If US sanctions Turkey, can India be far behind?
By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | March 9, 2019
Turkish-American relations are at a crossroads. Unlike the past history of their troubled relationship which saw hiccups but the two NATO allies moved on eventually, this time around, they are barreling toward a clash.
From an Indian perspective, it is of interest that the clash is over the Turkish decision to buy the S-400 Triumf missile defence system from Russia, which violates the US’ sanctions regime against Russia known as the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA).
In September last year, Washington invoked CAATSA for the first time and sanctioned China over its purchase of Russian military jets and surface-to-air missiles — 10 Russian Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets and S-400 missiles. Will it be Turkey’s turn now? And if Turkey gets sanctioned, can India be far behind?
The US had explicitly warned India against going ahead with the S-400 Triumf deal with Russia. But India went ahead, nonetheless, last October. (The deal is estimated to be worth at least $5.4 billion.) But while Delhi went about its decision tactfully, Ankara is openly defiant. The Turkish President Recep Erdogan stated on Wednesday in a TV interview,
“We signed a deal with Russia for the purchase of S-400, and will start co-production. It’s done. There can never be a turning back. This would not be ethical, it would be immoral. Nobody should ask us to lick up what we spat. Later, we may perhaps go for the S-500s as well, after the S-400.”
The US probably never ever heard such spiteful words from a key NATO ally. Erdogan also warned that the U.S. should not try to “discipline” Turkey through trade measures. If it did, he emphasised, Turkey has its own measures prepared. One of the trade measures he alluded to is the US’ intention to exclude Turkey from the generalised system of preferences (GSP).
Interestingly, while notifying the US Congress last week regarding his intention to remove the GSP benefits to them in trade, President Trump bracketed India with Turkey. India downplayed Trump’s move, saying the GSP benefits are only marginally affecting India’s exports to the US. But Erdogan apparently plans to retaliate.
The Pentagon has sharply reacted to Erdogan’s remarks, warning Turkey of “grave consequence in terms of our military relationship.” Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the senior US general for operations in Europe and NATO’s top officer, warned in congressional testimony on Tuesday that Turkey’s pursuit of the S-400 deal would jeopardise American plans to sell to Ankara the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter for both policy and security reasons.
“My best military advice would be that we don’t then follow through with the F-35, flying it or working with an ally that’s working with Russian systems,” Scaparrotti told the Senate Armed Services Committee in testimony. According to a Reuter report, he hinted at concerns that Turkey’s using both the S-400s and the F-35 could provide Russia with valuable information on how to defeat the tech-heavy jet slated to become a signature fighter for NATO countries and their partners.
However, Turkey is not backing down. The Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar has disclosed that the S-400 missile system will reach Turkey in July and deployment will go ahead as planned in October. The space for diplomatic manoeuvring is shrinking and, clearly, the chances for imposition of US sanctions against Turkey under CAATSA are increasing.
Of course, if Washington imposes sanctions against its key NATO ally, it is going to be highly problematic to exempt India from similar punitive measures for committing the very same offence. Interestingly, like Erdogan, Modi is also getting a very bad press in the US lately. They are the kind of ultra-nationalists that the US regards as hindrances to its regional strategies.
The Turks harbour the suspicion that the failed coup in July 2016, which was masterminded by the Turkish Islamist preacher Fetullah Gulen living in Pennsylvania in exile for the past two decades, had covert American support.
Last week, incidentally, US First Lady Melania Trump visited a pre-kindergarten class in Oklahoma, which Ankara believes is linked to supporters of Gulen. Turks believe that the White House was taunting Erdogan.
President Trump’s detractors in the US and in Europe used to berate him for empathising with “strong men” like Erdogan or Vladimir Putin. But as it turns out, the US finds such world leaders irksome in their zeal to uphold strategic autonomy in their foreign and security policies. The US media has been highly critical of Modi too in the recent months.
But US attempts to undermine these nationalist leaderships have run into headwinds since leaders like Erdogan and Putin happen to enjoy mass support in their respective countries. For sure, Washington will be keenly watching the outcome of the upcoming parliamentary election in India in April-May where Modi is seeking a renewed mandate.
As for India, what emerges at the end of the 5-year term of the Modi government is that under his watch India’s relations with the US have been pragmatic and based on limited common interests — shared notions of countering the rise of China and Islamism — and that too, without undermining India’s strategic autonomy. The US seems disappointed that Modi failed to fulfil their high expectations of him as a strategic partner. A sense of frustration is palpable among the US’ lobbyists in India as well.
At any rate, the Modi government continues to negotiate big weapons deals with Russia, disregarding the CAATSA. Last week, PM Modi inaugurated a massive Russian-Indian joint venture, which will reportedly produce about 7,50,000 AK-203 rifles, the most recent version of the famous AK-47 rifles for the use of the Indian armed forces as the standard assault rifle for decades to come. Again, on Friday, Delhi inked a defence deal worth over $3 billion with Moscow for the lease of a nuclear-powered attack submarine from Russia. It cannot be lost on Washington that the Modi government expedited these mega deals with Russia even as its term in office is ending, while US arms vendors have been kept waiting.
All in all, the S-400 which is one of the world’s most advanced AMB systems, is fast acquiring the reputation of a Russian “geopolitical missile” targeted at the US. If the US proceeds with sanctions against Turkey on account of the S-400 deal, it will have deleterious downstream impact on many geo-strategic templates.
The very cohesion of the NATO and the alliance’s overall effectiveness in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East could be affected. Similarly, the US also eyes India as a potentially big customer for American weaponry and will be shooting at its own feet if it were to sanction India. Suffice to say, paradoxically, any US sanctions may only increase Turkey or India’s dependence on Russia for sourcing advanced weaponry, which of course would defeat the very purpose of the CAATSA.
Trump and the Gordian Knot, Year Two
By Patrick ARMSTRONG | Strategic Culture Foundation | 09.03.2019
About a year ago I advanced the theory that US President Trump understood that the only way to “Make American Great Again” was to disentangle it from the imperial mission that had it stuck in perpetual wars. I concluded that his statements implied that he believed that
1) the post 9/11 military interventions did nothing for American security;
2) foreign interventions impoverish the country;
3) the alliance system is neither useful nor a good deal for the country;
4) Russia is not the once and future enemy.
I further argued that he understood that the Gordian Knot of entanglements could not be cut from the American end because Americans were too wedded to the idea that the USA was “the indispensable nation” or too complacently accepting of the conceit that it had a moral obligation to set the world aright. (Gallup has just revealed that Americans greatly overestimate the respect and affection the rest of the world holds for them.) In any case “The Swamp” was too entangled in the war business ever to change. I speculated that he understood that the cutting could only come from the other side.
In short I saw method in Trump’s boorishness and well-displayed contempt for Washington’s allies.
So what do we find thirteen months later? Well, of course, one year is not nearly enough time to cause American allies to quit. Washington has not pulled out of NATO and no one has left it, the wars continue, the bases remain; but the Knot is loosening a bit. Despite very strong pressure from Washington, Ankara is going ahead with its S-400 purchase and Berlin is determined to complete Nord Stream. Washington has made its opposition plain – and with menaces – but these two important allies persevere in their contumacy.
Recently more cracks widened. Secretary of State Pompeo at Warsaw, trying to get everyone on board with attacking Iran: “Sadly, some of our leading European partners have not been nearly as cooperative. In fact, they have led the effort to create mechanisms to break up our sanctions.” Vice President Pence at the Munich conference all but ordering the allies to get on board with Washington’s leadership, to stop buying weapons from “our adversaries” and equating opposition to Washington’s stand on Iran with anti-Semitism.
These efforts fell flat. Even The Economist called the Warsaw effort “shambolic” and a number of invited key players sent lower-ranking substitutes. So unenthusiastic was the response that the meeting had to be rebranded as about security in the Middle East rather than about making war on Iran. So, altogether, a bust: the whistle blew but the dogs didn’t come. But worse, Pence’s speech at Munich, praising Trump in every paragraph and threatening allies, fell completely flat with almost no applause. German Chancellor Merkel, speaking for the opposition (lots of applause) demurred. NPR sums up the two meetings:
First, in Warsaw, Poland, the U.S. organized a conference seeking to marshal international outrage over Iran, and Vice President Pence urged France, Germany and the U.K. to abandon the Iran nuclear deal, accusing them of concocting a “scheme” to continue to [do] business with Iran. Top European allies trying to keep the nuclear deal alive declined to send top-level diplomats to the conference.
Then on Saturday, in Munich, German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the security conference with several critiques of U.S. foreign policy – and received a sustained standing ovation.
So, a failure for Washington but, if you agree with my theory, a success for Trump’s scheme.
Merkel devoted some time in her speech to Russian gas supplies, pointing out that in the Cold War, both Germanys reliably received gas from Moscow, thereby reminding Pence, if he was listening, of Disagreement Number Two – Nord Stream. We had earlier been reminded of Disagreement Number One which was the unilateral American rejection of the JCPOA. Washington has sanctioned Tehran; the repellent CAATSA (in fairness, not Trump’s doing) means that anyone who trades with someone Washington dislikes will also become a target of Washington’s sanctions. In reaction, Germany, France and the UK have developed a Washington-independent payment system. How effective it will be remains to be seen but it is undeniably a rebellion against Washington’s fiat.
And now we come to Disagreement Number Three: Washington’s rejection of the INF Treaty. Negotiated in 1987 between the USA and the USSR, it eliminated all land-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5500 km. The Treaty had been preceded by large demonstrations across Europe against the deployment of American missiles. Washington’s excuse is that Russia has violated the Treaty (Theodore Postol has convincingly argued that, whatever Russia may have done, the USA did violate it). Some see it as the latest target of Washington’s dismantling of the arms control treaties of the Cold War, although one cannot rule out the possibility that this is Trump’s opening position to get a new INF Treaty with Russia and China. But it could put the Europeans on Moscow’s target list if the US puts intermediate range missiles into Europe. (The European protests were a causative factor of the original treaty.) In her Munich speech, Merkel called the cancellation “very bad news” and the former head of the NATO Military Committee, Harald Kujat, flatly called it “a betrayal of the security of the European allies“. The full ramifications of this latest trampling of allies’ interests have not been felt but the Atlantic Alliance will not be stronger for it. And I doubt allies will be any happier with Pompeo’s latest blank war cheque.
Even in Korea, where Trump’s new foreign policy has had, perhaps, its greatest success, we see a touch of the same thing. The two Koreas and China are moving forward whatever Washington does or, as in the Hanoi meeting doesn’t, do.
The economic integration plans are moving forward even before the nuclear issue has been resolved, the sanctions have been lifted, or a formal treaty ending the war has been signed. The entire region appears to be breaking out of Washington’s orbit and charting a new course on its own.
Two things seem pretty clear: the Trump Administration is alienating its allies and it doesn’t seem to care very much that it is. Washington has always overborne its allies but it has usually been more polite and discreet about it. Today there is no attempt to hide it: Trump & Co brusquely tell them our way or else.
Will Washington’s contempt and indifference make Europe start to look east?
Donald Trump and his “America First” attitude has thereby afforded Europeans some space to maneuver and establish some level of autonomy, resulting in increasing synergies with Moscow and especially Beijing.
Or will Europe swallow the insults? Will it stand on its “own two feet“? Or have its feet atrophied? We don’t know yet: there is talk, but talk is cheap and easy.
My question remains: we see the alienation but is it deliberately-caused or is it not? Is Trump behaving in a boorishly unilateral way to force his allies to break the imperial connection, or is it just the habitual “America First” style now crudely stripped of the earlier politesse?
(Which is not to say that they’re aren’t some significant inconsistencies in Trump’s foreign policy and, on closer examination, these exceptions become very confusing and inconsistent themselves. I will take up this question separately.)
Gabbard’s Pro-INF Bill Has ‘No Chance’ Due to Military-Industrial Complex Lobby
Sputnik – March 8, 2019
In a last-ditch effort to keep the US from exiting the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), Democratic Party presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard introduced a draft bill to Congress which would prevent the authorization of government funds for the testing, procurement or deployment of any missile prohibited under the treaty.
Congress released the full text of Gabbard’s bill, dubbed the INF Treaty Compliance Act of 2019, this week, with the proposed legislation originally introduced by the Hawaii congresswoman in mid-February for deliberation by the House Armed Services Committee.
Gabbard had earlier described Trump’s decision to pull out of the 1987 treaty as a “reckless” move which could exacerbate “a new Cold War” with Russia. The bill has now been cosponsored by six Democratic lawmakers, including Ilhan Omar, James McGovern, Mark Pocan, Barbara Lee, Raul M. Grijalva, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Despite the bill’s positive goal of preserving the global strategic balance and preventing a new arms race, Russian observers fear it has little chance of passing, notwithstanding the Democrats’ recently won majority in the House.
Dr. Sergei Sudakov, a professor at the Russian Academy of Military Science research center in Moscow, argues that the bill won’t pass since it doesn’t have the lobbying support from arms manufacturers.
“Obviously, with the termination of the INF Treaty, the US military-industrial complex will receive additional orders. This doesn’t mean that the Gabbard initiative is in vain, however. It’s possible that the discussion of the bill will cause a public resonance which will prevent the implementation of some of the lobbyists’ plans,” he said.
For his part, Konstantin Blokhin, a fellow at the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies think tank, said that the US exit from the INF was predestined before Trump ever stepped into office, with the Pentagon looking for any excuse to allocate funding for the development of new missile systems banned under the treaty, which restricts ground-based missiles in the 500-5,500 km range.
“Gabbard’s bill has no chance. No matter how Congress votes, Trump is against preserving this treaty. He simply won’t sign it,” the analyst said.
At the same time, Blokhin argued that individual politicians like Gabbard were “on the periphery within the US political elite,” with a normalization of relations with Russia out of the question for the political mainstream, Democrat or Republican, while most ordinary Americans are concerned with domestic politics.
Pavel Podlesny, a researcher at the Moscow-based Institute for US and Canadian Studies, was similarly pessimistic. “It’s in the interest of the current administration, and the overwhelming majority of lawmakers in Congress, to unleash a new cold war. They are confident that this is the most effective way to damage Russia and take it out of the running of global players. Moreover, opponents of this view are sometimes classified as ‘Russian agents’,” he said.
Last month, NBC smeared Gabbard over her “pro-Russian” positions on issues like the war in Syria and accused her of being the Kremlin’s “crush” due to fair media coverage of her campaign by Sputnik and RT. Commenting on the scandal, Podlesny said the smear campaign was just “a bluff.”
“There are no pro-Russian politicians in the US. People like Gabbard, in my opinion, have a more sensible understanding of the world than the ruling elite. They understand that without Russia, Washington will not be able to solve key global problems. Gabbard is disliked for having an independent position. I think that this can help her get quite a bit of support from voters,” the observer concluded.
President Trump announced the US intention to withdraw from the INF Treaty late last year, with Washington formally starting the six-month procedure suspending US obligations under the treaty on February 2.
The US has claimed that it made the decision due to treaty violations by Moscow with the ground-launched 9M729 cruise missile, which Washington claims has a range in excess of 500 km. The Russian Defence Ministry debunked the claims at a press briefing in January.
Moscow, for its part, has accused the US of deploying dual use missile defence system launchers in Poland and Romania which are said to be capable of firing nuclear-armed Tomahawk missiles. Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that the US withdrawal from the INF was “a direct step toward the destruction of the entire system of agreements in the field of international security.”
Bolton’s Act of Sabotage
By David Macilwain | American Herald Tribune | March 8, 2019
Across the Western world, there has been discussion and argument and consternation over the apparent failure to make progress on disarmament at the recent talks in Hanoi. Examination of the reasons for that failure has been replaced by speculation about the DPRK’s next move and suspicions about its motives, without any similar skepticism or doubts about the US intent and strategy. But such speculation is entirely misguided, and only possible because of ignorance of one key detail in the discussions in Hanoi.
Thanks mostly to the efforts of Australia’s former ambassador to South Korea and Vietnam, Richard Broinowski, whose diplomatic contacts in Canberra relayed inside information about the discussions, the alarming truth on why the talks suddenly fell apart was revealed to the SBS TV network, and to its listeners in the evening news broadcast on March 1st.
While media around the world, apparently including those not allied to the US, broadcast the press briefing by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo laying the blame on North Korea for demanding all the sanctions be lifted, only SBS listeners got to hear what really happened, and thenceforth to see things in an entirely different light. As Richard Broinowski explained several days later writing on John Menadue’s influential blog Pearls and Irritations :
… “a well-informed senior Asian diplomatic source in Canberra has added another reason for the Summit’s breakdown: that Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, persuaded Trump to add another demand, without notice, that led to North Korean refusal and a premature end to the summit even before negotiations had begun.”
“The Asian diplomat recalled that John Bolton had been scheduled to visit Canberra at the end of February. But the visit was cancelled when he suddenly went to Hanoi instead, whether at Trump’s directive or on his own initiative being unclear. The diplomat’s understanding is that Bolton suggested to Trump that as well as demanding a complete inventory of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and delivery systems, Trump should also request details of the country’s chemical and biological arsenal, a demand Kim found unexpected, and for which he was unprepared, and refused. Trump then broke off the meeting before substantive negotiations had even begun.”
We may all too easily forget the anticipation before these crucial talks between Trump and Kim Jong Un, where it at least looked possible that Trump might “do a deal” on a basis that the North Koreans could accept. The early signs were more than promising, with Kim Jong Un assuring that he would not have been there had he not sought progress on denuclearisation, and Trump prepared to take him at his word. While “substantive negotiations” had not begun, the North Koreans had already suggested they would make very significant concessions in return for the lifting of some sanctions and some other commitments by the US to reduce tensions – “security guarantees” in other words.
It’s worth noting in this context that Sergei Lavrov, speaking at a parallel meeting of the Valdai Club in Ho Chi Minh city had stated quite clearly that the US must make significant concessions, rather than demanding that the DPRK completely denuclearise before lifting sanctions. As always it’s worth reading Lavrov’s wide-ranging and straightforward remarks on the poor state of the world and the destabilizing and destructive role being played by the US.
The necessity for lifting some sanctions on the DPRK is further emphasized by the news that their food production this year is severely restricted by the worst climatic conditions for a decade, making food imports and relief urgent. Their demands for sanctions relief in Hanoi concerned this issue rather than anything connected with the nuclear program.
The truth of the story of Bolton’s demands, which look very much like a planned act of sabotage, is beyond doubt and endorsed in statements from South Korea’s former unification minister Chong Se-Hyun published in Korean newspapers and reported elsewhere. The Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian also covered the story on the following Monday, but this was a temporary blip on their normally unchallenging sympathy for the official US viewpoint. Australia’s other State broadcaster the ABC, however, made no mention of it, simply repeating Trump’s cover-up claim on the sanctions removal.
These media along with their Western partners in officially approved disinformation are now once again adding to the rumor mill on “North Korea’s ongoing nuclear threat” with suspect stories about the renewal of a missile launching site. Satellite photos taken only hours after the failure of the talks claim to show such activity. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which has close links to government, has meanwhile warned that moves to scale down the annual war games proposed belatedly as a “goodwill gesture” by the US, are “dangerous and will embolden the North”.
Putting things into a wider perspective, former Australian ambassador to the UN and nuclear disarmament negotiator Richard Butler added his weight to the subject the following day with this footnote on Broinowski’s article:
“This report has now been confirmed by a report published in the March 4th edition of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which cites a statement by the DPRK Foreign Minister, Ri Yong-Ho, in Hanoi, that “John Bolton disrupted the talks by demanding that North Korea disclose its chemical and biological arsenal as well as its nuclear arsenals”. This would seem to answer the question I posed in my article on whether or not a spanner had been thrown into the works and if so, by whom? Not unusually, there seems to have been no report of this highly salient fact by western mainstream media.”
What matters here however is not simply to expose the misinformed and fraudulent claims made about the failure of the Hanoi talks. Bolton and his allies – whoever they are – evidently sought to sabotage the talks and the possibility of agreement and détente, against the intention of Donald Trump. The last thing they want is to lose the pretext for maintaining and expanding missile systems in the region aimed at threatening or “countering” China. An informative report from the East Asia Forum think-tank also makes this suggestion:
For many in the US security community the ‘no deal’ comes as a relief. There were concerns that Trump would be eager to rush into a deal, no matter what the costs of the concessions, to claim the diplomatic achievement for his administration. This seemed an over-urgent goal due to the impending report by FBI special prosecutor Robert Mueller on the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and possible obstruction of justice, as well as the heat on Trump from his former fixer Michael Cohen’s damning testimony last week to Congress.
So far from returning to the US with an extra feather in his golden cap, Donald Trump came home to face the music, and not just from the Russia-gate witch-hunt. Even though he had called off the talks with Kim Jong Un, he had already engaged in friendly exchanges and pleasantries that some found offensive, inviting media to repeat the tired nonsense about his dealings with President Putin – that “Trump takes the advice of “dictators” over that of his own intelligence community”. (perhaps not an unwise move under the circumstances!)
The story of his brief meeting with Kim then immediately focussed on how Trump had “taken Kim’s word” over the case of Otto Warmbier, the detained American student allegedly killed by mistreatment in a North Korean hospital. The grotesque demand of the DPRK for $500 million compensation for his death from a US court illustrates the problem that many in the US seem to have in relating to those with a different viewpoint and different attitude. If similar suits were brought against the US government by relatives of the millions of North Koreans who have died over the last sixty-five years as a direct or indirect result of US aggression and sanctions, the US would be bankrupted.
It’s hard not to conclude that the man who was considered “too extreme” to join the regime of George W Bush because of his preference for armed attacks and even nuclear strikes over diplomacy has now launched a soft coup against his own President. Immediately following the Vietnam venture, Bolton was making threats of military action against Venezuela’s President Maduro which had a strange resonance. The demand that Venezuela’s democratically elected President be replaced by an unknown and unelected puppet selected and launched like a missile into Caracas by the US and its European allies is now being copied by the self-selected “Interim President of the United States”, John Bolton.
And a world under this new de facto President with his choice of puppet might just make us look back on the Golden Age of Trump if we are lucky enough to survive it.
Netanyahu Threatens to Deploy Israeli Navy to Enforce US Oil Sanctions on Iran
Sputnik – March 7, 2019
Earlier, despite threats to bring Tehran’s crude oil exports down “to zero,” Washington granted ‘temporary waivers’ on Iranian oil to major importers including China, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Greece, and Turkey, as well as Taiwan. Unless they are renewed, these waivers may expire in May.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to deploy the Israeli Navy to help tackle suspected Iranian efforts to smuggle out oil via maritime routes to skirt US sanctions.
“Iran is trying to circumvent the sanctions through covert oil smuggling over maritime routes, and to the extent that these attempts widen, the Navy will have a more important role in blocking these Iranian actions,” Netanyahu said, speaking to graduates of the Israeli Naval Academy in Haifa on Wednesday, according to the Jerusalem Post.
“I call on the entire international community to stop Iran’s attempts to circumvent the sanctions by sea, and of course, by [other] means,” Netanyahu added.
The prime minister did not clarify how the Israeli Navy, whose fleet consists mostly of coastal patrol ships, missile boats, corvettes and support ships, would tackle the suspected Iranian oil smuggling, or whether Israeli efforts would include preparedness for direct armed confrontation at sea. At present, the Israeli Navy operates primarily in the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea.
Boarding merchant vessels in international waters without the flag state’s permission is illegal under the Convention on the High Seas, and may be interpreted as an act of aggression.
Tehran has repeatedly warned that it may resort to closing the Strait of Hormuz, a key strategic waterway through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil passes, if it is provoked into doing so and its oil exports interfered with. Oil exports are a vital lifeline for Iran’s economy, with the country exporting some $40.1 billion of crude oil in 2017, contributing to nearly 5 percent of total world supplies.
Former UN Arms Inspector: Europe as Much to Blame for Demise of INF Treaty as US
Sputnik – 06.03.2019
WASHINGTON – The European member nations of NATO are as much to blame for the destruction of the intermediate Nuclear-Forces (INF) Treaty as the Trump administration, former United Nations Chief Weapons Inspector on Iraq Scott Ritter told Sputnik on Tuesday.
“Europe is as much to blame for the demise of the INF Treaty as is the US,” Ritter said. “NATO’s slavish echoing of the US accusations void of any demonstrable proof that the US claims had any validity provided the diplomatic cover the US needed to proceed to withdraw from the treaty.”
On Monday, the Kremlin press service said that Russian President Vladimir Putin had signed a decree suspending Russia’s obligations under the INF Treaty until the United States resumes its compliance with the agreement. Putin’s decree came into effect on the day it was signed.
The United States formally suspended its obligations under the INF Treaty last month and gave Russia six months to comply with its demands, prompting Russia to do the same.
Putin said Moscow did not want a costly arms race but ruled out any new talks on arms controls, saying all earlier proposals remained on the table.
Ritter pointed out that the Trump administration had falsely accused Russia of being in violation of the INF Treaty.
“The US demands vis-à-vis the 9M729 missile were unreasonable. The missile had not been demonstrated to be in violation of the INF Treaty. US accusations were not backed up with any evidence that corroborated the claimed violations,” he said.
There were measures that could have been taken to ascertain whether the 9M729 was in compliance with the INF Treaty, such as a technical inspection of the missile itself, Ritter pointed out. However, the US government refused to pursue those options, he said.
Instead, the US government declared “the Russians to be non-compliant, and demanding that the 9M729 be destroyed. This was an unrealistic and unreasonable demand, purposefully designed to prompt a Russian refusal and as such trigger a US withdrawal — which was the goal all along,” he said.
The US already had the physical infrastructure in place to deploy INF systems in Europe. The Mk 41 Aegis Ashore sites in Poland and Romania could be modified to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles with little effort, Ritter pointed out.
“It seems NATO has little or no institutional memory … NATO doesn’t seem to have woken up to this reality, and the fact that these facilities are in two nations that welcome this kind of anti-Russian provocation means that local protests are unlikely,” he said.
If the US seeks to develop a new INF-type system along the lines of the former Pershing II missile, then the issue will become more complicated, Ritter cautioned.
“It is unlikely any European nation would allow a new INF system to be deployed on its soil, and the consensus-driven reality of NATO is such that getting unanimous consent for such deployment is unlikely,” he said.
Europe was given a reprieve from the reality of living under the threat of imminent nuclear destruction by the INF Treaty, but that era has now ended, Ritter warned.
“Now they will once again know what that nightmare is like. Europe will need to relearn the lessons from the 1980s. The INF Treaty was a unique agreement forged out of the reality of US-Soviet arms control talks during the height of the Cold War. This environment is not likely to be replicated,” he said.
It was unrealistic to think the INF Treaty could be brought back to life, Ritter explained.
“Any effort to create a new treaty vehicle involving China, India, Pakistan, etc. would have to be linked to US and Russian strategic weapons as well. This kind of broad-based multilateral approach to nuclear arms control is virtually impossible to consider under current global conditions,” he said.
In this Aug. 29, 2017, file photo, Japan Air Self-Defense Force demonstrates a training to utilize the PAC-3 surface to air interceptors at the U.S. Yokota Air Base on the outskirts of Tokyo
Moreover, without the INF Treaty, it is likely that the New START Treaty will be scrapped as well, Ritter pointed out.
“There is not the kind of diplomatic foundation for meaningful arms control talks between Russia and the US, and one is not likely to exist while Trump remains president,” he said.
Ritter was one of the first INF inspectors and was assigned to the Votkinsk Portal Monitoring Facility from June 1988-July 1990. He also carried out other INF inspections, as well as handled other treaty-related tasks.
See also:
Japan to Host US Missiles Despite Russian Claim That They Violate the INF Treaty
Integrity Initiative: The Sinister Chain of Events Leading Up to Salisbury
By Kit Klarenberg – Sputnik – March 4, 2019
In several reports to date, I’ve documented how the Integrity Initiative – the shadowy UK government-funded military intelligence front – and its assorted operatives and media assets systematically shaped news reporting on, and Whitehall’s response to, the apparent poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia on 4 March 2018.
Now, on the anniversary of that fateful and ever-mystifying day, I’ll attempt to track some of the activities of the Initiative’s parent, the Institute for Statecraft, and other key figures and organizations directly and indirectly connected to the body in the years immediately prior.
Troublingly, the information collected here inevitably represents but a negligible fragment of a much wider clandestine picture. The full extent of the British state’s sinister and long-running secret machinations leading up to the Salisbury incident certainly isn’t ascertainable at this time, and may well never be.
‘Peculiar Struggle’
In July 2014, Institute for Statecraft ‘senior research fellow’ Victor Madeira wrote an article for the organization’s website, Russian Subversion — Haven’t we been here before?. In it, he suggested that far from a “new type of warfare”, the West’s tussle with Russia in the wake of the Maidan coup was “actually only the latest chapter in a 100-year-old playbook the Bolsheviks called active measures”, albeit “modernised to exploit the speed and reach of 21st-century mass/social media”.
After attempting to link various tactics employed by the Soviet Union to the modern day, Madeira somewhat chillingly concludes the piece with a quote from Ronald Lindsay, UK ambassador to Germany, who in February 1927 urged Whitehall to realise they were engaged in a “new kind of war” with the then-burgeoning Soviet Union.
“Anti-subversive measures could not be gradual; they had to be part of a package of ‘economic boycott, breach of diplomatic relations’ as well as ‘propaganda and counter-propaganda, pressure on neutrals.’ He argued a diplomatic breach with Moscow would at least turn ‘the present peculiar struggle into an armed conflict of the old-fashioned sort’ that Great Britain and the West could win,” Madeira records.
A document authored by the academic — who 2010 — 2014 tutored and lectured at Cambridge under former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove — in January 2015 (Russian Federation Sanctions ) makes clear he, and presumably his Institute employers, support Lindsay’s strategy and objectives.
The file sets out a number of “potential levers” for achieving a number of “main aims”, including “peace with Ukraine”, the “return” of Crimea, “behaviour change” and/or “regime change” — for, much to Madeira’s evident chagrin, the wave of sanctions imposed upon Russian individuals and businesses the previous March weren’t having a sufficiently deleterious impact on the Kremlin, or the Russian people.
Victor Madeira’s Ruminations on the Russian People
“[Russia] is not a ‘normal’ country in most senses of the word. Crucially, Russians see life and the world very differently from us… Russians are not nearly as driven by economic and financial considerations… For most Russians, daily life has long been a struggle (not least for survival). Not having Western goods and services will not necessarily be much of an issue in the medium to long-term,” he wrote.
Moreover — and perhaps worst of all in Madeira’s mind — President Vladimir Putin — someone who “survived abysmal post-WW2 conditions” and “[believes] nothing the West can do is worse than what [he’s] already endured in life” — remains popular among the Russian public due to “the chaos” of the 1990s, and for having “restored stability, prosperity and pride”.
“Fear of renewed uncertainty and chaos… keeps Russians in check”, he writes — as a result, “driving a wedge between Russians and [their] government is key.”
The bullet-pointed “levers” that make up the bulk of the document span areas including ‘diplomacy’, ‘finance’, ‘security’, ‘technology’, ‘industry’, ‘military’, and even ‘culture’, and include; suspending or expelling Russia from “G8, WTO… and similar organisations”; “[expanding] existing sanctions regimes to anyone helping [Russia] break them”; “[arresting] every known RF agent — not least ‘agents of influence'”; “banning RF delegates” from a variety of international fora, “[advocating the] view RF [is] untrustworthy of hosting [international sporting events]; “[banning] Russian companies from launching IPOs in [the] West”‘; asset freezes and “visa bans” for the “top 100 RF government officials and [their] immediate families”; “[sanctioning] RF media”; and much, much more.
‘Potential Levers’ for Regime Change in Russia Outlined by Victor Madeira
Certain “levers” — such as suspending visits by the Bolshoi and Kirov Ballets to Western countries — are baffling, while others — for instance “repatriating” the children of Russian government studying abroad, or “[increasing] scrutiny” of Russian religious organizations in Western countries — appear wanton and excessive, if not outright barbarous.
However, one of Madeira’s suggestions, about which he was apparently so enthusiastic he mentions it thrice, “simultaneously [expelling] every RF intelligence officer and air/defence/naval attache from as many countries as possible (global ‘Operation Foot’)” — is especially striking.
Operation Foot saw 105 Soviet officials deported from the UK in September 1971 at the behest of then-Prime Minister Edward Heath, the largest expulsion of foreign state personnel by any government in history. Eerily, several mainstream media outlets would reference the historic mass defenestration when Whitehall successfully corralled 26 countries into expelling over 150 Russian diplomatic in response to the Salisbury incident, 27 March 2018.
‘Something Dreadful’
On 12 October 2016, Institute for Statecraft chief Chris Donnelly met with retired senior UK military official General Richard Barrons, Joint Forces Command chief 2013 — 2016. Their discussion was incendiary.
“We have led comfortable lives since the end of the Cold War. Wars have been away matches on our terms, with resources we have chosen to apply. Our institutions are now failing to deliver or being bypassed. Our world system is being challenged, by Russia, China… the power of initiative and decision is ebbing away from the West. [The] US can no longer protect us,” the document’s introduction states.
As 50 percent of the UK’s energy, and 40 percent of the UK’s food, is “from abroad”, the country “has vital interests in having the ability to engage globally, but that engagement will no longer be on our terms alone”. However, while in recent wars “the opposition had no peer capabilities and could pose no military threat” to the UK, the conflicts “have not required the full mobilisation of the military or any motivation of civilian society” and “given us the impression we can afford war at two percent GDP”, despite the UK needing “£7 billion just to our current force up to effectiveness”.
Moreover, “mixed success” in these conflicts is also said to have “left a bad aftertaste” with “no appetite for intervention” among the British public and politicians, and UK armed forces “cannot themselves speak out and say ‘we are broken’… as that would breach the rules of democratic control”.
Record of Richard Barrons’ Meeting with Chris Donnelly
Barrons goes on to despair that the subordination of the military to civil servants and ministers in the Ministry of Defence means “the military do not do policy” — a state of affairs he believes must be radically changed, with the armed forces removed from government control and transformed into “an independent body outside politics”.
“Government is living in denial… We need discussion and debate as to how Russia can be managed and deterred. We need to deal with Russia by doing things that are serious… If no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response, then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take [the military] out of the political space. We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests… [we] must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside government… there is not a moment to be lost,” Barrons concludes.
Serious Matters
Barrons’ fears of a loss of US military protection were no doubt widespread within the British establishment — for some time, US Presidential candidate Donald Trump had been questioning the necessity of NATO, advocating a protectionist and insular ‘America first’ agenda in respect of world affairs.
Likewise, Trump’s repeated suggestion of improved relations between Washington and Moscow should he become President were unquestionably unwelcome in many quarters — not least, of course, the offices of the Institute for Statecraft. It’s perhaps unsurprising then the organisation played a pivotal role in kickstarting ‘RussiaGate’.
The month after Donnelly’s meeting with Barrons, and mere weeks after Trump’s shock election victory, Andrew Wood — UK ambassador to Russia 1995 — 2000, and a member of the Institute’s ‘expert team’ — was a delegate at the eighth annual Halifax International Security Forum in Canada. Senator John McCain was also in attendance, and the pair would speak privately on the event’s sidelines about allegations of Trump’s collusion with the Russian state, in particular, the claims of former MI6 operative Christopher Steele, and his ‘Trump-Russia’ dossier.
Andrew Wood’s Institute for Statecraft Staff Profile
How and why McCain and Wood met, and precisely what they discussed, isn’t remotely clear — Wood has offered several wildly divergent accounts of the event since, variously suggesting the meeting was entirely chance and initiated by McCain due to the issue “being very much in the news”, that he approached McCain due to his personal concerns after being shown the dossier by Steele, and that he was actively “instructed” by Steele to relay the dossier’s contents to the Senator, without having actually seen a copy in full.
In any event, as a result of their conversation, the Senator dispatched his aide David Kramer, former assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration, to meet with Steele in London and discuss the dossier’s contents, and arrange for a copy to be sent to Washington. On 9 December, McCain met then-FBI Director James Comey and provided him with the dossier, which Comey then circulated across all US intelligence agencies. It would reach the desk of outgoing President Barack Obama and several senior members of Congress in the first week of January 2017.
This development would be reported 10 January by CNN — the article stated the dossier suggested Russian operatives possessed “compromising personal and financial information” about Trump, but the outlet refrained from publishing specific details of the dossier as they hadn’t been “independently corroborated”.
CNN breaking cover — the dossier had been an “open secret” among US journalists for some time by that point — would provide BuzzFeed News with the ‘public interest’ defense it required to justify publishing the dossier, which it did 11 January, despite acknowledging its contents were “unverified, and potentially unverifiable”, and contained “clear” factual errors.
In the days afterward, the publication was severely criticised by many other media outlets — Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan called the dossier “scurrilous allegations dressed up as an intelligence report meant to damage Donald Trump” — and the ethics of publishing unsubstantiated information offered by entirely anonymous sources was hotly debated.
However, these misgivings were quickly silenced, thanks in no small part to a number of esteemed ‘experts’ who vouched for Steele’s credibility in the media — the earliest, most enthusiastic and prominent being none other than Wood himself. He would describe Steele as “very professional and thorough in what he does”, and “a very competent, professional operator” who wouldn’t “make things up”, among other effusive plaudits.
It would take months for Wood to reveal he wasn’t merely ‘familiar’ with Steele, but the pair were in fact long-time friends — and moreover he was an “associate” of Steele’s firm (what form this relationship takes, and whether Wood receives any remuneration from Orbis Intelligence, remains uncertain). Conversely, his association with the Institute for Statecraft has never been acknowledged by the mainstream media, and would never have been known if it wasn’t for the leak of the organization’s internal files in November 2018.
The leak also revealed that in March 2017, the Integrity Initiative submitted a bid for Ministry of Defense funding — among its key performance indicators achieving a “tougher stance in government policy towards Russia”, the publication of “more information in the media on the threat of Russian active measures”, the growth of its cluster network “across Europe” and “greater awareness in all areas of society of the threat posed by Russian active measures to UK’s democratic institutions”.
Integrity Initiative Bids for MoD Funding, March 2017
Russ to Judgement
BuzzFeed would again be used as a conduit for virulently anti-Russian propaganda in June, when it published a series of articles — From Russia With Blood – documenting 14 ‘suspicious deaths’ in Britain it claimed were potential or likely assassinations carried out by Russian “security services or mafia groups”, which UK authorities somehow failed to properly investigate.
The investigation caused something of a sensation, landing BuzzFeed in the running for a variety of prestigious journalism awards, including the Pulitzer and Orwell prizes — Investigations Editor Heidi Blake, who led the series, said her team’s work had cemented the outlet as a “major force in global news”.
However, examination of the seven articles offers much reason for scepticism. First and foremost, suggestions of possible Russian involvement in the deaths hinge almost entirely on the accusations of anonymous intelligence sources, without supporting documentation of any kind. In fact, the pieces often contain information directly contradicting the notion a featured individual was even murdered, let alone by Russians.
For instance, the third installment, The Man Who Knew Too Much, delved into the case of Dr. Matthew Puncher, a UK radiation scientist who’d been conducting work at a Russian nuclear facility, and was found stabbed to death in his kitchen in February 2016.
BuzzFeed notes Puncher’s wife Kathryn told investigators her husband tried to hang himself with a computer cable the the week prior, and Detective Constable Rachel Carter, who inspected the scene, told the inquest “there was no sign of a struggle, none of the furniture had been knocked over, and all the blood belonged to Puncher”, and she was “satisfied” he’d committed suicide as “all the information told us he was very depressed and no-one in his family seemed particularly surprised he had taken his own life”.
However, BuzzFeed had other ideas, stating “four American intelligence officials… believe he was assassinated”. Alternatively, a former senior Scotland Yard counter-terror officer unconnected to the case was quoted as suggesting — also anonymously — the Russian state could have given Puncher drugs to “create depression” and precipitate his suicide.
The fourth installment — The Secrets Of The Spy In The Bag — deals with Gareth Williams, the GCHQ codebreaker seconded to MI6 who died in a Pimlico flat owned by the spying agency in August 2010 and is similarly dubious in the extreme.
Williams’ demise is unambiguously mysterious — his decomposing naked body was found in a padlocked sports bag in the bath, although no fingerprints or traces of his DNA were found on the rim of the bathtub, bag, bag’s zip, or padlock, and an inquest ruled his death to be “unnatural and likely to have been criminally mediated”.
Litvinenko’s been in the news a lot the last couple of days, but nothing about MI6 spy Gareth Williams. The Met found it was ‘probably’ a self-inflicted ‘accident’ that he ended up padlocked inside a bag, in a bath, with none of his fingerprints on either. pic.twitter.com/wofSh40rvY
— dan barker (@danbarker) March 12, 2018
Ironically, much of the article’s content raises serious questions about the role of Williams’ employer’s in his death. For instance, BuzzFeed notes he’d been dead for around 10 days by the time his body was found, but astoundingly neither GCHQ nor MI6 had alerted authorities to his absence from work. It would take his sister informing GCHQ Williams was missing at 11:30 am GMT on 23 August for the agency to contact police — albeit five hours later.
The outlet also records how in the ensuing investigation police were prevented from interviewing Williams’ colleagues at MI6, or reviewing relevant documents, and instead forced to rely upon officers from national counter-terrorism force SO15, which took no formal statements from witnesses, and passed on only anonymised briefing notes to their Metropolitan force counterparts.
Conversely, BuzzFeed fails to mention coroner Dr. Fiona Wilcox ruling involvement of SIS staff in Williams’ death was a legitimate line of inquiry for police — instead again relying on the unsubstantiated claims of the anonymous quartet of US intelligence officials that Williams had been tracing international money-laundering routes used by organised crime groups to blame his probable murder on the Kremlin, and/or Russian gangsters.
The eponymous investigation — focusing on the suicide of Scot Young, an associate of oligarch Boris Berezovsky — is perhaps the series’ most puzzling, for more reasons than one. Young — a corrupt tycoon with clear criminal connections — lost all his money on a failed property endeavor, spent time in prison for contempt of court, and suffered a lengthy and costly divorce battle.
Such a litany of crippling personal calamities — and doctors’ appraisal of him as “paranoid, with a manic flavour” with a “complex delusional belief system” — would surely make Young at least a potential candidate for suicide watch, and indeed police concluded he’d taken his own life by throwing himself from his apartment window.
Three of his associates, Paul Castle, Robbie Curtis, and Johnny Elichaoff likewise “experienced dramatic financial [collapses]” in which they lost all their potentially ill-gotten gains, and subsequently took their own lives — Castle and Curtis both jumped in front of oncoming trains, while Elichaoff leaped off the roof of a London shopping centre.
Yet again though, the word of anonymous US intelligence officials is sufficient to perk BuzzFeed’s suspicions about all their deaths, the unnamed operatives saying Russia could have “engineered” their suicides “through manipulation and intimidation tactics”.
The article’s discussion of Berezovsky’s death is likewise suspect and contradictory, quoting Richard Walton, Scotland Yard’s former counter-terror commander, as saying his department investigated the exiled Russian’s death “very thoroughly” and “hadn’t been able to find any evidence of murder”. Fascinatingly though, in seeking to construct a case for Berezovsky being unlawfully killed, BuzzFeed notes business partner, Georgian oligarch Badri Patarkatsishvili, died from an apparent heart attack in 2008. American spy agencies are said to have intelligence suggesting he was murdered, and while predictably none is presented in the article, Patarkatsishvili was provably subject to at least one assassination plot prior to his death — and it certainly wasn’t Russian in origin.In 2007, covert recordings revealed three Georgian national security service officials had plotted to kill ‘Georgia’s Richest Man’ at the behest of then-President Mikheil Saakashvili. In one recording they debate the best means of execution, an official suggesting they use a poisonous substance which will “kill a person two hours after touching it”. “You smear [it] on the door handle,” they say — the precise method by which Sergei and Yulia were contaminated with novichok, according to UK authorities.
Whatever the meaning of that parallel, BuzzFeed’s series is highly significant, for it was fundamental to cementing the notion of frequent Kremlin-directed murders on British soil in the public consciousness in the year prior to Salisbury. Almost inevitably too, it was widely invoked in the immediate wake of the apparent poisoning as evidence, if not proof, of Russian state involvement.
A Tweet by BuzzFeed Investigations Editor Heidi Blake on Skripal, Documented by Integrity Initiative
Among those seeking to connect From Russia With Blood with the attack on the Skripals was none other than BuzzFeed’s Heidi Blake herself. Her Twitter postings on the subject would be documented by the Integrity Initiative in regular roundups of social media activity relating to the incident — and reference to the series was made in an Initiative briefing document (likely circulated to journalists), Russian Lies and the Skripal Case, which called the “evidence” presented by her team’s investigation “compelling”.
So it was on 13 March 2018, nine days after the Salisbury incident, then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd announced British police and MI5 would reinvestigate the numerous ‘suspicious deaths’ detailed by BuzzFeed — a development the outlet reported rather triumphally. However, a mere four months later, Home Secretary Sajid Javid revealed police had determined there was “no basis on which to re-open any of the investigations”. Fittingly, in December an inquest concluded Alexander Perepilichnyy, one of the ‘BuzzFeed 14′, had died of entirely natural causes.
Whatever the truth of the matter, a month prior the Initiative invited Blake to head an hour-long ‘Investigative Masterclass’ at an event the organization convened at London’s Frontline Club — Tackling Tools of Malign Influence.
‘A Good Shepherd’
Also in June 2017, BBC Diplomatic Editor Mark Urban somewhat miraculously began conducting a series of interviews with Sergei Skripal in the latter’s Salisbury home.
“I was intending to write a book about East-West espionage… My intention was to focus the story on a handful of people, using their stories, and the moment these narratives intersected at Vienna airport, during the swap of 2010, as the key to its structure. Skripal was to be one of the central half-dozen or so stories… I was doing this in my own time — there was no contract. The only sense in which this was a ‘book’ in June 2017 was in my own imagination,” Urban claims.
Over the course of their discussions, Skripal would disclose much about his time in the intelligence services, spell as a double-agent for MI6, incarceration in Russia after discovery, and life in Britain post-exile — although his enduring patriotism Urban found particularly notable.
“[Skripal] is… an unashamed Russian nationalist, enthusiastically adopting the Kremlin line in many matters, even while sitting in his MI6-purchased house,” Urban records, “he was adamant, for example, Putin had not surreptitiously introduced Russian troops into east Ukraine, as much of the Western press reported. If regular units had gone in, he insisted, they would have been sitting in Kiev very soon.”
“The problem with the Ukrainians is they are incapable of leadership. They need Russia for that. The Ukrainians are simply sheep who need a good shepherd,” Skripal explained.
Such sentiments may explain why Skripal seemingly remained in regular contact with the Russian embassy after his arrival in the UK. Speaking to the Independent 7 March 2018, former Kremlin official Valery Morozov, an associate of Skripal likewise exiled to the UK, claimed Skripal had meetings with Russian military intelligence officers “every month”.
Strikingly, he also rejected the notion the apparent nerve agent attack had anything to do with the Kremlin.
“Putin can’t be behind this. I know how the Kremlin works, I worked there. Who is Skripal? He is nothing for Putin. Putin doesn’t think about him. There is nobody in Kremlin talking about former intelligence officer [sic] who is nobody. There is no reason for this. It is more dangerous for them for such things to happen,” Morozov cautioned.
Urban would bizarrely fail to reveal having bagged the unprecedentedly fortuitous scoop until three months after the Salisbury incident — an extremely curious delay, perhaps partially explained by his lucrative book deal with publisher Pan Macmillan being announced mere days later.
Yes, I met Sergei Skripal a few times in 2017 while working on a book project. He’s a remarkable man with a dry sense of humour and a great resilience given all he’s been through https://t.co/hfppMtFM0H
— Mark Urban (@MarkUrban01) July 4, 2018
The resultant work, The Skripal Files, was published in October — rather than a history of “East-West espionage”, the project had evolved into an extensive telling of the government’s official narrative on the Salisbury incident, buttressed by discussions of alleged Kremlin assassinations in the UK, and Skripal’s life and career.
However, while widely marketed as the “definitive account” of the affair, the name Pablo Miller doesn’t appear once in the text — an amazing oversight given Miller was Skripal’s MI6 recruiter and handler, and neighbour in Salisbury, rendered all the more perplexing by Miller and Urban once having served in the same tank regiment.
Miller’s connections to the Salisbury incident are unclear, and by design — immediately afterwards he deleted his LinkedIn account, which revealed him to be a Senior Analyst at Christopher Steele’s Orbis Intelligence, and on 7 March Whitehall issued a D-notice blocking mention of him in the mainstream media. Miller also has unclear connections to Integrity Initiative, his name appearing on a list of invitees to an event hosted by the organization, alongside representatives of the BBC, Porton Down, the FCO, the MOD and the US Embassy.
Adding to the intrigue, Initiative operative Dan Kaszeta — a “counterfeit” chemical weapons ‘expert’ who was the very first source to suggest Sergei and Yulia may have been struck by novichok, a mere four days after the Salisbury incident — noted he’d met Urban “several times over the past few years” in a glowing review of The Skripal Files (since removed from the web) he wrote for the organization in December 2018.
In what may just be an intensely spooky coincidence, as 2017 drew to a close British-American TV project Strike Back: Retribution – a spy-drama based on a novel of the same name by ex-SAS soldier Chris Ryan — began airing on Sky One in the UK. The series followed the activities of Section 20, a fictional branch of British Defence Intelligence, which conducts secretive high-risk missions throughout the globe.
‘Strike Back: Retribution’ Episode Summaries
In episode four, broadcast 21 November, it’s revealed character Ilya Zaryn — who Section 20 rescued from the clutches of a terrorist group — is, in fact, Karim Markov, a Russian scientist who murdered a number of his colleagues with novichok, and is assisting the terrorists in their nefarious schemes.In the next episode, Section 20 locate Zaryn/Markov in a laboratory in Turov, Belarus, where he’s found producing more novichok — but while they manage to destroy the facility and the nerve agent, the dastardly Russian escapes.
In the next, Section 20 track Markov to a lab in Pripyat, Ukraine — but in attempting to contain the nerve agent, Section 20 operative Natalie Reynolds is contaminated. The unit forces Markov to create an antidote, but is killed before he can concoct one — Reynolds’ fellow agent Thomas McAllister manages to improvise and save her, however.
The series would air early the next year in the US on Cinemax — the second episode featuring novichok was transmitted 2 March, two days prior to the Salisbury incident, the third 9 March, five days after.
Expecting the Unexpected
Mainstream hostility towards the Kremlin had been intense ever since 2014, but ‘RussiaGate’ pushed this antipathy into overdrive. Critical, aggressive and paranoid media reports and statements by politicians had become an essentially daily staple by the start of 2018.
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UK Chief of General Staff Gen. Nick Carter (File)
Nonetheless, on 22 January General Nicholas Carter, UK Chief of General Staff, offered perhaps the most hawkish speech on Russia since the demise of the Soviet Union. Speaking at a Royal United Services Institute event, Carter described the country as the “most complex and capable state-based threat to our country since the end of the Cold War”, and warned hostilities could start “sooner than we expect”, particularly as he — ironically — claimed the Kremlin had “[convinced] ordinary Russians the West is a threat… We have been made to appear as the enemy”.
“If Russia sees itself in decline, and more able now to go to war than in the future, does this encourage them to think of war? Perhaps compare the situation today to 1912 when the Russian Imperial Cabinet assessed that it would be better to fight now, because by 1925 Russia would be too weak in comparison to a modernised Germany; and Japan, of course, drew similar conclusions in 1941. Russia worries, I think, that the West will achieve a technological offset in the next decade,” he cautioned.
Carter said the conflict — which he naturally envisaged being initiated by Russia — would “start with something we don’t expect”.
Not long after the speech, Operation Toxic Dagger was launched — a vast three week effort in which 40 Commando Royal Marines, Public Health England, the Atomic Weapons Establishment and Porton Down’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory collaborated to prepare Britain’s armed forces for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear operations by creating “realistic exercise scenarios based on the latest threat information”.
The endeavour included “company-level attacks and scenarios concerning CBRN vignettes, concluding with a full-scale exercise involving government and industry scientists and more than 300 military personnel”, with a “chemical decontamination area set up not merely to treat ‘polluted’ commandos, but also wounded prisoners”.
It was convened on Salisbury Plain — several of the Royal Marines taking part would be seconded to Operation Morlop, a multi-agency ‘clean-up’ effort launched in Salisbury in the wake of the poisoning of the Skripals, less than a fortnight after Operation Toxic Dagger was completed.
Ansarullah: UK’s Hunt distorting terms of Hudaydah ceasefire deal
Press TV – March 5, 2019
Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement has censured recent comments by British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt on the control of Hudaydah, saying the top UK diplomat is distorting the terms of a UN-mediated ceasefire deal reached between the Yemeni warring sides in Sweden over the strategic Red Sea port city.
During a visit to Yemen on Sunday, Hunt — whose country has been a major supporter of the deadly Saudi-led war on Yemen — claimed that Hudaydah “was supposed to be cleared of militia and left under neutral control by the beginning of January.”
Mohammed Abdul-Salam, a spokesman for the Houthi movement, rejected the comments in a statement released on Monday, stressing that the Hudaydah truce had never mentioned handing over the port city to a “neutral” party.
The ceasefire, he added, had stipulated that after the withdrawal of the warring sides, Hudaydah would be patrolled by an unspecified “local force” with UN observers.
“We are prepared to carry out the redeployment in the first step, but the other party refused because they do not want to expose the aggression mercenaries and to lose the pretexts and justifications for continuing the aggression on the West Coast,” Abdul-Salam said.
Representatives from the Houthi movement and the Riyadh-sponsored government of the ex-president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, agreed to cease fighting in Hudaydah during peace talks in Sweden last December.
Under the agreement, the rival parties also agreed to the withdrawal of their troops and the deployment of UN monitors to the port city, a lifeline for millions of Yemenis.
However, the Houthis – who control Hudaydah — have repeatedly complained about ceasefire breaches by the Saudi-backed side.
Elsewhere in his remarks, the Houthi spokesman said that the countries, which are involved in the bloody military campaign against Yemen, especially Britain are the ones violating the Hudaydah truce.
He also said the UN special envoy for Yemen – a British national — was relying on the UK in dealing with the Yemen issue.
“Martin Griffith appears not to be an envoy of the United Nations, but an English envoy representing Britain, especially after the British Foreign Office has made its objectives and position clear, which is in line with the obstruction of the agreement,” the Houthi official added.
“Britain has clearly revealed that it manages the process of blocking the agreement through its envoy to Yemen under the cover of the United Nations,” he pointed out.
Hudaydah, the entry point for most of Yemen’s commercial goods and vital aid, has seen some of the heaviest fighting in the four-year Saudi war.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE launched the offensive against Hudaydah in June 2018, but they have faced strong resistance put up by Yemeni armed forces – led by the Houthis — and the city’s residents.
The Saudi-led coalition claims that the Houthis are using the port for weapons delivery, an allegation rejected by the fighters.
The UK has licensed over £4.7 billion worth of arms exports, including missiles and fighter jets, to Riyadh since the Saudi regime and its allies launched a broader military campaign against Yemen in early 2015.
Britain has also been providing combat intelligence and target data to Saudi Arabia over the course of the war.
A Stumble at Hanoi, but Negotiations Remain on the Agenda
By Gregory Elich | Zoom in Korea | March 4, 2019
President Trump’s hasty decision to pull the plug on the Hanoi Summit ahead of schedule came as a stunning surprise. The feeling of disappointment in those who were hoping for success contrasted with the sense of relief in the U.S. foreign policy establishment, which remains steadfastly opposed to any improvement in relations.
The widespread assumption going into the summit was that the Trump administration would be able to buy off North Korea with diplomatic trinkets. It was thought that among these would be limited sanctions exemptions, such as allowing humanitarian organizations greater latitude to operate in North Korea. It was also anticipated that a document would be signed which would recognize that the Korean War had ended in 1953. While a peace declaration would have a symbolic “feel good” value, it would change no facts on the ground, and leave the North Koreans essentially empty-handed.
By all accounts, the North Koreans have been more clear-eyed about what they need in talks with U.S. negotiators than they had been given credit. Symbolic measures will not suffice. The North Koreans have serious and well-founded security concerns, given the various wars and military interventions the United States has launched around the world and its decades-long hostility to North Korea.
The Trump administration’s current campaign to destabilize Venezuela and substitute its handpicked lackey as that country’s president can only have further clarified thinking on security matters for the North Koreans.
A more immediate concern for North Korea is the impact of economic sanctions, which have as their aim the collective punishment of the entire population. According to a senior U.S. State Department official, during discussions on sanctions relief with their North Korean counterparts, U.S. negotiators “did our own calculations, and [the damage] tallies up to the tune of many, many billions of dollars.” North Korea’s GDP may be difficult to assess with precision, but it is estimated at around $30 billion. That places it below Vermont, which ranks dead last among U.S. states in terms of GDP. Given the economic damage/GDP ratio, it is obvious that the sanctions war is inflicting enormous hardship on the North Korean people.
According to North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho, “Our proposal was that, if the U.S. lifts some of the UN sanctions, or in other words those aspects of the sanctions that impede the civilian economy and the people’s livelihood, we will completely and permanently dismantle the production facilities of all nuclear materials, including plutonium and uranium, in the Yongbyon complex, through a joint project by technicians from our two countries, in the presence of American experts”
“They were willing to give everything, including all the facilities at Yongbyon,” revealed an unnamed source. “Not just one physical reactor, but the whole complex. They were also willing to present their willingness to fully dismantle in the form of an official document. They were getting down to business pretty seriously. And then Mr. Trump and the American side turned down the proposal and left,” to the dismay of the North Koreans.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged the president to reject the North Koreans’ proposal, as facilities outside of Yongbyon were not included, and nuclear weapons and missiles would remain untouched. National Security Advisor John Bolton may have added objections as well, given his well-known aversion to anything other than unilateral disarmament by North Korea.
“The President in his discussions challenged the North Koreans to go bigger,” a State Department official announced. “The President encouraged Kim to go all in, and we were… prepared to go all in as well.” Trump wanted the North Koreans to put their entire program on the table in exchange for relief on economic sanctions.
From the North Korean standpoint, complete dismantlement of its nuclear program cannot come without a security guarantee. According to Foreign Minister Ri, that guarantee is “even more important” than lifting sanctions. After all, it was for security reasons that North Korea developed its nuclear program, and its security will need to be assured through other means if it denuclearizes. “Given the current level of trust between our two countries,” Ri explained, the dismantlement of the Yongbyon facility is “the biggest step toward denuclearization that we can take at the present moment.” Trump’s proposed grand bargain failed to provide a secure basis for the North Koreans to abandon their nuclear program. Also unaddressed is the concept of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, which is habitually interpreted in a one-sided manner in the West as applying solely to North Korea. The meaning of that term needs to be clarified through further negotiations.
The U.S. side, however, remains wedded to the idea of maximum punishment as a negotiating tool and is unwilling to grant relief on economic sanctions without North Korea’s complete denuclearization. That is the essence of the current impasse between the two sides. In an interview broadcast on Fox News, Trump said, “The sanctions are there, and I didn’t want to give up the sanctions unless we had a real program.”
It seems clear that if both parties can agree on timing and sequencing, the possibilities for progress are there, starting with a partial lifting of economic sanctions in exchange for partial denuclearization.
Although the Hanoi Summit failed to produce a concrete result, it would be incorrect to say that it failed. Diplomacy is a process, not a single event. The summit did not end in rancor, and both sides have pledged to continue negotiations. KCNA, the North Korean news agency, reported that the summit “offered an important occasion for deepening mutual respect and trust,” and it noted that President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un “agreed to keep in close touch” and “continue productive dialogues for settling the issues discussed at the Hanoi Summit.”
“They were constructive discussions,” points out a State Department official. “There’s room to continue talking.” In Mike Pompeo’s assessment, “There have been lots of things that we’ve moved forward on, and I think we have a set of shared common understandings. I’ve seen enough congruence between what the two sides are trying to accomplish. I saw the goodwill between the two leaders.”
Despite the lack of agreement, Kim reiterated his commitment to maintain a freeze on nuclear and ballistic missile testing, while the U.S. is renaming and reducing the scope of its annual Foal Eagle and Key Resolve military exercises.
The main impediment to progress is U.S. bi-partisan opposition to dialogue and any reduction of tensions in East Asia. An often-repeated charge is that last year’s Singapore Summit produced no tangible result. However, the Singapore Summit was a short meeting meant to establish an agreement on intent, in which not only did North Korea promise to work toward denuclearization, but both sides committed to improve relations and build a peace regime on the Korean Peninsula. After decades of hostility and confrontation, the summit redirected the relationship to one of dialogue. That is no small thing. Critics who argue that detailed steps should have been drawn up in that initial meeting are, of course, intentionally distorting the nature of the meeting in an attempt to discredit the concept of U.S.-North Korea negotiations.
Similarly, those who wish to block progress can be expected to argue that the lack of an agreement at Hanoi proves that it is a mistake to meet with the North Koreans and talks must come to a halt. Nevertheless, U.S. and North Korean leaders remain invested in the process, and the less influence opponents have on U.S. negotiating strategy, the more chance of success. Moreover, although there is internal opposition from conservative forces in South Korea, the detente process between the two Koreas has developed its own momentum, which can be expected to exert a positive influence on the U.S. position. For now, there is certainly more reason for hope than despair.
Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People, and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period, published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific.
His website is https://gregoryelich.org
Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich
US Deploys THAAD Missile System to Israel
Sputnik – 04.03.2019
WASHINGTON – The United States military deployed a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile battery to Israel, European Command (EUCOM) said in a statement on Monday.
“At the direction of the Secretary of Defense, US European Command deployed a THAAD system to Israel in early March,” the statement said.
The move is intended to demonstrate the United States’ ongoing commitment to Israel’s security, the statement added.
As part of the deployment, US service members will work in different locations in Israel to help local military forces align their existing air and missile defence architecture with the THAAD system.
The exercise will allow the US military to incorporate key capabilities stationed in the country and Europe with its partners in the Israeli military, EUCOM said.
The THAAD system, considered one of the most advanced in the world, will be added to the existing Israeli air defence. The latter currently includes the Iron Dome, designed to shoot down short-range rockets and the Arrow system.
Commenting on the exercise, IDF Spokesperson Brig.-Gen. Ronen Manelis specified the US anti-ballistic missile battery would be deployed in the south of the country and that about 200 American servicemen would participate in the drills.
As Pakistan Calls for Peace, India Refuses to Reveal Air Raid Details – Report
Sputnik – 03.03.2019
India’s Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has stated that security agencies will not publish any operational details about the air raid against militant groups in Pakistan, the newspaper Dawn reported. The statement comes following calls to release evidence that the Indian Air Force hit militant camps in airstrikes on 26 February, which led to an escalation in tensions between the two neighbours.
“The armed forces must have, and our security and intelligence agencies must have, a full leeway in dealing with situations, and if anybody wants operational details to be made public […] he certainly does not understand the system”, Jaitley said.
India’s finance minister also denied allegations that the Indian military activities were connected with the upcoming general elections in May.
At the same time, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi called for a resolution to the escalating tensions between Pakistan and India via dialogue and diplomatic channels instead of military power.
“Peace is our priority and we do not desire war with India”, Qureshi said.
Calls to publish proof of striking militant camps came after Pakistan stated that the Indian airstrike on 26 February had hit an empty hillside. The air raid over Pakistani territory, which led to an escalation in tensions between Delhi and Islamabad, came in wake of a deadly attack on a security convoy that claimed the lives of 40 servicemen on 14 February carried out by the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).
New Delhi insists that Islamabad is harbouring and supporting militants that commit terrorist acts on Indian territory. Pakistan denies both the accusations and the existence of militant camps.
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