Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Trump names cause of Ukraine conflict

RT | June 21, 2024

Russia’s intervention in Ukraine was triggered by the irresponsible and provocative rhetoric which US President Joe Biden and his administration used about Ukraine joining NATO, Donald Trump has said.

Trump, who is seeking a rematch with Biden for the presidency in November, appeared on the ‘All-In’ podcast posted late on Thursday. The comments about Ukraine came during a conversation on foreign policy with co-host David Sacks.

“For 20 years, I heard that if Ukraine goes into NATO, it’s a real problem for Russia. I’ve heard that for a long time. And I think that’s really why this war started,” Trump said.

The Republican presidential candidate pointed out that there had been no talk about armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine when he was in the White House, but as soon as Biden replaced him, things began to deteriorate.

“I thought that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin may be – well, look, he’s a good negotiator, I thought he was going to be doing that for negotiation purposes,” Trump said. “Then all of a sudden, they attacked, and I said, ‘what’s going on here?’”

According to the former president, one of the key issues was the rhetoric coming out of the White House.

“Biden was saying all of the wrong things. And one of the wrong things he was saying [was] ‘no, Ukraine will go into NATO’,” Trump said.

Sacks pointed out that in January 2022 or thereabouts, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Moscow that Ukraine would join NATO and that Washington thought it was OK to put nuclear weapons there. “So no wonder the Russians hit the roof,” he noted.

“Well, let’s say you were running Russia. You wouldn’t be too happy,” Trump replied. “And that’s always been off the table. It’s always been understood that that was a no-no,” he added, addressing Kiev’s potential NATO membership.

Floating the idea of Ukraine in NATO was “very provocative,” Trump said. “And now it’s even more provocative. I hear routinely they’re now talking about Ukraine entering NATO. And now I hear France wants to go in and fight. Well, I wish them a lot of luck!”

Putin has specifically pointed to Western statements about Ukraine’s possible membership in the US-led bloc as a security threat Moscow could not ignore. Ukraine’s neutrality has been one of the non-negotiable Russian conditions for the conflict to end.

NATO has argued that its “open door” policy is essential and that no one had the right of veto over it, but also that its expansion eastward was not the cause of the conflict.

In an interview with Time magazine earlier this month, Biden claimed that the US is “the strongest nation” because of NATO expansion, and that he told Putin he would get “NATOization of Finland” instead of “the Finlandization of NATO” during their June 2021 summit in Switzerland.

June 21, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Hungary ‘won’t ride NATO war train’ – Orban

RT | June 21, 2024

The US appears intent on continuing to fight Russia in Ukraine and hopes to win, but Hungary is acting to counter this destructive policy, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said.

The vocal opponent of the Western approach to the Ukraine conflict expressed fresh criticism during a weekly interview on Kossuth Radio on Friday.

“It appears that the Western world, led by the Americans, wants to defeat Russia, with the Germans playing the role of extras,” Orban claimed. He described the strategy as “hopeless,” adding that it is disastrous for the Ukrainians and Russians dying on the battlefield and is potentially escalatory.

The Hungarian leader claimed, however, that “we have already slowed the train to war,” citing the outcome of the recent European Parliament elections in which his party enjoyed success while some pro-Ukrainian groups suffered setbacks.

The Hungarian government has secured assurances from both outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and his presumed successor, Mark Rutte, that Budapest will not be dragged into a “mission” that the US-led bloc is establishing in Ukraine, the prime minister said. Hungary will not contribute troops, weapons, or money to the plan, Orban vowed.

“I can pull the emergency brake. The train will stop, and we Hungarians will get off this train,” he said. “And if we become very strong and the stars are lucky, we will convince the driver not to go any further.”

Moscow has described the Ukraine conflict as a US-initiated proxy war. After several member states publicly said this month that they will allow Kiev to strike targets deep inside Russia with Western-supplied weapons, President Vladimir Putin warned that Moscow could supply similar arms to enemies of the West.

French President Emmanual Macron, who has called on NATO countries not to rule out troop deployments to Ukraine, was among the EU leaders to have suffered the biggest in the European Parliament elections. He subsequently dissolved the French parliament, and is facing the threat of becoming a lame duck for the rest of his term as his political alliance contemplates a potential wipeout in the national legislature.

Supporters of the NATO involvement in the Ukraine conflict say its mission will be limited to training Ukrainian troops on the country’s soil.

June 21, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | Leave a comment

History lesson for Piers Morgan

June 20, 2024

You seem very reliant on accepting Putin’s worldview
rather than perhaps the stark reality of the
barbarism with which he’s executed this war.
Yeah, maybe because I know too much about the United States.
Because the first war in Europe after world War two was the US bombing of Belgrade for 78 days to change borders of a european state.
The idea was to break Serbia, to create Kosovo as an enclave, and then to install Bondsteel, which is the largest NATO base in the Balkans, in the southwest Balkans.
So the US started this under Clinton, that we will
break the borders, we will illegally bomb another country.
We didn’t have any UN authority.
This was a, quote, NATO mission to do that.
Then I know the United States went to war repeatedly,
illegally, in what it did in Afghanistan and then what
it did in Iraq and then what it did in Syria, which was the Obama administration, especially Obama and Hillary
Clinton, tasking the CIA to overthrow Bashar al Assad.
And then what it did with NATO illegally bombing Libya to topple Muammar Gaddafi and then what it did in Kiev in February 2014.
I happened to see some of that with my own eyes.
The US overthrew Yanukovych together with right wing ukrainian military forces.
We overthrew a president.
And what’s interesting, by the way, is we overthrew
Yanukovych the day after the European Union representatives had reached an agreement with Yanukovych to have early elections, a government of national unity and a stand down of both sides that was agreed.
The next thing that happens is the opposition, quote unquote, says, we don’t agree.
They stormed the government buildings and they deposed Yanukovych.
And within hours, the United States says, yes, we support the new government.
It didn’t say, oh, we had an agreement that’s unconstitutional what you did.
So we overthrew a government contrary to a
promise that the European Union had made.
And by the way, Russia, the United States,
and the EU were parties to that agreement.
And the United States an
hour afterwards backed the coup.
Okay, so everyone’s got a little bit to answer for.
In 2015, the Russians did not say, we want the Donbas back.
They said, peace should come through negotiations.
And negotiations between the ethnic Russians in the
east of Ukraine and this new regime in Kiev led to the Minsk II agreement.
The Minsk II agreement was voted by the UN Security Council unanimously.
It was signed by the government of Ukraine.
It was guaranteed explicitly by Germany and France.
And you know what?
And it’s been explained to me in person.
It was laughed at inside the us government.
This is after the UN Security Council unanimously accepted it.
The Ukrainian said, we don’t want to give autonomy to the region.
Oh, but that’s part of the treaty.
The US told them, don’t worry about it.
Angela Merkel explained in Die Zeit in a notorious interview after the 2022 escalation.
She said, oh, you know, we knew that Minsk two was just a holding pattern to give Ukraine time to build its strength.
No, Minsk too was a UN security council unanimously
adopted treaty that was supposed to end the war.
So when it comes to who’s trustworthy, who to believe
and so forth, I guess my problem, Piers, is I know the United States government, I know it very well.
I don’t trust them for a moment.
I want these two sides actually to sit down in front
of the whole world and say, these are the terms.
Then the world can judge, because we could get
on paper clearly for both sides of the world, we’re not going to overthrow governments anymore.
The United States needs to say, we accept this agreement.
The United States needs to say, Russia needs to say,
we’re not stepping 1ft farther than whatever the boundary is actually reached and NATO’s not going to enlarge.
And let’s put it for the whole world to see once in a while, treaties actually hold.

June 21, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Droning Russia’s nuke radars is the dumbest thing Ukraine can do

Attacks on the early warning system actually highlights the fragility of peace between the world’s nuclear powers

BY THEODORE POSTOL | RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT | JUNE 5, 2024

For a fleeting moment on May 22 the world may have come closer to a catastrophic nuclear accident due to a reckless Ukrainian drone attack on two Russian strategic nuclear early warning radars at Armavir.

Fortunately, a subsequent Ukranian drone attack on a third radar station at Orsk in Russia on May 26 failed.

The incidents underscore a few important things. First, the Ukrainians could have needlessly sparked a crisis in which the Russians, feeling like one of their defenses against a U.S. nuclear attack, were down, struck back hard in retaliation. And second, it highlights the need for Russians to acquire comprehensive space-based nuclear radar of their own.

What happened and what it means

The Ukrainian attack at Armavir was a big deal. It shut down both Russian radars immediately. And it’s likely that within minutes of the attack, an emergency meeting took place with the commander of the Russian strategic rocket forces along with his highest-level officers.

The attacks should not be taken lightly, and President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken should be giving this special attention.

Even after decades of expensive Russian attempts to build a space-based early warning system that could provide global surveillance of U.S. submarine missile launches, Russia has been unable to marshal the extremely specialized high-technologies needed to build such a system.

To in part deal with this serious shortfall in Russia’s nuclear early warning capabilities, Vladimir Putin himself initiated and publicly supported a highly visible national effort to build a dense and capable nuclear strategic early warning radar system that utilizes numerous giant radars (typically about 30 to 35 meters high).

Since these radars basically form the singular foundation of Russia’s strategic nuclear early warning capabilities, any tampering with their functions in any unpredictable global situation is accompanied by very grave risks of misinterpretations of intentions that could lead to a massive launch of Russian nuclear forces.

Figure 1 below shows a satellite photograph of the two radars at Armavir. The radar beam from what is labeled “Radar Fan 1” is pointing in a counterclockwise direction from North of roughly 125°. Radar Fan 2 is pointing in a clockwise direction from North of roughly 125°.

Figure 2 shows the coverage of the two radar fans at Armavir, and the radar at Orsk drawn on a spherical earth. A side view of a radar fan is shown in the upper right corner. The side-on view shows an extremely important consequence of the fact that Earth is curved and the radar beam propagates basically in a straight line. Because of that, the radar cannot actually see objects near the surface.

For example, it is not possible for the radar to observe aircraft flying over Ukraine. Even ATACM missiles launched from the Ukrainian Black Sea coasts, which rise to altitudes of no more than 40km before they start gliding to their targets, cannot be reliably detected by these radars.

Thus, the radars at Armavir pose no surveillance threat to Ukrainian aircraft, cruise missiles, drones or ATACM missiles. The real threat to Ukrainian aircraft and missiles is from Russian airborne radar systems that are tightly queued into Russian ground-based surface-to-air missile systems.

Why these radars are so important
The importance of having a space-based satellite early warning system can be readily understood by re-examining figure 2.

For purposes of illustration, imagine that a Trident ballistic missile is launched at Moscow from the Indian Ocean at about the same latitude as Bombay on the West Coast of India (20° North latitude). The range to Moscow would be roughly 4,500 to 4,600 km.

If the ballistic missile were launched on a “minimum energy trajectory” (at a loft angle of roughly 34°) it would require the smallest missile burnout speed needed to reach Moscow. In this case the time between “breakwater” missile ignition and impact would be roughly 21 to 22 minutes.

However, the Trident missile is designed to launch its warheads to much higher burnout speeds. For example, it could launch its nuclear payload toward Moscow at a slightly higher speed and lower loft angle of 25° (this is often called a slightly “depressed” trajectory) and still easily reach Moscow in 18 to 19 minutes.

If a launch towards Moscow is on a slightly depressed trajectory, the Russians would not know they were under attack for at least six minutes, until the warheads and the rocket upper stages passed into the Armavir radar search fan. If the Armavir radar was not operating it would take eight to nine minutes from breakwater before the Russian radars in Moscow would indicate they were under attack.

The radar in Moscow would have to observe the incoming missile payloads for one or two minutes before it would have enough data to issue an alert — which means maximum decision-making time that might be available to Russian leaders would be about six or seven minutes!

So you can see why the Russians would be incensed over the Ukraine attacks, which would literally cut their already limited time in which to respond to a nuclear attack.

If the Russians had an early warning space-based system, they would know that they were under attack roughly 19 minutes before the attacking warheads would arrive and destroyMoscow. They would also immediately know whether or not ballistic missiles were being launched from other parts of the world.

Although all of these warning times are shockingly short, it is clear that a warning time of 19 minutes versus one of eight to nine minutes could make the difference between forcing Russia to rely on an automated decision that could lead to the accidental destruction of the United States and Western Europe, or instead on a more reasoned assessment by political leaders and highly professional military commanders.

Any appropriately knowledgeable expert who has listened carefully to Putin’s numerous statements about nuclear weapons would know that he has a detailed knowledge of this warning system and its limitations. He has regularly shown up at the inaugurations of early warning radar sites, overtly indicating his concerns about the need for adequate and reliable early warning systems.

The Russians do currently have an extremely limited space-based early warning system. The system only observes the U.S. ICBM fields near its northern borders and cannot be proliferated to provide global coverage against U.S. submarine missiles. It does not even have 24-hour coverage of the U.S. ICBM fields, since nine satellites are needed to provide that coverage and only four are active at this time.

I have sought to warn the U.S. government leadership of this serious problem, which could have been solved 30 years ago by the U.S. “lending” certain technologies to the Russians. My proposals involved providing the Russians with specialized space-qualified infrared arrays and electronics that would allow them to build their own systems.

This technology would not give the Russians any sensitive military secrets. There would be no way for the Russians to “reverse engineer” these implementing components. Just like the most advanced computer chips, only a vast technical enterprise could achieve such an end.

Instead of recognizing that it is in the interest of the entire world for both Russia and the United States to have reliable and capable early warning systems, at that time, the Clinton administration largely ignored this serious problem, which I believe threatens the survival of civilization even today. Other administrations that followed did no better.

The bottom line is that this grave danger to human civilization, and possibly human survival, could have been solved by competent political leadership almost 30 years ago, to the benefit of the entire world. But it wasn’t, which makes the attack on the radars now a potential crisis.

Theodore A. Postol is Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at MIT. He also taught at Princeton and Stanford, and was an advisor to the Chief of Naval Operations, where he evaluated U.S. tactical and strategic nuclear war plans, U.S. strategic anti-submarine warfare plans, Russian and U.S. missile defenses, and the Trident I and Trident II Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile Systems.

June 20, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Ukraine frustrated with US over F-16 pilot training

RT | June 19, 2024

The US is making “excuses” for its failure to prepare sufficient numbers of Ukrainian F-16 fighter pilots to aid the war effort, the head of the arms procurement commission in Kiev’s parliament, Aleksandra Ustinova, has claimed.

Kiev’s sponsors in the so-called ‘F-16 coalition’ – the US, Belgium, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands – have pledged to deliver up to 60 American-made aircraft by the end of this year. Ukrainian pilots are being trained in the US and Denmark, while a separate training program in Romania is planned, but is yet to begin.

So far only eight Ukrainian pilots have received training at the Morris Air National Guard Base in Tucson, Arizona, Ustinova told British newspaper The Times in an interview published on Monday. An additional 12 are being trained in Denmark, she added.

The delay in preparation means Ukraine is likely to only have 20 fully trained F-16 pilots by the end of this year, the lawmaker said. Ukraine earlier asked the US for at least another ten spots in the training programs, but was refused, Ustinova noted.

Last week, Politico wrote that Kiev’s efforts to get 30 more pilots into Western training facilities have been rebuffed. Ukrainian pilots have already hit language barrier issues, a senior DOD official told the news outlet. The Tucson base can only train 12 at a time, and Washington already has other countries’ pilots booked, the source added.

Ustinova questioned the US justification for the delays, suggesting it was deliberate.

“These are not arguments, they are excuses, and they keep coming up with them time and time again,” she stated. The training delays are likely motivated by Washington’s fear that a large-scale presence of US F-16s in the Ukraine conflict could be viewed by Moscow as the integration of the country into NATO, Ustinova told The Times. “This is totally political.”

F-16s are needed to help mitigate the effect of Russian glide bombs on the battlefield, a weapon that has shown devastating effectiveness in the Ukraine conflict, Ustinova stressed. “These bombs are huge – from 500 kilos to 1,500 kilos,” and for Kiev, the only solution is to “bring them down is jet-to-jet.”

Moscow has repeatedly warned that Western arms deliveries will not change the course of the conflict, and only prolong it, causing more deaths. The Russian Parliament’s Defense Committee chair, Andrey Kartapolov, replied to Kiev’s statements about plans for some F-16s to be stationed outside Ukraine. Should the aircraft take off from foreign bases and be used to strike at Russian forces, both the jets and the facilities they are stationed at will be considered “legitimate targets,” Kartapolov warned.

June 19, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Glenn Diesen about the benefits of a multipolar, Eurasian world order

Reinvent Money | June 16, 2024

Paul Buitink talks to Glenn Diesen, a Norwegian academic and political scientist. He is a professor at the School of Business of the University of South-Eastern Norway. Glenn explains why the current international liberal unipolar world order is in decline. And why a new multipolar Eurasian order is inevitable and how that would benefit the world. He describes Europe’s role and challenge in this new world order. Also Glenn dives into the Russia and Ukraine conflict and why the incremental approach of the West could lead to a boiling frog situation. At the end he also shares his experiences of being a controversial scientist in Norway.

Find more about Glenn Diesen here, including his latest book The Ukraine War & The Eurasian World Order: https://x.com/Glenn_Diesen https://www.amazon.com/Ukraine-War-Eu…

Follow Paul on X here:   / paulbuitink  

June 19, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Militarism, Russophobia, Video | , , , , | Leave a comment

Russia withdraws from MH17 resolution process

RT | June 18, 2024

Moscow is not interested in participating in a “performance” before a Western-dominated panel of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) about the 2014 crash of a Malaysian passenger jet in Donbass, the Russian Foreign Ministry has said.

Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down in Ukrainian airspace. Kiev immediately blamed Donetsk People’s Republic forces and Russia for the incident. In March 2022, the Netherlands and Australia opened an investigation against Russia at the ICAO Council.

“The ICAO Council is not the right place to look for the truth. It makes no sense for us to remain a part of the ‘performance’ started in it,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Monday.

Russia had initially agreed to take part in the proceedings “because we believed that the ICAO platform could be used for professional dialogue about the plane crash,” the ministry said.

However, the council first claimed judiciary powers it did not have, then tried to admit as evidence the two investigations into the MH17 disaster that explicitly excluded Russia – by the Dutch Security Council (NSB) and the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) – while welcoming Ukraine and other adversely interested parties, according to Moscow.

Russia has proposed “a full, thorough and independent international investigation into the crash of flight MH17, as required by UN Security Council Resolution 2166 and the ICAO Dispute Resolution Rules,” but the council refused, the foreign ministry said.

“Ruled by the countries of the collective West and their satellites, the ICAO Council also refused to take into account the decision of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) of January 31, 2024,” which rejected Ukraine’s claims against Russia in the MH17 case, the ministry noted.

The council consists of 36 members, who vote according to instructions from their governments. Australia and 12 others had already publicly blamed Russia for MH17 before any investigation began, the ministry said. When Russia asked them to abstain from voting in the matter, they refused.

This pattern of behavior “runs counter to the minimum requirements for the objectivity of the proceedings,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said. “Under such circumstances, it is impossible to talk about an unbiased establishment of facts, much less a fair decision.”

The “extensive and convincing evidence,” both factual and legal, that Russia was not involved in the MH17 incident has been made available to 193 ICAO members, the ministry noted.

June 18, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Russia’s post-war dilemmas in Ukraine

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | JUNE 18, 2024 

In regard of the war in Ukraine, Russia’s main challenge going forward is to find the equilibrium between strategic overestimation and underestimation. “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten,” as Bill Gates put it. 

A triumphalist tone is unmistakeable in President Vladimir Putin’s speech on Friday to a special gathering of senior foreign ministry officials in Moscow presenting the guardrails for negotiations with Ukraine. Russia is a country of high-context culture, which communicates in ways that are implicit and relies heavily on context. 

Putin underscored certain pre-conditions. Russia is ready to immediately cease hostilities if Ukraine begins withdrawing its military units beyond the administrative boundaries of Donbass, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions. This is a curious replay of the precondition that Moscow fulfilled in March 2022 when following the talks in Istanbul, Ukraine expected a rollback of Russian deployments around Kiev. 

Once bitten, twice shy — Putin’s precondition implies that new territorial realities should be fixed by international treaties. Moscow is ready to negotiate only after Kiev formally notified NATO that it is abandoning the intent to seek membership. Russia expects a complete lifting of sanctions. 

Evidently, Russia’s peace terms are, partly at least, based on certain prerequisites that are, conceivably, impossible for Ukraine and its mentors to fulfil. So, presumably, a further hardening of the peace terms is to be expected if Russian troops make more gains on the battlefield. Meanwhile, Moscow is signalling to its Western adversaries the inevitability of a massive redrawing of the Russian-Ukrainian border as the basis for peace.  

Unsurprisingly, the Western powers view Putin’s peace terms as an ultimatum although Russian diplomacy propagates them as an important peace initiative. It is timed carefully, just as the G7 summit at Borgo Egnazia in Italy ended and on the eve of the Western-sponsored ‘peace meet’ in Bürgenstock. 

The prognosis by the influential politician who has been a deputy speaker of the Duma since 2016 and the scion of an illustrious Russian family, Pyotr Tolstoy (great-great-grandson of Leo Tolstoy) is that Moscow will call out next only for the surrender of Ukrainian forces. 

The mood in Moscow has become belligerent, as the EU, at sustained prodding by Washington, is inexorably moving toward the confiscation of Russia’s frozen assets in western banks — ostensibly for meeting Ukraine’s needs but in reality to defray the huge expenses Washington is incurring for its proxy war. 

The G7 summit’s communique highlights that “In the presence of President Zelenskyy, we decided to make available approximately USD 50 billion leveraging the extraordinary revenues of the immobilised Russian sovereign assets, sending an unmistakable signal to President Putin. We are stepping up our collective efforts to disarm and defund Russia’s military industrial complex.” 

The G7 formulation is a white lie. What is unfolding is a financial scam of the century and the largest theft of money in history. A clutch of modern-day brigands is literally grabbing about $260 billion of Russia’s sovereign assets and giving it the colouring of a legal translation by attributing to it the process the status of a financial collateral for an American loan to Ukraine in blatant violation of international financial law that would ultimately line the pockets of the US military-industrial complex and the politicians.

Suffice to say, Washington is making its proxy war in Ukraine a self-financing, cost-accounting enterprise with Europeans as guarantors. Washington is inflicting a big blow to Russia’s national honour and pride. The big question is where does Russia go from here, given its ‘high-context culture’? 

One barely-noticed ellipsis in Putin’s speech on Friday was that he left his lengthy recap of Western betrayals hanging in the air without a foot note as to how Russia came to such a sorry pass at all historically. 

If the willing submission to the avalanche of national humiliations was merely due to Russia’s weakness, surely, that is a thing of the past. Today, Russia stands tall as the fourth largest global economy, a great military power and the sole power on the planet with the strategic capability to reduce the US to thermonuclear ashes. Yet, minions like NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg are threatening Russia that he’s heading a “nuclear alliance.” 

That is where the elucidation on Putin’s speech by the Dy Chairman of Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev — “on what he [Putin] carefully hinted at in his speech” — needs to be understood properly. 

Medvedev made four key points:  

  • The new territories that became part of Russia since 2022 will “remain so forever.”
  • A “catastrophic scenario” is developing for the Kiev regime.
  • The sanitary zone Russia will create on its western borders to prevent terrorist attacks may extend right up to Ukraine’s border with Poland, the staging post for NATO’s threats against Russia. 
  • “The President did not say this [western Ukraine’s fate] directly, but it is obvious that such territories, if desired by the people living there, can become part of Russia.” 

Most certainly, it is not a coincidence that Putin landed in Pyongyang this morning — or that, Russia’s Pacific Fleet commenced a large scale naval exercise from today till the 28th of June in the Pacific Ocean, in seas of Japan and Okhotsk.  

In the context of his state visit to North Korea, Putin wrote in an article for North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun, “We highly appreciate the DPRK’s unwavering support for Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine… We will… jointly oppose illegitimate unilateral restrictions [read sanctions], and shape the architecture of equal and indivisible security in Eurasia.” 

By the way, if North Korea, which is a nuclear power, figures in the first circle of Russia’s strategic calculus as an ally, can Iran which is a nuclear threshold country be far behind — and, importantly, what could be its alchemy? Indeed, Russia has warned that it will give an asymmetrical response to the attack on its territory with western weapons allegedly aided by NATO personnel — something without precedent even at the high noon of the Cold War — and NATO secretary-general’s open, vociferous support for it.

In Strobe Talbott’s book The Russia Hand (2002), he narrates an aside with Bill Clinton during a US presidential visit to Moscow in 1995. Clinton told Talbott using a favourite metaphor that his instincts were that Russian elites were sulking and couldn’t take anymore the “shit” being shoved down their throat. Indeed, NATO’s eastward expansion was already on the drawing board in the White House by then. 

However, it took Russia another quarter century till February 2022 to resist US bullying. To be sure, Medvedev’s candid ‘annotation’ could not have been without approval from Putin.

The challenge for the next two years is that Russia might overestimate the willingness of the US and EU to concede its legitimate demand of equal and indivisible security. 

On the other hand, in a longer term perspective, Moscow should not underestimate the stubborn refusal by Europe’s declining powers — UK, France and Germany — to accept the rise of Russia as a compelling geopolitical reality that they must reconcile with. 

Hungarian PM Viktor Orhan is spot on in estimating that it will be sheer naïveté to assume that the new EU leadership would moderate the policies towards Ukraine and Russia, despite the ascendancy of the right-wing parties in the recent elections to the European Parliament. 

June 18, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Sham-ocracy, Scam-ocracy

By Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute | June 17, 2024

The word “democracy” is bandied about rhetorically by politicians on a regular basis to rationalize whatever it is that they want to do. This tendency has increased markedly in recent times as so-called wars of democracy and campaigns to save or preserve democracy are cast as the most pressing priorities of the day.

In the U.S. presidential election campaign currently underway, both members of the War Party duopoly claim to be the champions of democracy, while depicting their adversaries as loose cannon authoritarians. President Joe “Our Patience is Wearing Thin” Biden attempted in 2021 to force free people to submit to an experimental pharmaceutical treatment which many of them did not need. The Biden administration also oversaw what was one of the most assiduous assaults on free speech in the history of Western civilization. Social media platforms were infiltrated by agents of the federal government with the aim of squelching criticism of regime narratives, even, remarkably, facts recast by censors as malinformation for their potential to sow skepticism about the new mRNA shots never before tested on human beings.

Biden & Co. nonetheless insist that voters must reelect him, because his rival is a dictator in waiting à la Hitler or Mussolini. This despite the fact that Donald Trump already served as president for four years, and never imposed martial law, not even at the height of the highly chaotic and destructive George Floyd and Black Lives Matters protests. Ignoring such conflicting evidence, Joe Biden and his supporters relentlessly proclaim that a Trump victory in November 2024 would usher in the likely end of democracy.

After the conviction of Trump on felony charges crafted through novel procedures and using legalistic epicycles in entirely unprecedented ways, obviously tailored to convict one and only one person, with the aim specifically of preventing his election as the president of the United States, Democratic party operatives and Deep State bureaucrats alike have voiced concern that, if Trump is elected in November, he will go after those responsible for what fully half the country views as his persecution. Given the manifold conflicts of interest involved in the case, in which he was found guilty of all thirty-four charges, it seems likely that, as in the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling to remove Trump’s name from the ballot in that state, the creative felony convictions of Trump will not stand on appeal. One thing is clear: the crime of “miscategorizing hush money payments” has arguably been committed by every member of Congress for whom taxpayer money was used to dispense “undisclosed” payments in suppressing allegations of sexual harassment and other forms of malfeasance. (Thanks to Representative Thomas Massie for sharing on Twitter/X that $17 million dollars were paid to settle 268 such lawsuits from 1997 to 2017.)

Meanwhile, the Russiagate narrative which dominated the mainstream media for the entirety of Trump’s presidency, and continues to this day to color people’s views of the Russian government—thus buoying support for the war in Ukraine—has already been thoroughly debunked for the Hillary Clinton campaign product that it was. The Clinton campaign and the DNC (Democratic National Committee) were fined by the Federal Election Commission for their use of campaign funds miscategorized as legal fees to conduct opposition research which found its way into the Steele dossier on which angry denunciations of Trump’s supposedly treasonous behavior were based. To this day, none of the individuals involved have been indicted for what endures in many minds as the fanciful idea that “Trump is inside Putin’s pocket!” as a man I met in rural New Zealand in 2017 so vividly put it. (I assume he watches CNN.)

Since Trump’s recent conviction for the erroneous classification on his tax form of a hush money payment as a legal fee, he has been busy making lemonade out of lemons, using his new, improved tough-guy “gangster” image to wheel in voters and financial supporters who relate more than ever to his plight, having themselves either been or known victims of the not-so-evenhanded U.S. justice system. To Trump and his supporters, of course, going after those who went after him would be tit-for-tat retribution, just the sort of sweet revenge which persons wronged may crave. But to the many Trump haters (and there is no other way to describe them at this point in history), any attempt to retaliate by using the legal system to press charges against individuals who used the legal system for diaphanously political aims would constitute a grave injustice and threat to democracy.

The situation differs in degree, not in kind, in Europe, where the results of the recent elections have inspired heartfelt exclamations by the usual suspects (European Union Commission president Ursula von der Leyden, et al.) that “democracy” is endangered by the right-wing political groups now in ascendance. Pointing out that those groups were voted in by the people (demo-) to rule (-cracy) does nothing to quell the hysterics, who are somehow oblivious of the fact that when new parties are voted into power, this is precisely because of the electorate’s dissatisfaction with their current government officials. Voting is the only way people have of ousting the villains currently holding elected positions, along with the bureaucrats appointed by them.

In Europe, many working people are disturbed by not only the immigration situation and the specter of totalitarian “wokeism” but also the insistence of their current leaders on provoking and prolonging a war with Russia. It does not seem to be a matter of sheer coincidence, for example, that French president Emmanuel Macron suffered a resounding electoral blow after having expressed the intention to escalate the war between Ukraine and Russia, thus directly endangering the people of France. Macron was also assiduous in excluding swaths of his population, who protested in the streets for months on end, from participation in civil society for what he decreed to be their crime of declining to submit to the experimental mRNA treatment during the height of the Coronapocalypse.

Protests tend not to have any effect on the reigning elites, primarily because the mainstream media no longer covers them to any significant degree, but when politicians are removed from office by the electorate, and replaced by persons who share the concerns of the populace, then change does become possible, at least in principle. Unfortunately, most viable candidates today are card-carrying members of the War Party, whatever divergent opinions they may hold about domestic issues such as whether persons in possession of Y-chromosomes should be considered biological males or whether non-citizens should be permitted to vote.

It would be nice to be able to believe, as some of Trump’s libertarian-leaning supporters apparently do, that his populist appeal reflects a genuine interest in preserving freedom and democracy. This notion is however impugned by the fact that it was under Trump’s administration that the active pursuit of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange commenced, when he was wrenched from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and thrown into Belmarsh prison, where he continues to languish today. It was also under Trump that Assange’s internet access was taken away, which already represented an assault on free speech. But by allowing then-CIA director Mike Pompeo to “mastermind” the eternal silencing of Assange, for the supposed crime of exposing U.S. war crimes (recast as serial violations of the Espionage Act of 1917), Trump betrayed his own commitment to the now octopoid MIC (military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics-banking complex), notwithstanding his occasional moments of seeming lucidity with regard to reining in the endless wars. Among other examples, there is not much daylight between the platforms of Biden and Trump regarding Israel. President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken occasionally pay lip service to the innocent Palestinians being traumatized, wounded, and killed, but they nonetheless have furnished Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the means to do just that.

In reality, highly seductive, albeit fraudulent, claims to be defending democracy have been the primary basis for waging, funding, and prolonging wars which have resulted in the deaths of millions of human beings in this century alone. For two decades, the war in Afghanistan was rationalized by appeal to the need to democratize that land, which is currently ruled by the manifestly authoritarian Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (formerly known as the Taliban), just as it was in 2001. Indeed, every country targeted by the U.S. military behemoth is claimed to be the beneficiary of what are the twenty-first-century equivalent of the missions civilisatrices of centuries past. Today, brutal bombing campaigns, invasions and occupations are invariably sustained through the rhetoric of democracy. Since every U.S.-instigated or funded war is said to support “democracy” (by definition!), this rhetorical strategy succeeds in garnering the support of politicians who know that their constituents know, if nothing else, that murder is evil, and democracy is good.

That wars imposed on people against their will—and in which they themselves are annihilated—serve democracy is a preposterous conceit, and yet it becomes ever more frequent as leaders continue to point to World War II as proof that sometimes people must die if freedom and liberty—and, of course, democracy—are to survive. Whoever is running Joe Biden’s Twitter/X account posted a suite of recycled versions of this fallacious notion not long after Memorial Day:

“American democracy asks the hardest of things: To believe we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. Democracy begins with each of us. It begins when one person decides their country matters more than they do.”

“Democracy is never guaranteed. Every generation must preserve it, defend it, and fight for it.”

“History tells us that freedom is not free. If you want to know the price of freedom, come here to Normandy, or other cemeteries where our fallen heroes rest. The price of unchecked tyranny is the blood of the young and the brave.”

Any sober examination of the historical record reveals that vacuous claims to be supporting “democracy” in wars abroad—the literal weaponization of that term—have as their primary result that the people being slaughtered lose not only their political voice, but also their very life, usually against their own will. War represents, in this way, the very antithesis of democracy.

The conflation of defense and offense codified in 2002 by the George W. Bush administration in its notorious National Security Strategy of the United States of America was made public in a pithy phrase: “Our best defense is a good offense.” This perverse rebranding of state aggression as somehow honorable has given rise to a global military system in which wars are funded by the U.S. government under the assumption that they are everywhere and always a matter of protecting post-World War II democracies. But if people are killed in these wars against their will, often because they are forbidden from leaving their country, and therefore subjected to a greatly increased risk of death through bombing, as was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere throughout the Global War on Terror), and is currently the case in both Ukraine and Israel, then there is no sense in which the military missions which culminate in the deaths of those people constitute defenses of democracy. Instead, the prolongation of such wars ensures only that there will be fewer people voting than before.

Such flagrant assaults on democracy (rule by the people) in the name of democracy do not, however, end with the depletion of the civilians sacrificed by leaders for the lofty aims of securing the freedom of future, as-of-yet unborn persons. Notably, the idea that already existent young persons should be coerced to fight and die in such wars is often supported by the warmongers as well. The current British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, recently proposed that mandatory national service be reinstated, a clear sign of only one thing: that the British public has grown weary and wary of the endless regime-change wars waged and/or funded by the U.S. government and unerringly supported by its number one poodle ally, the United Kingdom. As a result of the willingness of the British government to deploy its military to serve the dubious purposes of the U.S. hegemon, the number of voluntary enlistees is naturally in decline.

Conscription, the use of coercive means to increase the number of persons to fight in wars, directly contradicts the very foundations of democracy. If democracy is rule by the people, then in order for a war to have any democratic legitimacy whatsoever (ignoring, as if it were somehow irrelevant, the “collateral damage” on the other side), it would have to be fought not only for but also by persons who support it. If it is not to be a contradiction in terms, a democratic war would involve only persons who freely agreed to sacrifice their own lives for a cause which they themselves deemed worth dying for. The fact that coercive threats of imprisonment or even death are used to enlist new soldiers shows that at least those persons, a clearly demarcated segment of the society, do not agree with what they are being ordered to do. A war does not become democratic because a majority of the persons too old to fight in it support sending their young compatriots to commit homicide and die in their stead.

This is the sense in which antiwar activists who exhort chicken hawks such as Senator Lindsey Graham and former Vice President Dick Cheney to go fight their own bloody wars are right. For in any conflict purported to be a “war of democracy,” only persons who freely choose to fight, kill and possibly die in it would be donning uniforms. By this criterion, neither World War I nor World War II were wars of democracy. All of the draft dodgers imprisoned or executed for evading military service were horribly wronged wherever and whenever this occurred.

Conscription is always floating about as a topic of debate in so-called democratic nations because of the list of wars capriciously waged with abstract and dubious aims, and incompetently executed, such as the series of state-inflicted mass homicides constitutive of the Global War on Terror. The prospect of active conscription is always looming in the background wherever more and more leaders, under the corrupting influence of military industry lobbyists, and seduced by “just war” rhetoric, exhibit a willingness to embroil their nations in war. Young persons understandably exhibit an increasing reluctance to serve in what since 1945 have proven to be their self-proclaimed democratic leaders’ nugatory and unnecessary wars.

Mandatory national service is a condition for citizenship in some countries, such as Israel, where at least some persons (the Israelis) can freely choose to leave or to substitute a form of civil service rather than agreeing to kill other human beings at the behest of their sanguinary leaders. In wars in progress, such as that in Ukraine, conscription is used in more of an ad hoc way, as it becomes clear that the forces are dwindling and must be replenished, if the war is to carry on. But the very fact that conscription has come to seem necessary to the leaders prosecuting a war itself belies their claims that what is at stake is democracy itself.

This antidemocratic dynamic is currently on display in Ukraine, where President Volodomyr Zelensky recently remained in power, effectively appointing himself monarch, after canceling the elections which would have given the people the opportunity to oust him, specifically on the grounds that they oppose his meatgrinder war with no end in sight—barring either negotiation or nuclear holocaust. In a true democracy, the people themselves would be able to debate and reject the government’s wars, but in a nation such as Ukraine, the president decides, based on “guidance” provided to him by the leaders of powerful and wealthier nations, above all, the United States and its sidekick, the United Kingdom, to carry out a war for so long as he is furnished with the matériel needed to keep the war machine up and running.

The problem for Zelensky is that no matter how many bombs, missiles, and planes are furnished to the government of Ukraine to bolster the purported defense of democracy, there will always be the need for personnel on the ground to deploy those means. When the voluntary members of the army are injured, exhausted, or dead, then the government, rather than taking a seat at the negotiation table, opts to create an artificial pool of soldiers by coercing able-bodied persons who are ill-inclined to participate, having already had the opportunity to volunteer to serve but declined to do so.

The primary support of both the war in Ukraine and the Israeli government’s assault on Gaza is based on a curtailed, amnesiac view of history, conjoined with the fiction that the states currently in existence are somehow eternal and sacred plots of land the borders of which may never be changed. In reality, states are artifacts, the perimeters of which were established by small committees of (usually) men who negotiated among themselves at some point to permit distinct states to exist. In order for a border war to be in any sense democratic, it would have to take into account the interests of all of the persons likely to be affected, not only the young people enlisted to fight, but also the hapless civilians forbidden from relocating, as in Gaza, and then summarily slaughtered by the government as it pursues its own agenda. The frequently recited refrain that it is necessary to continue to fund the commission of mass homicide in Ukraine and Israel in order to preserve democracy is self-contradictory and delusional, both a sham and a scam.

Laurie Calhoun is a Senior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. She is the author of Questioning the COVID Company Line: Critical Thinking in Hysterical Times,We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Clooney Foundation for Justice is Globalist Policy Vehicle Disguised as Charity

By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 17.06.2024

Hollywood star George Clooney headlined the Biden campaign’s June 15 fundraiser alongside other celebrities, helping Joe Biden collect over $30 million. Clooney has long been in the vanguard of the Democratic party machine, including through his charity the Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ).

The ‘justice’ foundation set up by actor George Clooney and his human rights lawyer wife Amal is just a political slush-fund for globalist causes, Charles Ortel, Wall Street investigator, revealed to Sputnik.

Anna Neistat, the CFJ’s Docket Project legal director, told the US state-controlled Voice of America on May 30 that the organization was asking European countries to launch criminal proceedings against Russian journalists covering the Ukraine conflict.

Neistat said the NGO was deliberately not disclosing the names of targeted Russian reporters because it wanted them “to travel to other countries and be arrested there.”

However, Hollywood actor George Clooney, who founded the CFJ together with his wife Amal, denied on June 3 that his NGO was going after journalists. But the foundation’s apparent intent to suppress freedom of speech has already raised questions.
What is CFJ’s Agenda and Who is Behind It?

“Like the Clinton Foundation, this entity is a ‘public charity’,” Wall Street analyst and charity fraud expert Charles Ortel told Sputnik. “As such, it may not be controlled by one family and its board must be broadly representative of the public at large.”

Ortel noted that the foundation’s board was led by George and Amal Clooney as ‘co-presidents’.

“While substantial amounts are paid for ‘management’ to third parties, I suspect this is actually led primarily by Amal with George along for star power and fundraising,” he said.

“The Docket initiative does not provide details on revenues and expenses which are required,” continued Ortel. “The entity uses ‘cash’ accounting rather than required ‘accrual’ accounting — given its size — which is sloppy and more likely to create conditions prone to fraud.”

Ortel has previously run a private investigation into the Clinton Foundation’s alleged fraud — and sees similarities between the Clooneys’ and the Clintons’ charities.

The NGO’s major backers include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Co-Impact and the Ford Foundation. They promote a globalist liberal agenda and often cooperate with the Rockefeller Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. According to Influence Watch, the Clooneys also collaborate with the Obama Foundation.

Ranked first in the CFJ’s list of donors, the Gates Foundation has repeatedly drawn criticism over failed agricultural projects in Africa, Bill Gates’ ties with billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, participation in the Clinton Foundation’s supposed pay-to-play schemes, and the Gates-funded biotechnology company Oxitec’s apparent involvement in the Pentagon bioweapon program — as exposed by Russia’s Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense (RCB) Troops in July 2023.

Clooney and Co Go After Conservatives

The CFJ and its founders have earned their membership of the club of liberal charities. During Donald Trump’s presidency, Clooney and other Hollywood celebrities were vocal in their criticism of the Republican and US conservatives in general.

In August 2017, the Clooney Foundation gave $1 million to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), known for attacking US conservative PACs as “hate groups.”

In March 2018, the SPLC went even so far as to accuse a left-wing Radio Sputnik podcast of pandering to white supremacists, but later retracted its claim and apologized.

Clooney wrote an op-ed for the Daily Beast in June 2020 in support of the controversial and highly-politicized Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, as part of what appeared to be a concerted effort by liberal Democrats and progressives prior to the November 2020 elections.

The same year, Clooney attacked conservative Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban while defending Hungarian-born US billionaire George Soros from criticisms from his home country.

The actor vehemently denied any connection to Soros or his son Alexander, claiming he had met the tycoon only once at a UN meeting and had bumped into the heir to his international NGO network at an event in Davos.

Coordinated Infowar in Ukraine

When the Ukraine conflict erupted, Hollywood celebrities including actor Sean Penn flocked to Ukraine to portray the Kiev regime and its leader Volodymyr Zelensky as Winston Churchill-style patriots and freedom fighters.

George Eliason, a US investigative journalist who lived and worked in Donbass at that time, told Sputnik then that the flocking of celebrities to Kiev was nothing short of a “coordinated infowar operation” on the part of the West.

The Clooney Foundation’s Docket Project has been gathering “evidence” of alleged “war crimes” by the Russian military in Ukraine since the beginning of the conflict.

But the NGO has overlooked the Kiev regime’s eight-year-long war against the civilian population of the Donbass and the secret torture chambers run by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), neo-Nazi Mirotvorets website’s kill list targeting Russian and foreign journalists, politicians and children, and many other abuses human rights and media freedom of speech by Ukrainian authorities.

In October 2023, the Hollywood Reporter revealed that HiddenLight Productions, co-founded by Hillary Clinton, Sam Branson and Chelsea Clinton, was working with the Clooneys on their effort to investigate Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

The series, with the working title “The Swallows Will Return”, will follow Neistat in her search for stories of how Russians “murdered”, “raped” and “tortured” Ukrainian civilians and their families in a bid to smear and de-humanize Russians as was done the ‘Bucha massacre” hoax.

The Bucha provocation in early April 2022 was used as a pretext to tear up the peace deal struck between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul. In December 2023, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov highlighted that no list of alleged victims in the town near Kiev had yet been published, and the incident had not been thoroughly investigated despite intensive media coverage in the spring of 2022.

The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) said in response to a request from Sputnik that it is not in contact with the Ukrainian authorities on the issue of the list of ‘Bucha victims’.

The lack of interest from international organizations shows that the incident was a staged provocation carried out by the hands of the Kiev regime, a Russian Foreign Ministry source told Sputnik, comparing it to Nazi Germany’s attempt to blame its massacre of civilians at Nemmersdorf in late 1944 on the advancing Red Army.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

NATO to Control Ukraine Aid to ‘Trump-Proof’ Arms Shipments

By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | June 17, 2024

The US took a significant step towards preventing a future American president from curtailing weapon transfers to Ukraine by allowing NATO to coordinate the arms shipments. Washington and some of its allies are concerned that former President Donald Trump will end military aid and seek a diplomatic settlement to the war should he return to office.

The bloc adopted the new policy during a meeting of NATO defense ministers on Friday. “With a command in Wiesbaden, Germany, NATO will coordinate training and equipment donations, with nearly 700 personnel from Allied and partner nations involved in this effort,” a press release from the alliance said. “NATO will also facilitate equipment logistics and provide support to the long-term development of Ukraine’s Armed Forces.”

Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren explained that the bloc took the step as the war may grind on for some time, adding that coordination of arms shipments through Brussels will help prevent any country from altering its policy. “It’s to make it proof to any situation,” she said, observing that Russia’s war “might go on for years – so you want to have something in place that does not depend on specific persons, ministers or whoever.”

One official told AFP that the move was meant to prevent Trump from changing US policy. “it is about Trump-proofing, and that is what Stoltenberg says, protecting it from winds of political change,” the official stated. “Any US president can pull the plug on it tomorrow.”

On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to end the war within “24 hours” of returning to office, but has failed to explain how he plans to achieve that promise. Additionally, the former president gave his political support to the $95 billion foreign military aid bill signed in April – which included over $60 billion for Ukraine – helping to break the deadlock in Congress.

Still, Trump’s statements about ending the war have caused concern among NATO members and Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelenskly recently asserted Trump would become a “loser president” if he ended the conflict and would make America “very weak.”

In addition to agreeing to funnel all arms to Ukraine through NATO, the defense ministers agreed to step up intelligence-sharing with Ukraine, and “discussed the ongoing adaptation of NATO’s nuclear capabilities.” Stoltenberg said, “We are a nuclear Alliance – committed to being responsible and transparent. But clear in our resolve to preserve peace, prevent coercion, and deter aggression.”

While the NATO chief did not provide details about what adaptations the bloc is making, in recent months, Sweden and Poland have expressed interest in hosting NATO nuclear weapons.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Russian news photographer killed in Ukrainian drone strike

RT | June 16, 2024

Russian news photographer Nikita Tsitsagi has died from injuries sustained in a drone strike in the Donetsk People’s Republic, the portal News.ru reported on Sunday. According to the publication, the correspondent was killed in an attack by Ukrainian drones in the area of the Nikolsky Monastery near the Donbass city of Ugledar, where he was filming a report.

The tragedy was confirmed by Tsitsagi’s colleagues working in the area and local operational services. The details of the incident are unclear so far.

Tsitsagi collaborated with several Russian media outlets, including TASS and Lenta.ru. In June last year, he received the ‘Editorial Board’ journalistic award for a report he did on the Ukraine conflict and its repercussions in the Russian border town of Shebekino in Belgorod Region.

Earlier this week, another photojournalist, NTV crew member Valery Kozhin, died from wounds he suffered in a Ukrainian drone attack on Gorlovka, also in the Donetsk People’s Republic. Kozhin was filming in the area when a mortar round exploded on top of his crew. Journalist Aleksey Ivliev and an accompanying Russian military officer were also injured.

At least 30 Russian journalists have lost their lives in the Ukraine conflict since it began in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a press briefing during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) earlier this month. Among them are Boris Maksudov, who worked for Russia 24 TV, RIA Novosti’s Rostislav Zhuravlev, Tavria TV’s Oleg Klokov, and RuBaltic’s Aleksey Ilyashevich.

Moscow has repeatedly accused Ukrainian forces of deliberately targeting members of the Russian press who are reporting from the frontline. Earlier this week, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova lashed out at international human rights organizations, including the UN, for remaining silent in the face of Ukrainian attacks. She accused them of becoming Kiev’s accomplices in “this monstrous hunt for our correspondents” and encouraging further atrocities.

June 16, 2024 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »