Northern Ireland faces loss of 1 million sheep and cattle to meet climate targets
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | April 30, 2022
Not only does agriculture account for a large slice of NI’s emissions (and Ireland’s too), it also accounts for a lot of its GDP, directly and indirectly.
There is a reason why Ireland is dominated by pastoral rather than arable farming. It’s because most of the land is unsuitable for growing of crops, certainly to a profitable extent. Much of the land is rocky and the climate is far too wet. That was why Ireland was so reliant on potatoes at the time of the Great Famine.
Currently only 4% of N Ireland’s farmland is arable.
Although farm labour only accounts for 7% of the country’s labour force, many more depend on the rural economy. Altogether the rural population makes up about 40% of the total in N Ireland. Destroying a large part of farming sector there would be catastrophic for the rural sector. Replacing the meat and dairy sector with, for instance, potatoes would decimate incomes and lead to mass migration out of the countryside.
Perhaps the most shocking part of the Guardian’s report is the reaction of Chris Stark, who is more interested in his modelling than in people’s lives. It also raises the question of just how all of this will be enforced. Farmers certainly are not going to give up willingly.
Shades of the infamous Soviet Land Reforms?
Dr. Drew relies on Rumble after YouTube censorship
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | April 30, 2022
Celebrity physician Dr. Drew Pinsky streamed on Rumble on Friday after getting slapped with a 7-day suspension on YouTube.
“Despite my vocal support of vaccines and science, YouTube deleted my #2 most-viewed show, put a strike on my channel & locked it for a week… again,” he wrote on Twitter. “Thankfully @RumbleVideo supports free speech. Watch @AskDrDrew LIVE at 4 pm PT.”
The video that led to the suspension featured the doctor talking about the effects of Covid vaccines. In the episode that streamed on Rumble, Dr. Drew’s wife Susan said their kids aged over 20 experienced side effects after receiving booster shots.
The video on Rumble was captioned: “Should ‘Big Tech’ have the power to censor debates between doctors … and how can social platform moderators correctly identify ‘medical misinformation’ unless they are doctors themselves?”
Dr. Drew’s YouTube channel has over 58,000 subscribers. On Rumble, his channel has already attracted over 113,000 subscribers.
Former colony resists direct UK rule
The acting premier of the British Virgin Islands, Dr. Natalio Wheatley.
Samizdat | May 1, 2022
The acting premier of the British Virgin Islands has voiced deep “concerns” over London’s plans to assume direct governance of the Caribbean territory, following the arrest of its leader in a US drug sting operation, and a highly-critical report into alleged systemic corruption.
On Friday, shortly before the premier of the British Virgin Islands, Andrew Fahie, appeared before a US judge on charges of cocaine smuggling and money laundering, a commission of inquiry led by Judge Sir Gary Hickinbottom hurriedly published its final report, urging the UK to dissolve the islands’ elected government, suspend their constitution, and impose direct rule for at least two years.
“What this would mean in real terms is that there would no longer be elected representatives who represent the people of the districts and the territory in the house of assembly where laws are made for our society,” said Natalio Wheatley, who assumed the post of acting premier after Fahie’s arrest.
London already dispatched a Foreign Office minister, Amanda Milling, to meet the territory’s Governor James Rankin and other senior figures and discuss the terms of direct rule, ahead of a formal decision expected next week.
The acting BVI premier acknowledged “very serious matters highlighted in the report, which spanned successive Administrations,” and did not question the British Crown representative’s authority and responsibility to maintain order – but said the proposed reforms “can be achieved without the partial or full suspension of the constitution,” under already existing emergency powers.
“I urge you the public to read the report with an objective eye in terms of strengthening our systems of Government under a democratic framework of governance, as opposed to draconian measures that would set back the historical constitutional progress we have made as a people.”
Hickinbottom’s commission was established in 2021, amid claims of corruption and wasteful government spending – as well as rumors that the island leadership was engaging in drug trafficking. According to The Guardian, the British government was aware of the US undercover investigation, and decided to “rush out” the 1,000-page Hickinbottom report after Fahie was arrested.
Named by Christopher Columbus, the Virgin Islands are divided between the UK, the US and the US territory of Puerto Rico. Some 35,000 BVI residents have been British citizens since 2002. While they enjoy a limited self-governance under a 2007 constitution, the string of islands is officially designated as one of the British overseas territories, called crown colonies prior to 1983.
Strike off the truth tellers? No, strike out Whitty & Co!
By Angus Dalgleish | TCW Defending Freedom | April 30, 2022
THE recent announcement from the General Medical Council that doctors face being struck off for spreading fake news on vaccines and lockdowns is somewhat frightening given the recent experience of Dr Sam White, a GP in Hampshire. It has a chilling Orwellian overtone to it.
It seems to imply that fake news is anything not approved by the Government and any of its agencies such as Public Health England and the NHS plus the mainstream media, who have been bribed throughout the pandemic with lucrative advertising contracts.
It assumes that ideas and speculation from discredited sources such as Neil Ferguson and Sage were correct and accepted by the senior medical officers such as Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, with all other inputs ignored or treated with contempt. Many of us suggested that as Covid was an airborne virus which affected mainly the old and those with other medical conditions it should be treated as such. This was based on knowledge accrued from years of treating such unknown upper respiratory tract infections (URTIs) which involves correcting the hideously low levels of vitamin D3 in the population and treating symptoms with regular gargling of aspirin and mouthwash and intranasal sprays. In short, vitamin D3 and topical anti-inflammatory medicines abort colds and flu when given early and frequently.
Why was this not made official policy? I observed severe Covid symptoms melt with such a regimen in many friends and colleagues.
Secondly, why were doctors not allowed to give dexamethasone, which is known to be life-saving in cases of lung inflammation? No, we had to wait for a trial to tell us it worked. A colleague calculated that 4,000 to 5,000 patients died unnecessarily through this decision, which the Chief Medical Officer has to own.
Also why did they stamp on any original idea such as ivermectin, which was dismissed as ‘worm treatment for horses’ when it clearly has some benefit in some Covid cases?
What I am driving at here is that common sense can be classified as fake news by the ever-increasingly power-crazed authorities. The greatest example of this ill-informed madness was the decision to enforce lockdowns not once but twice. It has been calculated that lockdown probably averted 200 Covid deaths but the advisers took no account of the effects on other conditions by denying screening and early treatment of cancer, heart attacks, strokes, not to mention the infliction of severe mental health problems and chronic stress (I personally know of four suicides, two of them medical colleagues). This is before we get on to the big picture – the destruction of young lives, education and the economy.
For what? Sweden refused to follow the lockdown route and not a single child lost a day’s education.
Our experts who felt entitled to tell us what to do and conspired to denigrate those of us with an alternative take such as Professor Sunetra Gupta, myself and other Great Barrington declarants. They cruelly derided Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell for refusing to back lockdown, with 2,000 of his own condemning him.
It has now been accepted by all bar the CCP in China that lockdown was an absolute and avoidable disaster. Yet those of us who were right would be persecuted and prosecuted and struck off by this new emanation from the GMC. Dr Sam White also thought that masks were a waste of time, something every one of the government advisers has agreed with at some time, but they were insisted upon by the Department of Fear, Intimidation and Control of the Population.
Next comes the ‘vaccine’ project. In spite of our warning that a good vaccine needs a powerful T-cell adjuvant, and that the 80 per cent of the spike which mimicked human sequences and was likely to induce side-effects should be omitted, we were dismissed as not important or eminent enough to heed. The vaccines that the establishment backed were experimental medicines designed to reduce morbidity and death in the older population and of course to save the NHS.
So why were they imposed on the whole population without testing to see if they were needed? Even the BCG vaccine was given only to non-tuberculin reactors after a test.
My colleagues started to see serious reactions especially in those below 55 years, which have now been accepted to be real, such as blood clots, strokes, heart inflammation and death. Our original report highlighted the sequence in the spike similar to a neurological protein and severe neurological damage has now been officially recognised. For pointing this out early we were accused of being anti-vaxxers. No, we were not! We were just trying to save people from serious side-effects from a disease with an 0.085 per cent fatality rate.
Presumably the GMC would now strike off anyone, such as Sam White, trying to do the best for their patients. No, they should be looking at the real culprits for this mayhem and whether they had the skills and experience to make these decisions (they did not).
Bizarrely, in this brave new world they were given knighthoods.
Ukrainian strike on Donetsk market was a terrorist act
© Eva Bartlett
By Eva Bartlett | Samizdat | April 30, 2022
If the Donetsk marketplace that was hit by rocket artillery on Thursday had been in a city controlled by Kiev, the names and faces of the five civilians killed would be on all major news sites. But because it was another Ukrainian attack on civilians in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), the deaths and 23 additional civilians injured will almost certainly go unreported, as has the been the norm during the regime’s eight years of the Donbass and Western media’s eight years of ignoring the attacks.
According to the DPR’s Healthcare Ministry, “The strike at the Tekstilschik neighbourhood in the Kirovsky district killed four people on the spot. One patient died in an ambulance during the transportation.”
With another journalist, I went in a taxi to the bombed markets. Two of the dead still lay at the site when we arrived, splayed on the ground. The other bodies had already been removed, but traces of their blood remained on the ground, doors nearby were riddled with shrapnel holes and debris from the strike was all around.
Presumably, rescue workers dealt with the injured first and didn’t prioritize retrieving all the dead as further Ukrainian strikes were possible. I saw this during my experience in Gaza, where Israeli’s waited for people to come to the scene of their attack, then bombed again.
According to Gennady Andreevich, a local employee of the district’s safety commission, at 11:40 am Grad missiles struck two different nearby markets: the vegetable and clothing market where the bodies lay, and a household chemicals and building materials market across and down the street. The latter was far more damaged, stalls completely burnt out, but no one was killed there.
Gennady walked with us to the vegetable market, speaking about previous Ukrainian attacks–which have been happening since 2014. More recent shellings hit near a gas station outside the market, at a residential building beyond the market, and in his own market administrative building, killing two colleagues.
He noted that at this time of day the market would have been filled with people, and that Ukraine knows very well what it is firing at.
“They know there is a market here and that from 10am to 1pm there are many people here,” Gennady said as we walked past shops.
This is a completely civilian area, no military installations.
Who else attacks markets and public spaces?
Striking crowded markets and streets at a busy time of the day is something terrorists in Syria did for years, to the silence of Western media. It is something Israel has also done for a long time, hitting residential and public areas of Gaza–one of the most densely inhabited places on earth.
During the 2009 war on Gaza, Israel bombed crowded mosques, hospitals, and buildings housing displaced Palestinians. One of the more notable incidents was when Tel Aviv targeted a UN-run school in Jabaliya sheltering nearly 1,500 people. At least 40 were killed. Another horrific attack on a crowded place was in the Zeitoun district, after Israeli soldiers forced at gunpoint nearly 100 of the extended Samouni family into one home and later bombed it, killing 48 members of the clan.
During the war, I accompanied medics in their ambulances, documenting Israel’s war crimes. A medic (Arafa abd al-Dayem) I had accompanied was killed one day when the Israeli army fired a prohibited flechette (dart) shell directly at him and the ambulance he stood beside. The following day, Israel struck the crowded mourning tents, also with flechettes, killing six and injuring 25 of the relatives and friends who had gathered in one small space to mourn Arafa’s death.
Damascus’ old city is a maze of twisting lanes, overlapping houses, churches, mosques, schools, crowded outdoor eateries, and markets. Terrorist factions occupying eastern Ghouta shelled most frequently when children would be going to or from school, people to markets.
Having spent a lot of time in the East Gate and Thomas Gate areas of the old city, I experienced the shelling and, unfortunately, acquired many accounts of the terrorists shelling crowded places.
Even today, walking around Old Damascus, you’ll find the imprint of mortar blasts. And if you do walk those lanes, you’ll see how crowded they usually are, meaning many people would have been injured and killed per single mortar blast.
In mid April 2014, for example, they hit an elementary school and a kindergarten, killing one child and injuring 65 more, just some of the countless children killed and injured by shelling over the years.
Incidentally, I later wrote about how the BBC were present at the same hospital where I saw these injured children, and were told explicitly that terrorists were mortaring the city every single day. The BBC article that later followed included the line: “the government is also accused of launching them into neighborhoods under its control.”
I also wrote about terrorist bombings of Aleppo, citing one day in November 2016 when I was in the city, which by the end of the day killed 18 and injured more than 200 civilians. These were some of the nearly 11,000 civilians killed in Aleppo alone by terrorist attacks on homes and public places.
I could continue citing such acts of terrorism in Syria, in Palestine, elsewhere, but I’ve made my point: when Ukraine bombs a crowded market, it is an intentional act of terrorism. As is Ukraine’s relentless bombing of homes in the Donbass republics these past eight years.
Western Media won’t report on this; Western politicians won’t condemn this; virtue signallers won’t speak about this. And when you actually go and document it, they will silence you relentlessly.
© Eva Bartlett
My initial tweet about the market attack was predictably trolled, with comments claiming the bodies were fakes, the bombing never occurred, “prove it” sort of remarks.
Since my observations and photos, as well as Gennady’s testimony, will still not be proof enough, in my video I also included footage taken by a local who was in the market when it was bombed and filmed the immediate aftermath. Gennady himself showed photos on his phone of firefighters dousing the flames, and scenes of the wounded and dead, clearly surrounded by new bomb debris.
But this is what we’ve come to today: Ukraine, often using weapons acquired from the West, can continue to bomb busy civilian areas of the Donbass republics, killing still more civilians, and not only do the hypocrites of the West so keen to accuse Russia of war crimes (which they can never prove and often contradict themselves over), but media and troll farms work in lockstep to gaslight the public and whitewash Ukraine’s war crimes.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).
New bill aims to dissolve Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board
Defund the Department of Homeland Security
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | April 30, 2022
Rep. Lauren Boebert is leading the way in introducing a bill to defund the newly formed Disinformation Governance Board, under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
We obtained a draft copy of the bill for you here.
“This kind of stuff is terrifying. We in Congress have the power of the purse. It is our duty to shut down this department immediately,” Boebert told Fox. “I’m calling on leadership in the Republican Party – Leader McCarthy, Whip Scalise, and others — to join me in calling for this department to be shut down and defunded.”
The new board will focus on Russian propaganda and “misinformation” spread by and about human traffickers at the border.
The head of the board, Nina Jankowicz has previously been accused of spreading misinformation. She called the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story Russian disinformation. The authenticity of the laptop has since been proven.
“No tax dollars should go to where Biden can use the power of the federal government to silence truthful stories like Big Tech did with the Hunter Biden story,” Boebert said.
Boebert compared the formation of the new board to the draconian world in George Orwell’s book “1984.”
“Democrats took that [book] not as a warning, but as a guide,” she added.
Boebert is looking for cosponsors for the bill, which she is expected to introduce next week.
“This really is a department of propaganda,” Boebert said. “To say that the federal department has a say in what’s right and what’s wrong. What’s truth and what is not. This is a very dangerous place that we’ve come to.”
Syria grants amnesty for terrorist crimes
Samizdat | April 30, 2022
Syrian President Bashar Assad issued a decree on Saturday granting amnesty to Syrians for terrorist crimes up to the end of April, except those leading to death. Assad has extended similar olive branches to deserters, criminals and opposition fighters before, often to the displeasure of the US.
Assad’s decree, first reported by Syrian state media on Saturday, “grants a general amnesty for terrorist crimes committed by Syrians before [Saturday], except for those that led to the death of a person.”
While the pardon frees terrorists from criminal prosecution, it does not exempt them from civil lawsuits brought by those they may have harmed.
Those pardoned would have been prosecuted under a 2012 anti-terrorism law and a 1949 provision of Syria’s legal code, and as such will affect the various terrorist groups fighting in Syria’s civil war, which began in 2011. Assad, with the help of Russian forces, has broadly succeeded in maintaining control of Syria against a collection of opposition militias and terrorist groups like Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) and Al-Nusra Front.
Throughout more than a decade of war, Assad has periodically offered pardons to his opponents. Military deserters who didn’t take up arms with terrorists were given amnesty in 2018 and allowed to return to Syria, while a general amnesty for misdemeanors and juvenile crimes was granted in 2021.
However, at the outset of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, Assad attempted to offer opposition fighters amnesty in exchange for surrender. This offer was rejected by the United States, with State Department official Victoria Nuland advising the opposition to ignore Assad’s offer and continue fighting.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry at the time accused Washington of “inciting sedition” with this advice and “supporting acts of killing and terrorism.” The war would continue, and Nuland would go on to oversee the violent overthrow of democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014, and is currently shaping US policy on Ukraine as President Biden’s under secretary of state for political affairs.
Iran: Politicization of Syria’s chemical-weapons file harms OPCW credibility
Press TV – April 30, 2022
Iran’s deputy permanent representative to the UN has decried the politicization of the Syrian chemical-weapons file by certain countries, stressing that the move will endanger the credibility and authority of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the global chemical watchdog.
Zahra Ershadi made the remarks in an address to the UN Security Council session titled “The situation in the Middle East: (Syria – Chemical)” on Friday, during which she strongly condemned the use of chemical weapons anywhere, by anyone, and under any circumstances.
Ershadi stressed the implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and said the treaty aims to protect humanity from the devastating repercussions and scourge of the use of chemical weapons.
“We reiterate our call for the full, effective, non-political, and non-discriminatory implementation of the CWC, and preserving the OPCW’s authority as well. We believe that politicizing the implementation of the Convention and exploiting the OPCW for politically motivated agendas endangers the Convention’s credibility and also the Organization’s authority,” the Iranian envoy to the UN said.
“We also emphasize that any investigation into the use of chemical weapons must be impartial, professional, credible, and objective in order to establish the facts and reach evidence-based conclusions, and in doing so it must strictly adhere to the provisions and procedures within the framework of the Convention; no deviation from the Convention shall be permitted,” she added.
Underlining Syria’s strenuous efforts to meet its CWC obligations, she said the country has shown its willingness to collaborate with the OPCW.
“However, it is disappointing that certain States Parties have politicized the Syrian chemical weapons file, preventing the OPCW from confirming Syria’s compliance with its obligations, which could have resulted in constructive dialogue and cooperation with Syria,” Ershadi said.
“We recognize the critical importance of the Syrian government’s efforts to fulfill its obligations under the Convention,” she further added.
Ershadi also expressed Iran’s support for the approach taken by OPCW and Syria to hold a high-level dialogue and hoped that the initiative would yield positive results.
OPCW, CWC ‘politically biased’
Ershadi’s remarks came after the US accused Syria of flouting the CWC and obstructing the OPCW’s inspectors on Friday, which marked the 25th anniversary of the implementation of the landmark treaty.
Responding to the US accusations, Syrian ambassador Bassam Sabbagh said the inspectors had been denied access because of a “lack of objectivity and professionalism.”
Sabbagh also accused the OPCW and the CWC of political bias.
Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya said the convention had become a “punitive” instrument wielded in the interests of a “narrow group of countries” against Syria.
“At its 25th anniversary, the OPCW has very serious systemic problems and a tarnished reputation,” Nebenzya noted. “Russia unconditionally supports the CWC and is committed to its letter and spirit. What gives rise to question to us is how its provisions are being implemented by the OPCW.”
Moscow and Damascus have on many occasions said members of the so-called White Helmets civil defense group stage gas attacks in a bid to falsely incriminate Syrian government forces and fabricate pretexts for military strikes by the US-led military coalition.
The group, which claims to be a humanitarian NGO, has long been accused of collaborating with anti-Damascus militants.
On April 14, 2018, the US, Britain, and France carried out a string of airstrikes against Syria over a suspected chemical weapons attack on the city of Douma, located about 10 kilometres northeast of the capital Damascus.
Washington and its allies blamed Damascus for the Douma attack, a charge the Syrian government rejected.
According to concealed OPCW documents that were revealed later, the investigators of the Douma incident had found “no evidence” of a chemical weapons attack.
However, the organization censored the findings under pressure from the US and its allies to conceal evidence undermining the pretext of the ensuing US-led bombing of Syria.
Syria surrendered its stockpile of chemical weapons in 2014 to a joint mission led by the United States and the OPCW, which oversaw the destruction of the weaponry.
The Arab country has consistently denied the use of chemical weapons despite Western rhetoric.
HOW COULD THE U.S. HELP TO BRING PEACE TO UKRAINE?
BY NICOLAS J. S. DAVIES | BLACKLISTED NEWS | APRIL 28, 2022
On April 21st, President Biden announced new shipments of weapons to Ukraine, at a cost of $800 million to U.S. taxpayers. On April 25th, Secretaries Blinken and Austin announced over $300 million more military aid. The United States has now spent $3.7 billion on weapons for Ukraine since the Russian invasion, bringing total U.S. military aid to Ukraine since 2014 to about $6.4 billion.
The top priority of Russian airstrikes in Ukraine has been to destroy as many of these weapons as possible before they reach the front lines of the war, so it is not clear how militarily effective these massive arms shipments really are. The other leg of U.S. “support” for Ukraine is its economic and financial sanctions against Russia, whose effectiveness is also highly uncertain.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is visiting Moscow and Kyiv to try to kick start negotiations for a ceasefire and a peace agreement. Since hopes for earlier peace negotiations in Belarus and Turkey have been washed away in a tide of military escalation, hostile rhetoric and politicized war crimes accusations, Secretary General Guterres’ mission may now be the best hope for peace in Ukraine.
This pattern of early hopes for a diplomatic resolution that are quickly dashed by a war psychosis is not unusual. Data on how wars end from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) make it clear that the first month of a war offers the best chance for a negotiated peace agreement. That window has now passed for Ukraine.
An analysis of the UCDP data by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that 44% of wars that end within a month end in a ceasefire and peace agreement rather than the decisive defeat of either side, while that decreases to 24% in wars that last between a month and a year. Once wars rage on into a second year, they become even more intractable and usually last more than ten years.
CSIS fellow Benjamin Jensen, who analyzed the UCDP data, concluded, “The time for diplomacy is now. The longer a war lasts absent concessions by both parties, the more likely it is to escalate into a protracted conflict… In addition to punishment, Russian officials need a viable diplomatic off-ramp that addresses the concerns of all parties.”
To be successful, diplomacy leading to a peace agreement must meet five basic conditions:
First, all sides must gain benefits from the peace agreement that outweigh what they think they can gain by war.
U.S. and allied officials are waging an information war to promote the idea that Russia is losing the war and that Ukraine can militarily defeat Russia, even as some officials admit that that could take several years.
In reality, neither side will benefit from a protracted war that lasts for many months or years. The lives of millions of Ukrainians will be lost and ruined, while Russia will be mired in the kind of military quagmire that both the U.S.S.R. and the United States already experienced in Afghanistan, and that most recent U.S. wars have turned into.
In Ukraine, the basic outlines of a peace agreement already exist. They are: withdrawal of Russian forces; Ukrainian neutrality between NATO and Russia; self-determination for all Ukrainians (including in Crimea and Donbas); and a regional security agreement that protects everyone and prevents new wars.
Both sides are essentially fighting to strengthen their hand in an eventual agreement along those lines. So how many people must die before the details can be worked out across a negotiating table instead of over the rubble of Ukrainian towns and cities?
Second, mediators must be impartial and trusted by both sides.
The United States has monopolized the role of mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis for decades, even as it openly backs and arms one side and abuses its UN veto to prevent international action. This has been a transparent model for endless war.
Turkey has so far acted as the principal mediator between Russia and Ukraine, but it is a NATO member that has supplied drones, weapons and military training to Ukraine. Both sides have accepted Turkey’s mediation, but can Turkey really be an honest broker?
The UN could play a legitimate role, as it is doing in Yemen, where the two sides are finally observing a two-month ceasefire. But even with the UN’s best efforts, it has taken years to negotiate this fragile pause in the war.
Third, the agreement must address the main concerns of all parties to the war.
In 2014, the U.S.-backed coup and the massacre of anti-coup protesters in Odessa led to declarations of independence by the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. The first Minsk Protocol agreement in September 2014 failed to end the ensuing civil war in Eastern Ukraine. A critical difference in the Minsk II agreement in February 2015 was that DPR and LPR representatives were included in the negotiations, and it succeeded in ending the worst fighting and preventing a major new outbreak of war for 7 years.
There is another party that was largely absent from the negotiations in Belarus and Turkey, people who make up half the population of Russia and Ukraine: the women of both countries. While some of them are fighting, many more can speak as victims, civilian casualties and refugees from a war unleashed mainly by men. The voices of women at the table would be a constant reminder of the human costs of war and the lives of women and children that are at stake.
Even when one side militarily wins a war, the grievances of the losers and unresolved political and strategic issues often sow the seeds of new outbreaks of war in the future. As Benjamin Jensen of CSIS suggested, the desires of U.S. and Western politicians to punish and gain strategic advantage over Russia must not be allowed to prevent a comprehensive resolution that addresses the concerns of all sides and ensures a lasting peace.
Fourth, there must be a step-by-step roadmap to a stable and lasting peace that all sides are committed to.
The Minsk II agreement led to a fragile ceasefire and established a roadmap to a political solution. But the Ukrainian government and parliament, under Presidents Poroshenko and then Zelensky, failed to take the next steps that Poroshenko agreed to in Minsk in 2015: to pass laws and constitutional changes to permit independent, internationally-supervised elections in the DPR and LPR, and to grant them autonomy within a federalized Ukrainian state.
Now that these failures have led to Russian recognition of the DPR and LPR’s independence, a new peace agreement must revisit and resolve their status, and that of Crimea, in ways that all sides will be committed to, whether that is through the autonomy promised in Minsk II or formal, recognized independence from Ukraine.
A sticking point in the peace negotiations in Turkey was Ukraine’s need for solid security guarantees to ensure that Russia won’t invade it again. The UN Charter formally protects all countries from international aggression, but it has repeatedly failed to do so when the aggressor, usually the United States, wields a Security Council veto. So how can a neutral Ukraine be reassured that it will be safe from attack in the future? And how can all parties be sure that the others will stick to the agreement this time?
Fifth, outside powers must not undermine the negotiation or implementation of a peace agreement.
Although the United States and its NATO allies are not active warring parties in Ukraine, their role in provoking this crisis through NATO expansion and the 2014 coup, then supporting Kyiv’s abandonment of the Minsk II agreement and flooding Ukraine with weapons, make them an “elephant in the room” that will cast a long shadow over the negotiating table, wherever that is.
In April 2012, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan drew up a six-point plan for a UN-monitored ceasefire and political transition in Syria. But at the very moment that the Annan plan took effect and UN ceasefire monitors were in place, the United States, NATO and their Arab monarchist allies held three “Friends of Syria” conferences, where they pledged virtually unlimited financial and military aid to the Al Qaeda-linked rebels they were backing to overthrow the Syrian government. This encouraged the rebels to ignore the ceasefire, and led to another decade of war for the people of Syria.
The fragile nature of peace negotiations over Ukraine make success highly vulnerable to such powerful external influences. The United States backed Ukraine in a confrontational approach to the civil war in Donbas instead of supporting the terms of the Minsk II agreement, and this has led to war with Russia. Now Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavosoglu, has told CNN Turk that unnamed NATO members “want the war to continue,” in order to keep weakening Russia.
Conclusion
How the United States and its NATO allies act now and in the coming months will be crucial in determining whether Ukraine is destroyed by years of war, like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, or whether this war ends quickly through a diplomatic process that brings peace, security and stability to the people of Russia, Ukraine and their neighbors.
If the United States wants to help restore peace in Ukraine, it must diplomatically support peace negotiations, and make it clear to its ally, Ukraine, that it will support any concessions that Ukrainian negotiators believe are necessary to clinch a peace agreement with Russia.
Whatever mediator Russia and Ukraine agree to work with to try to resolve this crisis, the United States must give the diplomatic process its full, unreserved support, both in public and behind closed doors. It must also ensure that its own actions do not undermine the peace process in Ukraine as they did the Annan plan in Syria in 2012.
One of the most critical steps that U.S. and NATO leaders can take to provide an incentive for Russia to agree to a negotiated peace is to commit to lifting their sanctions if and when Russia complies with a withdrawal agreement. Without such a commitment, the sanctions will quickly lose any moral or practical value as leverage over Russia and will be only an arbitrary form of collective punishment against its people, and against poor people everywhere who can no longer afford food to feed their families. As the de facto leader of the NATO military alliance, the U.S. position on this question will be crucial.
So policy decisions by the United States will have a critical impact on whether there will soon be peace in Ukraine, or only a much longer and bloodier war. The test for U.S. policymakers, and for Americans who care about the people of Ukraine, must be to ask which of these outcomes U.S. policy choices are likely to lead to.
NICOLAS J. S. DAVIES IS AN INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST AND THE AUTHOR OF BLOOD ON OUR HANDS: THE AMERICAN INVASION AND DESTRUCTION OF IRAQ.