“We are not threatening anyone.… We have made it clear that any further NATO movement to the east is unacceptable. There’s nothing unclear about this. We aren’t deploying our missiles to the border of the United States, but the United States IS deploying their missiles to the porch of our house. Are we asking too much? We’re just asking that they not deploy their attack-systems to our home…. What is so hard to understand about that?” (Russian President Vladimir Putin)
Imagine if the Mexican army started bombarding American ex-pats living in Mexico with heavy artillery-rounds killing thousands and leaving thousands more wounded. What do you think Joe Biden would do?
Would he brush it off like a big nothingburger and move on or would he threaten the Mexican government with a military invasion that would obliterate the Mexican Army, level their biggest cities, and send the government running for cover?
Which of these two options do you think Biden would choose?
There’s no doubt what Biden would do nor is there any question what the 45 presidents who preceded him would do. No US leader would ever stand by and do nothing while thousands of Americans were savagely slaughtered by a foreign government. That just wouldn’t happen. They’d all respond quickly and forcefully.
But if that’s true, then why isn’t the same standard applied to Russia? Isn’t the situation in Ukraine nearly identical?
It is nearly identical, only the situation in Ukraine is worse, much worse.
The former Polish FM, now European MP Radek Sikorski, has personally thanked the United States for the damages done yesterday to the Russian gas pipeline Nord Stream 2. Apparently, he’s no friend of Germany.
Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said that this might be regarded an official statement of being a terrorist attack. (Source: TASS)
In February this year U.S. President Joe Biden said the following to a reporter:
Pres. Biden: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Reporter: “But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany’s control?”
Biden: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.” (Source: ABC News)
We don’t care. The United States and NATO. We do not care how many Ukrainians die. Nor civilians, nor women, nor children, nor soldiers. WE DO NOT CARE.
It’s become a great football game, you know. We’ve got our team, they’ve got their team, rah rah! We want to get the biggest score and run it up. And, you know, we don’t care how many of our players get crippled on the playing field as long as we win. Now, we are shipping fantaaaastic quantities of weapons. And it’s caused the stock of Raytheon, which creates missiles and Northrop Grumman which creates aircraft and so forth and missiles. All of these defense industries have become tremendously bloated with tax dollars. I don’t think it’s ultimately going to change the outcome. I think that Russia will prevail. The Ukrainians are in a very awkward strategic position in the east. But if you look at the way that this unfolded, President Putin made a desperate effort to stop the march towards war. Back in December of 2021 he went so far as to put specific written proposals on the table with NATO – peace proposals to diffuse what was coming about, because at this point, Ukraine was massing troops to attack the Donbass. And, so he was trying to head this off. He didn’t want war. And NATO just blew it off, just dismissed it, never took it seriously, and never went into serious negotiations.
At that point, Putin, seeing that armed Ukrainians with weapons to kill Russian troops were literally on their borders, decided he had to strike first. Now, you could see that this was not some preplanned attack. This was not like Hitler’s attack into Poland, where the standard rule of thumb is that you always have a 3 to 1 advantage when you are the attacker. You have to mass three times as many tanks and artillery and planes and men as the other side has. In fact, when Russia went in, they went in sort of with what they had, what they could cobble together on short notice. And they were outnumbered by the Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainian forces had about 250 thousand; the Russians had perhaps 160 thousand. So instead of having three times as many, they actually had fewer troops than the Ukrainians. But they were forced to attack to try to preempt the battle that was looming where the Ukrainians had massed these forces against the Donbass. Now, the Donbass is adjacent to Russia. It is a portion of Ukraine that did not join with the revolutionary government that conducted the coup in 2014 and overthrew the government of Ukraine. They refused to become a part of the new revolutionary government of Ukraine and so they declared their independence.
And Ukraine had massed this enormous army to attack against the Donbass. And so Russia was forced to go in to preempt that planned attack by Ukraine. You could see that Russia very much hoped that they could conduct this special operation without unduly causing casualties for the Ukrainians, because they think of the Ukrainians, or at least they did think of the Ukrainians as brothers-Slavs that they wanted to have good relations. But there was a famous picture with a Russian tank that had been stopped by a gathering of maybe 40 civilians who just walked out in the road and blocked the road and the tanks stopped. I can tell you, in Vietnam, if we had had a bunch of people who stood in the way of an American tank going through, that tank would not have slowed down in the slightest. It wouldn’t honk the horn, it wouldn’t have done anything. It wouldn’t have fired a warning shot; it would have just gone on. And I think that’s more typical. I’m not criticizing the Americans. I was there and I was fighting. And I probably would have driven the tanks straight through myself. But what I’m saying is that the rules of engagement for the Russians were very, very cautious. They didn’t want to create a great deal of hatred and animosity.
The Russians did not go in. They did not bomb the electrical system, the media systems, the water systems, all of these, the bridges and so forth. They tried to retain the infrastructure of Ukraine in good shape because they wanted to get back. They just wanted this to be over with and get back to normal. It didn’t work. The Ukrainians, the resistance was unexpectedly hard. The Ukrainian soldiers fought with great valor, great heroism. And so now the game has been upped and it’s become much, much more serious. But it is amazing to look and to see that Russia dominates the air. They haven’t knocked out the train systems. They haven’t knocked out power plants. They haven’t knocked out so many things. They’ve never bombed the buildings in the center of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. They haven’t bombed the buildings where the parliament meets. They’ve been incredibly reserved about these things, hoping against hope that peace could be achieved. But I don’t think Ukraine has anything to do with the decision about peace or war. I think the decision about peace or war is made in Washington, D.C. As long as we want the war to continue, we will fight that war using Ukrainians as proxies, and we will fight it to the last Ukrainian death.
Wednesday marked half a year since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, as well as the day the nation annually celebrates its 1991 independence from the Soviet Union.
The Ukrainian leader had issued his own defiant morning video address, declaring: “We don’t care what army you have, we only care about our land. We will fight for it until the end.”
Referring to Russia he vowed Ukraine “will not try to find an understanding with terrorists”.
“For us Ukraine is the whole of Ukraine,” he said. “All 25 regions, without any concession or compromise.”
This is my most powerful interview yet. I took Maria, a fierce liberal, anti-war protester to the FRONT LINES of the war in the Donbass to see things for herself, to speak to the people for herself. This woman, with balls of steel, even walked with me through the streets of Svyatogorsk, with Ukrainian snipers just 200 meters away, to speak to civilians trapped in their basements and bring them food. How much of what she believed was right? Or wrong? This is an interview you must see to believe.
The massive expansion of NATO, not only in Eastern and Central Europe but the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia, presages endless war and a potential nuclear holocaust.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the arms industry that depends on it for billions in profits, has become the most aggressive and dangerous military alliance on the planet. Created in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, it has evolved into a global war machine in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia.
NATO expanded its footprint, violating promises to Moscow, once the Cold War ended, to incorporate 14 countries in Eastern and Central Europe into the alliance. It will soon add Finland and Sweden. It bombed Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. It launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, resulting in close to a million deaths and some 38 million people driven from their homes. It is building a military footprint in Africa and Asia. It invited Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, the so-called “Asia Pacific Four,” to its recent summit in Madrid at the end of June. It has expanded its reach into the Southern Hemisphere, signing a military training partnership agreement with Colombia, in December 2021. It has backed Turkey, with NATO’s second largest military, which has illegally invaded and occupied parts of Syria as well as Iraq. Turkish-backed militias are engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds and other inhabitants of north and east Syria. The Turkish military has been accused of war crimes – including multiple airstrikes against a refugee camp and chemical weapons use – in northern Iraq. In exchange for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s permission for Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, the two Nordic countries have agreed to expand their domestic terror laws making it easier to crack down on Kurdish and other activists, lift their restrictions on selling arms to Turkey and deny support to the Kurdish-led movement for democratic autonomy in Syria.
It is quite a record for a military alliance that with the collapse of the Soviet Union was rendered obsolete and should have been dismantled. NATO and the militarists had no intention of embracing the “peace dividend,” fostering a world based on diplomacy, a respect of spheres of influence and mutual cooperation. It was determined to stay in business. Its business is war. That meant expanding its war machine far beyond the border of Europe and engaging in ceaseless antagonism toward China and Russia.
“It is clear to everyone in the world that Ukraine will win. It’s only a matter of time. It is a matter, unfortunately, of the losses we suffer, primarily of people. It is a matter of modern weapons, which we must get and will definitely get.” Source: Volodymyr Zelensky
Contrary to Washington’s triumphalist pronouncements, Russia is winning the war, Ukraine has lost the war. Any longer-term damage to Russia is open to debate.
American sanctions against Russia have turned out to be far more devastating to Europe than to Russia. The global economy has slowed and many developing nations face serious food shortages and risk of broad starvation.
There are already deep cracks in the European façade of so-called “NATO unity.” Western Europe will increasingly rue the day that it blindly followed the American Pied Piper to war against Russia. Indeed, this is not a Ukrainian-Russian war but an American-Russian war fought by proxy to the last Ukrainian.
Contrary to optimistic declarations, NATO may in fact ultimately emerge weakened. Western Europeans will think long and hard about the wisdom and deep costs of provoking deeper long term confrontations with Russia or other “competitors”of the US.
Europe will sooner or later return to the purchase of inexpensive Russian energy. Russia lies on the doorstep and a natural economic relationship with Russia will possess overwhelming logic in the end.
Europe already perceives the US as a declining power with an erratic and hypocritical foreign policy “vision” premised upon the desperate need to preserve “American leadership” in the world. America’s willingness to go to war to this end is increasingly dangerous to others.
The West has declared a total war on Russia and the Russian world, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday.
“The West has declared a total war on us, on the Russian World. Nobody makes any secret of this,” Lavrov said at a meeting of the Council of the heads of Russia’s constituent territories at the Foreign Ministry.
Lavrov warned that the Western policy of “cancelling” Russia would continue for a long time.
“The culture of cancelling Russia and everything related with our country has reached a point of absurdity. Bans have been imposed on such classics as Tchaikovsky, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Pushkin. Persecution is underway against Russian culture and art workers. In general, one can be certain that this situation will last,” Lavrov said.
“We must realize that it has exposed the West’s real attitude to the beautiful slogans that were put forward 30 years ago after the end of the Cold War, the calls for universal humanitarian values, for building a common European home from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Now we can see the real worth of these fine words,” Lavrov said.
He stressed that Russia would certainly not agree to put up with this.
The veteran Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by Israeli forces on Wednesday while on assignment covering an Israeli incursion in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
Ahead of the burial on Friday, thousands had gathered to participate in a funeral march which Israeli forces would not allow. In shocking footage aired live on Al Jazeera, Israeli forces beat mourners, including those carrying Abu Akleh’s body, almost causing them to drop the coffin.
“Al Jazeera condemns Israeli occupation forces’ attack on the mourners carrying the coffin of murdered journalist Shireen Abu Akleh,” the Qatar-based network said on Friday.
“In a scene that violates all norms and International laws, the Israeli occupation forces stormed the French Hospital in Jerusalem and attacked the mourners of the late Shireen Abu Akleh at the start of the funeral procession. They severely beat the pallbearers of the late journalist,” the network said in a statement.
“Al Jazeera Media Network denounces this violence in the strongest terms, and holds the Israeli government fully responsible for the safety and security of all the mourners and the family of our colleague Shireen.”
Against the Grain 