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How Could Western Intelligence Have Got It Wrong, Again? They Didn’t. They Had Other Purposes

By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 6, 2023

Larry Johnson, an ex-CIA analyst, writes “I no longer hold clearances and have not had access to the classified intelligence assessments. However, I have heard that the finished intelligence being supplied to U.S. policymakers continues to declare that Russia is on the ropes – and their economy is crumbling. Also, analysts insist that the Ukrainians are beating the Russians”.

Johnson responds that – lacking valid human sources – “western agencies are almost wholly dependent today on ‘liaison reporting’” (i.e., from ‘friendly’ foreign intelligence services), without doing ‘due diligence’ by cross-checking discrepancies with other reporting.

In practice, this largely means western reporting simply replicates Kiev’s PR line. But there does occur a huge problem when marrying Kiev’s output (as Johnson says) to UK reports – for ‘corroboration’.

The reality is UK reporting itself is also based on what Ukraine is saying. This is known as false collateral – i.e., when that which is used for corroboration and validation actually derives from the same single source. It becomes – deliberately – a propaganda multiplier.

In plain words however, all these points are ‘red herrings’. Bluntly, so-called western ‘Intelligence’ is no longer the sincere attempt to understand a complex reality, but rather, it has become the tool to falsify a nuanced reality in order to attempt to manipulate the Russian psyche towards a collective defeatism (in respect not just to the Ukraine, but to the idea that Russia should remain as a sovereign whole).

And – to the extent that ‘lies’ are fabricated to accustom the Russian public to inevitable defeat – the obverse edge clearly is intended to train the western public towards the ‘groupthink’ that victory is inevitable. And that Russia is an ‘unreformed evil Empire’ which threatens all Europe.

This is no accident. It is highly purposeful. It is behavioural psychology at work. The ‘head-spinning’ disorientation created throughout the Covid pandemic; the constant rain of ‘data-driven’ model analysis, the labelling of anything critical of the ‘uniform messaging’ as anti-social disinformation – enabled western governments to persuade their citizens that ‘lockdown’ was the only rational answer to the virus. It was not true (as we now know), but the ‘pilot’ behavioural nudge-psychology trial worked better – better even than its own architects had imagined.

Professor of Clinical Psychology, Mattias Desmet, has explained that mass disorientation does not form in a vacuum. It arises, throughout history, from a collective psychosis that has followed a predictable script:

Just as with lockdown, governments have used behavioural psychology to instil fear and isolation to mass large groups of people into herds, where toxic sneering at any contrariness cold-shoulders all critical thinking or analysis. It is more comfortable being inside the herd, than out.

The dominant characteristic here is remaining loyal to the group – even when the policy is working badly and its consequences disturb the conscience of members. Loyalty to the group becomes the highest form of morality. That loyalty requires each member to avoid raising controversial issues, questioning weak arguments, or calling a halt to wishful thinking.

The ‘Groupthink’ allows some self-imagined reality to detach; to drift further and further from any connection to reality, and then to transit into delusion – always drawing on like-minded peer cheerleaders for its validation and extended radicalisation.

So, it’s ‘goodbye’ to traditional Intelligence! And ‘welcome’ to western Intelligence 101: Geo-Politics no longer revolves around a grasp on Reality. It is about the installation of ideological pseudo-realism – which is the universal installation of a singular groupthink, such that everyone lives passively by it, until it is far too late to change course.

Superficially, this may seem clever new psyops – even ‘cool’. It is not. It is dangerous. By deliberately working on deeply ingrained fears and trauma (i.e. the Great Patriotic War for Russians (WW2)), it awakens a type of multi-generational existential plight within the collective unconscious – that of total annihilation – which is a danger that America has never faced, and towards which there is zero American empathetic understanding.

Perhaps, by resurrecting long, collective memories of plague in European countries (such as Italy) western governments have found that they were able to mobilise their citizens around a policy of coercion, that otherwise ran wholly against their own interests. But nations have their own distinct myths and civilisational mores.

If that were the purpose (to acclimatise Russians to defeat and ultimate Balkanisation), Western propaganda has not only failed, but it has achieved the converse. Russians have coalesced closely together against an existential western threat – and are prepared to ‘go to the wall’, if necessary, in defeating it. (Let those implications sink in.)

On the other hand, falsely promoting a picture of inevitable success for the West inevitably has raised expectations of a political outcome that is not only not feasible, but which recedes further into the far horizon, as these fantastical claims of Russian setbacks persuade European leaders that Russia can accept an outcome in line with their constructed false reality.

Another ‘own goal’: The West now faces the task of de-fusing the landmine of their own electorate’s conviction of a Ukraine ‘win’, and of Russian humiliation and decomposition. There will be anger and further distrust for the Élites in the West to follow. Existential risk ensues when people believe nothing the élites say.

Plainly put, this resort to clever ‘nudge theories’ has succeeded only in toxifying the prospect for political discourse. Neither the U.S. nor Russia can now move directly to pure political discourse :

Firstly, the parties inevitably must come to some tacit psychological assimilation of two quite dis-connected realities, now hyped into palpable, vital beings through these psychological ‘Intelligence’ techniques. There will be no acceptance by either side of the validity or moral rightness of the Other Reality’s, yet its emotive contents must be acknowledged psychically – together with the traumas underlying them – if politics is to be unlocked.

In short, this western exaggerated psyops perversely is likely to lengthen the war until facts-on-the ground finally grind the contrasting expectations closer to what may be the ‘new possible’. Ultimately, when perceived realities cannot be ‘matched’ and nuanced, war rubs one or the other into more emollient form.

The degeneracy in western intelligence did not start with the recent collective ‘excitement’ at the possibilities of ‘nudge-psychology’. The first steps in this direction began with a shift in ethos reaching back to the Clinton/Thatcher era in which the intelligence services were ‘neo-liberalised’.

No longer was the role of ‘devil’s advocate’ – of bringing ‘bad news’ (i.e. hard-edged Realism) to the relevant political leadership valued; instead what was inserted was a radical shift towards ‘Business School’ practice of services being tasked with ‘adding value’ to existing government policies, and (even) of creating ‘a market’ system in Intelligence!

The politician-managers demanded ‘good news’. And to make ‘it stick’, funding was tied to the ‘value added’ – with administrators skilled at managing bureaucracy moved into leadership jobs. It marked the end to classical Intelligence – which always was an art, rather than science.

In short, it was the outset to fixing the intelligence around policies (to add value), rather than the traditional function of shaping policies to sound analysis.

In the U.S., the politicisation of intelligence reached its apex with Dick Cheney’s initiation of a Team ‘B’ intelligence unit reporting personally to him. It was intended to furnish the anti-intelligence to combat the intelligence service output. Of course, the Team ‘B’ initiative shook confidence amongst the analysts, and by-passed the work of the traditional cadre – just as Cheney had intended. (He had a war (the Iraq war) to justify).

But there were separately other structural shifts. Firstly, by 2000, woke narcissism had begun to eclipse strategic thought –creating its own novel groupthink. The West just could not shake off the sense of itself at the centre of the Universe (albeit no longer in a racial sense, but via its awakening to ‘victim politics’ – requiring endless redress and reparations – and such woke values serendipitously seemed to anoint the West with a renewed global ‘moral primacy’).

In a parallel shift, U.S. neo-cons piggy-backed on this new woke universalism to cement the meme of ‘Empire matters primordially’. The unspoken corollary to this, of course, is that original values of the American Republic or of Europe, cannot be re-conceived and brought forward into the present, as long as ‘liberal’ Empire groupthink configures them as a threat to western security. This conundrum and struggle lies at the heart of U.S. politics today.

Yet the question remains just how can the intelligence being supplied to U.S. policymakers insist that Russia is imploding economically, and that Ukraine is winning – against what can be easily observed facts on the ground?

Well, no problem; Washington think-tanks have big, big finance from the Military Industrial World, with the preponderance of these funds going to the neo-cons – and their insistence that Russia is a small ‘gas-station’ posing as a state, and not a power to be taken seriously.

Neo-con claws tear at anyone gain-saying their ‘line’ – and think-tanks employ an army of ‘analysts’ to turn out ‘academic’ reports suggesting that Russia’s industry – to the extent it exists at all – is imploding. Since last March, western military and economic experts have been regularly-as-clockwork, predicting that Russia has run out of missiles, drones, tanks and artillery shells – and is expending its manpower throwing human-waves of untrained troops upon the Ukrainian siege lines.

The logic is plain, but again flawed. If a combined NATO struggles to supply artillery shells, Russia with the economy the size of a small EU state (logically) must be worse off. And if only we (the U.S.) threaten China hard enough against supplying Russia, then the latter will ultimately run out of munitions – and NATO supported Ukraine ‘will win’.

The logic then is that a war prolonged (until the money runs out) must deliver a Russia bereft of munitions, and NATO-supplied Ukraine ‘wins’.

This framing is entirely wrong because of conceptual differences: Russian history is one of Total War that is fought in a long, ‘all-out’, uncompromising engagement against an overwhelming peer force. But inherent to this idea, is its all-important grounding in the conviction that such wars are fought over the course of years, with their outcomes conditioned by the capacity to surge military production.

Conceptually, the U.S. shifted in the 1980s away from its post-war military-industrial paradigm, to off-shore manufacturing to Asia and to ‘just-in-time’ supply lines. Effectively, the U.S. (and the West) shifted in the opposite direction to ‘surge capacity’, whereas Russia did not: It kept alive the notion of sustainment which had contributed to saving Russia during the Great Patriotic War.

So, western intelligence services again got it wrong; they misread the reality? No, they didn’t get it ‘wrong’. Their purpose was different.

The few who got it right were mercilessly caricatured as stooges to make them seem absurd. And Intelligence 101 was re-conceived as the purposeful denialism of all off-Team thinking, whilst the majority of western citizens would live passively in the embrace the groupthink – until too late for them to awaken, and to change the dangerous course on which their societies were embarked.

Unverified Ukrainian reports (liaison reporting) served up to western leaders therefore is not a ‘glitch’ – it is a ‘feature’ of the new Intelligence 101 paradigm intended to confuse and dull its electorate.

March 7, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

Silence is not an option, and sending weapons to Ukraine perpetuates the war

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | March 6, 2023

As is usually the case in long wars, the warring parties and their affiliated media in the Russia-Ukraine conflict have painted each other using uncompromising language, making it nearly impossible to offer an unbiased view of the ongoing tragedy that has killed, wounded and displaced millions of people.

While it is understandable that wars of such horror and near complete disregard for the most basic human rights often heighten our sense of what we consider to be moral and just, parties involved and invested in such conflicts often manipulate morality for political and geopolitical reasons. This logic is underway in Ukraine. Both sides are adamant that nothing less than a comprehensive victory is acceptable. The Ukrainian view is fully supported by western countries in word and deed, sending billions of dollars’ worth of modern weapons that have done little except make an already bloody conflict worse. They perpetuate the war, not end it.

The Russians hardly see their war in Ukraine as a war against Ukraine itself. In his speech on the first anniversary of the war, Russian President Vladimir Putin presented the war as an act of self-defence. “They are the ones who started this war, and we are using our forces to put a stop to it,” said Putin in a joint session of the Russian Parliament and Kremlin officials.

NATO members have also characterised the war using similar language. “We are fighting Russia,” said Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. Although her statement was withdrawn later on, Baerbock was actually being honest: NATO and Russia are, indeed, at war.

The narratives of both sides, however, are both complex and polarised. To even attempt to offer a third view on the war, or to even approach the subject in a purely analytical manner, immediately qualifies one to be accused of being “biased” one way or the other. Each side believes that its version of the truth is moral, historically defensible and consistent with international law. As a result, many reasonable people find themselves retreating in silence.

Silence is an immoral position, especially during times of war and human suffering. Anyone who thinks otherwise should think again. In Islamic theology, it is accepted that, “Anyone who refrains himself from speaking the truth is a mute devil.” This maxim is shared by most modern philosophies and political ideologies. Among many such statements addressing the matter, one of the most powerful assertions by Dr Martin Luther King Jr. was, “The day we see truth and cease to speak is the day we begin to die.”

Yet, there is no single truth on the Ukraine war that can remain fully truthful after being placed within a larger context. The war on Ukraine is indeed illegal; but the preceding civil war in Donbas and the violated Minsk agreements at the behest of Western powers — as admitted by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel — were also immoral and illegal. In fact, none of these acts can be analysed accurately or understood fairly, without considering the others.

A year after the war started, more fuel has been added to the fire, as if the main goal behind the war is prolonging it. Concurrently, very few proposals for peace talks have been advanced or considered. Even a proposal made by former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, hardly a peacenik, was dismissed almost immediately by the pro-Ukraine camp. When someone like Kissinger is accused of being a compromiser, we can be certain that the political discourse on the war has reached a degree of extremism unprecedented in decades.

Aside from the morality of speaking out against the continued war, and the immorality of silence, there is another matter deserving of our attention. It is not simply a dispute between Russia and its allies on one hand, and Ukraine and NATO on the other. It is affecting all of us.

A comprehensive study conducted by researchers from the Universities of Birmingham, Groningen and Maryland examined the possible effect of the war on household incomes in 116 different countries. The study created a model for the future, based on what millions of people around the world, especially in the Global South, are already experiencing. It looks bleak. Just the fact that energy prices could force an individual household to spend anywhere between 2.7 to 4.8 per cent more is enough to push 78 to 114 million people into extreme poverty. Since hundreds of millions already live in extreme poverty, a massive section of the human race will no longer be able to afford proper food, drinkable water, education, healthcare or shelter.

Hence, our silence on the inhumanity and futility of the war in Ukraine is not only immoral, but also constitutes a betrayal of the fate of hundreds of millions of people around the world. This is why the war in Ukraine must end, even if one party is not fully and comprehensively defeated; even if NATO’s geopolitical interests are not served; and even if not all of Russia’s goals, whatever they are, are achieved.

The war should end because, regardless of the outcome, long-term instability in that region will not cease completely any time soon; and because millions of innocent people are suffering and will continue to suffer, in Ukraine and around the world as a direct result of the conflict. And because only political compromises through peace negotiations can put an end to this horror.

March 6, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

War and Propaganda in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict

BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • MARCH 6, 2023

We recently passed the first anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war and the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy review of the twelve months of the conflict, summarizing what had happened and describing future prospects, an article that attracted more than 2,500 comments.

  • Ukraine Is the West’s War Now
    The initial reluctance of the U.S. and its allies to help Kyiv fight Russia has turned into a massive program of military assistance, which carries risks of its own
    Yaroslav Trofimov • The Wall Street Journal • February 25, 2023 • 2,800 Words

Although hardly critical of our involvement, the writer noted that America and its allies had already provided Ukraine with an astonishing $120 billion in military equipment and money, a figure far larger than Russia’s entire defense budget, with further massive outlays still to come.

As the title of the piece indicated, the West had effectively now taken over control of the war, and if the effort to defeat Russian President Vladimir Putin failed, American global influence might be undermined and the future of the NATO alliance called into question. Indeed, such notable foreign policy luminaries as John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Douglas Macgregor, and Lawrence Wilkinson have all recently raised the possibility that NATO risks disintegration, especially in the wake of Seymour Hersh’s bombshell disclosure that President Biden had illegally destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines, some of Europe’s most important civilian energy infrastructure.

So in effect, America is at war with Russia on Russia’s own border, and if we lose that war, the era of our global dominance that followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union might come to an end. Since the earliest days of the fighting, our electronic and social media have functioned as unrestrained cheerleaders, hailing Ukrainian victories and Russian defeats, but this WSJ article could not avoid providing a much more sobering perspective.

Although this war has been of enormous world importance, I’ve actually written very little about the details of the conflict.

I lack any military expertise and doubted that I could contribute anything useful about the fighting, which was anyway obscured by the fog of war. America’s reigning Neocon establishment totally controls the Western mainstream media and over the last few decades they have made propaganda, dishonest or otherwise, one of their most frequently deployed political weapons. Indeed, no sooner had the war broken out than social media was awash with the heroic exploits of “the Ghost of Kyiv” and “the Martyrs of Snake Island,” outright hoaxes that were widely disseminated and believed at the time.

We live in the era of smartphones, so video clips showing Russian tanks destroyed or Russian troops defeated and retreating were widely promoted by partisans of the Ukrainian side. But such anecdotal evidence seemed totally meaningless to me. In 1940 the French army suffered one of history’s most lop-sided defeats at the hands of the Germans, yet if smartphones had been around at the time, it would have been easy for pro-French activists to provide hundreds of clips showing destroyed German panzers or small German units suffering defeat. Such war-porn seems more like entertainment for political partisans than anything having serious value.

This obvious problem soon led some observers to search out a means of more objectively determining combat losses. Many of them began relying upon the Oryx website, run by a purportedly independent “open source” organization that organized and displayed images of destroyed tanks and other military vehicles, thereby allowing analysts to total up the losses suffered by each side in the conflict. Journalists and others soon used this photographic evidence to conclude that the Russians had suffered enormous, almost catastrophic losses, with the under-gunned but highly-motivated Ukrainian defenders destroying huge numbers of Russian tanks and other military vehicles, a result that also suggested very high Russian casualties.

The alleged loss of Russian hardware documented by Oryx seems absolutely staggering. One of the main website pages itemizes nearly 9,500 Russian armored vehicles lost, of which 6,000 were destroyed and nearly 2,800 captured. Those losses included nearly 1,800 tanks, with well over 500 of these captured by the plucky Ukrainians. Each of these listed items is linked to a photograph, most of them either being uploaded separately or contained within a Tweet. For example, 244 destroyed or captured T-72B tanks are listed, all individually numbered and linked to the photographic evidence. Obviously, not all destroyed Russian vehicles would have been swept up, so the true scale of Russia’s apparent losses must surely have been considerably greater. Ukraine’s hardware losses were also cataloged, but they only totaled about 3,000 armored vehicles.

Throughout most of the last year, our mainstream media outlets have been filled with stories of Ukrainian victories and Russian defeats, and surely the large compendium of factual material provided by the Oryx website has been an important reason for this. The Oryx Wikipedia entry runs only three short paragraphs, but explains that the website has been regularly cited by Reuters, the BBC, the Guardian, the Economist, Newsweek, CNN, and CBS, with Forbes hailing Oryx as “outstanding” and “the most reliable source in the conflict so far.” My impression is that many writers on military affairs are enthralled by such photos of heavy equipment, whether intact or destroyed, and Oryx provides many thousands of such striking images, thus capturing their rapt attention.

If the Russians had indeed suffered more than three times the Ukrainian losses in armored vehicles, with well over 500 of their tanks captured by the latter, a Ukrainian military triumph might have seemed very likely, so the Americans and their allies naturally rewarded their victorious proteges with a tidal wave of financial and military support that easily topped a hundred billion dollars.

The supposed Ukrainian achievement was certainly a remarkable one. According to Wikipedia, the largest land offensive in human history was Germany’s 1941 Operation Barbarossa, which involved fewer than 7,000 armored vehicles. But if we credit Oryx, over the last twelve months Ukraine’s doughty patriots have totally annihilated a far greater Russian mechanized force, while their own losses have been just a fraction of that. Individuals should decide for themselves how plausible such total numbers sound.

I only very recently looked at the Oryx website, and the first issue that came to mind was how anyone could possibly determine whether the images were real, faked, or duplicated. According to Wikipedia, the Ukrainian military possessed thousands of tanks, many of them being the same models used by the invading Russians. So if Ukrainian activists uploaded a photo of a destroyed T-72B to Oryx, how can we really be sure it was a Russian tank rather than one of their own? What if several different photos of the same wrecked vehicle were taken from different angles, and separately uploaded? The fighting in the Donbass began in 2014, and can we be sure that the photographs provided are from the current fighting rather than from battles fought years ago?

Is This a Destroyed Russian T-72B or a Destroyed Ukrainian T72B? They Look Much the Same to Me.

None of the military enthusiasts whom I asked had any ready answers to those questions, perhaps because they had never even previously considered such troubling possibilities.

During recent decades, Hollywood special effects wizards have displayed great technical skill in showing Spiderman swinging between skyscrapers and the Incredible Hulk undergoing a transformation. Surely producing simple photographs of destroyed military equipment would be a triviality, with the costs almost invisibly small compared to a movie budget. But consider that those simple photographs uploaded to a Dutch website have been a crucial factor in attracting many tens of billions of dollars of financial support from American and allied governments, giving each single image on the Oryx website a potential value of $10 million or more. Producing fake photographs is certainly much safer and easier than destroying Russian tanks in real life, and doing so on an industrial scale would seem a very cost-effective propaganda strategy, so it’s difficult to believe that neither the Ukrainians nor their Neocon/CIA/MI6 mentors ever decided to employ such methods.

Putting the issue in very crude terms, I doubt whether Russian losses may be accurately estimated by aggregating and analyzing what amounted to Ukrainian propaganda-Tweets.

Furthermore, an examination of Oryx’s origins raised other troubling issues.

From the Iraq War onward, the credibility of the American government has steadily deteriorated, considerably weakening the effectiveness of its international propaganda campaigns, a central pillar of its international influence.

Then in 2014 a British blogger named Eliot Higgins established Bellingcat, supposedly an independent research organization that relied upon the objective analysis of open source materials. However, in practice his efforts seemed to almost invariably produce conclusions closely aligned with American foreign policy interests in Syria, Ukraine, and other international flashpoints. This notably including the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 and the alleged gas attack in Syria that Higgins himself had covered the previous year, always pinning the blame upon governments that were the targets of American hostility.

Numerous distinguished international journalists and other experts, notably including Seymour Hersh, Theodore Postol, and Karel van Wolferen often came to totally different conclusions, but their views were usually ignored by the media, while Bellingcat was heavily quoted in the Western outlets as fully confirming the accusations of the American government. As a consequence, there have been widespread suspicions that Bellingcat merely operated as a tool of Western intelligence services, very similar to how the CIA had established other such front-organizations for propaganda purposes during the original Cold War.

According to the Wikipedia page on Oryx, both its founders were Bellingcat alumni, raising serious questions about whether they are really as independent-minded as they claimed to be.

Meanwhile, other American military experts have provided very different assessments of the course of the war.

For decades, Col. Douglas Macgregor has been regarded as a leading conservative military strategist, authoring several well-regarded books and having many dozens of guest appearances on FoxNews. After having a long career in NATO, he had been a finalist for the position of National Security Advisor, served as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, and was nominated as U.S. Ambassador to Germany. He is obviously very well-connected in such establishment military circles, and based upon his Pentagon contacts, he has repeatedly stated that it is actually the Ukrainian forces that have suffered horrendous casualties, including as many as 160,000 combat deaths compared to far lower Russian losses of perhaps 20,000 or so. Other military experts such as Scott Ritter and Larry Johnson have expressed very similar views.

Across all of his numerous interviews, Macgregor comes across as quite persuasive and confident in his assessments of the military situation.

Given the enthusiastic, almost uniform support of powerful Western political, financial, and media interests for the Ukrainian side, I find it difficult to understand why Macgregor, Ritter, Johnson, and others would be taking such contrary positions unless they sincerely believed that they were correct. Indeed, a BBC research effort recently used social media and other open sources to identify 14,709 individual Russian service members killed in the war, a figure that seems quite consistent with Macgregor’s total estimate of 20,000.

So we have diametrically conflicting positions, with Ukrainian officials and the Oryx website claiming Russian losses have been several times greater than Ukrainian ones, while Macgregor and his allies put the ratio at perhaps 8-to-1 in the opposite direction.

I personally lean much more towards Macgregor’s perspective, but I actually doubt that the issue matters much in strategic terms. From the beginning, I’ve never regarded the operational-level details of the fighting in Ukraine as very interesting or important, and haven’t paid much attention to it. This explains why I had never looked at the Oryx website until just a few days ago.

If the Russian army were completely defeated by the Ukrainians and lost control of Crimea and the Donbass, that sort of military disaster for Russia would have major global consequences. But I consider that possibility exceptionally unlikely and doubt that anyone sensible thinks otherwise.

Instead, it seems almost certain that the war will either become roughly stalemated, as many Western analysts seem to believe, or that the Russians will eventually crush the Ukrainians, as predicted by Macgregor and some other Western experts. But unless the latter result draws in NATO forces and leads to a wider war, with possible risk of a nuclear confrontation, I don’t think the strategic consequences are much different in those two contrasting scenarios.

Before the war began, the Russians were widely expected to overwhelm Ukrainian resistance in a matter of weeks, and compared to those early expectations, the war has already been stalemated for a full year.

In hindsight, Russia’s failure to win a quick, decisive victory should not have been too surprising. For example, I’d been entirely unaware that Ukraine actually had an enormous regular army, more than three times the size of Germany’s, and far larger than that of any European NATO country. Much of Ukraine’s military was fully trained to NATO standards, and including reserves and the National Guard, Ukraine deployed more than a half-million ground troops, outnumbering the attacking Russian forces by around 3-to-1, with many of its best units heavily entrenched in strong defensive positions. Under such challenging circumstances, it’s quite understandable that the Russians have required a year of heavy fighting to gain ground against the stubborn Ukrainian defenders, with the latter heavily backed by supplies and assistance from America and the rest of NATO.

But although Russia’s operational progress on the battlefield has been slow and mixed, on the geostrategic level, the Russians have already won a series of major victories. China, Iran, India, Saudi Arabia, and most of the other non-Western countries have clearly moved towards Russia, which also easily surmounted the unprecedented sanctions that most had expected would cripple her economy. The reckless American destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines and the European energy crisis may eventually cause the collapse of NATO. Putin’s domestic approval rating is in the 80s, probably as high as it has ever been. And I don’t see any of these results changing if the military stalemate continues.

One year ago, just after the war broke out, I’d outlined my broader perspective in a long article:

For more than a hundred years, all of America’s many wars have been fought against totally outmatched adversaries, opponents that possessed merely a fraction of the human, industrial, and natural resources that we and our allies controlled. This massive advantage regularly compensated for many of our serious early mistakes in those conflicts. So the main difficulty our elected leaders faced was merely persuading the often very reluctant American citizenry to support a war, which is why many historians have alleged that such incidents as the sinkings of Maine and the Lusitania, and the attacks in Pearl Harbor and Tonkin Bay were orchestrated or manipulated for exactly that purpose.

This huge advantage in potential power was certainly the case when World War II broke out in Europe, and Schultze-Rhonof and others have emphasized that the British and French empires backed by America commanded potential military resources vastly superior to those of Germany, a mid-size country smaller than Texas. The surprise was that despite such overwhelming odds Germany proved highly successful for several years, before finally going down to defeat…

Consider the attitude taken during the current conflict with Russia, a severe Cold War confrontation that might conceivably turn hot. Despite its great military strength and enormous nuclear arsenal, Russia seems just as out-matched as any past American foe. Including the NATO countries and Japan, the American alliance commands a 6-to-1 advantage in population and 12-to-1 superiority in economic product, the key sinews of international power. Such an enormous disparity is implicit in the attitudes of our strategic planners and their media mouthpieces.

But this is a very unrealistic view of the true correlation of forces…just two weeks before the Russian attack on Ukraine, Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping held their 39th personal meeting in Beijing and declared that their partnership had “no limits.” China will certainly support Russia in any global conflict.

Meanwhile, America’s endless attacks and vilification of Iran have gone on for decades, culminating in our assassination two years ago of the country’s top military commander, Qasem Soleimani, who had been mentioned as a leading candidate in Iran’s 2021 presidential elections. Together with our Israeli ally, we have also assassinated many of Iran’s top scientists over the last decade, and in 2020 Iran publicly accused America of having unleashed the Covid biowarfare weapon against their country, which infected much of their parliament and killed many members of their political elite. Iran would certainly side with Russia as well.

America, together with its NATO allies and Japan, does possess huge superiority in any test of global power against Russia alone. However, that would not be the case against a coalition consisting of Russia, China, and Iran, and indeed I think the latter group might actually have the upper hand, given its enormous weight of population, natural resources, and industrial strength.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, America has enjoyed a unipolar moment, reigning as the world’s sole hyperpower. But this status has fostered our overweening arrogance and international aggression against far weaker targets, finally leading to the creation of a powerful block of states willing to stand up against us.

Then last October, I’d updated my analysis and I think that the subsequent developments have generally confirmed my appraisal:

I wrote those words just two weeks after the war began, and as is inevitable in any conflict, various matters have gone differently than anyone originally predicted.

The Russians had been widely expected to sweep the Ukrainians before them, but instead they have encountered very determined resistance, suffering heavy casualties as they made slow progress. Generously resupplied with advanced weaponry from NATO stockpiles, the Ukrainians recently launched successful counter-attacks, forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin to call up 300,000 reserves.

But although Russia’s military efforts have only been partially successful, on all other fronts, America and its allies have suffered a series of strategic geopolitical defeats.

At the start of the war, most observers believed that the unprecedented sanctions imposed by America and its NATO allies would deal a crippling blow to the Russian economy. Instead, Russia has escaped any serious damage, while the loss of cheap Russian energy has devastated the European economies and severely hurt our own, resulting in the highest inflation rates in forty years. The Russian Ruble was expected to collapse, but is now stronger than it was before.

Germany is the industrial engine of Europe and the sanctions imposed on Russia were so self-destructive that popular protests began demanding that they be lifted and the Nord Stream energy pipelines reopened. To forestall any such potential defection, those Russian-German pipelines were suddenly attacked and destroyed, almost certainly with the approval and involvement of the U.S. government. America is not legally at war with Russia let alone Germany, so this probably represented the greatest peacetime destruction of civilian infrastructure in the history of the world, inflicting enormous, lasting damage upon our European allies. Our total dominance over the global media has so far prevented most ordinary Europeans or Americans from recognizing what transpired, but as the energy crisis worsens and the truth gradually begins to emerge, NATO might have a hard time surviving. As I discussed in a recent article, America may have squandered three generations of European friendship by destroying those vital pipelines.

Meanwhile, many years of arrogant and oppressive American behavior towards so many other major countries has produced a powerful backlash of support for Russia. According to news reports, the Iranians have provided the Russians with large numbers of their advanced drones, which have been effectively deployed against the Ukrainians. Since World War II, our alliance with Saudi Arabia has been a linchpin of our Middle Eastern policy, but the Saudis have now repeatedly sided with the Russians on oil production issues, completely ignoring America’s demands despite threats of retaliation from Congress. Turkey has NATO’s largest military, but it is closely cooperating with Russia on natural gas shipments. India has also moved closer to Russia on crucial issues, ignoring the sanctions we have imposed on Russian oil. Except for our political vassal states, most major world powers seem to be lining up on Russia’s side.

Since World War II one of the central pillars of global American dominance has been the status of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and our associated control over the international banking system. Until recently we always presented our role as neutral and administrative, but we have increasingly begun weaponizing that power, using our position to punish those states we disliked, and this is naturally forcing other countries to seek alternatives. Perhaps the world could tolerate our freezing the financial assets of relatively small countries such as Venezuela or Afghanistan, but our seizure of Russia’s $300 billion in foreign reserves obviously tipped the balance, and major countries are increasingly seeking to shift their transactions away from the dollar and the banking network that we control. Although the economic decline of the EU has caused a corresponding fall in the Euro and driven up the dollar by default, the longer-term prospects for our continued currency hegemony hardly seem good. And given our horrendous budget and trade deficits, a flight from the dollar might easily collapse the US economy.

Soon after the outbreak of the Ukraine War, the eminent historian Alfred McCoy argued that we were witnessing the geopolitical birth of a new world order, one built around a Russia-China alliance that would dominate the Eurasian landmass. His discussion with Amy Goodman has been viewed nearly two million times.

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March 6, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

Russia to maintain high oil output – JPMorgan

RT | March 5, 2023

Russian oil drillers can maintain high production despite numerous rounds of Western sanctions, JPMorgan projected this week, according to Reuters.

The Wall Street bank pointed to growing demand for crude oil from China and India which is expected to increase collectively by 1 million barrels per day (mbd) this year.

“We believe Russia will be able to maintain its oil production at pre-war levels of 10.8 mbd but will have difficulties getting back to peak pre-Covid volumes of 11.3 mbd,” JPMorgan reportedly stated.

The US bank suggested that Moscow could struggle to reroute part of its oil product exports away from the EU, following the bloc’s embargo on imports of Russian fuels. Seaborne oil product shipments from Russia are set to decline by around 300,000 barrels per day to “lows last seen in May 2022,” it projected.

Meanwhile, business daily Kommersant reported this week, citing industry sources, that Russian oil output in February reached pre-sanctions levels for the first time, and may exceed the February 2022 figure.

According to Kpler, Russian crude oil and petroleum product exports also held strong last month, with energy producers managing to ship 7.32 million barrels per day of crude oil and oil products.

While the EU and G7 nations have introduced price caps and restrictions on Russian fuel imports, China, India, Türkiye, and some other countries have boosted purchases from Moscow. Last month, Russia unveiled plans to curb oil production in March by 500,000 barrels a day, or about 5%, in retaliation to Western sanctions.

March 5, 2023 Posted by | Economics | , , , | Leave a comment

Blinken lied about exchange with Lavrov – Moscow

RT | March 3, 2023

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was lying when he claimed that he and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, discussed a jailed American citizen during a brief recent exchange, the Foreign Ministry in Moscow has said.

Speaking at a press conference on Thursday, Blinken revealed that he and Lavrov “spoke briefly” on the sidelines of a meeting of G20 foreign ministers in India. Among other things, the American official said he had “raised the wrongful detention of Paul Whelan,” a former US Marine currently serving a 16-year prison term in Russia for espionage.

“The United States has put forward a serious proposal. Moscow should accept it,” Blinken added.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova denied those claims on Friday, saying she had asked Lavrov about the exchange with Blinken. The top Russian diplomat told her that his American counterpart had not brought up Whelan’s case, with Zakharova describing Blinken’s statement as “lies” and an example of “astounding” behavior by the US government.

Whelan is a Canadian-born former US Marine, who in 2020 was sentenced to a 16-year prison term in Russia for spying. He claimed he was framed while on a trip to the country.

The administration of President Joe Biden has called on Russia to release Whelan, branding his sentence unfair. The proposal to which Blinken referred matches those previously made by Washington to Moscow, State Department spokesperson Ned Price claimed on Thursday.

US officials reportedly tried to include Whelan in a prisoner exchange last year involving American WNBA player Brittney Griner and Russian businessman Viktor Bout, although the two sides ultimately freed just one convict each. Griner was serving a term for a drug crime in Russia, while Bout was imprisoned in the US on gun trafficking charges.

March 3, 2023 Posted by | Deception | , | Leave a comment

Europe needs new NATO without US – Orban

RT | March 2, 2023

Europe needs its own military bloc free of American influence, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told Swiss magazine Weltwoche on Thursday. The politician accused the US of dragging Europe into a conflict that cannot be won and risking a global war.

“The solution would be a European NATO,” Orban said, arguing that America’s desire for further expansion of its influence is what led to the current tensions between the West and Russia.

Moscow is concerned about NATO expanding further east into Ukraine and Georgia, Orban stated, referring to his conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin just weeks before the conflict between Moscow and Kiev erupted in late February 2022.

“Putin told me his problem was with the American missile bases in Poland and Romania and possible NATO expansion in Ukraine and Georgia,” Orban told the Swiss media, noting that the Russian leader was concerned about the US potentially deploying its weapons to these nations as well.

According to the Hungarian premier, that was one of the underlying reasons behind the conflict in Ukraine. “I understand what Putin said. I do not accept what he did,” Orban explained.

He insisted that Hungary should stay out of the conflict, but added that Budapest was subjected to “constant pressure” as other Western nations “want to drag us into the war through every possible means.”

Orban believes that this is because the EU is serving the interests of the US at the expense of its own. “Decisions made by Brussels reflect American interests more often than European ones,” he said.

Orban argued that Western nations need to demonstrate a true “desire” and “will” for peace in Ukraine, adding “that will is what is lacking today, at least in the West.”

Hungary has repeatedly called for peace amid the conflict between Moscow and Kiev, and has criticized the Western sanctions imposed against Russia and arms deliveries to Ukraine. Earlier this week, Orban said that the hostilities benefitted no one in the world. Hungary was also the only NATO nation to voice support for China’s peace plan for Ukraine.

March 3, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Medvedev names ‘red line’ for direct war with NATO

RT | March 2, 2023

Canadian and German troops teaching Ukrainians how to use Leopard tanks already qualifies as participation in the conflict, but sending fighter jets to Poland would mean “direct entry,” former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday.

Medvedev, who is also deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, warned the US and its allies that they can be treated as parties to the conflict “if, in addition to supplying weapons, they train personnel to operate them,” citing legal precedents from the early 20th century.

Tank training on EU territory already applies, Medvedev noted on Telegram, but if that expands to fighter jets based somewhere in Poland, “that would be direct entry of the Atlanticists into war against Russia, with all the consequences that entails.”

“Everyone who made the decision to deliver those weapons or repair them, along with foreign mercenaries and military trainers, ought to be considered legitimate military targets.”

According to Medvedev, only fear of this has so far restrained the “infantile” West from giving airplanes and long-range weapons to Kiev, though he predicted their desire to destroy Russia would prevail before long.

While the US, NATO and the EU talk about the “freedom-loving people of Ukraine,” Thursday’s attack on Russia’s Bryansk Region shows that they are supporting “Nazi bastards, terrorist scum who attack civilians,” Medvedev said.

“These are your proteges, Mr. Sunak, Macron, Scholz and Biden!” he wrote, addressing the leaders of the UK, France, Germany, and US. “And our attitude towards you is now the same as towards them. Your countries are now participants in the terrorist acts of the Ukrainian regime, and you are direct accomplices of terrorists.”

Though the West considered him a “liberal” during his 2008-2012 presidency, Medvedev has been blunt and outspoken about the military operation in Ukraine since it was launched in February 2022. Just last month, he warned the US that its talk about “strategic defeat” means Russia now sees the conflict as existential.

A group of Ukrainian soldiers crossed the border into Russia on Thursday morning, attacking two villages and shooting up a car with civilians inside. Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the “terrorist attack” and vowed to punish the perpetrators.

March 3, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Russia reveals position on Istanbul grain deal

RT | March 2, 2023

The Black Sea “grain deal” arranged last August is not working as intended, because the grain from Ukraine is not going to the needy countries of Africa and Asia, while the West continues to block all Russian food and fertilizer exports, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced on Thursday.

The arrangement, negotiated by the UN and signed on July 22, 2022 in Istanbul, established a safe corridor for ships bringing corn and wheat from Odessa to countries facing food insecurity. It was also supposed to re-establish the export of grain and fertilizer from Russia, the ministry noted in a statement.

Eight months later, only the first part of the deal has been implemented, and in a way “far from the declared humanitarian goals,” the ministry said. Since August 1 last year, Ukraine has exported over 23 million tons of grain, of which 70% was animal feed. Of that, the EU accounted for 47% and “upper-middle income countries” for another 34%, Moscow said, while only 2.6% is currently going to countries needing food the most.

Meanwhile, there has been “close to zero” progress in unblocking the delivery of Russian grain or fertilizer, badly needed elsewhere. Kiev has continued to block the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline “for purely political reasons,” resulting in a shortage of 2.5 million tons of raw material that could produce seven million tons of fertilizer and feed 200 million people, the ministry said.

The US and its allies have said their sanctions do not include Russian food and fertilizer – but they have banned all Russian ships from docking in their ports or accessing insurance and brokerage service, imposing a total blockade on commercial shipping in effect, if not in name.

“It’s time to stop playing the food card. The lion’s share of grain from Ukraine goes to the European Union as fodder at dumping prices, and not to the poorest countries,” the ministry noted. “Russian agricultural exports are being blatantly hindered, no matter how much the Europeans and Americans, who are used to telling lies, try to convince everyone otherwise.”

As an example, the ministry said that 262,000 tons of Russian fertilizer has been blocked in the Dutch and Baltic state ports for months. Moscow has offered the fertilizer to African countries absolutely free of charge, yet only one shipment of 20,000 tons, destined for Malawi, has managed to depart so far.

Russia is working on its own to organize deliveries to Africa, since the UN process is plagued by such difficulties and delays, the ministry added.

Moscow is therefore forced to conclude that the grain deal “does not work,” identifying the main problem as “sabotage by Western countries” of the Russia-UN memorandum.

“It is obvious that Americans and Europeans do not care about the needs of countries in need, nor about the efforts of the UN, which they have long and persistently tried to turn into a tool for serving their political goals,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

March 2, 2023 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

The American People Must Draw Red Lines Now

By Connor Freeman | The Libertarian Institute | March 2, 2023

Washington and NATO have rapidly escalated their war with Russia. The White House appears to have blown up the Nord Stream pipelines in a blatant act of war against Russia, not to mention Germany and other European allies.

The CIA is reportedly conducting sabotage attacks on Russian infrastructure and the Pentagon has tacitly endorsed Kiev’s drone strikes hundreds of miles deep inside the Russian mainland.

Along with an assortment of NATO commandos, U.S. troops, CIA, and Special Operations forces are on the ground in Ukraine as well. The White House has greenlit the transfer of Bradley armored fighting vehicles, longer range rockets, and M1 Abrams battle tanks to the battlefield.

Kiev is demanding hundreds of tanks. Concurrently, multiple European NATO members are sending their own main battle tanks to Ukraine, and a U.S. backed assault on Crimea is expected soon.

While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky goads London, Berlin, and Paris into handing over fighter jets, his country has already suffered more than 100,000 casualties, hundreds of Ukrainian troops are dying every day just over a battle for the eastern Donetsk city of Bakhmut.

In recent months, officials in Kiev have explicitly stated that Ukraine—a “de facto” NATO member—is “shedding blood” for a “NATO mission.” The goal is eliminating Moscow as a “threat” to the alliance by weakening, destabilizing, and disintegrating Russia.

In the process, Ukraine, the human battering ram, is being destroyed. But in the words of Madeline Albright, from the Empire’s perspective, “the price is worth it.”

Russia must be crippled before the Pentagon launches its impending war against China, “the big one,” which top military commanders and four star generals now warn will take place in only a few years.

In the meantime, experts and analysts continue to point out—along with even The New York Times—that we are systematically pushing “the United States and its NATO allies closer to direct conflict with Russia.”

What is the justification for this seemingly perpetual escalation? The U.S. war machine reasons that since Russian President Vladimir Putin has not yet ordered strikes on NATO territory or pushed the nuclear button, Washington and its NATO vassals can freely provide Kiev with increasingly advanced weapons and even support assaults against the Crimean Peninsula as well as the Russian homeland itself.

The aforementioned tanks will likely be used for the potential attacks on Crimea (read: Russian territory) currently being considered by the White House. Such an escalation could swiftly lead to World War III and a nuclear exchange.

Incidentally, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists warns nuclear war is now a more likely possibility than at any time during the Cold War. In making their case for turning the clock to 90 seconds to midnight—for the first time—the group partly refers to the refusal of the United States, Ukraine, and its allies to come to the negotiating table.

BAS president and CEO Rachel Bronson said in a statement following the decision that the “U.S. government, its NATO allies and Ukraine have a multitude of channels for dialogue; we urge leaders to explore all of them to their fullest ability to turn back the clock.”

Last fall, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was advocating a negotiated settlement between Kiev and Moscow. However, he was all but vetoed by the so-called diplomats in Antony Blinken’s State Department.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett recently discussed how he attempted to mediate a peace deal with Russia and Ukraine in early March 2022. According to Bennett, both sides made major concessions and “there was a good chance of reaching a ceasefire.”  He has now revealed the effort was overruled and ultimately “blocked” by President Joe Biden and former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

According to current and former U.S. officials, that same month, Turkish brokered talks in Istanbul between the warring sides also established a workable foundation for a future settlement. The whole enterprise was squashed again by Johnson, acting on behalf of the “collective West.”

Even when U.S. military leadership expresses uneasiness about the war’s trajectory, the provision of heavy western-made tanks, or the sheer inability of Ukrainian forces to regain all the territory Russia has captured, the escalations continue anyway.

The hawkish Secretary General of NATO himself has said “I fear that the war in Ukraine will get out of control, and spread into a major war between NATO and Russia.”

Likewise, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned “I fear the world is not sleepwalking into a wider war. I fear it is doing so with its eyes wide open.”

The American people must draw red lines now and stop their out of control ruling class waging wars against nuclear armed powers. As Roger Waters says, this is not a drill.

Our fellow countrymen have become dangerously desensitized to the thought of direct conflict with both Russia and China.

Tragically, our people have been numb for a long time. They have yet to truly reckon with our government’s mass murder marathon of the last 20 years including one million dead Iraqis, half a million dead Syrians, as well as the hundreds of thousands killed in Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

Designedly, our enemies in Washington need us to be numb to the inevitable results of their reckless, murderous policies.

The hawks will next try the same proxy war strategy in Taiwan, we will not get another chance to draw red lines.

We must demand all military aid be terminated, and that the White House and the State Department be forced to support or at least not interfere with negotiations.

We must demand an immediate end to this war now.

Connor Freeman is the assistant editor and a writer at the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on Conflicts of Interest.

March 2, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Bryansk Terror Attack Deliberate Plot by Ukraine to Stoke Escalation: Scott Ritter

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 02.03.2023

One person was killed and a 10-year-old child was injured after Ukrainian saboteurs opened fire on a civilian vehicle in a border village in Russia’s Bryansk Region. Retired US Marine and former weapons inspector Scott Ritter suspects the attack was not a random act of terror, but a deliberate plot to provoke Moscow.

“It’s clear there were no military objectives. This was a deliberately provocative attack, and it was an attack that was designed to anger Russia by intent. You don’t target women, children, you don’t target a civilian, a village, unless your goal is to anger Russia and provoke Russia into perhaps overreacting. I think that’s the objective,” Ritter told Sputnik after being asked to comment on Thursday’s incident in the village of Lyubechane, in Russia’s Bryansk Region.

“It’s the only thing that can explain it other than simply stating that the people involved are the criminal elements with zero redeeming qualities, purely animalistic. And I’m not going down that route. What I believe is that these people were selected to do a mission that was designed to provoke Russia into an overreaction that could then be used by the Zelensky government as justification for requesting even more military assistance,” Ritter stressed.

The observer warned that Moscow could react to the attack in a variety of ways, for example by lifting its self-proscribed restrictions on targeting decision-making centers in Kiev, or even Ukraine’s president.

“Zelensky would say ‘this war has expanded and I now need the West to step up and deliver more equipment, F-16 fighters,’ things of that nature, because right now Zelensky has hit a brick wall. He’s not getting what he believes he needs to survive. And if he doesn’t get this, he will be facing the inevitability of the strategic defeat of Ukraine. And so I think you’re going to see more and more acts of desperation like this in an effort to push Russia into overreacting so that Zelensky could use a Russian overreaction as justification for demanding even more assistance from the West,” Ritter said.

Commenting on the incident earlier in the day, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the “terrorist act” near the border was “committed by the neo-Nazis and their masters,” and predicted that the West would ignore the crime, just as it had done with others like it. The Russian leader emphasized that those responsible “would not succeed” in their violent and criminal behavior, and that Russia would ultimately “crush them.”

Bryansk’s authorities said that along with the deadly attack on a vehicle in Lyubechane, a residential building in the nearby village of Sushany caught fire after being hit by a bomb dropped from a Ukrainian drone.

On Wednesday, Putin had instructed Russia’s Federal Security Service to step up its work along the Russian-Ukrainian border, citing the dangers to critical infrastructure posed by Western-backed radicals and extremists.

March 2, 2023 Posted by | War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

West demands South Korea to supply weapons to Ukraine

By Ahmed Adel | March 2, 2023

A South Korean supply of weapons to Ukraine could lead to Russia and China increasing their cooperation with North Korea. It is for this reason that Seoul is in no hurry to make a decision to support Ukraine, even if Washington and NATO continue to pile on pressure.

In February, it was reported that the US asked to purchase more artillery ammunition from South Korea. According to government sources cited by JoongAng Ilbo, Washington requested Seoul for artillery ammunition and is currently deliberating the matter.

It is recalled that the US bought 100,000 rounds of 155-millimetre howitzer artillery shells from South Korea to send to Ukraine in November. South Korea’s Defence Ministry said at the time that the ammunition purchase was with “the premise that the United States is the end user” so that they could replenish their depleted stockpiles.

The US wants South Korea to maintain distance from Russia and China. However, Russia and China are South Korea’s neighbours, not an ocean length away like the continental USA. This obviously factors into Seoul’s strategic thinking and will impact its decision on whether to support Ukraine, particularly as both countries could use any provocation as a pretext to boost cooperation with North Korea.

Although it might seemingly appear that Beijing has little interest in South Korea’s position relating to a far-off conflict, Seoul’s decision will signal just how easily it will capitulate to US interests. China and Russia will certainly be observing how Seoul responds to pressure from the US and from there make a decision on whether to boost their ties with North Korea.

Regarding the latest US request, a South Korean official, in speaking with Joong Ang Ilbo, said: “there is no change to our stance of not supplying lethal military aid to Ukraine.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he hopes for South Korean military support when responding to a question from a JTBC reporter at a press conference in Kiev on February 24, the one-year anniversary of the Russian military operation.

“We view weapons supplies to us positively,” Zelensky said, adding that he hopes South Korea “will find an opportunity to help Ukraine.”

It is recalled that Zelensky addressed South Korea’s National Assembly via video livestream in April 2022 and begged for anti-aircraft weapons. There was an evident lack of interest in Zelensky’s speech as only about 60 of the 299 sitting lawmakers were present during the address.

With South Korean lawmakers evidently not interested in sending weapons to Ukraine, a position that has been maintained by the government, pressure has been sustained by the US so that this policy can change.

Adding to this squeeze, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called on South Korea to “step up” its military support to Ukraine during his January visit to the Asian country. There, Stoltenberg had the audacity to cite the example of several NATO member states that have revised their policies against exporting weapons to Ukraine. Stoltenberg evidently forgot that South Korea is not a NATO member, or perhaps even the very fact that South Korea is a Pacific country, and not an Atlantic one.

For now, Seoul’s support to Ukraine is not what NATO and the US are expecting. South Korea has only provided humanitarian aid, which, while helpful for citizens, does nothing to alleviate Ukraine’s lack of weapons and ammunition.

President Yoon Suk Yeol has set out to make South Korea a “global pivotal state,” and it is for this reason that the West is piling pressure on South Korea to make a firm stance on the Russia-Ukraine war. Due to South Korea’s rapid economic development and ambitions to grow its prominence on the international stage, the West wants Seoul to make more substantial contributions to global issues, but obviously in accordance to Western interests.

Although there is a likelihood that South Korea’s leaders would like to conform to Western demands, reality dictates that it must consider the consequences its actions can have, particularly in relation to North Korea, China, and Russia. It cannot be overlooked that all three countries are armed with nuclear weapons, with the North Korean nuclear issue being the overriding concern, at least from Seoul’s perspective.

This suggests that although South Korea wants to be a “global pivotal state” and “step up” as a foreign policy actor, as Yoon said, it will be difficult to achieve so long as most of its attention and resources are dedicated to the unresolved war in Korea. Given that the Korean War has not reached a peaceful resolution as only an Armistice Agreement was signed in 1953, South Korea must seriously consider how its actions against Russia could lead to closer ties between Moscow and Pyongyang, and how it could be perceived by China.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

March 2, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Russian airlines surviving sanctions – Bloomberg

RT | March 1, 2023

Sanctions against Russian aviation have led to mixed results but have failed to cause the significant pain to the sector that was expected by Western countries, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday, citing industry analysts.

The Ukraine-related sanctions forced two of the world’s largest aircraft manufacturers, Boeing and Airbus, to stop doing business in Russia. Meanwhile, over 40% of the aircraft operating in Russia were owned by foreign lessors that demanded their property back shortly after the restrictions were introduced.

However, Russian air carriers are still operating 467 Airbus and Boeing jets versus the 544 a year ago, according to data from researcher Cirium, as cited by the news agency.

The country’s airlines reportedly keep flying the jets without software updates and other forms of support from Boeing and Airbus. Both manufacturers told the agency that they had stopped providing parts, maintenance or technical support to airlines or maintenance companies in Russia.

In February, Russian Federal Air Transport Agency head Alexander Neradko said that Boeing and Airbus planes operated by Russian airlines will be able to fly safely until 2030 if properly maintained.

In an attempt to isolate Russia, the US, EU, and a number of other countries closed their airspace to Russian airlines. However, despite losing many destinations, Russian carriers have reportedly increased the number of flights to Thailand, Türkiye, the United Arab Emirates, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

According to Cirium estimates, Russian airports are now served by some 270 international flights daily compared to 300 a year ago.

At the same time, Russia’s retaliatory measures forced EU and US carriers to make long and expensive detours on flights to Asia. Russian airspace is still open to airlines from nations that opted not to support the sanctions, such as the UAE, which has ramped up service.

“Clearly the sanctions didn’t work as the West thought they would, and the global aviation industry is a lot leakier than anyone thought,” industry consultant Richard Aboulafia told Bloomberg. “Yes, safety will deteriorate the longer these sanctions go on, but it’s clearly not going to bring connectivity within Russia and from Russia to a grinding halt.”

March 1, 2023 Posted by | Economics | , , | Leave a comment

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