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A new multipolar security system based on ‘Pax Rossiya’

Strategic Culture Foundation | June 21, 2024

For several years now, Russia, China and other members of the expanding BRICS alliance have been formulating progressive trade and financial relations of the emerging multipolar world order. That order is based on mutual respect and partnership grounded in international law and the UN Charter.

The BRICS concept is rightly the zeitgeist of our time. It is rallying more nations to its fold especially those of the so-called Global South which for decades have been subjected to the unilateralism of Western hegemony.

The trouble is that for a new world order based on equality and fairness to succeed in practice, it needs to be secure from arbitrary military aggression and imperialist tyranny. In other words, a new security architecture is required to underpin the development of a multipolar world.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been advocating for a new indivisible international security system. This week saw the plan for a new security arrangement put into action.

The Russian leader embarked on state visits to North Korea and Vietnam during which he signed new strategic partnership and defense accords.

Ahead of his trip to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Putin outlined the integrated vision thus: “We are also ready for close cooperation to make international relations more democratic and stable… To do this, we will develop alternative mechanisms of trade and mutual settlements that are not controlled by the West, and jointly resist illegitimate unilateral restrictions. And at the same time – to build an architecture of equal and indivisible security in Eurasia.”

The concept of indivisible security is by no means limited to Eurasia. Russia has signaled the same principles apply to Latin America, Africa and indeed every other corner of the world.

During Putin’s meetings with Chairman Kim Jong Un of the DPRK and President Lo Tam of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the strategic partnerships agreed were not merely about military defense and security. They involved comprehensive partnerships for the development of trade, transport, technology, education, science and medicine.

Nevertheless, it was clear that the commitment to strategic partnership was underpinned by new mutual defense accords. This was most explicit in the treaty signed with the DPRK which furnished “mutual assistance in the event of aggression against one of the parties”.

This is a game-changer. It totally upends the geopolitical calculations of the United States and its NATO partners who have been unilaterally expanding military force and provocations in Eurasia and elsewhere.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has ramped up aggression in the Asia-Pacific against China and North Korea with impunity. Under his watch, the US has increasingly moved nuclear forces into the region to intimidate not only Beijing and Pyongyang but also Moscow. The Biden administration has been assiduous in forming hostile military formations in the region with its NATO partners, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea.

Year after year, the United States has built up weapon systems in Taiwan to provoke China and on the Korean Peninsula to threaten North Korea.

This unilateral aggression and “might is right” arrogance underpin the notion of Pax Americana that prevailed for decades after the Second World War. That notion was always a cruel euphemism for American imperialist violence to impose its economic and political interests. The Korean and Vietnam Wars in which millions of civilians were annihilated were the real-world grim translations of Pax Americana and its fraudulent “rules-based order”.

Geopolitical perceptions have dramatically changed in a few short years. The U.S. and its Western partners – a global minority – have come to be seen by most people of the world as rogue states that have trashed international law through illegal wars and unilateral bullying with economic sanctions. The U.S. dollar and Washington’s relentless debt spending are seen as instruments of imperialist looting.

The BRICS multipolar world order is a welcome alternative to the mayhem of the Western-dominated system. The principles of fairness and cooperation are laudable and necessary to implement. But such principles must be reinforced with military defense and security for all. This is far from the one-sided “defense and security” of the United States and its NATO partners, which in reality is an Orwellian cover for aggression.

The defense commitments given by Russia to the DPRK this week can be seen as long overdue. One may wonder how the U.S. and its allies got away with threatening the people of North Korea for so long and denying Pyongyang the sovereign right to self-defense. Admittedly, Russia did previously support UN sanctions on North Korea over its missile program. That’s over.

The U.S.-led proxy war in Ukraine against Russia that erupted in February 2022 was a wake-up call for Moscow and many people around the world.

Patently, the Western hegemonic system will stop at nothing to assert its neocolonialist privileges, even to the point of antagonizing a nuclear world war.

There is only one language that the U.S. and its minions understand – and that is the threat of devastating countervailing force.

Washington and its NATO lackeys think they can put missiles in Ukraine to hit Russia or in South Korea and Japan to hit North Korea – at no cost to their own security. Well, now, they might want to think again. There’s a new sheriff in town, as this week’s developments show.

A new global security system is being incarnate. Russia’s vision of indivisible, mutual security is shared by China and many other nations because it is fully compliant with international law and nations’ sovereignty.

Russia, China and other supporters of a multipolar world are not preemptively threatening anyone. But it takes the guarantee of unassailable nuclear powers, Russia and China, to make a new security system viable by restoring the deterrence towards the rogue states of the United States and NATO accomplices.

The defense accords between Russia, the DPRK and Vietnam are installments of the new security architecture that is needed in Eurasia and globally. The has-been American hegemon has been served notice that from now on its presumption of belligerence with impunity, to destroy nations, and to have a license to murder en masse is null and void.

Welcome to the new multipolar order and Pax Rossiya. All are welcome – except hegemonic rogue states.

June 22, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , | Leave a comment

US forces Russia to close visa centers – ambassador

RT | June 22, 2024

US authorities are closing both Russian visa center offices in the country and will deprive Russia’s diplomats of tax exemption, Moscow’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, has revealed.

The Russia Visa Application Center operates in Washington and New York, assisting those looking to get permits to travel to Russia with preparing the necessary papers and submitting them to the Russian consular offices.

“The Americans notified us that the visa center is closing,” Antonov told the journalists on Saturday. The move by Washington creates a “serious extra burden for us given the fact that our consulate general offices in Houston and New York are drained of blood” due to expulsions of Russian diplomats from the US, he stressed.

The decision to revoke tax exemption status from Russian embassy workers is another “petty, nasty attack” by Washington, the ambassador said. The cards are common practice and handed out to diplomats in all countries, he explained.

US officials didn’t provide any reasoning for their actions, Antonov noted. As for a possible response by Moscow, he said that “there is no need to make any rash moves. We need to consider what the specific consequences of what we will have to do.”

According to the ambassador, the Americans “are trying to break [Russia], trying to change [its] foreign policy, trying to force our diplomats to hide behind the walls of the embassy, to stop communicating and working,” he said.

“This will not happen. Until the last diplomat, while we remain here, we will keep performing our duties,” the ambassador assured.

Relations between Moscow and Washington have steadily deteriorated over the past decade, with the administration of former US President Barack Obama shutting down several Russian consulates after accusing Moscow of “interference” in the 2016 presidential election. The diplomatic row has only escalated since Moscow launched its military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, prompting a wave of Western sanctions and several tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats by both countries.

Last month, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov warned that Moscow may well downgrade its diplomatic ties with Washington if the West “continues on the path of escalation” in terms of supporting Ukraine or making hostile economic moves.

June 22, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

Hungary ‘won’t ride NATO war train’ – Orban

RT | June 21, 2024

The US appears intent on continuing to fight Russia in Ukraine and hopes to win, but Hungary is acting to counter this destructive policy, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said.

The vocal opponent of the Western approach to the Ukraine conflict expressed fresh criticism during a weekly interview on Kossuth Radio on Friday.

“It appears that the Western world, led by the Americans, wants to defeat Russia, with the Germans playing the role of extras,” Orban claimed. He described the strategy as “hopeless,” adding that it is disastrous for the Ukrainians and Russians dying on the battlefield and is potentially escalatory.

The Hungarian leader claimed, however, that “we have already slowed the train to war,” citing the outcome of the recent European Parliament elections in which his party enjoyed success while some pro-Ukrainian groups suffered setbacks.

The Hungarian government has secured assurances from both outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and his presumed successor, Mark Rutte, that Budapest will not be dragged into a “mission” that the US-led bloc is establishing in Ukraine, the prime minister said. Hungary will not contribute troops, weapons, or money to the plan, Orban vowed.

“I can pull the emergency brake. The train will stop, and we Hungarians will get off this train,” he said. “And if we become very strong and the stars are lucky, we will convince the driver not to go any further.”

Moscow has described the Ukraine conflict as a US-initiated proxy war. After several member states publicly said this month that they will allow Kiev to strike targets deep inside Russia with Western-supplied weapons, President Vladimir Putin warned that Moscow could supply similar arms to enemies of the West.

French President Emmanual Macron, who has called on NATO countries not to rule out troop deployments to Ukraine, was among the EU leaders to have suffered the biggest in the European Parliament elections. He subsequently dissolved the French parliament, and is facing the threat of becoming a lame duck for the rest of his term as his political alliance contemplates a potential wipeout in the national legislature.

Supporters of the NATO involvement in the Ukraine conflict say its mission will be limited to training Ukrainian troops on the country’s soil.

June 21, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | Leave a comment

Russia withdraws from MH17 resolution process

RT | June 18, 2024

Moscow is not interested in participating in a “performance” before a Western-dominated panel of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) about the 2014 crash of a Malaysian passenger jet in Donbass, the Russian Foreign Ministry has said.

Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down in Ukrainian airspace. Kiev immediately blamed Donetsk People’s Republic forces and Russia for the incident. In March 2022, the Netherlands and Australia opened an investigation against Russia at the ICAO Council.

“The ICAO Council is not the right place to look for the truth. It makes no sense for us to remain a part of the ‘performance’ started in it,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Monday.

Russia had initially agreed to take part in the proceedings “because we believed that the ICAO platform could be used for professional dialogue about the plane crash,” the ministry said.

However, the council first claimed judiciary powers it did not have, then tried to admit as evidence the two investigations into the MH17 disaster that explicitly excluded Russia – by the Dutch Security Council (NSB) and the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) – while welcoming Ukraine and other adversely interested parties, according to Moscow.

Russia has proposed “a full, thorough and independent international investigation into the crash of flight MH17, as required by UN Security Council Resolution 2166 and the ICAO Dispute Resolution Rules,” but the council refused, the foreign ministry said.

“Ruled by the countries of the collective West and their satellites, the ICAO Council also refused to take into account the decision of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) of January 31, 2024,” which rejected Ukraine’s claims against Russia in the MH17 case, the ministry noted.

The council consists of 36 members, who vote according to instructions from their governments. Australia and 12 others had already publicly blamed Russia for MH17 before any investigation began, the ministry said. When Russia asked them to abstain from voting in the matter, they refused.

This pattern of behavior “runs counter to the minimum requirements for the objectivity of the proceedings,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said. “Under such circumstances, it is impossible to talk about an unbiased establishment of facts, much less a fair decision.”

The “extensive and convincing evidence,” both factual and legal, that Russia was not involved in the MH17 incident has been made available to 193 ICAO members, the ministry noted.

June 18, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Russia’s post-war dilemmas in Ukraine

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | JUNE 18, 2024 

In regard of the war in Ukraine, Russia’s main challenge going forward is to find the equilibrium between strategic overestimation and underestimation. “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten,” as Bill Gates put it. 

A triumphalist tone is unmistakeable in President Vladimir Putin’s speech on Friday to a special gathering of senior foreign ministry officials in Moscow presenting the guardrails for negotiations with Ukraine. Russia is a country of high-context culture, which communicates in ways that are implicit and relies heavily on context. 

Putin underscored certain pre-conditions. Russia is ready to immediately cease hostilities if Ukraine begins withdrawing its military units beyond the administrative boundaries of Donbass, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions. This is a curious replay of the precondition that Moscow fulfilled in March 2022 when following the talks in Istanbul, Ukraine expected a rollback of Russian deployments around Kiev. 

Once bitten, twice shy — Putin’s precondition implies that new territorial realities should be fixed by international treaties. Moscow is ready to negotiate only after Kiev formally notified NATO that it is abandoning the intent to seek membership. Russia expects a complete lifting of sanctions. 

Evidently, Russia’s peace terms are, partly at least, based on certain prerequisites that are, conceivably, impossible for Ukraine and its mentors to fulfil. So, presumably, a further hardening of the peace terms is to be expected if Russian troops make more gains on the battlefield. Meanwhile, Moscow is signalling to its Western adversaries the inevitability of a massive redrawing of the Russian-Ukrainian border as the basis for peace.  

Unsurprisingly, the Western powers view Putin’s peace terms as an ultimatum although Russian diplomacy propagates them as an important peace initiative. It is timed carefully, just as the G7 summit at Borgo Egnazia in Italy ended and on the eve of the Western-sponsored ‘peace meet’ in Bürgenstock. 

The prognosis by the influential politician who has been a deputy speaker of the Duma since 2016 and the scion of an illustrious Russian family, Pyotr Tolstoy (great-great-grandson of Leo Tolstoy) is that Moscow will call out next only for the surrender of Ukrainian forces. 

The mood in Moscow has become belligerent, as the EU, at sustained prodding by Washington, is inexorably moving toward the confiscation of Russia’s frozen assets in western banks — ostensibly for meeting Ukraine’s needs but in reality to defray the huge expenses Washington is incurring for its proxy war. 

The G7 summit’s communique highlights that “In the presence of President Zelenskyy, we decided to make available approximately USD 50 billion leveraging the extraordinary revenues of the immobilised Russian sovereign assets, sending an unmistakable signal to President Putin. We are stepping up our collective efforts to disarm and defund Russia’s military industrial complex.” 

The G7 formulation is a white lie. What is unfolding is a financial scam of the century and the largest theft of money in history. A clutch of modern-day brigands is literally grabbing about $260 billion of Russia’s sovereign assets and giving it the colouring of a legal translation by attributing to it the process the status of a financial collateral for an American loan to Ukraine in blatant violation of international financial law that would ultimately line the pockets of the US military-industrial complex and the politicians.

Suffice to say, Washington is making its proxy war in Ukraine a self-financing, cost-accounting enterprise with Europeans as guarantors. Washington is inflicting a big blow to Russia’s national honour and pride. The big question is where does Russia go from here, given its ‘high-context culture’? 

One barely-noticed ellipsis in Putin’s speech on Friday was that he left his lengthy recap of Western betrayals hanging in the air without a foot note as to how Russia came to such a sorry pass at all historically. 

If the willing submission to the avalanche of national humiliations was merely due to Russia’s weakness, surely, that is a thing of the past. Today, Russia stands tall as the fourth largest global economy, a great military power and the sole power on the planet with the strategic capability to reduce the US to thermonuclear ashes. Yet, minions like NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg are threatening Russia that he’s heading a “nuclear alliance.” 

That is where the elucidation on Putin’s speech by the Dy Chairman of Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev — “on what he [Putin] carefully hinted at in his speech” — needs to be understood properly. 

Medvedev made four key points:  

  • The new territories that became part of Russia since 2022 will “remain so forever.”
  • A “catastrophic scenario” is developing for the Kiev regime.
  • The sanitary zone Russia will create on its western borders to prevent terrorist attacks may extend right up to Ukraine’s border with Poland, the staging post for NATO’s threats against Russia. 
  • “The President did not say this [western Ukraine’s fate] directly, but it is obvious that such territories, if desired by the people living there, can become part of Russia.” 

Most certainly, it is not a coincidence that Putin landed in Pyongyang this morning — or that, Russia’s Pacific Fleet commenced a large scale naval exercise from today till the 28th of June in the Pacific Ocean, in seas of Japan and Okhotsk.  

In the context of his state visit to North Korea, Putin wrote in an article for North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun, “We highly appreciate the DPRK’s unwavering support for Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine… We will… jointly oppose illegitimate unilateral restrictions [read sanctions], and shape the architecture of equal and indivisible security in Eurasia.” 

By the way, if North Korea, which is a nuclear power, figures in the first circle of Russia’s strategic calculus as an ally, can Iran which is a nuclear threshold country be far behind — and, importantly, what could be its alchemy? Indeed, Russia has warned that it will give an asymmetrical response to the attack on its territory with western weapons allegedly aided by NATO personnel — something without precedent even at the high noon of the Cold War — and NATO secretary-general’s open, vociferous support for it.

In Strobe Talbott’s book The Russia Hand (2002), he narrates an aside with Bill Clinton during a US presidential visit to Moscow in 1995. Clinton told Talbott using a favourite metaphor that his instincts were that Russian elites were sulking and couldn’t take anymore the “shit” being shoved down their throat. Indeed, NATO’s eastward expansion was already on the drawing board in the White House by then. 

However, it took Russia another quarter century till February 2022 to resist US bullying. To be sure, Medvedev’s candid ‘annotation’ could not have been without approval from Putin.

The challenge for the next two years is that Russia might overestimate the willingness of the US and EU to concede its legitimate demand of equal and indivisible security. 

On the other hand, in a longer term perspective, Moscow should not underestimate the stubborn refusal by Europe’s declining powers — UK, France and Germany — to accept the rise of Russia as a compelling geopolitical reality that they must reconcile with. 

Hungarian PM Viktor Orhan is spot on in estimating that it will be sheer naïveté to assume that the new EU leadership would moderate the policies towards Ukraine and Russia, despite the ascendancy of the right-wing parties in the recent elections to the European Parliament. 

June 18, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Macron’s political bet could backfire with France one step closer to leaving NATO

By Uriel Araujo | June 18, 2024

NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, although claiming he would not comment on France’s ongoing domestic crisis, said that “I strongly believe it is in the interest of France, and all the allies, to keep NATO strong, because we live in a more dangerous world.”

France is right now facing a political crisis – maybe the wildest one in decades, as Arnaud Bertrand, businessman and commentator, writes.

French President Emmanuel Macron dissolved his country’s parliament and decided to gamble on a snap election, as a reaction against the rise of the so-called “far-right.” The problem is that the populist party National Rally (Rassemblement National), formerly known as the National Front, is projected to win 31.5 percent of the vote, which is over twice the 14.7 percent projected for Macron’s Renaissance party.

Bardella, who is the president of the National Rally’s party since 2022, and also currently a member of the European Parliament, and who is a likely next Prime Minister for France, has pledged to maintain Paris within NATO at least as long as the conflict in Ukraine keeps going: “The proposal we’ve always advocated … did not factor in war… You don’t change treaties in wartime.” Hence, Stoltenberg “warning”.

There is of course a catch in such a commitment: for one thing, Ukraine has never declared war against Russia to this day. In fact, on April, retired general Igor Romanenko, a former deputy chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said that doing so would go against Ukraine’s interests: “If we went to a state of war, then assistance for weapons and equipment would cease not only from the United States, but also from most of the allies.”

This could be just a legal technicality, but it does make it hard to draw the line about when exactly a “war” ended or started. For instance, Ukraine has been bombing the Donbass region since 2014. Even with a Russian de facto victory, Kyiv could just claim Crimea and Donbass indefinitely, and all the Ukrainian far-right militias can make sure that some sort of low-level or frozen conflict (with provocations and terror attacks) goes on for many years. On the other hand, this very ambiguity may give room to a hypothetical National Rally presidency in future France to deem that the war in Ukraine is “over” whenever it sees fit – and then proceed to withdraw from NATO. One should bear in mind that Bardella has only made this caveat with regards to an ongoing “war” in the Eastern European country. Other than that, he does claim that leaving NATO has always been his party’s proposal. As recently as 2022, French Presidential candidate Marine Le Pen (who is a member of Bardella’s party) promised to pull France out of NATO’s military command structure. One should also keep in mind that France did withdraw from the Atlantic Alliance’s integrated military structure in 1966, albeit not completely leaving the NATO Treaty, and even expelled all of its units and headquarters on French territory back then. The country’s  “estrangement” from the Atlantic organization only ended in 2009 with then President Nicolas Sarkozy, which means it took no less than 43 years for France to change its course.

Today’s  French Fifth Republic is a semi-presidentialism system, in which the French President (the executive Head of State) has more powers with regards to foreign policy, also being the commander-in-chief of the French Armed Forces. The Prime Minister, in turn, being the head of government, mostly occupies oneself with domestic issues. Of course, a National Rally government, if politically successful, could pave the way for a future National Rally presidency. Moreover, the French government, led by its Prime Minister, controls the budget and could therefore hamper military aid to Ukraine in a number of ways – this, by the way, would be a very popular measure in France,  considering that just recently, in March 2023, Macron imposed a very unpopular bill raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 years old by unusually invoking a special constitutional powers and basically shunning parliament.

Even former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in his recent interview, has described Macron’s latest decision to dissolve the parliament as a “major risk for the country.”  He added that the “endless enlargement of Europe towards Ukraine” is a mistake against which he “warned”:  “I even dared to make a comparison, and I was widely criticized for, asserting that Ukraine risked becoming, for President Macron, what Turkey had been for President Chirac… Enlargement towards Ukraine is a contradiction, [it takes place] while the Balkan countries, which are European, have been waiting for so long.”

In France, the President names the Prime Minister, but in practice is forced to make a choice that would be able to get the support of a majority in the assembly, because the French National Assembly can dismiss the Prime Minister government.

Therefore, Macron has indeed placed himself in a very difficult and risky position. He has vowed to remain in the presidency regardless of the results of parliamentary elections (on July 7) he himself convoked. He thus might have to name a far-right government, depending on the results. Such results are to come a few days before the NATO summit in Washington, which Macron is of course expected to attend. In such a scenario, he would arrive there in a completely demoralized position.

Marine Le Pen’s 2022 proposal (to leave NATO) was just following the steps of Charles de Gaulle. Le Pen (who is the “far-right” most famous politician in France) is, truth be told, basically a Republican conservative. She supports left-wing economic policies, is pro-abortion, and is a vocal critic of the current “open-borders” migration policy.

For years, the “far-right” label has been the most feared political weapon in Europe and, more broadly, in the West. Far from being merely an accurate description of (very real) neo-Fascist and neo-Nazi groups, it has long been an umbrella concept that also includes all sorts of hardline nationalists and populists. On different occasions, this bogeyman enlarged concept (weaponized by both the left and the right) has served the purpose of setting up Establishment centrist coalitions everywhere.

Today’s mainstreamization of the so-called “far-right” thus serves justice – in a way. At the same time, it also opens the way for the rehabilitation of real Fascists – as long  as they remain loyal to the European bloc and to the Atlantic alliance, as I wrote before. Part of the European center-right and conservative Establishment did hope to make good use of a co-opted and domesticated “far-right” – as seen with the Meloni-Von der Leyen political Alliance. The ongoing French situation brings back the specter of a rising NATO sceptic (and EU sceptic) political alternative and basically short-circuits the system.

June 18, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

BRICS Members Reject Joint Declaration at Swiss Ukraine Conference

Sputnik – 16.06.2024

The BRICS countries, as well as several other states that attended the Swiss-hosted summit on Ukraine did not sign a joint declaration on the results of the talks on Sunday, according to the signatory list.

Earlier in the day, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said that the text of the declaration had been finalized and that Kiev’s positions had been taken into account.

The list of countries that signed the final declaration was displayed by the organizers on the screens of the press center at the Buergenstock resort where the summit was held. The document was signed by 80 countries out of 92 present, but Armenia, Bahrain, Brazil, the Holy See, India, Indonesia, Libya, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, South Africa, Switzerland, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates did not sign it.

The Ukraine conference is taking place this weekend at the Bürgenstock resort near Lucerne. It includes 92 countries and 55 heads of state, as well as eight organizations, including the EU, the Council of Europe, and the UN. However, US President Joe Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and leaders of many other countries did not attend. Some participants, such as US Vice President Kamala Harris and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, left early.

Russia was not invited to the summit. The Kremlin commented that trying to find solutions to the Ukrainian conflict without Moscow’s involvement is completely illogical and unpromising.

June 16, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

Palestinian Resistance’s response to ‘Israel’s’ ceasefire proposal

Al Mayadeen | June 14, 2024

Al Mayadeen obtains a document outlining the fundamental principles of the Palestinian Resistance’s response to the Israeli proposal, as presented by US President Joe Biden, regarding the ceasefire agreement in the Gaza Strip.

After the Palestinian Resistance in the Gaza Strip recently submitted its response to the American proposal for a ceasefire, including comments and amendments reflecting its conditions, Al Mayadeen acquired a document outlining the basic principles of the response document.

Here is the text of the Resistance’s response:

Here are the foundational principles for an agreement between the Israeli and Palestinian sides in Gaza concerning the exchange of detainees and prisoners, as well as achieving sustainable calm.

This text outlines the fundamental principles for an agreement, referencing the Palestinian response to the Israeli proposal dated May 6, 2024.

The framework aims to release all Israeli captives in the Gaza Strip, including civilians and soldiers, regardless of their status (alive or deceased) or the duration of their detention. In exchange, there would be a reciprocal release of an agreed-upon number of prisoners held in Israeli prisons, to achieve a state of calm.

To achieve a permanent ceasefire, the following steps are proposed: the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip, the reconstruction of Gaza, and the lifting of the blockade. This includes opening all border crossings to facilitate the movement of residents and unrestricted transport of goods.

The framework agreement consists of three related and interconnected stages as follows:

The first phase (42 days)

1. Both parties agree to temporarily cease military operations, with Israeli forces withdrawing eastward and away from densely populated areas to position themselves along the border throughout the Gaza Strip. This includes the Philadelphi Axis and the Gaza Valley (Netzarim Axis and the Kuwait roundabout), as outlined below.

2. Temporary cessation of flights (both military and reconnaissance) over the Gaza Strip daily, to be restricted to 10 hours, extended to 12 hours on days designated for the exchange of captives and prisoners.

3. The agreement includes provisions for returning displaced individuals to their respective areas of residence, along with the withdrawal of forces from the Philadelphi axis and Gaza Valley (specifically the Netzarim axis and the Kuwait roundabout).

  1.  On the third day (following the release of three detainees), Israeli forces will fully withdraw from the Rafah crossing, the entire Philadelphi Axis, and eastward from al-Rashid Street to Salah al-Din Street. All military sites and installations in the area will be dismantled by no later than the seventh day. From the first day, displaced individuals will begin returning to their residences (without carrying weapons), and residents will enjoy unrestricted movement throughout the Gaza Strip. Additionally, humanitarian aid will enter via al-Rashid Street from the outset without restrictions.
  2. By the 22nd day, Israeli forces will withdraw from the central areas of the Gaza Strip, specifically the Netzarim Axis and the Kuwait Roundabout axis, to a nearby border area. All military sites and installations in this zone will be dismantled. Displaced individuals will continue returning to their residences throughout the Gaza Strip, without carrying weapons, with a focus on facilitating their return from the South to the North. The agreement ensures unrestricted freedom of movement for the population across all areas of the Gaza Strip.
  3. From the first day onwards, a substantial amount of humanitarian aid, relief materials, and fuel will be delivered, totaling 600 trucks daily. This includes 50 fuel trucks, with 300 allocated for the northern regions. The aid will support the operation of power stations and trade activities, and provide equipment for rubble removal, hospital rehabilitation, and operational needs across Gaza’s health services and bakeries. This humanitarian assistance will be sustained throughout all phases of the agreement.

4. Prisoner-captive exchange between both sides:

During this initial phase, Hamas will release 32 Israeli captives, including both living individuals and the remains of the deceased. This group includes women (both civilians and female soldiers), children (under 19 years who are not conscripts), elderly individuals (over 50 years old), and civilians who are sick or wounded. In exchange, an agreed number of prisoners held in Israeli prisons and detention centers will be released.

  1. Hamas would release all living Israeli captives, which includes civilian women and children (under 19 years old who are not conscripts). In return, “Israel” agrees to release 30 women and children for each Israeli captive released, based on lists provided by Hamas, according to their date of capture.
  2. Hamas would release all living Israeli detainees, including elderly individuals (over 50 years old) and sick or wounded civilians. In exchange, “Israel” agrees to release 30 elderly individuals (over 50 years old) and any sick or wounded civilian detainees for every Israeli captive, based on lists provided by Hamas sorted by the oldest arrests.
  3. Hamas would release all living Israeli female captives and recruits, in exchange for “Israel” releasing 50 detainees from its prisons for every Israeli female captive released (30 sentenced to life, 20 to other sentences) based on lists provided by Hamas.

5. Mechanism for exchanging detainees and prisoners between the two parties during the first phase:

  • By the third day, Hamas will release three Israeli captives, prioritizing civilians. By the seventh day, Hamas will release three Israeli captives, prioritizing civilians.
  • Afterward, Hamas will release three Israeli detainees every seven days, beginning with women (both civilians and soldiers, if possible), and prioritizing all living detainees for release before addressing the transfer of body parts and remains of the deceased.
  • In return, “Israel” will release the agreed-upon number of detainees in Israeli prisons for every Israeli captive who is released, provided that this happens simultaneously and on the same day according to the lists that Hamas will provide.
  • During the sixth week, Hamas will release the remaining detainees included in this stage. In exchange, the agreed-upon number of detainees will be released from Israeli prisons simultaneously and on the same day, based on lists provided by Hamas.
  • By the seventh day, Hamas will disclose the available information regarding the number of Israeli detainees to be released in this phase, contingent upon “Israel” providing adequate information to Hamas and relevant international authorities regarding Palestinian prisoners and detainees from the Gaza Strip, particularly those arrested after October 7, 2023.
  • On the 22nd day, “Israel” will release all detainees who were re-detained following the Gilad Shalit deal.
  • If the number of Israeli detainees to be released in this stage does not reach 32, Hamas will supplement the release with body parts or remains of the deceased from the same categories outlined for this stage. In exchange, “Israel” will release all women, children (under 19 years old), patients, and elderly individuals (over 50 years old) who were arrested from the Gaza Strip after October 7, 2023.

This exchange is expected to occur during the fifth week of this phase.

  • The standards and criteria for a prisoner-captive exchange in this stage will apply to the two individuals, Hisham al-Sayyed and Avera Mengistu if they are confirmed to be alive.
  • The exchange process is contingent upon adherence to the terms of the agreement, which include halting military operations by both parties, withdrawing Israeli forces along the border including the Philadelphi Axis and Rafah crossing, facilitating the return of displaced persons to their homes, and ensuring the unrestricted entry of humanitarian aid.

6. The Palestinian detainees who are liberated will not be re-detained on the same charges for which they were initially detained. “Israel” will not reincarcerate these prisoners to serve the remainder of their sentences, nor will they require them to sign any documents as a condition for their release. These measures will be accompanied by necessary legal procedures to ensure compliance with these terms.

  • Restoring the conditions of prisoners and detainees in Israeli prisons and detention camps to what they were before October 7, 2023, including those who were arrested after this date.

7. The principles and criteria for exchanging detainees and prisoners in the first phase mentioned above do not serve as the basis for negotiating the exchange criteria in the second phase.

8. By the 16th day at the latest, indirect discussions will commence between the two parties to finalize the criteria for exchanging detainees, including conscripts and remaining individuals, for the second phase. This process must be completed and agreed upon before the end of the fifth week of this phase.

9. The United Nations, its agencies (including UNRWA), and other organizations will actively engage in providing humanitarian services across all areas of the Gaza Strip, a commitment that will be sustained throughout all stages of the agreement.

10. Infrastructure rehabilitation (including electricity, water, sewage, communications, and roads) across all areas of the Gaza Strip will commence immediately from day one. Necessary equipment for civil defense, public works, and municipal services will be deployed for debris removal and reconstruction, a process that will persist throughout all phases of the agreement.

11. The necessary supplies and resources will be provided to accommodate displaced persons who lost their homes during the war, ensuring a minimum of 60,000 temporary homes and 200,000 tents.

12. An agreed-upon number of wounded soldiers will be permitted to travel (at least 50 per day) through the Rafah crossing. Restrictions on travel will be lifted, and the movement of goods and trade will resume from the first day of this phase.

13. Arrangements and plans are underway for the reconstruction of homes, civilian facilities, and infrastructure destroyed during the war. Those affected will receive support and compensation under the supervision of several countries and organizations, including Egypt, Qatar, and the United Nations.

14. All procedures from this stage will carry over into the second stage, encompassing temporary cessation of military operations by both parties, relief efforts, shelter provisions, withdrawal of Israeli forces, cessation of flights, and more, until a sustainable calm is declared, marking a permanent cessation of military and hostile operations that comes into effect.

Negotiations will persist under the guarantee of mediators until both parties agree on the criteria for exchanging captives and detainees during the second phase.

The second phase (42 days):

15. Announcing the restoration of sustainable calm, which signifies a permanent cessation of military and hostile operations, will take effect before the captive-prisoner exchange between the two parties.

This exchange will involve all remaining Israeli male captives who are alive (both civilians and soldiers), in exchange for an agreed-upon number of detainees from Israeli prisons and detainees from Israeli detention centers. Additionally, it includes the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip.

The third phase (42 days):

16. Both parties will exchange all body parts or remains of the deceased after their arrival and identification.

17. Initiate the Gaza Strip reconstruction plan, scheduled to span three to five years, encompassing the rebuilding of homes, civilian facilities, and infrastructure to support and compensate all affected groups. This effort will be overseen by several countries and organizations, including Egypt, Qatar, and the United Nations.

18. Ending the complete siege of the Gaza Strip entails opening all border crossings, notably the Rafah crossing, to facilitate the movement of residents and goods. Additionally, ensuring uninterrupted electricity supply throughout all areas of the Gaza Strip is paramount.

Guarantors of this agreement:

Qatar, Egypt, the United States, the United Nations, Turkey, Russia, and China

June 15, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

Collapsing Empire: Georgia and Russia restore diplomatic relations

By Kit Klarenberg | Al Mayadeen | June 15, 2024

It’s been reported by Georgian media that Tbilisi is now “actively working” to restore the country’s diplomatic relations with Moscow, severed by the then regime in August 2008, following its trouncing in a calamitous five-day war with Russia. While this may seem mundane to outside observers, it is a seismic development, amply testifying to the extraordinary pace and scale of the US Empire’s self-inflicted collapse.

Over decades, Washington has invested enormous energy and money into turning Georgia against Russia. Tbilisi has deep and cohering cultural, economic, and historic ties with its huge neighbor. Today, nostalgia for the Soviet Union is widespread, and Joseph Stalin remains a local hero for a significant majority of citizens. While public support for Euro-Atlantic integration and EU and NATO membership is strong, recent developments have prompted many Georgians to reconsider their country’s relationship with the West.

Since taking office in 2012, the ruling Georgian Dream has struck a delicate balance between strengthening Western ties and maintaining civil coexistence with Moscow. This has become an ever-fraught dance since the outbreak of the Ukraine proxy conflict, with external pressure to impose sanctions on Russia and send arms to Kiev perpetually rising. Against this backdrop, there have been multiple apparent plots to overthrow the government and install a more belligerent administration.

In order to neutralize the threat of a coup by Georgian Dream’s domestic and international adversaries, legislation compelling foreign-funded NGOs – of which there are over 25,000 in Tbilisi – has been passed. Its gestation produced a bitter showdown with the EU and US, ending with lawmakers who voted for the law being sanctioned by Washington and the threat of further action to come. Along the way, Georgian citizens were confronted with the poisonous reality of their relationship with the West. And they didn’t like it.

‘Foreign assistance’

Contemporary media reports on Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan “revolution” either ignored the unambiguous Western role in fomenting it or dismissed the proposition as Russian “disinformation” or “conspiracy theory”. Ever since the proxy conflict began, Western journalists have become even more aggressive in rejecting any and all suggestions that the insurrectionary upheaval in Kiev was anything other than an overwhelmingly – if not universally – popular grassroots public revolt.

Yet, it was not long ago that the Empire unabashedly advertised its role in orchestrating “color revolutions” throughout the former Soviet sphere, of which Maidan will surely in future be considered the final installment. In 2005, intelligence cutout USAID published a slick magazine, Democracy Rising, documenting in detail how Washington was behind a wave of rebellious unrest in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere during the first years of the 21st century.

Two years prior, the Washington-sponsored “Rose Revolution” unseated longtime Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze, replacing him with handpicked, US-educated Mikheil Saakashvili, a close associate of George Soros. Shevardnadze had since Tbilisi’s 1991 independence from the Soviet Union eagerly served as a committed agent of Empire, opening up his country to far-reaching privatization for the benefit of Western investors and extensive societal and political infiltration by US and European-funded organizations.

In a bitter irony, such subservience was Shevardnadze’s ultimate undoing. Brussels and Washington exploited this space to lay the foundations of his overthrow, financing individuals and organizations who would serve as shock troops in the “Rose Revolution”. For instance, Democracy Rising reveals that in 1999, US funding “helped Georgians draw up and build support for a Freedom of Information Law, which the government adopted.” This allowed Western-funded media and NGO assets “to investigate government budgets, [and] force the firing of a corrupt minister.”

The US, moreover, bankrolled the training of “lawyers, judges, journalists, members of parliament, NGOs, political party leaders, and others” to wage war against their government. The official purpose of this largesse was to “give people a sense that they should regulate the government.” As per Democracy Rising, “the Rose Revolution was the climax of these efforts.” Following Tbilisi’s November 2003 election, US-financed exit polling suggested the official result – pointing to the victory of a coalition of pro-Shevardnadze parties – was fraudulent.

Scores of anti-government activists from across the country then descended upon Tbilisi’s parliament building, ferried on buses paid for by Washington. Nationwide demonstrations led by US-bankrolled NGOs and activist groups raged for weeks, culminating on November 23 with activists storming parliament brandishing roses. The very next day, Shevardnadze resigned. One recipient of Western support remarked in Democracy Rising, “Without foreign assistance, I’m not sure we would have been able to achieve what we did without bloodshed.”

As the USAID pamphlet noted, many US-financed and trained assets in Georgia central to the “Rose Revolution” went on to become officials within Saakashvili’s government. One, Zurab Chiaberashvili, was appointed as chair of Tbilisi’s Central Election Commission from 2003 to 2004, before becoming mayor of Tbilisi. He was quoted in Democracy Rising as saying:

“Under US assistance, new leaders were born… [the US] helped good people get rid of a bad and corrupted government… [this assistance] made civil actors alive, and when the critical moment came, we understood each other like a well-prepared soccer team.”

‘Demonstrations of will’

The Empire’s in-house journal Foreign Policy has conceded the results of the “Rose Revolution” were “terribly disappointing”. Far-reaching change “never really materialized,” and “elite corruption still continued apace.” Saakashvili was no more democratic or less authoritarian than his predecessor – in fact, his rule was brutal and dictatorial in many ways Shevardnadze’s was not. Questions abound about his involvement in several suspicious deaths, he directed security services to assassinate rivals, and at his personal behest, prisons became politicized hotbeds of torture and rape.

The Empire could forgive Saakashvili all this though, for further facilitating his country’s economic rape and pillage, and even more crucially, intensifying Tbilisi’s anti-Russian agitation locally and internationally. This crusade came to a bloody head in August 2008, when Georgian forces, with US encouragement, began shelling civilian positions in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow intervened to decisively defend the pair. As many as 200,000 locals were displaced in subsequent battles, with hundreds killed.

Dissident journalist Mark Ames visited sites of the fighting in December of that year and witnessed “an epic historical shift” – “the first ruins of America’s imperial decline.” The Georgian army had been trained, armed, and even clothed by the US over many years, only to be comprehensively crushed by Russia’s military – and there was “no American cavalry on the way.” His first-hand insights led Ames to dub the outbreak of war that year, “the day America’s empire died.”

Ames had previously visited Georgia in 2002 to report on the arrival of US military advisors to the country. As the journalist records, “At the time, the American empire was riding high.” TIME magazine had recently celebrated George W. Bush’s inauguration with a column declaring that Washington was “the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome,” and thus positioned “to re-shape norms, alter expectations and create new realities,” via “unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.”

US military expansion into Georgia was one such bold “demonstration of will.” Military advisors were dispatched ostensibly to train Tbilisi’s soldiers to combat “terrorism”. In reality, as Ames wrote, the purpose was to tutor them “for key imperial outsourcing duties.” It was expected that “Georgia would do for the American Empire what Mumbai call centers did for Delta Airlines: deliver greater returns at a fraction of the cost.” The move would also secure Washington’s “strategic control of the untapped oil in the region.”

The benefit for Georgia? “[Moscow] wouldn’t f*** with them, because f***ing with them would be f***ing with us – and nobody would dare to do that.” In the event, however, Saakashvili’s intimate bromance with the West was no deterrent at all. The blitzkrieg’s success, moreover, left Russia “drunk on its victory and the possibilities that it might imply”:

“Now it’s over for us. That’s clear on the ground. But it will be years before America’s political elite even begins to grasp this fact… We have entered a dangerous moment in history – America in decline is reacting hysterically, woofing and screeching and throwing a tantrum, desperate to prove that it still has teeth. Russia, meanwhile, is as high as a Hollywood speedballer from its victory… If we’re lucky, we’ll survive the humiliating decline… without causing too much damage to ourselves or the rest of the world.”

The Maidan coup starkly showed the Empire failed to learn lessons from the 2008 war, and Ames’ hope that Washington’s “humiliating decline” could be endured by US citizens and politicians alike “without causing too much damage to ourselves or the rest of the world” was futile. The West is now struggling to confront its undeniable defeat on Ukraine’s eastern steppe and accept the unraveling of its long-running efforts to absorb Moscow’s “near abroad”, openly mulling direct intervention in the proxy conflict. God help us all.

June 15, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Putin names conditions for Ukraine peace talks

RT | June 14, 2024

Ukraine must remove its troops from Russia’s new regions before any meaningful peace talks can begin, President Vladimir Putin has said.

Moscow rejects Kiev’s claims of sovereignty over five formerly Ukrainian regions, four of which have joined Russia amid the ongoing hostilities. People in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions voted for the transition in late 2022, though hostilities continue in all of them.

Ukrainian troops must be removed from these territories, Putin said on Friday at a meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other senior Russian diplomats.

“I stress: the entire territory of those regions as defined by their administrative borders at the time they joined Ukraine [in August 1991],” Putin stated.

“Our side will order a ceasefire and start negotiations the minute Kiev declares that it is prepared to take this decision and starts actual withdrawal of troops from those regions, and also formally informs us that it no longer plans to join NATO,” the Russian leader pledged.

Putin outlined the conditions after condemning Kiev’s Western backers for allegedly preventing it from holding peace talks with Moscow while accusing Russia of rejecting negotiations.

“We are counting on Kiev to take such a decision on withdrawal, neutral status, and dialogue with Russia, on which the future existence of Ukraine depends, independently based on the current realities and guided by the true interests of the Ukrainian people and not at Western orders,” Putin stated.

At this point, Moscow will not accept a frozen conflict, which would allow the US and its allies to rearm and rebuild the Ukrainian military, Putin claimed. The full resolution of the issue will involve Kiev recognizing the four new regions as well as Crimea as part of Russia, he insisted.

“In the future, all those basic principled positions have to be enshrined in fundamental international agreements. Naturally, that includes the lifting of all Western sanctions against Russia,” Putin stated.

Accepting these terms will allow everyone involved to turn the page and gradually rebuild damaged relations, the president said. Eventually, a pan-European security system that works for all nations on the continent could be created, Putin added, noting that Moscow has sought this outcome for years.

The Russian president’s keynote remarks came ahead of a Swiss-hosted summit supposedly meant to further peace in Ukraine. Kiev has insisted that Moscow could not be invited to the event because it would try to “hijack” it by promoting alternatives to the “peace formula” pushed by the Ukrainian government.

Putin claimed that the event was meant to distract public opinion from the “true roots” of the conflict, and that Vladimir Zelensky has usurped power in Ukraine after his presidential term expired last month. Nothing but demagoguery and accusations against Russia can come out of the Swiss gathering, he predicted.

June 14, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Blind and deaf: how Israel lost the north

By Indrajit Samarajiva | indi.ca | June 5, 2024

It’s fascinatingly boring how Hezbollah has decimated Israel’s “eyes and ears.” For months, the Lebanese resistance’s videos have been methodically mundane, blowing up this communication tower, that building, that listening station.

It seemed like a bunch of nothing, but it adds up. Hezbollah had a list of Israel’s intelligence gathering posts in the north and has spent months methodically eye poking them, like Odysseus and the Cyclops. Now – however big the Israeli military might be – they’re effectively blinded.

Map shows the new buffer zone in the north, as reported by Haaretz

As Hezbollah opens bigger and bigger gaps in the occupation state’s air defenses, they can fire larger missiles with more frequency into Israel, with better and deeper penetration. For Israel, this attrition is a compounding problem. Their air defenses are a connected system and the network is increasingly returning 404. Take for example, the destruction of the $230 million dollar SKYDEW blimp/spy balloon.

This balloon is designed to detect low-flying drones and missiles, especially important as this is the vector most used by the Resistance. SKYDEW can stay up much longer – and is relatively cheaper – than planes, and can ‘see’ much further than ground-based systems. It was also placed in a highly strategic area that allowed them to cover attacks from Syria, Iraq and, to a lesser degree, from Hezbollah, specifically on the port of Haifa. But now the party’s over. Look at the balloon now:

SKYDEW is now shriveled and useless – a big loss, which also signals a big breakdown. As the SKYDEW ‘Target Card‘ (from Hezbollah intelligence) says, it was “protected by an electronic monitoring and jamming system against drones and UAVs,” and “secured by three layers of missile interception systems: Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Hetz [Arrow].” That all got sliced through like the layers of an onion, leaving Israeli defenses naked.

The northern front is porous now, as Israeli settlers know better than anybody. To quote Moshe Davidovitz, head of the Asher regional council:

“Ten rockets fell in the center of the country and the media is in an uproar — the country is in turmoil,” he wrote. “But every day dozens of rockets are fired towards the confrontation line settlements and the Galilee, including anti-tank missiles and suicide drones, and the country remains silent. Once again, it’s proof that the north is not being counted.”

Hezbollah of course, has counted the north. They have a list of Israeli military targets and they go through them one by one. Take, for example, the Mount Meron Air Surveillance Base, one of the two main bases in the occupation state. This is what a senior Israeli air force official says about the base, in a 2016 article by Maariv:

“The air control system is crucial for the operational capability of the Air Force. Its main duty is to protect the occupied airspace. Through the control system, we activate all capabilities to protect the sky, including helicopters, aircraft, missiles, and other classified systems.”

And this is what Hezbollah intelligence released, as they were bombing it:

Firstly, the Meron Air Surveillance Base is located on the summit of Mount Jarmaq [“Mount Meron”] in northern occupied Palestine, the highest peak in occupied Palestine. Meron Base is the sole center for administration, surveillance, and air control in the northern part of the usurping entity and there is no major alternative to it. It is one of two main bases in the entire usurping entity: “Meron” in the north, and the second being “Mitzpe Ramon” in the south.

The Meron Base is responsible for organizing, coordinating, and managing all air operations towards Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Cyprus, and the northern part of the eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea. Additionally, this base is a main center for electronic jamming operations in the aforementioned directions and is staffed by a large number of elite officers and soldiers of the zionist forces.

Secondly, the fighters of the Islamic Resistance at 07:50 AM on Saturday, January 6, 2024, as a part of the preliminary response to the crime of assassinating the great leader Sheikh Saleh Al-Arouri and his martyr brothers in the southern suburb [Dahiyeh] of Beirut, targeted the Meron Air Surveillance Base with 62 missiles of various types, inflicting direct and confirmed hits.

Hezbollah has aired its attacks on Meron Air Base in countless videos now, and they have been relentless. It can get boring because the whole thing never fireballs, but each small hit adds up. Every time a hole in Israeli air defenses opens, the hole widens, because Hezbollah is damaging complex, interconnected systems.

Today, the Meron base can barely defend itself, let alone the region. Tel Aviv has responded by assassinating Hezbollah and allied leaders, but the resistance just name missiles after those martyrs and send more.

This is a battle of attrition and Hezbollah is paying attention while Israel is mindlessly lashing out. Completely distracted by its brutal military assault on civilians in Gaza, in the south, Israel has lost the battle for the north.

After months of this boring de-administrative work, Hezbollah has finally arrived at the good stuff. The occupation state’s northern air defenses today are like a ragged old mosquito net that the dog chased the cat through. It’s full of holes, and big ones. Hezbollah can increasingly fire at will, with increasingly accurate weapons. For example, here is Hezbollah taking down a SKYSTAR 330 by drone-striking its Battalion 869 operator.

In this case, Hezbollah targeted not the spy balloon itself, but the balloon controllers, in three locations at the same time. With the operators eliminated, the balloon drifted out of control, landing in Lebanon where some kids recovered it. This is the state of Israel’s eyes and ears in the north. They’re on the ground.

Iron ‘Done’

Israel has nothing worth calling an air-defense in the north anymore. The Iron Dome is done. Hezbollah can fire at will, and has for every single day for seven months now. Iraqi Resistance missiles are flying right over them, towards Haifa. Iran can overwhelm the entire national system whenever it wants. Israel can still offend the conscience, but they’re missile defenseless now. Even Hamas is hitting them, from within traumatized Gaza. It’s open season, and the settlers know it.

Israeli settlers openly bemoan their unsettled state all over the Hebrew press. Some were so pyrrhicly incensed they threatened to secede from the entire state and form the new State of Galilee. As The Jerusalem Post has said:

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the prime minister’s answer at the cabinet meeting to a question by Benny Gantz, as reported by N12. Gantz wondered if the residents would return to their homes on September 1, for the start of the school year, and Netanyahu replied, “What’s the worst that will happen if they return a few months after September 1?”

This is of course the worst that can happen. The entire premise of Israel’s decades of grooming international actors to accept and expect bad behavior from Tel Aviv is that they can do whatever they want. If the Iron Dome doesn’t work, Israel doesn’t work, and now the Iron Dome doesn’t work. It’s the Iron Sieve now. Holy warriors have poked it full of holes.

An Iron Dome battery targeted by Hezbollah

This is a huge problem because the Iron Dome is not just Israel’s physical defense mechanism, it’s their psychological defense mechanism. It’s what makes the whole colonial project believable, that they can bully everyone in the region and suffer no consequences. Belief in the ‘Iron Dome’ is belief in ‘Israel’ and neither is believable anymore. Thus the northern Jewish settlements have emptied out and they’re not coming back anytime soon. As the Resistance News Network (RNN) said (on May 29th):

930 settler houses in northern occupied Palestine have been damaged by Hezbollah rockets in 86 settlements since October 7th, according to the zionist Ministry of War.

In Al-Manara for example, 130 out of 155 houses were destroyed. Metulla has just 34 residents left in the settlement, at most. Kiryat Shmona, one of the largest (northern) settlements, has seen its population plummet from 24,000 to under 4,000, and 124 houses have been damaged within it.

This comes as over 200,000 settlers in the north are displaced by the resistance, having built their own refugee camp. Some want to secede from “Israel” and build their own state, while others, such as the settlement of “Margaliot” have severed their ties with the entity as of yesterday.

Perplexingly, the IOF reportedly plans to significantly cut down the number of soldiers it has on the northern border and nearby settlements, citing funding reasons, or perhaps to lessen the number of targets available to Hezbollah.

Let’s look at one example of Hezbollah eliminating one target, an Iron Dome battery. They systematically do this over and over. This report describes how Hezbollah first gets the battery to reveal itself by firing rubbish at it, then hits it with drones.

The exclusive footage reveals the monitoring and reconnaissance operations that enabled Hezbollah to uncover the positions of “Iron Dome” batteries stations near the settlement of “Kfar Blum” using a tactic called “fire luring.”

The footage shows Hezbollah launching munitions toward the sites and documenting the interception process carried out by the Iron Dome, which enabled Hezbollah to execute a high-precision qualitative operation.
The scenes at 4:25 show a successful targeting of the Iron Dome batteries, without them being able to detect, track, or thwart the attack. Published photos also reveal Hezbollah’s intelligence penetration of the Israeli soldiers in these newly established sites, and their ability to document the geographical details and size of the fortifications used.

Hezbollah has done this over and over, methodically hunting and seeking Iron Dome batteries one by one. Given that the rest of their surveillance equipment is decimated and they can’t see what’s coming, Israel is forced to then draw its military assets even further from the border. Otherwise this is what happens:

This is the moment Hezbollah hits the garrison unit of Barkat Risha with an Iranian Almas top-attack ATGM [Anti-Tank Guided Missile]. ‘Unlike Hezbollah and Hamas, Israel has not spent the past 20 years tunneling underground, so their troops are all exposed without the Iron Dome. Take also, for example, the IOF’s 769th Brigade Headquarters, or what’s left of it.

The colonial project will shrink rapidly without air defenses. When the soldiers leave, the settlers have to leave. This is not a strategic retreat, it’s strategic defeat. This is not a solution, just dissolution. But it’s all Israel can do. It hasn’t simply lost control of the north, it has lost control of the tempo of this war. Hezbollah can keep turning the heat up until Israel is cooked. Behold Kiryat Shmona (occupied al-Khalisa), which was literally in flames a few days ago:

This is directly because the Iron Dome is not intercepting drones and Hezbollah has fire control of the whole region. Hence it burns. Settlers now see a “welcome” board that has literally melted.

As Israel retreats further and further from its border with Lebanon, the collapse of the northern front also opens up the occupation state to attacks from Syria and Iraq, which can fly straight through. This is all causing massive psychological damage to Israel because the Iron Dome was their primary safety blanket.

Hezbollah has reported destroying over 1,650 pieces of intelligence, surveillance and target acquisition (ISR) equipment since 8 October, 2023. The Lebanese resistance had an actual strategy while Israel was wildly bombing ambulances and homes with no military value. Now Israel has lost northern Palestine and it’s not coming back.

June 9, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

Western hegemony is over – Moscow

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova
RT | June 8, 2024

The concepts of hegemony and global dominance, which the Collective West clings to, have no place in the multipolar world order – which is already becoming a reality, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Saturday.

Speaking at a panel discussion on new norms of international relations at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), Zakharova slammed Western governments for resisting the structural changes which have already started with regard to the self-organization of nations and their interactions with other states.

“We are talking about polycentrism, a departure from previous norms, and we see the desperate resistance of the Collective West… They see the norm differently – as their own dominance, as a world order based on one rule – that they must dominate as before, and everyone must do only what the dominant allows them to do,” she stated, adding that the drive for dominance has only ever “led humanity to monstrous tragedies,” including colonialism and Nazism.

“Today it is hegemonism, an obsession with domination, a painful pseudo-messianic idea of [the West’s] global mission… But neither people nor states can declare themselves as missionaries, only history can prove whether their mission was good or based on unhealthy ideas,” Zakharova said.

She added that the ideas of global dominance, of the exceptionalism of some nations amid the destruction of ethnic and cultural identities of others have repeatedly been expressed by Western leaders. She went on to say that these ideas are not shared by the global majority, which has already embraced the concept of multipolarity.

“We should not forget, they are a minority – the Collective West… their worldview is shared by no one except for them,” she said, citing memorandums adopted by multinational blocs as the Russian-led BRICS group, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, African Union, and others, in which member states commit to forming a multipolar world order.

“The SCO… covers 3 billion people – half of humanity… BRICS covers over 30% of the Earth’s land mass, 45% of the world population – some 3.5 billion people, and 33% of global GDP… 3% more than the GDP of the G7,” she stated.

Zakharova noted that even in the West, some analysts claim that “the US has not been a world hegemon for a long time,” while “its actions in the international arena have led to the destabilization of world politics.” However, until there are significant changes in policy and ideology, Russia and its global allies have “a long struggle ahead” to form a truly polycentric world order, she said.

“While our cause is not simple, it is worthy and noble. And we will walk this path as a global majority. We don’t call it a mission, though, we call it our goal and objective.”

June 8, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

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