Russia’s Military Performance Doesn’t Match the Propaganda
By Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute | May 3, 2023
American government and media statements have led the public to believe that the Russian military has been shockingly ineffective and there should be confident optimism for a Ukrainian victory. Ukrainians have indeed fought courageously and performed above expectation. But there has been a vast gulf between private and public assessments. Recent leaks have confirmed what has long been suggested: there is a need to re-evaluate the performance of the Russian army and to recalibrate the optimistic expectations.
The ridiculing and mocking of the Russian military has been possible only because of a deliberate self-delusion that demanded turning away from two important admissions.
First, in the three quarters of a century since the United States became the world’s dominant power, it has seldom decisively won a war or fully achieved its explicit policy goal for going to war. Honestly evaluating Russia’s military performance requires comparing it to the exemplar of recent American wars. The United States has consistently failed to defeat armies far more ragtag than the modern Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Since Vietnam, the United States has failed to achieve its military and political goals in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya. After twenty years of fighting in Afghanistan, the U.S. was forced to withdraw. They were in disarray; the Taliban is back in power. The United States has twice withdrawn from Iraq because their government refused to capitulate to Status of Forces Agreements. The first withdrawal left Saddam Hussein in power; the second removed him and left Iran (not the U.S.) strengthened in Iraq. The war in Libya left a failed state to bleed weapons into extremist movements throughout North Africa. In none of these wars did the United States leave victorious nor with their foreign policy objectives achieved. Each of them left a government in power that was not pro-American. The war in Syria has also left Bashar al-Assad in power.
If the Russian military has fared badly against the modern Ukrainian army, it has fared no worse than the United States has against much less modern adversaries.
The second point is the reason why Russia is fighting such a modern Ukrainian army. Ukraine has become a de facto member of NATO. The United States and its NATO allies are providing everything but the bodies in the war against Russia. Moscow is not pulling off this level of performance against Kiev: it is pulling off this level of performance against the combined resources of NATO. The United States and its NATO allies have provided and maintained the weapons, trained the Ukrainian soldiers to use them, and provided the intelligence on where to target them. The U.S. is providing “stepped up feeds of intelligence about the position of Russian forces, highlighting weaknesses in the Russian lines.” The U.S. has essentially assumed planning, conducting war-games, and “suggesting” which “avenues… were likely to be more successful.” In March, the U.S. hosted members of the Ukrainian military at an American military base in Germany for war games to strategize for the next phase of the war. In April, they “held tabletop exercises with Ukrainian military leaders to demonstrate how different offensive scenarios could play out” in the expected counter offensive, for which the U.S. has “worked” with Ukraine “in terms of their surprise,” according to General Christopher Cavoli.
But even though Russia is facing an enhanced Ukrainian military, recent leaks confirm what private assessments have long suggested: Ukraine’s losses have been understated while its prospects have been overstated, and Russia’s losses have been overstated while its achievements have been understated.
Long before the recent leaks revealed that many more Ukrainian soldiers than Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded on the battlefield, that Ukraine will be out of antiaircraft missiles by early May, that they are short of troops and ammunition and their counteroffensive will fall “well short” of its goals, attaining, at best, only “modest territorial gains,” U.S. generals and government officials had been quietly admitting as much.
In February, The Washington Post reported that privately the U.S. intelligence’s “sobering assessment” that retaking Crimea “is beyond the capability of Ukraine’s army” has been “reiterated to multiple committees on Capitol Hill over the last several weeks.” As early as November, 2022, U.S. officials shared that assessment with Ukraine, suggesting they “start thinking about [their] realistic demands and priorities for negotiations, including a reconsideration of its stated aim for Ukraine to regain Crimea.” That same month, western military analysts began to warn of an “inflection point” at which Ukraine’s battlefield gains were at an apex. And on January 21, 2023, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said publicly that Ukraine would not be able to retake all of its territory.
But it was not only that Ukraine’s ambitions had been inflated and their prospects overstated. Their losses had also been understated. Despite public claims of parity in losses or worse for Russia, the leaked reports of a much higher ratio of Ukrainian deaths and casualties to Russian deaths and casualties had been forecasted by military analysts who frequently put the ratio of soldiers killed at closer to 7:1 or 10:1 Ukrainian versus Russian losses. Der Spiegel has reported that German intelligence is “alarmed” by the “high losses suffered by the Ukrainian army” in the battle for Bakhmut. They told German politicians in a secret meeting that the loss of life for Ukrainian soldiers is in “three-digit number[s]” every day on that battleground alone. The Washington Post has reported that the most highly trained and experienced Ukrainian soldiers are “all dead or wounded.”
And it is not only Ukrainian losses that may have been understated. Russian losses, ineptitude, and material setbacks may have been just as overstated. After suffering high casualties at the beginning of the war, Alexander Hill, professor of military history at the University of Calgary, says Russia began to pursue a more methodical battlefield strategy and lowered their losses.
On April 26, General Cavoli, the commander of United States European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, gave a congressional audience of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee a report that is very different from what they’d been told just a month earlier. The public is constantly told that Putin is throwing his soldiers into a meatgrinder. General Mark Milley recently reported that Russian troops are “getting slaughtered.” He told the House Armed Services Committee in late March, “It’s a slaughter-fest for the Russians. They’re getting hammered in the vicinity of Bahkmut.”
But in April, General Cavoli told that same body, “The Russian ground force has been degenerated somewhat by this conflict; although it is bigger today than it was at the beginning of the conflict.” And it is not only the ground force. Cavoli went on to report, “The air force has lost very little: they’ve lost eighty planes. They have another one thousand fighters and fighter bombers. The navy has lost one ship.”
And as for the larger Russian military, Cavoli said, “Much of the Russian military has not been affected negatively by this conflict… despite all of the efforts they’ve undertaken inside Ukraine.”
Historian Geoffrey Roberts, an authority on Soviet military history, told me:
“Russia’s Armed Forces have made many mistakes and suffered severe setbacks during the course of its war with Ukraine and NATO, but overall it has performed very well. Like the Red Army during the Second World War, the Russian military has shown itself to be a resilient, adaptable, creative, and highly effective learning organization—a modern war-making machine whose lessons and experience—positive and negative—will be studied by General Staffs and military academies for generations to come.”
After initial territorial setbacks, the Ukrainian military countered with two shocking victories in Kharkiv and Kherson provinces. But in each of those cases, Russia seems to have either decided to leave or redeployed, offering little defense. Military analyst and ret. Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis has pointed out that in each situation where the Russian military “chose to stand and fight, Ukraine has not defeated them.” Russia has not lost a battle it has chosen to fight.
Since then, the Russian military has settled itself in Bakhmut where, like death’s maw, it has devoured everyone Kiev has sent in to displace it. A Ukrainian commander in Bakhmut has said that “the exchange rate of trading our lives for theirs favors the Russians. If this goes on like this, we could run out.” Daniel Davis has pointed out that, even if Ukraine were to launch and win a counteroffensive, the rate of casualties and deaths would be so high, they would “have spent [their] last remaining force with which to conduct offensives” or future operations. Military historian Geoffrey Roberts recently told an interviewer, “if the war continues for much longer, I am worried that Ukraine will collapse as a state.”
Professor Hill argued in November 2022 that “had Zelensky’s Ukrainian government been willing to negotiate back in April [2022] then the eventual outcome on the ground would probably have ended up being better for Ukraine than is likely to be the case today or in the future.” It’s a prognosis, he told me, that still stands.
The Ukrainian military may have performed above expectation, and the Russian military may have performed below expectation. But recent statements, both leaked and on the record, suggest the need for an updated, more sincere evaluation. Russia is not struggling only against the Ukrainian Armed Forces: they are struggling against a military seriously swollen by NATO resources, training, and planning. And even still, they are faring no worse than the U.S. military has fared against much less equipped, trained, and prepared forces over the past several decades. The dismissive mocking of the Russian military has been helped by underestimating Ukrainian losses, overestimating Ukrainian capabilities, and by overestimating Russian losses and degeneration and underestimating Russian capabilities and achievements.
Both senior U.S. military leadership and major western media must begin reassessing the Russian military and its capabilities for what they are, instead of how narratives wish them to be.
The US Is Rounding Up Allies Ahead Of A Possible War With China
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | MAY 1, 2023
The US is shaping the Asia-Pacific in preparation of a conventional conflict with China, to which end it unveiled the AUKUS alliance in late 2021. This platform is intended to form the core of a NATO-like military structure for containing the People’s Republic, and it’ll replace whatever related role American policymakers initially envisaged the Quad playing. This makes AUKUS extremely dangerous, especially as other regional countries tacitly expand their cooperation with its American leader.
South Korea’s recent decision to let US nuclear-armed submarines dock at its ports for the first time in decades, which was made during President Yoon’s trip to DC last week, signals its interest in de facto integrating into this anti-Chinese bloc. Nearby Japan can already be regarded as an informal member of that alliance after Prime Minister Kishida reaffirmed his country’s commitment to the US’ regional goals in January and implied that it’ll rapidly remilitarize in the coming future in order to contain China.
Taken together and paired with the recent Japanese-Korean rapprochement, it can therefore be concluded that the US has strengthened its alliance network in Northeast Asia in order to facilitate the region’s unofficial integration into AUKUS+. At the same time, it’s also doing something similar with the Philippines in Southeast Asia, whose president visits the US this week. He’s expected to also de facto integrate his country into AUKUS+ too exactly as his South Korean counterpart just did.
The Philippines’ northernmost core island of Luzon is much closer to Taiwan than the Japanese Home Islands are, thus making it an ideal staging post for any American military intervention in that Chinese province. Although President Marcos just denied that his country intends to facilitate anyone’s regional military plans, it was recently revealed that the four new bases that he agreed to let America use are located on that island, thus casting serious doubts on the sincerity of his claim.
Three other recent developments bode ill for peace in this part of Asia. CNN published a lengthy analysis in mid-April arguing that the US should maximally stockpile weapons in Taiwan in order to help its ally’s forces survive in the event that China blockades the island prior to launching a special operation there. Curiously, such resupply challenges were then confirmed a few days later during an anti-Chinese congressional committee’s wargame of precisely that scenario.
The second development concerned top EU diplomat Borrell’s suggestion that the bloc’s navies patrol the Taiwan Strait. This came just several weeks after NATO Secretary-General Stoltenberg declared that “We are now stepping up our cooperation with our partners in the Indo-Pacific: Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia.” The indisputable trend is that the US’ European partners are poised to play a larger military role in the region, including a provocative one if they end up patrolling the Taiwan Strait.
And lastly, it was reported last weekend that US special forces carried out their first-ever drills simulating what they’d do if their country went to war with China over Taiwan, thus removing any so-called “strategic ambiguity” about how Washington would respond to that scenario. It can no longer claim any pretense to neutrality after literally preparing its most highly trained forces for infiltrating into Taiwan to kill whatever Chinese forces might eventually enter that island.
These three developments prove that the US is rounding up allies in both the Asia-Pacific and Europe ahead of a possible war with China, but there are two important players that either won’t participate in this plot or have yet to decide, with these being India and Indonesia respectively. The influential Council on Foreign Relations’ official magazine just published a piece about why India won’t get involved, while Indonesia is being pressured to allow American and Australian forces to transit through its territory.
Even without those two, the US’ emerging anti-Chinese containment coalition is still very formidable and represents its success in getting a multitude of countries to converge around AUKUS. South Korea will serve as an intelligence and missile outpost, Japan’s Ryukyu Islands and the Philippines’ Luzon are complementary staging points for facilitating a US intervention in Taiwan, and NATO will provide back-end support all across the region as well as possibly provoke China by patrolling the Taiwan Strait.
Amidst the solidification of the Asia-Pacific’s NATO-like military structure, the US and its allies will likely fill Taiwan to the brim with weapons exactly as CNN suggested and an anti-Chinese congressional committee curiously confirmed should be a top priority just a couple days later. These interconnected trends represent extremely pressing challenges for China’s objective national security interests, which are being threatened ever more by the day as it holds off on launching a special operation in Taiwan.
There are justifiable reasons for China’s stance, especially since its leadership would truly prefer to peacefully reunify with their country’s wayward region and thus want to completely exhaust all related possibilities before resorting to military means. This moral approach is predicated on their reluctance to be the first to initiate what would be a fratricidal conflict, which is commendable, but it comes at the expense of military interests in the event that a war over that island is inevitable.
No one knows whether it is or not, but the US is doing its utmost to be in the best position possible should that scenario unfold, which thus complicates China’s own position in that event. If the US feels that it’s obtained a decisive edge over China through the crystallization of AUKUS+ and upon maximally stockpiling weapons in Taiwan, then it might even seek to provoke a conflict that wargamers convinced themselves Beijing would lose, which is a frightening scenario that can’t be ruled out.
The U.S. Proxy War Against Russia & China Is Increasingly Seen Globally As A Disaster Made By American And NATO Lies
Strategic Culture Foundation | April 28, 2023
It has become patently obvious to the world that the conflict in Ukraine is a dirty and desperate geopolitical confrontation, despite massive Western media efforts to portray it as something else more noble – the usual charade of chivalry and virtue to disguise naked Western imperialism.
The death and destruction in Ukraine is nothing but a proxy war by the United States and its NATO partners to defeat Russia in a strategic gambit. But the unspoken objective does not end with Russia. The U.S. and its Western imperialist lackeys are driven to push for confrontation with China too.
As if taking on Russia is not reckless enough! The Western powers want to double down on their warmongering with China. This is all because the underlying impetus is for Washington and its Western minions to promote U.S.-led dominance of the global order. Russia and China are the main obstacles to that path of would-be dominance, and hence we see this manic drive for aggression stemming from Washington, the executive power of the Western order.
It should be obvious that while the U.S.-led NATO axis has stoked the war in Ukraine to calamitous heights, this same axis is wantonly inciting tensions with China. This observation alone should be enough to condemn the criminality of Western powers.
This week saw the NATO powers deliver depleted uranium weapons to the Kiev regime, while the United States announced that it would be docking submarine nuclear warheads in South Korea, a move that infuriated China which pointed out that Washington was violating decades-old commitments to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. Of course, such perverse provocation is par for the course as far as Washington is concerned. It is done deliberately in a conscious effort to exacerbate tensions and escalate militarism. Peace and security are anathemas to the U.S. (and its minions) whose whole ideological raison d’être is to aggravate war to gratify corporate capitalist addiction – a system that is increasingly bankrupt and dysfunctional, and hence the insane desperation for craving “war-fixes”.
In a scathing speech to the United Nations Security Council this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov asserted that the conflict in Ukraine cannot be properly resolved without an understanding of the geopolitical context. In other words, the war in the former Soviet republic which erupted last February has bigger causes than what the Western powers and their compliant news media would try to pretend otherwise.
Defense of Ukraine? Defense of democracy? Defense of international law? Defense of national sovereignty? These are some of the laughable claims made by Washington and its allies. One only has to consider the decades of total trashing of the UN Charter and democratic principles by the United States and its rogue partners in their pursuit of criminal wars to realize that their virtue-signaling over Ukraine is a vile joke.
Lavrov’s address to the Security Council was a stunning rebuke of the hypocrisy and criminality of the United States, Britain, France, Germany and other NATO powers, as well as the European Union. His speech was akin to the scene in the classic old movie The Wizard of Oz when the curtain was pulled back on the buffoonish villain for all to see. Any objective observer would agree with the Russian foreign minister’s excoriating survey of modern history and why the war in Ukraine has tragically manifested. Lamentably, if we fail to understand history and the real causes of conflicts, then we are condemned to repeat the horrors.
Ironically, Western leaders have at times revealed the bigger geopolitical agenda with their own misspoken arrogant words. U.S. President Joe Biden had previously blurted out a call for regime change in Moscow while his senior aides, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin, have succumbed to the intoxication of their narcissism and hubris by saying that the purpose of the war in Ukraine is the “defeat of Russia”.
Other NATO senior figures, such as the stupid, conceited Polish leaders and their Baltic buddies, have also come out and stated that the war’s ulterior agenda is to vanquish Russia. The fascist skeletons of their Nazi-collusion past have resurrected their deathly rattles, uncontrollably.
As Lavrov’s address to the Security Council intimates, the systematic violation of the UN Charter by the United States and its Western partners is a deplorable continuation of the Nazi fascism and imperialist barbarism that was supposed to have been defeated in World War Two. The culmination of the constant, unbridled Western imperialist criminality and its state terrorism is the current war in Ukraine and the growing aggression toward China over Taiwan as a pretext.
In all of this, woefully, the Western public has been flagrantly lied to by their governments and media as to the real nature of the war in Ukraine. American and European citizens have been bilked for hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up a Nazi regime in Kiev whose function is to act as a NATO spear-tip against Russia, and ultimately China when the NATO powers feel they are done with Ukraine. (The latter is a futile ambition, as is becoming increasingly evident.)
Journalists and antiwar activists in the West who highlight the malfeasance over Ukraine are either sacked, vilified, censored, or sanctioned into poverty, or even imprisoned.
Nevertheless, the Western public and the rest of the world are increasingly becoming aware of the odious charade. By definition, charades are inevitably untenable.
The Global South – the majority of the 193 nations at the UN – has had it with Western capitalist hegemony and its outrageous neocolonialist privileges. The incremental dumping of the U.S. dollar as an international reserve currency for trade is a testament to the historic shift towards a multipolar order in defiance of Western unipolar elitism. The nations of Africa, Latin America and Asia understand that the U.S.-led NATO war in Ukraine is a desperate last-ditch bid to preserve an imperialist global order which should have been eradicated after World War Two with the establishment of the United Nations, but which, regrettably, was not. Because the root cause of imperialism is the AngloAmerican-led Western capitalist order. The end of World War Two, as with World War One, was but a pause in the historical killing machine.
It is now increasingly evident in the light of leaked documents from the Pentagon that the war in Ukraine is a disaster. The Kiev regime is facing defeat at the hands of superior Russian forces even though that regime has been flooded with weapons by the United States and NATO. Great expectations of a Ukrainian victory that were widely predicted by Western leaders and media have been shown to be empty, contemptible lies.
The side-show of this war is a gargantuan racket. Western arms companies have raked in unprecedented profits, while the NATO-backed cabal in Kiev has skimmed off hundreds of millions of dollars. This is the same Kiev regime that is burning down Orthodox Christian churches, exterminating the Russian language, lionizing World War Two Nazi criminals, and locking up any critical opposition and media.
But the main takeaway is the lies that the United States and Western lackeys, including the entire media industry, have been telling about the proxy war in Ukraine. This war is an imperialist adventure that has been financially ruinous, has destroyed Ukraine, and is driving a dangerous all-out war with Russia and China that could turn into a nuclear armageddon.
We should not be surprised by such blatant lying and deception. President Joe Biden and his administration have been telling barefaced lies to conceal the corruption oozing out of Biden’s own family. Biden and his son Hunter have exploited Ukraine since the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014 for personal enrichment. The president has even reportedly got his senior aides to do his bidding to censor intelligence agencies and media from revealing to the public the corruption at the heart of his family. (Risibly, the truth is smeared as Russian or Chinese disinformation!)
The lies that Biden and his administration tell about personal corruption are indelibly coupled with the lies told about the proxy war in Ukraine.
It is increasingly clear that the American public, the European public, and the rest of the world have been duped in multiple ways. The phony war in Ukraine is exposing the deep, stinking well of corruption in this White House. There will be hell to pay.
Poland’s Top Military Official Shared Some Unpopular Truths About The NATO-Russian Proxy War
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | APRIL 29, 2023
The last time that Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces General Rajmund Andrzejczak generated media attention was in late January after he elaborated on how formidable Russia remained at the time, but now he’s once again making headlines for building upon this assessment. Poland’s Do Rzecy reported on his recent participation in a strategy session with the National Security Bureau, during which time he shared some unpopular truths about the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine.
Andrzejczak said that the situation doesn’t look good for Kiev at all when considering the economic dynamics of this conflict, with him drawing particular attention to finance, infrastructure issues, social issues, technology, and food production, et al. From this vantage point, he predicts that Russia can continue conducting its special operation for 1-2 more years before it begins to feel any structural pressure to curtail its activities.
By contrast, Kiev is burning through tens of billions of dollars’ worth of aid, yet it still remains very far away from achieving its maximum objectives. Andrzejczak candidly said that Poland’s Western partners aren’t properly assessing the challenges that stand in the way of Ukraine’s victory, including those connected to the “race of logistics”/ war of attrition” that the NATO chief declared in mid-February. Another serious problem concerns refugees’ unwillingness to return to their homeland anytime soon.
These economic, logistical, and population factors combined to convince him that he must urgently raise the greatest possible awareness of these problems in order to “give Ukraine a chance to build its secure future”, which in the context that he shared this motivation, is a euphemism for even more Western aid. He elaborated by adding that “As a soldier, I am also obliged to present the most unfavorable and difficult to implement variant, giving a field to all those who can and should help Ukraine.”
Nobody should therefore doubt Andrzejczak’s intentions or suspect that he’s a so-called “Russian agent” since he sincerely wants the West to win its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, but he’s also very worried that it might lose unless his side acknowledges the unpopular truths that he just shared. In his view, their failure to do so could doom Kiev to defeat, though the argument can also compellingly be made that indefinitely perpetuating this conflict like Poland seeks to do might be even more disastrous.
After all, none of the three challenges that he drew attention to can be overcome anytime soon. The only exception might be the population one, but that would entail changing EU legislation in order to allow the expulsion of refugees, which is unlikely to happen. The economic and logistical factors are systemic ones, which affect not only Ukraine, but the entire West in general. It’s simply impossible to sustain the pace, scale, and scope of the West’s multidimensional aid to Ukraine if the conflict drags on.
As Andrzejczak himself admitted, “We just don’t have ammunition. The industry is not ready not only to send equipment to Ukraine, but also to replenish our stocks, which are melting.” Considering that Poland is Ukraine’s third most important patron behind the Anglo-American Axis, this strongly suggests that all other NATO members are struggling just as much as it is to keep up the pace, scale, and scope of support, if not more since many are a lot smaller and thus less capable of contributing in this respect.
Accordingly, this observation means that Kiev’s upcoming counteroffensive will likely be its “last hurrah” prior to resuming peace talks with Russia since the West won’t be able to keep up its assistance for much longer. Andrzejczak seems keenly aware of this “politically inconvenient” fact, hence why he wants his side to give its proxies as much as possible until the end of that operation in the hopes that they can then be in a comparatively more advantageous position by the time these talks recommence.
He and those who think like him are making two very dangerous gambles: 1) they expect the upcoming counteroffensive to be at least mildly successful in gaining some ground; and 2) anticipate that Russia will agree to resume peace talks once this operation finally ends. The corresponding risks are obvious in that: 1) the counteroffensive might fail so badly that Russia exploits this disaster to gain an uncertain amount of ground instead; and/or 2) Moscow might not recommence talks upon Kiev’s request.
No responsible policymaker would take either of those variables for granted, hence why it’s arguably better if Kiev abandons its counteroffensive and accepts China’s ceasefire proposal instead of taking the growing risk that it fails and/or Russia keeps fighting knowing that Western support might soon end. Those interconnected worst-case scenarios are growing in likelihood due to the economic and logistical challenges that Andrzejczak identified, with only the chance of Russian mishaps balancing out the odds.
Nevertheless, all indications suggest that the counteroffensive will soon begin despite the serious challenges inherent in it, with this decision being driven by political factors connected with the need to show the Western public that their over $150 billion worth of aid has been spent on something tangible. Even if it ends up being a disastrous spectacle, decisionmakers are willing to take that risk, with some like Andrzejczak wanting to go all in out of desperation to score a final victory before resuming peace talks.
Has the NATO boss lost his mind?
By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | April 28, 2023
So NATO now is planning on making Ukraine a member, or at least this is the rhetoric coming from its secretary general who recently announced it. Given that the very essence of what the Ukraine war is about is membership of this 31 member defence organisation it would seem unfitting for Stoltenberg to make such an announcement, especially considering that Hungary would always veto such an idea anyway.
So what’s really behind this latest ‘news’ item? Here are the five ways to interpret the subject of Ukraine becoming a NATO member. Buckle up.
News fodder not to be taken seriously. Could Stoltenberg just be bluffing? It’s quite possible, given the lack of any progress or battle victories on the side of Ukraine that he is concerned about the lull in media coverage and needs to throw the journalists a bone to chew on, to distract them away from reporting “Ukraine is losing the war”. And this NATO membership subject would certainly do that for a couple of weeks while Ukrainian troops cede defeat in Bakhmut which is slowly being taken by Russia. Although this town is not considered a ‘prize’ by either side, it is still a crush to the morale of Ukrainian forces who have taken heavy losses and will always be a negative talking point for western journalists – or the few who at least decide to report on Ukraine’s loss there.
Preparing for NATO troops to fight in Ukraine. It is entirely possible that NATO members and its chief are in a panic mode now that well over 100 bn dollars given to the Ukrainians in the last year seems to have vanished in terms of battlefield hardware with no real progress in sight; and also that the spring offensive which Ukraine is preparing – which would probably target the Crimean bridge and strategic towns like Mariupol – is being prepared for but is highly risky. For Ukraine to make any headway the offensive needs to be bold and this all-or-nothing game plan is worrying NATO as, in the event of heavy losses, it will push the West into a corner in how they explain this to their own voters (especially with U.S. election campaigning expected to start at the end of the summer). Are things so desperate that the Plan B that Stoltenberg has is that NATO troops – probably from eastern European countries that have the most to lose – will be sent to Ukraine? And that this NATO membership story is a ruse to prepare the west for this scenario as if NATO were to make Ukraine a member immediately, then, in theory Article 5 would apply and it would be an automatic process to send other NATO troops there?
Preparing for mercenaries from neo-Nazi groups in Europe to be sent there. This notion could well be the compromise for going full throttle on NATO membership and sending troops to Ukraine. Instead, would western countries consider looking at their own neo-Nazi groups and consider sending them on an informal basis with maximum plausible deniability that this is official policy? This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. In the UK in 2011, the security services gave full support to young Libyan men to travel there and fight with Al Qaeda groups against Ghaddafi so why wouldn’t they allow skinheads to travel to Ukraine in great numbers to fight Russians while keeping their social security benefits at home?
Guarantee that no negotiation for peace can take place. One of the nightmare scenarios for the West, in particular the U.S., is that Zelensky can’t keep his side of the bargain and looks to end the war. NATO and the U.S. clearly would like to rule this out and so how to do it without causing too much of a fall-out? Announce NATO membership as an incentive for when the war is over. But this narrative is too hard for the Ukrainian president to swallow given the losses that he is enduring on a daily basis and for the promises made for military hardware to bear fruit and in time. It seems a neat, swift and clever way of ruling out any peace talks between the U.S. and Russia also. One clean blow.
Panic after Zelensky reached out to China to broker peace. The problem with the former plan about guaranteeing that peace talks are blocked between U.S. and Russia is of course it swings the spotlight onto other superpowers, or the main one, in fact, China to step up to the mark. It must be incredibly frustrating for the Biden administration and the NATO boss to read in the newspaper at the end of February that Zelensky is openly asking the Chinese premier to come to Ukraine and to “call” him. There can be no grey area here with this appeal. Zelensky wants China to broker a peace deal as he knows it is impossible for his own sponsors and so-called allies to do so. This, on its own, may well explain a certain panic reaction by the U.S. which has been felt by the NATO boss as well and both of these camps are looking at “when shit hits the fan” scenarios of boots on the ground.
NATO wants Georgia involved in its proxy war with Russia
By Lucas Leiroz | April 28, 2023
The current crisis in Georgia has been news on media outlets around the world. However, few analysts have paid attention to the real reason why so much instability is being fomented in the country. Indeed, Tbilisi seems to be the new focus for western warmongers. NATO plans to bring Georgia into a conflict with Russia. This will allow the West to open a new flank and distract Moscow by forcing it to send troops to yet another battlefield.
While the wave of violent protests has decreased its strength the crisis in Georgia appears far from over. Destabilizing forces are boosting the social and institutional chaos in order for the government to make decisions in favor of foreign interests. This is becoming increasingly clear as domestic players are formally calling on Western countries to impose sanctions on Georgia to advance pro-NATO and anti-Russian agendas.
In April, former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili formally requested that the Collective West sanction his own country. According to Saakashvili, currently imprisoned on serious charges of abuse of power and other crimes, with Western coercive measures, Georgia would be forced to release him and thus increase civil and political freedoms. On the occasion, he emphasized that the US and Europe would be the global defenders of democracy, decency and justice, and should therefore react to the supposedly “pro-Russian” tendencies of the current Georgian government – which he accuses of complying with “orders” from Moscow.
The case is particularly curious as it echoes the current Georgian domestic political situation. The opposition to the government uses as its main rhetoric a supposed connection of the Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili with Russia. No evidence of his alleged connection with Moscow is presented, other than his resistance to being actively involved in the Ukrainian conflict – in addition to his wise attitude to avoid fomenting new security crises in the separatist regions on the border with Russia.
When anti-government protests began in March, the signs of foreign interference to promote anti-Russian policies were already obvious. In the streets of Tbilisi, protesters held Ukrainian flags and sang the Ukrainian national anthem, as well as war songs of the neo-Nazi regime. President Vladimir Zelensky himself went public to thank the protesters for their support and said that “there is no Ukrainian who would not want the success of our friendly Georgia”, in addition to calling the demonstrations a “democratic success. European success”.
It is important to remember that at the height of the protests, these pro-instability actions were supported by the country’s own president, the native Frenchwoman Salome Zurabishvili, who expressed strong opposition to the government and parliament for the approval of a law against foreign espionage. Being a foreign agent on Georgian soil herself, Zurabishvili echoed Western rhetoric demanding special registration for NGOs funded by international groups would be a kind of abusive or dictatorial attitude.
In fact, these attitudes on the part of the opposition to the current Prime Minister are not by chance – these moves indicate a coordinated action to pressure Georgia to act incisively in favor of Western interests. Zurabishvili, before becoming the country’s president, had served as foreign minister, standing out for her extremely pro-NATO work. In the same vein, former President Saakashvili, who is now demanding Western sanctions to pressure the government to release him, was recognizably a US-backed head of state, largely responsible for provocations against pro-Russian border regions during the 2008 conflict. He also gained asylum in post-Maidan Ukraine, even being governor of Odessa during the Poroshenko era.
The fact that politicians like Zurabishvili and Saakashvili are acting incisively to foment polarization and protests within Georgia, in addition to sanctions and external pressure at the international level, shows that there is indeed a Western plan for Tbilisi to take an openly anti-Russian position in the current NATO proxy war with Moscow. This scenario reflects the current strategy of the Atlantic alliance, which seems focused on the multiplication of battlefields. The more conflict zones, the better for the Western powers, which want to harm Russia as much as possible, causing it to lose troops and weapons.
Many analysts believe that the West is currently about to “admit” its failure in Ukraine, which is why, in order to safeguard its global hegemony, NATO’s new focus would be to fight against China, which is seen by the US as a weaker adversary and against which there are more chances of victory in direct military confrontation. But for a war against China to be viable, it would be necessary to prevent Moscow from helping Beijing on the battlefield, which would explain the attempt to distract the Russians with multiple conflicts in the Eurasian space.
In this military context, forcing Georgia to assume a fully pro-NATO and anti-Russian foreign policy would be a great victory for the West. As long as the Georgian government continues to avoid involvement in the conflict, international pressure and the foment of internal color revolution will remain. Certainly, chaos in the country will continue to be stimulated by foreign agents until the government agrees to send troops to provoke the Russians in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, opening a new front in NATO’s war of aggression.
Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
NATO Could Send Troops to Western Ukraine if Kiev’s Spring Offensive Fails – Here’s Why
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 26.04.2023
Mainstream reporting related to the so-called “Pentagon leaks” about the DoD’s sobering assessment of the real state of the NATO-Russia proxy conflict in Ukraine has brought the “do or die” pressure facing Kiev into focus. Without a decisive victory, Kiev may be pushed into ceasefire talks, says international affairs expert Mark Sleboda.
Anonymous Biden administration officials told US media this week that the White House is “quietly preparing” for the contingency of Ukrainian forces failing to gain any significant ground against Russia during Kiev’s much-hyped spring offensive, and for the reputational blow this might have for Washington via-a-vis other allies and clients. Administration officials reportedly also fear that a failed or stalled offensive could result in attacks on the White House at home both by hawks pushing for even more aid to Kiev, and doves arguing that the Ukrainian Army’s failure would prove that Russia can’t be ejected from Crimea, Donbass, and its new territories.
Officials are reportedly mulling pushing Zelensky into a “ceasefire” to enable Kiev to retool and reequip for a resumption of the conflict at a later date, with measures meant to prod the Zelensky government into accepting including “NATO-like security guarantees,” EU economic support, and more military aid.
“I think this is actually one in a series of articles that have come out in the last few weeks, including the so-called ‘Pentagon Leaks’ which I think most Russian analysts believe are just another narrative management tool,” Mark Sleboda said, speaking to Radio Sputnik’s The Final Countdown radio show on Tuesday.
The latest piece in the MSM hyping the prospects of a possible Ukrainian defeat isn’t the first, Sleboda recalled, pointing to another recent legacy media piece from last week warning that a “breakthrough” in the conflict may not come at all in 2023, and that observers should lower their expectations of Ukraine advancing more than 30 km.
“So [there’s a] lowering [of] expectations, lowering the bar for success. Now we have twin articles coming out of Politico, but also The New York Times coming out within 24 hours of each other. And the Times tells us that ‘Ukraine’s spring offensive comes with immense stakes for future of the war’ and that without a decisive victory, Western support for Ukraine could weaken and Kiev could come under increasing pressure to enter serious peace talks to end or freeze the conflict,” the observer noted.
Characterizing the expected Ukrainian offensive as “the most telegraphed offensive in history,” Sleboda said that naturally, reality “cannot possibly” live up to the hype as far as objectives are concerned.
“And again, the mainstream media, The Washington Post, The New York Times have done features about how Russia has been, for the last half year, building up extensive layered trench networks, fortified concrete fortifications, pillboxes, tank obstacles like dragon teeth, etc., and very extensive minefields laid out in advance… We have seen the Kiev regime go on the offensive before against Russian troops that weren’t even half as well dug-in in Kherson. And it’s now acknowledged that Russian forces withdrew, but without taking any significant casualties. They withdrew tactically to avoid being enveloped, but they inflicted crippling casualties because the Ukrainian forces were charging across open steppe into superior artillery, rocket systems, and air dominance,” the analyst said.
Russia could afford to give up territory in the past because they’re “fighting a different type of conflict,” according to Sleboda, prioritizing force preservation and attrition warfare meant to “grind down the Kiev regime’s military and now effectively NATO as well, because NATO is 100% supplying the regime at this point.”
‘Talking Smack About Crimea’
Among Kiev’s formal priorities is a long-promised attack on Crimea. That’s a fantasy, Sleboda believes, since even without a Kherson-Zaporozhye “land bridge” linking Crimea to the Russian mainland, the peninsula is just too tough a nut to crack.
“Of course, they talk a lot of smack about Crimea, which is ridiculous, because Crimea is a peninsula, geographically a very difficult target to attack, very heavily defended with a 95% pro-Russian population. It’s ridiculous,” the observer stressed. The reality, he added, is that even officials like Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley have recognized that Kiev has no chance of “retaking” the peninsula.
“It’s perfectly obvious from the articles being put out today that now they don’t believe they could even get to that administrative border, nowhere close to it. I don’t believe so either. They may push Russian forces back a bit. But they talked about it in The New York Times back in December even, that the Biden administration, speaking through their stenographers anonymously, said ‘we don’t think that they can take Crimea, but we need to have the Russians believe Crimea is under threat to improve the Kiev regime’s negotiating position in future negotiations.’ They think they can get Russia to withdraw from Kherson and Zaporozhye and be satisfied with just the Donbass and Crimea. That’s their thinking. That’s why they don’t consider Bakhmut strategic, unlike Zelensky, who is trying to hold on to it all, because the US has written the Donbass off. They know that it’s an overwhelmingly pro-Russian area, that Russia has invested an enormous amount of political capital with the referendums there, but they think they can still get them to give up on Kherson and Zaporozhye, which also held referendums, by the way,” Sleboda said.
Sleboda pointed to the Times’ admission that the 12 new Ukrainian combat brigades of 4,000 troops apiece formed for the spring offensive – which are expected to be ready by the end of the month, are “raw recruits with a small core of experienced veteran soldiers,” and that they are equipped with handfuls of more modern NATO tanks and armored vehicles accompanied by much older equipment, and facing a big disadvantage in artillery and control of airspace.
Even the debate over deliveries of the much-vaunted F-16 fighters to Kiev is “all political,” according to the observer, because it takes years to train to use them, and Washington may prefer to save them, along with the ATACMS missiles long demanded by Kiev, for a possible war against China in the Pacific.
‘New Domino Theory’ and Danger of WWIII
Pointing to the “new domino theory” that’s being pushed by neocons and neoliberals in Washington on the need to prop up Kiev at all costs, or face Taiwan “falling” to China, Sleboda fears that if push comes to shove and Kiev suffers a major defeat on the battlefield, NATO may be tempted to intervene directly in the crisis to prevent its global defeat.
“I believe that if the Kiev regime suffers a catastrophic defeat and NATO can’t filter more weapons useful to them through them, they might consider what I’ve talked about for maybe half a year now – sending US and Polish troops, maybe Romanians, the Baltics, the Brits – a new ‘coalition of the willing’ as ‘peacekeepers’ into western Ukraine. To tell you the truth Russia would probably yell and scream, but they don’t really want to occupy West Ukraine because unlike East Ukraine, they really do hate Russia over there. It would be very hostile guerilla territory. That’s the part of Ukraine that sided with Nazi Germany in World War II and is resurrecting all of that type of anti-Russian, Banderite fascist glorification today,” Sleboda said.
Ultimately, the main issue of concern for the analyst is Odessa – the strategic, majority Russian-speaking seaport. “If the Kiev regime loses that, then they’re a landlocked little rump state, and the US [has] got the 101st Airborne just across the border in Romania exactly to step across as a tripwire force into Odessa. And that’s the scenario that keeps me up at night. That’s the World War III scenario, as far as I’m concerned [it] is a possible direct NATO-Russia fight over Odessa because I do not believe for a second that Russia would allow Odessa to become a US naval base,” Sleboda summed up.
Ukraine’s NATO membership “unacceptable” – Slovak parliamentarian
By Lucas Leiroz | April 26, 2023
A prominent Slovakian politician recently stated that the Atlantic military alliance must stop raising “false hopes” in Ukraine about NATO membership in the future. The parliamentarian’s words reinforce what had already been said for a long time about the infeasibility of accepting the entry of a country under military conflict into the western coalition. It remains to be seen whether NATO leaders will actually observe the Slovak request.
The statement was made by the speaker of the Slovak parliament, Boris Kollar. He warned that the alliance should make clear the impossibility of a Ukrainian membership, given that Kiev is currently in a military conflict. Kollar said that welcoming Ukraine into the alliance would be “unacceptable” for most member countries. He also stated that he considers the absence of a definitive answer on the topic to be irresponsible, as this would generate “false hopes” in the candidate country.
“A country in the midst of a military conflict cannot possibly join NATO. It is unacceptable. I think it would never be ratified by the member states. It is very irresponsible to raise false hopes about it,” Kollar said during an interview to a Slovak news channel.
During a European interparliamentary conference in Prague, Kollar also warned about the risks of war and unprecedented violence in Europe, since the entry of Ukraine would lead to the alliance immediately triggering the collective defense clause, creating a scenario of world conflict. Therefore, Kollar stated that the matter should not be considered appropriate for now, but that there would be no objections if peace was achieved in Ukraine.
Kollar’s words come as a response to a recent statement by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, in which the leader stated that Kiev would be part of the “Euro-Atlantic family” and that all member states had agreed that “Ukraine will become a NATO member.” The pronouncement seems untrue and somewhat hypocritical, since, despite not ruling out Kiev, the alliance has avoided moving forward with the membership process, delaying as much as possible the discussions around the issue. However, there are a number of reasons why Stoltenberg and other alliance leaders are continuing to hold these “false hopes” for Kiev.
Indeed, the possibility of admission to NATO is a central factor in keeping the Ukrainian war machine active. Kiev’s armed forces continue to fight the Russians because they have the hope of full integration into the West. There is a strong belief among Ukrainians that the deployment of regular NATO troops will also become a reality in the future, as they really believe in the existence of an international alliance against “Russian aggression”, being deceived by their own propaganda.
Regardless of the viability of Ukrainian membership in the alliance, these hopes need to be maintained, otherwise Ukrainian soldiers will certainly feel “betrayed” and “abandoned”, resulting in phenomena such as mass surrender, desertions and disobedience of orders from superiors. This would be Ukraine’s “moral defeat” and would lead in the short term to defeat on the battlefield as well. So, to avoid this kind of situation and keep the troops’ morale high, the West needs to keep giving Kiev hope.
For Western public opinion, the situation is a little more complicated. Although exposed to every form of pro-Kiev propaganda – added to the censorship of pro-Russia content – ordinary citizens of NATO and EU countries do not want to engage in a world-scale war, which is why Ukrainian membership would face high popular resistance, possibly leading to waves of mass protest and crises in the legitimacy of local governments. However, at the same time, if NATO officially rules out Ukrainian membership, it is possible that public opinion, which is constantly brainwashed by pro-Kiev media, will also react badly and feel that their governments “betrayed” Ukraine.
For these reasons, the discourse is uncertain, ambiguous and focused on maintaining “false hopes”. Stoltenberg makes it clear that he agrees with the Ukrainian membership, but says that this will happen “in the future”, keeping the project as something distant and not in need of immediate discussion. The problem is that this ambiguity and uncertainty does not please the leaders of member countries of lesser relevance in the alliance, as in the case of Slovakia and some others. These states do not participate in the bloc’s superstructure and their voices are rarely heard by NATO’s central command. In practice, the result of this is that these nations really do not know whether or not in the near future they will be forced to send their troops to war against Russia.
In this sense, the words of the top Slovakian parliamentarian express the real desire of some NATO countries: to obtain the certainty that they will not need to get involved in a big war in the near future. While they want to integrate with the West and support Kiev, these states are not willing to accept their own annihilation just to fulfill the promise of Ukrainian membership.
Lucas Leiroz is a journalist and a researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
Who gains from a forever war in Ukraine?
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | APRIL 26, 2023
The newly elected president of the Czech Republic Petr Pavel is an unusual European politician. He is the second president in his country with a military background but the first without political experience.
He never saw combat duty and is an arm chair military strategist but lionised as a “senior NATO leader” — whatever that may mean. The high noon of Pavel’s professional career in the military was reached in 1993 when while serving in the UN Protection Force in Bosnia, he led a team of 29 soldiers to evacuate a French military outpost under siege by Serbian soldiers, which he executed after overcoming obstacles that slowed down the operation such as fallen trees which his soldiers had to remove from the road. France decorated Pavel.
At any rate, the 61-year old soldier-politician has hit the road running when barely 7 weeks into his new job as head of state, Pavel threw a curve ball claiming China cannot be a reliable mediator between Russia and Ukraine due to Beijing’s secret craving for “more war.”
Pavel assessed that China gets cheap oil, gas, and other resources from Moscow in exchange for promises of “partnership” and its interest lies in prolonging the status quo “because it can push Russia to a number of concessions.”
These remarks could have been dismissed as those of a greenhorn but for his fame as a “senior NATO leader” and the Czech Republic’s reputation as a chattel and cats-paw of Washington. Hence the big question: What is the Biden administration up to?
The obvious thing will be that Pavel’s remark on “cheap” oil and gas from Russia to China is a gross simplification of a complicated story. Europe was receiving Russian gas and oil for decades at low prices on the basis of long-term contracts until the EU, under American pressure, took the idiotic decision to sanction Russia.
Whereupon, Russia turned to other markets, principally Asian, China being one of them. The rest is history. What’s the point of sitting upon the ground and telling sad stories?
Europeans should feel worried that even after the war ends, once Russia diversifies its export markets, they may never again get “cheap” Russian gas. (By the way, China is not the only beneficiary, as Europeans who continue to buy Russian oil and petroleum products from Indian companies at much higher prices would know!)
Pavel spoke in the context of the expected announcement by Joe Biden seeking the presidency once again in 2024. One hugely consequential part of Biden’s announcement on Tuesday is that the prospect of the Ukraine war ending between now and 2024 November elections in the US can now be deemed as practically nil.
The only way it can happen otherwise is if the US outright wins the war and candidate Biden claims victory. But the reaction from Moscow shows that what is in the cards is an escalation in Ukraine that is fraught with great risk of a direct conflict between Russia and the US.
Top Kremlin officials came out on Tuesday with a spate of statements on an impending showdown with the Biden administration. The Russian media disclosed that Russia’s new state-of-the-art Armata T-14 main battle tank has been deployed on the Ukrainian front lines.
Moscow anticipates large scale US interference in Russia’s internal politics to create conditions that would undermine the country’s stability, as part of a grand design to trigger a break-up of the Russian Federation, as had happened to the former Soviet Union. (here)
Moscow estimates that the Biden administration will try hard to bring about a regime change in the Kremlin. Above all, Moscow no longer rules out that the US escalation in Ukraine may aim to create conditions posing grave threat to the Russian state. ( here)
The former president Dmitry Medvedev vividly spoke of such a scenario warning explicitly that Russia may be compelled to resort to first use of nuclear arms if its existence is threatened, underscoring that paragraph 19 of the country’s nuclear doctrine states that nuclear weapons “can be used when aggression is carried out against Russia with the use of other types of weapons that endanger the very existence of the state. It is essentially the use of nuclear weapons in response to such actions. Our potential adversaries should not underestimate this.”
Specifically, with reference to Biden’s mental health and failing faculties, Medvedev also tweeted: “Biden has made the decision, after all. A daring geezer. In place of the American military, I would immediately make a fake trunk with false nuclear codes in case he wins, so as to avoid fatal consequences.”
On the other hand, the spectre that haunts the Biden administration is that Europe cannot easily extricate itself from its relationship with China and it is the interests of Old Europe’s economic heartlands that will ultimately determine EU policy.
Make no mistake, just 3 countries of Old Europe — France, Italy and Germany — account for more than a half of EU’s GDP and they also happen to be China’s largest trading partners in the EU. Amidst the brouhaha over French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent endorsement of a close industrial relationship with China, what has gone unnoticed is that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is on the same page as Macron. Equally so with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The European industry is also loathe to lose China as a privileged trading partner, after having lost Britain and Russia.
New Europeans like Pavel may have different priorities, being the strongest trans-atlanticists in the EU, but East Europe makes up just 10% of the EU’s GDP and does not speak for the EU, despite the media hype its leaders have lately enjoyed as “frontline states”, due to Anglo-American patronage.
Suffice to say, there is trepidation in the American mind as to whether the EU will follow the US into a confrontational position with China in the coming months, or would strive to become more independent of the US, with all the consequences that would ensue. Equally, from the viewpoint of Old Europe, the gnawing doubt is whether a future US administration would want to align with Europe even if Europe were to align with the US.
On balance, it is difficult to visualise the EU fully aligning with the US in an all-out conflict with China over Taiwan, agree to freeze Chinese official reserves as it did last year with Russia, and stop investing in China.
The EU economy is simply not built for cold-war style relations, as it has become too dependent on global supply chains. All things taken into account, therefore, the strong likelihood is that the pro-China lobby in Germany will win this debate. In fact, in the process, the Franco-German alliance may be rekindled, too.
Pavel’s demonisation of China as an evil spirit stalking Europe can be put in perspective. His is a surrogate voice mouthing Biden’s angst that as the Ukrainian military is comprehensively ground down in the battlefields by the Russian forces in the months ahead, Europe may join hands with China to bring the war to an end.
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Book Review
The Greatest Threat to World Peace? A Review of Daniele Ganser’s ‘USA: The Ruthless Empire’
Review by Marilyn Langlois | November 10, 2023
If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .
If you want to promote peace but haven’t yet explored deceptive events that precipitate US warmongering . . .
. . . here is a volume that will clear the air and paint an honest picture of the significant, not-so-rosy impact US foreign policy and actions have had in the world around us.
USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, is the newly published English language translation of his book Imperium USA, originally written in German and published in 2020. Here is a summary of key points — including some lesser-known ones — along with remedies for a more peaceful future, that are covered in the book. … continue
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