Russia closes Black Sea ‘grain corridor’
Samizdat – October 31, 2022
The Russian military closed the so-called “grain corridor” used to ship Ukrainian agriculture products through the Black Sea on Monday. The move was provoked by the actions of Ukraine, which used the route to launch attacks on Russia, the Russian Defense Ministry said.
“Any navigation through the security corridor designated under the Black Sea [grain shipment] initiative would be halted until the situation around the Ukrainian … terrorist attack on the military and civilian vessels in Sevastopol is cleared,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement.
The ministry also said that Kiev should specifically commit not to use the corridor for military purposes. At the same time, it maintained that Russia does not withdraw from the deal but only suspends it for an indefinite period of time.
Earlier on Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia was ready to compensate for the missing Ukrainian grain exports to the poorer nations from its own stocks. He also warned that the grain deal has become “much more risky, dangerous” now since Russia cannot guarantee maritime security in the waters of the designated grain corridor.
Russia is “still in contact” with other parties, including the UN and Türkiye, Peskov said, adding, however, that Moscow was not ready to be talked into resuming its participation in the deal.
A dozen ships carrying Ukrainian grain were cleared to leave Turkish ports earlier on Monday. The Joint Coordination Centre (JCC) in Istanbul agreed on a plan to inspect a further 40 ships, despite Moscow’s decision to suspend the deal. It is unclear whether it will follow on its plan now.
Russia tells UN it will inspect Black Sea ships
Samizdat – October 31, 2022
Ukraine “grossly violated” the Istanbul agreement on grain exports via the Black Sea and forced Moscow to suspend it indefinitely, Russia’s envoy to the UN Vassily Nebenzia told the Security Council on Monday. The Russian navy will inspect all cargo ships bound for Ukraine, even those unilaterally cleared by the Turkish-based coordination center, he added.
“This subversive action of Kiev grossly violates the Istanbul agreements and, in fact, puts an end to their humanitarian dimension. It is now obvious to everyone that the Black Sea humanitarian corridor is being used by the Ukrainian side for military sabotage purposes,” Nebenzia said, referring to Saturday’s drone attack on Sevastopol.
Russia “cannot guarantee the safety of civilian ships participating in the Black Sea initiative,” Nebenzia added, as “We do not know what other terrorist attacks Kiev is preparing with the support of its Western sponsors.”
On Sunday, after Moscow announced the suspension of the arrangement, the Joint Coordination Center (JCC) in Istanbul said it had greenlit 16 ships to navigate the corridor on Monday and “informed” Russia about the decision. According to maritime traffic data, at least two ships left the Black Sea port of Odessa in the morning, reporting Istanbul as their destination.
“Decisions and measures taken without our participation are not binding on us,” Nebenzia told the UN. Moscow “cannot allow ships to pass without our inspection and will be forced to take independent measures” to inspect ships authorized by the JCC without Russian approval.
Meanwhile, the UN coordinator for the Black Sea grain initiative, Amir Abdulla, insisted that “the food must flow.”
The UN and Türkiye mediated a deal in July under which Ukrainian grain could be exported via the Black Sea, while Western obstacles to the export of Russian grain and fertilizer would be removed. The US and its allies insist they had never sanctioned grain exports – but their sanctions on Russian ships and insurance made them impossible in practice.
Moscow has criticized the West for not living up to its part of the deal and pointed out that the bulk of Ukrainian exports went to the EU and not the African nations most affected by food insecurity.
Russia Retrieves and Examines Parts of Drones Used in Sevastopol Attack, MoD Says
Samizdat – 30.10.2022
MOSCOW – The Russian Defense Ministry raised from the sea bottom and inspected fragments of drones that were used to strike ships and infrastructure of the Russian Black Sea Fleet on Saturday, which revealed that they were launched near the port city of Odesa, the ministry said on Sunday.
The ministry noted that its specialists, in coordination with experts from other state agencies, examined the Canadian-made navigation modules installed on the maritime drones.
“According to the results of recovery of the information read from the memory of the navigation unit, it was established that the launch of the maritime drones was carried out from the coast near the city of Odesa,” the ministry said.
The drones were moving along the safe zone of the so-called grain corridor before swerving towards Russia’s navy base in Sevastopol, according to the ministry.
“Coordinates of the trajectory of one of the maritime drones suggest that it was launched from the waters of the ‘grain corridor’ safe zone in the Black Sea. According to experts, this may indicate a preliminary launch of this drone from one of the civilian vessels chartered by Kiev or its Western supporters to export agricultural products from Ukrainian ports,” the ministry said.
On Saturday, the Russian defense ministry said that Moscow was suspending its participation in the grain deal following Ukraine’s drone attack on vessels of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol.
Russia suspends participation in grain deal after Ukrainian attacks on ships
Samizdat | October 29, 2022
Moscow has halted its compliance with a grain deal with Kiev, brokered by the UN and Türkiye, after Ukraine launched a major drone attack on ships involved in securing safe passage for agricultural cargo, the Russian Defense Ministry announced on Saturday.
In a post on its Telegram channel, the ministry said Russia “is suspending its participation in the implementation of agreements on the export of agricultural products from Ukrainian ports”.
It explained that the move was prompted by “a terror attack” against the ships of the Black Sea Fleet and civilian vessels involved in ensuring the security of the grain corridor. The ministry also alleged that the bombing was organized with the involvement of British military.
The UK Defence Ministry has denied any involvement in the Ukrainian drone attack on the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, claiming that Moscow “is resorting to peddling false claims of an epic scale” in an effort to distract the global community from “their disastrous handling of the illegal invasion of Ukraine.”
“This invented story, says more about arguments going on inside the Russian Government than it does about the West,” it added.
Commenting on Russia’s decision to suspend the grain deal, Andrey Ermak, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s chief of staff, accused Moscow of “blackmail.”
“Russian blackmail is primitive across the board: blackmail in nuclear, energy and food field,” he stated, adding that all supposed Russian ploys are “too simple and predictable.”
Earlier on Saturday, Russia’s Agriculture Minister Dmitry Patrushev signaled that Moscow is ready, with Türkiye’s help, to send the world’s poorest countries up to 500,000 tons of grain within the next four next months.
He noted that considering this year’s harvest, Russia “is fully ready to replace Ukrainian grain” and arrange deliveries to “all interested countries” at a reasonable price.
“The grain deal not only did not solve the problems of countries in need, but even aggravated them in a sense. We can see where the ships from Ukraine were heading – Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. For some cargoes, the share of EU countries ranges from 60 to 100%. These are not the states that are experiencing a real food problem,” the minister said.
Russia earlier warned that it could quit the grain deal if an agreement to ease restrictions on its food and fertilizer exports were not implemented. Moreover, following the blast on the strategic Crimean Bridge, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that if turns out that Ukraine – the country that Moscow accused of carrying out the attack – used grain corridors to transport explosives, “it would put the very existence of these corridors in question”.
The breakthrough deal between Moscow and Kiev was reached in Istanbul in July with mediation by the UN and Türkiye. It aimed to unlock agricultural exports via the Black Sea from Russia and Ukraine – two of the world’s leading grain exporters – which had ground to halt due to the conflict between the two nations.
British experts helped Kiev’s forces to prepare “terrorist act” in Crimea: Russia
Samizdat | October 29, 2022
An unsuccessful Ukrainian attack on the port city of Sevastopol in Crimea early on Saturday involved nine aerial and seven naval drones, Russia’s defense ministry has said.
The “terrorist attack,” which targeted the vessels of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and civilian ships docked in the city began around 4.20am local time, the ministry said in a statement on Saturday.
It added that the Russian Navy ships had been involved in providing security for the “grain corridor,” which was set up to allow exports of Ukrainian food products from the Black Sea ports in line with a deal reached between Moscow and Kiev with UN and Turkish mediation in the summer.
All of the incoming drones were shot down by Russian warships and naval aviation in the bay of Sevastopol, the ministry said.
According to the statement, the attack resulted in minor damage to the trawler vessel ‘Ivan Golubets’ and to the net boom barrier in the bay.
“The preparation of this terrorist act and training of the military personnel of the Ukrainian 73rd Special Center for Maritime Operations had been carried out under the supervision of the British experts, based in the city of Ochakov in Ukraine’s Nikolaev Region,” the ministry said.
Information obtained by the Russian military suggests that the same unit of the Royal Navy took part in planning, supplying and carrying out the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea on September 26, the statement read.
Earlier on Saturday, Governor of Sevastopol Mikhail Razvozhayev said it was the largest Ukrainian drone attack on the city since the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine in late February.
Located in Crimea, which became part of Russia after a referendum in 2014, Sevastopol has been designated as a federal city by Moscow due to its strategic importance and status as the base of Russia’s Black Fleet. The key port has frequently been the target of drone attacks by Ukraine during the conflict.
In July, six people were injured after a UAV crashed into the Black Sea Fleet’s headquarters in Sevastopol. The attack took place on Russia’s Navy Day and led to the cancellation of celebrations in the city. Another UAV hit the roof of the HQ in August, but failed to cause any significant damage.
US Pretends to be ‘Open to Talks’ With North Korea While Boosting Sanctions
Samizdat – 28.10.2022
Russia and China will continue to jointly address the North Korea issue. The main cause of tensions on the Korean Peninsula is the pressure exerted on the DPRK and the show of force by South Korea and the United States.
Russia remains committed to a joint plan with China for a Korean settlement.
“We will adhere to the agreed position on this issue”, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday at a plenary session of the Valdai Discussion Club.
The Russia-China action plan is based on the principle of reciprocal steps by the United States and the DPRK. These steps could be taken by the United States without damaging its reputation, and on the same basis by DPRK leaders. Moscow and Beijing believe that success in the settlement can only be achieved on the basis of reciprocal movement: action after action, step by step, gradually, and consistently.
At the same time, Moscow and Beijing have repeatedly warned that the formula, according to which North Korea must first completely get rid of its nuclear missile program and only then it will be possible to think about lifting sanctions on the DPRK and ensuring its economic development, is absolutely unsustainable.
“Our roadmap, which we proposed together with China, was that first we should build confidence through mutual meetings, and then we should take some tangible measures, including the suspension of military exercises, tests, and missile launches, and then proceed to negotiations,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier, presenting a joint Russia-China plan for a Korean settlement.
The plan was put forward to the two Koreas, the United States, and Japan in the fall of 2019 after three meetings between the US and DPRK leaders in Singapore, Hanoi, and the demilitarized zone in Panmunjom ended inconclusively. These meetings were held on June 12, 2018, February 27-28, 2019, and June 30, 2019, respectively.
When answering experts’ questions at the Valdai Discussion Club related to the Korea issue, Vladimir Putin said that the unwillingness to talk and the absolutely boorish attitude to North Korea’s interests, including in the sphere of security, has led to the DPRK nuclear issue. In an interview with Sputnik, Alexander Zhebin, director of the Center for Korean Studies and member of the Russian Political Science Association, commented on the Russian president’s statements as follows:
“Vladimir Putin was referring to the boorish behavior of the United States, because the US and the DPRK had an agreement at Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong-un in Singapore that Pyongyang would not launch long-range missiles that could reach American territory, and would not test nuclear weapons. The Americans would respond to this, as recorded in the Singapore declaration, by building a new relationship. Instead, the Americans continued to impose more and more sanctions against the DPRK, which means that they have not fulfilled their part of the commitments.”
According to Alexander Zhebin, the US behaves arrogantly towards the DPRK in the UN Security Council as well:
“Each UN Security Council resolution that imposed sanctions on the DPRK stipulated that positive steps by the DPRK to reduce nuclear missile activity must be accompanied by reciprocal steps by those who imposed sanctions and lead to their partial lifting. This has not happened. On the contrary, no matter what the DPRK has done, the US has kept imposing new sanctions, both by Trump and then by Biden.”
Today, instead of negotiations, the US and South Korea are working on scenarios for destroying the top political leadership of the DPRK and the country’s control centers.
“On the one hand, the Americans say they are ready to negotiate with the DPRK at any time, anywhere, and without any conditions. However, at the same time, they have imposed unprecedentedly harsh sanctions on the DPRK and do not intend to lift them. On the contrary, they are obstructing all attempts by China and Russia to reduce the sanctions burden and start a dialog process. In fact, the invitation to negotiations is just talk. Under that guise, the US is implementing a longstanding plan according to which, eventually, the DPRK, under the weight of economic sanctions, will not survive, thus forcing Kim Jong-un to surrender.
They are not hiding the fact that large-scale military exercises carried out by the US and South Korea are used to practice the elimination of the DPRK’s top political leadership and the country’s control centers. The scale of the recent maneuvers is simply off the chart. 240 American and South Korean aircraft, including the latest F-35 stealth fighters, have been deployed off the coast of North Korea. This cannot but cause serious concern to the DPRK leadership, since everything is happening near its borders. The DPRK is very much concerned about its security,” Alexander Zhebin stressed.
The DPRK’s missile launches are a response to US and South Korean military drills, which constantly press Pyongyang to demonstrate its power, Jin Xiangdong, a researcher at Xiamen University’s School of International Relations, said in an interview with Sputnik :
“Since coming to power, the new South Korean government has conducted a series of military exercises near the Korean Peninsula. The DPRK has responded by launching ballistic missiles. The main problem with the situation on the peninsula is that the new South Korean government is constantly putting pressure on North Korea and demonstrating its power. China’s position on the Korean Peninsula issue is consistent and clear. China defends the maintenance of peace and stability on the peninsula, denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula, and the resolution of issues through dialog and consultations. Meanwhile, in general, the solution to the Korean Peninsula problem is still complicated.”
The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the South Korean Armed Forces said that North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles toward the Sea of Japan on Friday. The launches took place on the last day of South Korea’s Hoguk military exercises, which began on October 17. These maneuvers featured a large-scale amphibious landing exercise near the city of Pohang on the coast of the Sea of Japan.
On October 31, the Republic of Korea and the United States will launch large-scale joint air exercises. The high intensity and scale of the drills provoke growing tensions in Northeast Asia. The US threatening to give a strong response to a possible nuclear test by the DPRK has aggravated the situation.
The Ukraine war of words that heralds ethnic cleansing
By Dr Gregory Slysz | TCW Defending Freedom | October 28, 2022
As The Ukrainian forces and their Western backers celebrate their recent military advance, the fate of ethnic Russians in the reclaimed territories looks bleak now that local and national leaders have declared a reckoning against those whom they consider to be collaborators and traitors.
It’s a policy that originates from the early stages of the conflict based on a law passed in March that threatened anyone who co-operated with the occupying Russian authorities with up to 15 years of imprisonment together with the confiscation of property. Hitherto there have been many arrests of those accused of pro-Russian collaboration, including the leader of Ukraine’s official parliamentary opposition Viktor Medvedchuk, and assassinations of officials such as Alexei Kovalev, deputy head of the military and civil administration in the Kherson region. But as the Ukrainian forces wrest back territory from Russia, a wide net is being cast against alleged collaborators that extends well beyond officials to include teachers, social media warriors and victims of unsubstantiated claims of snitches, shedding light on the intentions of Ukrainian authorities in the unlikely event of total victory.
Ukraine is a culturally heterogenous population in which linguistic affiliation is complex, being governed by both cultural and social situations. At least 17 per cent of Ukrainians claim Russian heritage, with about 14 per cent declaring Russian as their main language and a further 17 per cent Russo-Ukrainian bilingualism, with an unknown number opting to converse in a hybrid Surzhyk dialect. Russian speakers are overwhelmingly concentrated in the eastern and southern regions of the country. It’s a situation, moreover, that has reflected the electoral geography of the country of both parliamentary and presidential elections with the eastern and southern parts of the country exhibiting close affinities with Russia.
Starting as a reasonable initiative at nation-building that intended to correct the inequalities of institutional Russification of the Soviet era, language policy came to be weaponised by nationalist political forces that sought to use it to marginalise Russian culture. Although a cultural reset was inevitable after the collapse of the Soviet Union to redress years of Russification, its initial steps were measured, such as the Law of Languages of 1989, which extended legislative protections to Russian as well as other languages. For Ukraine’s increasingly influential nationalists, overwhelmingly located in the West of the country, the Law was intolerable and unsurprisingly fell victim to the Maidan coup of 2014, that replaced the Russophile President Viktor Yanukovich with Petro Poroshenko.
While its provisions were maintained by Ukraine’s subsequent leadership, following international condemnation of its revocation, the decision of the Constitutional Court to deem the Law unconstitutional was viewed by the Russian minority as a sign of a broader assault on Ukraine’s Russian heritage and served to fuel separatist sentiment in the Crimea and the Donbas. It also played into the hands of Vladimir Putin who could now claim to be the champion of Ukraine’s oppressed Russian speakers, by military means if necessary. Such fears were not unwarranted as in 2019 a new language law sought to end the hitherto ad hoc implementation of existing legislation and subject transgressors to severe fines. Poroshenko, who was campaigning for re-election, weaponised Ukraine’s language policy with his election slogan ‘Army, faith, language’, declaring that ‘the only opinion that we weren’t going to account for [in drafting the legislation] is the opinion of Moscow’. Salt was further rubbed into the wounds of the third of the country which rejected it by its being signed off by the Speaker of Parliament, Andrei Parubiy, a former activist in the neo-Nazi Social-National Party, who warned chillingly that ‘those people who try to revise the language law . . . will soon feel the whole anger of the Ukrainian people’. Remaining loopholes were filled in January 2022, just before Russia’s military incursion, which for instance compelled Russian language print media to produce Ukrainian translations for all publications in a move that de facto targeted Russian for discrimination.
To indigenous Russian speakers, such rhetoric marked the creation of an ethnic state in which they were not welcome. The escalation of the war in 2022 seemed to confirm their worst fears as not only did Russian become ‘the language of the enemy’ but things Russian, political parties, music, literature were officially shunned, banned or marginalised in a policy that hitherto had been executed only by the far right nationalists of Lviv City Council in West Ukraine. Whereas then the likes of Canadian and British ambassadors joined Moscow in condemning such action as ‘just plain dumb’ and intolerant, now such nationwide ‘de-Russification’ initiatives were met with silence.
International opinion recognised Ukraine’s language policy as conflict-bearing due to its increasingly divisive and discriminatory nature. The scrapping of minority language provisions by Ukraine’s Constitutional Court in 2014, for instance, raised concerns in the European Parliament which deemed it as ‘undermining any notions of justice, freedom, civilisation, progress and democracy’ and called for the EU Commission to ‘condemn the action of the Ukrainian Parliament and the nationalistic attacks on minority communities in Ukraine’. The 2019 law came under similar criticism from the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s advisory body on constitutional affairs, which declared that it threatened to become ‘a source of inter-ethnic tensions within Ukraine’. It reiterated its conclusion following the passing of the January 2022 Law, noting that ‘historical oppression of Ukrainian . . . may lead to the adoption of positive measures aimed at promoting Ukrainian, but this cannot justify depriving the Russian language and its speakers of the protection granted to other languages’.
Both the intra-parliamentary brawls and street standoffs between Ukrainian and Russian speakers during the passage of the language legislation were chilling portents of what was come. Although the escalation of the war in 2022 has seen some ethnic Ukrainian Russian speakers distance themselves from ‘the language of the enemy’ and embrace Ukrainian as their main language, it has also seen ethnic Russians fortify their Russian identity. While this in itself has demonstrated the complexity and malleability of identity in Ukraine, it has also reinforced pre-existing cultural fissures, leaving ethnic Russians with no option other than to embrace Mother Russia as their homeland.
While the conflict in the Donbas since 2014 rendered reconciliation between the Ukrainian authorities and the Russian minority problematic, as the failure of the Minsk agreement testifies, the escalation of the conflict has entrenched pre-war hatreds. With the national conversation decisively turning against the reintegration of Russian culture and language into Ukraine’s social fabric, it is difficult to see how a status quo ante bellum with even rudimentary cultural and linguistic protections for ethnic Russians is possible were the Ukrainian state reconstituted within its pre-war borders. In fact, everything points towards mass retribution and ethnic cleansing on a scale not witnessed in Europe since the Second World War, in a scenario that is likely to overshadow the grim events of the conflict itself. Ukraine’s Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council, certainly didn’t mince his words on a recent Ukrainian talk show in calling for the ‘complete disappearance of the Russian language from our land’ in what sounded like incitement to ethnic cleansing.
Nothwithstanding the difficulty such actions would present for social reconstruction, the questionable legality of extra-judicial killings of officials and political persecution of ‘collaborators’ threatens to draw attention to atrocities committed by Ukrainian paramilitary forces during the Second World War against Russians, Jews, Poles and other minorities. These crimes, together with the ritualistic celebrations by Ukraine’s highest political authorities of those who perpetrated them like nationalist leader and Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera, have been conveniently whitewashed so as to not tarnish the image of a virtuous Ukraine that has been carefully cultivated over the past few months. The sources which once regularly condemned Ukraine for not only celebrating wartime collaboration but also tolerating a revival of neo-Nazi paramilitarism now declare similar condemnation by Russia as hostile propaganda. A Ukraine seen to be persecuting minorities again would be a propaganda disaster for its Western backers.
Dividing Ukraine’s population into ‘the people’ and ‘the rest’ where the latter were made to feel subordinate in their ancestral lands to the former was always going to lead to conflict. Yet just as wise counsel of the likes of George Kennan, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski warned of the grave risks of Nato’s expansion to Russia’s borders, so warnings came aplenty of the dangers of a divisive language policy. To Ukraine’s detriment, however, neither was heeded and now a reckoning against ‘the rest’ will be as useless in knitting back together shattered communities as the pre-war language policy was in solving peaceful coexistence between Russian and Ukrainian in a single public space.
West’s Policy Toward Other Countries ‘Dirty, Bloody,’ Denies Nations Right to Sovereignty: Putin
By Ilya Tsukanov – Samizdat – 27.10.2022
The West seeks to establish and maintain its control over the rest of the planet using “dirty” and “bloody” means, President Vladimir Putin has said.
“World domination is what the so-called West has staked in its game, but the game is unquestionably dangerous, bloody and I would say, dirty,” Putin said, speaking at the plenary meeting of the Valdai Discussion Forum on Thursday.
“It denies the sovereignty of nations and peoples, their identity and uniqueness, and has no regard whatsoever for other countries,” Putin added.
‘Rules-Based Order’ is an ‘Order With No Rules’
The Russian president also suggested that the so-called ‘rules-based’ international order declared by the US and its allies actually has only one “rule” – designed to give those who created it “the opportunity to live without any rules whatsoever” and enabling them to “get away with anything, no matter what they’ve done.”
Attempts to do away with cultural, social, political and civilizational diversity and to “erase any and all differences have become almost the essence of the modern West,” and is aimed at ensuring “the disappearance of the creative potential in the West itself and the desire to contain and block the free development of other civilizations. There is also a direct mercantile interest here, of course,” Putin said, pointing to the West’s efforts to impose its consumer culture values on others to expand their markets.
“It’s no coincidence that the West claims that its culture and worldview should be universal. Even if they don’t say so directly, they behave this way. In fact, their approach insists that these values be unconditionally accepted by all other participants in international communication,” the president said.
The origins of the current crisis have their roots in the destruction of the Soviet Union three decades ago, Putin said. “The collapse of the Soviet Union destroyed the balance of political forces. The West felt like a winner and proclaimed a unipolar world order in which only its will, its culture, its interests had the right to exist.”
Escalation
“The so-called West – I use this term conditionally of course, there is no unity there, it’s clear that this is a very complex conglomerate – has taken a number of steps in recent years and especially in recent months toward escalation,” Putin said, describing the state of affairs in the world today.
“They’re always trying to escalate…They’re fueling the war in Ukraine, organizing provocations around Taiwan, destabilizing the world food and energy markets,” Putin said.
Putin characterized last month’s terrorist attack against the Nord Stream gas pipeline network as an “outrageous” step, adding that unfortunately, “we are witnessing these sad events.”
Pointing to Western governments’ admission that they financed the events leading up to the 2014 Euromaidan coup in Kiev, which gave rise to the current crisis in relations between Russia and the West, Putin suggested that they’ve openly demonstrated their “loutish” nature.
Putin warned that the West’s confidence in its “infallibility” is a “very dangerous” delusion, with there only being “one step” between this self-confidence to the idea that “they can simply destroy those they do not like, or as they say, to ‘cancel’ them.”
But “history will put everything in its proper place and will not ‘cancel’ the works of the greatest and broadly recognized geniuses of world culture, but instead those who today have decided for some reason that they have the right to dispose of world culture at their own discretion. The self-conceit of these people is off the charts. But in a few years no one will remember them, while Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky and Pushkin will live,” Putin assured.
The neo-liberal “American-style” model is experiencing a “doctrinal crisis,” according to the president, and has “nothing to offer the world except to preserve their dominance.”
Emphasizing that Russia is not a natural “enemy” of the West, Putin urged the West’s liberal leaders and elites to stop seeing “the hand of the Kremlin” behind all their internal domestic problems.
“In the conditions of the current tough conflict, I’ll say a few things directly: Russia, being an independent, distinct civilization, has never considered itself and does not consider itself an enemy of the West. Americanophobia, Anglophobia, Francophobia, Germanophobia are forms of racism, just like Russophobia and Anti-Semitism or any manifestation of xenophobia,” Putin stressed.
But there are “at least two Wests,” the president added, including the positive, traditional one with its immensely rich culture and the aggressive, neocolonial one, whose dictates Moscow will never accept. Russia has resisted Western hegemony and “its right to exist and develop freely,” and at the same time does not have any plans to itself “become some kind of new hegemony,” nor to impose its values on anyone or “interfere in someone else’s backyard,” Putin said.
Solutions
The Russian president suggested that amid the escalating economic, humanitarian, military and political crises plaguing the planet, it is unlikely that any country anywhere will be able to ‘sit things out’. Therefore, solutions of a global scale need to be reached, even if they are imperfect ones.
“The crisis has acquired a truly global character and affects everyone. There’s no need to harbor any illusions. There are essentially two paths for humanity: either to continue to accumulate the burden of problems which will inevitably crush us all, or to try to find solutions together, solutions which may not be ideal, but which work, and which are capable of making our world more stable and safer,” Putin said.
The Russian president emphasized that the West would need to start talking to rising alternative centers of power. “I have always believe and continue to believe in the power of common sense, and therefore am convinced that sooner or later both the new centers of a multipolar world order and the West will have to start a conversation based on equality about our common future. The sooner, the better, of course,” he said.
The “new world order” that replaces the current one “should be based on law, be free, original and fair. Thus, the world economy and trade should become more fair and open,” Putin said, benefiting the majority of nations and people, not individual corporations. At the same time, technology should reduce inequality, not increase it.
The president added that new international financial platforms are necessary which are outside the control of national jurisdictions, and which are “secure, depoliticized, automated and not dependent on any single control center.” Putin expressed confidence that such a system could be built.
Multipolarity is a necessity for the planet, including for Europe – to restore the latter’s political and economic agency, which is “very limited” today, according to Putin.
“We are standing on a historical frontier. Ahead of us is probably the most dangerous unpredictable and at the same time important decade since the end of the Second World War,” Putin said.
Ukraine
Commenting on Russia’s ongoing military operation in Ukraine, Putin said he thinks about the losses in life resulting from the conflict “all the time,” and that the crisis in Ukraine is a part of the “tectonic changes” taking place “in the entire world order.”
“Why was it necessary to carry out a coup d’etat in Ukraine in 2014?” Putin asked, recalling the origins of the current crisis. “[Ukrainian President Viktor] Yanukovych actually gave up power and agreed to hold early elections… Why was it necessary to carry out a bloody anti-constitutional coup under these conditions?”
The answer, Putin believes, is that the West wanted to “show” everyone “who’s the boss in the house. ‘Everyone (and ladies please excuse me for the expression) has to sit on their buttocks and not quack. It will be how we say it will be.’ I simply cannot explain these actions any other way,” Putin said.
Putin said Russia had no other choice but to recognize the Donbass republics in February and to come to their defense, and said that the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people is an undisputable historical fact. Only Russia could guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty, as Russia “created” Ukraine during the Soviet period, Putin said.
In the decades after the end of the Cold War, Russia’s consistent message to the West and NATO was “let’s all get along,” like in the Soviet children’s cartoon Leopold the Cat, but in almost all the main areas of potential cooperation, Moscow got the simple answer “No,” according to Putin.
Regarding the latest developments in the Ukrainian crisis and the concerning reports from Russian officials and military commanders that Kiev may be preparing to use a dirty bomb, Putin said he welcomes the International Atomic Energy Agency’s initiative to check Ukraine’s nuclear facilities.
“We are for it. This needs to be done as quickly as possible, as thoroughly as possible, because we know that right now the authorities in Kiev are doing everything possible to cover up the traces of these preparations,” Putin said.
The Russian president warned that it would be “easy” for Kiev to assemble a dirty bomb, and that Moscow has a rough idea about where it’s being created. Ukraine could use a Tochka U or another missile in its inventory to detonate the bomb somewhere and accuse Russia of launching a nuclear strike, Putin said.
The Pentagon Brought on Both Nuclear Crises
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | October 26, 2022
I fully realize that when it comes to Ukraine, one is supposed to focus exclusively on Russia’s invasion and not on what the Pentagon did to gin up the crisis, a crisis that has gotten us perilously close to a world-destroying nuclear war with Russia.
Nonetheless, the Pentagon’s role in this crisis needs to be emphasized, over and over again, just as the Pentagon’s role in ginning up the Cuban Missile Crisis also needs to be emphasized, over and over again.
Yes, what I am emphasizing is the Pentagon’s role in ginning up both of these crises that have gotten us so close to nuclear war with Russia.
At the end of the Cold War racket, there was absolutely no reason for NATO to remain in existence. Its purported mission of protecting Europe from a Soviet (i.e., Russian) attack had been fulfilled. The Cold War was supposedly over.
The only problem was that it wasn’t over for the Pentagon and the CIA. If they had had their druthers, their Cold War racket would have gone on forever. After all, what better justification for their ever-increasing budgets and power within the federal governmental structure?
That’s why they kept NATO in existence. While they were engaging in their interventionist antics in the Middle East, which led to their war-on-terrorism racket, they were, at the same time, using NATO to provoke Russia, with the aim of reigniting their old Cold War racket. Instead of dismantling their old Cold War dinosaur, they used it to absorb former members of the Warsaw Pact, which enabled the Pentagon and the CIA to move their nuclear missiles and military forces inexorably closer to Russia’s border, over Russia’s vehement objections.
Ultimately, they threatened to absorb Ukraine into their NATO racket, knowing full well that Russia had vowed for some 25 years to invade Ukraine to prevent that from happening. Their scheme succeeded. Once Russia invaded Ukraine, the loyal followers of the Pentagon and the CIA focused exclusively on the invasion and not also on the NATO racket that had provoked the invasion.
It was no different with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The reason that Cuba and the Soviet Union installed nuclear missiles in Cuba was to deter another invasion of the island by the CIA and the Pentagon. Don’t forget that the CIA had already invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and had failed miserably. After that, the Pentagon continually exhorted President Kennedy to initiate a full-scale military invasion of Cuba. That’s what the Pentagon’s fraudulent false-flag operation known as Operation Northwoods was all about, which Kennedy, to his everlasting credit, summarily rejected.
What legal justification did the Pentagon and the CIA have to invade Cuba? None! The fact that Cuba had a communist regime certainly never justified an invasion (or, for that matter, repeated murder attempts against Fidel Castro). Keep in mind that Cuba had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. In the long relationship between communist Cuba and the United States, it has always been the U.S. government that has been the aggressor, including with its old Cold War economic embargo that continues to target the Cuban people with death and impoverishment as a way to achieve regime change on the island.
Cuba and Russia knew full-well that the CIA and the Pentagon were fully determined to invade Cuba again, with the aim of replacing the Fidel Castro regime with another pro-U.S. dictatorship, like the one that preceded the Castro regime. That’s why Cuba and Russia installed those nuclear missiles in Cuba — to deter another illegal U.S. invasion of the island.
Why can’t the loyal acolytes of the U.S. national-security establishment see all this? Because for them, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA are their triune god. Who wants to question or criticize god?
But if we are going to put out nation back on the right road — the road to liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world, it is necessary for the American people to not only question this false god but also to toss it and its evil rackets into the dustbin of history and restore America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic.
Kiev ‘Made Dummy Missile’ for Provocation With ‘Dirty Bomb’ Over Chernobyl Zone
Samizdat – 26.10.2022
MOSCOW – The Kiev regime has already completed technical preparations for a provocation with a “dirty bomb,” having prepared a dummy missile, which is planned to be filled with radioactive material, a source familiar with the situation told Sputnik.
“Experts from the Yuzhmash plant have already made a dummy missile of the Iskander system, the head cluster part of which is planned to be filled with radioactive material, and then ‘shot down’ by Ukrainian air defense forces over the exclusion zone of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in order to declare a Russian launch of a nuclear charge,” the source said.
He clarified that the model of the Iskander missile was made on the basis of a projectile from the Tochka-U missile system.
“After the dummy is shot down, the Kiev authorities intend to show the Western and Ukrainian media fragments of the mockup and electronics of the alleged Iskander missile in order to convince the Western public of Russia’s guilt,” the source said.
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Book Review
A Palantir Manifesto
By Alan Mosley | The Libertarian Institute | April 22, 2026
Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s book, The Technological Republic, is a clarion call for Silicon Valley to abandon its consumer trinkets and rush headlong into the arms of the military-industrial complex. According to Karp, America’s future depends on wielding hard power through technology—arming soldiers, AI-weaponry, and mass surveillance systems—rather than on the “soft” influence demonstrated by free markets and liberty-first principles. The book claims that “the survival of the American experiment depends on the technological revitalization of the military-industrial complex” and urges the country’s engineering talent to focus on national defense. Karp and his co-author, Nicholas Zamiska, argue that tech bros should “grow up” and start killing America’s enemies before they kill us. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- The Surveillance Accountability Act Demands Warrants for Data
- #FreeYousofAzizi: Petition launched to seek release of Iranian academic, anti-war activist detained in US
- The First Photographs Ever Taken of Iran [1848-1858] by Colonel Luigi Pesce + Persepolis, Old World
- Confusion, delusion, and how Israel drives the Iran War
- After the ceasefire illusion: Why Gaza’s “Day After” still has no buyer?
- Shifting to Guerilla Warfare, Hezbollah Delivers Massive Blows to Israel
- Wired for War: Israel’s Black Cube and the infiltration of Europe
- Monitoring group finds UK media guilty of ‘systematic’ dehumanization of Palestinians
- Al-Akhbar’s Amal Khalil assassinated by Israel, left to die under rubble
- US naval blockade has disrupted but ‘not broken’ Iran’s oil exports: Kpler
- If Americans Knew
- Meet the Top “Content” Producers Linked to Canary Mission
- Lebanese Journalist Amal Khalil Bombed and Left to Die by Israel
- Israel Moves to Re-establish Ganim Colony In Jenin
- Two Iranian Women in ICE Detention Are Not, In Fact, Related to Qasem Soleimani, Documents Show
- “The shooting was not in the air”: Testimonies from the Flour Massacre
- Israel chases down, kills Lebanese journalist, massacres 5 in Gaza, all during “ceasefires” – Daily Update
- Gaza’s unseen casualties: A surge in stillbirths and birth defects
- ‘Day of Ordinary Terror’: Israeli Attack on West Bank School Kills Man, Child
- Final Gaza Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment
- Zionist Doxxing Campaigns Upended Their Lives. Now They’re Suing for Damages.
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
- New Study: No Linear Warming Or Glacier Retreat Along Northern Antarctic Peninsula Since 1980s
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
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