Putin’s Valdai Speech, What You Need to Know
By Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute | October 12, 2023
On October 5, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the plenary session of the Valdai International Discussion Club near Sochi, Russia. The session was attended by scholars and diplomats from forty-two countries. Putin spoke for half an hour and then answered questions for about three hours. Several interesting things were said.
In western discourse it is always said that Russia started an unprovoked war in Ukraine. There has been much discussion—though not in the mainstream media nor in statements issued by western governments—about whether the war was unprovoked. But there has been little discussion about whether Russia started it.
Putin claimed that Russia’s “special military operation” did not start the war in Ukraine but, rather, was designed to stop it. “I have said many times that it was not us who started the so-called ‘war in Ukraine,’” Putin said. “On the contrary, we are trying to end it.”
The war started, according to Putin, when the United States “orchestrated a coup in Kiev in 2014.” Putin said that the U.S. “provoked the Ukraine crisis by supporting the coup in Ukraine in 2014. They could not fail to understand that this was a red line, we have said this a thousand times. They never listened.”
After the coup, the new government in Kiev “intimidate[d]” the ethnic Russian populations of Crimea and the Donbas, prohibited them from speaking “their native language,” and threatened them “with ethnic cleansing.” It was Kiev, and not Russia, “who tried to force Donbass to obey by shelling and bombing.” The new government in Kiev bombed the region “for nine years, shooting and using tanks. That was a war, a real war unleashed against Donbass.”
The war started, not a year and a half ago, according to Putin’s chronology. Instead, “This war, the one that the regime sitting in Kiev started with the vigorous and direct support from the West, has been going on for more than nine years, and Russia’s special military operation is aimed at stopping it.”
With the end of the Cold War, there was a window of opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the previous destructive era. There was an opportunity to move from “military and ideological” blocs to collective solutions. First Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, and then Russia, sought a new international order that transcended blocs. Putin even recalled “a moment when I simply suggested: perhaps we should also join NATO?”
But Putin says that Russia’s “interest in constructive interaction was misunderstood, was seen as obedience, as an agreement that the new world order would be created by those who declared themselves the winners in the Cold War. It was seen as an admission that Russia was ready to follow in others’ wake and not to be guided by our own national interests but by somebody else’s interests.”
American “arrogance” attempted to establish a global “hegemony” over a world “too complicated and diverse to be subjected to one system.” This arrogance led to two things. The first was “endless expansion” by the political West. “NATO expansion has been pursued for decades.”
Putin reminded his audience that Russia was “promised verbally” about NATO “non-expansion to the east.” He then complained, “Yes, we were promised everything verbally, and our American partners do not deny this, and then they ask: where is this documented? There is no document. And that was it, goodbye. Did we promise? It looks like we did, but it was worth nothing.”
Eventually, this broken promise led to NATO expansion creeping up to Ukraine and right up against Russia’s borders. “Among the ways the crisis in Ukraine was provoked,” Putin said, “was the irrepressible desire of Western countries, especially the United States, to expand NATO to the borders of the Russian Federation.”
“After all,” Putin pointed out, NATO “is not only a political bloc, it is a military and political bloc, and the approach of its infrastructure is fraught with a grave threat to us.” He then added, “NATO’s expansion right up to our borders is threatening our security. This is a massive challenge to the Russian Federation’s security.”
To attain its hegemonic goal, it was necessary for the United States to “to replace international law with a “rules-based order.” But unlike the international law of the charter international system that is based on the United Nations, “It is not clear what rules these are and who invented them.” In the service of Americna hegemony, the U.S. “arbitrarily set[s] these rules.”
In a recent essay, professor of international law John Dugard has said that it is neither clear what the rules of the rules-based order are nor “the method for their creation,” and has offered as a possible explanation of the rules based order that it is “international law as interpreted by the United States to accord with its national interests,” meaning whatever the U.S. needs it to mean in any given situation. He suggests that the United States tries “to impose the concept of a rules-based world order on the international community. They use this banner to promote, without any hesitation, a unipolar model of the world order where there are ‘exceptional’ countries and everyone else who must obey the ‘club of the chosen.’”
In this world order, the United States not only tells other nations how they “should behave overall” in a “colonial mentality,” but there exists “an international system where arbitrariness reigns, where all decision-making is up to those who think they are exceptional, sinless and right [and] any country can be attacked simply because it is disliked by a hegemon.”
Putin says that Russia sees a future multipolar world order in which “no one can unilaterally force or compel others to live or behave as a hegemon pleases even when it contradicts the sovereignty, genuine interests, traditions, or customs of peoples and countries.” Russia sees “civilization [as] a multifaceted concept subject to various interpretations.” The world has evolved from the “colonial interpretation whereby there was a ‘civilized world’ serving as a model for the rest, and everyone was supposed to conform to those standards. Those who disagreed were to be coerced into this ‘civilization’ by the truncheon of the ‘enlightened’ master. These times, as I said, are now in the past, and our understanding of civilisation is quite different.”
Putin argued, as he has consistently, for the principle of the indivisibility of security, the idea that security cannot be divided so that the policies that increase the security of one country decrease the security of another. Indivisibility of security assures that the security of one state should not be bought at the expense of the security of another.
The American insistence on the right of states to unrestrained free will in their choice of security alignments and the accompanying NATO open door policy to Ukraine ignores the indivisibility of security. Putin said, “The main thing is to free international relations from the bloc approach and the legacy of the colonial era and the Cold War. We have been saying for decades that security is indivisible, and that it is impossible to ensure the security of some at the expense of the security of others.”
Putin said he thinks that suggestions of “a new security system in Europe, which would include Russia, and the United States, and Canada; but not NATO, but together with everyone else: for Eastern and Central Europe… would solve many of today’s problems.”
It is often said in the West that Putin seeks to reestablish a Russian empire and reacquire vast territories, starting with Ukraine. Putin, though, says in contradiction to those claims, “The Ukraine crisis is not a territorial conflict, and I want to make that clear… [W]e have no interest in conquering additional territory.” He insisted, “This is not a territorial conflict and not an attempt to establish regional geopolitical balance. The issue is much broader and more fundamental and is about the principles underlying the new international order.”
Those principles are a balanced multipolar world, indivisibility of security, an end to blocs and to NATO encroachment and protection of ethnic Russians in the Donbass and Crimea.
During the question and answer period, political scientist Sergei Karaganov suggested that the current Russian nuclear doctrine is no longer taken seriously by the West as a deterrent. He asked whether it was not time to modify the nuclear doctrine and lower the threshold.
Often portrayed in the West as a nuclear weapons sabre rattler, Putin tamped down the question, answering, “I do not see the need to change our conceptual approaches. The potential adversary knows everything and is aware of what we are capable of.”
Putin explained Russia’s existing nuclear doctrine. He said there are two situations that could trigger a “possible use of nuclear weapons by Russia.” The first is that “the use of nuclear weapons against us… would entail a so-called retaliatory strike.” The second situation is “an existential threat to the Russian state—even if conventional weapons are used against Russia, but the very existence of Russia as a state is threatened.”
Putin insisted that Russia does not need to change its stance. In the case of the first scenario, “this response will be absolutely unacceptable for any potential aggressor, because seconds after we detect the launch of missiles… the counter strike in response will involve hundreds—hundreds of our missiles in the air, so that no enemy will have a chance to survive.” As for the second, important as an insight into how Putin evaluates the situation in Ukraine, “There is no situation imaginable today where something would threaten Russian statehood and the existence of the Russian state.”
However, Putin said that nuclear testing is “a whole different matter.” He says that, after signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the United States never ratified it. Russia, on the other hand, both signed it and ratified it. He told his audience that the development of new strategic weapons—including the nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile with “basically unlimited range” and the super heavy Sarmat missile—is “nearing completion.” He then said that Russia can “act just as the United States does” and “offer a tit-for-tat response,” suggesting that Russia could repeal the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and begin testing new weapons.
In response to the question of whether Russia objected to Ukraine joining the European Union, Putin responded that Russia had “never objected or expressed a negative attitude to Ukraine’s plans to join the European economic community—never.” He said that Russia opposes Ukraine joining NATO because NATO is a “military bloc” and a “tool of U.S. foreign policy.” But “the EU is not a military bloc,” and, as for “economic cooperation, or economic unions, we do not see any military threat.”
The Caucasus and West Asia are joined at the hips
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | OCTOBER 10, 2023
Frozen conflicts can only be understood through history. That is why the ‘erasure’ of Nagorno-Karabakh from the map by Azerbaijan is an incredibly tumultuous development for Transcaucasia and its surrounding regions.
The backdrop is the breakup of the Soviet Union, which left us with a rather odd map. Consequently, conflicts in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Ukraine and others left us with de facto boundaries that are unrecognised in law. There is an imperative need for a peace treaty that reflects the new facts on the ground.
At issue is the status of Nakhchivan, which still remains the landlocked exclave of Azerbaijan located near the Turkish border. Azerbaijan, emboldened by its annexation of Nagorno-Karabakh last month, is on the lookout for a direct land link to Nakhchivan, which Baku regards as unfinished business.
To attain this audacious objective, Azerbaijan — once again, with Turkey’s support — hopes to seize control of a hefty slice of Armenia’s territory, which is also that country’s borderland with Iran to the south. Unsurprisingly, both Yerevan and Tehran oppose any such move, which would otherwise mean that Armenia and Iran cease to be neighbours and get encircled by the Azeri-Turkish strategic axis.
Through dialogue and negotiations a mutually acceptable formula must be found for any land link — known as “Zangezur Corridor” — guaranteed under international law, which preserves Armenia’s territorial integrity and its border with Iran, even while providing Baku with free access to Nakhchivan.
What complicates matters is the geopolitics, involving the 3 immediate stakeholders — Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iran — and two other regional states — Russia, Turkey — as well as certain intrusive extra-regional powers and entities — the United States, European Union and NATO.
While Russia and Iran are also stakeholders, the same cannot be said for the extra-regional powers and entities who are meddling in a highly competitive regional environment. The “butterfly effect” of the Zangezur Corridor will be profoundly consequential to the Black Sea and Caspian regions and could impact the Middle East and Central Asia as well.
Among the regional states, Iran stands out for its anti-revisionist approach. During separate meetings last Wednesday in Tehran with visiting Armenian and Azerbaijani officials, Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi reiterated amid persisting tensions over the Karabakh region Iran’s opposition to the opening of the Zangezur Corridor, saying Tehran is against geopolitical changes in the region.
Raesi reportedly stated that the Zangezur corridor would be “a NATO foothold, a national security threat for countries, and is thus resolutely opposed by Iran,” as his political chief of staff Mohammad Jamshidi put it. Tehran cannot but factor in that Israel has a strong intelligence presence in Azerbaijan.
Speculation is rife that Azerbaijan might use force to open the Zangezur Corridor, Iran’s opposition notwithstanding. Turkey, the region’s number one revisionist power is a mentor and ally of Azerbaijan with whom it claims ethnic affinities. Turkey harbours grand visions of expanding its economic reach and political influence through a land route that extends from its European border in Eastern Thrace to the Caspian Sea and over to its ancestral lands of Central Asia that border China.
Suffice to say, the Zangezur Corridor will make Turkey a strategic hub in the geopolitics of the region if the Silk Road to Europe passes through its territory and the Soviet era land route to Russia reopens. Russia has separately promised to make Turkey an energy hub for export of its gas as well.
Much to Iran’s discomfiture, Turkey is exploiting Moscow’s dependence on Ankara in the conditions under western sanctions and the Ukraine conflict — Turkey controls the straits leading to the Black Sea from the Mediterranean— to muscle its way into the Caucasus and the Caspian, which has been traditionally Russia’s sphere of influence.
Meanwhile, Russia’s influence in the Caucasus suffered a setback as Armenia’s gradual drift toward Western benefactors following the colour revolution and regime change in Yerevan in 2018 has dramatically accelerated lately and taken an overt form. The Western powers are encouraging Armenia’s current leadership to leave the CSTO and seek the closure of the Russian bases on its soil where 5000 troops are garrisoned.
However, Armenia cannot do without Russia’s help. And Russia has strategic reserves to play itself back into the centre stage of the Caucasian chessboard. Of course, an optimal Russian comeback in the Caucasus will have to wait for its victory over the US and NATO in Ukraine, possibly by next year. Thus, Moscow seems confident that its pre-eminence in the Caucasus is a given.
Russia’s trump card, ultimately, is that much as the US and/or EU may try to get a toehold in the Caucasus, they are faraway powers and pretty much exhausted today with economic anxieties and growing war fatigue in Ukraine, amidst signs of disunity within the EU itself.
Indeed, a summit gathering close to 50 European leaders, dozens of aides and legions of journalists in Grenada, Spain, on October 5, which was billed as an opportunity to broker peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, ended as a damp squib when Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev and Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan decided to skip the gathering and Azerbaijan accused France of bias in negotiations.
The bottom line is that in the power dynamic in the Caucasus, Iran is Russia’s natural ally and the two regional powers can be a factor of regional security and stability. This is important, since all sorts of dangers are lurking in the shade in the geopolitics of the Black Sea and Eastern mediterranean and Central Asia, and the darkening horizon presages storms ahead.
To flag a few ominous signs, the US has seized Israel’s escalating confrontation with Hamas and Hezbollah to resort to a major show of force in the Eastern Mediterranean — as if it is preordained. Such force projection cannot be an end in itself. Can it be coincidental that US-trained jihadi groups are also stirring up the Syrian pot lately?
Again, last week, a series of Ukrainian attacks in the Black Sea with Western-supplied cruise missiles forced Russian vessels to relocate from their main base in Sevastopol to the port of Novorossiisk 300 km to the east. British Defence Minister James Heappey promptly called it the “functional defeat of the Black Sea Fleet.”
Moscow is now reportedly planning to build a permanent naval base on the Black Sea coast in the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia.
Only a week ago, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned that Moscow is alarmed by “the attempts of extra-regional players to become more active in the Afghan direction.”
Make no mistake, the US has not reconciled to the ascendance of Russian and Chinese influence in the Middle East or the Iran-Saudi rapprochement that led to an overall easing of tensions, especially Syria’s normalisation with its Arab neighbours, all of which which has drained America’s regional influence and weakened Israel.
Equally, with the spectre of a humiliating defeat in Ukraine haunting the Biden Administration, the temptation must be there to assert American hegemony. A confrontation with Iran is just what may suit Washington as ramp to cover its retreat from Ukraine’s battlefields.
Fundamentally, the US strategy is to get Russia bogged down on multiple fronts and prevent it from advancing Syria’s stabilisation optimally or consolidate its alliances with North African states — Egypt, Libya and Algeria — and expand its presence in the Sahel region which effectively thwarts NATO’s expansion plans in Africa.
Similarly, Iran’s surge as regional power has been to the detriment of Israel’s regional supremacy. Success of the US-Israeli strategy depends on piling pressure on Iran and Hezbollah, who were game changers in the Syrian conflict, and eroding the Russian-Iranian axis in West Asia, the Caucasus and the Caspian.
Armenia’s defection from the Russian orbit and the conflict situation currently developing in Gaza (and Lebanon) provide a window of opportunity to challenge Russia and Iran in the Levant. A vast armada of US warships is approaching the Eastern Mediterranean to intimidate Iran.
Meanwhile, the US hopes to undermine Saudi Arabia’s normalisation process with Iran and create contradictions within BRICS and OPEC Plus.
In sum, like in the famous play by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, we are currently witnessing a play within a play in the great game in Transcaucasia — an extraordinary blend of high theatricality, folk storytelling, music and even dialectical inquiry.
Europe worried that US support for Ukraine waning
By Ahmed Adel | October 6, 2023
Dutch Defence Minister Kajsa Ollongren made a shocking statement at the Warsaw Security Forum by emphasising the strategic importance of arming Ukraine as a cost-effective means of containing Russia when responding to questions about the sustainability of US and allied support for Kiev given the political turbulence in Washington.
“Of course, supporting Ukraine is a very cheap way to make sure that Russia with this regime is not a threat to the NATO alliance. And it’s vital to continue that support,” she said. “It is very much in our interest to support Ukraine, because they are fighting this war, we are not fighting it.”
Responding to the shocking admittance that NATO only views Ukraine as a “very cheap way” to contain Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on October 5 that Ukrainians would soon “stop liking” how they are seen and used by the West.
“[The West does not hide its intention to fight to the last Ukrainian and continues to use Ukraine] as cheap soldiers,” the spokesman said when commenting on Ollongren’s recent statement that it was vital to continue to support Ukraine. “[Soon, Ukrainians will begin to hear such statements] in a different light for themselves” and “they will stop liking it.”
Mentioning developments “overseas,” referring to the US, Ollongren said it is “worrying and also I think we have to address that worry.”
“We cannot pretend that we’ll just wait and see how the American elections are going,” she said before highlighting that if Washington’s support for Ukraine falls, that would be “substantial.”
Her concern about the situation in the US comes as a survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, published on October 4, found that 47% of Americans believe the US should support Ukraine for as long as necessary, a drop from 58% in July 2022; support for providing economic and military assistance to Ukraine has dropped from 78% in March 2022 to 61% in September 2023; and, support for sending US troops to Ukraine dropped from 36% in March 2022 to 26% in September 2023.
According to the survey, “There have been dips in support, which is not surprising given that both the length of the conflict and the extent of the US financial contribution have likely exceeded Americans’ initial expectations.”
“Americans express less confidence now than in previous surveys that Ukraine is doing better than Russia on the battlefield. Now only 14 percent of Americans say Ukraine has the advantage in the war, compared with 26 percent in November 2022,” the Chicago Council on Global Affairs report added.
US President Joe Biden has long been confident that Congress would continue to provide billions of dollars in support to Ukraine, even as the situation becomes increasingly tense in a divided Washington. The last agreement was only to avoid a collapse of the American government. However, it should not last long as it became clear how unpredictable Washington can be in its negotiations to support Ukraine as it continues encountering serious difficulties.
To avoid the collapse of the government, on September 30, a decision to leave Ukraine out of the budget was made, demonstrating that the situation is not only delicate but there is also great pressure from critics of the support given by Biden to Kiev. The challenge now, especially for the Europeans, is that a politically polarised America extends to foreign policy.
Despite all the domestic financial problems, the US continues to allocate huge funds to Ukraine. Since February 2022, Kiev has received more than $110 billion from Washington. This means that the “very cheap way” to fight Russia is turning out to be very expensive, as demonstrated by the fact that the government of the world’s greatest superpower almost shut down.
The removal of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy from the US Congress only worsens the already troubled process of Washington’s military and financial aid for Ukraine as its counteroffensive against Russia grinds on with little change to the frontlines. This is significant because, without a Speaker, the House cannot pass legislation, throwing Washington’s military backing for Kiev into doubt since it could be another week or more before a successor is elected.
Although Ukraine is not a “very cheap way” for NATO to fight Russia, the statement by Ollongren provides a fascinating insight into how the Atlantic bloc views the beleaguered Eastern European country – nothing more than an expendable proxy weaponised against its far larger and more powerful neighbour.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Ukraine’s backers blinded by Russia hate – top analyst
RT | October 5, 2023
Kiev’s globalist and neo-conservative supporters in the West are so driven by their hatred of Russia that they completely disregard the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who are dying in a futile effort to defeat Moscow’s forces, US public policy analyst Jeffrey Sachs has argued.
Sachs, an award-winning economist who advised the Russian and Ukrainian governments following the breakup of the Soviet Union, made his comments in an interview posted on Thursday by US podcast host Andrew Napolitano. Asked how the US and its NATO allies can ignore the catastrophic destruction of Ukraine while prolonging the conflict and making false claims of battlefield successes, Sachs said they are “blinded” by their hatred of Russia.
“They are not counting the Ukrainian dead,” the analyst said. “They have lied to the public all along about the military situation . . . . They want so much to fight Russia and have someone else do the fighting and the dying that they want another massive recruitment of the remaining Ukrainian young men that can be grabbed off the streets and be thrown into the killing fields.”
More than 83,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed during a Donbass counteroffensive that began in June, according to an estimate released by the Russian Defense Ministry last month. Despite knowing that the Ukrainians have no chance of making major gains on the battlefield amid Russia’s air superiority and artillery dominance, Kiev’s benefactors have shown a “grotesque” disregard for the heavy casualties, Sachs said. He argued that the UK, in particular, has championed the counteroffensive because of London’s centuries-long and deeply embedded desire to crush Russia.
Sachs, now a UN adviser and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, has argued that NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe helped trigger the current crisis. He said Washington and its allies missed many opportunities to avoid the current conflict, then kept it going by discouraging Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky from finalizing a peace deal with Russia in March 2022.
Responding to claims by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that critics of Washington’s Ukraine policy are “siding with” Russian President Vladimir Putin, Sachs argued that he’s showing concern for the Ukrainian people. “I don’t want Ukraine to be completely destroyed by these neocons, by their fantasy world, by their desire to throw Ukrainians by the hundreds of thousands to their deaths,” he said. He added, “This isn’t siding with Putin or siding with anybody. This is trying to protect Ukraine from American zealots.”
Sachs claimed that US President Joe Biden must reach out to Putin to negotiate an end to the bloodshed, which would involve ruling out adding Ukraine to NATO, as well as addressing Russia’s legitimate security concerns. “We have stoked so much provocation in this, so much anxiety, overthrowing governments, starting multiple wars, pushing NATO enlargement, abandoning nuclear agreements, and then saying, ‘Oh, he doesn’t want to negotiate,’” the analyst said.
Ukraine Fatigue Is Worrying NATO Elites – and So They Should Be
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 4, 2023
On both sides of the Atlantic, there is now discernible fatigue and anger among citizens over the bottomless money pit that is NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.
The only wonder is that it has taken so long for the Western public to get wise to the scam.
The disgraceful adulation of a Nazi war criminal by the whole Canadian parliament in a perverse show of solidarity with Ukraine against Russia has helped focus public attention on the obscenity of the NATO proxy war.
All told, since the NATO-induced conflict blew up in February last year, the American and European establishments have thrown up to €200 billion into Ukraine to prop up an odious Nazi-infested regime.
All that largesse that is billed to U.S. and European taxpayers has resulted in a slaughter in Europe not seen since the Second World War – and a failed Ukrainian state. And of course huge profits for the NATO military-industrial complex that bankrolls the elite politicians.
Times are changing though. In the United States, the financially conservative Republicans have had enough of the blank checks to the Kiev regime. The U.S. Congress finally showed a modicum of sanity to prevent a government financial shutdown – by dropping military aid to Ukraine. That shows how twisted Washington’s priorities have become when national self-interest has to wrestle with funding for a Nazi regime.
And then following the Congressional vote to temporarily end funding for Ukraine, the Kiev regime’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba dared to reprimand American lawmakers: “We are now working with both sides of Congress to make sure that it does not (get) repeated under any circumstances.”
Meanwhile in Europe, Slovakian citizens have voted for a new government to end the military fueling of war in Ukraine. The Smer-SD party led by Robert Fico won the parliamentary elections primarily on the vow to shut off any further weapons supply to the Kiev regime.
This week also saw massive protests in Germany against Olaf Scholz’s coalition government over the latter’s abject pro-war policies in Ukraine. German Unity Day on October 3 prompted a mass rally in Berlin denouncing the NATO proxy war in Ukraine and calling for peace negotiations to end the conflict.
There were also unprecedented protests across Poland in Warsaw, Lodz and other cities against the PiS government’s slavish implementation of the U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine. Faced with millions of Ukrainian refugees and neglect of social needs for Poles, the PiS ruling party has recently threatened to end weapons supply to Kiev – a move less about principle and more about trying to buy votes in the forthcoming election on October 15. Nevertheless, the belated move by the Polish government illustrates the concern among European leaders about growing public disdain over the seemingly endless financial aid allocated to Ukraine.
Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, says it is a “worrying” sign that Washington for the first time closed the coffers for Ukraine.
The EU foreign ministers held a summit in Kiev on Monday. It was the first time that their summit was convened in a non-EU country. The agenda was a little too self-conscious, slated as a show of “solidarity” with Ukraine.
Borrell and the other EU diplomats said the summit was a warning to Russia to not count on “weariness” among Europeans over support for Ukraine. Who is he trying to convince? Russia or Europeans?
The unelected European elites described the war in Ukraine as an “existential crisis” which requires never-ending support for the Nazi regime against Russia.
Such melodrama needs serious qualification. The conflict is only “existential” for certain people: the NATO ideologues, the elitist leaders, the military-industrial complex, and the corrupt Nazi regime in Kiev. But it’s not existential for most other people who want to end this insane slaughter, grotesque wasting of public finances, and perilous flirting with nuclear war.
Significantly, the contrived EU summit in Kiev was not attended by Hungary’s foreign minister Peter Szijjarto. In highly critical comments on the EU’s misplaced priorities, he said that other countries do not understand why Europe “has made this conflict global” and why people living in Asia, Africa and Latin America have to pay for it due to growing inflation, energy prices and unstable food supplies.
The Hungarian diplomat slammed the EU leaders for their double standards and hypocrisy, adding: “I can say that the world outside Europe is already really looking forward to the end of this war because they do not understand many things. They do not understand, for example, how it can be that when a war is not in Europe, the European Union, looking down with fantastic moral superiority, calls on the parties to peace, advocates negotiations and an immediate end to violence. However, when there is a war in Europe, the European Union incites the conflict and supplies weapons, and anyone who talks about peace is immediately stigmatized.”
At least two members of the EU and the NATO alliance – Hungary and Slovakia’s new government – are opposed to the absurd military and financial support fueling the war in Ukraine. Both countries want peace negotiations with Russia to be prioritized. There is an unavoidable sense that this common sense dissent will grow into a domino effect because it is the truth and has an unassailable moral force.
What the conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated clearly to the Western public is just how morally bankrupt their governments and media have become. American and European elitist leaders may kid themselves a little longer by pretending there is no weariness and fatigue over their proxy war against Russia. The more they pretend the greater the eventual crash and downfall from public anger.
Biden Tells Allied Leaders ‘Ukraine Aid Cannot Be Interrupted Under Any Circumstances
By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | October 3, 2023
President Joe Biden held a call with the leaders of several allied nations to stress that weapon shipments to Ukraine cannot end for any reason. Some members of NATO recently expressed an unwillingness or inability to provide further arms to Kiev.
National Security Council Spokesman John Kirby stated Biden spoke with the leaders of Canada, Italy, Japan, the UK, Poland, Romania, Germany, the European Commission, the European Council, and NATO on Tuesday. Kirby said the president expressed that “we cannot under any circumstances allow America’s support [for] Ukraine to be interrupted. Time is not our friend.”
Biden added that he was confident Congress would authorize an additional $24 billion in aid that the White House requested. While a majority of representatives in both houses continue to support aiding Ukraine, recent polling shows that 71% of Republicans, and 55% of Americans, do not want Congress to pass another multibillion-dollar bill to support Kiev.
A press release from UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said London was committed to supporting Kiev. It stated that he “outlined the UK’s ongoing military, humanitarian and economic assistance to Ukraine and stressed that this support will continue for as long as it takes.”
However, the Telegraph reported that London had depleted its available stockpile of weapons it can ship to Kiev. “We’ve given away just about as much as we can afford,” the unnamed source “We will continue to source equipment to provide for Ukraine, but what they need now is things like air defense assets and artillery ammunition, and we’ve run dry on all that.”
After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky criticized Poland at the United Nations General Assembly, tensions between Kiev and Warsaw boiled over. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced that arms shipments to Ukraine would end.
On Monday, Slovak Social Democracy, running on a platform of ending arms transfers to Ukraine, won a plurality in Bratislava’s legislature. The party leader, Robert Fico, doubled down on the pledge after Monday’s election victory.
Washington has also struggled to transfer Kiev the weapons the Ukrainian military needs. The White House resorted to sending Ukraine the cluster variants of 155MM artillery shells and long-range rockets because the Department of Defense lacked enough conventional munitions to transfer to Kiev.
Someone Wants ‘the War to Continue’
By Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute | October 3, 2023
At times, Ukraine has been unwilling to negotiate an end to the ongoing war with Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has gone so far as to issue a decree banning negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
At other times, Russia has given up on negotiating. In a press conference at the United Nations, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov lamented, if you insist “’on the battlefield’—well, let it be on the battlefield.”
And at times, Ukraine and Russia have been willing to negotiate with each other. The United States, though, has at no time been willing to negotiate. Instead, an administration that promised the world “a new era of relentless diplomacy” has delivered an unhappy pattern of obstructing negotiations.
As early as December 17, 2021, months before their invasion, Russia presented the United States with a proposal on mutual security guarantees that demanded NATO not expand into Ukraine. The proposal demanded that “The United States of America shall take measures to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and deny accession to the Alliance to the former USSR republics.” A month later, on January 26, the United States rejected Russia’s central demand and formally declined to negotiate, insisting instead on “the right of other states to choose or change security arrangements.”
Vladimir Putin remarked “that fundamental Russian concerns were ignored.” In the official Russian response on February 17, 2022, Russia said that the United States and NATO offered “no constructive answer” to Russia’s key demands. Four days later, on February 21, Sergey Lavrov said, “The assessment of this response shows that our Western colleagues are not prepared to take up our major proposals, primarily those on NATO’s eastward non-expansion. This demand was rejected with reference to the bloc’s so-called open-door policy and the freedom of each state to choose its own way of ensuring security.” Highlighting American stubbornness about negotiating, the veteran diplomat added the important detail that, “Neither the United States, nor the North Atlantic Alliance proposed an alternative to this key provision.”
On April 8, 2022, Derek Chollet, counselor to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, admited that the United States told Moscow that negotiating NATO expansion into Ukraine was never on the table.
Just last month on September 17, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made the stunning concession that, as Putin had always insisted, Russia “went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders,” and that Putin “sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.” Stoltenberg then repeated, “He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO… We rejected that.”
On February 27, 2022, only a month into the war, Russia and Ukraine announced that they would hold talks in Belarus. At the end of the talks, the two delegations returned home for consultations, having identified priority topics. A second round of talks took place in Belarus on March 3.
At a February 25 press conference, State Department spokesman Ned Price was asked what the U.S. position was on the upcoming “talks between Russia and Ukraine happening in Minsk,” the capital of Belarus. Price rejected negotiations, saying, “Now we see Moscow suggesting that diplomacy take place at the barrel of a gun or as Moscow’s rockets, mortars, artillery target the Ukrainian people. This is not real diplomacy. Those are not the conditions for real diplomacy.
Shortly after, on March 6, then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett made a surprise visit to Moscow to meet with Putin in an attempt at mediation. Bennett had a series of back and forth conversations with Putin and Zelensky before flying to Germany for meetings with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Bennett also had conversations with French President Emmanuel Macron, followed by then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and U.S. President Joe Biden.
Bennett said that “there was a good chance of reaching a ceasefire.” But Bennett also says the West made a different decision. “So, they blocked it?” his interviewer asked. “They blocked it,” Bennett replied.
From March 2022 into April, Turkey mediated talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul. The two sides reached a tentative agreement.
On June 13, Putin confirmed that “we reached an agreement in Istanbul,” and that it had reached the level of having been initialled by both sides. On September 9, Lavrov further confirmed that the agreement had been initialled: “[W]e did hold talks in March and April 2022,” Lavrov said, “We agreed on certain things; everything was already initialled.”
A face-to-face meeting between Putin and Zelensky was in the process of being set.
But on April 9, 2022, Boris Johnson rushed to Kiev and insisted to Zelensky that Vladimir Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with” and that, even if Ukraine was ready to sign some agreements with Russia, “the West was not.”
The negotiations came to a sudden stop. On June 13, 2023, Putin said, “We actually did this but they simply threw it away later and that’s it.” On June 17, Putin told an African delegation that “the Kiev authorities… tossed [their commitments] into the dustbin of history. They abandoned everything.” Putin implicitly blamed the United States, saying that that when Ukraine’s interests “are not in sync” with American interests, “ultimately it is about the United States’s interests. We know that they hold the key to solving issues.” On September 23, 2023, Lavrov, too, said, “I think, someone in London or Washington did not want this war to end.”
On April 20, 2022, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said, “There are countries within NATO who want the war to continue.”
“Following the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting,” Cavusoglu explained, “it was the impression that… there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia get weaker.” On November 18, 2022, Numan Kurtulmus, the deputy chairman of Erdogan’s ruling party, said. “We know that our President is talking to the leaders of both countries. In certain matters, progress was made, reaching the final point, then suddenly we see that the war is accelerating… Someone is trying not to end the war. The United States sees the prolongation of the war as its interest… There are those who want this war to continue… Putin-Zelensky was going to sign, but someone didn’t want to.”
No talks between Russia and Ukraine have been held since.
NATO-trained Ukrainian conscripts surrendering en masse
By Drago Bosnic | October 3, 2023
One of the many peculiarities of the special military operation (SMO) has been the rather small number of POWs (prisoners of war) on both sides (relative to the number of overall casualties). Reasons for this are manifold and include the way the conflict is being waged (the vast majority of casualties are the result of long-range strikes, primarily artillery and drones), widespread use of combat drugs, as well as the rabidly Russophobic propaganda that is being disseminated among the Kiev regime forces. This often results in instances of summary executions of Russian POWs by the Neo-Nazi junta troops or their unwillingness to surrender to the Russian military, as they are being fed propaganda that the Russians will treat them the same, even though evidence suggests otherwise.
However, it seems such trends are changing rapidly, particularly as the number of ideologically charged soldiers among the Kiev regime forces is going down due to the number of KIA/WIA/MIA (killed/wounded/missing in action). They have been increasingly replaced by forcibly conscripted regular Ukrainians who simply don’t see the conflict as their own. The fact that the commanding officers (COs) are effectively treating the soldiers as literal cannon fodder is also contributing to this, further resulting in low morale and even widespread insubordination. There were instances of Ukrainian soldiers even shooting their COs in order to avoid being sent into the meat grinder. Others are simply doing anything they can to leave the country and escape being sent to the frontlines.
In order to reduce the number of casualties on both sides, the Russian military has even set up special communication channels for Ukrainians willing to surrender. This has been giving results for several months already, particularly since the start of the much-touted counteroffensive of the Neo-Nazi junta troops. On October 2, the elite 1st Guards Tank Army of the Russian Battlegroup West captured two units composed of Ukrainian conscripts in the vicinity of Artyomovsk (previously known as Bakhmut) in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). The units in question are the 77th Airmobile Brigade and the 56th Separate Motorized Brigade. Surprisingly, reports about the mass surrender of Ukrainian conscripts are also becoming more common in Western media, too.
Retired United States Army Colonel and former senior adviser at the Pentagon Douglas MacGregor has repeatedly reiterated that the number of surrendering Ukrainian conscripts keeps growing, particularly as the embattled Kiev regime is having trouble hiding the catastrophic losses in both manpower and equipment. According to both American and Ukrainian combat veterans, the NATO training they’ve been provided all these years has been proven detrimental to their fighting capabilities, resulting in higher casualties and lesser combat effectiveness. In fact, many Ukrainian soldiers have stated they’d be dead if they followed the much-touted NATO standards. Instead, they’re still largely relying on Soviet-era training, equipment and weapons, as these have been proven as much more effective.
Another reason for the high casualty ratio among the Neo-Nazi junta troops is the very limited training that Ukrainian conscripts have been given before being sent to the frontlines. The primary reason for this is the urgency of replacing previous losses, resulting in a vicious cycle that even the mainstream propaganda machine couldn’t ignore. Back in May, the Wall Street Journal reported that poor men from villages and small towns were sent to the frontlines after just two nights at a base. The report effectively admitted that the COs insisted that “conscripts learned on the battlefield to compensate for the almost total lack of training”. The overall result of this has been that conscript units now have up to 90% KIA/WIA/MIA, as reported by various local and global military sources.
Russian intelligence reports also indicate that Ukrainian conscript units are increasingly “trained” by the much-touted British Special Air Service (SAS), highly popularized in various shooter video games, particularly the Call of Duty series, a major NATO propaganda tool in recent years. The United Kingdom keeps insisting that their forces are supposedly not present in Ukraine, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak even denying the claims of his own cabinet’s Defense Secretary Grant Shapps that British advisors will officially be sent to train the Neo-Nazi junta troops. It’s important to note that high-ranking Russian military intelligence officials (both retired and active) have pointed out the high frequency of the usage of English among military personnel embedded within the Kiev regime forces.
Namely, this is particularly true when it comes to the areas where the abortive counteroffensive is (still) being conducted. Apart from American special forces, this reportedly also includes SAS operatives. And while the mainstream propaganda machine keeps ridiculing Moscow’s claims about the presence of NATO personnel in Ukraine (either as mercenaries or under the direct command of the belligerent alliance) and decrying them as supposed “conspiracy theories” and “Russian disinformation”, battlefield information suggests otherwise. This is also further reinforced by NATO’s standard counterintelligence practice of denying that certain weapons will be delivered and then stating they “might be” delivered only to then announce they will be sent to the Neo-Nazi junta when the process has already been completed.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Russia raises military budget for 2024 by 70%: what does this mean?
By Gilbert Doctorow | September 30, 2023
It is always a pleasure to have an on-air chat with WION, the premier English-language global broadcaster of India. Yesterday was especially so when their program host posed a series of very relevant questions about the just announced Russian military budget for 2024 showing a 70% increase in spending over the current year. Naturally, one wonders about Russia’s intentions: how will these new funds be spent? On which weapons systems? What kind of message is Russia sending to the West by this increase? How will the increased military spending impact on social spending within Russia or, put another way, are guns and butter a sustainable political course?
In this introduction, I will not telescope my answers. I am hopeful that readers will watch the interview and follow the logic set out therein.
However, I can say here that I set out the key drivers for the increased spending. One is the latest Russian assumptions on when the war in Ukraine will end, on how it may escalate into a general Russia-NATO war as the Biden administration resists admitting defeat in Ukraine, which is possibly imminent, by expanding the conflict and introducing NATO forces on the ground. The second is the expenses related to the near doubling of the size of the Russian army now underway following the induction of 300,000 men one year ago by mobilization of reserves and the sign-up of more than 400,000 volunteers that we have seen since the start of this year.
As regards the other issues, such as the 6% of GDP that the new military budget represents, or the 2% overall budget deficit that Russia is now incurring, I explain in this interview why such figures cannot be commented upon as if in a vacuum but must be compared to what countries in the West are now experiencing, as well as to Russia’s own Soviet past.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
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From the Archives
How Bill Gates Premeditated COVID Vaccine Injury Censorship
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | March 30, 2021
In 2000, everything about Bill Gates’ public persona changed. He morphed from a hardnosed and ruthless technology monopolizer into a soft, fuzzy and incredibly generous philanthropist when he and his wife launched the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.1
It was a public relations coup. May 18, 1998, the U.S. Justice Department, in collaboration with 20 state attorneys, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.2 At that time, the company was 23 years old and was ruling the personal computer market. The Seattle Times described the fallout from the antitrust lawsuit:3
“The company barely escaped being split up after it was ruled an unlawful monopolist in 2000 for using its stranglehold on the PC market with its Windows operating system to cripple competitors, such as Netscape’s Navigator Web browser.”
How would the world be different today if the company had been split? Yale law professor George Priest described the antitrust lawsuit as “one of the most important antitrust cases of its generation.”4 In 2002, a court settlement placed restrictions on Microsoft to curb some of its practices for five years.
It was later extended twice and then expired May 12, 2011. The lawsuit had a dramatic effect on “the emergence of an entirely new field called IP (intellectual property) antitrust,” Iowa law professor Herbert Hovenkamp told the Seattle Times.5
Later, large sums donated from the foundation made the news multiple times, including $9.5 million to GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines), a second $7.5 million to GAVI and $6.8 million to the World Health Organization in 2017.6
By June 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, the Gates Foundation’s donations totaled 45% of WHO’s funding from nongovernmental sources.7 Once mainstream media’s attention was no longer on Gates’ antitrust activities and focused on the philanthropist actions of the foundation, Gates publicly turned his attention to vaccinating the world, long before COVID-19.8
Event 201: A Preplanned Pandemic
In a deep dive into the Gates Foundation’s charitable donations, The Nation found there were $250 million in grants to companies where the foundation held corporate stocks, including Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Sanofi and Medtronic. The money was directed at supporting projects “like developing new drugs and health monitoring systems and creating mobile banking services.”9 … continue
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