On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump tapped retired General Keith Kellogg as his envoy to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Kellogg advocated for the Joe Biden administration strategy in Ukraine and even called for implementing a no-fly zone over the war-torn country.
“I am very pleased to nominate General Keith Kellogg to serve as Assistant to the President and Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia. Keith has led a distinguished Military and Business career, including serving in highly sensitive National Security roles in my first Administration,” Trump posted on TruthSocial, adding, “Together, we will secure PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH, and Make America, and the World, SAFE AGAIN!”
While Kellogg served in the first Trump administration, his views on Ukraine are starkly different from what Trump said on the campaign trail. As a candidate, Trump promised, on day one, to end the Ukraine war. Though, he never explained how he would accomplish that ambitious goal.
In March of 2022, in an interview on Fox News, Kellogg suggested that Biden and NATO leadership were wrong to dismiss the idea of a no-fly zone over Ukraine. If implemented, that policy would have required the US to shoot down Russian planes over Ukraine, a major escalation that would have meant direct war with Russia.
A year later, in March of 2023, Kellogg endorsed Biden’s Ukraine policy to Congress. “I believe that if you can defeat a strategic adversary without using any US troops, you are at the acme of professionalism.” He continued, “Because letting Ukraine defeat [Russia] it takes a strategic adversary off the table. And we can focus where we should be focusing against, our primary adversary, which is China.”
In a paper published by the America First Policy Institute in April, Kellogg and coauthor Fred Flietz argue that Putin invaded Ukraine because Biden was not aggressive enough in his approach towards Moscow. Kellogg highlighted Trump’s willingness to kill Russian mercenary troops in Syria in 2018, that he “revitalized the NATO alliance,” and sanctioned the Nord Stream 2 Pipelines as examples of his aggressive policies.
“Trump also had a Russia policy that demonstrated American strength. For example, in 2018, after the Russian mercenary Wagner Group advanced on U.S. bases in Syria, they were met with immediate and decisive action when President Trump authorized punitive airstrikes against them,” they wrote. “Russia never retaliated against the United States over that attack—which reportedly killed hundreds of Russian mercenaries—likely because Putin did not know how Trump would respond.”
Kellogg and Fleitz go on to explain that Biden’s crucial failure in the war was not giving enough support to Kiev at the start of the conflict. “Nevertheless, Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia ran out of steam by the fall of 2022 because the United States and its allies failed to provide the country with the weapons it needed to continue the fight to reclaim its territory.” They add, “Biden failed to recognize until it was too late, however, that it was in America’s interests and the interests of global security for the United States to do everything possible short of direct US military involvement to help Ukraine.”
The authors propose no workable plan to end the war as they are only willing to offer the Kremlin a postponement regarding Kiev’s prospective NATO membership. Putin was opposed to Washington’s plans seeking Ukraine’s NATO membership when they were announced in 2008, and it is unlikely that taking the issue off the table for a few decades will appease the Kremlin.
November 27, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Russophobia | Ukraine, United States |
2 Comments
New polling conducted this month by the Pew Research Center indicates that only 30 percent of Americans believe that the invasion of Ukraine by Russia is a “major threat to U.S. interests.” That perception was at its highest of 50 percent of Americans shortly after the invasion. It has in successive polling consistently come in much lower, until reaching this new low.
Nevertheless, the United States government over the past nearly three years has kept ramping up its support for Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia — including via money, intelligence, and weapons. So involved in the war has the US become that it is seems a stretch to claim that the US is not at war directly with Russia. Thus we reach the point where nuclear war between the US and Russia has become a possible outgrowth of the ongoing conflict.
When Russian troops entered Ukraine on February 24, 2022, US President Joe Biden rushed to present a speech to stir up public support for the US government helping Ukraine and punishing Russia. He presented the US as acting to advance democracy in these endeavors. However, even at the height of stirred up war fever, an American majority did not see Russia’s action as a major threat to US interests. Now, that view is held by less than a third of Americans. Yet, the US government remains relentless in its war effort. In reality, it is all about power to the politicians, not power to the people.
Biden’s appeal to democracy was intended to stir up an overwhelming support among Americans for the US going all in on aiding Ukraine and harming Russia. He largely failed in the effort. Democracy in America has said “no” to war. Nonetheless, Biden, along with many other politicians, have continued pursuing war anyway. And now it seems they may keep doing so to the point of nuclear annihilation.
November 27, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Russophobia | United States |
1 Comment
Businesses in NATO countries should prepare themselves for a “wartime scenario” and adjust their production lines and supply chains to be less vulnerable to blackmail by nations such as Russia and China, the outgoing chief of the US-led bloc’s military committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, said on Monday.
Speaking at a European Policy Center think-tank event in Brussels, he urged Western industries and businesses to implement deterrence measures.
“If we can make sure that all crucial services and goods can be delivered no matter what, then that is a key part of our deterrence,” Bauer argued.
“Businesses need to be prepared for a wartime scenario and adjust their production and distribution lines accordingly. Because while it may be the military who wins battles, it’s the economies that win wars,” the NATO official said. He mentioned China and Russia in the context of how he believes wars are waged in the economic sphere.
“We thought we had a deal with Gazprom, but we actually had a deal with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” he stated, apparently referring to the drop in Russian gas supplies to the EU, which took place after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.
At the time, the EU declared that ending its reliance on Russian energy was a key priority, and many members voluntarily halted their imports, while supplies also plunged due to the sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines.
American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh blamed the sabotage on the CIA, alleging that the agency had carried out the attack under the direct orders of the White House – an allegation it has denied.
Bauer then extended his warning to China, claiming that Beijing could use its exports to NATO states and the infrastructure that it owns in Europe as leverage in the event of a conflict.
“We are naive if we think the [Chinese] Communist Party will never use that power. Business leaders in Europe and America need to realize that the commercial decisions they make have strategic consequences for the security of their nation,” the official claimed.
It is unclear what “wartime” Bauer is predicting in his statements.
NATO has long declared Russia to be a direct threat, and Western officials have repeatedly claimed that if Moscow is allowed to win the conflict in Ukraine, it could then attack other European countries. Russia has dismissed these claims as nonsense. Restrictions that Moscow introduced in trade with the West have largely come in response to unprecedented economic sanctions placed on the country in connection with the Ukraine conflict.
Beijing has also faced its share of trade barriers and restrictions introduced by Western states, and introduced similar measures in response. According to most experts, including many in the West, the sanctions policy has backfired on Western economies, leading to supply shortages and inflation.
November 25, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Russophobia, Sinophobia | China, European Union, NATO, Russia, United States |
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When the Soviet Union dissolved in late 1991, the world seemed poised for a new, more peaceful era no longer haunted by the fear of a nuclear Armageddon. The principal successor state from the wreckage of the USSR was a noncommunist Russia that was intent on becoming part of the democratic, capitalist West. President George H. W. Bush and his top advisers exercised considerable diplomatic skill in managing the twilight years and ultimate demise of the Soviet Union. Their core achievement was to gain Moscow’s assent to Germany’s reunification and membership in NATO. The implicit tradeoff (unfortunately, never put in writing) was that NATO would not expand beyond the eastern border of a newly united Germany.
The contrast between the benign end to the original Cold War and the current status of relations between the West (especially the United States) and Russia could not be greater or more alarming. NATO’s meddling in the armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia has reached the point of being an outright proxy war for the alliance. As NATO’s leader, the United States has pushed a series of extremely dangerous escalatory steps. The latest provocation is the decision by President Joe Biden’s administration authorizing Ukraine to use long-range U.S. Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) that are capable of striking at least 190 miles inside Russia. Moscow has responded by adopting a new nuclear doctrine warning that the use of such missiles by NATO’s Ukrainian proxy would mean that Moscow is officially at war with the U.S.-led alliance. Perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin is bluffing, but the risk of a nuclear collision between NATO and Moscow now appears to be at unprecedented levels.
It is bitterly ironic that the decision to let Ukraine use American missiles that might trigger World War III has been made by the lamest of lame duck U.S. presidents. At the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour, the leaders of the Democratic Party pressured Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race. They did so because the evidence of his cognitive decline had become undeniable. However, his hand-picked successor, Kamala Harris, then proceeded to lose the presidential election to Republican nominee Donald Trump.
To say that the Biden administration has no mandate to make such a crucial decision involving war and peace would be a monumental understatement. In fairness, though, the current foreign policy crew is not solely responsible for fouling-up relations with Russia and provoking a new cold war with nuclear implications. That “achievement” has been a bipartisan effort taking place over a span of more than three decades.
Toward the end of George H. W. Bush’s administration, public opinion polls in Russia showed that nearly 80% of Russians held positive views of the United States. In the late stages of the Bill Clinton administration, nearly the same percentage held negative opinions.
It was hardly a surprising development. During his years in office, Clinton and his Russian-hating advisers (especially UN ambassador and later Secretary of State Madeleine Albright) antagonized Moscow on multiple occasions. Washington went out of its way to attack Russia’s long-standing religious and political clients, the Serbs, as the Yugoslav federation disintegrated. However, the Clinton administration’s decision to expand NATO to include Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary struck the biggest blow to East-West relations.
Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, continued and intensified the policy of provoking and antagonizing Russia. Subsequent rounds of NATO expansion brought U.S. military power to Russia’s immediate neighborhood by adding such new members as the three Baltic republics, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. Most provocative of all, Bush pushed to add Ukraine to the alliance. Although Germany and France temporarily blocked immediate moves to make Ukraine a member, Washington’s ultimate goal was quite clear.
A rising number and volume of warnings against making Ukraine a NATO asset also came from Putin and other officials. Washington and its key European allies ignored those warnings but it became clear in 2014 that the Kremlin was not bluffing. When President Barack Obama and key European leaders helped overthrow Ukraine’s generally pro-Russia president and install a regime subservient to NATO, Moscow struck back emphatically, seizing Ukraine’s strategic, but majority Russian populated, Crimean peninsula.
Relations between the West and Russia continued to deteriorate thereafter. In the autumn of 2021, the Kremlin proposed a new relationship with the West that amounted to Russia’s minimum demands. Those demands included a guaranteed neutral status for Ukraine—thus foreclosing the prospect of Kiev’s eventual membership in NATO. The Kremlin also sought the withdrawal of advanced U.S. weaponry from the easternmost members of NATO. It amounted to an ultimatum, and when the Biden administration treated Moscow’s demands with contempt, the Kremlin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. That offensive, combined with the decision by the United States and its allies to impose severe economic sanctions against Russia, ignited an ever-escalating military crisis.
It is uncertain whether President-elect Donald Trump intends to end the dangerous impasse with Moscow. Contrary to the partisan myth that Trump has been Putin’s puppet, his actual policies during his first term were consistently hardline. One can hope, though, that he has fully absorbed the lesson of what a disaster Washington’s love affair with Ukraine has become for both countries. Restoring cooperative bilateral relations with Russia is essential for global peace.
There is an alarming possibility, however, that Trump won’t get the opportunity, even if he wishes to back away from the beckoning abyss. The lame-duck Biden administration still holds power for nearly another two months, and that is more than enough time to plunge the country into nuclear war, if administration leaders are so inclined. The departing president’s conduct in recent weeks, especially authorizing Ukraine to attack Russia with U.S.-supplied, long-range missiles, is beyond reckless. Biden’s legacy is already bad, but it could become even worse.
November 25, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Russophobia | NATO, Russia, United States |
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Washington’s decision to blacklist Russia’s Gazprombank, a key conduit for gas purchases from Russia, is aimed at undermining energy security in the Central European region, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has claimed.
Earlier this week, the US Treasury Department imposed blocking sanctions on more than 50 Russian financial institutions, including Gazprombank, linked to the eponymous Russian gas giant, and six of its international subsidiaries.
The newly introduced restrictions effectively cut off Russia’s primary bank for energy-related transactions from the SWIFT interbank messaging system, meaning it can no longer conduct dollar-based transactions.
“Including Gazprombank to the sanctions list is a decision that deliberately puts some Central European countries in a difficult situation, and deliberately jeopardizes the security of energy supplies” to several nations in the region, Szijjarto wrote on Facebook on Friday.
The Hungarian diplomat stated that any attempts to jeopardize energy supplies to Hungary “either by imposing sanctions or by cutting off transit supplies are considered as an offence against our sovereignty.”
“We reject all the attacks of the kind against our sovereignty, resist the pressure, and pursue our national interests,” he said.
Szijjarto added that he discussed the issue of gas supplies to Hungary with the first deputy head of the Russian Energy Ministry, Pavel Sorokin, on the sidelines of the Istanbul Energy Forum, which convened in Türkiye on November 22.
“We reviewed the situation in the field of gas transportation and confirmed that we will support necessary cooperation for secure energy supplies to Hungary,” he stated.
Budapest is also discussing the situation with the energy ministers of Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, and Serbia, and consulting with Slovakia to find a solution for securing energy supplies, Szijjarto added.
EU nations are still purchasing record volumes of liquified natural gas (LNG) from Russia. Despite the bloc’s plans to eliminate its dependence Russian energy, it remains one of the world’s major importers of Russian fossil fuels.
In August, pipeline gas comprised the largest share of the EU’s purchases of Russian fossil fuels (54%), followed by LNG (25%), according to the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
November 23, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Russophobia | European Union, Hungary, Russia, Slovakia, United States |
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Part 2 of our series on how Barack Obama undermined U.S. democracy
One of the least known aspects of the Russiagate affair is the central role that Barack Obama played in it. For years, the focus has been on individuals such as James Comey, Peter Strzok, the infamous dossier author Christopher Steele, and, of course, Hillary Clinton. And those names are indeed central to the plot, with Clinton being the one who devised the nefarious scheme to portray her opponent as a Russian agent. However, there was someone in the background, pulling many strings, who was even more crucial to the entire scheme: the then-sitting president, Barack Obama.
In this installment of our series on how Obama undermined U.S. democracy, we take a closer look at his role in both promoting and weaponizing the Russiagate hoax, which fraudulently linked Trump to Russia.
July 28 disclosure
We know from emails released by WikiLeaks that early discussions regarding the Clinton campaign’s dirty trick to associate Trump with Russia—what Clinton called the Swiftboat plan—were in full swing by February 2016. Over the following months, various components of this nefarious project came together. These included the hiring of campaign operatives Fusion GPS, commissioning the dirty dossier from Christopher Steele, and enlisting a group of IT specialists tasked with creating a false data trail linking Putin and Trump. We do not know whether Obama was privy to these early efforts. The earliest documented date we have for Obama’s involvement in the scheme is July 28, 2016. On this day, Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, came to the Oval Office and briefed Obama on Clinton’s Swiftboat project. Thus, we can say with certainty that, at the very latest, it was on this day that Obama became aware that the allegations of Russian collusion were nothing more than a fraudulent scheme concocted by Hillary Clinton.
As president, voters had entrusted Obama with the solemn responsibility of keeping the United States safe and secure. For this reason, Obama had a critical duty on July 28, 2016, to promptly put an end to the fraudulent allegations of collusion with Russia. The nominee of a major political party for president being falsely portrayed as a Russian agent posed numerous national security concerns. The fact that the entire scheme had been orchestrated by his opponent, arguably constituted an even more significant national security threat. In simple terms, of the two individuals who could become president, one was falsely accused of being a Russian agent while the other was the one who had cooked up the scam.
However, consistent with the theme throughout our series on Obama, he opted for treachery instead of truth. He wanted the country to tear itself apart, which is why, instead of telling Clinton to put an end to her devious scheme or, better yet, asking his Justice Department officials to investigate her campaign for creating a national security nightmare, Obama went full steam ahead in helping to perpetuate the hoax. Within 72 hours of the Oval Office meeting, the FBI launched its fraudulent Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump.
No peaceful transfer of power
It was a terrible betrayal of the American public who voted Obama into office, and the situation would only worsen. Over the coming months, the fraudulent Russia collusion investigation intensified. Numerous members of Trump’s campaign team were surveilled and monitored by the FBI. When an FBI analyst raised alarm bells about the fabricated Alfa Bank story—a tale concocted by Clinton’s IT operatives to link Putin to Trump—the analyst was promptly sidelined, and the matter was handed over to more pliant agents. However, it was all to no avail. Clinton lost, and Trump was suddenly the president-elect. At this point, it was once again Obama who intervened to undermine Trump and, consequently, American democracy.
The media incessantly discusses the so-called peaceful transfer of power, lamenting that Trump refused to hand over the reins in January 2021. Leaving aside that this assertion is demonstrably false—he did transfer power and retreated to his Mar-a-Lago estate—it is often overlooked in the debate about the peaceful handover of power that it was Obama who did not peacefully hand over power in 2017. Instead, he weaponized the Russia collusion hoax to undermine the incoming Trump administration. He did so fully aware that it would jeopardize Trump’s presidency, and in many ways, it indeed did. It is remarkable how much Trump accomplished despite the persistent cloud of Russia collusion allegations that loomed over him daily.
The specifics of Obama’s actions are relatively straightforward, yet they are seldom discussed. Immediately after Trump won the election, Obama, in collaboration with the intelligence community, initiated an effort to publish an official report, the Intelligence Community Assessment, that would claim that Trump had only won because of Putin’s help. This strategy served two purposes. First, it absolved Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party of accountability for a humiliating defeat. Second, and far more significantly, it created a huge roadblock for the incoming Trump administration. In addition to the persistent inquiries regarding Trump’s alleged connections to Putin, which hindered the administration’s ability to focus on other matters, Obama understood that his plan would effectively criminalize diplomatic relations with Russia. It was sabotage.
Trump’s hands were tied. He could not engage with Russia without provoking an immediate and loud outcry from Democrats, the intelligence community, and the media. Even something as mundane as meeting the Russian ambassador—an event that would ordinarily never make the news—was immediately portrayed as an act of treason. When Trump met Putin in person, the media had a massive meltdown, even accusing Putin of secretly bugging a soccer ball that had been gifted to Trump’s son, Barron. The hysteria knew no bounds, and this was catastrophic, especially given that all of this was occurring against the backdrop of escalating hostilities in Ukraine and the warming of relations between Russia and China—something that the United States should have done everything possible to prevent.
Secret meeting with journalists
And if all of that wasn’t enough, on January 17, 2017, Obama invited a group of journalists to a secret White House meeting. A 21-page transcript, which was only recently released, reveals that Obama used this meeting to carefully plant the fraudulent Russia collusion narrative in the minds of the attending journalists. He did this despite knowing that the entire situation was a hoax. But Obama ensured that the media perceived things otherwise, providing not only the presidential seal of approval to the Russia collusion hoax but also the impression of confirmation from someone with access to all the relevant secret intelligence. In other words, Obama abused the presidency to ensure that his successor would be burdened with the incessant Russia collusion narrative.
Obama’s central role in promoting the Russia collusion hoax was partially revealed by former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who in 2020 disclosed details of the July 2016 meeting between Obama and Brennan. Other intelligence officials within the Trump administration, including his first Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, had access to the same information as Ratcliffe. However, instead of speaking out, they actively sought to undermine the president they were supposed to serve. Ratcliffe’s recent nomination as CIA Director represents not only a significant step toward reforming the intelligence community but also suggests that accountability for Obama may finally be on the horizon.
November 23, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Russophobia | CIA, Democratic Party, FBI, Hillary Clinton, Obama, United States |
1 Comment
The latest round of US sanctions against Russian financial institutions, which specifically target Gazprombank, is an attempt to block Russia’s gas supplies to the EU, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated on Friday. The lender is Russia’s primary bank for energy-related transactions.
Peskov warned that Moscow would respond to restrictions with countermeasures, though he did not specify what they would entail.
The Kremlin spokesman’s remarks follow an announcement by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Thursday, which said Gazprombank and six of its international subsidiaries had been added to its sanctions blacklist. Gazprombank had already been sanctioned by the UK and Canada shortly after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. However, the US had previously avoided placing restrictions on the lender as it was used by EU states to pay for Russian gas.
When asked whether the Kremlin viewed sanctions on Gazprombank as an attempt to jeopardize supplies of Russian gas to Europe, and whether Moscow planned any response, Peskov replied: “The answer is ‘Yes’ to both questions.”
He noted that Russian authorities were already working on ways to alleviate the problems that the new restrictions could cause Russia and its foreign gas buyers.
“Of course, we’ll find options. It is impossible to introduce completely blocking measures against a country like Russia. It may take some time, but a solution will still be found,” Peskov said.
The new measures mean Gazprombank can no longer carry out transactions that involve the dollar-based financial system. Gazprombank earlier said that sanctions would not affect its operations within Russia, but warned that its UnionPay cards may stop working outside the country.
Apart from Gazprombank, the new US restrictions also targeted more than 50 small-to-medium Russian lenders, some 40 securities registrars, and 15 financial officials.
After the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, the EU declared the elimination of its reliance on Russian energy to be its top priority. Many member states, including Poland, Bulgaria, Finland, the Netherlands, and Denmark, voluntarily halted their imports. However, several EU nations, including Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Italy continue to rely on Russian gas to meet their energy needs, and have not stopped buying the commodity despite pressure from peers within the bloc.
Moscow has slammed Western sanctions as illegal, and noted that they keep backfiring on the countries that impose them. Russia has also been gradually moving away from the dollar in trade, switching to transactions using national currencies with most of its international partners.
The newly imposed US sanctions against Russia’s Gazprombank are expected to send energy costs surging in parts of Europe, Finam Financial Group analyst Aleksandr Potavin told TASS on Friday. The risk of secondary restrictions will force buyers of Russian oil and gas to seek new payment tools, he predicted.
On Thursday, the US Treasury Department introduced blocking sanctions against more than 50 Russian lenders, including Gazprombank and six of its international subsidiaries. The new penalties effectively cut one of Russia’s largest banks off from the SWIFT interbank messaging system, meaning it can no longer carry out transactions that involve the dollar-based financial system. Gazprombank’s assets in the US have also been frozen.
“Due to the new sanctions against Gazprombank, foreign buyers of Russian gas and oil will be faced with the need to look for alternative payment routes that are likely to complicate the entire process, increase risks, and make the payment procedure more expensive,” Potavin said.
He specified that European buyers could use accounts in other banks or pay for energy supplies via other world currencies as an alternative.
“The new sanctions will lead to an increase in prices for Russian hydrocarbons in Europe, and supply disruptions can’t be ruled out as well, since all this creates new risks for foreign companies working with Russia,” he explained.
According to Alexander Frolov, expert at the InfoTek energy news center, the latest restrictions won’t have a direct impact on buyers of Russian gas who previously agreed to adopt the “gas for rubles” scheme to pay for their energy purchases. They will only apply to individuals and legal entities subject to US jurisdiction, he said, as quoted by TASS.
The analyst admitted, however, that companies using rubles for Russian energy supplies are at risk of secondary sanctions, “so gas buyers from Europe will turn to the US Treasury for clarification.”
Supplies of Russian pipeline gas to Europe have substantially declined due to Ukraine-related restrictions and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, although EU nations are still importing record volumes of LNG from the sanctions-hit state. Despite the bloc’s vows to drop purchases of Russian energy, it remains one of the world’s major buyers of Russian fossil fuels. In August, pipeline gas comprised the largest share of the EU’s purchases of Russia’s fossil fuels (54%), followed by LNG (25%), according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
November 22, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Russophobia | European Union, Russia, United States |
2 Comments
The war in Ukraine is an American war for which the United States government should be ashamed and blamed.
It was initiated by President Joe Biden and then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, both of whom advised Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that if he rejected a peace treaty that his own government had freely negotiated and agreed to in 2022 with Russian negotiators, Ukraine could join NATO. The treaty was more than 100 pages in length, each page of which had been initialed by both sides, and its essence accepted by the Kremlin and by Kyiv — until Biden and Johnson advised against it.
Their advice was essentially to trust their military support, as it would be strong enough to resist any Russian incursion into eastern Ukraine and relieve Kyiv of the need to make concessions to the Kremlin. They used Zelensky as a puppet, since their purpose was not motivated by peace or empathy or justice, rather by hatred for all things Russian.
So, the U.S. and the U.K. encouraged bloodshed instead of peace, confrontation instead of communication, and Congress began paying for a war without declaring one. Motivated by years of anti-Russian jingoism, heedless of its duties under the Constitution, thumbing its nose at at least three treaties ratified by the Senate that permit war only when the U.S. or an ally is gravely threatened, Congress permitted Biden to start an undeclared war against a country that poses no threat whatsoever to the national security of the United States.
Here is the backstory.
The war began in 2014 when the U.S. State Department and the CIA engineered a coup against the popularly elected and neutral-leaning government of Ukraine. Much of Russian-speaking and Russian culturally oriented Ukraine in the east was unhappy with the coup. The American and British plotters then installed a puppet regime that actually began attacking Russian Ukrainians in eastern Ukraine.
The area of eastern Ukraine in which this government-orchestrated violence was taking place has been Russian in culture, religion and language since before the American Revolution. The American and British plotters of the 2014 coup did not expect the resistance that their coup generated. Yet, they looked the other way when the Ukraine government attacked its own people for demonstrating a decided affinity for Moscow over Kyiv; so decided, that the province of Crimea actually voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia.
One person who did not look the other way was Russian President Vladimir Putin. Who could blame him? The U.S. has known since the early 1990s that Russia will not accept an eastward expansion of NATO. The George H.W. Bush administration promised the late Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev as much in return for the peaceful liberation of eastern Europe and especially the reunification of Germany. Nevertheless, with Poland’s entry into NATO, the western perfidy became apparent, as NATO — and its heavy weaponry — moved toward Moscow.
Angry that his predecessor had permitted this, fearful of the same mentality that engineered the 2014 coup now managing NATO, Putin came to the rescue of Russian Ukrainians. When the U.S. and U.K. succeeded in busting the Russia/Ukraine treaty tentatively agreed to in Istanbul, and tempted Zelensky with Ukrainian membership in NATO, Putin’s only alternative was to resist NATO expansion and the Ukrainian military by the use of Russian force.
Who can blame Putin? How would American presidents react to the threat of Chinese offensive weaponry in Mexico?
I know this is not a popular history in the U.S., as mainstream media as well as popular culture and government schools have demonized Russia since the end of the Cold War. That demonization gave Biden cover to promise Zelensky “whatever he needs for as long as it takes.” In his nearly four years in the White House, Biden has declined to articulate as long as it takes to do what.
Biden’s war has cost the American taxpayers nearly $240 billion and Ukraine 600,000 dead troops. It was not declared by Congress. It was facilitated by many Americans on the ground in Ukraine — military in uniform and out, intelligence personnel, and defense contractors. Much of the military equipment that the U.S. has sent to Ukraine — most from America’s substance, not surplus — required U.S. troops and other personnel to train Ukrainian troops in the use of it.
But last weekend, Biden — whose presidency has been thoroughly repudiated by American voters — authorized the use of offensive weaponry that can reach 190 miles into Russia and which can only be manned by U.S. personnel. At this writing, the U.S. equipment has attacked and destroyed a warehouse holding artillery ammunition some 70 miles inside the Russian border.
Who is firing U.S. offensive weaponry?
There is no dispute but that the U.S. is waging war on Russia — without a congressional declaration, without the consent of the United Nations (as the U.S. is obliged to do under a treaty that the U.S. wrote) and solely on its own. I say solely on its own because the weaponry that destroyed the Russian military warehouse requires secret U.S. satellite technology to operate, and U.S. personnel with top-secret security clearances to aim and trigger. It would be an act of espionage to permit Ukrainians to do this.
War is politics by other means. But it is the most deadly, destructive and irreversible means — and must always be a last resort. The Constitution intentionally separated the war-declaring power from the war-waging power. Its author, James Madison, poignantly argued that if presidents could both choose the enemy and fight it, such a person would be a prince and not a president.
Joe Biden’s presidency has been an abysmal failure, and he doesn’t know it. He must perversely hope that history will reward him if he keeps the killing coming to the last Ukrainian and even risks a wider war. Can a presidency of peace come soon enough?
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2024 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
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November 21, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Russophobia | NATO, UK, Ukraine, United States |
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The German military has begun instructing local enterprises on how to prepare and what to do in the event of a conflict between NATO and Russia, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper has reported.
The Bundeswehr is providing training to the companies based on a 1,000-page document entitled ‘Operational Plan Germany’, which was recently approved by lawmakers, the outlet stated in an article on Monday.
The contents of the plan are classified, but FAZ claimed that it includes lists of buildings and infrastructure facilities that should be protected as a priority in case of an escalation with Moscow. The plan also reportedly details what private businesses should do to help with defense operations.
If the fighting breaks out on NATO’s eastern flank, Germany could become a hub for hundreds of thousands of soldiers, who would have to be transported to the east, as well as for military equipment, food and medical supplies, the article read.
Among other things, the German military urges businesses to draw up specific plans for employees and try to ensure self-sufficiency through diesel generators or wind turbines, FAZ said.
The paper also cited concrete advice given by Lieutenant Colonel Jorn Plischke to companies during a recent meeting at the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce. “For every hundred employees, train at least five additional lorry drivers that you don’t need. [Because] 70 percent of all lorries on Germany’s roads are driven by Eastern Europeans. If there is a war there, where will these people be?” he said.
Similar meetings are taking place across Germany, with the Bundeswehr ordering all state commands to organize them, according to FAZ.
The first joint exercises between civilian forces and the German military, called ‘Red Storm Alpha’, were recently held in Hamburg. They were aimed at protecting the local port from espionage and sabotage attempts, the report read. ‘Red Storm Bravo’ drills are already in preparation, it added.
Plischke told FAZ that, based on Berlin’s intelligence assessments, Russia “will be willing and able” to attack NATO within four or five years.
A few months ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected allegations of Moscow planning aggression against NATO as “nonsense” and “bulls**t.” According to the Russian leader, such claims are made by Western politicians to deceive the public in their countries and justify increased spending on defense and aid to Kiev amid the conflict with Moscow. “In Ukraine, we are just protecting ourselves,” Putin insisted.
November 20, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Russophobia | Germany, NATO |
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In 2022, Bloomberg’s Jason Leopold obtained a transcript of a secret briefing that Barack Obama held with a group referred to in the transcript as “progressive journalists.” The meeting took place during the final days of the Obama administration on January 17, 2017.
A Bloomberg article regarding the secret meeting focused on the part of the briefing in which Obama alleviated the journalist’s concerns about a potential Trump presidency. Obama stated that a one-term Trump presidency was no big deal because Trump’s breach of the “norms” could be remedied, whereas eight years of norm breaking posed a genuine threat.
Leopold later sent out a tweet promoting the Bloomberg article. It mentioned that he would post the transcript; however, it was only posted a few days ago. Many thanks to our friend Stephen McIntyre for bringing it to our attention.
The transcript, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, spans 21 pages. The most intriguing revelations have, to date, remained unreported. In particular, the transcript reveals a strategy employed by Obama to repeatedly implant the Russia collusion narrative in the minds of the attending journalists. In fact, Obama addressed the Russia collusion hoax on four distinct occasions during the meeting.
Before we delve into an analysis of what Obama said, it is worth noting that approximately six months earlier, on July 28, 2016, Obama was informed by his CIA director, John Brennan, that the Russia collusion narrative was a dirty trick concocted by the Hillary Clinton campaign. It is unclear what Obama communicated to Brennan during the closed-door White House meeting in July 2016, which was apparently also attended by FBI Director James Comey. What is known is that within three days of this meeting, the FBI launched its fraudulent Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the Trump campaign for alleged collusion with Russia, despite the fact that they should have been investigating the Clinton campaign for staging a hoax with significant national security implications.
Instead, the investigation continued to escalate, placing several Trump advisors under surveillance. Notwithstanding the onslaught, Trump managed to secure a victory in November 2016. After Trump’s win, Obama chose to weaponize the Clinton’s dirty trick by commissioning an Intelligence Community Assessment with the aim of entrenching the false narrative that Trump owed his win to Putin. This action by Obama solidified the Russia collusion narrative and, in many ways, undermined Trump’s presidency over the following four years.
With this in mind, it is remarkable that Obama was exceedingly cunning and dishonest with the group of progressive journalists. Instead of extinguishing the flames of a situation he knew to be fabricated, he chose to fan them.
- Obama blames media for not embracing Russia collusion narrative
In the first of four instances where Obama discussed the Russia collusion allegations, he stated the following:
“I think the Russian leaks, how that played out, how all this stuff was reported — I mean, I’m just being honest with you, and many of you share this view. You guys weren’t necessarily the culprits, but how that played out. Some failures of polling and analytics leading a leading Democratic candidate never to appear in Michigan or Wisconsin, or show up in a union hall, right? I mean, there’s just a bunch of stuff that could have happened in which we wouldn’t be having this particular conversation.”
In his characteristic crafty manner, Obama intertwined Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings with the media’s failures, particularly lamenting that the media did not promote the Russia collusion narrative with greater intensity. What is often overlooked is that, despite numerous attempts by the Clinton campaign to publicize the Steele dossier, the media did not report on it until just a few days before the election, and the dossier was not published until two months after the election. The most straightforward explanation for the media’s actions is that they may have been more principled eight years ago and refrained from publishing information that seemed fabricated and was entirely uncorroborated. Additionally, most people anticipated Clinton’s victory, which may have led the media to feel less compelled to fully engage with the highly dubious dossier.
By attributing blame to the media, Obama skillfully, albeit subtly, instilled the notion of guilt regarding Trump’s victory, fully aware that the media would subsequently intensify its efforts to compensate for its perceived role in failing to prevent his win.
- Obama suggests that Trump uses third parties to communicate with Putin
Having planted the seed of guilt, Obama then turned it up a notch and not so subtly suggested that Trump was communicating with Putin through intermediaries:
“I think the Russia thing is a problem. And it’s of apiece with this broader lack of transparency. It is hard to know what conversations the President-elect may be having offline with business leaders in other countries who are also connected to leaders of other countries. And I’m not saying there’s anything I know for a fact or can prove, but it does mean that — here’s the one thing you guys have been able to know unequivocally during the last eight years, and that is that whether you disagree with me on policy or not, there was never a time in which my relationship with a foreign entity might shade how I viewed an issue. And that’s — I don’t know a precedent for that exactly.”
Notice how Obama addressed the issue by stating that Russia is a problem, but then seamlessly transitions to talking about other countries more broadly, effectively distancing himself while knowing that the audience will primarily remember Russia. In typical Obama fashion, he then established a contrast with himself.
The idea that Trump was secretly communicating with Putin through third-party business leaders appears to directly reference the Alfa Bank hoax, which was included in both the Steele dossier and the broader Clinton dirty tricks campaign. Specifically, the allegation claimed that Trump was in contact with Vladimir Putin via Russia’s Alfa Bank. A few weeks after Obama held his secret meeting, Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann approached the CIA to promote the false Alfa Bank narrative. He had previously pushed the Alfa Bank allegations into the FBI.
- Obama implies that Trump received payoffs from Russia
When a reporter asked Obama to “talk a bit more about the Russia thing”, he had this to say:
“And can say less. (Laughter.) This is one area I’ve got to be careful about. But, look, I mean, I think based on what you guys have, I think it’s — and I’m not just talking about the most recent report or the hacking. I mean, there are longstanding business relationships there. They’re not classified. I think there’s been some good reporting on them, it’s just they never got much attention. He’s been doing business in Russia for a long time. Penthouse apartments in New York are sold to folks — let me put it this way. If there’s a Russian who can afford a $10-million, or a $15- or a $20- or a $30-million penthouse in Manhattan, or is a major investor in Florida, I think it’s fair to say Mr. Putin knows that person, because I don’t think they’re getting $10 million or $30 million or $50 million out of Russia without Mr. Putin saying that’s okay.”
Obama’s response seems to reference the unwitting involvement of Sergei Millian in the Russia collusion narrative. Millian is an American realtor who, in 2007, sold condominiums to Trump in Florida, including, reportedly, to Russian buyers. On direct instructions from Clinton campaign operatives, ABC News obtained, under false pretenses, footage of Millian acknowledging that Trump had sold apartments to Russian citizens. While there is nothing inherently wrong with such transactions—Trump has sold numerous apartments to individuals of various nationalities—the ABC footage was utilized by Clinton in an advertising campaign to imply that Trump was indebted to Putin. Setting this aside, the notion that Putin would personally need to approve Russian citizens purchasing apartments appears to be rather implausible. However, this did not concern Obama, whose primary objective was to weaponize Clinton’s dirty tricks campaign in an effort to undermine the President of the United States.
- Obama insinuates that Putin has influence over Trump
Later in the briefing, Obama was asked: “if there were somebody with the powers of U.S. President who Russia felt like they could give orders to, that Russia felt like they had something on them, what’s your worst-case scenario?”
Again, Obama’s response was intended to stoke the flames of a scandal he knew to be fabricated:
“What I would simply say would be that any time you have a foreign actors who, for whatever reason, has ex parte influence over the President of the United States, meaning that the American people can’t see that influence because it’s not happening in a bilateral meeting and subject to negotiations or reporting — any time that happens, that’s a problem. And I’ll let you speculate on where that could go.”
With little effort to conceal his true intentions, Obama not so subtly suggested that Trump was under Putin’s influence. What is particularly noteworthy—and once again quite clever on Obama’s part—is that he informed the media that this influence was occurring secretly behind the scenes. This ensured that the media would propagate entirely speculative stories, as Obama had effectively encouraged them to do so.
Lastly, we will engage in some speculation of our own. The 21-page transcript does not indicate who the progressive journalists in attendance were. However, on two occasions, Obama mentions someone named Greg. Greg Miller is a national security reporter for The Washington Post and was part of a group that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Russia collusion, reporting that was largely false. While we cannot assert with any degree of certainty that Obama was referring to Greg Miller, the familiarity Obama displayed with him, along with Miller’s outlet and area of coverage, suggests a strong possibility that it is indeed Greg Miller. In other words, if our speculation is accurate, Obama directly contributed to the false narratives that led to legacy media winning the Pulitzer Prize.
November 20, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | CIA, FBI, Hillary Clinton, Obama, United States |
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Leaked files show top UK military figures conspired to carry out the Kerch bridge bombing, covertly train “Gladio”-style stay-behind forces in Ukraine, and groom the British public for a drop in living standards caused by the proxy war against Russia.
Emails and internal documents reviewed by The Grayzone reveal details of a cabal of British military and intelligence veterans which plotted to escalate and prolong the Ukraine proxy war “at all costs.” Convened under the direction of the British Ministry of Defense in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the cell referred to itself as Project Alchemy. As British leadership sabotaged peace talks between Kiev and Moscow, the cell put forward an array of plans “to keep Ukraine fighting” by imposing “strategic dilemmas, costs and frictions upon Russia.”
The leaks obtained by The Grayzone expose a hidden hand behind Britain’s policy in Ukraine, showing in unusually granular detail how it aimed to engineer a long, grinding war through covert operations that stretched the bounds of legality.
Project Alchemy’s proposed schemes spanned every conceivable field of warfare, from cyber attacks to “discreet operations” to outright terrorism. The secret cell even put forward a plan to “aggressively pursue” and “dismantle” independent media outlets – including The Grayzone – through an aggressive campaign of legal harassment and online censorship, so they “would be forced to close.” The incendiary blueprints were fed to the highest levels of the British state and national security structure, where they were apparently well-received.
Founded by a senior British Ministry of Defence official, Project Alchemy is composed of veteran military and intelligence operatives united by a desire for all-out war between the West and Russia. Some have trained Ukrainian forces in clandestine sabotage tactics.
Members of the national security cabal tacitly acknowledged that their proposed operations stretched the bounds of British law. Thus they suggested that London should be “prepared to creatively use the law” to meet its goals, and even be willing to erase “legal restrictions on UK deniable ops” against Russia.
Some of Project Alchemy’s most extreme recommendations have already been implemented, often with calamitous results. These include the cell’s proposal to strike Crimea’s Kerch Bridge, which prompted a Russian escalation that saw punishing attacks on Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure. Alchemy also envisioned the construction of a secret, Gladio-style army of Ukrainian partisan fighters to carry out assassination, sabotage, and terror missions behind enemy lines.
It appears the British premier, Keir Starmer, fell under the influence of the Project Alchemy cabal soon after his election in July, when he eagerly embraced the role of “wartime prime minister.” After pledging to support Ukraine “as long as it takes,” however, Starmer is quietly backing away from the maximalist policy. In Kiev, Ukrainians are left to ponder how their “friends” in London got them into this mess, and why they can not, or will not get them out of it.
The British spooks who gathered around Project Alchemy reasoned that the longer the proxy war continued, the more Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “credibility at home and abroad drops, and his ability to fight NATO is degraded.” Today, Project Alchemy’s gambit has clearly backfired, as Putin remains popular within Russia, while a crumbling Ukrainian army loses territory by the day despite constant re-arming by the West. But the war planners in London remain staunchly committed to escalation, refusing to shelve their diabolical proposals.
Britain takes ‘unilateral lead’ on ‘regime change’ in Russia
Project Alchemy was founded on the personal orders of Lt. General Charlie Stickland, who is charged with “planning, executing and integrating UK led joint and multinational overseas military operations” as the head of Britain’s Permanent Joint Headquarters. Stickland boasts in leaked communications that his family “come from a long line of pirates and buccaneers.” In his email signature, the general identifies himself as an “LGBTQ+ Advocate” in rainbow-colored text.
Stickland and his assistant, Maj. Ed Harris, did not answer The Grayzone’s calls to their personal phones, nor did they respond to detailed questions submitted to them through WhatsApp.
https://twitter.com/GeneralStaffUA/status/1624474926064230402
Stickland convened the first meeting of Project Alchemy’s on February 26, 2022, just days after Russian troops made their initial foray into Ukraine. According to minutes of the gathering, “an assortment of leading academics, authors, strategists, planners, pollsters, comms, data scientists and tech” was on hand to produce a “grand strategy options paper.”
The paper consisted of a series of proposals for the British government to “defeat Putin in Ukraine and set the conditions for the reshaping of an open international order of the future.” Throughout the document, the need to “keep Ukraine fighting” was described as London’s “main effort” in the conflict.
In an email to British military apparatchiks dated March 3 2022, Stickland described Alchemy’s paper as the result of “some mischief I’ve been up to” with “a group of ‘sideways thinkers.’” He expressed satisfaction that “this has been seen by all sorts of people,” including senior British government and military officials, “and landed well.”
An Excel document listing potential and confirmed recruits for the effort, authored by project chief Dom Morris, names a number of individuals from the private sector and academia alongside high-ranking army officials. Currently a fellow at King’s College’s “Centre for Grand Strategy,” Morris was listed in the document as a “civilian leader.” The role of “military leader” was to be carried out by Simon Scott, a brigadier in the British army who was appointed O.B.E. in 2013 for his “gallant and distinguished services” in Afghanistan.
Information operations were to be headed by a still-to-be determined member of Britain’s 77th Psychological Operations Brigade. Also listed as a participant in information operations was longtime British psychological warfare operative Amil Khan, founder of the “counter-disinformation” analysis firm Valent Projects.
In 2021, The Grayzone revealed how the then-Prince of Wales, King Charles, enlisted Khan’s Valent Projects to astroturf a pseudo-socialist YouTube influencer to attack skeptics of the government’s ham-fisted response to Covid. Previously, Khan participated in the UK Foreign Office’s program to foment regime change in Syria.
Months after Alchemy put Khan forward as a member of its team, The Grayzone exposed him for plotting with celebrity-left journalist Paul Mason to destroy this publication. One leaked email showed Khan proposing a “full nuclear legal [attack] to squeeze [The Grayzone ] financially.” The newly-uncovered documents indicate the decision to assail The Grayzone was met with approval from the highest ranks of the British government.
‘Ukraine’s Next Chapter – Elders Grand Strategy Options Paper’
Within Project Alchemy’s covert war room, the obsession with a long war quickly took hold. Members of the cell took their cues from a policy paper Stickland attributed to “The Elders,” which he described as “a group of Fusion players,” referring to the strata of academics and defense industry figures with strong ties to the British military.
An Alchemy document composed under Stickland’s watch and titled, “Ukraine’s Next Chapter – Elders Grand Strategy Options Paper,” suggests that members of the cabal had convinced themselves a “palace coup” inside the Kremlin was inevitable. So long as Russia struggled inside Ukraine, they believed, British intelligence would be granted “the opportunity to challenge” Moscow’s ever-growing “stature as a competent international actor” on the world stage.
“A long war against a small state makes [Putin] look a fool,” the Alchemy paper asserted. “He is obsessed by the end of Ghaddafi – he will want to avoid that… Pressure will pile on from oligarchs as a long war drags on – he will not want to give them excuses to threaten his authority.” The group reasoned that “a long war will affect [Putin’s] international credibility,” as “a failure to quickly defeat Ukraine will seriously… reduce his credibility with new rich friends in Belarus, Hungary, China, India, Middle East, Brazil etc.
“Most importantly,” protracted Russian involvement in Ukraine “will embolden NATO,” Alchemy argued. Convinced that Putin would fail in the eastern Donbas region, triggering a collapse of his government, Project Alchemy members openly fantasized about absorbing Russia into the Western-dominated financial order afterwards under the guise of a “Post Putin Marshall Plan.” Of particular interest was London’s “re-engagement” with Moscow “in global energy and commodity markets,” a seeming reference to the West’s desire for cheap Russian gas and wheat.
“Discreet operations”: reviving ‘Operation Gladio’ terror ops in Ukraine
To accomplish the balkanization of Russia, Project Alchemy’s plotters took inspiration from Operation Gladio, a CIA and NATO-orchestrated covert operation that saw fascist paramilitaries carry out false flag terrorist attacks across Western Europe after World War II in a bid to prevent communism from taking root.
A section detailing potential “discreet operations” in Alchemy’s strategy paper, which stressed the “need to intervene in every way except ‘official,’” explicitly recommended “Stay-behind Gladio handbooks/ Partisan Pamphlets” which would be “updated for Information Age.”
Another move Alchemy proposed was to deploy Britain’s “strong” private military [PMC] industry “to out Wagner, Wagner.” In other words, the group aimed to establish a British rival to the Russian mercenary force founded by the now-deceased commander Yevgeny Prigozhin. This objective required the formulation of “a new doctrine, operating concept, and legal framework, for effectively integrating the activities of PMCs and other [non-military] actors.” Under these guidelines, British mercenary firms capable of using “sophisticated weaponry like SAMS, cyber, combat air, drones” would be employed to “operate and train and accompany Ukraine formations.”
These operations were all intended to ultimately be “sponsored and commanded” by the UK government, “using discreet cover” to avoid triggering NATO’s Article 5.
Following the production of their grand strategy paper, Stickland invited his team of “sideways thinkers” at Project Alchemy to submit further proposals for Gladio-style operations. Among the pitches that arrived was a “mission” to “disable the Kerch Bridge in a way that is audacious, and disrupts road and rail access to Crimea and maritime access to the Sea of Azov.” The blueprints of this highly provocative plot were exposed by The Grayzone in October 2022, in the immediate aftermath of the truck bomb attack that crippled the Kerch Bridge.
Alchemy’s team also produced a PowerPoint presentation entitled, “Training a Ukrainian Commando Force to restore Maritime Sovereignty – Elders,” outlining plans to construct a 1,000-strong Ukrainian commando force “trained in Britain by military veterans equipped with British equipment” to “degrade the Russian Navy and open another flank in the fight for Kherson and the south of Ukraine.”
Alchemy’s team had been working on the plan for at least three months by the time of the presentation’s submission. “Ukrainians abroad and volunteers inside Ukraine” had already been recruited, in advance of 12 weeks basic training “in the use of all troop weapons including mortars, anti-tank missiles, sniper craft, cliff assault, small craft training, demolitions,” the proposal stated.
The plan called for formally integrating the commandos into the Ukrainian Navy. Alchemy boasted that the prospective force “will be a force multiplier and highly mobile,” while Russia’s “outdated doctrine will struggle with a highly motivated and well-equipped naval force conducting hit and run operations and targeting Crimea.”
Moreover, “individuals who are fluent Russian speakers and deemed suitable for covert undercover operations,” including “female operators,” would be “inserted into southern occupied Ukraine and Crimea for intelligence gathering and sabotage of key infrastructure targets.” They would be trained by MI6 officers. For this, Alchemy asked the British government for a total of £73.5 million. “The program is at a high state of readiness. We are ready to go,” the presentation forcefully declared.
The enormous sum was to be paid to Elders Services Ltd that was founded by Alchemy members and registered to an address just 15 miles from Fort Monckton, which was described by former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson as “the SIS’s field operations training centre.” It is unknown how much money, if any, the firm received from the British government for resuscitating Operation Gladio in Ukraine. Elders Services Ltd shuttered in March 2023 after less than a year of operation, without filing financial accounts.
British spies call for ‘action’ against The Grayzone
Behind the Project Alchemy team’s bravado was a sense that Western hegemony was crumbling on the icy borderlands separating Ukraine from Russia. Referring to the rising BRICS alliance, which gathered in Kazan, Russia this October to challenge the US-dominated financial order, Alchemy planners urged British leadership to “prepare for SWIFT II,” as SWIFT was “going to be destroyed” by the West’s anti-Russia sanctions, “slowly, but inevitably.”
According to Alchemy’s analysts, countries across the globe would naturally “see the need for a non-US alternative” means of safely parking their cash and trading. In a rare show of political sobriety, the British spooks predicted that sanctions on Russia combined with the Ukraine proxy war would impose higher prices on consumer goods and “hit British voters in the pocket.”
This posed “a threat to public support” for the British government’s “hard line” on Ukraine, they warned. “Domestic UK public opinion” would understandably get “fed up” paying more for everyday goods, meaning “pressure grows for a compromise.”
To prepare the British public for the coming storm, Project Alchemy’s plotters proposed what they blandly described as “information operations,” but which could be more accurately described as a blend of domestic state propaganda and malign attacks on disruptive media outlets.
The task they outlined not only included “[dismantling] Russian disinformation infrastructure” by pressuring social media to ban RT and Sputnik, but also targeting critical independent media like The Grayzone.
“A number of actions can be undertaken against these outlets. The most obvious is legal since the content of these media outriders is frequently in contravention of media law in the UK, US and EU,” Alchemy insisted.
“Aggrieved parties currently tend to ignore libel/defamation by these outlets. Were they to aggressively pursue these outlets, it is likely they would be forced to close.”
The Grayzone, it was claimed, had thus far “managed to obscure” its funding – a suggestion that this outlet is covertly funded by Russia or some other enemy state, which is completely false. The paranoid fantasies of British intelligence may explain why this journalist was quizzed on the subject by British counter-terror police when they detained and interrogated him at Luton International Airport in May 2023.
Alchemy plotters seek to place Britain at lead of war with Russia
In addition to playing a leading role in media manipulation, Alchemy sought to place Britain at the forefront of the International Criminal Court’s agenda to investigate and prosecute the Russian government for alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
Alchemy suggested London “set international conditions, collection mechanisms and funding for collection of data and evidence” in the proxy conflict, and “provide all possible support, including intelligence” to the ICC “in its efforts to investigate war crimes,” just as British spies did for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Though not named in the document, high-profile British lawyers, including celebrity Amal Clooney, have since emerged at the forefront of efforts to prosecute Russian officials for war crimes, and establish an ICTY analog. As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal reported, Britain played a critical role in the appointment of Amal Clooney’s mentor, Karim Khan, as ICC prosecutor.
Project Alchemy’s provocative proposals appear to have reached the desk of PM Keir Starmer in some form. At NATO’s 75th anniversary summit, Starmer issued his full-throated endorsement of deep strikes by the Ukrainian military into Russia. Echoing the aggressive language found in Alchemy documents, he pledged to “deliver £3 billion worth of support to Ukraine each year… for as long as it takes.”
But as the Ukrainian military’s offensive in Russia’s Kursk region falters, the Biden administration has distanced itself from the calls for striking into the Russian heartland. Fortunately for British leaders hellbent on taking the fight to Moscow, Project Alchemy has ensured that a platter of off-the-books options remains handy.
As Alchemy noted in its grand strategy paper, “The UK seeks always to act multilaterally, but is prepared to take a unilateral lead where achieving multilateral consensus might prove time-consuming or difficult.” Among the war’s covert sponsors, who were safely ensconced over 1,000 miles away from the front lines, it was firmly agreed: “we should attempt at all costs to keep Ukraine fighting.”
November 19, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Russophobia, War Crimes | MI6, Russia, UK, Ukraine |
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Following Trump’s election, there has been much speculation about how the war in Ukraine might end. But to understand how it might end, it’s vital to understand how it started.
The origins of the war in Ukraine can be traced back to the ouster of Ukrainian President Yanukovych in February 2014. Russia labelled it a coup, realists would say it was unconstitutional change in power, and U.S. & British officials would shrug their shoulders.
After Russia occupied Crimea and as insurgency broke out in the Donbas, the French and Germans launched a peace process involving the Presidents of Russia and Ukraine. From this so-called ‘Normandy format’ emerged two peace deals named the Minsk agreements. But the UK was sidelined from the peace process and the Americans suspicious of it.
Left out, Britian, supported by the U.S., pushed sanctions as the primary vehicle to contain Russia, running counter to what the French and Germans were trying to achieve. By the summer of 2015, the Minsk agreements had become sidelined, and sanctions were set in stone.
Since that time, Russia has become the most sanctioned country on the planet. Thirty-three western countries, led by the USA, imposed more than twenty thousand sanctions against Russian people and companies. That’s fifteen times more sanctions than Iran in a distant second place.
If we could completely cut Russia’s economic ties with the west, so the theory went, then that would be so damaging that Russia would have to withdraw from Ukraine. Western powers therefore sanctioned everything that they could, from money, ships, oil, gold, diamonds, weapons and all manner of hi-tech components. But from a very early stage, it was clear that sanctions weren’t altering Russian policy to Ukraine, quite the opposite.
When I left the Foreign Office in 2023, the UK government with its western partners, had gone through all the sanctions that they thought might weaken Russia. The west could probably find more people or entities to sanction. But policy makers never really gripped Russian gas, as some European countries still rely on it. And anyway, the destruction of the Nordstream pipeline solved that conundrum. Russian oligarchs that had political connections in the west were spared as were Russian companies that owned factories in the USA, to prevent American job losses. But we hit most things and neared the bottom of the barrel.
Yet, Russia’s economy always seemed to bounce back. That’s partly because, sanctions were never as big a deal as other events that moved the global economy, such as the oil price collapses in 2014 and 2016 and Covid. But it was also because Russia continually adapted its macroeconomic policy to absorb and, in the end, profit from sanctions. Following an immediate post-sanctions contraction of economic growth in 2022, Russia has grown more strongly than the western countries that imposed sanctions.
Western powers therefore needed something stronger, so sanctions evolved into a political tool to isolate Russia on the world stage. The USA, European Union and other countries including Japan and Australia sanctioned every possible type of economic, social and cultural activity involving Russia. Western academics no longer collaborate with Russian academics. Russian airliners can’t pass over western airspace and vice versa. Border posts have been closed or minimised. Russia can’t compete in international sporting events or even the Eurovision song contest.
Russian Ministers are subjected to indignant walkouts by western diplomats and ministers at international gatherings. Ordinary Russian people were denied a weekend ParkRun. Ukraine did its part, cancelling the Russian Orthodox church and going on a propaganda offensive with any western company that sold goods with the word ‘Russia’ in their branding.
And yet, outside of the west, Russia’s standing on the global stage doesn’t seem to be in decline. In a process accelerated by the Ukraine war, Russia, with China, has spearheaded a rapid shift by the developing world to create their own formats for dialogue and cooperation. There are over 200 countries on this planet, so the wealthy ‘west’ is in a minority. The BRICS group has grown rapidly, with a long queue of countries waiting to join, including NATO member Turkey. Vladimir Putin has an International Criminal Court arrest warrant out on him, yet he still travels freely to ‘friendly’ countries, where he receives the red-carpet treatment. He recently hosted a successful BRICS summit in Kazan while war continued to rage in Ukraine.
War started in February 2022 a few days after the Ukrainian government finally signalled the death knell of the Minsk peace agreements. But the point is that the Minsk agreement was [not] necessarily bad; it’s simply that the U.S. and UK invested significant efforts in ensuring its failure.
Sanctions never looked likely to prevent war, nor force its end, despite the death or injury to over one million people and a vast exodus of Ukraine’s population. War in Ukraine became reduced to the brutal, bloody town by town fighting in Europe after D-Day, while life in the west, and in Russia, carried on almost as normal. Fighting alone, Ukraine has never had sufficient resources to survive and never will.
There is a strong case that sanctions created the conditions for war to erupt, by undermining the very peace process – the Normandy Format – that was established to prevent it. And that the west’s continued blind faith in sanctions took us to the brink of a doomsday scenario, more horrific than the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Western leaders, not wanting war themselves, focussed blindly on supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes. But the notion of ‘as long as it takes’ became tarnished with increasing numbers of western politicians started complaining that it is taking too long. Not least as the economics and demographics of war still show that Russia can continue fighting for as long as it takes, and that Vladimir Putin has the domestic political support to do that.
So, beyond the hype, if Trump is serious about ending the war in Ukraine, he must look at its origins. A ceasefire alone won’t cut it with Putin. There needs finally to be a peace proposal that includes targeted sanctions reduction. That, and a final reckoning with the NATO membership issue, the brightest red line of all.
November 18, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Russophobia | European Union, NATO, Russia, UK, United States |
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