Pentagon ‘Calls the Tune’ in US’ China Policy as Bomber Flight Follows Blinken’s Beijing Visit
Sputnik – June 19, 2023
The US Air Force has dispatched several B-52H Stratofortress bombers to Abdulrachman Saleh Air Force Base in Indonesia from their bases in North Dakota. The bombers are joining US Pacific Air Forces and Indonesian Air Force aircraft in the Cope West exercise, a bilateral air drill, before returning to the US in the coming days.
The B-52 has been in service with the US Air Force since the 1950s, when it was introduced to haul large numbers of nuclear and conventional bombs to its targets. They were used with devastating effect during the Vietnam War, although it only dropped conventional bombs. The US retains a handful of the massive aircraft to use as “missile trucks” and to intimidate “hostile” nations.
The drills come just days after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken paid a visit to Beijing to meet with senior Chinese diplomatic leaders, including President Xi Jinping. The two sides reaffirmed their desire to avoid a new cold war and claimed they do not seek the other’s overthrow or to supplant their positions on the international stage.
Experts told Sputnik that this kind of contradictory messaging is all too common from the West, especially the United States, where war and intimidation have always been the primary tools of diplomacy.
James Bradley, China expert, historian and author of the “The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia,” told Sputnik on Thursday that whatever rhetoric the US says at the moment, its long-term strategic concern in East Asia has always been controlling and containing China.
“The US Navy was surveying islands near China as early as the 1850s,” he noted, adding that “1898 saw America grabbing the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii to construct a sluice for the riches of China to flow to the US. Since 1945, the United States has been trying to contain China. The State Department can talk about dialogue, but the former War Department – currently called the Defense Department – calls the tune.”
In fact, Bradley noted that when journalist John Pilger asked him in 2016 if the US was already at war with China, “I answered yes.” That was even before the official US strategic shift toward “great power competition” that came in 2018.
“Economic war, cyber war, propaganda war. The business of China is business, and the business of America is war,” Bradley told Sputnik.
Jeff J. Brown, author of The China Trilogy, editor at China Rising Radio Sinoland and co-founder and curator of the Bioweapon Truth Commission, told Sputnik that such disjointedness between diplomatic rhetoric and military activity is typical of Western nations, where “in general, politics is individual and self-aggrandizing.”
“It is not unusual for the US Department of State, Department of Defense, the White House and Congresspersons to have conflicting and confusing messages, since each has their own agendas to push,”he said. “Not only are we seeing the Blinken-Indonesia white-hat black-hat routine, but at the same time, Joe Biden just called Chinese President Xi a ‘dictator!’”
“In the West in general, politics is individual and self-aggrandizing, so none of this is surprising that the left hand doesn’t care what the right hand is doing. In China, the government practices Marxist democratic centralism: argue and debate beforehand, but then publicly speak and act in one, unified voice,” Brown noted.
As to why Indonesia would agree to host US strategic bombers amid its attempts to stay neutral on the Washington-Beijing rivalry, Brown noted that the forces in power in Jakarta came to power in a US-sponsored pressure of pro-Chinese forces.
“We cannot forget that today’s Indonesia was born in the US genocide of millions of communists, socialists, leftists and liberals in 1965-66, to depose non-aligned President Sukarno for <…> General Suharto. Since then, the US military naturally pulls a lot of strings with the Indonesian army. We see the same situation in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Independent-minded presidents, prime ministers and legislatures are always confronted by the Western imperial toolbox: blackmail, bribery, extortion, false flags and fake news,” he explained.
“This is why we can see executives and legislatures cooperating with anti-imperial countries like China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela, while their militaries work with NATO.”
The author predicted that while the US would likely continue to pressure Jakarta to avoid buying advanced military hardware from China or Russia using “negative, reactionary diplomacy,” the inevitable decline of the West and rising of the developing world means its ability to do so is only going to diminish in the future.
“With the West’s continuing decline and the rise of BRICS and SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organization], Indonesia may want to reorder those Su-35s,” Brown said, referring to a 2018 deal with Russia that the US blocked.
“It might work this go-around. In the meantime, the US will continue to use Western imperialism’s negative, reactionary diplomacy, by heavily playing the Taiwan separatist card, pushing NATO in Japan <…>, patching together hind-end groupings like the Quad and AUKUS, and sanctioning everything that moves,” he added.
“This, while China has masterfully united East and Southeast Asia into the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) free trade agreement, totally outclassing the US’ inchoate, anti-China Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It’s so much easier to say ‘yes’ to mutually respectful, win-win cooperation.”
EU Transfers to Ukraine Another $1.6Bln in Financial Assistance – Von der Leyen
Sputnik – 22.06.2023
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Thursday the European Union have transferred to Ukraine another 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) in financial assistance to support its infrastructure.
“Today we disburse another €1.5 bn for Ukraine in macro-financial assistance. We help keep Ukraine’s services and infrastructure afloat in its brave fight for freedom,” von der Leyen tweeted.
She also promised to give Kiev more money, recalling the recently announced 50 billion euros of four-year financial reserves for Ukraine.
The head of the commission reiterated the EU was willing to provide Kiev with “long haul” support.
Earlier, the European Commission has reviewed the draft EU budget for the 2024-2027 period and asked member states to increase it by 66 billion euros ($72 billion), mostly to fund assistance for Ukraine.
Western countries have supplied Ukraine with military aid since the start of hostilities in February 2022. The support evolved from lighter artillery munitions and training in 2022 to heavier weapons, including tanks, later that year and in 2023.
Latest news ‘from the front’
By Gilbert Doctorow | June 22, 2023
This morning’s edition of the news and discussion program Sixty Minutes on Russian state television opened with the now traditional montage of excerpts from U.S. television reporting on transgender issues. Today this was the latest court decisions on state legislation banning sex change operations in children. That sort of material is now the daily filler on Russian news, providing a nice distraction from the misery of war and a clear demonstration of what degenerates the Americans have become.
However, this distraction was cut short and ten minutes into the program we were shown live images of the ongoing meeting of the RF Security Council chaired by Vladimir Putin. The meeting was virtual not in-person. The President was seated at his desk in his Kremlin office with the other participants shown on television monitors. We caught the moment when Defense Minister Shoigu was reporting to Putin on the summary results of the fighting since the start of the Ukrainian counter-offensive at the start of the month: 246 Ukrainian tanks, including13 German Leopards, have been destroyed and a bit more than 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. Yes, killed. In addition there must be the injured.
This, of course, was the part of the session fit for public dissemination. What really brought the Council together today was something else: to consider Russia’s response to latest developments in the war zone, namely the Ukrainians’ destruction yesterday of several bridges connecting the Kherson oblast under Russian control to the Crimea. It has already been determined that the attackers used the British supplied cruise missiles Storm Shadow. This looks very much like the tripwire that Shoigu had in mind a couple of days ago when he said that Russia will bomb the decision making center in Kiev if its territory is attacked. So we may well expect something to happen now.
Then there was surely another issue on the table arising from developments described in a 5-minute report by a journalist with the German Bild magazine which the Russians put up on the screen. His televised report was devoted to the consequences of the explosion at the Kakhovka dam and the emptying of the vast reservoir behind it, which, per the journalist was, as measured in square kilometers, larger than the Berlin metropolitan area.
After opening his remarks with the Hail Mary assertion that the Russians were responsible for this disaster, he went on to describe very persuasively why the emptying of the reservoir now serves Ukrainian military interests perfectly. Most of the land which had been under water is now dry and can very likely support tanks. In the new conditions, the distance separating Ukrainian and Russian forces in the Kakhovka area has been reduced to zero from what had been a body of water varying from 5 to 31 kilometers in width. Moreover, the length of this new stretch of the front is up to 200 km. And in this new front line, the Russians have no defensive mine fields, tank traps, hidden artillery or well engineered trenches that have been so murderous to the attacking Ukrainian army in the Southern Donetsk and Zaporozhie fronts.
This has to be one of the main “surprises” that the Ukrainian command had in mind as it looks for new ways to achieve a breakthrough. But, this potentially dramatic change is not necessarily what it seems: this is not some German move around the Maginot line that left the French with no response. Russia has the means to respond, but that takes us back to point one: to finish off the regime in Kiev now and not wait further.
Finally, within the broadcast of Sixty Minutes, the leader of a Chechen unit active in the Donbas who appears rather frequently on the program gave his assessment of the personnel and equipment losses on Ukrainian fighting potential. As he noted, the loss of tanks and artillery pieces means that the best trained Ukrainian fighters are now dead. To put an infantry soldier on the front lines, you hand him a Kalashnikov and push him out on the field. But the tank commanders and artillery men are the top soldiers who have undergone long training and war experience. Their loss is irreplaceable and explains the heavy infantry losses comprising most of the 13,000 dead, new recruits who were sent to their deaths as cannon fodder.
The two o’clock feature news program on Channel One provided additional video excerpts from the morning’s RF Security Council meeting, in particular the report to Putin by Nikolai Patrushev, the Secretary of the Council. His discussion of Ukrainian equipment destroyed was far more detailed, listing the numbers of armored personnel carriers, artillery pieces and rapid fire rocket launchers, helicopters, drones and much more. The conclusion was that most of the equipment that has been supplied to Ukraine over the past months is now destroyed. That takes in both US and European manufactured equipment as well as Soviet equipment donated by former Warsaw Pact countries. Ukraine is now living hand to mouth on fighting material coming in from the West.
The two o’clock news also devoted special attention to the commemorative events going on today in Moscow and in cities and towns across Russia to mark the 82nd anniversary of the German invasion that brought the USSR into WWII. We were shown video recordings of candle lightings where tens of thousands of lights were laid out to form powerful images of remembrance. All of this comes in the midst of what is seen as a new struggle to crush Nazism in Europe as did their parents and grandparents in the Great Patriotic War.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
US should pay the bill for devastation in Ukraine – Russian envoy
RT | June 22, 2023
The Ukraine conflict was instigated by the US and other Western countries, and as such it is up to Washington to pay for the reconstruction of the ravaged nation, Russia’s ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, claimed on Wednesday.
Antonov was asked to comment on a statement by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who, while speaking at a Ukraine reconstruction conference in London, claimed that “Russia will eventually bear the cost” of restoring the country.
The Russian diplomat pushed back against Blinken’s remarks, saying the conflict between Moscow and Kiev was “the result of years of deliberate efforts by the United States to create a hotbed of tensions at our borders, to turn Ukraine into ‘anti-Russia,’” which involved a Western-backed coup in the Ukrainian capital in 2014.
Antonov claimed that the US was actively fanning hostilities by pumping Kiev with weapons, while nipping any peace initiatives in the bud. “This means that the administration is fully responsible for what is happening in Ukraine. That’s why it is up to the United States to rebuild the country,” he stated.
He went on to state that while it is possible to restore houses destroyed by American weapons, it will be much more difficult to erase the humanitarian consequences of the conflict.
“How will… Washington evaluate the lives of innocent people? How is the United States going to settle accounts with the Ukrainians, whom they are driving into reckless frontal assaults in today’s so-called counter-offensive?” the envoy asked.
While Western countries have pledged billions of dollars in reconstruction assistance to Ukraine, some of Kiev backers have also called for the seizure of Russian assets that were frozen after the start of the Ukraine conflict, to be used for reconstruction. While legal hurdles have so far prevented this from happening, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov has described the initiative as “pure banditry.”
Raytheon CEO Explains Why China Has US Military By The Balls
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | June 21, 2023
Raytheon Chief Executive Greg Hayes admitted last week that Beijing effectively has the US military’s supply chain by the balls thanks to its reliance on rare earths and other materials which come from, or are processed in, China.
According to Hayes, Raytheon has “several thousand suppliers in China,” because of which “decoupling … is impossible.”
“We can de-risk but not decouple,” he told the Financial Times, adding that he thinks this is the case “for everybody.”
“Think about the $500bn of trade that goes from China to the US every year. More than 95 per cent of rare earth materials or metals come from, or are processed in, China. There is no alternative,” Hayes continued, adding “If we had to pull out of China, it would take us many many years to re-establish that capability either domestically or in other friendly countries.”
Hayes’ comments underline the difficulties facing western manufacturers amid growing friction between China and the US and its allies.
Beijing in February imposed new sanctions on both Raytheon and US defence peer Lockheed Martin for supplying weapons to Taiwan. Hayes has also been placed under sanctions.
The sanctions have had little commercial impact as the groups are not allowed to sell military equipment to China. Raytheon, however, has a substantial commercial aerospace business in the country through its engine subsidiary, Pratt & Whitney, and aviation systems and cabin equipment specialist Collins Aerospace. It has about 2,000 direct employees in China. – FT
Hayes said that the company is looking “to take some of the most critical components and have second sources but we are not in a position to pull out of China the way we did out of Russia.”
That said, entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand makes a solid point – that this makes war with China “less likely.”
Except that they have all the leverage and we have have Joe Biden.
North Korea slams Blinken’s recent China visit as ‘begging trip’
Press TV – June 21, 2023
North Korea has ridiculed US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent visit to China as a “disgraceful begging trip,” further slamming it as a failure of policy aimed at exerting pressure on Beijing.
The rare visit was aimed at begging for the relaxation of tensions as the “attempt to press and restrain China may become a boomerang striking a fatal blow to the US economy,” said North Korean international affairs analyst Jong Yong in a column published by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Wednesday.
“In a word, the US state secretary’s recent junket can never be judged otherwise than a disgraceful begging trip of the provoker admitting the failure of the policy of putting pressure on China,” he then added.
The analyst further blamed Washington for escalating regional tensions with “anti-China complexes” such as the so-called Quad strategic security group, which includes Japan, Australia, India, and the United States, as well as the Australia-UK-US security deal known as AUKUS.
“It is the height of the double-dealing and impudence peculiar to the US to provoke first and then talk about the so-called ‘responsible control over divergence of opinion,'” he said.
Blinken arrived in Beijing on Sunday on a high-stakes diplomatic mission in a bid to ease deteriorating tensions between the world’s two largest economies amid little hope for much progress in the talks.
During his two-day visit, Blinken met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, saying they had agreed to stabilize their intense rivalry so it did not veer into conflict.
Biden calls China’s Xi ‘dictator’
However, a day after the top American diplomat visited China to purportedly ease tensions, US President Joe Biden likened his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping with “dictators.”
Speaking at a Democratic Party fundraiser in northern California, Biden claimed Xi had been angered over an incident in February when a Chinese balloon flew over the United States and eventually shot down with Washington claiming – despite Beijing’s denials – that it was used for spying.
“The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two box cars full of spy equipment is he didn’t know it was there,” Biden proclaimed.
“That’s a great embarrassment for dictators,” he then emphasized. “When they didn’t know what happened. That wasn’t supposed to be going where it was. It was blown off course.”
Blinken also stated at the conclusion of his visit that he had called on China to urge North Korea to stop launching missiles as Beijing holds a “unique position” to press Pyongyang to engage in dialogue.
North Korea is reeling under harsh US-led sanctions over its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, which have not prevented it from developing its military capabilities as a deterrent against persisting war games near its waters by US and South Korean military forces that Pyongyang regards as rehearsals for invading the country.
The North has further underlined that it will continue responding to joint military maneuvers of its adversaries by holding its own drills as well as developing all sorts of weaponry, including long-range missiles.
Prior to his visit to Beijing, Blinken had said the trip aims to establish communication channels to avoid the ongoing rivalry between the two nations to spiral into a military conflict.
He said to avoid a conflict with China they should start with “communicating.”
Blinken was the highest-ranking US official to visit China since Joe Biden became president in 2021.
Is China reciprocating US aggression?
By Drago Bosnic | June 21, 2023
When the Soviet Union placed its nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962, the United States threatened to attack if the R-12 “Dvina” and R-14 “Chusovaya” nuclear-tipped missiles deployed on the Caribbean island country weren’t removed. After most of October that year was spent in strenuous talks and strategic military maneuvers that nearly escalated into full-scale confrontation barely 17 years after WW2, Washington DC and Moscow finally negotiated a mutually beneficial (albeit last-minute) agreement that moved the world away from the thermonuclear abyss that threatened to destroy it.
For decades, much of the world was convinced that what today is (unjustly) called the Cuban Missile Crisis was initiated by Russia. And even nowadays, when we all know that it was started by the US and its 1961 deployment of the PGM-19 “Jupiter” nuclear-tipped missiles in Turkey and Italy, Washington DC still insists that Moscow was responsible for the crisis. Something eerily similar is unfolding as we speak. However, instead of Russia, the other party involved in this case is China. Namely, according to the Wall Street Journal, Beijing is currently in talks with Havana to establish new military facilities in Cuba.
The report, published on June 20, states that the two socialist allies are working out the final arrangements of the deal that would reportedly secure a military base for the PLA (People Liberation Army) in northern Cuba. The WSJ reports that this has “sparked fears among US officials that [Cuba] could eventually host a permanent Chinese troop presence”, prompting the troubled Biden administration to intervene with Cuban officials, seeking to block the establishment of permanent military installations. This will reportedly also include the expansion of ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) capabilities of the PLA’s existing military facility.
The claims about China’s supposed military bases in Cuba are based on anonymous sources from unnamed US intelligence services. However, the authors admit that the aforementioned services are not exactly certain about the possibility of a full-blown joint Chinese-Cuban military base, stating that “the reference to the proposed new training facility in Cuba is contained in the highly classified new US intelligence, which State Department officials described as convincing but fragmentary”. The report further adds that “it’s being interpreted with different levels of alarm among policymakers and intelligence analysts”.
“Most worrying for the US: The planned facility is part of China’s ‘Project 141’, an initiative by the People’s Liberation Army to expand its global military base and logistical support network, one current and one former US official said. China and Cuba already jointly run four eavesdropping stations on the island, according to US officials. That network underwent a significant upgrade around 2019, when a single station expanded to a network of four sites that are operated jointly, and Chinese involvement deepened, according to the officials,” the WSJ authors detail.
It’s quite difficult to measure the sheer magnitude of Washington DC’s hypocrisy and double standards when it comes to this issue. Considering not only the outright hostile and oftentimes openly Sinophobic rhetoric, but also the numerous concrete moves aimed against China, could anyone honestly blame Beijing for anything except reciprocity? Apart from the trade war initiated under former president Donald Trump, the US has been conducting a comprehensive crawling aggression against China, openly seeking to contain the Asian giant with a massive network of military bases and other installations across Asia-Pacific.
Most alarmingly for Beijing, the US is aiming to push its military infrastructure ever closer to China’s shores, particularly by exerting greater control over the Asian giant’s breakaway island province of Taiwan. And this is only the tip of the iceberg of resurgent Neo-McCarthyism in US foreign policy that involves the sending of entire delegations of Washington DC warhawks to Taipei, in addition to the massive shipments of weapons and equipment (that now includes F-16 Block 70/72 fighter jets and hundreds of anti-ship missiles), amounting to approximately $20 billion, albeit mostly backlogged due to US (over)focus on the Kiev regime.
Taking into account such unadulterated hostility, can anyone blame Beijing for wanting to strengthen its ties with Havana? Worse yet, Cuba is an independent country, while Taiwan is internationally recognized as part of China (including by the US itself), meaning that the expansion of America’s military infrastructure to the island directly threatens Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity. However, in its endless hypocrisy and double standards, Washington DC wants to maintain the Monroe Doctrine by exerting additional pressure on Latin America while encroaching on other superpowers’ geopolitical backyards.
“Some intelligence officials say that Beijing sees its actions in Cuba as a geographical response to the US relationship with Taiwan: The US invests heavily in arming and training the self-governing island that sits off mainland China and that Beijing sees as its own,” the WSJ admitted begrudgingly, adding: “The Journal reported that the US has deployed more than 100 troops to Taiwan to train its defense forces.”
In addition, the authors also acknowledged that “Taiwan is roughly 100 miles from mainland China, about the same distance Cuba is from Florida”, effectively conceding that there’s strategic equivalency between the two.
“China has no combat forces in Latin America, according to US officials. Meanwhile, the US has dozens of military bases throughout the Pacific, where it stations more than 350,000 troops. Chinese officials have pointed this out when they push back on American efforts to counter their military expansion outside of the Indo-Pacific,” the WSJ report concludes.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Kiev Resorts to ‘Human Wave Attacks’, Still Fails to Breach Russian Defense Lines
By Andrei Dergalin – Sputnik – 20.06.2023
While the long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive has been going on for more than two weeks already, one thing has become increasingly apparent: Kiev’s troops’ have stalled while they continue to suffer heavy casualties, a security analyst told Sputnik.
Ukraine essentially continues to be sending all its troops at the Russian defenses, sacrificing hundreds, if not thousands, of Ukrainian soldiers and still failing to produce any result that Zelensky and his NATO sponsors could sell as at least a tactical victory.
Speaking to Sputnik, international relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda noted that “there has been essentially no progress by the Kiev regime’s offensive.”
“It is effectively stalled and they continue to take heavy casualties, heavy attrition,” Sleboda said, adding that, in most cases, Ukrainian troops bleed and die “still ten, fifteen kilometers” away from “Russia’s first defensive line.”
According to Sleboda, all this fighting is taking place in what he described as the “throwaway zone”: an area before the actual Russian defensive lines, which the Russian troops deemed unsuitable for “static, heavy defenses, defensive lines with trenches and fortifications.”
Noting how Institute for the Study of War said in a statement that Ukrainian forces may be temporarily pausing counter offensive operations to reevaluate tactics, the analyst suggested it essentially means that the architects of the counteroffensive realized that their approach is not working.
While he did admit that this statement could be a deception, Sleboda argued that it “largely reflects what we’re seeing,” with Ukrainian forces managing to seize into a “string of farm hamlets” at a cost of “so much blood and steel,” only to find themselves the lowlands, with Russian forces raining rockets and shells upon them from fortified positions located on the high ground.
He also stressed that, while resorting to “human wave attacks” allowed Ukrainian forces to drive back some of the Russian screening squads deployed ahead of the actual Russian defensive lines, most of the Kiev regime’s troops who perished in this counteroffensive “died without ever really seeing the enemy,” not to mention that they lost a lot more men than the Russian defenders.
On Tuesday, June 20, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that Kiev regime forces lost over 400 militants dead during the past 24 hours alone while unsuccessfully attempting to simultaneously advance on several fronts.
Republican Presidential Candidates Lining Up in Support of War on Mexico
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | June 19, 2023
On April 10, I wrote about Republican presidential candidates being open to pursuing war on Mexico — sending the US military into Mexico to fight drug cartels despite the opposition of the Mexico government to such intervention.
Mexican-American War II advocates, I noted, included candidates Donald Trump, Asa Hutchinson, and Vivek Ramaswamy.
It turns out the list of Republican presidential candidates open to such US military action is longer. Republican presidential candidates Tim Scott and Nikki Haley have announced they support war on Mexico, as detailed by Brad Dress in a Saturday The Hill article.
Ron DeSantis, who has the second most support among Republican presidential primary candidates, has so far refrained from endorsing war on Mexico. Dress wrote:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the top candidate after Trump, has not explicitly endorsed military action but said last month “we really need to hold the Mexican drug cartels accountable” over migration concerns.
If DeSantis were to come out strongly against war on Mexico, he could set himself apart from the field and challenge front-running candidate Trump’s claim to the title of “peace candidate” in the Republican presidential primary contest.
Copyright © 2023 by RonPaul Institute
Kiev ‘Politically Pushed’ by NATO to Launch Counteroffensive Despite Being Unprepared
By Andrei Dergalin – Sputnik – 19.06.2023
The long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive, touted both by the regime in Kiev and its Western backers for months, finally began this month, although it seems that it has so far failed to produce the results its masterminds desired.
While Ukrainian forces demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for losing manpower and military hardware by charging across minefields into fortified positions held by Russian forces, they haven’t managed to get close to, let alone breach, the first line of Russian defense.
Retired USAF Lt.Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former analyst for the US Department of Defense, told Sputnik that Western media “has reported very little concrete information about the counteroffensive,” with much of the information on the subject coming straight from Ukrainian media and thus being “difficult to verify.”
According to Kwiatkowski, Kiev was “politically pushed” into launching this counteroffensive by “its NATO sponsors,” despite the fact that, as it turned out, Ukrainian forces simply weren’t prepared for it.
“The results are an increasingly desperate battlefield for Ukraine, and increasingly desperate measures being taken by Ukraine and its political leadership,” she said. “When I say desperate, I’m suggesting that the Ukrainian leadership has decided to write off regaining the eastern lands including Crimea and now are ready to do what they can to simply increase costs for Russia in the future – by destroying civilian and energy infrastructure, and the ability of that part of Ukraine to become productive as easily as they might.”
Rather than an actual counteroffensive meant to allow Kiev to seize control over Donbass and Crimea, Kwiatkowski argued, we are witnessing what she described as “dog in the manger” military scenario.
It also remains unclear whether NATO leaders and the Kiev regime are even in agreement about what the “end goal” of this “strangely-designed counteroffensive” actually is, the ex-DoD analyst mused.
“When US policymakers are asked about this ‘goal’ they say simply, ‘no peace, no freeze, keep fighting until the last Ukrainian,'” she added.
As Kwiatkowski explained, the Kiev regime and its NATO backers are unlikely to achieve any “serious progress” if they “continue solely with what they have been doing.”
Theoretically, Ukrainian forces might achieve success if their “ground and limited sea capability” could be “refreshed, well-led, focused on a specific mission, AND a specific counter-offensive coordinated with a temporary destruction of air command and control, or a major destruction of Russian airfields or aircraft,” she said.
However, “the very imaginative consideration of how many ducks would need to be in a row for this to succeed is mind-blowing, and certainly unsustainable by current Ukrainian capabilities,” Kwiatkowski remarked.
“In a sense, this has been the story of the Ukraine war — and fantasies that have fed Ukrainian political strategy since 2014. These fantasies are based in trust in American politicians and diplomats – who know very little about actual war-fighting, actual democracy, and economy,” she continued. “The same people who promised cakewalks and flowers in Iraq and new energy pipelines across Afghanistan, also promised Zelensky things that cannot be delivered.”
Kwiatkowski did warn, however, that this does not mean that the “neocons in the West, who have insisted upon this war, are not dangerous to Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the planet.”
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From the Archives
The New Baghdad Pact
By Dr Bouthaina Shaaban | February 23, 2017
A recently declassified CIA document prepared in 1983, and released on 20 January 2017, shows that the United States had at the time encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Syria, which would have led to a vicious conflict between the two countries, thus draining their resources.
The report, which was then prepared by CIA officer Graham Fuller, indicates that the US tried adamantly to convince Saddam to attack Syria under any pretense available, in order to get the two most powerful countries in the Arab East to destroy each other, turning their attention away from the Arab-Israeli conflict. … continue
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