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Israel bombs Palestinian families in northern Gaza school

(Photo Credit: Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu Agency)
The Cradle | May 25, 2024

Israeli jets bombed the An-Nazla elementary school in northern Gaza near Jabalia camp on 25 May, killing at least 10 Palestinians, among them several women and children.

“The children were playing in the schoolyard, and suddenly we were bombed,” one displaced woman whose daughter was injured in the attack told Al-Jazeera. “We lived something unnatural.”

An-Nazla School has been serving as a shelter for hundreds of refugees. According to eyewitness reports, a group of Palestinians were filling up gallons of water when Israeli jets bombed the school.

Soon after the attack on the school near Jabalia camp, Israeli jets bombed a group of civilians in the Al-Faluja area of northern Gaza, killing several.

Palestinians, including five children, were also killed in Beit Hanoon when Israeli forces raided a house.

On Saturday afternoon, medical sources in Gaza reported to WAFA News Agency that Israeli troops conducted five massacres against families in the Gaza Strip over the previous 24 hours, killing at least 46 and injuring 130 others.

Occupation troops are also regularly blocking ambulances and rescue teams from reaching the sites of the massacres.

The spike of Israeli violence in northern Gaza comes one day after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Tel Aviv to immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah, where the army has also massacred dozens over the past 24 hours.

More than 900,000 Palestinians have fled Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, over the past three weeks after Israel violently took control of the city’s only border crossing and “expanded” its military offensive.

Israeli troops earlier advanced towards Rafah’s Kuwaiti Hospital and struck residential buildings in its vicinity.

May 25, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel will not stop ‘this madness’ until we make it stop: UN rapporteur

MEMO | May 25, 2024

The UN’s special rapporteur on Palestine on Saturday urged member states to impose sanctions on Israel along with an arms embargo until it stops “this madness,” Anadolu reports.

“Let’s be clear. As the ICJ orders Israel to stop its offensive in Rafah, Israel intensifies its attacks on it,” Francesca Albanese said on X.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its latest ruling ordered Israel to immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza where more than 1.5 million displaced Palestinians had sought refuge.

“The news I am receiving from the people trapped therein are terrifying,” she said.

“Be sure: Israel will not stop this madness until WE make it stop,” she added.

Albanese urged all UN member states to “impose #sanctions, arms embargo and suspend diplo/political relations with Israel till it ceases its assault.”

On Friday, the ICJ reaffirmed its previous orders and indicated further measures including, keeping the Rafah border crossing open and allowing access for investigators to the blockaded enclave.

Over 35,800 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, the vast majority being women and children, and nearly 80,300 others injured since October following an attack by Hamas.

More than seven months into the Israeli war, vast swathes of Gaza lay in ruins amid a crippling blockade of food, clean water and medicine.

May 25, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , | 1 Comment

Palestinians detained by Israeli Occupation Forces in Gaza ‘disappearing into the unknown’

Al Mayadeen | May 25, 2024

The Palestinian Ministry of Detainees and ex-Detainees Affairs in Gaza warned that the vast majority of Palestinians detained from the Strip during the war by Israeli forces “disappear into the unknown” within the occupation’s prisons, camps, and detention centers.

In a press statement, the Ministry confirmed that the detainees are held in secret detention centers, such as the infamous Sde Teman detention center in the occupied Negev, where they are subjected to brutal and severe abuse and systematic torture, especially at the beginning of their detention.

It added that Israeli security agencies conduct investigation sessions using various forms of torture in order to “extract confessions and information by any means necessary.”

Meanwhile, the Israeli occupation refuses to engage with any institution or entity,  especially the International Committee of the Red Cross, requesting information or visits to any detainee.

The interrogation of a large number of detainees has been concluded, but the occupation still refuses to release them, the statement continued.

The Ministry emphasized that what the detainees endure in the occupation’s prisons constitutes “an intended, deliberate crime and a compound crime against our people and prisoners.” It highlighted that the occupation practices “killing, execution, and sadism against the prisoners,” imposing extremely harsh conditions that violate all international and humanitarian norms and laws.

It condemned “the heinous crimes committed against the prisoners and detainees in Israeli prisons since October 7” and held the Israeli occupation and the US administration “responsible for the ongoing crimes against Palestinian detainees.”

As the situation of detainees continues to worsen, the Ministry called for a “serious international investigation into the crimes committed by the Israeli occupation against defenseless detainees.”

The Ministry urged for “international pressure on the occupation to open the prisons and secret detention centers to international organizations, institutions, and lawyers” to conduct visits and assess the conditions of the detainees. It also called on the international community and all international human rights organizations and institutions to “assume their responsibilities towards this serious issue, which the world has never witnessed before.”

The statement concluded by calling on all Palestinian people and national factions to stand by the families of the detainees and offer them support.

1,000 Palestinians missing

Earlier this month, Palestinian human rights groups reported a lack of information regarding the whereabouts and status of hundreds of Palestinian workers from Gaza.

After the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza was launched last October, “approximately 6,441 workers were deported to the West Bank, and approximately 1,000 workers remain missing in light of the ongoing crime of forced disappearance against Gaza detainees,” the Commission of Detainees’ Affairs, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, and the Ramallah-based Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association (Addameer) said in a joint statement.

The institutions stated that “Israel” has declined to reveal the location or provide any information regarding the well-being of these individuals. The only information provided by “Israel” is that there are two military camps for Gaza detainees: one near Beer al-Sabe and another near al-Quds.

New Guantanamo

Israeli media had repeatedly broadcast scenes showing dozens of Palestinian detainees of all ages in Gaza stripped naked and blindfolded before being led to an unknown location, sparking international outrage.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported last December that hundreds of Palestinians who were detained in Gaza and taken to the Sde Teman base near Beer al-Sabe’ were killed as a result of the harsh detention conditions.

It said that “the age group of the Palestinian detainees killed while under investigation ranges from minors to elderly individuals” and also described how “detainees are locked in fenced areas blindfolded and handcuffed for most of the day, with lights kept on throughout the night.”

Commenting on Haaretz’s report, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Observatory later announced that the testimonies it collected were consistent with the Israeli outlet’s findings regarding the martyrdom of Palestinian detainees from Gaza due to torture in an Israeli center that the Observatory described as a “new Guantanamo”.

Among the crimes committed by the Israeli occupation against civilians are forced displacement, field executions, random and arbitrary arrests, and harassment.

To this end, the Observatory called for “an impartial and urgent international investigation into the Israeli army’s field execution of Palestinian civilians after detaining them from various areas across the Gaza Strip.”

May 25, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

German police crack down on pro-Palestinian encampment in Berlin

Press TV – May 25, 2024

German police have violently cracked down on pro-Palestinian student protesters at a university in the capital Berlin.

Students have gathered a Humboldt University’s Department of Socials to protest against Israel’s savage war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The demonstrations began on Wednesday.

Riot police entered the faculty building on Thursday evening and broke up the encampment.

A police spokeswoman said they briefly arrested 169 people and wrote down their identities.

She said that police also took further “measures restricting freedom” at a subsequent protest rally, and issued criminal summons to six more people.

Student organizers condemned violent police actions against protesters, saying the officers used unnecessary force against students.

“The violent eviction” of the student protesters, “marked by police brutality,” as well as “the failure of the university authorities to protect their students,” is a “grave injustice,” the group Student Coalition Berlin wrote in a post on Instagram.

However, the group called on students to continue protests in solidarity with Palestinians.

Encampment protests in Germany have stepped up in recent weeks after anti-Israel protests that have roiled campuses in the United States spread across Europe.

Students have been camping out and calling for their colleges to financially divest and dissociate from companies that profit from or engage in Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza.

The protests spread to university campuses in Berlin, Munich, Cologne and other cities across Germany.

Berlin authorities have taken a tough line against anti-Israeli protesters, labeling student demonstrators as “antisemites and terror sympathizers.”

Students say they are “witnessing a great endangerment of academic freedom” since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza.

In several cases, officers were seen carrying some students away, while punching their heads and repeatedly kicking them.

Despite repression and police interventions, students continue to mobilize in support of Palestine, leading demonstrations, and organizing lectures and sit-ins on university campuses across Germany and Europe as well.

May 25, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

NATO Cries Wolf Over Finnish Islands to Hype ‘Russian Threat’ Narrative

Finland’s autonomous Aland Islands. © AFP 2023 / ALESSANDRO RAMPAZZO
By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 25.05.2024

Western-peddled fears of an alleged potential threat posed to NATO by Moscow have become the norm amid the alliance’s relentless expansion closer to Russia’s borders and hiked up military spending benefiting the military-industrial complex.

NATO is increasingly crying wolf over an archipelago in the Baltic Sea as part of its “Russian threat” propaganda.

The Åland Islands have been dubbed the “Achilles’ heel” of the alliance’s newest member — Finland — Bloomberg reported.

The self-governing, demilitarised Swedish-speaking region of Finland sits at the crossroads of major trade routes worth an estimated $160 billion annually. Key energy and communication infrastructure, undersea electricity and internet cables are located in the area.

But what has NATO stymied is the fact that “Russia is tasked with enforcing an accord that has banned any military presence on its shores for over a century,” the news site pointed out.

Now the Nordic country is a NATO member, warmongering hawks see the archipelago as a huge blind spot, “giving Moscow an open field should it ever decide to invade.”

“If you have all the Åland Islands, you can block maritime traffic both to the Gulf of Bothnia and to the Gulf of Finland… Then we are pretty screwed,” claimed Pekka Toveri, a former major general in Finland’s armed forces.

Finland’s demilitarized Aland Islands. © Photo : Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission; Finnish Border Guard; Finnish Navy

The Agreement between the-then Soviet Union and Finland on the Åland Islands was signed in 1940 following the end of the Winter War. The Finnish side pledged “to demilitarise the Åland Islands, not to fortify them, and not to put them at the disposal of the armed forces of foreign states.” A Soviet Consulate was established in Åland’s capital, Mariehamn.

According to Toveri, the Russian consulate on the Åland Islands needs to be shut down, and Finnish forces must begin training there.

The member of parliament for the center-right National Coalition Party added that archipelago is more important to Finland than Gotland Island is to Sweden. As with Gotland, control of Åland is perceived as key to military dominance in Baltic waters.

In the summer of 2022, Sweden hosted NATO’s BALTOPS 22 exercises on Gotland Island. After Stockholm joined NATO, abandoning long-standing neutrality, Sweden’s prime minister Ulf Kristersson expressed openness to “reinforcing” Gotland’s defenses, in a nod to NATO plans for the Baltic. Sweden’s plans to create a NATO base on the island of Gotland were slammed as provocative by the Russian Foreign Ministry.

After a recdnt review of the Åland islands’ status, the Finnish government saw no need to make any changes. That stance is backed by recent polls among Åland’s residents.

Bloomberg acknowledged that shredding any international demilitarization agreements would be a time-consuming feat, and is unlikely to happen, “for now.”

Developments around both Gotland and the Åland Islands fit the ongoing “Russia threat” narrative NATO has been pushing — while continuing its eastward expansion.

At the Antalya Diplomacy Forum held in Turkey earlier this year, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took Finland and Sweden to task for abandoning their longstanding neutrality to join NATO.

He said that their decision marked the end of “decades of good neighborliness.” Lavrov also warned that Russia would respond by taking additional measures “appropriate to the threats that could appear on the territory of Finland and Sweden.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin recently scotched those claims, highlighting NATO’s hostile posture towards Moscow.

“They’re trying to intimidate their own population with an imaginary Russian threat. This is an obvious fact,” Putin noted in his interview with Tucker Carlson, adding that “smart people understand perfectly well that this is a fake.”

May 25, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Russia Muting Musk’s Starlink Satellites Using Sophisticated Electronic Warfare Tools

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 24.05.2024

The Russian military possesses perhaps the most comprehensive, multilayered and multi-domain electronic warfare capabilities in the world, using an array of short, medium, long and ultra-long range systems to effect throughout the course of the proxy war with NATO in Ukraine.

The Russian military continues to ramp up its ability to disrupt the Starlink internet capabilities Ukraine’s troops use to coordinate their forces, collect intel and launch drone attacks on Russian frontline positions, causing mass “outages” in the Kharkov area of the front and playing a role in the rapid pace of Russia’s recent advances.

That’s according to Ukrainian officials, soldiers and electronic warfare specialists queried by the New York Times to find out why Russia’s EW operations had slowed frontline troops’ ability to communicate using Starlink internet to a crawl, forcing troops to resort to simple text messages.

NYT warned that if Russia’s massed efforts to disrupt Starlink “continue to succeed, it could mark a tactical shift in the conflict, highlighting Ukraine’s vulnerability and dependence on the service provided by Mr. Musk’s company,” while raising “broader questions about Starlink’s reliability against a technically sophisticated adversary.”

“We’re losing the electronic warfare fight,” a deputy commander from the Ukrainian 92ndAssault Brigade’s drone battalion told the newspaper. “One day before the attacks, it just shut down. It became super, super slow,” he complained.

A Ukrainian drone operator confirmed the connectivity issues. “During the first hours the front line was very dynamic. The enemy was moving. And we were moving as well. We needed to be to be fast in communicating,” the soldier said, complaining that the loss of Starlink connectivity “made everything more complicated” and “time consuming.”

Starlink, which operates by beaming internet down to portable Earth-based terminals using vast constellations of satellites, has been in Russia’s crosshairs since the early months of the Ukrainian crisis.

Sputnik has detailed the technical minutiae of some of the tools Russia has at its disposal to jam Starlink’s operations in Ukraine without breaking international law – including the use of ground-based radars to detect the operation of and pinpoint the location of Starlink terminals, and jamming signal transmission directly. The Borshchevik is one such system.

Ukrainian Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov told the NYT that Russia’s latest attacks against Starlink appeared to be using more advanced technology, saying the Russians were “testing different mechanisms to disrupt the quality of Starlink connections because it’s so important for us.”

Fedorov did not elaborate on the nature of these “powerful” Russian EW systems, but said Kiev has maintained constant communication with Starlink to try to resolve the problems.

Experts from NATO countries aren’t entirely certain what’s causing the signal loss – improved and more precise Russian jamming equipment, or a new breed of special electronic warfare weapons mounted on drones to confuse the GPS signals. NYT also didn’t rule out that “solar storms” may be responsible for random outages.

Russia has demonstrated a mounting technological advantage over Ukraine in recent months, blasting through heavily fortified defensive lines in the Donbass – which Ukraine’s military had spent nearly a decade building up with NATO’s help, and advancing rapidly in the Kharkov region to create a “sanitary zone” after repeated Ukrainian attacks on Russian civilian infrastructure, including the border city of Belgorod.

Retired US Army Lieutenant General and former spec ops commander Mike Nagata warned last week that America was “falling behind” its adversaries in electronic warfare despite its best efforts.

“The gap between where the United States should be and where we are, in my judgement, continues to expand not everywhere, but in far too many places,” Nagata said at a Special Operations Forces Week conference in Tampa, Florida.

The former commander’s assessment was echoed by Hudson Institute senior fellow Daniel Patt in recent Congressional testimony. Patt warned in March that Russian EW systems had resulted in a dramatic drop in the effectiveness of some US GPS-guided munitions sent to Ukraine from 70 percent to as low as six percent.

Over the past two years, Russia has fine-tuned its electronic warfare capabilities to jam NATO artillery shells and JDAMs, heavy and long-range strike drones, and missiles. An informed source told Sputnik last October that Russia’s EW troops were preparing equipment to suppress F-16s when they arrive in Ukraine.

Electronic warfare has been a traditional Russian strong suit going back to Soviet days, when doctrines emphasized the “total integration of electronic warfare and physical destruction resources” on the battlefield.

May 25, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Blinken’s blunders epitomize the bankruptcy of U.S. power and diplomacy

Strategic Culture Foundation | May 24, 2024

As the Iranian nation mourned the tragic death of President Ebrahim Raisi this week, the United States could not even muster a respectful offer of condolence.

The U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, officially that country’s top diplomat, made a crass remark that the Iranian people would be “better off”. This as the Islamic Republic had declared five days of mourning for the late president whose funeral in the city of Mashhad was attended by millions of Iranians.

President Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash along with the country’s much-respected Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and several other dignitaries who were also on board the aircraft. The fatal crash happened in treacherous weather over a mountainous region in northwest Iran as the president’s entourage returned from a visit to Azerbaijan.

Most of the world expressed shock and grief over the loss. The UN General Assembly held a minute’s silence and at the funeral, 68 nations were represented including officials from Russia and China.

The United States and Iran have been staunch adversaries for almost half a century following the Iranian revolution in 1979. Nevertheless, it is a basic matter of diplomacy and etiquette for countries to show a token of sympathy at such a time of national mourning.

The disgraceful and cheap comments about the death of Iran’s president show how inadequate Blinken is as the supposed U.S. primary diplomat. But the failure is not merely a personal matter, it epitomizes the general collapse of Washington’s political quality and international standing.  The United States presumes to be a world leader but it evidently has no class. Biden, the president and Blinken’s boss, is a foul-mouthed crank who regularly insults other leaders with ignorant prejudice.

On Blinken’s insult over the Iranian president’s death, Russia’s presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov expressed the disgust of many observers around the world when he said: “It is hard to believe that a diplomat — let alone a high-ranking official of a country such as the United States — would make such a clumsy remark, to say the least. In essence, it was an insult directed at an entire nation.”

Apart from the lack of human decency, there is a total lack of politics. Blinken’s offensive comment comes at a moment of extreme tension in the Middle East amid a genocide perpetrated by the Israeli regime with support from the United States. The powder-keg situation could explode at any time into an international war engulfing the entire region. Israel and Iran have already exchanged military blows.

All diplomats worth their salt should be trying to calm tensions, not inflame them. Blinken’s contemptible insult to the Iranian people is a reckless provocation.

But such sensibility and respect are too much to expect from Blinken who has shown himself to be way out of his depth as a diplomat.

Last week, the “top diplomat” embarrassed his office by playing guitar on stage in a bar during an official visit to Kiev. Blinken was in the Ukrainian capital promising billions of dollars more in military aid to prolong a bloody and futile proxy war against Russia. Reliable estimates put the Ukrainian military death toll at over 500,000 in over two years of combat. Yet, here was Blinken strumming electric guitar with a local rock band. Even more cringe-making was his choice of song, Neil Young’s ‘Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World’. Not only was Blinken tone deaf to the horror of war, but he was oblivious to the fact that the song is an explicit condemnation of American imperialist barbarity.

How could anyone be so stupid and insensitive? That is the measure of Antony Blinken right there.

Lamentably, Blinken has a lot of dubious company in Washington. Their collective arrogance and incompetence are driving the world to calamity. It is reported this week that Blinken is among those in Washington advocating for the supply of long-range U.S. weapons to strike Russian territory. Others pushing this recipe for World War Three include Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and former State Department official Victoria Nuland.

Blinken’s blunders should have seen him sacked long ago in disgrace. He was a chief cheerleader for arming the Kiev regime long before the conflict escalated in February 2022. He along with Nuland and others was instrumental in setting the course for this proxy war that runs the risk of spiraling into a nuclear war.

During his previous posts as national security advisor to President Obama and Biden when he was vice president, Blinken endorsed the NATO “human rights” war on Libya and the “pro-democracy” proxy war for regime change in Syria. The latter involved Washington arming sectarian terror gangs – until Russia and Iran put an end to that dirty operation.

This trail of disaster chartered by Blinken should have ensured his barring from ever ascending to the prominence of Secretary of State. However, that is assuming such appointments are made based on sanity and sound foreign policy.

No, Blinken is a war criminal whose ignorant narcissism knows no bounds. He is nothing but a useful tool for American imperialist warmongering. The guitar-playing, Harvard-educated Blinken is a manikin that provides a pseudo-liberal image to cover for the barbarity of US global power.

His ineptitude is leading the world to an abysmal state of confrontation in the Middle East and between nuclear powers over Ukraine.

What’s more though is the deplorable truth that Washington is full of clones like Blinken. The level of political culture in the U.S. establishment that spawns the likes of Blinken is so putrid and prevalent, that it is difficult to envisage any quality thinkers and leaders emerging.

The degeneration of politics and diplomacy in the United States has been on a long decline much like its global power. Some of Blinken’s more recent predecessors include Mike Pompeo (“we lie and cheat all the time”) and Hillary Clinton (who gloated about the murder of Muammar Gaddafi with “we came, we conquered, he died”); Condoleezza Rice (of Iraq war and rendition torture notoriety) and Colin Powell (who told barefaced lies to the UNSC over WMD). The list of degenerates goes on.

But in Blinken’s case, he’s probably the high point – or maybe that should be the low point – of polished incompetence.

Cometh the hour of U.S. failure, cometh the man who embodies abject failure.

May 25, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | 1 Comment

US Should Quit Sending Money to Ukraine, Try to Negotiate Peace — Congressman Massie

Sputnik – 25.05.2024

WASHINGTON – The United States should stop sending money to Ukraine and attempt to negotiate peace as soon as possible, US Congressman Thomas Massie told Sputnik on Friday.

“I think we should quit sending money there. I think we should try to negotiate peace as soon as possible,” Massie said on the sidelines of the 2024 Libertarian National Convention.

US lawmakers are showing dwindling support for sending military aid to Ukraine each time the matter comes to a vote, Massie highlighted.

“The support for sending weapons to Ukraine is weakening in the US Congress, as you can see with each subsequent vote,” the congressman emphasized.

There should be some effort made to bring both Ukraine and Russia to the upcoming conference in Switzerland as it is hard to imagine negotiations without Russia, Massie stressed.

“This sounds kind of hard to negotiate a peace if they don’t have Russia at the table. So I think there should be some effort to have Ukraine and Russia there,” the congressman said.

Talks Must Go On

Talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Joe Biden could help solve the conflict in Ukraine, and even lower-level discussions between top diplomats could help achieve progress, Massie highlighted.

“I think it could help,” Massie said when asked whether talks between Biden and Putin could help solve the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. “Although, even lower-level negotiations would help as well, I think.”

When asked at what level such discussion should be held, the congressman said, “Maybe at the secretary of state level, for instance.”

Massie expressed his view that it is “wrong” that communications between the US and Russia are limited.

“I think there should be talks,” he said.

‘Very Short-Sighted Policy’

The US government freezing of foreign assets, including those of Russia, is a very short-sighted policy and sends a message to the international community that the United States may stop honoring transactions, the congressman emphasized.

“I think it’s very short sighted of our government to freeze for instance, Treasury assets, that are held by other countries, such as Russia, because it sends a message to the world that if you buy our debt, then we may not honor the transaction at some point,” Massie explained.

The representative added that US moves to freeze foreign assets are “extremely dangerous” because they will increase the price that Washington has to pay to finance its debt.

“I’m sure that our closest allies will still trust that we’ll be good on our word, but other sovereign funds will have a diminished appetite for financing our debt,” Massie said. “So, I think it’s very short-sighted of us to do that.”

Moscow has maintained that any attempt to confiscate its frozen assets would violate international law, with the Russian Foreign Ministry labeling such an action as theft.

No More Money to Ukraine

The congressman argued that he opposes the US government sending more money to Ukraine unless such assistance achieves peace.

“I told our own speaker – if you want to send $60 billion and the goal is to achieve some kind of peace, I might be compelled to vote for it. But I’m not voting for $60 billion that will then only necessitate another $60 billion,” the representative clarified.

Massie also said that both sides to the conflict in Ukraine will eventually run out of people if fighting continues.

“I think it’s immoral to grind up people in this war on both sides,” Massie added.

Earlier on Friday, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that the United States was providing a new weapons package for Ukraine worth $275 million.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Monday the United States has already delivered many of Ukraine’s “top-priority requirements” and much more assistance is on the way.

Austin added that he expects a steady flow of US assistance for Ukraine on a weekly basis.

Russia has consistently warned against continued arms deliveries to Ukraine by the collective West, saying they would only prolong the conflict but would not change the situation on the ground.

May 25, 2024 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

No Velocity Whatsoever: Hyper-Velocity Pipe-dreams

By Bill Buppert | The Libertarian Institute | May 24, 2024

Since October 2021, it has either failed the flight test or scrubbed launches.

Three years.

The joint Army/Navy Dark Eagle Long Range Hypersonic Weapon, that despite the $8.3 billion in R&D invested in it have so far failed to successfully fire a single AUR, All Up Round, it doesn’t fill you with confidence after the cancellation of the Air Force AGM-183 Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), both are/were hyper-sonic glide missiles.

Don’t believe the January 2023 estimates of 41 million per missile if it ever gets off the ground. Yet another signature failure of the sclerotic and arthritic Pentagon spending sprees using an acquisition system the Soviets would blanch at.

The US remains the most expensive paper tiger in the history of the Earth.

The ARRW program was launched in April 2018 and originally planned to achieve initial operational deployment in 2022. However, in November 2023, after conducting two test flights in August and October 2023, the ARRW hypersonic program was officially cancelled.

The U.S. Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW): Dark Eagle

May 25, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | | Leave a comment

Inter-EU Spat Over Air Defenses Scratches the Surface of Deep Divisions in Europe

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 24.05.2024

Poland and Greece on one side and EU behemoth Germany on the other have presented competing visions of a common European air defense system. Sputnik asked respected Polish political observer Mateusz Piskorski about the hidden tectonic political, economic and geostrategic tensions that the rival plans have laid bare.

Warsaw and Athens on Thursday urged the European Union to join forces to create a common “air defense shield” for the bloc.

“Europe will be safe as long as the skies over it are safe,” Polish and Greek prime ministers Donald Tusk and Kyriakos Mitsotakis wrote in a joint letter to European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen. “That is why the EU needs a new flagship program – a European air defense shield – a comprehensive air defense system to protect our common EU airspace against all incoming threats.”

The ‘shield’ “must be a program which addresses [the] major vulnerability in our security” resulting from an array of global crises, and one “which strengthens the EU’s overall defense capabilities and incentivizes European defense companies to develop cutting-edge technologies,” the letter stressed.

Von der Leyen, up for reelection in the quickly approaching elections to the European Parliament in June, quickly endorsed the Polish-Greek proposal at a debate Thursday night.

The new air defense proposals comes after –and apparently as a direct challenge to, a German-led initiative floated in 2022 to create a ‘European Sky Shield’, involving the joint European purchase of pricey air defense equipment. That project fell into obscurity after other major EU partners, including France, expressed opposition to purchasing weapons made outside the bloc.

France and Italy have been pushing their own sophisticated rival to the American Patriot missile system known as the SAMP/T – priced at roughly $500 million per battery and $2 million per interceptor missile (compared to about $1 billion per battery and $4 million per missile in the Patriot’s case). Both systems have been thrashed by Russian forces after being sent to Ukraine.

The competing EU air defense proposals and inability to agree on a bloc-wide policy to date is logical outcome of a union divided by internal political divisions, economic and strategic considerations, and the overbearing influence of Europe’s partners in Washington, says Mateusz Piskorski, a former Sjem lawmaker, independent political observer and columnist for the Mysl Polska (‘Polish Thought’) newspaper.

Piskorski reminded Sputnik that the second of the competing air defense proposals have been unveiled on the eve of elections to the European Parliament, and recalled that both the Polish and Greek prime ministers are members of the same European-level party – the center-right, pro-Europeanist European People’s Party.

“As representatives of this pan-European party, the ranks of which incidentally include Ursula von der Leyen, they are likely trying to demonstrate in the framework of pre-election activities that they have their own version and vision of a European air defense system. In other words, this is an election campaign issue,” Piskorski explained.

From that perspective, the observer stressed that there’s no question that the Polish-Greek ‘European Air Defense Shield’ is an alternative to the German European Sky Shield proposal, recalling that Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats are direct competitors to the European People’s Party at the EU level.

“Secondly, of course, there are certain political subtleties,” Piskorski said, pointing to lingering Greek animosities to Germany’s treatment of Athens a decade-and-a-half ago when Greece suffered economic collapse, and the strict austerity programs enforced on it at Berlin’s direction.

Poland too has “historical and political grounds” of its own to express skepticism of German initiatives, Piskorski said.

“Everyone understands that the creation of such a system – the development of this program would require the effort of all EU members,” and that a major European power – Germany or France, would have to take the lead, the observer noted.

One of the prime reasons Europe already doesn’t have its own common air defense system comes down to the influence of its “Anglo-Saxon friends, and, naturally, first and foremost the USA, who are protecting their own interests and see continental Europe as their protectorate,” Piskorski said.

The UK plays second fiddle in this arrangement, having left the EU through Brexit, closing the door to any pan-European integration projects, including defense policy.

With Central European countries like Poland owing their allegiance to the US, Piskorski rules out the creation a genuinely European mutual air defense arrangement at the current stage. “No one will say so directly, but such an initiative would not be received kindly by Washington and American authorities, just like attempts to create a common European defense policy,” he said.

“Attempts to create large, powerful structures in the military-industrial complex of continental Europe are projects which contradict the main economic and geopolitical interests of the United States,” Piskorski stressed.

That said, the observer doesn’t rule out a European move toward “strategic autonomy,” to quote President Macron of France, including as far as questions related to defense are concerned, after the presidential elections in the US, and in the event that Washington scales back its participation in and financing for various defense-related projects in Europe.

“This would make these projects more concrete and substantive. But this is a question for the future. It’s a slow process. I think that the process of gaining autonomy in this area may take at least several years, perhaps several decades,” Piskorski stressed.

Discord in Europe

Besides US intransigence, up to and including the possible use of agents of influence to resist EU air defense initiatives, there are issues of financing, as well as “technological barriers,” the observer believes.

“There are many factors here, but first and foremost of all is the question of financing. We know that, unfortunately, the European Commission’s sanctions policy and the so-called ‘green agenda’ on environmental issues, among other things, has resulted in European industry being curtailed. Europe is in a fairly deep economic crisis, at least for now,” Piskorski said.

As for technological barriers, “they are connected, first of all, with the fact that Europe has relied exclusively on the United States in this regard in the past, and did not have time to develop its own technologies to the same level… And of course, within Europe there is competition between the defense-industrial complexes of different nations. Naturally, any EU country will seek to support the interests of its own manufacturers, developers of technology, and so on,” the political observer summed up.

May 25, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Russia proposes global space monitoring system

RT | May 24, 2024

Russia has floated the idea of creating a global space monitoring system to provide early warning about celestial threats, Yury Borisov, the head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, has revealed.

The proposal was made during a two-day summit of the space agency chiefs of the BRICS member states in Moscow, Borisov told RT on the sidelines of the event on Friday.

“The Russian proposal to create a global space monitoring system to determine threats, from both natural and artificial objects, has sparked genuine interest. We’re talking about protection from debris, asteroids,” the space boss explained.

The proposed system would not be limited to BRICS states only, as creating it would require the joint effort of many countries around the world, Borisov suggested.

“Such a system can be built only as a global system, since a lot of sensors are needed on the ground all around the globe, as well as space components to ensure reliability for decision making in case of close encounters with any dangerous objects,” he stressed.

The system would involve a “joint informational environment,” with participants contributing the readings from installations located in their countries and receiving in return access to the aggregated data from the whole project.

“The system is an open one, we are not seeking to seclude ourselves. We will call upon all the nations that will deem it possible to participate to join the system, and we will accept them,” Borisov said.

The official also spoke about the summit itself, hailing the event as an important milestone for the group in the field of space cooperation. The BRICS member states are expected to adopt a joint declaration on the matter during the summit of leaders in September, Borisov revealed, a statement that will reaffirm the group’s commitment to peaceful exploration of space and rejection of it being militarized.

“Almost all the participants of our forum have already confirmed their commitment to making such a statement,” he added.

May 25, 2024 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism | | Leave a comment

Hungary blocking EU plan to give Russian money to Ukraine – FT

RT | May 25, 2024

Hungary has blocked legislation that would allow the EU hand over profits earned on frozen Russian assets to Ukraine, the Financial Times reported on Saturday, citing sources.

The West froze around $300 billion in Russian sovereign assets when the Ukraine conflict escalated, trapping around $280 billion in the EU. While the bloc stopped short of confiscating the assets outright due to legal concerns, earlier this week it approved the use of interest generated from the assets to provide military aid to Kiev. The annual revenue is estimated to be around $3 billion.

However, according to five FT sources familiar with internal discussions among EU ambassadors, Hungary’s envoy has opposed expedited payments to Ukraine using Russian interest income. “For the time being they are blocking everything connected to the military support to Ukraine,” one source said, adding the situation would not change until next month’s elections for the European Parliament, at the earliest.

To placate Hungary, the EU reportedly proposed a deal under which its share of the bloc’s funds would not be used to purchase weapons for Ukraine. According to FT, this had limited success, as Budapest agreed not to veto the transfer of revenue to Ukraine. However, it is holding up the implementation of the decision by failing to support the necessary legislation, the article says.

The outlet also said that while Hungary is not opposed to sending the Russian money to Ukraine per se, it has concerns about making the payments automatic.

Meanwhile, Moscow has denounced the decision to transfer profits from its assets to Ukraine as blatant and illegal “expropriation.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has called the move “potentially dangerous,” and warned of possible repercussions, including lawsuits.

Hungary has been a consistent critic of the West’s approach to the Ukraine conflict, particularly its arms shipments to Kiev. Officials in Budapest have repeatedly called for a ceasefire, insisting that EU sanctions against Russia have failed to undermine its economy and have boomeranged against the bloc.

At the end of last year, Hungary delayed the EU’s €50 billion ($54 billion) aid package to Ukraine for several weeks, but eventually backed down under Western pressure.

May 25, 2024 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

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