By Connor O’Keeffe | Mises Wire | July 19, 2023
As Ukrainian forces continue their much-hyped counteroffensive to take back contested territories in the country’s eastern and southern regions, we’re faced with conflicting coverage of the campaign. Many reports say Ukraine’s forces are struggling to break through the minefields fortifying Russia’s lines. And many admit that even the sudden and dramatic Wagner Group mutiny did not appear to hand Ukraine much of an advantage on the front. Days ago, in a move that looks like damage control, Ukraine’s defense secretary even announced that Kyiv would no longer measure success in recaptured territory but would instead just aim to destroy as much Russian military infrastructure as possible.
Still, according to some Western journalists, this is all part of Ukraine’s plan. They’re just testing Russian resistance to find weak spots so they can better allocate resources during the next phase of the counteroffensive. And that’s when the big gains will take place. Maybe that’s true, but still, other coverage about Ukraine’s losses would have you think the counteroffensive has been a horrific disaster.
Much like the wider war, how you see this counteroffensive playing out depends almost entirely on where you get your news. That is not an accident. As citizens of the wealthiest country whose government controls the most military hardware in the world, it’s important to remember that all coverage of this war ought to be viewed with some baseline degree of skepticism. This is because numerous parties—in both governments and the media outlets themselves—are working hard to bend the American public’s perception of the war to their benefit.
That is, of course, nothing new. In 1941—the last time a European war threatened to go global—the British sent an intelligence officer named William Stephenson to the United States and tasked him with running an information operation to turn American public opinion away from noninterventionism.
The main approach Stephenson’s stories team used was secretly planting carefully crafted—and sometimes outright fake—stories in the biggest American newspapers and magazines. These stories were specifically designed to portray British forces as having more than enough courage to take on the Germans but lacking sufficient resources, regardless of how accurate that depiction was at any given time.
It was a specific tone that the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) believed had the best chance of convincing the American public to support joining the fight. Since then, every group that the American political establishment wants to support militarily gets presented to the American people in a similar fashion—from the Mujahideen to the Syrian Kurds to the current Ukrainian regime.
Though we may not know about the prevalence of covert information operations for some time, a pair of stories published last month offer a window into some more overt efforts to shape our perception of the war in Ukraine. First, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a Ukraine correspondent for the New York Times, wrote a viral story detailing how Ukrainian press officers and some Western journalists have tried to downplay, justify, or cover up the use of Nazi symbols by Ukrainian soldiers.
One specific passage tells of Western photojournalists asking their subjects to remove patches with Nazi emblems before taking photos. By doing so, these journalists crossed the line from documenting their subjects to staging them.
On the same day, former New York Times media columnist Ben Smith published an article reporting that many Western journalists have grown frustrated with how the Ukrainian government uses access and accreditation to shape war coverage. For example, the Ukrainian military threatened to revoke a photojournalist’s credentials after he took pictures of conscripted soldiers in a trench without the presence or permission of a military press officer.
In another example, an NBC News crew traveled to Crimea to interview residents about the war. After reporting that most people they talked to preferred that Crimea belonged to Russia, the Ukrainian government revoked NBC’s credentials and confined their in-country crew to a hotel.
Smith even brings up Thomas Gibbons-Neff from above, who had his access and credentials revoked after reporting on Ukraine’s use of banned cluster munitions. There’s no question that, at least to some extent, the continual threat of a loss of access affects everyone reporting over there in an official capacity.
This is not a new or unusual technique. The US government used similar tactics to help shape the narrative of its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most professional journalists struggle endlessly to find sources. So, by granting extensive access that can always be revoked, governments can run an effective carrot-and-stick ploy to control media coverage.
Our views of war are warped by design. Sure, the Russian regime is mounting a similar effort to control how the Russian people view the war, but it would be absurd to say that the Kremlin holds an influence over the American public that’s even comparable to the US or Ukrainian governments.
Despite what the media, the government, or your middle school civics teacher wants you to think, you don’t need to frantically keep up with the hourly developments in Eastern Europe to be a good citizen. But if you choose to follow this war, understand which parties have a hand in delivering whatever information you’re consuming because not everyone is trying to tell you the truth.
Connor O’Keeffe produces media and content at the Mises Institute. He has a masters in economics and a bachelors in geology.
By Ahmed Adel | July 20, 2023
US officials are concerned that Ukraine is not making enough progress in its much-heralded counteroffensive, The Washington Post reported on July 18, citing unnamed sources. According to the media outlet, the US is urging Kiev to commit to a decisive breakthrough as Ukrainian commanders are, supposedly, yet to employ the full-scale offensive tactics Western instructors taught them.
A US official explained on condition of anonymity to the newspaper that the West had trained Ukrainian forces in integrated offensive manoeuvres and provided them with mine clearance equipment. The source stressed that it was critical for Kiev’s troops to apply these capabilities to break through Russian defences quickly.
Western officials have reportedly criticised Ukraine’s armed forces for taking an attrition-based approach by firing artillery and missiles at command, transport, and logistics locations at the rear of Russian positions rather than using Western-style “combined arms” that involve large-scale attacks with tanks, armoured vehicles, infantry, artillery, and the air force.
Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War explained that Ukrainian commanders chose to adopt more discreet advances, involving groups of 15 to 50 soldiers to preserve the military contingent.
“Russian defensive operations in southern Ukraine follow a pattern in which one echelon of Russian forces slows and degrades attacking Ukrainian forces until a second echelon counterattacks from prepared defensive positions to roll back the Ukrainian advances,” the journal wrote.
In this way, Ukrainian forces are being methodically neutralised by the Russian military as they have turned the battlefield into a meatgrinder.
This situation will not improve for Ukraine, especially following the acknowledgment by the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff that Kiev will have a “long,” “difficult,” and “bloody” fight against Russian forces, even if he did go on to sell an illusion that Ukraine can still win the war and that the offensive had not failed.
“It is far from a failure… I think that it’s way too early to make that kind of call,” US General Mark Milley said on July 18. “I think there’s a lot of fighting left to go and I’ll stay with what we said before: This is going to be long. It’s going [to] be hard. It’s going to be bloody.”
Although he sold Kiev, once again, an illusion, he did have to begrudgingly acknowledge that it would take years and billions of dollars for the Ukrainian Air Force to gain parity with their Russian competitors.
“Ten F-16s are $2 billion. So, the Russians have hundreds of fourth and fifth-generation airframes. If they [the Ukrainians] are going to try to match the Russians, one for one or even two to one, you are talking about a large number of aircraft,” Milley said during the press briefing.
“That’s going to take years to train the pilots, years to do the maintenance and sustainment, years to generate that degree of financial support to do that. You’re talking way more billions of dollars than has already been generated,” he added.
In this way, he contradicts himself since he believes Ukraine can still win the war even though this is impossible without air superiority, something he acknowledges will take years and much more resources than the West has already committed to. Ukraine and the European Union do not have the years needed because their economic crises are only deepening, while the former faces significant manpower and labour issues.
To overcome this issue, Milley suggests that instead of supplying Ukraine with expensive aircraft, there should be a focus on air defences and tackling sort of offensive combined arms manoeuvres, i.e., artillery and long- and short-range artillery. But this, again, is problematic since any air defence systems that Ukraine receives from the West are destroyed almost immediately by Russian strikes.
It is recalled that Lieutenant General Douglas Sims, operations director for the Pentagon’s joint staff, said on July 13, “Conditions right now for the employment of the F-16s… they’re probably not ideal.”
“The Russians still possess some air defence capability. They have [air-to-air] capability. The number of F-16s that would be provided may not be perfect for what’s going on right now,” he added.
The three-star general’s comment came the same week as the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, during which a so-called “fighter coalition” of 11 European countries met to discuss providing Kiev with the American-made fighter jet. There, the US-backed European coalition announced its plans to begin training Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16s in August, with Dutch and Danish aviators leading instruction, first in Denmark and later Romania.
Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive was an utter failure. All attempts to break through by the Ukrainian military have failed, resulting in heavy casualties. Even though the situation will not change, in fact, it will only worsen for Ukraine, Washington is still pushing the Kiev regime towards further conflict, which will only lead to the unnecessary death of thousands of more Slavs.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
By Lucas Leiroz | July 20, 2023
In the last few days, the armed forces of the Russian Federation have launched a series of massive attacks against the Ukrainian ports in Odessa, destroying several strategic targets. Western media are reporting the strikes as “terrorism” and trying to link them to the fact that Moscow recently suspended its participation in the Black Sea Grain Deal. However, these narratives are biased and ignore the fact that Kiev maintains several arms depots in the ports.
Russian attacks began on 18 July, hitting several Ukrainian port facilities in the Odessa region overnight. Among the targets hit were depots of weapons, ammunition and fuel used to supply Ukrainian troops and carry out terrorist attacks against Russian territory. The next day, a new wave of attacks was carried out. Russian forces have used cruise missiles launched from their Black Sea positions. Moscow’s officials said all targets were appropriately neutralized with high precision strikes. New raids are expected for the coming days.
Among the military objectives of this operation is the destruction of several maritime drone bases that were detected by Russian intelligence in the ports of Odessa. As well known, the recent attack on the Crimean Bridge, which resulted in the death of a couple and the injury of their orphaned daughter, was carried out using maritime drones. Evidence suggests that the vehicles used came from the ports of Odessa, which explains the reasons why Russia decided to launch several missiles at enemy naval facilities. Russian authorities had promised retaliation for the attack on the Bridge.
In addition to the retaliation for the incident on the Bridge, it must be remembered that there were lately many other drone incursions against Crimea. For example, on July 18 dozens of Ukrainian drones were neutralized by Russian forces with artillery and electronic warfare measures, avoiding the death of numerous civilians. Furthermore, on the 20th, Crimean government confirmed that a teenage girl died during a drone strike in the morning, which certainly will be retaliated soon.
Another important point is that these Ukrainian ports were being used by the enemy side to receive weapons from abroad and store them among grains. Intelligence data shows that Western weaponry was arriving in Odessa inside civilian ships. Therefore, obviously Kiev was misusing the humanitarian grain pact to gain military advantage. This was a decisive factor both for Russia to cancel its participation in the deal and to destroy the infrastructure of the ports.
However, Western media has once again worked dishonestly and biasedly, ignoring Ukrainian crimes when reporting Russian attacks. The main narrative used by outlets is that Russia would be harming world food security by suspending the deal and subsequently destroying Ukrainian ports, which is obviously a lie.
“The attack threatens Ukrainian grain exports, which bolster the country’s economy and supply the global market. The strikes on Odessa follow Russia’s announcement that it will suspend the Black Sea Grain Initiative, a United Nations-negotiated deal to allow grain exports from Odessa that is set to expire Sunday. The strikes suggest a connection between that deal’s failure and an effort by Moscow to hurt Ukraine’s major export, even if doing so contributes to global grain shortages,” an article by an American newspaper reads.
The mainstream media’s words echo Ukrainian propaganda, which has used the same language, accusing Russia of practicing “terrorism” in Odessa, and threatening the food security of countries in Africa and Asia.
“Today’s Russian terrorists’ attack on Odessa proves that their target is not only Ukraine, and not only the lives of our people. About a million tons of food is stored in the ports that were attacked today. This is the volume that should have been delivered to consumer countries in Africa and Asia long ago. The port terminal that suffered the most from the Russian terror last night had 60,000 tons of agricultural products stored in it, which were intended to be shipped to China. That is, everyone is affected by this Russian terror. Everyone in the world should be interested in bringing Russia to justice for its terror”, Zelensky said on his Twitter account.
These lies can be easily refuted by analyzing information from the recent past. It is the Russian side, not the Ukrainian one, that has consistently sought to improve world food security through changes in the grain pact. Previously, Russia had already suspended its participation in the agreement since Ukrainians and Europeans were not complying with the humanitarian terms. Last November Moscow reported that most of its grains and fertilizers shipped to Africa and Asia were being illegally arrested in European ports because of sanctions. Russia did its best to make the deal work, but the counterpart was uncooperative. And the data on military use of the ports was a redline for Moscow to make a final decision on the matter.
Despite the biased tales spread by the media and neo-Nazi officials, it seems quite clear that the Russian attacks on Odessa are necessary measures to guarantee the security of Russia’s civilian population, mainly in Crimea, which has been a frequent target of terrorist drone raids. The Russians are just defending their own civilians with these high-precision strikes.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
By Ahmed Adel | July 19, 2023
A US military veteran, who claimed battlefield victories as a combatant in Ukraine and gained fame through media interviews and Twitter posts by boasting about his exploits against Russian forces, has been exposed for lying to create a false image that he could take advantage of after the end of the conflict to become rich. This again demonstrates the unprofessionalism of Western media, which knowingly advanced the lies of a mercenary for propaganda reasons.
James Vasquez, who has amassed more than 400,000 followers on Twitter and is regularly quoted by CNN and the New York Times, has falsely claimed exploits on the Ukraine battlefield, Insider reported on July 16.
The portal, which cited allegations by four other foreign volunteers in Ukraine, also confirmed through the Pentagon that Vasquez lied about his military history when he claimed to have had combat deployments as a sergeant in the US Army in Iraq and Kuwait. It is revealed that he served as an electrical systems repairman in the US Army Reserve.
Vasquez’s social media posts often went viral, purportedly about his exploits on the front lines.
“In his videos and posts, he bragged about capturing Russians and taking out tanks, was regularly interviewed by the news media, and made catchy claims including that he imagined the ‘punchable’ Tucker Carlson when preparing for battle,” wrote the portal.
Other fighters told the media that Vasquez boasted he would become a millionaire when the conflict ended.
“James said, and I quote, ‘I’m never gonna go back to work as a handyman. I’m probably never gonna have to work again after this war. I’m gonna be famous,’” said Tim, an American man working with the Ukrainian army who spoke to Insider on the condition of withholding his last name.
Vasquez created his claims by going to areas where battles had recently occurred, filming videos of destroyed equipment and claiming achievements as his own, say other foreigners. In one case, he claimed on Twitter that he was heading to Soledar, where heavy fighting was allegedly occurring. However, Ukrainian forces had withdrawn from the area days earlier.
Accusations against Vasquez apparently began to surface earlier this year. Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, an American who works in the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces media department, said in a Twitter post in March that Vasquez could not have legally gone on combat missions because he did not have a contract with the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
“I met James Vasquez three times for a total of about four hours,” she told Insider. “During our last meeting, in the presence of another person, he gave himself up and confirmed what I had known since last summer, that he was never a member of the AFU. That night he stated clearly he never had a contract nor had he ever been paid. This was in January. It was the last time I saw him.”
Although Vasquez was often accused of being a fraud or a scammer who exploited the situation in Ukraine for personal gain or fame, one of the most serious accusations against him was that he endangered the safety of his fellow fighters for social media clout. In one instance, he posted a video on Twitter that showed him standing next to a sign that indicated the exact coordinates of the unit he was with, which could have exposed them to a Russian attack.
Ashton-Cirillo told Insider : “As someone who notified a large media outlet about James Vasquez in June of 2022 and stated to them clearly that Vasquez had no combat experience and was filming fake fight scenes, it is disgraceful that they and so many other journalists advanced his lies for so long.”
This is far from being the only example of propaganda deployed by Western media in relation to Ukraine, and Ashton-Cirillo is fully aware of this fact considering her own position. In fact, she engages in such propaganda. Rather, her main concern was that Vasquez became too obvious in his propaganda stunts, and she knew it was only a matter of time until it all is exposed.
For her part, April Huggett, a Canadian volunteer who knew Vasquez, told Insider in a text message that he would exaggerate how close he was to the heavy fighting.
“I did realise very quickly he was sitting comfy right in Maidan and he was not leaving Kiev very often,” she said. “He also drank so much.”
“James just kept talking about becoming a millionaire after this,” Huggett continued.
“I’m tired, but I’m not sorry I exposed the lying scammer. […] We took away his fame and fortune, we made people see him for the disgrace he is,” she added.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
This is how empire ends: not with a bang, but a whimper
By William Schryver – imetatronink – July 13, 2023
The member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — consisting of the teetering Masters of Empire and their tawdry entourage of class-stratified vassals — have just concluded a historic confab in Vilnius, Lithuania, capital of the alpha Baltic chihuahua.
In a shockingly transparent but otherwise rather banal series of events it became unmistakably clear that their grand plans to subject Russia to the “rules-based order” have come to naught.
Among others, the following consequences will ripple in the wake of this reality:
Of course, many will immediately object:
“But the US hasn’t even employed its military in Ukraine! If the US entered this war with its awesome air and naval power, and its “best-in-class” army … well, the Russians would get pounded to dust within a few weeks.”
Well, I hope the thesis is never put to the test, because it will NOT end well.
I am now more convinced than ever that Russia’s specific strengths match and will consistently defeat the American military’s perceived strengths.
Russia admittedly does not wield an expeditionary military, but the concept and constitution of the military it has built renders it effectively unbeatable in its own neighborhood.
A little over a year has now passed since I published an essay entitled The United States Could Not Win and Will Not Fight a War Against Russia. I have recently revisited it. I felt no impulse to change a thing. Indeed, I am struck by how much it is more apropos now than it was a year ago. I believe it constitutes an essential element of understanding in relation to the geopolitical realities at work in our world circa 2023.
Since I wrote the article, there have been many twists and turns in the path of the continuing quasi-proxy war in Ukraine between the rapidly descendant American Empire and an increasingly resurgent Russia. But in early July 2022, it had, in my estimation, become undeniably evident that Russia had effectively wrecked the formidable original proxy army the empire had built, trained, and partially equipped on the foundation of Ukrainian flesh and blood, and a substantial collection of legacy Soviet implements of war.
Sure, there were still scattered potent remnants, but it had been degraded at least 60% by that point in time. Despite a few own-goals along the way, the Russians accomplished this using a force less than half the size of the one the Ukrainians arrayed against them, while inflicting severe equipment losses and at least a 7 to 1 casualty ratio.
So NATO was forced to up the ante. Aspiring to address the obvious Russian advantage in firepower, they shipped several batteries of M-777 155 mm howitzers to Ukraine, followed soon by a few dozen M-142 HIMARS rocket launchers.
Both weapon systems enjoyed a smattering of early successes that were ecstatically trumpeted by western media and their devout disciples around the world.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Ukrainian young men were being trained in NATO bases dotting Europe and the western hemisphere. They were instructed in the use of NATO equipment, and to fight the Russians according to NATO battlefield doctrine.
By mid-summer, a significant portion of this second iteration of the Ukrainian army had arrived back in Ukraine, along with hundreds of NATO infantry vehicles, mountains of ammunition — and perhaps most significantly — a substantial contingent of NATO-affiliated “volunteers” from many countries within the western alliance, notably Poland.
I am persuaded this escalatory step convinced the Russians they must immediately begin to more fully prepare themselves for the prospect that NATO would directly intervene in the war.
First they gave priority to learning how best to track down and destroy the limited-mobility M-777 howitzers. And rather than obsess unduly on targeting the elusive HIMARS launcher vehicles, the Russians instead focused on electronically jamming / spoofing the GPS sensors or otherwise shooting down the rockets with their short- and medium-range air defense systems.
(Their success in this respect has been nothing short of a revolution in military affairs. It is unprecedented in the age of aerial warfare. Yes, some missiles still get through, but not many, and typically only in the absence or on the outskirts of Russian ECM and air defense coverage areas.)
The Russians had, throughout early- to mid-2022, made significant offensive advances into the Novorossiya regions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Lugansk, and Kharkov. But as the summer waned, they began to perceptibly consolidate the entire line of contact. They then quickly brought to pass popular referenda in all but the Kharkov region — thereby formally assimilating the other four into the Russian Federation.
In mid-August 2022, the AFU began to advance against Russian forces on the western borders of the Dnieper River near Kherson. The Russians savaged the initial attacks, but then assumed a tactical-retreat posture. This continued for many weeks as they methodically contracted their lines into a bridgehead on the western part of Kherson city proper, all the while exacting severe losses on the attacking forces.
They would eventually effect an almost-flawless evacuation of twenty thousand troops and virtually all their heavy equipment to the eastern bank of the river, blow up the Antonovsky bridge, and then proceed to methodically destroy the AFU equipment, ammo, and troops on the other side with artillery and airstrikes that continue to this day.
As September rolled around, the Ukrainians (with significant numbers of NATO-affiliated “volunteers” in the vanguard) moved with an even more potent force in the Kharkov region, aiming for the strategic cities of Kupyansk, Izyum, and Kremmenaya.
Again, amid much triumphalism in the western punditsphere, as well as bitter recrimination and hyperbolic dooming from the Russian sixth column and its acolytes, the Russian high command effected what I observed to be an orderly, well-executed fighting retreat to the other side of the Oskol river, where they had prepared fortified lines and installed substantial reinforcements.
At that point, the Ukrainian offensive in the Kharkov region reached its high-water mark, and as autumn turned to winter and then to spring, every attempt to advance further — and there were a great many — was met with a decisive repulse.
Though consistently ignored by those who laud the “lightning advances” of the late-season AFU “counter-offensive” in Kharkov, the attacking Ukrainian forces were horrifically mauled between the first week of September and mid-October — and ever since.
As the Russians contracted their lines to much more defensible positions, they concurrently mobilized and commenced intensive training of several hundred thousand reservists and new volunteers; ramped up armaments production to completely unforeseen levels, and settled in for the next few months to fight a punishing war of attrition against Ukraine and its NATO benefactors — even as they simultaneously prepared to face the credible possibility of direct NATO intervention.
That said, despite a mostly defensive posture throughout late 2022 and early 2023, the Russians did launch an operation against the strategic cities of Soledar and Bakhmut that few foresaw would evolve into the bloodiest battle on European soil since the Second World War. “Surovikin’s Meat Grinder” would eventually consume many tens of thousands of Ukraine’s best remaining troops and equipment.
In the end, the second iteration of the Ukrainian army was degraded even more comprehensively than was the first.
Ukrainian air power has long-since been rendered effectively negligible. Provided with occasional but very sparse deliveries of old Soviet aircraft from the former Warsaw Pact nations, they have continued to manage occasional stand-off missile strikes, but close air support has been nonexistent.
Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure in early 2023 served to rapidly deplete the legacy Soviet air defense systems. And all western shipments of would-be replacements have proven to be inferior to Ukraine’s old stocks of S-300 and Buk systems.
Fantastical Ukrainian and western media claims of 90%+ shoot-downs of Russian missiles notwithstanding, the Russians now routinely strike targets throughout Ukraine where and when they will.
Most debilitating of all, persistent ammunition shortages have now become acute. Original and supplemented stocks of Soviet-sized 152 mm artillery are nearly exhausted. And despite the US having coordinated the shipment of millions of NATO 155 mm artillery shells from every nook and cranny in the empire’s vast global network of bases and those of its obedient vassals, the cupboard is now bare.
What was widely (albeit fallaciously) believed to be a nearly inexhaustible supply of equipment and ammunition in the warehouses of the Pentagon and its various less-than-sovereign minions around the globe has been exposed as entirely inadequate to the demands of a real war.
It is an astonishing revelation in the eyes of a great many in the world.
And yet, it shouldn’t be.
In my July 2022 article, I prominently cited US Army Col. (Ret.) Alex Vershinin’s all-important analysis regarding The Return of Industrial Warfare, which had appeared in RUSI a couple weeks previous. If you have not already done so, I highly recommend this short but powerful essay. His entire argument has now been confirmed by events.
Here in mid-July 2023, almost everything that eighteen months ago was only seen through a glass darkly is now undeniably apparent to all with eyes to see:
Far from being massively attrited, as any number of empire-compromised NATO rent-a-generals and politicians have ludicrously argued from the first weeks of the war, the Russians have employed an extremely impressive economy of force to achieve their objectives. To be certain, they have suffered losses in men and equipment that would be far in excess of anything western nations could abide. But the fact remains that the Russians have inflicted the most disproportionate casualty ratio of any major war in the modern era.
My sense of the matter is that the aggregated total of Russian, Donbass militia, and PMC Wagner combat deaths is probably in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand.
On the other side of the line, Ukrainian combat deaths are now almost certainly in the range of 250k to 350k – at least 20k of that total occurring just since the first week of June.
The third iteration of the Ukrainian army, equipped predominantly with imported NATO armor, artillery, and ammunition, has been torn to shreds over the course of the previous six weeks of their last gasp offensive. The AFU very likely has been husbanding its scant remaining stock of NATO equipment and ammunition for one last “charge of the damned”, but otherwise Ukrainian offensive potential is played-out, and there will be no fourth iteration of a Ukrainian army to face the Russians on the field.
Meanwhile, upwards of four-hundred thousand uncommitted Russian reserves are champing at the bit to be turned loose. With Russian military industrial output now in high gear, these troops are better-equipped than any that have yet taken part in this conflict.
The Russian air force has received substantial numbers of new airframes from the production line. Attack helicopters roam the battlefield with near-impunity. Russian supply of strike drones, cruise missiles, and supersonic air-launched missiles appears to meet all its battlefield demands. Its so far modest deployment of hypersonic missiles has shown them to be extremely potent weapons that defy the attempts of antiquated western air defenses to interdict them.
This war is a lost cause for the empire and its hapless allies in Europe and around the world. And that, of course, is the unavoidable conclusion that has finally managed to seep into the otherwise dense skulls of the various participants at the recent NATO summit in Lithuania.
The Masters of Empire now face a no-win scenario. They must abandon their failed Ukraine gambit — and inexorably, over the next few years, yield to maximalist Russian demands regarding the roll-back of NATO to its pre-1997 borders — or else yield to the mad impulse of a futile attempt to subjugate Russia by force of arms in the form of direct US/NATO intervention into this war.
Either way, the decline of the empire will be radically accelerated; NATO will almost immediately cease to function as a credible military/political alliance; the EU will dissolve as a monetary/political “union”; the demise of the global dollar system will rapidly gain momentum.
And though many, if not most, find risible the assertion that these things could possibly come to pass in anything like the near- or medium-term (2 – 5 years), I increasingly expect they will be proven catastrophically mistaken.
A whining President Zelensky goes home with almost nothing but still might start WWIII
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • JULY 18, 2023
It is a lucky break that the Screen Actors Guild has gone on strike as it will give Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky an opportunity to dust off his thespian credentials and look for a new job when the Russians eventually bring down his government. Hollywood and Las Vegas would undoubtedly compete for such a nice Jewish young man to revive his former comedy routine where he played a piano with his penis. To be sure, without disrobing, Zelensky was inevitably the star performer at the recently completed two day NATO Summit in Vilnius Lithuania on July 11th-12th which also featured as a speaker US President Joe Biden, who provided a certain type of context by declaring that “Russia could end this war tomorrow by…ceasing its inhumane attacks on Russia!”
Zelensky whined and strutted through the two days, complaining that instant fast-track admittance of Ukraine to the NATO alliance was his right to enable him to defeat the Russian invaders. When he was instead offered a collaborative process whereby Ukraine would be made “ready” for entry through necessary rebuilding of its military coupled with institutional reforms to combat corruption and strengthen democracy, Zelensky called the delay “absurd” and “weak” on the part of his hosts. And he did so on social media to make sure that he embarrassed everyone involved. Zelensky also did not help his cause by parading in his ratty green combat fatigues, to include his presence at the first night’s gala reception before a group photo where he was observed standing alone, being ignored by the well-dressed crowd of delegates and spouses nearby who had turned their backs on him both metaphorically and physically.
All of which did not mean that the Summit was not, at least rhetorically, a cheerleading event for the plucky Ukrainian defenders against the Russian hordes. The American delegation emphasized that Washington would be there with whatever it takes to support the Ukrainians until “the end” when the war was “won,” whatever that was intended to mean. This has been described by some in the US media as an “Israel Model” in which you supply your proteges with money and weapons before looking the other way when they actually use them “aggressively and unilaterally,” often contrary to your own interests. And NATO meanwhile was firm in its support of the demand that all Ukrainian land be returned to Kiev’s control, to include Crimea, which is a complete deal breaker if there is ever to be any possibility of a negotiated settlement of the conflict, so it seems that the war will go on.
Observers at the Summit opined that the consensus among participants at the meeting was to throw some scraps to Zelensky while also avoiding any commitments that would heighten the risk of escalation into a nuclear war. The decision not to jump into bed with a desperate Zelensky recognized in part that he was and is reckless and would do anything he could to provoke broadening of the war if given the ability to do so. Beyond that, most of the heads of state gathered in Vilnius recognized that, from a domestic political perspective, their respective fellow countrymen have become increasingly weary of the war as it grinds on and brings with it negative economic consequences. And there are elections coming up, not only in the United States, later this year and in 2024.
Nevertheless, Washington was certainly on top of the effort to make sure that Zelensky would have the tools and political support that he would need to start World War Three, even if it required a bit of dissimulation. Biden wrapped up his whirlwind visit to Europe in new NATO member Finland on Thursday, praising the strength of the NATO alliance and expressing his delusion that there is no possibility that Russia will win the war against Ukraine. He said, without stuttering, that “Putin’s already lost the war. Putin has a real problem. How does he move from here? What does he do?”
Many believe, in fact, that it is Russia that has already won the war and, putting the sage commentary from Biden aside, seems to know exactly what is at stake. The effort to rearm the largely destroyed Ukrainian air force with US-made nuclear capable F-16s was expedited by Summit members, an escalation that was particularly noted in Moscow where Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented in explicit terms how “Just one example of an extremely dangerous turn of events is the United States plans to transfer F-16 fighter jets to the Kiev regime. We have informed the nuclear powers, the United States, Britain and France, that Russia cannot ignore the ability of these aircraft to carry nuclear weapons. No amount of assurances will help here. In the course of combat operations, our servicemen are not going to sort out whether each particular aircraft of this type is equipped to deliver nuclear weapons or not. We will regard the very fact that the Ukrainian armed forces have such systems as a threat from the West in the nuclear sphere. The United States and its NATO satellites are creating risks of a direct armed clash with Russia, and this is fraught with catastrophic consequences. The conditions for Russia’s use of nuclear weapons are clearly defined in our military doctrine. They are well known, and I will not repeat them once again.”
And then there are the cluster munitions, promised by Biden two weeks ago after what must have been consultations with his astrologer, with at least some weapons reportedly being delivered by last Thursday. Cluster munitions are banned by over 100 countries in the world, including most of NATO’s member nations and many consider their use to be a war crime. They are particularly lethal when used in civilian areas as they disperse multiple small explosive charges over a wide area that sometimes do not detonate and kill many years later when they are encountered by accident. They were used extensively during the Vietnam War and are still killing farmers in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam itself. Ironically, the United States accused Russia of using cluster bombs last year after it invaded Ukraine, calling them an illegal weapon, but now it is handing them to a psychopath who will undoubtedly seek to use them inside Russia to create a massive escalation that he expects to bring NATO fully into the war on his side. World War Three then inevitably evolves.
Washington’s aggressive moves to arm Ukraine follow on Britain’s in recently supplying Kiev with depleted uranium shells which contaminate surrounding areas with a radioactive dust during and after use. Evidence from areas such as Fallujah in Iraq, where the US and Britain fired large numbers of these shells, suggests the contamination can include a decades-long spike in cancer and birth defects.
And then there is the final Biden gesture to bring about peace on earth which took place through a White House order issued on the day after the NATO Summit ended. It states that: “I hereby determine that it is necessary to augment the active Armed Forces of the United States for the effective conduct of Operation Atlantic Resolve in and around the United States European Command’s area of responsibility… not to exceed 3,000 total members at any one time, of whom not more than 450 may be members of the Individual Ready Reserve, as they deem necessary, and to terminate the service of those units and members ordered to active duty.” While the numbers are not great and the language is governmentese, it is an order to send more soldiers to Europe to increase available resources for potential combat against the Russians. It may be the first of a number of such orders since NATO has reportedly assured Zelensky that the alliance would be increasing its so-called high readiness forces (ready to deploy in 30 days or less) to 300,000. Right now, the number of US troops in all of Europe is roughly 100,000 plus an estimated 100 CIA officers and some special ops personnel on the ground in Ukraine itself. One would not be surprised to learn that the first tranche of soldiers is bound for Poland, which borders Ukraine, Belarus and Russia and where there has already been a significant military build-up including troops from the 101st Airborne and 3rd Armored Division sent to the country for “training” last year.
There are also reports that the White House has moved B-52 bombers from their bases in the continental US to bases in Alaska closer to Russia to serve as a warning. One can only hope that somehow, some way this insanity will stop. We elect our leaders with the expectation that they will keep us safe, not engage in brinksmanship with nuclear weapons. If this is a pre-electoral ploy to re-elect Joe Biden next year by making him appear to be some kind of strong, wartime president, someone should pull the plug right now and tell Joe it is time to retire. Good going-going-gone to you Joe and whichever morons are advising you, most likely to be Antony, Jake and Victoria! You are well on the way to killing all of us for nothing!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
RT | July 18, 2023
The Russian military has conducted strikes on Ukrainian facilities used to prepare terrorist attacks, the Defense Ministry reported on Tuesday. The attacks were carried out in retaliation to Monday’s attack on the Crimean Bridge, which claimed two civilian lives and left one child injured.
In a statement, the ministry said that Russian forces overnight launched “a group retaliatory strike” using high-precision sea-based weapons. The attack was aimed at facilities that were used to prepare “terrorist acts” against Russia involving unmanned drones, as well as the shipyard in the southern Ukrainian city of Odessa that produced them, it added.
Apart from this, the barrage targeted depots in Odessa and Nikolaev that contained around 70,000 tons of fuel meant for the Ukrainian military. “All designated targets have been hit. Fires and detonations have been registered at the destroyed facilities,” according to the statement.
On Tuesday, Sergey Bratchuk, the head of the Odessa administration, reported a rocket attack on the city which involved six Kalibr missiles, but claimed that all of them had been downed. However, he noted that “port infrastructure facilities” and several other buildings were damaged in the strike.
Vitaly Kim, the head of the Nikolaev administration, said the attack hit “an industrial facility,” causing a fire that was promptly extinguished.
Unverified footage circulating on social media shows Ukrainian air defenses firing at an unknown target in Odessa Region, with a powerful explosion occurring several seconds later. Local media suggested that the strike could have destroyed a German-supplied Gepard air defense system.
Another unverified clip from Nikolaev Region appears to show a loud explosion and a fire.
On Monday, Russia accused Ukraine of staging a terrorist attack on the Crimean Bridge involving two maritime drones which damaged one section of the roadway and killed a married couple, injuring their minor daughter.
In response, Russian President Vladimir Putin promised retaliation, noting at the time that the Defense Ministry was already preparing “necessary proposals.”
By Drago Bosnic | July 18, 2023
In late November 2022, Washington DC admitted that it was unable to account for approximately $20 billion in weapons sent to the Kiev regime. At the time, the newly elected Republican-dominated Congress vowed to conduct “impending audits” as soon as they took over in January. Officially, the GOP wanted audits to determine and then release information on the massive weapons shipments from the United States to the Kiev regime and how much of that “aid” was ending up “where it’s supposed to be”. Republicans promised to “hold the government accountable” for spending US taxpayers’ dollars for the sake of the deeply corrupt Kiev regime.
At the time, major news media, such as Fox News, claimed that the Biden administration inspected only 10% of approximately 22,000 weapons sent to the Kiev regime from late February to November. However, oversight issues also extended to other “theaters of operation”, such as Taiwan, where approximately $19 billion in weapons sales for China’s breakaway island province were “missing”. In late August, a Defense News report claimed there was a $14 billion backlog in weapons sales to Taiwan. However, the November data indicated that the actual number was nearly $19 billion in delayed deliveries, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“US government and congressional officials fear the conflict in Ukraine is exacerbating a nearly $19 billion backlog of weapons bound for Taiwan, further delaying efforts to arm the island as tensions with China escalate,” the WSJ report claimed. “The US has pumped billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February, taxing the capacity of the government and defense industry to keep up with a sudden demand to arm Kiev in a conflict that isn’t expected to end soon,” the authors added in an admission rarely seen in mainstream media.
And yet, close to eight months since promising to conduct the aforementioned “impending audits”, the Republican-dominated Congress never did anything of sorts, while the so-called “aid” has swelled to over $170 billion, according to the data released by the Neo-Nazi junta itself. Strangely, the troubled Biden administration has been successful in preventing Congress from creating an inspector general’s office that would finally provide the much-needed oversight for the massive weapons shipments to the Kiev regime. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would create the inspector general office modeled after the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR).
The issues US government experienced during the existence of SIGAR is what likely caused the GOP-dominated Congress to keep postponing its “impeding audits”, despite clear promises it would conduct them. It can even be argued that much of the electorate voted for Republicans precisely because of their promises to heavily scrutinize the so far “unquestionable commitment” to provide the massive amount of “aid” to the Kiev regime. And indeed, the regular reports issued by SIGAR were a source of great embarrassment for any administration in Washington DC during America’s decades-long invasion of Afghanistan. These issues later greatly contributed to the humiliating US defeat in August 2021.
The Afghan-era inspector general John Sopko detailed the unchecked, all-present corruption that led to numerous failures during the truly unprovoked US aggression in Afghanistan. Sopko’s quarterly reports regularly embarrassed US and NATO officials who tried to present the supposed “improvement” of the operational situation as true. He has warned that “an inspector general’s official for the Ukraine war needed to be established to prevent a repeat of the situation American aid created in Afghanistan, which saw massive corruption”. Considering that the “Ukraine aid” is orders of magnitude greater than anything Afghanistan ever got, the scale of corruption in Kiev is virtually impossible to overstate.
“There is an understandable desire amid a crisis to focus on getting money out the door and to worry about oversight later, but too often that creates more problems than it solves,” he wrote in a report submitted to Congress earlier this year, adding: “Given the ongoing conflict and the unprecedented volume of weapons being transferred to Ukraine, the risk that some equipment ends up on the black market or in the wrong hands is likely unavoidable. You’re bound to get corrupt elements of not only the Ukrainian or the host government, but also of US government contractors or other third-party contractors to try to steal the money. There’s just so much money going in, and it’s hard to keep track of.”
Still, the troubled Biden administration keeps insisting that an inspector general for Ukraine would be an “unnecessary hurdle” as the Pentagon is “already monitoring transfers“.
“This expansion is both unnecessary and unprecedented, as oversight of US assistance for the benefit of a country’s people is already provided by the Inspectors General for the Department of State and United States Agency for International Development,” the White House stated.
And yet, according to a June report issued by the Pentagon inspector general, a number of issues with US weapons shipments to the Neo-Nazi junta were found.
“DoD [Department of Defense] personnel did not have the required accountability of the thousands of defense items that they received and transferred at Jasionka, [Poland],” the report claimed, adding: “We observed that DoD personnel did not fully implement their standard operating procedures to account for defense items and could not confirm the quantities of defense items received against the quantity of items shipped for three of five shipments we observed.”
The political West has sent tens of billions worth of weapons to the Kiev regime since before Russia launched its strategic counteroffensive against NATO aggression in Europe. This includes everything from small arms and tactical reconnaissance drones to heavy armor and very likely nuclear-capable fighter jets in the near future. And while Washington DC and its favorite puppet regime insist “all weapons are strictly and only being used on the battlefield”, dozens of countries in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere routinely complain that various extremely dangerous and violent criminal groups and terrorist organizations now possess advanced military-grade weapons that have been illegally acquired in Ukraine.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | July 17, 2023
A senior figure in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) was placed in pretrial detention. Cleric Metropolitan Pavlo is facing charges for voicing opinions deemed too pro-Russian.
A Kiev court ordered Pavlo to jail on Saturday. The cleric’s bail was nearly $900,000, and he could remain in pretrial detention for a month. The judge claimed Pavlo violated a court order by contacting a witness in his trial. Pavlo, who is also known as Petro Lebid, says he did not know that the person was a witness.
On April 1, Pavlo was placed under house arrest. Though initially only scheduled for a month, his house arrest has been extended several times. The charges against Pavlo include inciting hatred and justifying the Russian war in Ukraine.
On Saturday, Moscow demanded Kiev release Pavlo. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria said, “We demand strict compliance by the Kiev regime with its international legal obligations, the immediate release of Metropolitan Pavlo, who is suffering from a serious illness, and the provision of proper medical care for him.” She added that the arrest was “yet another manifestation of political arbitrariness and lawlessness [by Kiev.]”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has waged a culture war. The UOC has been a primary target of the “derussification” campaign. On December 1, Zelensky announced that Kiev would attempt to expel all religious institutions with ties to Russia, arguing the move would make “it impossible for religious organizations affiliated with centers of influence in the Russian Federation to operate in Ukraine.”
Kiev further ratcheted up the campaign to erase the UOC by seizing the assets and placing travel bans on several of the church’s top officials. Additionally, a series of raids by Ukrainian police targeted the UOC.
Zelensky’s derussification campaign has extended far beyond the UOC. Kiev has nationalized the media, renamed public places named for Russian historical figures, banned books printed in Russian and outlawed political parties representing Ukraine’s ethnic Russians.
By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 17, 2023
Hubris consists in believing that a contrived narrative can, in and of itself, bring victory. It is a fantasy that has swept through the West – most emphatically since the 17th century. Recently, the Daily Telegraph published a ridiculous nine minute video purporting to show that ‘narratives win wars’, and that set-backs in the battlespace are incidentals: What matters is to have a thread of unitary narrative articulated, both vertically and horizontally, throughout the spectrum – from the special forces’ soldier in the field through to the pinnacle of the political apex.
The gist of it is that ‘we’ (the West) have compelling a narrative, whilst Russia’s is ‘clunky’ – ‘Us winning therefore, is inevitable’.
It is easy to scoff, but nonetheless we can recognise in it a certain substance (even if that substance is an invention). Narrative is now how western élites imagine the world. Whether it is the pandemic emergency, the climate or Ukraine ‘emergencies’ – all are re-defined as ‘wars’. All are ‘wars’ that are to be fought with a unitary imposed narrative of ‘winning’, against which all contrarian opinion is forbidden.
The obvious flaw to this hubris is that it requires you to be at war with reality. At first, the public are confused, but as the lies proliferate, and lie is layered upon lie, the narrative separates further and further from touched reality, even as mists of dishonesty continue to swathe themselves loosely around it. Public scepticism sets in. Narratives about the ‘why’ of inflation; whether the economy be healthy or not; or why we must go to war with Russia, begin to fray.
Western élites have ‘bet their shirts’ on maximum control of ‘media platforms’, absolute messaging conformity and ruthless repression of protest as their blueprint for a continued hold in power.
Yet, against the odds, the MSM is losing its hold over the U.S. audience. Polls show growing distrust of the U.S. MSM. When Tucker Carlson’s first ‘anti-message’ Twitter show appeared, the noise of tectonic plates grinding against each other was unmissable, as more than 100 million (one in three) Americans listened to iconoclasm.
The weakness to this new ‘liberal’ authoritarianism is that its key narrative myths can get busted. One just has; slowly, people begin to speak reality.
Ukraine: How do you win an unwinnable war? Well, the élite answer has been through narrative. By insisting against reality that Ukraine is winning, and Russia is ‘cracking’. But such hubris eventually is busted by facts on the ground. Even the western ruling classes can see their demand for a successful Ukrainian offensive has flopped. At the end, military facts are more powerful than political waffle: One side is destroyed, its many dead become the tragic ‘agency’ to upending dogma.
“We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met … [however] unless Ukraine wins this war, there’s no membership issue to be discussed at all” – Jens Stoltenberg’s statement at Vilnius. Thus, after urging Kiev to throw more (hundreds of thousands) of its men into the jaws of death to justify NATO membership, the latter turns its back on its protégé. It was, after all, an unwinnable war from the beginning.
The hubris, at one level, lay in NATO’s pitting of its alleged ‘superior’ military doctrine and weapons versus that of a deprecated, Soviet-style, hide-bound, Russian military rigidity – and ‘incompetence’.
But military facts on the ground have exposed the western doctrine as hubris – with Ukrainian forces decimated, and its NATO weaponry lying in smoking ruins. It was NATO that insisted on re-enacting the Battle of 73 Easting (from the Iraqi desert, but now translated into Ukraine).
In Iraq, the ‘armoured fist’ punched easily into Iraqi tank formations: It was indeed a thrusting ‘fist’ that knocked the Iraqi opposition ‘for six’. But, as the U.S. commander at that tank battle (Colonel Macgregor), frankly admits, its outcome against a de-motivated opposition largely was fortuitous.
Nonetheless ‘73 Easting’ is a NATO myth, turned into the general doctrine for the Ukrainian forces – a doctrine structured around Iraq’s unique circumstance.
The hubris – in line with the Daily Telegraph video – however, ascends vertically to impose the unitary narrative of a coming western ‘win’ onto the Russian political sphere too. It is an old, old story that Russia is military weak, politically fragile, and prone to fissure. Conor Gallagher has shown with ample quotes that it was exactly the same story in World War 2, reflecting a similar western underestimation of Russia – combined with a gross overestimation of their own capabilities.
The fundamental problem with ‘delusion’ is that the exit from it (if it occurs at all) moves at a much slower pace than events. The mismatch can define future outcomes.
It may be in the Team Biden interest now to oversee an orderly NATO withdrawal from Ukraine – such that it avoids becoming another Kabul debacle.
For that to happen, Team Biden needs Russia to accept a ceasefire. And here lies the (largely overlooked) flaw to that strategy: It simply is not in the Russian interest to ‘freeze’ the situation. Again, the assumption that Putin would ‘jump’ at the western offer of a ceasefire is hubristic thinking: The two adversaries are not frozen in the basic meaning of the term – as in a conflict in which neither side has been able to prevail over the other, and are stuck.
Put simply, whereas Ukraine structurally hovers at the brink of implosion, Russia, by contrast, is fully plenipotent: It has large, fresh forces; it dominates the airspace; and has near domination of the electromagnetic airspace. But the more fundamental objection to a ceasefire is that Moscow wants the present Kiev collective gone, and NATO’s weapons off the battle field.
So, here is the rub: Biden has an election, and so it would suit the Democratic campaign needs to have an ‘orderly wind-down’. The Ukraine war has exposed too many wider American logistic deficiencies. But Russia has its’ interests, too.
Europe is the party most trapped by ‘delusion’ – starting from the point at which they threw themselves unreservedly into the Biden ‘camp’. The Ukraine narrative broke at Vilnius. But the amour propre of certain EU leaders puts them at war with reality. They want to continue to feed Ukraine into the grinder – to persist in the fantasy of ‘total win’: “There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin … We have to take all risks for that. No compromise is possible, no compromise”.
The EU Political Class have made so many disastrous decisions in deference to U.S. strategy – decisions that go directly against Europeans’ own economic and security interests – that they are very afraid.
If the reaction of some of these leaders seems disproportionate and unrealistic (“There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin”) – it is because this ‘war’ touches on a deeper motivations. It reflects existential fears of an unravelling of the western meta-narrative that will take down both its hegemony, and the western financial structure with it.
The western meta-narrative “from Plato to NATO, is one of superior ideas and practices whose origins lie in ancient Greece, and have since been refined, extended, and transmitted down the ages (through the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and other supposedly uniquely western developments), so that we in the west today are the lucky inheritors of a superior cultural DNA”.
This is what the narrators of the Daily Telegraph video probably had at the back of their minds when they insist that ‘Our narrative wins wars’. Their hubris resides in the implicit presumption: that the West somehow always wins – is destined to prevail – because it is the recipient of this privileged genealogy.
Of course, outside of general understanding, it is accepted that notions of ‘a coherent West’ have been invented, repurposed and put to use in different times and places. In her new book, The West, classical archaeologist Naoíse Mac Sweeney takes issue with the ‘master myth’ by pointing out that it was only “with the expansion of European overseas imperialism over the seventeenth century, that a more coherent idea of the West began to emerge – one being deployed as a conceptual tool to draw the distinction between the type of people who could legitimately be colonised, and those who could legitimately be colonizers”.
With the invention of the West came the invention of Western history – an elevated and exclusive lineage that provided an historical justification for the Western domination. According to the English jurist and philosopher Francis Bacon, there were only three periods of learning and civilization in human history: “one among the Greeks, the second among the Romans, and the last among us, that is to say, the nations of Western Europe”.
The deeper fear of western political leaders therefore – complicit in the knowledge that the ‘Narrative’ is a fiction that we tell ourselves, despite knowing that it is factually false – is that our era has been made increasingly and dangerously contingent on this meta-myth.
They quake, not just at a ‘Russia empowered’, but rather at the prospect the new multi-polar order led by Putin and Xi that is sweeping the globe will tear down the myth of Western Civilisation.
RT | July 17, 2023
Russia will no longer provide security guarantees for civilian vessels traversing the formerly exempted corridor in the Black Sea, the country’s foreign ministry has announced. Earlier on Monday, the Kremlin stated that it would not extend the Black Sea grain agreement since its own food and fertilizer exports are still being blocked.
In a statement released on Monday, the Foreign Ministry said that this latest decision “means the recall of maritime navigation security guarantees, the discontinuation of the maritime humanitarian corridor [and] the reinstatement of the ‘temporarily dangerous area’ regime in the north-western Black Sea.” Russian diplomats went on to accuse Ukraine of using the humanitarian corridor to carry out attacks on Russian targets.
As for the Ukrainian grain shipments that were facilitated by the deal, the ministry claimed that the vast majority of those ended up in Europe, with several countries there allegedly lining their pockets.
The statement pointed out that the whole mechanism, which was launched last summer, had ostensibly been designed to help avert famine in poorer nations.
According to Moscow, key points in the Russia-UN memorandum, which was signed in lockstep with the Black Sea Initiative, have remained unfulfilled to date.
As a result, the ministry explained, Russian bank transactions, insurance and logistics were effectively paralyzed, meaning that Moscow could not sell its own produce and fertilizers on the international market. In one case cited in the statement, a shipment of Russian fertilizers donated free of charge to several African countries was blocked in the EU.
The foreign ministry concluded that in light of all these issues, the agreement no longer makes sense.
Moscow has suggested European nations should allow Ukraine to transfer its grain via their territory and potentially face the wrath of local farmers, or take action and address Russia’s grievances.
Should this happen, Moscow would be ready to return to the implementation of the agreement, the statement noted.
Earlier on Monday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov announced the termination of the deal. He also reiterated Russia’s readiness to return to the mechanism; however, he added that this would only happen if its interests were respected.
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that Moscow would “suspend participation in this deal,” describing the arrangement as a “one-sided game all along.”
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By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
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