarmament professionals, such ignorance -- to put the best face on the matter -- is not an excuse. The Russian foreign policy elite is not the same as it was during the 1990s, when the very existence of the Russian state was in question. Western diktat in the "rules-based international order" will not work. Unconsciously or otherwise, most U.S. Russian experts and foreign policy actors take the 1990s as normative, when millions of Russians were starving, criminal gangs held sway, and the country was being looted -- as some of us saw a sample of even in one short visit, ironically sponsored by the State Department/CIA via USAID.

The re-orientation of Western leaders to a fully-sovereign, economically- and socially-successful Russia, something the West has not seen in a while, is going to be very difficult. Meanwhile Russia's social model and its values are eclipsing the dysfunctional nihilism of the West in the eyes of many. The U.S., for one, is coming apart. Social and value differences have been amplified and weaponized to serve electoral ends as never before.

There will be no progress on nuclear disarmament in the near future. The central barrier is American Exceptionalism, the structural necessity of Empire for our economic elites and the MICIMATT overall, and the arrogance in our foreign policy elites, which are currently career requirements. Instead, the central problem in the nuclear weapons field is advancing peace overall, breaking the intellectual and political stranglehold of the MICIMATT, and the avoidance of deeper war. Being attached to "nuclear weapons" as a singular issue is part of the problem. Most NGOs hide in that, avoiding real political engagement.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, for example, is completely irrelevant on the domestic front as well as in the relationships between nuclear powers, especially in the case of the U.S and Russia, which is what must be repaired in order to avoid nuclear war and -- eventually -- achieve nuclear disarmament.

Featured • Scott Ritter: Putin’s ‘Dedicated Work’ Added to Reinvigorated Russia, Oleg Burunov, Sputnik International, Mar 17, 2024

Speaking to Sputnik, former US Marine Corps Intelligence Officer Scott Ritter looked back at Putin’s previous years of presidency in light of the Russian head of state’s election victory. According to Ritter, the process of reinvigorating the Russian nation was one of the key achievements by Putin. One should understand that this process “didn’t happen in a vacuum” and was “the byproduct of a quarter century of dedicated work on behalf of Vladimir Putin for Russia and the Russian people,” the ex-US Marine Corps intelligence officer said. He recalled Putin’s state of the nation address to the parliament last month, when the Russian president talked about “the pride that Russians have in their country, the pride he has in being a Russian leader, that Russia is a civilization that must be taken into account by the rest of the world, that a world without Russia is a world that cannot exist.”

It seems, however, people “don’t understand where this is coming from,” per Ritter. “You see, the root of all of this passion for Russia comes from the decade of the 1990s, the time when the very existence of the Russian state, of the Russian people, of the Russian nation was being called into question. It came in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was born of the dark times of the failure of perestroika,” which saw former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s “failed gambit to transition from a communist society into one where Western market capitalism could prevail,” Ritter noted.

At the time, he went on, “criminal oligarchs took over, hijacked the Russian economy on behalf of ostensibly western allies, who weren’t true allies, rather people […] who were seeking to dominate Russia politically and economically. This was the decade that Vladimir Putin grew into political prominence,” the former US Marine Corps Intelligence Officer pointed out. “Vladimir Putin was a product of the 1990s. He saw the reality of the 1990s and he understood that Russia could never allow itself to go back to those times. He understood that if Russia didn’t break free of the path that it was headed on during the decade of the 90s, there would be no Russia,” Ritter concluded. (emphasis added)

On Wednesday, US media published sensationalist headlines declaring that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “ready to use” nuclear weapons if the existence of Russia is threatened. But a deeper reading reveals that Putin was only reiterating the longstanding policy of Russia, which is shared by other nuclear powers.

The US fearmongering surrounding Russia is the result of a sort of “Neo-McCarthyism” Mark Sleboda, an international relations and security analyst told Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Wednesday.

“If someone threatened the existence of the US state, they would use nuclear weapons. Putin is saying the exact same thing,” Sleboda explained. “The Western media just loves putting Russia and nukes together in the same sentence. I think it has a certain amount of scaremongering, a kind of neo-McCarthyite effect just by seeing the two words together in a headline.”

Show host Melik Abdul pointed to a panel between US commentators Candace Owens and Chris Cuomo, during which Cuomo refused to acknowledge that Putin is intelligent, Abdul said that it is emblematic of the West’s refusal to “acknowledge basic stuff.”

“I mean, could we agree that Putin is intelligent?” Sleboda responded playfully. “Could we agree that Putin is a human being? [Do] we agree that Putin’s first name is Vladimir? None of these things, I guess, [can] be agreed on because we live in a constant state of hyper neo-McCarthyism,” Sleboda added, noting that the term isn’t quite correct since Russia is no longer communist.

“Maybe Russophobic hysteria” is a better term, he pondered.

“But Vladimir Putin is, obviously, an extremely intelligent and capable leader of his country. He is a thorn in the US hegemony’s side. Numerous US politicians and officials have admitted that, but in the current social-political climate in the United States, it’s simply verboten. It is forbidden to acknowledge things like that,” Sleboda explained. “Let us understand that this is a propaganda bubble that Americans have, to a large part, inflicted on themselves.”Sleboda noted that Russia is not alone in being targeted by this type of propaganda by the US. “It’s not just Putin, of course, this is against any opponent of the US,” he explained. “A country is usually demonized to a caricature vision of one person, one leader, as it was done with [Former Iraqi leader] Saddam Hussein, as it was done with [former Libyan leader Muammar] Gaddafi, as it is done with [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Un.”

He noted that some countries are reduced to a group rather than a single leader but the effect remains the same. “With China… It’s the Chinese Communist Party. Or in Iran, it’s the mullahs.” Ultimately, the goal is to “dehumanize the opponent and then malign it into one easily identifiable evil package in this kind of childish, Manichean representation of the world, to make things easier for the American voter to understand who the enemy is.”

The majority of people, by the way, don’t actually understand the real reason behind Germany’s trepidation at sending the Taurus. It’s not that Germany is somehow more afraid to get involved, considering the fact they’re already the top aid provider besides the U.S.

It has more to do with the fact that, unlike the Storm Shadows, limited to under 250km for the export versions given Ukraine, the Taurus comes stock at well over 500km range, and is reportedly secretly capable of carrying nuclear warheads—a fact the Bundestag indirectly confirmed by declining to answer the question recently, stating it was ‘top secret information’.

That means the Taurus presents a totally different type of strategic threat if used against Russia. From the Russian standpoint, if a Taurus were to be launched into Russian territory, Russia would have no choice but to treat it as a potential nuclear first strike attack from NATO, given that Moscow is less than 500km from Ukrainian territory and there is no way to determine if the missile is nuclear-armed during its inbound flight. This opens up an entirely different can of worms, which would doctrinally give Russian armed forces the allowance to potentially respond to Germany in almost any escalatory measure, up to and including preventative nuclear launch on Berlin.

Germany knows this, which is why the Taurus is off the table. However, they’re now considering their old ‘circular’ game of providing the Taurus to the UK in exchange for UK freeing up its remaining Storm Shadow stocks to Ukraine, etc.

Lastly, it’s very interesting that today, right after Macron’s brawny televised theatrics, Russia struck none other than….Odessa with a huge masterful blow that reportedly wiped out many important people, and has even the Ukrainian side openly wailing from the soul:...

Russian President Vladimir Putin touched on a number of recent developments and hot topics that emerged after the message to the Federal Assembly in an exclusive interview with Dmitry Kiselev, director general of Rossiya Segodnya, Sputnik’s parent media group. President Vladimir Putin has stated very clearly that Russia is not against peace negotiations, but that they cannot be conducted on the basis of proposals put forward by the Kiev regime, Russian political scientist Dmitry Evstafiev told Sputnik. The so-called “Zelensky formula” “will not be discussed in any way,” Evstafiev underscored. Commenting on Vladimir Putin’s interview with Dmitry Kiselev, director general of Rossiya Segodnya, Sputnik’s parent media group, he continued: “Some of our partners have hinted to us about the need to start negotiations… But, first and foremost, [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky’s formula cannot be a starting position. Secondly, any negotiations should lead to the establishment of a lasting peace, and cannot be an instrument of a temporary truce at the front in order to further pump the Kiev regime with weapons.”

According to the analyst, an integral element of any negotiations needs to be “the West’s refusal to supply weapons to Ukraine.” Thirdly, these negotiations need to be conducted in a “public format and must be anchored in public agreements at the political level.” Putin laid out very clearly that Russia needs guarantees, the analyst said. “Guarantees can only be given by responsible political figures representing stable governments of Western countries, and must be offered in the nature of absolutely binding signed documents,” Dmitry Evstafiev said. He singled out the Russian head of state’s remark that there will be no secret temporary agreements with anyone. Russia was, is, and will always be open to negotiations on a settlement in Ukraine, but intends to continue the special military operation until its goals are achieved, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated earlier in the year. Russian and Ukrainian delegations have engaged in several rounds of peace talks, but the negotiations ultimately reached an impasse.

In October 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree stating that Kiev could not hold peace talks as long as Vladimir Putin is president of Russia. In November 2022, Zelensky unveiled a 10-point initiative dubbed a “peace formula.” It included an all-for-all prisoner swap with Russia, security guarantees for Ukraine, and a return to the pre-2014 borders. Moscow has continuously said it is open to peace negotiations as long as Kiev recognizes the territorial gains Russian forces have made since the launch of the special military operation. President Vladimir Putin has issued a warning to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that Russia is prepared to defend itself with all possible means, military analyst Anatoliy Matviychuk told Sputnik. Weighing in on Putin’s interview on March 13, the analyst said: “I believe that Putin is warning the US that you [NATO] expanded and expanded, but as long as you did not affect our living space, we were silent.”

No matter what “plausible intentions,” such as “defense of democracy, or defense against Martians,” might be drummed up to justify any foreign army’s boots on the ground on Russian territory, it would be an intervention, the retired colonel of the Russian Armed Forces underscored. “Intervention is an invasion into the expanses of the economy, into the expanses of finance, into the expanses of military security and, strictly speaking, into vital areas where Russia carries out its life activities. We will defend it with all possible forces and means that we have. And we know that the president has always warned: in the event of a sharp deterioration or even a threat to sovereignty, we will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons. I believe that is his message in this interview,” Anatoliy Matviychuk said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his interview that there has not yet been any need to use tactical nuclear weapons as part of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, but when asked whether such an idea ever occurred to him, he replied, “No, but why?” Russia is prepared to use nuclear weapons if the existence of the Russian state is threatened, the Russian leader said, adding that Russia’s nuclear triad is more advanced than that of any other country. “From the military and technical point of view, we are, of course, ready,” Vladimir Putin said.

Bennett claimed Putin’s convincing victory will frustrate attempts to divide and weaken Russia’s centuries-old civilization. Two years ago, the US-government sponsored Helsinki Commission held a hearing on its plans to balkanize Russia under the pretext of “decolonization.” The country has long been seen as a threat to Western and US hegemony with its vast territory, wealth of resources, and cultural resilience.

Former US Vice President Dick Cheney once proposed carving Russia up into several smaller countries, while ex US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski advocated transforming it into a “loosely confederated” union of republics. The United States employed such tactics in the former Yugoslavia and has openly admitted to funding separatists in China to erode national unity.

“The West understands that with Putin’s victory they have lost the chance to dismember and cannibalize and weaken the Russian government, culture, and people,” said Bennett. “This is significant because the West's strategy has always been to disintegrate and steal Russian resources.”

“This is a great day for Russia and it gives new hope and promise that the future has a greater chance for peace and stability with President Putin at the helm of Russia than it would without him,” he concluded. “Moving forward we will see the Russian people stand with one voice, one heart, and one vision, and they will emerge as a dominant political country as Europe crumbles in the confusion of their own jealousy, envy, greed, and berserk belligerency.”

“It’s becoming manifestly clear to more and more people that Kiev is gonna lose the war,” John Mearsheimer, an American political scientist and Professor at the University of Chicago, told the YouTube channel Duran, referring to the Ukraine conflict. “We can talk about exactly what it means ‘cause that is a very complicated issue, but there’s no question that […] the Russians are going to win,” while Ukraine “is going to suffer a defeat and indeed NATO’s gonna suffer a defeat as well,” Mearsheimer pointed out. According to the pundit, “there’s no plausible strategy” for Kiev and Brussels to rectify the situation, something that he said is a “huge problem and a devastating defeat for the West.”

Some Ukrainian villages and small towns are left with hardly any adult men amid aggressive and indiscriminate mobilization tactics by the army recruiters, who are desperate to refill the ranks of the depleted forces, according to a report by the Washington Post. In an article published on Saturday, the outlet detailed the plight of the village of Makov, in the Khmelnitsky region in Western Ukraine, where virtually every man of fighting age had been killed, wounded, or gone missing with the remaining few being hunted down by the draft officers. “It’s just a fact, most of them are gone,” Larisa Bodna, deputy director of the local school, which keeps a database of students whose parents are deployed, told the outlet.

“People are being caught like dogs on the street,” noted another resident, whose husband was forcefully drafted last year, despite a medical condition that was meant to exempt him from the military service. “The whole village was taken this way,” her mother-in-law added. The newspaper noted that the sense of resentment is steadily growing among the civilian population, with the majority feeling that their men have been targeted disproportionately, compared to larger cities, where it is easier to go into hiding. The residents say that even those already serving in the army and youths below the draft age are being stopped and questioned on the streets. Multiple videos of troops forcing men into vehicles that have surfaced online in recent months, sparking rumors of kidnappings and contributing to panic among the locals.

Ukraine announced a general mobilization shortly after the start of the conflict with Russia in February 2022, but thousands managed to flee to the bordering Romania and Moldova. Following the failed counteroffensive in the summer of last year, Kiev was desperate to replenish the ranks, seeking to mobilize up to 500,000 new recruits. In late January, the Ukrainian lawmakers passed the first reading of a revised mobilization bill aimed at increasing the military ranks by lowering the conscription age from 27 to 25 and tightening draft conditions. The Russian military estimated Kiev’s casualties at over 444,000 killed or badly injured, as of the end of February. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky claimed last month that only 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in two years of hostilities with Russia, a figure that even journalists sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause have called implausibly low.

While answering a reporter’s question on whether US President Joe Biden had been briefed about Putin’s comments, Jean-Pierre responded that the Russian leader was “restating Russia’s nuclear doctrine” but went on to claim that “Russia’s nuclear rhetoric has been reckless and irresponsible throughout this conflict.” Peskov described the White House’s reaction to Putin’s interview as an “absolutely deliberate distortion of the context,” adding that “no threats to use nuclear weapons were made by Putin in this interview.”

He indicated that the president was answering the journalist’s questions rather than making official statements and explained that Putin “was just talking about the reasons that could make the use of nuclear weapons inevitable.” The Kremlin spokesperson also drew attention to the fact that Jean-Pierre had omitted the president’s remark where he stressed that “it has never come into his mind to use tactical nuclear weapons” despite the “various situations” that had emerged on the battlefield. While answering a question about tactical nuclear arms in the interview, Putin stressed that weapons of mass destruction have never been used by Russia in Ukraine. “Weapons exist to be used. We have our own principles and they imply that we are ready to use any weapons, including the ones you mentioned, if we are talking about the existence of the Russian state, in case of a threat to our sovereignty and independence. Everything is written in our Strategy, we haven’t changed it.”

In June 2020, Putin signed a decree on Russia’s nuclear deterrence policy. The document provides for the use of nuclear weapons in a number of cases, one of which is aggression against Russia using conventional weapons that puts the existence of the state at risk. Putin warned that Russia is prepared to use nuclear weapons and considers its arsenal “more advanced than anyone else’s.” Meanwhile, the Russian leader suggested that Washington has enough experts in strategic deterrence, including President Joe Biden himself, to avoid a nuclear conflagration. But he added that if the US abandons its de facto moratorium on nuclear tests, Moscow will do the same.

The Russian Defense Ministry has released an update on the number of foreign mercenaries killed fighting for Ukraine since February 2022.

At least 13,387 foreign mercenaries have traveled to Ukraine to fight for Kiev, according to figures released by the ministry, with some 5,962 of these confirmed killed.

Ukraine’s western neighbor, Poland, which has been one of the strongest supporters of Kiev during the conflict, has provided by far the largest number of mercenaries, with 2,960, the ministry data shows. More than a half of these, some 1,497 Polish nationals, have been killed during the hostilities.

The US, Kiev’s main sponsor and donor of military aid, has provided some 1,113 mercenaries. At least 491 of these have been killed, according to Russian military estimates.

Mar 13, 2024

 • Polish troops would never leave Ukraine – Putin, RT, Mar 13, 2024

Any attempt to send Polish troops into Ukraine could end in a long-term occupation, Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned in an extensive interview with journalist Dmitry Kiselyov, set to be aired by the Russia 1 TV broadcaster and RIA Novosti on Wednesday.

“If Polish troops enter the territory of Ukraine in order to, as they say, secure the Ukrainian-Belarusian border, for example, or in some other places to free up Ukrainian rear military units to participate in hostilities on the front line, then I think that Polish troops will never leave,” Putin said, according to excerpts from the interview.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s talk about maybe sending troops to aid Kiev may have been spurred by three assessments produced by the French military that painted a dire picture of the Ukraine conflict, according to the magazine Marianne. The reports, which have somehow found their way into the weekly’s possession, argued that Ukraine wrecked its Western-trained force in the failed 2023 offensive, has run out of men to mobilize, and that its recent loss in Avdeevka shows it can’t even hold the line against Russia. “Ukraine cannot win this war militarily,” concludes the first report, written in the fall of 2023, following Kiev’s disastrous ground offensive. It praises the Russian forces as the new “tactical and technical” standard of how to run defensive operations and debunks the media myth of “meat assaults.”

For the West to continue pursuing a military solution in Ukraine would be “the most serious error of analysis and judgment,” the classified document said, according to Marianne. Sending French troops to Ukraine would be “unreasonable,” one senior officer wrote. “Make no mistake, up against the Russians we are an army of cheerleaders!” he added. The second report, outlining the prospects for 2024, says that Kiev needs 35,000 men per month but is “recruiting less than half” of that number, while Russia enlists 30,000 volunteers monthly. Meanwhile, the 2023 offensive “tactically destroyed” half of Kiev’s 12 combat brigades. “The West can provide 3D printers to manufacture drones or loitering munitions, but will never be able to print men,” the report said. One solution it advised was sending Western troops to Ukraine to carry out support tasks in the rear, freeing the Ukrainians for frontline duty.

The second report also acknowledged the Western special forces and “soldiers in civilian clothes” had a far greater presence in Ukraine than officially acknowledged, including “quite a few British,” as well as French naval commandos training the Ukrainians. The third and latest report, which had the French observers “in cold sweat,” described the Battle of Avdeevka as a possible “rout” of Ukrainian forces. It described how Russia created “hell” for the Ukrainian troops by using massive glide bombs to inflict more than 1,000 casualties per day. The French document also described the Ukrainian retreat on February 17 as “sudden and unprepared.” At the end of February, Macron made an argument to NATO members that all options for helping Ukraine should be “on the table,” implying the possibility of sending ground troops. The idea was publicly repudiated by most members of the US-led bloc, however.

Russia’s defense industry is turning out nearly three times more artillery shells than its American and European counterparts, according to a NATO intelligence report obtained by CNN. Western powers have scrambled to ramp up production as Ukrainian troops face dire ammunition shortages.

While the US and Europe have the capacity to produce a combined 1.2 million shells annually, Russia’s output has now reached 3 million, the NATO estimate said. Though Washington aims to boost production to 100,000 155mm shells each month by 2025 – up from just 28,000 last September – that target can only be met with a resumption of American aid to Kiev, and would still put US output at less than half of Moscow’s.

According to US officials, Russia is burning through around 10,000 shells per day, vastly outgunning Ukraine’s daily average of just 2,000. The Estonian Defense Ministry has estimated that Kiev would need 200,000 rounds every month to match Russia’s firepower.

....Russian troops are well managed and cared for:

The reports also highlight that contrary to Ukraine "the Russians have managed their reserve troops well, to ensure operational endurance." According to this document, Moscow reinforces its units before they are completely worn out, mixes recruits with experienced troops, ensures regular rest periods in the rear... and "always had a coherent reserve force to manage unforeseen events." This is far from the widespread idea in the West of a Russian army sending its troops to the slaughter without counting...

The Ukrainians on the other side are done with:

"To date, the Ukrainian general staff does not have a critical mass of land forces capable of inter-arms maneuver at the corps level capable of challenging their Russian counterparts to break through its defensive line," concludes this confidential defense report, according to which "the gravest error of analysis and judgment would be to continue to seek exclusively military solutions to stop the hostilities". A French officer summarizes: "It is clear, given the forces present, that Ukraine cannot win this war militarily."

The fall of Avdeevka has shown that the Ukrainian military, even on the defensive, will inevitably lose the fight:

"The Ukrainian armed forces have tactically shown that they do not possess the human and material capabilities [...] to hold a sector of the front that is subjected to the assailant's effort," continues the document. "The Ukrainian failure in Avdiivka shows that, despite the emergency deployment of an 'elite' brigade – the 3rd Azov Air Assault Brigade –, Kiev is not capable of locally restoring a sector of the front that collapses," alerts this last report.

In consequence the Russian forces will simply move on:

What the Russians will do with this tactical success remains to be seen. Will they continue in the current mode of "nibbling and slowly shaking" the entire front line, or will they seek to "break through in depth"? "The terrain behind Avdiivka allows it," signals this recent document, also warning that Western sources tend to "underestimate" the Russians, themselves adept at the practice of "Maskirovka," "appearing weak when strong." According to this analysis, after two years of war, Russian forces have thus shown their ability to "develop operational endurance" that allows them to wage "a slow and long-intensity war based on the continuous attrition of the Ukrainian army."

There is nothing really new in the above for people who have followed the facts on the ground.

Mar 12, 2024

Featured • Scott Ritter: How Close Is US to War?, Judging Freedom, Mar 11, 2024

 • Ukraine already bankrupt long ago, former Prime Minister Azarov says, TASS, Mar 11, 2024

Ukraine has long been completely insolvent, former Ukrainian Prime Minister (2010-2014) Nikolay Azarov said in commenting on the Standard & Poor’s rating agency’s downgrade of its credit rating on Ukraine’s sovereign debt to "junk" status.

"Ukraine is fully insolvent. However, international agencies do not risk assigning it a default rating. Although Ukraine went bankrupt long ago," he wrote on his Telegram channel.

Earlier, S&P downgraded Ukraine from a "CCC" rating to "CC." "Now the country’s long-term sovereign [debt] rating has received a highly telling stigma - ‘negative outlook,’ ‘a virtual certainty of default,’ ‘debt susceptible to non-payment,’" the former head of the Ukrainian government added.

The Polish ministers love surprises. This week, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski stunned the public when he said “several NATO countries already have their troops in Ukraine.” Sikorski represents the pro-EU “liberal” party Civic Platform, which recently replaced the “anti-European” nationalists from the Law and Justice (PiS) party. By voicing the shocking remark, Sikorski was effectively attempting to outdo the media star of the previous cabinet formed by the PiS. That media star was Mariusz Blaszczak, the former minister of defense who promised Poland would have “the strongest army in Europe” in two years In fact, Sikorski’s statement about NATO troops in Ukraine was not much of a secret for Russia. Even Sikorski’s attempt to create intrigue by saying he would not reveal the troops’ countries of origin was a failure. Maria Zakharova, the official representative of Russia’s Foreign Ministry, acknowledged that Russia knew about the presence of Western servicemen and which countries they came from.

She said: “It does not make sense for NATO to deny it’s sending soldiers to Ukraine any more.” However, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius again denied the presence of NATO troops in Ukraine recently, in this way one more time exposing himself or Sikorski as a liar. Sikorski made his revelation about NATO troops at a celebration devoted to the 25th anniversary of Poland joining the NATO alliance alongside Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999. In his speech, Sikorski also said that sending Western troops to Ukraine was a “creative” move, and that “the West should pursue the policy of asymmetrical escalation” in Ukraine. Through the official’s commentary and by ignoring Russia’s warnings of the inevitable retaliation for the escalation, Sikorski is – again – following in Blaszczak’s footsteps. It was under him that Poland, indeed, became Europe’s fastest growing military power, and the Civic Platform does not show any willingness to stop the project.

The US Pentagon’s fantasy in Ukraine is falling apart, former UN weapons inspector and commentator Scott Ritter told Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Monday.

Speaking on reports in US media that said there are growing tensions between Kiev and Washington because Ukraine reportedly did not listen to tactical advice offered by the Pentagon, Ritter said he believes the assertions are not based in reality but instead are designed to shift the blame away from the United States.

“The Pentagon is definitely trying to create political cover for itself because their huge Ukrainian fantasy is falling apart,” Ritter asserted, explaining earlier that Ukraine had little choice but to hold Avdeyevka for as long as possible so that defensive lines could be built behind it, noting however, that Russian airpower prevented even that goal from being achieved.

Mar 11, 2024

Featured • SITREP 3/11/24: Patriots Blown Up as Mix-Messaged NATO Fumbles On, Simplicius, Mar 10, 2024
Tour de force.

 • France Just Can't Calm Down, Itching to Start World War III, Report Shows, Sputnik International, Mar 10, 2024

Commenting on Macron’s statements, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stressed that NATO troops’ potential boots on the ground in Ukraine will lead to an inevitable conflict between Russia and the alliance.

Russia has repeatedly warned NATO countries that arms supplies to Ukraine would be considered legitimate targets. Moscow has accused NATO countries of "playing with fire" by arming Ukraine, emphasizing that such actions hinder the possibility of Russia-Ukraine negotiations.

Mar 10, 2024

Featured • Pope Francis Urges Zelensky to Save Lives, Find 'Courage of the White Flag' to End Conflict, John Miles, Sputnik International, Mar 9, 2024

The Catholic leader said Ukraine’s president should resume negotiations with Russia with the help of international mediators.

Pope Francis added his name to the long list of international critics of Volodymyr Zelensky recently in comments urging the Ukrainian president to find the “courage” to negotiate with Russia for an end to the Donbass conflict.

“The word negotiate is a courageous word,” said Francis in an excerpt from an interview recorded last month. “When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well, you have to have the courage to negotiate. Negotiations are never a surrender.”...

“I think that the strongest one is the one who looks at the situation, thinks about the people and has the courage of the white flag, and negotiates,” the cleric insisted. “Today, for example, in the war in Ukraine, there are many who want to mediate.”...

“One may feel shame, but how many dead will it [the conflict in the Donbass] end up with?” the Pope asked. “[Zelensky should] negotiate in time, find a country that can be a mediator. Do not be ashamed of negotiating, before things get worse.”

Russia will for some time find its acquisition of the “new territories” challenged by nations who question the legitimacy of Russia’s military occupation and subsequent absorption of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions into the Russian Federation. The reticence of foreigners to recognize these regions as being part of Russia, however, is the least of Russia’s problems. As was the case with Crimea, the Russian government will proceed irrespective of any international opposition.

The real challenge facing Russia is to convince Russians that the new territories are as integral to the Russian motherland as Crimea, a region reabsorbed by Russia in 2014 which has seen its economic fortunes and its population grow over the past decade. The diminished demographics of Kherson and Zaporozhye represent a litmus test of sorts for the Russian government, and for the governments of both Kherson and Zaporozhye. If the populations of these regions cannot regenerate, then these regions will wither on the vine. If, however, these new Russian lands can be transformed into places where Russians can envision themselves raising families in an environment free from want and fear, then Novorossiya will flourish.

Novorossiya is a reality, and the people who live there are citizens by choice more than circumstances. They are well served by men like Saldo and Balitsky, who are dedicated to the giant task of making these regions part of the Russian Motherland in actuality, not just in name.

Behind Saldo and Balitsky are men like Panchenko, people who left an easy life in Moscow or some other Russian city to come to the “New Territories” not for the purpose of seeking their fortunes, but rather to improve the lives of the new Russian citizens of Novorossiya.

For this to happen, Russia must emerge victorious in its struggle against the Ukrainian nationalists ensconced in Kiev, and their Western allies. Thanks to the sacrifices of the Russian military, this victory is in the process of being accomplished.

Then the real test begins – turning Novorossiya into a place Russians will want to call home.

Europeans, don’t be surprised if one day we wake up to the sound of news like “the war has begun”. This foreshadowing is anything but fanciful and should be taken very seriously. In my ignorance, I even think that in human history, after the Second World War and considering the experience of the Cold War, we are perhaps at the moment when the risk of military confrontation is highest. In the absence of a unifying world architecture, solid democracies and stable, credible communication channels… anything becomes possible.

As part of yet another adaptation of the century-old “sword and shield” strategic doctrine, enunciated in 1917 by General Pershing, when he explained to his troops that they were not in Europe to defend Europeans, but to defend Americans, since European countries are a shield and the U.S. is a sword, over the last 30 years, the White House has been building an aristocratic administrative elite, which responds first and foremost to the interests of the American “sword”.

In any closed group, its internal cohesion is based on feelings of belonging, which, in this case, lie in the values of exclusivity, individuality (it’s not for those who want it) and inaccessibility (it’s only for those who can) to ordinary mortals. The great aim and success of the American strategy lies in creating a feeling that each member of the group is part of a chosen structure, which only very special people can join. This feeling is worked out using a variety of communication, suggestion and persuasion strategies aimed at creating a group identity, even when the respective members come from different countries, realities and educational backgrounds....

The fact is that tomorrow, we could wake up to NATO forces officially stationed along Ukraine’s northern border with Russia and Belarus, and to the south, in the Odessa region, trying to save the country’s one remaining link to the Black Sea. From that day on, Vladimir Putin, Minister Shoigu or Medvedev will no longer have to pretend that there are no NATO troops on Russia’s doorstep! They will be there for all to see. On that day, we’ll find out what the national flags of EU and NATO member states are still used for. They only serve to mask the presence of the alliance with its chosen enemy, or to mislead the people of Europe that it is not NATO that will be there, but its states. Affirming NATO’s presence on the one hand and hiding it on the other.

When this happens, we will confirm in practice everything I said earlier: we are governed by an aristocracy elected by supranational powers, which uses states as expanded territories of the central interests to which they answer, and the concepts of nation-state only to legitimize the actions they aim to carry out under their guise.

And that’s the only way we can go to sleep, one night, in peace, and wake up, the next day, in war!

Meanwhile, in today's news:

"Pope Francis added his name to the long list of international critics of Volodymyr Zelensky recently in comments urging the Ukrainian president to find the “courage” to negotiate with Russia for an end to the Donbass conflict.

“The word negotiate is a courageous word,” said Francis in an excerpt from an interview recorded last month. “When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well, you have to have the courage to negotiate. Negotiations are never a surrender.”...

“I think that the strongest one is the one who looks at the situation, thinks about the people and has the courage of the white flag, and negotiates,” the cleric insisted. “Today, for example, in the war in Ukraine, there are many who want to mediate.”...

“One may feel shame, but how many dead will it [the conflict in the Donbass] end up with?” the Pope asked. “[Zelensky should] negotiate in time, find a country that can be a mediator. Do not be ashamed of negotiating, before things get worse.” (At https://sputnikglobe.com/20240310/pope-francis-urges-zelensky-to-save-lives-find-courage-to-end-conflict-1117235173.html)

Scott, this article is utterly one-sided and propagandistic. War always produces heroes and individual acts of nobility, on every side. These should not be confused with any nobility of the cause overall. You know this. We all know this.

For a wider perspective readers might try "Michael Brenner: The West’s Reckoning?", Mar 7, 2024 or "What Did the CIA Know and When Did it Know it?," Larry Johnson, Mar 5, 2024.

We at the Los Alamos Study Group curate a daily Ukraine update at https://lasg.org/Ukraine/Ukraine.html.

The Ukraine proxy war of the U.S. is going very badly for Ukraine, for the U.S., and for the West in general. It is another in a long line of failed U.S. wars and proxy wars fought for reasons that remain murky for most Americans. There were many heroic (and barbaric) acts in Vietnam, just as there are in Ukraine, but why were American forces there to begin with? What good did that do? In this case, the goal was to weaken and subjugate Russia using Ukraine, as outlined by Brzezinski and implemented by Nuland et. al. under the feckless Obama. That project has been an abject failure, and now Nuland has (been) resigned. Russia will not lose this war. That was always the case. The sooner more people realize this the sooner peace can come to Ukraine. Fighting on until the last Ukrainian of military age is dead is not the kind of courage needed. It lacks wisdom and it lacks compassion. Using the compassion of individuals to paint a false picture of this war is not good journalism. The sooner a detente with Russia can be established, the sooner the U.S. can deal with the horrendous, growing crises right here at home.

Why aren't more people speaking up?

The US should “cut a deal” and seek detente with Russia to prevent a Third World War, which would provide a baseline for world peace, American billionaire investor David Sacks told a gala for the Republican think-tank American Moment in Washington. During the speech, the 51-year-old also made the case that the US’s involvement in the Ukraine conflict has finally proved to be a failure. He blamed Washington for prolonging the standoff and slapping sanctions on Russia. “The idea that sanctions are working is totally delusional. The Russian economy stabilized and even outperformed G7 economies in 2023,” the venture capitalist stressed. Sacks insisted that a “real victim” of the sanctions was Europe, adding that the population of the continent “has realized that this [NATO’s proxy] war [with Russia] is not in their interests.”

Citing the asymmetric cost of artillery shell production, the size of the Russian military versus that of Ukraine, and the big gap in “war enthusiasm” in the two countries, the entrepreneur concluded that “while seeking to weaken Russia we [the West] only weaken ourselves.” As far as “a baseline” for peace is concerned, Russia has repeatedly signaled readiness for talks, but the Kiev regime introduced a legislative ban on them after torpedoing the 2022 Russian-Ukrainian negotiations in Istanbul at then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s behest. The West turns a blind eye to Ukraine’s constant refusals to engage in dialogue, he continued. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russian President Vladimir Putin “has stated numerous times that Russia was, is and will continue to be open for negotiations on Ukraine.”

“We are determined to reach our goals. And would prefer to complete it by diplomatic means. If not, the special military operation will be continued till we reach our goals,” Peskov emphasized. Putin, for his part, has said that if Ukraine wants a negotiation process, performative gestures are not the way and that it is necessary to scrap Kiev’s decree prohibiting negotiations with Russia. Moscow has never been against the settlement of the Ukraine conflict by peaceful means, but insists on the observance of Russia’s security guarantees, according to the Russian president.

China and Switzerland are working behind the scenes to get Russia invited to proposed Swiss-hosted talks aimed at ending the fighting between Kiev and Moscow, the South China Morning Post reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Last month, Switzerland announced plans to organize a peace summit “by the summer.” No specific date has been named yet. The number of potential participants has also not been revealed. However, Ukraine indicated that Russia can only be invited if it agrees in advance to a litany of preconditions.

According to the news website, China’s envoy for Eurasia Li Hui told EU officials that the summit “can’t be a conference that produces a plan that is pushed down the Russians’ throat.” The sources further told the publication that both China and Switzerland share a “pragmatic” view that the negotiations should not be just a formality.

Unlike many Western countries, Beijing has refused to blame Moscow for the outbreak of hostilities in February 2022, and has stressed that the conflict can only be ended through diplomacy....

According to the South China Morning Post, Chinese envoy Li told his EU counterparts that Moscow had two preconditions for talks – ending Western arms deliveries to Ukraine and the revocation of Zelensky’s 2022 decree that states negotiations with Putin are “impossible.” (emphasis added)

The European Commission president has urged member states to “turbo charge” the bloc’s arms manufacturing industry over the next five years.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has called on EU member states to invest heavily in the defense industry. These efforts should see the creation of weapons that will ensure the dominance of their armies on the battlefield, she said.

Von der Leyen also equated European security with continued support for Ukraine, which she said Brussels will keep providing “for as long as it takes.”

Addressing a congress of the European People’s Party in Bucharest, Romania on Thursday, von der Leyen said that the bloc needs to “turbo charge our defense industrial capacity in the next five years.” She added that this push would “help us fill the urgent need to rebuild, replenish and modernize Member States’ armed forces.”

“In doing so, Europe should strive to develop and manufacture the next generation of battle-winning operational capabilities,” she said.

In short, the coverage of these newspapers – and the coverage of other mass media outlets in the West is no different – is absolutely biased and manipulated. In fact, as always happens, they reverse roles: Germany, which threatened to blow up a bridge in Russia, is the victim, while Russia is the villain! If at least one of these newspapers really were a journalistic tool, and not a propaganda tool, it should publish an article with a title like “German officers considered blowing up bridge in Russia” or “Audios reveal discussion of attack on Russia with German weapons”. After all, which is more serious: the leak of the audio by Russian intelligence or the discussion among senior German officials about a military attack on Russia? No honest person would choose the first option. But we are not dealing with honest people when we talk about “journalism” in Europe and the United States.

In short, the coverage of these newspapers – and the coverage of other mass media outlets in the West is no different – is absolutely biased and manipulated. In fact, as always happens, they reverse roles: Germany, which threatened to blow up a bridge in Russia, is the victim, while Russia is the villain! If at least one of these newspapers really were a journalistic tool, and not a propaganda tool, it should publish an article with a title like “German officers considered blowing up bridge in Russia” or “Audios reveal discussion of attack on Russia with German weapons”. After all, which is more serious: the leak of the audio by Russian intelligence or the discussion among senior German officials about a military attack on Russia? No honest person would choose the first option. But we are not dealing with honest people when we talk about “journalism” in Europe and the United States.

Mar 8, 2024

Featured • SITREP 3/7/24: Macron Raises Rhetoric Temp, First HIMARS Kill, Black Sea Fleet Setbacks & More, Simplicius, Mar 7, 2024
Excellent as usual.

Featured • Michael Brenner: The West’s Reckoning?, Scheerpost, Mar 7, 2024

Western leaders are experiencing two stunning events: defeat in Ukraine, genocide in Palestine. The first is humiliating, the other shameful. Yet, they feel no humiliation or shame. Their actions show vividly that those sentiments are alien to them – unable to penetrate the entrenched barriers of dogma, arrogance and deep-seated insecurities. The last are personal as well as political. Therein lies a puzzle. For, as a consequence, the West has set itself on a path of collective suicide. Moral suicide in Gaza; diplomatic suicide – the foundations laid in Europe, the Middle East and across Eurasia; economic suicide – the dollar-based global financial system jeopardized, Europe deindustrializing. It is not a pretty picture. Astoundingly, this self-destruction is occurring in the absence of any major trauma – external or internal. Therein lies another, related puzzle.

Some clues for these abnormalities are provided by their most recent responses as deteriorating conditions tighten the vise – on emotions, on prevailing policies, on domestic political worries, on ginger egos. Those responses fall under the category of panic behavior. Deep down, they are scared, fearful and agitated. Biden et al in Washington, Macron, Schulz, Sunak, Stoltenberg, von der Leyen. They lack the courage of their stated convictions or the courage to face reality squarely. The blunt truth is that they have contrived to get themselves, and their countries, in a quandary from which there is no escape conforming to their current self-defined interests and emotional engagement. Hence, we observe an array of reactions that are feckless, grotesque and dangerous.

With the president facing challenges on multiple fronts, why would the White House choose this moment for a staff shakeup? ...

“The CIA would have, the NSA would have those conversations as well,” said McGovern, referring to leaked recordings of discussions between Nuland and German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius that appeared to reveal plans for an imminent attack on Russian soil. The leaks generated significant embarrassment for German officials as attention was drawn to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s support for the Ukraine proxy conflict.

Nuland’s bellicose rhetoric may suggest she was going rouge, according to McGovern, attempting to contrive a highly escalatory attack on a nuclear power without approval from her superiors in the State Department.

“My best guess here is that the CIA and the Defense Department and the NSA got this message around saying, 'look, Victoria's got her own agenda here,’” said the analyst. “‘The president doesn't really want to strike these ammo depots in Russia or knock down the [Crimean] Bridge. So we got to rein her in, I guess it's time for her to go to early retirement.’”

Some $300 billion in Russian assets were trapped abroad in 2022 following the escalation of the US proxy war in Ukraine. Under pressure from Kiev, there have been continued attempts by the West to seize those assets and give them to Ukraine. Britain is prepared to loan Ukraine all frozen Russian central bank assets in the United Kingdom on the belief that it will pay those loans back with Russian “reparations” following the end of the war, says UK foreign secretary David Cameron. Western countries have previously pledged a total of several billion dollars toward rebuilding Ukraine, including investment pledges from dozens of major multinational corporations. And in late January, Belgium announced it would allocate €611 million ($663 million) to help Kiev in 2024 using the profits they received from the frozen Russian assets.

Mar 7, 2024

Featured • Leaked German plot to attack Russia spoils Nuland’s ‘surprise’, Aaron Maté, New Kontinent USA, Mar 7, 2024

On two recent occasions, veteran war hawk and senior State Department official Victoria Nuland has vowed that Russia will face “surprises” – both “nice” and “nasty” — on the Ukrainian battlefield this year.

Nuland’s Russian adversary has already spoiled the surprise.

Russian media has published the contents of a conversation between four top German Air Force officers that was intercepted in Singapore. On the call, the Germans discuss providing Taurus missiles to help Ukraine strike targets including the Kerch Bridge, which links Crimea to Russia. They also mull how they could hide their role to avoid a direct conflict with Moscow. On that front, they additionally admit that US, British, and French troops are stationed in Ukraine to operate advanced weapons systems for strikes on Russian forces – an allegation these states have long denied. While accusing Russia of using the intercepted call for an “information war,” German officials have nonetheless confirmed that it is authentic.

German military leaders may have bungled foolishly over their private discussions regarding operational plans against Russia. However, the security of their incompetent communication – while laughable – does not lessen the seriousness of what was being discussed. Lt. General Ingo Gerhartz and his aides were earnestly weighing up the technical and propaganda means by which to strike Russia with long-range ballistic missiles. In short, a NATO member was caught red-handed hatching an act of war against Russia....

Gerhartz, the head of the German air force, tells his subordinates in no uncertain terms: “We are now fighting a war that uses much more modern technology than our good old Luftwaffe.” There you have it: the top German commander says unequivocally, “We are now fighting a war”. He also goes on to disclose that the American, British, and French militaries are deeply involved in the logistics and planning of attacks by the Ukrainian forces. We know from numerous other sources that the NATO militaries are involved on the ground in Ukraine fighting against Russian forces. American HIMARS and Patriot missile systems, and the British Storm Shadow and the French Scalp cruise missiles are operated with military expertise from these NATO members.

Still, what is highly damaging from the German military leak is the extent to which the commanders endeavor to conceal the involvement of Germany in a war with Russia. The tortuous conversation about how to avoid the imputation of the German military makes it clear that the German high command knows full well the gravity of what they are organizing. They are discussing the conduct of a covert war against Russia. This is tantamount to the crime of aggression and it runs the risk of starting a full-on war which would no doubt escalate into a nuclear conflagration....

Mar 6, 2024

Featured • What Did the CIA Know and When Did it Know it?, Larry Johnson, Mar 5, 2024

Despite repeated entreaties from Vladimir Putin to President Joe Biden and other Western leaders to provide assurances that Ukraine would not be admitted to NATO, the West told Putin to screw off and continued building up Ukraine’s military. The U.S. and its NATO allies believed that Russia’s military was weak and ineffective. Western leaders also believed that Russia’s economy was vulnerable to Western economic sanctions and that an economic collapse in Russia would catapult Putin from power.

The Western plan was simple, audacious and delusional — i.e., using Ukraine as a military proxy, defeat Russia and humiliate Vladimir Putin; apply Western economic sanctions that would devastate the Russian economy and further erode support for Putin; break up the Russia Republic into 41 new countries. Sounds crazy, but take a look at what Angel Vohra wrote in Foreign Policy Magazine in April 2023:

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, an independent U.S. government agency with members from the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate, and departments of defense, state, and commerce, has declared that decolonizing Russia should be a “moral and strategic objective.” The Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum, comprising exiled politicians and journalists from Russia, held a meeting at the European Parliament in Brussels earlier this year and is advertising three events in different American cities this month. It has even released a map of a dismembered Russia, split into 41 different countries, in a post-Putin world, assuming he loses in Ukraine and is ousted.

Western analysts are increasingly pushing the theory that Russian disintegration is coming and that the West must not only prepare to manage any possible spillover of any ensuing civil wars but also to benefit from the fracture by luring resource-rich successor nations into its ambit. They argue that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the West was blindsided and failed to fully capitalize on the momentous opportunity. It must now strategize to end the Russian threat once and for all, instead of providing an off-ramp to Putin.

Put simply, the United States and its NATO allies were obsessed with the elimination of Russia as a nation and saw the war in Ukraine as their opportunity to carry out this plan. At no time prior to the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, or after, did the U.S. intelligence community provide any assessment countering this narrative....

I would have to write a 500 page book to compile all of the West’s mistaken, erroneous predictions about Russia’s military capability. This represents a monumental intelligence failure.

We see a similar debacle when it comes to Western predictions about the anticipated effect of sanctions on the Russian economy....

Instead of weakening public support in Russia for Vladimir Putin, his political position became stronger. Instead of isolating Putin, NATO’s proxy war helped Putin solidify and expand relations with China, India, Iran, North Korea, South Africa and Brazil.

The West is caught in its own trap. Russia reactivated a moribund defense industry and is cranking out ammunition, shells, missiles, rockets, artillery, tanks, drones and combat vehicles at a rate the West cannot match. Instead of demonstrating Western superiority, the NATO alliance has been exposed as fractious, impotent lot. The defeat of Ukraine will force the United States and NATO to make a choice — escalate the war with Russia and risk a nuclear conflagration or find a diplomatic off-ramp. While the current rhetoric among many NATO members is bellicose, with France’s Macron trying to whip up support for joining the fight against Russia, the divisions in Europe are growing. Germany certainly is no longer enthusiastic about signing on to France’s suicide mission.

The key to the end of the war resides in Washington, DC. It is an election year and the electorate has no stomach for a direct military confrontation with Russia. Then there is the fact that the Biden Administration is more focused on the war between Israel and the Palestinians, the Houthi closure of the Red Sea and the fear that China will move against Taiwan. There is no good, clean, obvious exit plan for the U.S. to end its support of the proxy war with Russia. The best that the Biden team can hope for is that Ukraine’s Zelensky is overthrown and a new Ukrainian government decides to seek peace with Moscow. At that point, Biden can shrug his shoulders and say, “We tried” and then walk away. That is the outcome I’m hoping for.

In that capacity, she has worked on arming Ukraine and assembling a Western coalition that would supply Kiev with weapons and ammunition for the conflict with Russia. Last month, she pleaded to Congress to approve $61 billion in funding to Ukraine, arguing that most of it would be “going right back into the US economy,” to create jobs in the weapons industry. Her most recent trip to Kiev involved intervening with President Vladimir Zelensky on behalf of General Valery Zaluzhny, though to no avail. Zaluzhny was subsequently fired. In a CNN interview at the end of February, Nuland admitted the defeat of US policy towards Moscow, describing today’s Russia as “not the Russia that, frankly, we wanted.”

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova attributed Nuland’s exit to “the failure of the anti-Russian course of the Biden administration.” “Russophobia, proposed by Victoria Nuland as the main foreign policy concept of the United States, is dragging the Democrats to the bottom like a stone,” Zakharova said. Posting a photo of Nuland taken at an Orthodox church at some point, she said that if the US politician wanted to “go to a monastery to atone for your sins, we can put in a good word.” Nuland is married to neoconservative stalwart Robert Kagan. Her sister-in-law Kimberley Kagan, married to Robert’s brother Fred, runs the Institute for the Study of War.

And so we come to the truth at the heart of this recent raft of revelations.

It is this. The Russians — “Putin” if you like — were right all along. The Ukraine crisis is merely the latest phase of the West’s long campaign to surround the Russian Federation up to its borders, destabilize it and finally subvert it. Regime change in Moscow was and remains the final objective.

This is not a war in defense of “Ukrainian democracy” — a phrase that causes one either to laugh or do the other thing. It is the West’s proxy war, start to finish, Ukrainians cynically cast as cannon fodder, expendable stooges.

Russia had no choice when it intervened two years ago, this after eight years’ patience as the Europeans — Germany and France, this is to say — broke every promise they made by way of supporting a settlement. The Americans didn’t break any promises because they never made any — and no one would take them seriously if they had.

I come to the judgment I offered when the war that began in 2014 erupted into open conflict two years ago. The Russian intervention was regrettable but necessary. I took some stick for this view back in 2022. I learn lately it is recorded in some European intelligence files as if it were a major transgression.

It is as true now as then. All we learn in drips and drops about the Western powers’ various covert doings in the sad, failed state they have done much to ruin, confirms this.

Mar 5, 2024

Featured • Scott Ritter: Leaked Crimea Attack Plans Begs the Question ‘Who’s in Charge in Germany’?, Ilya Tsukanov, Sputnik International, Mar 5, 2024

“What’s interesting about this conversation is, a few days prior to it the German chancellor, the senior civilian executive authority in Germany today, had specifically said that Germany will not be providing the Taurus missile to Ukraine. Moreover, the parliament of Germany, not once but twice, overwhelmingly voted against providing the Taurus cruise missile to Ukraine. Who's in charge in Germany? The civilian leadership or the military? Because, according to the conversation being held by these four senior German military officers, they were talking about a project that had been greenlighted by the defense minister of Germany,” Ritter stressed.

In other words, “while the chancellor and the parliament have said no to the provision of the Taurus missile to Ukraine, the defense minister is working with his Air Force officers to make it happen – to go into planning about how this weapon could be used to bring harm to Russia,” the observer said.

On top of that, Ritter pointed out that the apparent operational planning detailed in the leaked conversation constitutes a grave violation of “everything” NATO “purports to stand for.”

“When NATO spoke of expanding, and I'm talking about prior to the unification of Germany, when the concept of NATO expansion arose, one of the key aspects was that any new member must adhere to the standards of democratic rule that NATO used to define itself. And one of the key aspects of this standard is civilian control over the military. Absolutely required. There is no room in NATO for a military dictatorship, for the military to be dictating outcomes, especially in times of peace, to the civilian leadership,” Ritter explained.

Furthermore, he noted, when Moscow agreed to the unification of the two Germanies in 1990, one of the conditions was that Germany would never again wage a war of aggression against Russia.

“There are members of Parliament now…in Saxony, Germany who are actively seeking to investigate these German officers, to hold them accountable for violating German law, for planning a war of aggression. Because a war of aggression was determined at the Nuremberg Tribunal, which held the Nazis accountable for their crimes, committed not just against the Soviet Union, but others – for planning and implementing the biggest war crime of them all, a war of aggression; which is exactly what those four German officers were plotting against Russia on behalf of their defense minister, in total contravention to the direction given to them by the chancellor of Germany and the German parliament.” (emphasis added)

There is “sincere panic” among Western leaders who are forced to “face the inevitable fact” that they are losing to Russia, Mark Sleboda, a foreign relations and security analyst told Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Monday. “It is shattering both their preconceptions of this conflict and also shattering their belief in their own exceptionalism and seniority,” he told co-hosts Melik Abdul and Jamarl Thomas....

Host Jamarl Thomas lamented how the West didn’t need to provoke Russia into the conflict, but Sleboda disagreed, saying that it was inevitable from the perspective of the “deep state.”

“They are fighting for US hegemony over the world - that’s why. From their point of view, this was also an inevitability, from [the perspective of] the people who run the United States, the blob, the deep state… this war was absolutely essential.”

Sleboda noted that the US did manage to gain one advantage in the war, it made Europe more subservient to them.

“They tied Europe more directly to them. Europe is now spending their money on two to four times more expensive [Liquefied Natural Gas] LNG than they were on Russian energy, which means that Europe's economy, yes, is facing de-industrialization. But, on the plus side, a lot of those European businesses are going to the US. So they achieved very real geopolitical results out of this conflict."

“We had to devour part of our neighbors, our own allies, in the process of this, but at least they are cut off from the Russians now,” Sleboda concluded.

Mar 4, 2024

Featured • Ray McGovern: ‘Sheer Incompetence and Ignorance’ Led to Plan to Attack Crimean Bridge, Ian DeMartino, Sputnik International, Mar 3, 2024

Co-host Wilmer Leon asked about comments from US Senator and vice chair of the Intelligence Committee Marco Rubio (R-FL) that Ukraine needs to end in a negotiated settlement. McGovern said he doubted Rubio’s intentions but said the comments were still significant.

“He’s the same guy that voted vociferously to give [$60 billion] more to Ukraine, and of course $14 billion to Israel, X billion to Taiwan and whoever else. So I don’t know. A lot of this is rhetoric now, but it is significant that the rhetoric itself is changing,” McGovern explained. “If they don't get a negotiated settlement or something they [can] depict as the same, it’s going to be just a disastrous loss.”

But anytime a world nuclear power is cornered, it can be extremely dangerous, McGovern warned.

“As John Kennedy said in that wonderful American University speech ‘Never give another nuclear power a choice between a humiliating retreat and using nuclear weapons’... Joe Biden is faced with humiliating retreat, he’s got lots at stake here,” McGovern warned. “If I were Putin, I would have my focus on full alert because one of these acolytes [might] say ‘hey, Mr. Biden… we did the cluster ammo, we did the depleted uranium, who’s going to complain if we do just a mini-nuke?’ So that’s the danger here.’”

Asked if waning support for Ukraine among the American public could pull the world back from the brink, McGovern said it depends on the American people.

“The question is whether enough Americans will go to their representatives and say ‘no more money to Ukraine, it’s a fool’s errand.’ Because Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, is under incredibly big pressure to approve that," McGovern advised. (emphasis added.)

I rather think, however, that Jünger’s metaphysical “titan of suffering” is not so metaphysical at all. It rather refers to a mundane power of the Russian state, namely its excellence and willingness across the centuries to mobilize huge numbers of men and material for war, at the expense of other social goals. War with Russia sucks. It means mass casualties, cold trenches, scarred earth, and long nights of shelling. The Ukrainians have coped with this as well as anyone (because they are themselves quasi-Russian, however much they deny it), but it is an awful thing to trade shells for years on end. The Russian power of suffering is to willingly fight wars that devolve into bat fights, knowing they have a bigger bat.

The window of strategic opportunity has closed for Ukraine, and now opens wide for Russia. The earth opens wide for the dead.

A recording of German military officers discussing a potential attack on the Crimean Bridge was released by Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT and Rossiya Segodnya, Sputnik’s parent media group, on March 1. Judging from the transcript, NATO soldiers from the UK, the US and France have been operating in the Ukraine combat zone for quite a while. “A significant part of the weapons used by the Ukrainian Armed Forces is supplied from the West,” Leonid Reshetnikov, a retired lieutenant general of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), told Sputnik. “In addition, there is a considerable presence of Western intelligence operatives from NATO countries in Ukraine. They have long settled there, in Ukraine, even before 2014 – the intelligence services of the US, the UK, and also other countries.”

Likewise, when transferring sophisticated and high-precision weapons to Ukraine, NATO countries usually also dispatch maintenance personnel, repair staff and crews to operate this equipment to the combat zone, the retired intelligence officer continued. “They have no time for training the Ukraine military in the midst of the special military operation. Therefore the crews of these [NATO] countries have been operating or firing systems such as Patriot air defense systems and other systems supplied by the Americans, NATO members, the French, and the British for quite a while. Of course, they are not deployed at the very forefront, but they operate artillery, air defense systems, and partially tanks,” Reshetnikov said. Similarly, NATO Special Forces disguised as mercenaries have also been deployed in the zone of the special military operation, according to the intelligence veteran.

“Yes, there are indeed some mercenaries [in Ukraine] who had been engaged in this business well before the special military operation. But starting from the mid-2022 or the beginning of 2023, there has been a systematic recruitment of active [NATO] units,” he said. Reshetnikov explained that under this scenario, NATO Special Ops soldiers formally leave their unit and go to the zone of the special military operation as volunteers. However, they are not only paid for participating in hostilities on Ukraine’s side, but also retain the income they received while serving in the army of a NATO country. Thus, Special Forces from the US, the UK and France are fighting on the ground pretending to be mere mercenaries. Given all of the above, one can see that NATO is really involved in the Ukraine conflict and is actively fighting on the side of the Kiev regime, the intelligence veteran emphasized.

Prior to the Bundeswehr release, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz came under fierce criticism for disclosing information about the presence of the British and French military in the combat zone in Ukraine. According to Scholz, Western soldiers have been dispatched to operate long-range Storm Shadow and SCALP cruise missiles and help Ukrainian fire at Russian targets. Speaking to journalists in Berlin earlier this week, Scholz explained why Berlin hesitates to send Taurus missiles to Ukraine. “This is a very far-reaching weapon,” Scholz said about the Taurus. “What the British and French are doing in terms of target control and support for target control cannot be done in Germany.” Berlin’s French and British allies lambasted the German chancellor for what they called a “flagrant abuse of intelligence”.

[..] Reshetnikov outlined two opposite trends. According to him, there are Western politicians, who, like Emmanuel Macron, are willing to expand NATO’s involvement in the Ukraine conflict. However, there are also others, who fear that the alliance’s presence in the conflict zone may lead to direct confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia. The latter are openly speaking about NATO’s involvement to trigger a public debate and resentment about getting bogged down in Ukraine, according to the intelligence veteran. “They are spilling the beans in order to somehow stop this, so that the public of their countries support them, so as not to cross the Rubicon, so as not to get involved in a direct open war,” he stressed.

There you have it — even if Germany supplies the missiles it will not change the fact that Ukraine is facing defeat and no NATO weapons will change that outcome. I still believe that the Russians leaked this intercept to RT for the express purpose of exposing NATO’s previous denials that it is providing personnel who are on the ground in Ukraine and assisting in the planning and execution of attacks against Russia. The release of this transcript/tape following President Putin’s warnings to the West in his state of Russia address last Thursday isa clear warning that Russia is prepared to escalate if NATO persists in going down this path.

Commenting on the remarks made by the German officers during the conversation about a British and US military presence in Ukraine, Schmidt noted that NATO does wage a war against Russia, just not directly but by using Ukraine as a proxy. “So the presence of [foreign] military personnel there is hardly surprising to anybody, especially when it comes to planning operations, maintaining NATO military hardware and so on,” he said. At the same time, Schmidt pointed out, the powers that be in Western countries keep telling their citizens that there is no NATO military personnel in Ukraine. “They are painting a whole different picture for the common people, even though everyone realizes that there is NATO personnel there, a lot of them, not on the frontline but, shall we say, in the second or third echelon,” he added.

Schmidt also lamented that only the AfD, the German political party he represents, openly declares that a conflict with a nuclear power and the actions of the German government are detrimental to Germany’s security whereas other parties in the country prefer to keep quiet on such matters. “We are being made a target for Russian weapons and this matter must be discussed. The citizens must be informed about how carelessly and irresponsibly politics [in Germany] are being conducted at the expense of our safety,’ he said.

Kiev has received over $265 billion in foreign military and economic aid to date, with the Kiel Institute for the World Economy tracking some €115 billion+ ($125 billion US)-worth in arms assistance alone – which is over one and a half times Russia’s entire defense budget in 2023.



Kiel Institute for the World Economy data on Western countries' arms aid to Ukraine between January 2022 and January 2024.

“Nothing will help Ukraine...But keeping it on life support is possible, including through the supply of Western weapons, ammunition and so on,” retired Soviet and Russian Army colonel Viktor Litovkin told Sputnik, commenting on Zelensky’s remarks.

The minister said hospitals must also conduct drills to practice their response to disasters, dismissing accusations of scaremongering by arguing that “doing nothing is not an option.” “It would be silly to say we are not preparing for a military conflict and then it won’t come. According to this logic, there would be no need for a Bundeswehr,” he said. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius stated last November that the country must become “war-capable,” and insisted again in January that Berlin and all of NATO should arm itself more actively to be able to “wage a war that is forced upon us.”

Last month, Bundeswehr General Carsten Breuer called for a “change in mentality” in German society, insisting that the nation needs to build credible “deterrence” to prepare for a potential war with Russia within five years. Commenting on claims that Russia could be planning an attack on Germany or any other NATO state, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in January that EU officials were “inventing an external enemy” to divert attention away from domestic problems. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that “no one wants a big war,” especially Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed the claims as “complete nonsense,” insisting that Moscow has “no geopolitical, economic… or military interest” in starting a conflict with NATO.

Mar 1, 2024

Featured • Pentagon Chief: If Ukraine Is Defeated, NATO Will Be At War With Russia, ZeroHedge, Mar 1, 2024
What madness is this? An inarticulate cry of pain from the idiot chamber, as the U.S. faces the bitterness of a strategic defeat? What is he thinking, to say this? He believes the propaganda sphere within which he operates, and has operated his whole career, apparently. He is not in touch with the reality of his words.

Featured • NY Times Plays CIA Messenger — Turn Off the Lights, the Party is Over, Larry Johnson, Feb 29, 2024
Excellent analysis of the NYT "investigation."

Featured • Patrick Lawrence: The CIA in Ukraine — The NY Times Gets a Guided Tour, Scheerpost, Feb 29, 2024

America was just emerging from the disgraces of the McCarthyist period when Stuart Loory opened the door on this question, the Church Committee convened, and Carl Bernstein filled in the blanks. In and out of the profession there was disgust at the covert relationship between media and the spooks. Now look. What was then viewed as top-to-bottom objectionable is now routinized. It is “as usual.” In my read this is one consequence among many of the Russiagate years: They again plunged Americans and their mainstream media into the same paranoia that produced the corruptions of the 1950s and 1960s.

Alas, the scars of the swoon we call Russiagate are many and run deep.

Today, we can say that after years and years of testing all over the world, the time has come for the internationalization and globalization of war. After Euromaidan, a whole process of normalizing war, the fear and terror of war, began in our daily lives. First, with the way the Special Military Operation was handled, characterized as a barbaric invasion, during which new shocks were induced in the Western population, whether through false narratives such as the “Bucha massacre”, the bombing of “schools and hospitals”, the infamous — and cartoonish — bombing of NPP Zaporozhye, in which it can be said that it is full of Russian soldiers and, at the same time, that it is bombed by them; the ever-present possibility of chemical, biological and nuclear attacks by the same old people: the “infernal and evil” Russians.

Under the cover of the shockwaves, war, arms distribution and investment in the military-industrial complex are normalized, while health, housing, education and wages are left behind; the — previously impossible — nuclear war is gradually entering our minds, specifically through the constant threat of Russia’s “invasion of NATO”. No one talks about the nonsense this means, or the historical and scientific inconsistency of the hypothesis. It’s not time for that, it’s time for propaganda shock.

And if the conflict in Ukraine allowed for the internationalization of eternal war, dragging an entire Europe into its own economic and social suicide; the Ukrainian shock allowed for another globalization, that of uniform propaganda, that of a single narrative. Never before has a narrative been so solid in the international arena. Once again, it’s the same methodology: inflict successive doses of shock, as many as necessary, until even the most critical are left without a reaction. Not because the narrative is true, but because it becomes suffocating.

This shock has given rise to yet another pretext for attacking our rights, this time directly affecting freedom of expression and opinion. The fact is that the legacy of this therapy is the internationalization and normalization of censorship, whether direct, from Russian channels, or indirect, from all opponents, on social networks. Never again will information circulate as before, and it will be filtered under the pretext of the need to defend ourselves from disinformation and propaganda. In other words, successive shocks of disinformation and propaganda, giving rise to censorship against the truth. Because censorship, and let there be no mistake, is always against the truth. It always aims to hide the truth, the possibility of comparison, the dialectical movement in the construction of thought.

From this evolution, we can draw two direct conclusions: the process of applying the shock doctrine evolved from the nation state to the entire world; it also evolved, from the financial component, to broader ones, such as total war; always in an increasing logic of evolution from the least to the most complex, until, if we do not prevent it, our total destruction.

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 • ‘The Real Purpose In Making The Bomb Was To Subdue The Soviets.’ Now It’s Happening Again, On A Vast Scale. Why? – July 22 At Fuller Lodge, Los Alamos Reporter, Jul 19, 2023

 • Bulletin 330: "'The real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets.'* Now it's happening again, on a vast scale. WHY?" A conversation with acclaimed historian Peter Kuznick and Greg Mello in Los Alamos, July 22, Jul 7, 2023

 • Ukraine War Makes it Harder to be a Nuclear ‘Dove’ | Our Land, Laura Paskus, New Mexico in Focus, Jun 30, 2023

 • Bulletin 329: Russia rules out nuclear disarmament negotiations; second week of Ukrainian offenses fail; what will US and NATO do? Build 60 projects in LANL's Pajarito Corridor?, Jun 17, 2023

 • Ukraine; Biden's Manicheism; the U.S. cannot even conduct a nuclear arms race, let alone win one, LASG friends ltr, Mar 16, 2023

 • Ukraine protest and updates, pit production delays and cost increases in NNSA's new budget, LASG friends ltr, Mar 14, 2023

 • Antiwar rally 2 pm Saturday in Albuquerque; LANL pits delayed, endorse the "Call for Sanity"; Ukraine update; the Nordstream investigation (and likely impeachment) "imperative" LASG friends ltr, Mar 11, 2023
 • Ukraine losses mount toward critical point; ANSWER rally against the war is now 2 pm (not 1 pm), March 18, Albuquerque; nearly half U.S. citizens believe WWIII is near, LASG friends ltr, Mar 7, 2023

 • Ukraine news and views; antiwar rally March 18; pending guest editorial; pit production precis, LASG friends ltr, Mar 3, 2023

 • Bulletin 325: Understanding the Nordstream sabotage and punishing those responsible, Feb 18, 2023

 • Ukraine news with comments and excerpts; bookmark for future reference if desired,LASG friends ltr, Feb 8, 2023

 • Bulletin 324: Opposition to Ukraine war gains visibility in New Mexico and via our web site, more broadly, Feb 6, 2023

 • Anti-nuclear activist opposes helping Ukraine, encourages peace, Santa Fe New Mexican, Feb 5, 2023

 • Bulletin 323: "Nuclear Hotseat" interview / Ukraine war updates, Feb 4, 2023

 • Bulletin 322: Right and Left To Join in D.C. Protest: ‘Not One More Penny for War in Ukraine’ / Bulletin of Atomic Scientists resets clock, blames Russia, Jan 25, 2023

 • $10 Trillion for Nuclear War: Racing to the Nuclear Cliff, The Socialist Program with Brian Becker, Jan 10, 2023

 • Bulletin 321: Last day for 2022 donations! / A few quick updates, Dec 31, 2022

 • Bulletin 320: Neocon humiliation -- or nuclear exchange / The centrality of war resistance in moral politics / 3 days left for 1:1 donation match!, Dec 29, 2022

 • Bulletin 319: Ukraine; NDAA: omnibus appropriations bill; fundraising --thank you; some matching funds still available, Dec 21, 2022

 • Stop the war now, Jean Nichols, The Taos News, Dec 19, 2022

 • Bulletin 318: Speak out now against further U.S. escalation in Ukraine; daily updates for your use, Dec 14, 2022

 • Agenda for tonight's emergency Ukraine meeting in Albuquerque, and by Zoom, Nov 15, 2022

 • Bulletin 314: Reminder re next week's antiwar, disarmament, & nuclear safety events: come if you can or tune in, outreach needed; pit interview on KNME tonight 7 pm; fundraising drive continues; erratum, Nov 11, 2022

 • Bulletin 313: Important meeting about Ukraine next week; DNFSB hearing in Santa Fe; more, Nov 7, 2022

 • Biden Administration releases aggressive nuclear strategy envisioning "first use" of nuclear weapons in wars like Ukraine, press release, Oct 27, 2022

 • Bulletin 310: Speak up! We urge you to take up the call for peace in Ukraine, Sep 25, 2022

 • Pope Francis: "World War III has been declared." We agree. Stop LANL's pit factory; Stop the U.S. war against Russia, presentation, Jun 15, 2022

 • Bulletin 301: Oppose the war! Demand and create accountability for lawmakers who fund and promote more war in Ukraine, May 16, 2022

 • Grave dangers loom in Ukraine war votes and escalations; opportunities open for journalists and citizens; We urge news media to widen debate, pose questions, create accountability, press release, May 16, 2022

 • LASG friends ltr: Thursday evening public discussion in Albuquerque: Ukraine, propaganda, progressives supporting Nazis and war, May 10, 2022

 • Escalation in Ukraine: The Nuclear War Danger is Real, Brian Becker & Greg Mello discuss the U.S. policy of waging proxy war on Russia, BreakThrough News, May 4, 2022

 • Bulletin 299: Emergency call to action: stop Biden's proposed $33 billion war escalation, Apr 28, 2022

 • Bulletin 298: Talk on pits & renewed U.S. nuclear weapons production Tuesday evening 4/26/22; antiwar billboard; what you can do, Apr 25, 2022

 • The core debate, Searchlight New Mexico, Mar 23, 2022

 • Bulletin 294: Please consider forwarding this fine statement from UNAC re Ukraine, Mar 23, 2022

 • Nuclear expert speaks on the dangers of war between the US and Russia, World Socialist Website, Mar 15, 2022

 • A Proposed Solution to the Ukraine War, Consortium News, Greg Mello, Mar 7, 2022

 • Bulletin 293: Ukraine conflict: If you want a ceasefire (as we do), stop firing, Mar 5, 2022

 • Bulletin 292: Statement on the Ukraine conflict and war with Russia, Mar 1, 2022

 • "What can we in New Mexico do?," LASG letter, Feb 23, 2022

 • Bulletin 288: US nuclear weapons since 2020: continuity and change, Dec 7, 2021 (see discussion of US, NATO, and Russia)

 • Nuclear experts speak on the dangers of war between the US and Russia, World Socialist Web Site, Apr 15, 2017

 • US Leaders Reject “Nuclear Winter” Studies, Ignore Existential Danger of Nuclear War. Turn a Blind Eye towards Armageddon, Steven Starr, Global Research, Nov 1, 2016

 • The Ukraine Conflict: What's Behind It? Why Is It Important?, Sep 26, 2015

 • Bulletin 200: Warhead budget bloat; U.S.-caused Ukraine catastrophe at the brink; hello peak oil, Feb 8, 2015