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Japanese firms have no plans to abandon Russian energy project

RT | March 14, 2022

Japanese trading houses, Mitsui and Mitsubishi, are reportedly not considering quitting Russia’s Sakhalin-2 project, that is focused on producing and shipping liquified natural gas (LNG), 60% of which is destined for the Japanese market.

The Japanese trading giants, which hold a total stake of 22,5% in Sakhalin-2, will remain partners to the project, as “prompt exit is risky” and “will be in favor of China,” Nikkei newspaper reports, citing documents submitted by the companies to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan earlier this month.

The project has been one of the main sources of natural gas supply to Japan with nearly 100% of Japanese LNG imports coming from Sakhalin-2, according to media reports.

Located on the Russian island of Sakhalin in the Pacific Ocean, north of Japan, the project reportedly produces nearly 11.5 million tons of LNG annually which is mainly exported to major markets in Asia.

The project, launched in 2009, includes the offshore Piltun-Astokhskoye oil field and Lunskoye natural gas field in the Okhotsk Sea, and associated infrastructure on Sakhalin Island itself.

Sakhalin-2 is managed and operated by the Sakhalin Energy Investment Company. The majority stake in the enterprise belongs to Russia’s energy giant Gazprom. Shell, the world’s largest LNG trader, holds 27,5% minus one share, Mitsui’s share totals 12,5%, while Mitsubishi Corporation owns 10%.

On February 28, UK-based Shell announced plans to pull out its stake in the Sakhalin-2 liquefied natural gas facility, its 50% stake in the Salym Petroleum Development and the Gydan energy venture following sanctions placed on Moscow over the ongoing military operation in Ukraine.

March 14, 2022 Posted by | Economics | , , | Leave a comment

India Should Quit Quad Now!

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | MARCH 14, 2022

Hedging between superpowers — United States, Russia and China — was never the smart thing to do. India should have known that the contradictions are simply irreconcilable.

This is a moment of truth, therefore, as the US unsheathes the sword to bleed and dismember Russia, and gives an ultimatum to China to stay out of it. 

The gravity of the situation is sinking in, finally. That is the message coming out of the Cabinet Committee on Security meeting convened by PM Modi on Sunday “to review India’s security preparedness, and the prevailing global scenario in the context of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” where he was briefed “on latest developments and different aspects of India’s security preparedness in the border areas as well as in the maritime and air domain.” 

The US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s meeting with China’s top diplomat and Politburo member Yang Jiechi in Rome later today promises to be a defining moment in world politics. 

Yesterday, Sullivan explicitly threatened China in an interview with CNN. He said: “We are communicating directly, privately to Beijing, that there will absolutely be consequences for large-scale sanctions evasion efforts or support to Russia to backfill them. We will not allow that to go forward and allow there to be a lifeline to Russia from these economic sanctions from any country, anywhere in the world.”

The warning to China is that it should conform to the US sanctions against Russia and desist from providing support (“lifeline”) to Russia in any form.

The cutting edge of Sullivan’s statement is that it also applies to India. The implications are very, very severe. Simply put, Washington’s demand is also that India should abandon its relationship with Russia. 

That means principally, that India should freeze the defence relationship. Considering that something like 60-70% of weaponry for our armed forces is of Russian origin, this will render a crippling blow to India’s defence preparedness. 

Essentially, this is going to be baptism by fire for the Indian leadership. It stands to reason that the Americans have already conveyed their charter of demands to the government, and PM’s hurried move to convene the CCS ensued. 

Last week, the Russian minister of energy had a call with his Indian counterpart where he not only offered oil at concessional rates but also invited Indian companies to step up investments in Russian oil and gas fields on a preferential basis. At a time when the oil price crossed $130 a barrel and the spot market price for gas is approaching $4000 per thousand cubic meters, the Russian offer came as a gift from God.

But the fact that the government downplayed it shows a state of paranoia — symptomatic of the same pusillanimity that characterised the UPA mindset, prompting the rollback of ties with Iran. 

The Americans have experienced that our elite are largely men of straw. Given the scale of corruption, there are all kinds of interest groups in our country. Besides, the comprador elements within our elite are stakeholders in the American agenda. That is a tragic fact of life. 

However, the difference today is that the looming American threat would have vital bearing on India’s defence capabilities, and national security. For a government that proclaims the nationalist credo, the choice ought to be clear. 

The Modi government should refuse to comply with the American legislations regarding Russia. Period. In all likelihood, Americans are bluffing. Or, if there is going to be a price to pay, the leadership should take the nation into confidence and explain the long-term imperative of safeguarding the country’s core interests at whatever cost. Indians are a patriotic people.  

To my understanding, in the world of today, American hegemony is unsustainable. The US bullies those who are susceptible to bullying and blackmails those ruling elites who are vulnerable to blackmail, individually or collectively. Hopefully, our ruling elite do not fall into such a pitiable category.

Freedom struggle was so much more arduous. The predicament today is also about the country’s independence. The nation will rally under an inspiring leader.  

Things have come to such a sorry pass today largely due to the flawed foreign policies through the past two decades or so when the American lobbyists began expounding that India’s interests are best served in an alliance with the US. 

‘Non-Alignment’ and ‘strategic autonomy’ became archaic concepts. Thus, circa 2000 or so, India ‘crossed the Rubicon’, to borrow the title of an infamous book of those times, to be with our ‘natural allies’. Where has it brought the country today after 21 years? 

The self-styled foreign policy gurus in the media and the strategic immunity proved horribly wrong in their assessment of international politics. Beyond the Rubicon, what we saw and experienced was a bleached landscape of parched earth and birds of prey, so different from the El Dorado that we were promised by the carpetbaggers.

Indian foreign policy needs a strategic course correction. India should distance itself completely from the self-centred US polices whose aim is the preservation of its global hegemony. The first step in that direction should be to quit Quad. 

Make no mistake, a US-China showdown is in the making sooner than one might have expected it, and it will be calamitous for India to get sucked into it. The visit by Japanese prime minister Kishida to India this weekend causes disquiet. 

By the colour of our skin, our religion, our culture, our geography, our political economy, we will never be accepted by the West as ‘one of us’. Do not be mesmerised by promises of equal partnerships. Look at the US’ track record — selfish, cynical and ruthless in the pursuit of its interests. 

History didn’t end with the eclipse of the Cold War. Fundamentally, what the Western powers are planning is a form of neo-colonialism borne out of the desperate need to arrest the decline of their economies through a massive transfer of wealth from the rest of the world inhabited by 88 percent of mankind — Asia, in particular. To that end, the West has unceremoniously buried ‘globalisation’ and turned its back on multilateralism. 

Quintessentially, what is unfolding is no different from 19th century colonial era. Therefore, India should work together with like-minded countries that are stakeholders in the preservation of their sovereignty, hard-won independence and most important, their cherished freedom to choose their paths of development insulated from interference in internal affairs or attempts at ‘regime change’. 

A peaceful external environment is an imperative need and the foreign policy should prioritise that objective. It means a revamp of India’s policies toward China and Pakistan. We are stuck in a groove cut decades ago largely for propaganda purposes, unable to disown our self-serving narratives. Fortunately, there are incipient signs of rethink lately. Do not let Washington queer the pitch of India’s crucial relationships with China or Pakistan.

A nation has no future if it is incapable of introspection. Mistakes have been made but it is false pride and hubris not to make amends. Indians are a forgiving people. And as for the present government at least, it only inherited the false narratives.  

March 14, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

When Fanatical Ideology Bumps up Against Stone Cold Reality

By Rob Slane | The BlogMire | March 13, 2022

I have avoided writing anything on recent events in Ukraine thus far, partly because I wanted to see how events were panning out, partly because I still don’t quite understand how this all fits in with the two year Globalist PsyOp that ended abruptly on 24th February – the same day as the Russian military operation started, as coincidence would have it – but mainly because the experience of trying to write rational analysis in the midst of propaganda that would have made the editors of Pravda blush is no easy task.

As a brief defence against those who will inevitably smear my attempts to analyse the context behind all this as somehow pro-Russian, let me ask them not to bother. I really don’t even understand the frame of reference, since I don’t view the world in the absurd black hat/white hat terms that lead to such jibes. And in any case, I am pro-God and pro-Truth, as well as being a patriotic Englishman who writes on such topics because he believes this once green and pleasant land is now run by terminally foolish clowns and Globalist ideologues who do not govern for the people but in the interests of others. I would also point out that I was writing about atrocities committed against Ukrainians years before it became fashionable to do so. However, unfortunately it seems I was supporting the wrong Ukrainians — the ones nobody cares about — in the Donbass, who have been killed, terrorised and forced to leave the country by their own brutal Government for eight years, with some even deliberately burned alive by the neo-Nazis formations that apparently don’t exist. Those caveats aside, let’s press on.

For most Westerners, it appears that the current conflict suddenly dropped from the sky one morning in February 2022. They woke up to hear about a Russian invasion, and without any prior knowledge or context, having been denied this for years by their so-called free press, simply accepted the narrative thrown at them that this invasion was utterly unprovoked — the brainchild of a madman who wishes to recreate Hammer and Sickle Land again.

None of this is remotely true. Whatever the actual reasons for invading at this particular time — and I don’t believe for one moment that we have the full picture yet — this conflict most certainly did not drop out of the sky or from the ravings of a lunatic on 24th February 2022. No, it is part of a sequence of events that was set off years ago, particularly in 2014, which were clearly destined to reshape the world. As I wrote back in September 2014:

“I believe this crisis to be the defining crisis of the 21st Century so far. … It is also something that may well define the shape of the planet for the rest of the century — whether we are left with a unipolar world … or whether we see a new multipolar world emerging … It is in a very real sense the key battle between globalisation and national sovereignty.”

That sequence of events has a long history, but behind it all is an ideological fanaticism that overtook certain elements of the Western powers – and I’m thinking here in particular of the cult known as neoconservatism (the name is a misnomer as they have their roots in Trotskyism, not conservatism) – who saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as an opportunity not for peace and stability, but for the establishing of a US-led Globalist hegemon, with “Full Spectrum Dominance”, as one of their number once put it.

It was this ideological fanaticism that led to the carpet bombing of Serbia, the invasion of Afghanistan, the war against Iraq, the dismemberment of Libya, and the arming of jihadists to destabilise Syria — wars which killed or displaced hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, yet which curiously attracted none of the sort of response we are seeing now.

It was this ideological fanaticism that also led to the continuance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), long after the ostensible reason for its existence ceased to exist. NATO was a military alliance against the Soviet Union, and since then it is a military alliance against Russia. This is undeniable, and it gives rise to two questions. Firstly, why was it deemed necessary to continue this alliance at a time when Russia itself quite obviously desired to be on good terms with the West (despite the pilfering of the country during the so-called Shock Therapy of the 1990s)? Secondly, since the alliance remained and was quite obviously aimed at Russia, isn’t it obvious and indeed reasonable that they would see it as a threat?

This should not be hard to understand. If, say, an anti-Russian military alliance crept up to its borders, in five successive waves, despite assurances given to the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 that this would not happen — all of which has come to pass — why on earth would anyone think that the Russians wouldn’t see this as a threat, and why on earth would anyone think that there would not be a major pushback at some point? This is not rocket science!

In 2007, Vladimir Putin warned very starkly at the Munich Security Conference of the long-term consequences of the continuance of this policy. Not only did the warnings go unheeded, the very next year NATO upped the ante significantly with the Bucharest Summit Declaration:

“NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”

Again, it fails me to see how can any rational person can look at this and not see the clash that was inevitably on its way from such a policy, and how easily it could have been avoided. It’s not as if the consequences were unknown. Amongst other foreign policy realists, the great US diplomat, George Kennan, observed the following about NATO expansion towards Russia:

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”

Indeed. And I’ll give you three guesses who agreed with that assessment back in 1997, calling out what the reaction might be should the Alliance move into the Baltic States, let alone Ukraine.

“The only thing that can provoke Russia into a hostile and vigorous response is the expansion of NATO to the Baltic states.”

Did you get it? Why, it was none other than Joe Biden, who apparently understood then what he pretends not to understand now.

It was therefore all extremely predictable what would eventually happen if this expansion occurred, and yet the expansion and promises of further expansion did continue nonetheless.

We then fast-forward to 2014, where we find what was perhaps the most blatant coup d’etat in history, when the US and EU conspired together to foment regime change in Ukraine. The coup itself relied heavily on neo-Nazi groups such as Pravy Sektor, whose leader at that time, Dmytro Yarosh, stood on the stage in Maidan Square in Kiev and, flanked by some sinister looking Nazi goons, informed the crowd that his organisation was rejecting the deal brokered by the French, Germans and Poles for a gradual and peaceful handover of power, and that if then President Viktor Yanukovych hadn’t vacated his premises by the following morning, they would depose him — violently. The rest is history. The coup took place, the French, Germans and Poles slunk away apparently forgetting the deal they had brokered, and Victoria Nuland at the State Department gleefully rubbed the cookie crumbs from her hands and set about realising her dream of what to do with that poor country, including the installation of biological weapons laboratories, it would seem. That’s her legacy: She came, she saw, she bought them Cookies and Plague.

One of the first things the new illegitimate regime did was announce a ban on Russian as an official language — despite the fact that it was the predominant language throughout most of the East and South East of the country, where the majority of people were historically, culturally, religiously, and linguistically Russian. Which explains why some of these regions rejected this new hostile, illegitimate government and decided to secede. Again, there is no rocket science here.

What then took place was eight years of conflict, in which the West turned a blind eye to continued atrocities — even blaming them on Russia, when it was the Western backed coup government that was carrying them out. For eight years, with varying degrees of intensity, that people were subjected to bombardment, and being terrorised both by the regular Ukrainian Army and the unashamedly Nazi Tornado, Azov, and Aidar Battalions, which the Western governments helped to train, whilst the Western media pretended it wasn’t happening. But it did happen, and here was the former Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko, boasting early on in the hostilities that the bombardment he authorised would see the children of Eastern Ukrainians cowering in basements. Even when a peace process was agreed, with the first and then second Minsk Accords, the shelling of those areas never ceased, over a million refugees fled to Russia, and the Western powers put absolutely no pressure on the Ukrainian Government to fulfil the obligations it had signed to seek a peaceful settlement with the two republics.

Why was this allowed to happen, and why was there no international outcry as those children were holed up in basements and as innocent civilians lived under the constant threat of bombardment by their own Government? The simple reason is that despite their current fake bleeding heart blue and yellow social media profiles, Western governments and the media don’t give a stuff about the people of Ukraine, but have instead led them up the garden path with their phoney promises of Westernisation and NATO membership, when in fact their entire plan was and is very simply to use that country as a stick to poke the bear next door. Here’s a quote from a piece I linked to back in 2014, which very succinctly explains the strategy:

“The Eurasian-wide plan of strategic destabilization and state fracturing owes its genesis to Zbigniew Brzezinski and his Eurasian Balkans concept. The US is flexible in practicing this concept, and it does not meet a dead end if the destabilization encounters an obstacle and cannot be advanced. Should this occur, as it has in Ukraine, Syria and Iraq, and possibly soon in the South China Sea, the stratagem evolves into maximizing the chaos within the launch pad states that are positioned on the doorsteps of the Eurasian Powers. The idea is to create ‘black holes’ of absolute disorder in which Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran are ‘damned if they do, damned if they don’t’ intervene.”

Which is basically where we’re at. The pathetic drivel put forward by the Western powers, in which Ukraine is the Shire, full of nothing but peaceful Hobbit folk with nary a neo-Nazi to be seen, but who unfortunately live next door to Mordor and its Orc hordes, is tripe of the tripiest dimensions. They care nothing about the people of Ukraine, but have simply used it as their Globalist Plaything, bleeding it dry via shell schemes in which sons of US Presidents magically get paid whacking great salaries for jobs they’re not remotely equipped to do, and where they arm and fund some of the worst people imaginable — in this case neo-Nazi battalions, just as they did the Mujahideen back in the day, and al-Nusra Jihadists more recently — to create permanent chaos on Russia’s borders.

But as I said earlier, we certainly haven’t been told the whole reason for the current invasion, and I’m sure there’s much more to come. Because ultimately this is not really about Ukraine, but about an inevitable conflict between ideological fanatics and stone cold realists, with the poor Ukrainians sadly caught in the middle of it.

I want to finish this piece with seven very brief points, some of which I may return to in the future.

Firstly, the reaction to the Russian intervention has been on a level of hysteria that I’ve only ever seen once before in my life — last year, in fact, with the absurd reaction to an eminently treatable virus with a 99.9% Survivability Rate. The fact that we are witnessing a reaction that never occurred during the US/NATO wars of aggression throughout the last few decades, or indeed during the Russian intervention in Syria (although there was some) should alert thinking people to the following conclusion: this military operation is about something much bigger than the reasons that have been stated either by the Russians or the West.

Secondly, the Western media has entirely deceived people into what is really going on, with their heroic but fake tales of Ghost pilots, Snake Islands, and massive Ukrainian resistance. The fact is that the bulk of the action has been in the East, not in Kiev as the media leads people to believe, and the Ukrainian armed forces are now basically trapped there in a number of military cauldrons, where they will either lay down their weapons or die. For an ongoing analysis of the situation, I recommend the excellent videos put out by The Duran.

Thirdly, the ONLY solution to this crisis that has any hope of bringing lasting peace, is for Ukraine to declare itself a neutral country between the NATO alliance and Russia. However, the Neocon Globalist cult will never accept this solution, and so unless other more sensible heads in the West understand this simple point and are able to prevail, the conflict will inevitably continue and quite possibly escalate even further at some point, which is a very scary thought.

Fourthly, the economic sanctions that have been placed on Russia by the Western countries will rebound spectacularly, and end up hurting European countries especially, far harder than they will hurt Russia. Again, the analysis at The Duran is excellent for those who want to learn more.

Fifthly, when the monumentally ignorant MPs in the British Parliament stood up to applaud President Zelensky, did they have the remotest clue that his closing words — “Glory to Ukraine” — was the official slogan of Stepan Bandera’s OUN-B, the Ukrainian Nazi group that fought alongside the Waffen SS in World War II, and which horrifically massacred 100,000 Poles in Volhynia in 1943, or that this same slogan is used by the openly Nazi heirs of Bandera today? I somehow doubt it.

Sixthly, the existence of US funded Biological laboratories on the territory of Ukraine, which was yesterday’s conspiracy theory, is in fact true and was even confirmed by none other than the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs of the United States, Victoria “Cookies” Nuland, who is apparently very concerned that the contents of these places might escape or fall into the hands of the Russians. Why is she so concerned, and why has the US tried to delete or burn the records of these places? For those interested in finding out, I recommend the work of a very brave proper journalist (remember them), George Webb who can be found on Twitter at @RealGeorgeWebb1. Should all this turn out to be as bad as it looks, it might just put a very different perspective on things and explain the unhinged reaction we’ve seen in the Western media. It would also be mighty ironic: many of the Western leaders and media that still justify the invasion of Iraq, even though it turned out not to have the Bioweapons that were claimed as the pretext, are now howling with outrage at a conflict in an area where they do exist.

Seventhly and lastly, why do I get the feeling that Klaus Schwab is one of the few people who is enjoying the economic repercussions of this war?

March 13, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

‘US will scrap Iran deal before agreeing with Russia on sanctions’

RT | March 13, 2022

The US will not negotiate the easing of any Ukraine-related sanctions on Russia to ensure that Moscow can trade with Tehran under a new iteration of the Iran nuclear deal, a US official told the Wall Street Journal on Sunday. Despite a deal being reportedly close at hand, the official said that Washington would pursue an alternate agreement before granting Russia any exemptions.

“I don’t see the scope for going beyond what is within the confines of the JCPOA,” the official said, referring to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which guaranteed Iran limited sanctions relief in exchange for a halt to its nuclear program. “I think it’s pretty safe to say that there is no room for making exemptions beyond those.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has demanded written assurances that sanctions imposed on Russia since the start of its military offensive in Ukraine won’t impact any trade between Russia and Iran under a successor deal to the JCPOA, which is currently being negotiated.

Despite US Secretary of State Tony Blinken describing the Ukraine-related sanctions as “irrelevant” to the deal last week, the Iranians are apparently siding with Russia. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh stated last week that “Iran’s peaceful nuclear cooperation should not be affected or restricted by any sanctions, including Iran’s peaceful nuclear cooperation with Russia.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Russian negotiators are likely to specify their precise demands in writing in the coming days, and the Americans will “know within a week whether or not Russia is prepared to back down,” the US official added.

Should Russia remain firm on its demands, the US would be open to negotiating a “replica of the JCPOA” without Russian involvement, the official said, noting that “we…at this point wouldn’t rule anything out.”

However, it is far from clear whether the other parties to the 2015 deal would agree to a new accord without Russia. The original agreement was signed by Iran and the US, UK, Russia, France, Germany, China and the EU. While the Wall Street Journal claimed that European diplomats are exploring “options for pursuing a deal without Russia,” China is a major nuclear power and generally a diplomatic ally of Russia, and may balk at any deal that excludes Moscow.

Negotiators have been attempting to hammer out a replacement for the JCPOA for nearly a year, meeting regularly in Austria’s capital Vienna for negotiations. The French Foreign Ministry said last week that the parties are “very close to a deal,” but admitted that disagreements between the US and Russia could scupper any potential accord. The anonymous US official echoed these concerns on Sunday, describing Russia’s demands as “the most serious stumbling block and obstacle to reaching a deal.”

March 13, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

Putin’s War

BY GILAD ATZMON | MARCH 13, 2022

Putin is not a military general. He is a modernist leader, a trained spymaster and strategist who understands that war is a continuation of politics by other means (Clausewitz). Accordingly, if we want to grasp Putin’s motives we should refrain from trying to assess Russia’s military campaign in terms of ‘strict military objectives.’ We should instead look at the military campaign as a political instrument that is set to mobilize a global and regional geopolitical shift and on a mammoth scale.

It is clear that Putin’s army is doing its best to avoid civilian casualties. It uses siege tactics as opposed to the barbarian American ‘Shock and Awe’ doctrine. Furthermore, the Russian military works hard not to dismantle the Ukrainian military. Instead it encircles cities and is cutting out the Ukrainian army in the East and South of the country. The Russian military has dismantled Ukraine’s ability to regroup, let alone counter attack. Western military analysts have agreed that clear evidence of the Ukrainian army’s growing disability is that Ukraine’s army didn’t manage to seriously damage the 60 km Russian convoy on its way to Kyiv despite the fact that the convoy stood still for more than 10 days. In the last 24 hours, Russia has made it clear to the West that any Western military supply to Ukraine will be treated as a legitimate military target. In other words, the elite Ukrainian army in the East is now a defunct military force; it can defend the cities, it can mount guerrilla attacks on stretched Russian military logistics but it cannot regroup into a fighting force that can alter the battleground.

Putin’s army, as military experts agree, enjoys massive firepower. It is hardly a secret that Russia’s artillery is a deadly force and there is no force that can match it anywhere in the world. The military rationale for this is plain. The USSR never trusted the quality and the loyalty of its foot soldiers. While it counted on the soldiers’ mass impact, their sheer numbers, it also invented the means, the technology, the tactics and the doctrine to win the battle from afar in preparation for the masses to move in. It was Red artillery that knocked down the 3rd Reich Army. Similarly, flattening enemy cities is something the USSR and modern Russia are famous for. Russia enjoys this power, but it has refrained, so far, from deploying this ability in Ukraine. Russia has displayed this capability rather than deploying it. According to military analysts, Russia hasn’t even begun to utilize its superior air power other than assuring its total air superiority over Ukraine.

The Russian army’s tactic has been to mount pressure on cities’ outskirts, demonstrating Russian military might and then opening corridors for humanitarian convoys. And this is the trick. Russia is creating a flood of refugees to the west. Due to the Ukrainian government ban on men 18-60 leaving the country, we are talking about women and children. So far there are about 2.5 million Ukrainian refugees but this number could increase dramatically. And the question follows: will Germany be happy to accept another million refugees that aren’t a working force? What about France and Britain, the USA, Canada, all those countries that pushed Zalensky and Ukraine into a war but were quick to leave the Ukrainian people to their fate?

Sooner or later, Putin believes, Europe will accept his entire list of demands and will lift the list of sanctions, and may even compensate him for his losses on oil sales all in a desperate attempt to stop the tsunami of Ukrainian refugees. By the time the guns cool down, many Ukrainians may actually prefer to stay in Germany, France, Britain and Poland. This will lead, at least in Putin’s mind, to a demographic shift in the ethnic balance in favor of the Russian ethnic groups in Ukraine. Within the context of such a shift, Putin will be able to dominate the situation in his neighbour state by political and even democratic means.

Putin’s plan is not new. It already succeeded in Syria.

When the West realised that Syria was on foot to Europe, it was very quick to allow Putin to win the battle for Assad at the expense of America’s hegemony in the Middle East. Putin now deploys basically the same tactics. He may be cruel or even barbarian but stupid or irrational he isn’t.

The main question is how is it possible that our Western political and media elite are clueless about Putin and Russia’s moves? How is it possible that not one Western military analyst can connect the dots and see through the fog of this horrid war? The reason is obvious: no gifted people see a potential career in military or public service these days. Gifted people prefer the corporate world, banks, high tech, data and media giants. The result is that Western generals and intelligence experts are not very gifted. The situation of our Western political class is even more depressing. Not only are our politicians those who weren’t gifted enough to join the corporate route, they are also uniquely unethical. They are there to fulfil the most sinister plans of their globalist masters and they do it all at our expense.

I have little doubt that an experienced politician like Angela Merkel wouldn’t have let the Ukraine situation escalate into a global disaster. She, like Putin, was properly trained for her job, understanding the deep distinction between strategy and tactics. She, like Putin, was trained to think five steps ahead. As far as I can tell there is no one in the West who understands Putin, who can read his mind. Instead they attribute to the Russian leader psychotic characteristics in a desperate attempt to hide the depth of the hopeless and tragic situation the West inflicted on itself and on Ukraine in particular.

Meanwhile Putin is taking the most spectacular measures to protect his life and his regime. We in the west find it ‘laughable,’ but Putin knows very well that the only way the West can deal with its own incapacity is to eliminate him and his regime one way or another.

March 13, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Leading to War in Ukraine?

By Peter Van Buren | March 11, 2022

The whole idea of boycotting Russian vodka reminds too much of “freedom fries” from Gulf War II. It seems stupid and silly until you realize we are stupid and silly and this is how we are led to war.

The tsunami of pro-Ukrainian propaganda is only matched by its transparency. The Ghost of Kiev was crafted out of an aircraft computer game. The Ukrainians on that island who would rather die than surrender surrendered. The supermodels joining the army are holding toy rifles. Zelensky is Where’s Waldo, popping up in undated video with unidentifiable backgrounds, dressed in military cosplay reminiscent of George W. Bush in his flight suit. The simplistic narrative is the same simplistic narrative: plucky freedom fighters against some evil dictator. It’s the same story of the resistance fighters in Syria against Assad, the Kurds against ISIS, the Northern Resistance, the Sunnis who joined our side, the Taliban who Ronald Reagan called the equivalent of our Founding Fathers for their fight against the Red Army.

Putin now is the most evil man on earth, unhinged, mentally unwell. Saddam once was, Assad used to be, and Quaddafi was to the point where America cheered as he was sodomized with a knife on TV.  Putin is so unstable we don’t know what he’ll do. Familiar voices are raised: The Brookings Institution’s Ben Wittes demands: “Regime change: Russia.” The Council on Foreign Relations’ Richard Haass roared that “the conversation has shifted to include the possibility of desired regime change in Russia.” One headline wishfully notes “knocking Putin’s teams off the sports stage leaves him exposed to his own people.” No one seems to recall, however, our last attempt at regime change in Russia is what put Putin into power in the first place.

Putin’s goals have gone in a matter of days from sorting out Cold War borders to “the restoration of a triumphalist, imperialistic Russian identity, or another bloodstained nationalistic surge to cover for the criminality of his regime, or whether he just has come egotistically unmoored.” One former Iraqi War cheerleader tells us Ukraine, the “front line between democracy and autocracy, is a core interest of the United States… Ukraine is where the battle for democracy’s survival is most urgent. ”

Others are more direct. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, Senator Roger Wicker, and Zelensky demand a no-fly zone. They have friends; a poll as the invasion began found “52 percent of Americans see the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as a critical threat to US vital interests” with almost no partisan division. No polling on what those vital interests might be. Rep. Eric Swalwell and Rep. Ruben Gallego want all Russians deported from the US. As if preparing for war, the U.S. has already closed its embassies in Ukraine and Belarus, and placed Embassy Moscow on “Authorized Departure” status for non-emergency staff and family members. On the other end of the government, the CIA is training Ukrainians for an insurgency. You know, like with the mujahedeen in Afghanistan years ago. Lawmakers at a congressional hearing discussed having American intelligence provide more direct assistance to Ukraine, including ground operatives.

No dissent is allowed. You are either “with us or against us.” The homogeneity of our social and MSM is terrifying. Censorship is in full fury; the fact checkers are hands off even the most outrageous claims (the Ukrainians have trained cats to spot Russian laser sights) and Twitter calls out Russian sources but not pro-Ukrainian ones. Facebook and YouTube post Ukrainian propaganda made in violation of the Geneva Convention. Google News will not include anything from Russian state media. The NYT is running anonymously-sourced tales claiming the Russians are deserting or sabotaging their own vehicles. Rolling Stone is naming “the American right-wingers covering for Putin as Russia invades Ukraine,” currently Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, J.D. Vance, and Tulsi Gabbard. The worst of all of course is Trump, whom Liz Cheney claims “aids our enemies” and whose “interests don’t seem to align with the interests of the United States.” When he proposed Congress vote on military escalations by the US in Ukraine, Senator Mike Lee was quickly called “Moscow Mike.”

If all that isn’t laying the ground work for a fight, it has been an awful lot of work for nothing.

We’ve been here before when everything was the same but not the same. Following Putin’s 2014 seizure of Crimea, and feints toward Ukraine, then-President Barack Obama said Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there. “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” Obama showed the same realism in 2013 when in the face of war-mongering over Assad “gassing his own people in Syria” he backed away from widening the war (if only Obama had been equally pragmatic over Libya.)

But Biden is not Obama. Biden, due to age and background, is not a strong man. Unlike Obama, he does not see himself awash in the stream of history, but more as a caretaker until the Democratic Party can regroup, the Gerald Ford of his era. Biden is a weak man who will come under increasing pressure to “do something” as it becomes apparent the newest layer of sanctions against Russia accomplishes as little as the last layer of sanctions. The previous sanctions, among other things, did not stop Putin from invading Ukraine.

But more than anything else, Joe Biden is a Cold Warrior, burdened fully with a world view Obama was not. That world view says the role of the United States is to create a global system and enforce its rules. We can invade nations that did not attack us and demand regime change but you cannot. We decide which nations have nuclear weapons and which can not. We can walk our NATO-alliance right to your border but you cannot do the same with yours. We decide what systems control international commerce and who can participate in them. It is right and just for us to talk about crippling an economy, but not you. It was all best expressed by Condoleezza Rice, who commented with a straight face on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.”

This world view says the United States can empower former Soviet satellites and grow American influence by expanding NATO eastward (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and Romania formally joined the alliance, East Germany by default) and to do this while taking the nuclear weapons away from those states so that none of them would become a threat or rival in Europe. It was American policy to have weak but not too weak states between Russia and the “good” part of Europe, dependent on America for defense.

As the Soviet Union collapsed, borders were redrawn to match the West’s needs (the same mistake was made earlier by the British post-WWI in the Middle East.) The reality of 2022 is Putin is seeking to redraw borders. Ukraine as a possible NATO member is a threat to Putin and he is now taking care of that. Americans live in a country that has no border threats and fails to understand the mindset time after time; imagine Mexico joining the Warsaw Pact in 1970.

We were warned. After the Senate ratified NATO expansion in 1998 despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ambassador George Kennan stated “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely. I think it is a tragic mistake. No one was threatening anybody else. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.”

That’s the circa-1998 trap Joe Biden is being lured back into. Only months after the America collapse and retreat from Afghanistan, Biden learned nothing. Our defeat did not teach us humility and restraint. It did not school us that America can no longer dictate global rules, sitting as judge while an ally invades a neighbor and then turning to hurl lightening bolts when an enemy invades one. It did not budge us a hair away from the destructive moral certainty that fuels our foreign policy. All that’s missing now is for someone to claim Russia and China are a new Axis of Evil.

Putin invaded Ukraine because, unlike Biden, he understands the new, new world order has different rules. Joe Biden, not always a quick study, has two choices. He can give in to the voices for war and try and prop up the myth of World’s Policemen for another round, or he can understand the consistent failures of American crusades and the global Pax Americana since WWII, especially those in the Middle East of the past two decades, plus the rise of multipolar economic powers to include China, have changed the rules. Negotiation is no longer appeasement. We aren’t in control anymore, and despite Iraq and Afghanistan, Biden may seek another bloody confirmation of that. Or he can understand America’s core interests are not in Ukraine and keep the peace.

March 13, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Iran and SCO sign protocol to start accession process for Tehran

Press TV – March 12, 2022

Iran and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) have started a formal process for Tehran’s accession to the major economic bloc.

A Saturday report by Iran’s IRIB News said that a document had been signed a day earlier in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent between representatives of the eight-member SCO and Iran to allow the organization to consider Iran’s accession bid.

Uzbekistan’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the signing of the protocol would practically allow the implementation of decision by SCO heads of state in Tajikistan last year to provide membership to Iran.

The next step in the process will be for Iran to sign a memorandum of commitment at an SCO summit in Uzbekistan’s Samarkand in September 2022, said the statement, adding that SCO heads of states will then decide to include Iran in the bloc.

Iran was an observer member of the SCO before applying to join the bloc that includes Russia, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Experts says Iran’s accession to the SCO will be a major boost to the bloc’s influence in the region mainly because Iran’s massive transportation network can facilitate regional and international trade.

Iran is also expected to benefit economically from membership in the bloc. The Iranian customs office (IRICA) said on Saturday that Iranian exports to SCO members had increased by 41% year on year in the 11 months to late February to reach nearly $18.3 billion.

IRICA figures showed that Iran had imported $14.4 billion worth of goods from the SCO countries between March 2021 and February 2022, an increase of 31% against the previous similar period.

March 12, 2022 Posted by | Economics | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Georgia and NATO announce joint exercises

RT | March 12, 2022

Joint NATO-Georgia IT-based exercises will be conducted from March 20 to 25, the Georgian ministry of defense announced on Saturday.

The exercises, which have been planned since 2020, will take place in the Georgia-NATO Joint Training and Evaluation Center (JTEC) with representatives of 23 NATO member states set to take part.

“The exercises will help increase interoperability between the military of Georgia and NATO member and partner countries,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement.

It specified that the goal of the upcoming exercises would be to develop the skills necessary for planning operations by using computer simulations, as well as to share knowledge and experience.

The exercises would be the third of their type held since 2016 and are a part of the Substantial NATO-Georgia Package, which was approved at the 2014 Wales Summit.

In 2008, in the Bucharest Summit Declaration the alliance announced that NATO welcomed “Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO.” The summit participants agreed that eventually these countries would “become members of NATO.”

This decision was condemned by Moscow which consistently opposed NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders.

The possibility of Ukraine becoming a member of the bloc has been one of the reasons for Russia’s ongoing military offensive, despite numerous assurances from NATO that neither Ukraine’s and Georgia’s memberships are currently on its agenda.

March 12, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Moscow rejects Washington’s chemical-weapons claim

RT | March 12, 2022

Russia’s ambassador to Washington accused the Americans on Saturday of trying to “demonize” Moscow, rejecting a US State Department allegation that his country may deploy chemical weapons in Ukraine.

“The US official, as always, did not bother to provide any evidence. This is another attempt to demonize our country,” Anatoly Antonov said, adding that such claims were “not worth a penny.”

Citing a paper from Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the official then suggested that Ukrainian “radical groups” – allegedly “[trained] under the control of the representatives of American special services” – could have themselves “prepared several potential scenarios of the use of toxic chemicals in order to carry out various types of provocations.”

“Our country, unlike the United States, eliminated all available stocks of chemical warfare agents in 2017. This fact has been documented by the OPCW. It is pointless to argue with this fact,” Antonov concluded, in reference to the fact that US chemical warfare stockpiles have yet to be completely decommissioned.

The Russian government has claimed that Ukrainian groups backed by the US could be preparing a false-flag chemical attack in order to “accuse Russia of the use of chemical weapons against the civil population and violating its obligations.” The US and Ukraine have denied such claims.

State Department spokesperson Ned Price suggested on Wednesday that Russia could use chemical weapons in Ukraine.

“Russia has a track record of accusing the West of the very crimes that Russia itself is perpetrating,” he said, calling Moscow’s warnings “an obvious ploy.”

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki claimed this week that Russia could “use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine” or “create a false-flag operation” with such weapons. Psaki added that the world should “be on the lookout.”

Psaki dismissed Moscow’s suggestions that the US and Ukraine could conduct a similar false-flag attack, calling them “false claims” and “conspiracy theories.”

The press secretary argued that Moscow’s claims were an “obvious ploy” to justify further military action in Ukraine.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry claimed on March 6 that Russian forces had discovered evidence of Ukraine erasing traces of an alleged US-backed military biological program in the country. Washington has claimed it is working to prevent Russian forces from capturing biological research material.

March 12, 2022 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Much wants more and loses all

GEFIRA | March 11, 2022

The collective post-West has been running amok for the last two weeks. The powers that be make believe that they did not expect that events would unfold the way they are unfolding now (though they did their best to make things happen as they are happening) and they make a show imposing sanctions on the aggressor and assuring the populace that the aggressor sooner or later will cave in. There is yet a third aspect to the phenomenon: the same powers that be want the people to forget that merely twenty years back they themselves assaulted Yugoslavia/Serbia, used missiles with depleted uranium, bombed cities and shot at civilians. Of course, that earlier event was a humanitarian action while the current one is a brutal act of aggression, but we digress.

Now there is a big misconception on the part of the post-West about Russia. If the Western media claim the Russian people are against the war or that the Russian people are about to rebel and overthrow President Putin, then they are either delusional or lying through their teeth. Reality is something that refuses to obey our wishes. The Russian people have rallied around their president and their authorities; the Russian people – unlike citizens of the post-Western countries – are patriotic and ready to sacrifice themselves in defence of their fatherland. Western sanctions? The post-West may withdraw businesses and impose sanctions on Russian oligarchs, which is music to the ears of the Russian people. They resented Western dominance anyway and they will be more than happy to see the oligarchs mopped up from their society. Russians view the hostilities as a repeat of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. Contrary to what has been done to the Western collective mentality, the Russian authorities under Vladimir Putin took great efforts to raise Russia’s citizens in patriotic values. Russians are going to win because they do not care about money so much as the West does. That’s one big misconception that Western people have about their opponents from the East.

It is the West that cannot imagine a life without money and the resultant luxuries. Sanctions or no sanctions, Western companies will sooner or later (I bet: sooner) resume business with Russia because – as everybody in the West knows – “money makes the world go round”. No less a person than Comrade Lenin famously said: capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will make a noose to hang them. And so they will, make no bones about it.

Yes, the West is ready to go to war with Russia so long as it has… Ukrainian, Polish, Romanian, Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian soldiers at its disposal. The moment the West runs out of those soldiers, its leaders will go back to the negotiating table with the Kremlin. Do you want any evidence? Here you are.

A few days ago Americans tried to set Poland against Russia in that they suggested to Warsaw that it send Soviet-made MiG aircraft to Ukraine. Though the Polish authorities usually oblige the West’s wishes, this time they had second thoughts about the proposal and replied that they were ready to send the said aircraft to the American air base in Rammstein so that Americans could pass them over to Kiev. And you know what? Washington was beside itself with annoyance! You see? The dog was expected to bite the bear, with the dog’s owner watching from the sidelines and biding his time.

Just picture it to yourself. Warsaw sends the MiG aircraft to Ukraine, Moscow regards it (and rightly so!) as a hostile act and fires a couple of missiles against selected targets in Polish territory. What do you think the West would do? Yes, you guessed it right. The West would express its great indignation and impose a set of new sanctions… for a time.

Talking about President Putin, who – according to the Western analysts is about to be toppled either by the people closest to him or by the nation – his Christian name is Vladimir, and Vladimir was the name of the grand prince of Rus’ who united the many Slavic tribes and christened them. He went down in history as Vladimir the Great. The chances are – whether you like it or not – that Putin is going to be another Vladimir the Great.

The current war means the end of the world that we have been accustomed to. We are entering a new cold war period and a new division of the globe with the United States, Great Britain, and the European Union on the one side, and Russia and China on the other. This new world throws a monkey wrench into the plans forged by globalists of the Klaus Schwab ilk. Or, globalism will be reduced to the Western world. The international rules that all the countries have up to now tried to abide by are no more valid for Russia, and consequently sooner or later for others because of the domino effect. Being beleaguered by the West, Moscow will have no intention to play by the rules created in this West. Why should it?

Sanctions work both ways. Russia has a lot to offer, be it crude oil, natural gas, rare metals or what not. Look back into the past! The Bolsheviks that took reins of power after 1917 were hated by the West. Lo and behold, it did not take many years for the capitalists to resume business with the hated communists; similarly, after the Second World War the Soviet Union was regarded as a hostile empire and yet, and despite that, business between the West and the Soviets went as usual. How about China? It was Taiwan that was first supported by the West, yet slowly but surely Washington reversed course, left Taiwan to its own devices and resumed contacts with Beijing. Since – as said above – money makes the world go round, the greedy capitalists helped China develop in that they outsourced almost all production to the Middle Kingdom. Do you think it is going to be different now with regard to Russia?

When Ukraine is eventually conquered by Russia, what will the elites in such small countries like Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – all bordering on Russia – think about their security and the ability of the collective West to help them? I want to see that man or that woman who really thinks that NATO will go to war with Russia over Estonia or Latvia.

Ukraine has been exploited by Western companies for thirty long years. All those contacts with democracies and capitalism did not benefit the country at all. It only benefited a handful of people, who fled Ukraine before the hostilities, leaving the rank and file behind. Rumour has it that President Zelensky is kept in the American embassy in Warsaw though we are all made to believe that he remains in Kiev. How much would you bet on President Zelensky residing in Kiev, a city that is about to be soon encircled?

The West could have further exploited Ukraine and teased Russia but it simply overplayed its hand. Precisely as it is described in this fable by Aesop where a goose laying golden eggs is killed by the greedy owners. The moral? Much wants more and loses all. Now that Moscow is taking retaliatory steps like shutting down media outlets that propagated Western ideas and Western lifestyle the West has lost its ideological bridgehead inside Russia that it has held for thirty years. The West really thought it was ready to make a killing. A big killing. Western elites really thought Russia would be withdrawing from its positions further and further; they really believed the Navalny kind of Russian dissenters that the Russian people were all against the authorities. Worse, the West still thinks that Russians will force their president to surrender because otherwise common people will be stripped of the opportunity to eat hamburgers and cheeseburgers in McDonald’s restaurants in Moscow and Petersburg! Sure, there are some such people who are ready to trade their country for ham- and cheeseburgers, but then it is a splinter from the large whole. The majority accustomed to Russia’s greatness are not willing to sell this greatness off. Plus, they are not attracted by the Western values of married homosexuals or the many sexes that are invented by the month. That’s also something that the post-West is not aware of. Remember also that millions of Russians have bitter recollections of the Yeltsin era during which western-style capitalism promised them well-being and brought poverty, unrest and humiliation instead. That’s one big reason why President Putin is appreciated by the vast majority of the population: he put an end to chaos and brought in stability. If you think Russians dream about homosexual parades in their cities or pregnant soldiers in their army or the many gender pronouns, you cannot be more delusional.

There is one more explanation to all what is occurring. The West went to great lengths to have Russia and Ukraine clash for the sheer purpose of weakening both countries. This is one sure way of preserving world preponderance, is it not? Lead nations to war the moment you see they have developed too much and too fast. The United States achieved its global dominance because the Second World War wreaked havoc with the economies of Germany, Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy and Japan – the world’s powerhouses. After the cessation of the hostilities all those countries needed American aid and American dollars and were compelled to accept almost all the dictates from Washington.

Look at the present political map of the world. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Ukraine, the countries of former Yugoslavia, the states that went through an array of all those colour revolutions: they are reeling under the blows of all manner of war, civil war, social upheaval and the attendant economic collapse. Which country emerges victorious? Yes, sure, the one that has not been directly engaged in the conflict. A classic case of two dogs fighting for a bone with a third running away with it.

Russia and Ukraine will lose a number of people (killed, wounded, displaced); Ukraine will have its economy ruined; Poland is already accommodating a million (and rising!) Ukrainians who somehow do not want to defend their country and prove their rights to it (If you say that women and children do not or should not take part in hostilities, then think again); Warsaw will have a lot of trouble with them. Who emerges victorious? You know who. Vice-President Kamala Harris visited Poland to reassuringly pat the Polish nation on the shoulder in recognition of Poland’s hospitality towards Ukrainians. She knows that such gestures work with Poles. The supranational elites hating ethnically monolithic countries are rubbing their hands in glee. At last Poland, this ethnically and religiously monolithic nation, is changing to a mix of Poles and Ukrainians, of Catholic and Orthodox Christians, to be later skilfully set off against each other like Croats and Serbs if Warsaw should fail to toe the Western party line.

GEFIRA – Global Analysis from the European Perspective. Preparing for the world of tomorrow.

March 12, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

US Officials Meet Maduro, Fail to Drive Wedge Between Venezuela and Russia

By José Luis Granados Ceja | Venezuelanalysis | March 7, 2022

Mexico City, Mexico – A high-level United States (US) government delegation that visited Venezuela on Saturday failed to produce an agreement with the government of Nicolás Maduro.

News of the delegation was first broken by the New York Times, which described the trip as the highest-level visit by US officials in years. Outlets subsequently reported that no agreement was reached. Caracas had not publicly commented on the meeting at the time of writing.

According to Reuters, the US team was led by White House Latin America adviser Juan González and made “maximalist” demands concerning electoral guarantees. Citing three people familiar with the matter, Reuters reported that the US was seeking new presidential elections, a larger participation of foreign private capital in Venezuela’s oil industry and a public condemnation of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine. The Biden administration representatives reportedly offered Venezuela a temporary return to the SWIFT financial transaction system.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who directly participated in the meeting, instead demanded broader sanctions relief and the return of foreign assets such as oil subsidiary CITGO. US officials reportedly brought up the cases of US citizens jailed in Venezuela, including six oil executives imprisoned for corruption and two former Green Berets who took part in a failed coup effort.

The meeting in Caracas was the latest US effort to isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin from his allies in the region. US officials told the Times that Washington views Russia’s Latin American allies as a potential “security threat” should the tensions continue to escalate in light of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, which has ratcheted up conflict between the US and Russia.

Venezuela broke off diplomatic relations with the US in 2019 after the latter recognized opposition figure Juan Guaidó as “interim president.” The US and its allies refused to recognize the results of the 2018 election that saw Maduro reelected to a six-year term. Washington then proceeded to engage in and support a series of unsuccessful coup plots, ultimately failing to oust Maduro from power.

US strategy toward Venezuela has more recently been focused on isolating Maduro, imposing crippling sanctions on the country’s energy sector and seizing, together with its allies, the country’s assets abroad. In public statements, the Biden administration has expressed its unwillingness to seriously negotiate with Caracas absent new elections.

Nonetheless, due to the failure of the US to successfully install Guaidó as an authority with any real power inside Venezuela, Caracas and Washington have maintained back-channel communications despite the lack of formal diplomatic relations. Guaidó, despite being recognized by the US as the country’s president, was only informed of the high-level delegation the morning of the meeting.

Venezuelan geopolitical analyst Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein told Venezuelanalysis that the leak of the news of the visit of senior US officials was motivated by an effort to drive a wedge between Caracas and Moscow and leave the impression that there was a “chill” in relations between the two countries.

Rodríguez maintained that Washington and Caracas would nonetheless leave the door open to dialogue.

“I believe that there will be continued attempts at rapprochement, especially because the Mexican [dialogue between the Venezuelan government and the opposition] was exhausted,” he said. “The Mexico talks were totally absurd since the opposition was being directed from within the United States, any step they took had to be consulted with Washington. In that sense it is much more feasible for the United States to negotiate directly with Venezuela.”

President Maduro has repeatedly expressed a willingness to negotiate an end to US-led sanctions on the country. The lack of a deal stemming from the visit by the senior-level delegation suggests Venezuela did not find it to be a workable proposal. Reuters reported that US officials agreed to a follow-up meeting.

It would take a considerable reversal of US policy toward the Caribbean nation to get the country to walk away from its Russian ally. Relations between the two countries have only grown in light of US efforts to isolate Caracas. Russian assistance has played an important role in Venezuela’s efforts to attend to the economic crisis in the country, providing support and expertise to the country’s key industries as well as steady investment in Venezuela’s energy sector.

Venezuela likewise recently strengthened its ties with Russia following a visit by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov in February.

Caracas has called for a “peaceful resolution” to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine but has stopped short of condemning the Russian military operation. Venezuela did not vote in the United Nations (UN) General Assembly’s resolution concerning the Russian offensive in Ukraine. The country’s voting rights have been suspended as a result of unpaid UN membership dues due the impact of sanctions.

In light of coercive measures applied on Russia by the US and the European Union, Maduro has insisted that Venezuela will maintain its commercial relations with the Eurasian nation.

The Venezuelan leader also spoke directly by phone with Putin last week, with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs reporting that the Venezuelan president expressed his “firm support” for Russia and condemned destabilization efforts by the US and NATO. Maduro has publicly called NATO’s handling of the Minsk Agreements a “mockery” and argued that their “derailment” constituted a violation of international law.

The Russian ambassador in Caracas Sergey Melik was invited to greet the opening 5th Congress of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela, held this Saturday, and was met with strong applause from the delegates.

Edited by Ricardo Vaz in Caracas.

March 11, 2022 Posted by | Economics | , , | Leave a comment

Russia adjusts to “sanctions from hell”

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | MARCH 11, 2022

The Russian President Vladimir Putin’s remarks at his meeting with government ministers on Thursday constituted his first comments on the West’s “sanctions from hell.” They were focused almost entirely on “a set of measures to minimise the consequences of sanctions on the Russian economy and the people of our country.” 

Putin’s number one priority is to hold himself accountable to his people. Unlike his American counterpart, Joe Biden, Putin feels no need of grandstanding, given his high approval rating above 70%. 

The paradox is, while the western countries who imposed the sanctions are going through paroxysms of angst, gnawing worries and anxiety syndromes, the “victim”, Russia, seems nonchalant and is calmly adjusting to the “new normal.” The contrast couldn’t be sharper. 

Without doubt, the Kremlin prepared thoroughly for the western sanctions. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin told Putin that a “special headquarters” has swung into action to coordinate the activities of all departments, including at the regional level. He said, “Steps to protect the most vulnerable areas are being worked through sector by sector.” The “core goals” are: 

  • “protecting the domestic market”; 
  • ensuring uninterrupted functioning of enterprises by eliminating disruptions in logistics and production chains;
  • helping the people and businesses to quickly adapt to the changing circumstances; and, 
  • maintaining employment. 

Over 20 major legislations are in the pipeline, which include specific proposals for stabilising financial markets, support  industries, especially for the private sector, as well as for the “return of capital.” 

One draft law aims to prevent shutdown of factories by foreign owners through “external management.” There is a vague hint of nationalisation, if push comes to shove.  Interestingly, most western owners are announcing “temporary suspension of operations” while paying salaries to employees. 

The IT sector, construction industry, transport companies and travel and tourism sector will receive special attention — as also agriculture, which is not only about jobs but also food security. There is an overall relaxation of regulatory measures, debt repayment schedules, bureaucratic procedure, etc.

Mishustin noted: “Maximum freedom of economic activity in the country, minimal regulation and control and, of course, support for the labour market will remain the basis for our economic response. The Government will expand import substitution and help domestic producers replace foreign products in supply chains.” 

The highlight of yesterday’s event was the presentation by Finance Minister Anton Siluanov on measures to stabilise the domestic financial market, underscoring how accurately the Kremlin anticipated the West’s agenda to isolate Russia. 

Siluanov said, “the Western countries have basically launched a financial and economic war” combining a default on their financial liabilities to Russia with a freeze on Russia’s gold and currency reserves. “They are doing all they can to stop foreign trade and the export,” he added, “trying to create a shortage of imported everyday essentials… (and) compel successful businesses with foreign capital to shut down.” 

In these circumstances, the government’s “priority is to stabilise the situation in the financial system and ensure uninterrupted operations.” Siluanov explained that the measures taken in this direction include “precautions to control the outflow of capital abroad” and a special procedure for servicing external debt, including national debt, whereby Russia will pay off its external liabilities in rubles and “carry out the conversion by de-freezing our gold and currency reserves.” 

Other measures include mandatory surrender of foreign exchange proceeds by companies, higher ruble interest rates, suspension of taxes on individual interest income for two years, suspended VAT on the purchase of gold and “a large project on capital amnesty.” 

The central bank will fully guarantee the liquidity and uninterrupted operations of financial institutions. Siluanov claimed, “These measures have already produced results. The situation on the outflow of deposits is being stabilised and the amount of cash withdrawals has been reduced to almost zero… balance of payments is also improving. Current account receipts are balancing out capital flow.”

To be sure, the big increase in oil and gas revenue will offset any decline in revenue in other sectors, thereby reduce borrowing and public debt, and will provide funds for priority spending. 

Most important, Siluanov stressed that the government regards the social commitments as the “top budget priority.” He said, “We will ensure the payment of pensions, benefits, salaries and other payments in a timely manner and in full. Medicines are provided as planned as well, including for children with complex diseases..

“In May, low-income families with children will start receiving new payments. We will earmark additional spending for these purposes in the budget system. The Government has begun to implement anti-crisis measures. Our top priority is to maintain employment and jobs, and to support people who need help under the current circumstances.” 

All in all, the prognosis here rubbishes the western predictions of “apocalypse now”. The EU’s rejection of Washington’s proposal for sanctions on Russia’s oil exports virtually ensures that there isn’t going to be any income deficit in Moscow. In 2021, the Kremlin balanced its budget with an oil price expectation of $45 per barrel. The prices currently exceed $130 per barrel!

This conservative fiscal approach by the government largely insulates the economy from the effects of Western economic sanctions. Ironically, the pressure is going to be on European leaders who are concerned about major energy supply disruptions from Russia and have to keep their economies supplied with fuel, while also punishing Russia!

On the contrary, if Putin responds with gas cutoffs, that could spike energy prices further, drive inflation, and undermine Europe’s economic recovery. Simply put, Russia is much larger than the contiguous United States, and has an educated population and far more natural wealth than the West’s Russophobes might expect! 

Take Russia’s exclusion from SWIFT. The fact of the matter is that while seven Russian banks were removed from SWIFT, those targeted did not include Sberbank or Gazprombank, two of Russia’s largest banks by assets. Why? Primarily due to Europe’s continued reliance on Russia for energy! 

The point is, Russia is intricately connected to the global economy, holds large quantities of critical resources, and has been strategically preparing since 2014 to weather the long-term impacts of sanctions and a removal from SWIFT.

Furthermore, it needs to be understood that while several Russian banks are now cut off from SWIFT, they can still execute international transactions with other banks — except that they must use slower and less-secure methods of interbank communication, such as the outdated telex telegram network or phone calls and email.

By the way, Russia has also developed its own internal financial transaction messaging system, the System for Transfer of Financial Messages that could at a pinch serve as a functional alternative to SWIFT. 

Equally, the western sanctions against Russia are bound to cause ripple effects across global markets, including supply chain disruptions and higher prices on energy and agricultural goods. Apart from being a key exporter of oil and gas, Russia is the world’s largest producer of palladium and the second-largest producer of platinum—key commodities used in semiconductor manufacturing—and a major exporter of other critical minerals, mining commodities, and agricultural goods.

Clearly, Russia has no dearth of willing trade partners across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, as it comes under compulsion to rely primarily on non-Western-aligned nations for trade markets for the foreseeable future. 

This has larger implications. Western sanctions could potentially accelerate a global economic divide between the West and Russian-aligned economies that are open to break away from the current US-dominated financial system, thereby accelerating a broad global economic reorientation. 

Surely, sanctions will isolate Russia from the US and EU markets, but its large reserve of natural resources and strong ties to China decrease the likelihood that it will become economically isolated.

On the contrary, if Western sanctions persist, economic relations with Russia could help accelerate the growth of a non-Western bloc in the global economy, which would have deleterious impact on the status of the American dollar as the world currency.

Quite obviously, there are already incipient signs that thoughtful minds in Europe, especially France and Germany, feel troubled and are conscious of the need to rebuild bridges with Russia. How they pan out remains to be seen.

The likelihood is that once the dust settles down in Ukraine and Russia has had its way as regards its security guarantees, a process of rapprochement will commence between the major European countries and Russia sooner rather than later.

In fact, at yesterday’s meeting, Putin expressed confidence that he expects a volte face by the US too, just as the Biden administration has done vis-a-vis Venezuela and Iran recently. Putin also signalled that Russia may not resort to tit-for-tat sanctions against Europe, especially in regard of energy exports.

March 11, 2022 Posted by | Economics | , , , | Leave a comment

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