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Britain will maintain sanctions to ensure war-affected Russians cannot receive aid

By Ahmed Adel | June 20, 2023

The UK has passed legislation that will allow sanctions against Russia to remain in effect until Moscow pays compensation to Ukraine, the British Foreign Office said on June 19. The British Foreign Office also stated that the European country’s law allows sanctioned Russians to transfer their frozen assets for Ukrainian reconstruction.

“The Government is taking powers to maintain Russian sanctions until compensation is paid to Ukraine and is introducing a route for frozen Russian assets to be donated for Ukrainian reconstruction, under new legislation announced by Foreign Secretary James Cleverly today,” the British Foreign Office announced.

In addition, the ministry pointed out that the UK will create a fund that will allow sanctioned Russians to transfer their frozen assets to the reconstruction of Ukraine.

“This will be a voluntary process whereby sanctioned individuals may apply for funds to be released for the express purpose of supporting Ukraine’s recovery and reconstruction. There will be no coercion of individuals to encourage them to transfer funds, nor any offer of sanctions relief in return for making a donation,” the Office audaciously added, although it does highlight the British entitlement of wanting Russians to release their funds for a purpose but without guarantees.

On June 18, the Daily Mail reported that the UK government and Russian businessman Roman Abramovich, who owned the English Premier League football club Chelsea until 2022 when he was forced to sell it due to the British sanctions campaign against Russia, could not agree on the distribution of funds received from the sale of the club as the billionaire wanted the funds to be sent not only to Ukrainians but also to Russians affected by the conflict. The UK government and the European Commission opposed Abramovich’s desire to send funds to Russians.

At the time of the forced sale, Abramovich’s press office said he “wanted the proceeds to be transferred to a charitable foundation for the needs of the victims on both sides of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.”

This latest provocation by Britain comes as the country’s Ministry of Defence released a video on June 14 revealing the advanced long-range drones that will be sent to Ukraine in the coming weeks. The video shows several types of drones, including one firing a torpedo over water and another being catapulted from the deck of a vessel.

“We announced a £92m air defence package, to be provided through the second procurement round,” the video’s caption said.

Despite the publication of the video, the British authorities did not provide details about the equipment. However, it is speculated that autonomous aircraft with a range of more than 200 kilometres will be sent to Kiev. It is worth noting that the UK recently supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine with a range of over 250 kilometres.

Western countries imposed comprehensive sanctions on Russia after it started a special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, and provided constant support packages to Kiev in the conflict. However, it has been their economies, especially the British, that have suffered from these sanctions.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was warned that the UK could be in recession next year as high inflation pushes interest rates to more than 5% before the next general election. With rising borrowing costs on mortgages and loans for millions of households, economists believe the Bank of England could be forced to drive Britain’s economy into a recession to deal with inflation.

Former IMF deputy director Mohamed El-Erian said the Bank of England would be forced to raise interest rates for longer, leading to a recession or near zero growth.

“The risk we now have, you put all that together – sticky inflation, the Bank having to go higher, borrowing costs going up – all that translates into a higher threat of stagflation. I use stag as shorthand for insufficient economic growth. It can be recession, it can be zero growth. This is not about abstract numbers; it’s about something that hits the poor particularly hard,” El-Erian said.

Yet, despite these significant economic problems, the UK establishment continues its centuries-long policy of opposing and challenging Russia, this time in the context of Ukraine. Already having imposed self-detrimental sanctions and funded Ukraine with billions of pounds, the UK will now roll out a major expansion to its cyber defence programme in Ukraine. It will be boosted by an injection of up to £25 million and a two-year expansion.

As demonstrated, London is concocting all sorts of methods, with endless money streams, to challenge Russia despite British citizens facing a once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis. Not only does this prolong the war and suffering, but it also shows Britain’s obsession with challenging Russia, so much so that it cannot even tolerate Russians affected by the war being supported with the frozen funds of Russian billionaires.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

June 20, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | | 5 Comments

‘Undeniable proof’ uncovered that Zionist agents targeted Jews in Iraq

MEMO | June 19, 2023

A distinguished Israeli-British historian and Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford has uncovered “undeniable proof” that Zionist agents were responsible for targeting the Jewish community in Iraq, pushing them to flee and settle in Israel. Prof. Avi Shlaim has made the claim in his autobiography, which details his childhood as an Iraqi Jew and subsequent exile in Israel. Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew was published last week. A review of the memoir appeared on Saturday in the Spectator magazine, detailing Shlaim’s shocking claim.

Why Arab Jews left Iraq and other countries in the Middle East to move to Israel after more than 2,000 years of living in relative peace and harmony with their Arab Muslim neighbours has been a controversial issue for decades. Events surrounding the creation of the Zionist state of Israel sparked an influx of Jews to historic Palestine. A combination of pull factors such as the belief in the notion of the “ingathering of the exiles” and “making aliyah” accounted for the migration of many Arab Jews.

Israel and supporters of the apartheid state, however, insist that it was the persecution of Arab Jews that pushed them out of their countries of birth. It is a claim that has long been contested. Israel carried out several false flag operations in the Middle East to “persuade” Jews to move to the new state. The most infamous of these was the “Lavon Affair”, during which Egyptian Jews were recruited by Israeli military intelligence to plant bombs inside British and American civilian targets, including churches and libraries.

From 1950 through to 1951 Israeli spy agency Mossad is also said to have orchestrated five bomb attacks on Jewish targets in an operation known as Ali Baba, to drum up fear amongst and hostility towards Iraqi Jews. As the mood darkened, more than 120,000 Jews — 95 per cent of the Jewish population in Iraq — left for Israel via an airlift known as Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.

While the role of Mossad is underplayed by Israel, Shlaim’s account disputes this view. The Oxford professor was born in Baghdad in 1945 and belonged to a prosperous and distinguished Jewish family that enjoyed a comfortable life in the city. According to his memoir, their lives took a drastic turn for the worse when a series of bombings rocked the Iraqi Jewish community in 1950. Faced with increasing danger, Shlaim’s family made the difficult decision to flee to Israel, leaving behind their luxurious lifestyle and struggling to adapt to a new and diminished existence.

Shlaim contends that the Zionist project dealt a severe blow to the position of Jews in Arab lands. In the memoir he argues that the Eurocentric Zionist movement and the state of Israel intensified divisions between Arabs and Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, Hebrew and Arabic, and Judaism and Islam. Furthermore, divisive pro-Israel forces worked actively to erase what Shlaim describes as an ancient heritage of “pluralism, religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism and coexistence. Above all, Zionism has discouraged us from seeing each other as fellow human beings.”

Shlaim discusses how Mizrahi Jews, like himself, who originated in the Middle East, faced discrimination from Ashkenazi Jews, who came from Europe. Mizrahi Israelis remain among some of the poorest communities in Israel, living in developing towns and underprivileged neighbourhoods.

See Also:

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