The Little Mermaid in Copenhagen has been decorated, or vandalised, if you like, in colours resembling those in the Russian flag this morning.
Background image is courtesy of Politiken, modified by me.
“This man is a destroyer!” “He’s an instrument of total destruction!” Tucker Carlson about Volodymyr Zelensky on Fox News yesterday: This could lead to the destruction of the West
U.S. President Joe Biden dared to make a ‘brave’ visit to Kiev only after obtaining guarantees of security from Russia, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said during a briefing on Wednesday. (Source: Tass News Agency)
Background image is courtesy of Politiken, modified by me.
Hundreds of protesters gathered in Washington, DC for the ‘March Against the War Machine’ rally, with a number of prominent speakers from across the political spectrum calling on the US government to end its military support for Ukraine in favor of diplomacy, and slash the Pentagon budget to address numerous domestic issues.
Former US Congresswoman and presidential candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, addressed the crowd of several hundred people with a reminder of what caused her to run in 2020, and how there was “no other candidate willing to talk about… the dangers where this new Cold War and nuclear arms race would eventually lead.”
“And so here we are. Two short years later what I warned about then is now a reality. This proxy that we are fighting against Russia right now could turn at any moment into a direct conflict between the United States/NATO and Russia,” she said, warning that “anyone with a little bit of common sense” knows that a Cold War can at any moment turn into a hot war against a nuclear-armed country.”
Source: RT International
We are with you all the way, Zelensky, and soon you’ll get the Abrams tanks you need, together with the German Leopard 2 tanks and the British Challenger 2 tanks. And for the Spring offensive, we’ll send you a whole fleet of fighter jets and finally some nukes to finish the Russians off once and for all. Great times for the war profiteers, you see!
Background image is courtesy of BBC, modified by me.
In an interview with Le Figaro, the well-known French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd claims that “the third world war has began”. Todd became famous for correctly predicting the devolution of the Soviet Union long before it happened. He was quite alone at that time.
Todd says “it’s obvious that the conflict, which started as a limited territorial war and is escalating to a global economic confrontation between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia and China on the other hand, has become a world war.”
He believes that “Putin made a big mistake early on, which is [that] on the eve of the war [everyone saw Ukraine] not as a fledgling democracy, but as a society in decay and a “failed state” in the making. […] I think the Kremlin’s calculation was that this decaying society would crumble at the first shock. But what we have discovered, on the contrary, is that a society in decomposition, if it is fed by external financial and military resources, can find in war a new type of balance, and even a horizon, a hope.”
He says he agrees with Mearsheimer’s analysis of the conflict: “Mearsheimer tells us that Ukraine, whose army had been overtaken by NATO soldiers (American, British and Polish) since at least 2014, was therefore a de facto member of the NATO, and that the Russians had announced that they would never tolerate Ukraine in NATO. From their point of view, the Russians are therefore in a war that is defensive and preventive. Mearsheimer added that we would have no reason to rejoice in the eventual difficulties of the Russians because since this is an existential question for them, the harder it would be, the harder they would strike. The analysis seems to hold true.”
Read the full article at: Moon of Alabama.
The map is courtesy of RT International (2016).
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said that Western military aid to Ukraine is what is needed to bring peace to the Eastern European country in the shortest time possible. He claimed that Russia will only agree to peace talks when it faces a situation in which it cannot achieve its goals militarily.
In an interview with German news outlet DPA, Stoltenberg said: “It may sound paradoxical, but continued military support for Ukraine is the quickest way to peace.”
The Western military bloc’s chief claimed that for the conflict to end, Russian President Vladimir Putin has to come to the conclusion that his forces are unable to take over Ukraine. It is only then that the Kremlin would be ready to negotiate a settlement.
Source: RT International
Background image via REUTERS, cropped and resized by me.
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in an interview with Die Zeit, published on December 7, that “the 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It…used this time to become stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the modern Ukraine.”
These comments echoed those of Petro Poroshenko, the former president of Ukraine, who came to power in snap elections after the 2014 coup d’état. Regarding his signing of the Minsk Accord, Poroshenko repeated in a Deutsche Welle interview last June his previous admission: “Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war—to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces.”
Meaning that Ukraine had no real intention of following the accords, but wanted to buy time while Ukraine built fortifications and developed a military strong enough to wage a war of aggression against the Russian-tilted Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which had demanded autonomy from the Ukrainian government installed in the February 2014 coup.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych (2010-2014) became a target for regime change when he spurned an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan and instead drew his country closer to Russia.
When protesters backed by the U.S. did not have enough signatures for Yanukovych’s impeachment, they overthrew his government by force and hunted down Yanukovych’s supporters. The new Ukrainian government further tried to impose draconian language laws and attacked the people of eastern Ukraine after they voted for their autonomy after the coup—an attack that began right after then-CIA director John Brennan visited Ukraine.
Signed originally on September 5, 2014, by Ukraine, Russia, rebel leaders in eastern Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), with mediation by leaders in France and Germany, the Minsk agreement had followed a twelve-point protocol advocating for a cease-fire in the fighting between the Ukrainian military and Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and to decentralize power, giving those Republics autonomy which they had voted for in popular referenda.
Additional provisions included the withdrawal of illegal armed groups and mercenaries from Ukraine, the release of hostages and illegally detained persons, the establishment of security zones and independent monitoring of the conflict zones, prosecution and punishment of war criminals, and continuance of inclusive national dialogue.
Unfortunately, the Minsk protocol was never followed, and conflict in eastern Ukraine persisted, leading to the signing of the Minsk II protocol in February 2015.
This protocol reaffirmed many aspects of the first Minsk agreement, including the promotion of decentralization and autonomy for the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics, which was to be enshrined in a new Ukrainian constitution that was to recognize the diversity of religions, languages and cultures within Ukraine.
When a law was passed in the Ukrainian parliament granting Donetsk and Luhansk partial autonomy, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the “law was a sharp departure from the Minsk agreements because it demanded local elections under Ukrainian jurisdiction.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Angela Merkel’s comments on December 7 were nothing short of the testimony of a person who openly admitted that everything done between 2014 and 2015 was meant to “distract the international community from real issues, play for time, pump up the Kyiv regime with weapons, and escalate the issue into a large-scale conflict.”
Merkel’s statements “horrifyingly” reveal in turn that the West uses “forgery as a method of action,” and resorts to “machinations, manipulation, and all kinds of distortions of truth, law, and rights imaginable.
Read the full article at: CovertAction Magazine
Background image via Kremlin.ru, cropped and resized by me.
The Ukrainian comedian and president Volodymyr Zelensky has arrived in the U.S. to beg for more money, military hardware and other means of support. Joe Biden has already assured him that he will get whatever he asks for. However, what Zelensky doesn’t seem to realise, is, that he is the puppet on a string in a proxy was between the US/NATO and Russia, and that his country and the Ukrainian people will be the ones to suffer the most from this tragic and insane conflict.
The image is a screenshot from a CNN video, edited by me.
Freddie Sayers meets political scientist John Mearsheimer, the world-famous proponent of realism in international relations. Recorded in London on Monday 28th November 2022.
Read the full article: John Mearsheimer: We’re playing Russian roulette
Concept inspired by this article: Why Do Americans Hate Putin?
Background caricature and logo via Wikimedia Commons, modified by me.
Against the Grain 