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Putin: Crazy Like a Fox

By Scott Ritter | Consortium News | March 2, 2022

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine goes on, the world wonders what the reason was behind such a precipitous act. The pro-Ukraine crowd has put forth a narrative constructed around the self-supporting themes of irrationality on the part of a Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his post-Cold War fantasies of resurrecting the former Soviet Union.

This narrative ignores that, far from acting on a whim, the Russian president is working from a playbook that he initiated as far back as 2007, when he addressed the Munich Security Conference and warned the assembled leadership of Europe of the need for a new security framework to replace existing unitary system currently in place, built as it was around a trans-Atlantic alliance (NATO) led by the United States.

Moreover, far from seeking the reconstitution of the former Soviet Union, Putin is simply pursuing a post-Cold War system which protects the interests and security of the Russian people, including those who, through no fault of their own, found themselves residing outside the borders of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In this age of politicized narrative shaping, which conforms to the demands of domestic political imperatives as opposed to geopolitical reality, fact-based logic is not in vogue. For decades now, the Russian leadership has been confronting a difficult phenomenon where Western democracies, struggling to deal with serious fractures derived from their own internal weakness, produce political leadership lacking in continuity of focus and purpose in foreign and national security relations.

Consistent Leadership

Whereas Russia has had the luxury of having consistent leadership for the past two decades, and can look to another decade or more of the same, Western leadership is transient in nature. One need only reflect on the fact that Putin has, in his time in office, dealt with five U.S. presidents who, because of the alternating nature of the political parties occupying the White House, have produced policies of an inconsistent and contradictory nature.

The White House is held hostage to the political constraints imposed by the reality of domestic partisan politics. “It’s the economy, stupid” resonates far more than any fact-based discussion about the relevance of post-Cold War NATO. What passes for a national discussion on the important issues of foreign and national security are, more often than not, reduced to pithy phrases. The complexities of a balanced dialogue are replaced by a good-versus-evil simplicity more readily digested by an electorate where potholes and tax rates matter more than geopolitics.

Rather than try to explain to the American people the historical roots of Putin’s concerns with an expanding NATO membership, or the impracticalities associated with any theoretical reconstitution of the former Soviet Union, the U.S. political elite instead define Putin as an autocratic dictator (he is not) possessing grandiose dreams of a Russian-led global empire (no such dreams exist).

It is impossible to reason with a political counterpart whose policy formulations need to conform with ignorance-based narratives. Russia, confronted with the reality that neither the U.S. nor NATO were willing to engage in a responsible discussion about the need for a European security framework which transcended the inherent instability of an expansive NATO seeking to encroach directly on Russia’s borders, took measures to change the framework in which such discussions would take place.

Russia had been seeking to create a neutral buffer between it and NATO through agreements which would preclude NATO membership for Ukraine and distance NATO combat power from its borders by insisting the alliance’s military-technical capabilities be withdrawn behind NATO’s boundaries as they existed in 1997. The U.S. and NATO rejected the very premise of such a dialogue.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine must be evaluated within this context. By invading Ukraine, Russia is creating a new geopolitical reality which revolves around the creation of a buffer of allied Slavic states (Belarus and Ukraine) that abuts NATO in a manner like the Cold War-era frontier represented by the border separating East and West Germany.

Russia has, by redeploying the 1st Guards Tank Army onto the territory of Belarus, militarized this buffer, creating the conditions for the kind of standoff that existed during the Cold War. The U.S. and NATO will have to adjust to this new reality, spending billions to resurrect a military capability that has atrophied since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Here’s the punchline — the likelihood that Europe balks at a resumption of the Cold War is high. And when it does, Russia will be able to exchange the withdrawal of its forces from Belarus and Ukraine in return for its demands regarding NATO’s return to the 1997 boundaries.

Vladimir Putin may, in fact, be crazy — crazy like a fox.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

March 4, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

Western anti-Russian agenda threatens UN’s existence

By Lucas Leiroz | March 4, 2022

Amid the abusive wave of sanctions against Russia due to the special operation in Ukraine, some specific rumors have caught the attention of experts, suggesting that there are plans on the part of the Western states to simply pressure to remove Russia’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council (UNSC). This kind of illegal maneuver is a real coup attempt and could lead to the end of the UN.

Apparently, an effort is under way to diplomatically isolate Moscow and even challenge Russia’s right to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, alleging that Russia took the seat of the former Soviet Union in 1991 without proper authorization – which in fact is nothing more than a public “justification” to promote such an illegal maneuver.

Currently, there are reports circulating on several websites alleging that Western diplomats, mainly American and British, are starting a research work to investigate whether there is a legal possibility of removing Russia from its position on the UNSC within the current international documents. Obviously, this type of “research” is useless and there is no possibility of carrying out such a maneuver within the limits of public international law. In practice, when reporting that diplomats are investigating this kind of maneuver, it is only possible to conclude that they are somehow conspiring to carry out a coup against Moscow at the United Nations.

This absolutely absurd idea has become a common discourse in the Western media recently. This is due to the fact that the West has become furious with the Russian veto on the American resolution against the operation in Ukraine, voted on at the UNSC last week. Western political analysts began to say that “administrative reform” was needed at the UN to prevent “aggressor nations” from vetoing sanctions against themselves. Shortly thereafter, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelesnky, during one of his online speeches, claimed that Kiev “demands” Russian removal from the Council, strengthening Western discourse.

Quite unexpectedly, diplomats seem to have paid attention to this utterly unrealistic idea suggested by Zelensky and some ideologically fanatical analysts, initiating the current plan, in which Western officials plan to form a legal argument about the “illegitimacy” of the Russian presence on the Council. It is expected that some document will soon emerge containing various distortions and arbitrary interpretations of the norms of international law, just in order to justify the idea of removing Russia.

It is questionable whether the analysts and diplomats involved in this type of maneuver are taking into account all the consequences of this attitude. This irresponsible, illegal, rude and anti-diplomatic act could simply generate the biggest crisis in international relations since the Second World War, directly threatening the stability of global peace.

The very existence of the UN will lose its meaning without the Russian presence in its Security Council, considering the country’s military and nuclear importance. If that happens, the Russian attitude may simply be to abandon the UN, as it will have become a mere pro-Western international organization. China would certainly take the Russian side in this dispute as it would also have its interests affected by the coup in the Security Council. Russia and China would perhaps form a new organization together. And that would be the end of the UN as the regulator of world peace. The UN would have the same end of its predecessor league and this is something that everyone wants to avoid – except the Western officials who are planning the coup against Russia.

Obviously, administrative reform is needed at the UN and until a few days ago there was a consensus on the need to expand the Security Council’s permanent seats, including new emerging states of geopolitical relevance, such as India, Pakistan, Brazil, among others. Trying to reduce the Council is absurd considering that the world is increasingly multipolar. This would be a mere attempt on the part of NATO to carry out a global coup d’état, but instead of controlling the world, it would only bring about the end of the UN.

It is necessary that good sense prevails in the UN, in order for such an illogical project to be promptly rejected, so that the organization survives. The attempt to “cancel” Russia cannot go beyond the limits of international law. It is essential that the main world powers are on the Security Council and that the most important of them have veto power to prevent the interests of one side from prevailing over those of the other. It is this structure that guarantees world peace. It is necessary to increase the permanent seats, giving this right to new world powers, adapting the UN’s structure to the multipolar world. Any attempt to the contrary threatens the very existence of the organization.

Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

March 4, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Russian MoD responds to Zaporozhskaya nuclear power station incident

RT | March 4, 2022

The spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defense, Major General Igor Konashenkov, issued an official statement on Friday morning concerning the shootout and fire that had occurred at Ukraine’s Zaporozhskaya nuclear power plant earlier the same day.

“Last night, an attempt to carry out a horrible provocation was made by Kiev’s nationalist regime on the area surrounding the station,” he announced, claiming the Russian troops patrolling the territory had been attacked by a Ukrainian sabotage group.

According to the spokesman, the Ukrainian forces had attacked Russian soldiers at about 2am local time, opening heavy fire from the training facility next to the power station in order to “provoke a retaliatory strike on the building.”

The Russian patrol had neutralized the group’s firing points, but the saboteurs had then set fire to the training facility as they retreated, Konashenkov said. The blaze was put out by the Ukrainian State Emergency Service’s firefighters. “At the moment of provocation, no staff members were at the facility,” he noted.

In response to the Russian Ministry of Defense’s statement, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky denied the provocation claims and accused Russian forces of having staged the attack.

The mayor of the nearby town of Energodar had originally reported that the fire had been caused by Russian shelling, and that the blaze had engulfed the power plant itself, but the emergency services dismissed the latter claim.

It was reported on Monday that the facility had been captured by Russian forces, and that staff were keeping operations going and monitoring radiation levels. The International Atomic Energy Agency has offered assurances that there has been no change in those levels in the wake of the incident.

Russia began its military offensive in Ukraine last week, claiming its invasion was aimed at “demilitarizing” and “denazifying” the government in Kiev and stopping what it called the “genocide” in the two breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk. Ukraine has accused Moscow of an unprovoked offensive, with the US and its NATO allies following suit and imposing severe economic sanctions.

March 4, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Nuclear Power | , | Leave a comment

On Ukraine, Biden’s State of the Union address was just ‘good vs. evil’

By Scott Ritter | RT | March 3, 2022

Biden’s simplistic “good versus evil” pronouncements on the Russian-Ukraine conflict did little to prepare America for the consequences of declaring economic warfare against the Russian state.

It wasn’t surprising that Russia’s ongoing military incursion into Ukraine topped the list of issues addressed by US President Joe Biden in his first State of the Union (SOTU) address, delivered on March 1, 2022, to a joint session of Congress.

Biden pitched the Ukraine crisis as a defining moment in modern history, a problem that could only be resolved with American leadership, both at home and abroad. His job during his address was to convince both domestic and foreign viewers alike that he was the man for the job.

He repeated the time-tested mantra that held that Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, constituted a threat to democratic principles at home and abroad. This was especially true, he said, when it came to Ukraine.

There was nothing new in what Biden told his audience – the same words and themes had been deployed many times over in the past week. He pushed the same buttons – Putin as the personification of “autocratic oppression,” leading a Russia addicted to power, hell-bent on forcefully absorbing the nation of Ukraine into the Russian orbit.

He likewise pulled at the heartstrings of America, talking about Ukraine’s embattled leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, and the heroic resistance of his people in the face of overwhelming Russian power. The United States stood fully behind them, Biden said. This sentiment was shared by many in the audience as the president spoke. They held small Ukrainian flags or wore the nation’s blue-and-yellow colors. But this support, he said, had its limits – the US, he declared, would not send a single soldier to Ukraine to fight for its cause.

The fact was, Biden was abandoning it to its fate. While praising the courage and leadership of the Ukrainian president, he said, “Let me be clear, our forces are not engaged and will not engage in conflict with Russian forces in Ukraine. Our forces are not going to Europe to fight in Ukraine, but to defend our NATO allies in the event that Putin decides to keep moving west.”

There is no evidence that Russia intends to “keep moving west.” And while Biden spoke of the important leadership role played by the US in Europe, the fact remains that Europe is a veritable prisoner to the whims of any US president, whose pronouncements take on the weight of law whenever they are uttered.

Neither Europe nor the United States, it seemed, would be intervening on behalf of Ukraine against Russia. Zelensky and Ukraine were on their own, their only choice for national relevance being to commit suicide on the international stage while the West, from the safety of their homes and offices, cheered them on like bloodthirsty Romans watching gladiators do battle in the Colosseum.

The major takeaway from Biden’s SOTU address? Ukraine will lose this war, and the West will do nothing to stop that fact.

While Biden lionized Ukraine and its beleaguered president, he failed to explain to the American people why there was a war, beyond the sophomoric argument that “Putin did it.” No talk of America’s role in the Maidan back in 2014, no discussion of the role played by Ukrainian right-wing ultra-nationalists in oppressing the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine, no mention of the shelling of the breakaway Donbass region, no discussion of the role that NATO expansion played in creating an untenable security situation for the Russian state.

Simplistic jingoism plays well in atmospheres such as televised political addresses, where a captive audience is compelled to rise and applaud made-for-TV pronouncements lest they be singled out for public criticism by a fawning, vindictive corporate media. The cheer-fest the SOTU has become would give any Brezhnev-era meeting of the Presidium a run for its money when it comes to mindless standing ovations.

But it was here, in the orgy of self-congratulation that is the interplay between president and Congress where America’s weakness in its conflict with Russia was exposed. As united as everyone seemed to be about sacrificing Ukraine on the altar of Russia-bashing, it was clear Congress was deeply divided from Joe Biden on issues of domestic policy, especially when it came to the economy of the US. While the US president may not want to engage Russia in a shooting war in Europe, he has embarked on a great global crusade to destroy it economically. And the tepid response the political opposition gave to his pronouncements underscores the reality that the US is not prepared for the consequences of his declaration of open economic war with Russia.

Let there be no doubt: Russia will win the shooting war in Ukraine. This outcome is inevitable, given the reality that Ukraine has been abandoned by its erstwhile partners in the West. Yet the conflict between Russia and the West won’t end when the last bomb explodes on Ukrainian soil, but when, in the mindset of the US and its European partners, the Russian economy is destroyed and Putin is humiliated and diminished as a political force, domestically, regionally, and globally.

Here, the US president did the American people a great disservice, selling them a feel-good struggle in which Ukraine is promoted as the glorified martyr and Russia demoted as the evil oppressor. A bloodless conflict – from the US perspective, at least – that will be won simply by shutting down the Russian economy by remote control. It won’t be that simple.

Russia has yet to respond to the US-led economic war being waged against it. When it does, rest assured that these sanctions Congress so enthusiastically applauded will prove to be a double-edged sword – one that will cut into a US economy still reeling from the consequences of the Covid pandemic. When that time comes, President Biden could find that many of those politicians who rose to their feet to cheer on the sacrifice of Ukraine will turn on him.

War, it is said, is but an extension of politics by other means. Given the deep partisan political divide that exists in the US when it comes to the economy, it is clear neither Biden nor the American public is ready for what is about to happen when the consequences of their anti-Russian hysteria finally comes home to roost.

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.

March 3, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

How JFK Would Have Handled the Ukraine Crisis

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | March 3, 2022

There is no doubt that President Kennedy would have handled the Ukraine crisis totally different from the way that President Biden has handled it. Unlike Biden, Kennedy would have resolved the situation so that there never would have been a Russian invasion of Ukraine, which would have meant that all the death and suffering being wreaked in that country today would never have occurred.

Kennedy had a unique ability to step into the shoes of his adversary to determine why he was taking a particular position or course of action. In the case of Ukraine, he would have easily realized that all that Russia wanted was a guarantee that Ukraine would not be admitted into NATO. He would have understood Russia’s reasoning that admitting Ukraine into NATO would have entitled the Pentagon and the CIA to install their bases, missiles, weaponry, tanks, and troops along Russia’s border. He would have understood why Russia would find that unacceptable.

Therefore, Kennedy would simply have issued the guarantee that Ukraine would never be admitted into NATO. He would have concluded that that would be a preferable outcome compared to a Russian invasion of Ukraine, which he would have known would have entailed massive death and destruction of innocent people. He also would have known that there would be a grave risk that such a war could turn into a nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. He would not have believed that such a risk would be worth taking. In his mind, it would have been much more preferable to simply issue the guarantee, no matter how much pressure he would have been getting from the Pentagon and the CIA to do the opposite.

How do we know that this would have been how Kennedy would have resolved the crisis? Because that’s how he resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis.

After the debacle of the CIA’s invasion at the Bay of Pigs, the Pentagon and the CIA were constantly exhorting Kennedy to initiate a full-scale military invasion of Cuba. They maintained that the communist regime in Cuba posed a grave threat to “national security.” The Pentagon even presented him with a plan called Operation Northwoods, which was false-flag operation designed to give Kennedy a pretext for ordering an invasion of Cuba.

The Cubans knew that the Pentagon and the CIA were hell-bent on invading the island and effecting regime change. Thus, once Kennedy discovered that the Soviets had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, he began trying to figure out why they would do that. He concluded that the missiles were intended to deter a U.S. invasion of Cuba or, in the case of an invasion, to enable the Cuban regime to defend itself. He also learned that the Soviets were chagrinned that the Pentagon had installed nuclear missiles in Turkey pointed at the Soviet Union.

Thus, to resolve the crisis, Kennedy simply issued a double guarantee to the Soviets. He guaranteed that the U.S. would not invade Cuba and he guaranteed the removal of the Pentagon’s missiles in Turkey. In return for that double guarantee, the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba and took them home. The crisis was over.

Needless to say, the Pentagon and the CIA were livid. They looked on Kennedy as an incompetent coward who had guaranteed the permanent existence of a grave threat to national security. One member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff compared Kennedy’s actions during the crisis to those of Neville Chamberlin’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich. He called Kennedy’s resolution of the crisis the biggest defeat in U.S. history.

By that time, Kennedy didn’t care what the Pentagon and the CIA thought because he held the entire military-intelligence establishment in deep disdain. Unlike Biden, he was willing to confront and oppose the fierce anti-Soviet and anti-Russian animus that characterized the national-security establishment. In fact, in his Peace Speech at American University the following year, he effectively announced an end to the Cold War and the establishment of a peaceful and friendly relationship with the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately, unlike Kennedy, Biden lacks the intestinal fortitude to oppose the fierce anti-Russia animus that still characterizes the U.S. military-intelligence establishment. As we have seen in the Ukraine crisis, Joe Biden is no John Kennedy.

March 3, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

International nuclear watchdog passes resolution on Ukraine

RT March 3, 2022

In a resolution passed on Thursday by its board of directors, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reportedly “deplored” Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia has denounced the document, calling it politicized and factually incorrect.

The resolution, which is yet to be published, apparently calls on Russia to allow the Ukrainian authorities to resume control of its nuclear sites. Moscow says the assertion that they are not already in control is incorrect.

There were claims that Russian troops had occupied the site of the destroyed Chernobyl nuclear power plant as they moved from Belarus towards Kiev. The Russian Defense Ministry has denied them, stating that Ukrainian guards remained in control of the facility.

On March 1, Reuters gave a preview of the draft of the damning resolution, which was penned by Poland and Canada on behalf of Ukraine.

The news of the resolution’s passage, with just two votes having been cast against it at the session of the 35-member board, was welcomed by Ukraine. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba claimed in a tweet that it showed the world was “united against Russia’s actions, which threaten Ukraine and all of Europe.”

Russia’s representative at the IAEA, Mikhail Ulyanov, blasted the document, claiming it contained “intentional politically motivated lies and mistakes.” In particular, the assertion that the Ukrainian authorities were not in control of the nation’s nuclear sites was wrong, the official said in a series of tweets.

Moscow was satisfied that “countries whose populations taken together exceed a half of the mankind refused to support the resolution,” Ulyanov added.

China has confirmed that it voted against the resolution. Its representative, Wang Qun, said the document “obviously” overstepped the agency’s mandate to monitor nuclear security, and that by adopting the resolution, it had undermined the IAEA’s position as a professional, non-political organization.

The diplomat complained that some nations had “forcibly pushed” the draft and rejected suggestions submitted by other board members about how to improve the document.

Earlier on Thursday, IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi confirmed to journalists that all safety precautions the agency had taken in Ukraine remained intact.

March 3, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Nuclear Power | , , , | Leave a comment

Why did the US embassy official website just REMOVE all evidence of Ukrainian bioweapons labs?

By Lance D Johnson | Natural News | March 2, 2022

The official US embassy website recently REMOVED all evidence of bio-labs in Ukraine. These bio-labs are funded and jointly operated by the US Department of Defense (DOD). The laboratory documents were public knowledge up until February 25, 2022. These documents include important construction, financing and permit details for bioweapon laboratories in Ukraine. But now the US government is scrubbing these documents from the internet and becoming less transparent with this critical information. This comes at a time when the world population is waking up to the reality of gain-of-function bioweapons research, lab leaks and predatory vaccine and diagnostics development. These bio-labs generate pathogens of pandemic potential that exploit human immune systems and are the foundation for which medical fraud, malpractice, vaccine-induced death and genocide originates.

Could the existence of these bioweapons’ labs have something to do with Russia’s “special military mission?” For years, Russia has accused the US of developing bioweapons near its borders. Are the Russians currently gathering evidence from these labs? What is the current status of these facilities? What if Russia was not conducting an imperialist invasion and occupation of Ukraine — a reality that has been propagated by Western media outlets? What if Russia was instead targeting international crime syndicates and going after criminal elements in the Ukrainian government that have harmed the Ukrainian people and others around the world?

The U.S. erected a vast network of bio-labs in Ukraine and is scrubbing details from the net

The US DOD funded at least 15 different bio-labs in Ukraine. These are not Chinese or Russian bio-labs. At least eight of these are bioweapons labs are operated exclusively by the US. These laboratories “consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern” to conduct “enhanced bio-security, bio-safety, and bio-surveillance measures” through “international research partnerships.” Each facility costs the US taxpayers anywhere from $1.8 to over $3 million. The DOD facilitated the permit process to allow Ukrainian scientists to work with pathogens of pandemic potential.

The US DOD works directly with Ukraine’s Ministry of Health, State Service of Ukraine for Food Safety and Consumer Protection, the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences and the Ministry of Defense. This network of bio-labs includes facilities in Odessa, Vinnytsia, Uzhgorod, Lviv, Kiev, Kherson, Ternopil, Crimea, Luhansk and two suspect facilities in Kharkiv and Mykolaiv.

In recent years, many of these labs have reached Bio-safety Level 2 status, allowing scientists to experiment with viruses and bacteria. Over the past two years, these laboratories, in cooperation with the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, erected four more mobile laboratories to conduct epidemiological surveillance of the Ukrainian people. These laboratories are part of a multi-national working group that creates disease surveillance networks that “strengthen global health security.”

Up until February 25, 2022, the existence and details of these bioweapons labs were public knowledge. The US embassy had previously disclosed the locations and details of these laboratories in a series of PDF files online. On February 26, 2022, the official embassy website shut down the links to all 15 bioweapon laboratories. All the documents associated with these labs have been removed from the internet. If you click on any of the links, the PDF files are no longer available. Thankfully, these files have been archived and can still be accessed. What is the US embassy trying to hide?

March 3, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Lavrov explains Ukraine’s jitter regarding talks with Moscow

Kiev is taking orders from Washington and does what it is told to, Russia’s foreign minister claims

RT | March 3, 2022

Ukraine is not a sovereign country, and this explains why its dealings with Russia to negotiate a cessation of hostilities was so chaotic, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed during an interview with international media on Thursday.

“The Ukrainian team once again found some reasons to delay negotiations. They certainly take orders from Washington, I have no doubt about that. The country is absolutely dependent,” the Russian diplomat remarked.

Lavrov was referring to the second round of Russian-Ukrainian talks, which were initially scheduled to take place on Wednesday, but were pushed back to Thursday at Ukraine’s request. On Thursday morning, there was another change of plans, reportedly after Kiev requested to change the location of the meeting.

The talks are set to take place somewhere close to the Polish border in Belarus, which provides security guarantees for visiting Ukrainian and Russian officials.

The first round of talks on Monday failed to produce a negotiated settlement. Russia says it would agree to nothing less than the demilitarization of Ukraine and the elimination of radical nationalist elements from its military, law enforcement and other parts of the government.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that his government would reject “unacceptable conditions and ultimatums” from Russia, but indicated that Ukraine’s neutral status was not off the table.

Lavrov remarked that the crisis in Ukraine has a wider aspect of determining the future world order.

“It’s no coincidence that the West has been avoiding at all costs reacting to our clear suggestions, which are based on existing treaties, regarding the security architecture in Europe,” he said.

Moscow accuses the US and its NATO allies of compromising its national security through continued expansion in Europe. It declared attempts to include Ukraine in the alliance as a red line that must not be crossed and that it would not tolerate the increasing presence of NATO instructors and equipment in Ukraine.

Commenting during the interview on Western assurances that Russia’s suspicions were unfounded, Lavrov said foreign nations were in no position “to determine for us what we need for our security.”

Western nations responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine with harsh financial and trade sanctions aimed at devastating the Russian economy. They also said they will ramp up arms supplies to Ukraine and other forms of military assistance for Kiev.

March 3, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Russia Prevents Washington from Unleashing Biological Warfare

By Vladimir Platov – New Eastern Outlook – 03.03.2022

In view of the unrest that US intelligence services have been actively initiating lately, whether in Central Asia, Transcaucasia or other areas bordering Russia and China, the risk of a biological disaster from multiple secret military biological laboratories deployed by the US in potentially politically and socially unstable regions is objectively increasing. In this regard, the issue of the US preparing a biological time bomb in Kazakhstan has been raised many times before. The growing risk of the Pentagon initiating biological warfare using over 400 US biological laboratories located overseas around the world and the need for a clear response to the risk of worldwide biological disaster from such secret US overseas facilities has been repeatedly pointed out.  After all, these biological laboratories employ some 13,000 “employees” who are busy creating strains of killer pathogens (microbes and viruses) that are resistant to vaccines.

It is no secret nowadays that the US has set up such biological laboratories in 25 countries around the world: in the Middle East, Africa, South-East Asia. Only within the former Soviet Union there are US military biological laboratories in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Uzbekistan.

The Americans try to deny the military nature of the studies conducted in such laboratories. However, the secrecy that surrounds them is only comparable to that of the most important military facilities. There is no accountability to the local and global public about the “work” being done there. Moreover, no scientific “achievements” have been publicly demonstrated by American biologists over the many years of the existence of such foreign secret laboratories, and the results of their research are not published anywhere in the public domain.

Meanwhile, laboratories are actively collecting information on the gene pool of the populations of countries where such laboratories operate. All this indicates that the Pentagon is undoubtedly preparing to wage a biological war using biological weapons, which the US is building in such biological laboratories. It is well known that the US has already spent over $100bn in recent years developing biological warfare weapons. The US is the only country that still blocks the establishment of a verification mechanism under the 1972 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction.

However, like Russia’s demands to the West for a clear agreement on universal security measures and on the non-proliferation of NATO to the east, warnings about US readiness to unleash a global biological war have never been heeded in Washington and Western capitals.

With this in mind, one can hardly deny that Russia, like any other country, does not wish to have such weapons near its borders, thus jeopardizing the security of all.

Therefore, in Moscow’s military operation to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine in recent days, getting rid of the numerous US military biological laboratories on the territory of that country is an important point.

On February 24, the British conservative publication THE EXPOSÉ published an article entitled “Is there more to the Ukraine/Russia conflict than meets the eye?” It recognizes that Russia should have conducted the current military operation on the basis of its security interests and confirms that there has long been a very serious threat to the lives and health of the Russian Federation population from the territory of Ukraine. It refers to at least 16 US military biological laboratories located in Odessa, Vinnitsa, Uzhgorod, Lviv (three), Kharkiv, Kiev (also three), Kherson, Ternopil, Dnepropetrovsk, as well as near Luhansk and the border with Crimea. Such “cooperation” between the Pentagon and the Ukrainian Ministry of Health dates back to 2005. Opposition parties managed to push through the Verkhovna Rada in 2013 to end this “cooperation”, but the US-led coup d’état in Kiev in February 2014 prevented the implementation of this decision, resulting in this “cooperation” not only continuing but also actively developing at the initiative of Washington.

Many of the Pentagon’s and White House’s official secrets about US clandestine biological laboratories overseas have been revealed by Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois at Champaign (USA) and author of the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 (BWATA). As this American scientist points out, “We now have an Offensive Biological Weapons industry in this country that violates the Biological Weapons Convention and my Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989”. According to Boyle, “American universities have a long history of willingly permitting their research agenda …. to be co-opted, corrupted, and perverted by the the Pentagon and the C.I.A. into death science”. He cites as an example the group of Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, which managed to increase the toxicity of the flu virus by a factor of 200. According to Boyle, the Pentagon and the CIA are “ready, willing and able to launch biowarfare when it suits their interests… They have a stockpile of that super-weapons-grade anthrax that they already used against us in October 2001”.

The threat to people living even at a distance from such laboratories is evidenced by an investigation conducted by USA Today newspaper, which showed that from 2006 to 2013 alone, more than 1,500 accidents and safety violations occurred in 200 military biological laboratories on the territory of the US. So what about possible similar incidents in biological laboratories in Ukraine or other former Soviet republics?

In the summer of 2019, “America’s main biological warfare lab has been ordered to stop all research into the deadliest viruses and pathogens over fears contaminated waste could leak out of the facility,” reported Britain’s The Independent. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the public health authority in the US, has revoked the military bioresearch center at Fort Detrick’s license to handle Ebola, smallpox and anthrax after CDC inspectors found “problems with the procedures used to decontaminate wastewater” at Fort Detrick. In this regard, it is notable that the possibility of “deadly viruses and pathogens” leaking into Fort Detrick’s wastewater was detected shortly before the COVID-19 outbreak, which the Americans were quick to blame on China. It is also noteworthy that the Pentagon has significantly stepped up the activities of its overseas biological laboratories since 2019, clearly shifting the “work” on particularly dangerous strains and biological weapons development there.

In these circumstances, the task of terminating the activities of the US secret biological laboratories as part of the demilitarization of that country is justified in the program of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine.

Against this background, it is noteworthy that the US embassy in Ukraine removed all documents about the biological laboratories in Kiev and Odessa from its official website after Moscow launched its military operation. This further confirms that in addition to the nuclear threat from Zelensky, Russia was also being prepared for bio-extinction behind the ocean. Under these circumstances, the announcement by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) on the US government procurement website last October of an addendum on “combating highly dangerous pathogens” is understandable. This document concerned the $3.6mln finishing work to launch two biological laboratories in Ukraine – in Kiev and Odessa, where machinery, equipment and personnel were already being prepared for the United States to unleash a biological war under the cover of Ukraine.

March 2, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Russia’s grain shipments drop by half

RT | March 2, 2022

Grain shipments from Russia have more than halved due to traffic restrictions in sea and river ports, the country’s grain union announced on Wednesday.

“Before the current situation [the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia], daily shipments of grain from Russia amounted to 100,000 tons. Now the volume is less than 40,000 tons,” the union’s president, Arkady Zlochevsky, said, as cited by RIA Novosti.

Not only has navigation via the Sea of Azov, which hosts several large Russian ports, been halted, but also shipments on river-sea routes in the Azov Basin, Zlochevsky explained, adding that only long-term contracts were currently permitted to be fulfilled.

Russia is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, accounting for over 18% of international exports. Together with Ukraine, which has also stopped shipping grain, the two countries account for about 30% of global wheat supplies. The crisis threatens to push food prices across the world to an all-time high.

March 2, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

Lavrov: US Nuclear Weapons in Europe are Unacceptable for Russia, Time to Return Them Home

Sputnik – 01.03.2022

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has declared that the presence of US nuclear weapons in Europe is simply unacceptable for Moscow.

In the current situation, Lavrov argued, it is important to prevent a new round of the arms race, and said that Russia calls upon the United States and its allies to join a moratorium on the deployment of short- and intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

“It is unacceptable for us that, contrary to the fundamental principles of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, US nuclear weapons are still present on the territory of some European countries,” he said while addressing the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva via a video call.

Lavrov also criticised the practice of the so called “joint nuclear missions” that involve non-nuclear NATO members, and which he said include scenarios where nuclear weapons are used against Russia.

“It is high time the US nuclear weapons are returned home, and the infrastructure in Europe related to them completely dismantled,” he said.

Lavrov also warned that Russia is doing everything it can to prevent Ukraine from acquiring nuclear weapons.

He argued that Kiev’s statements about procuring nuclear weapons are not just empty bravado as Ukraine has Soviet nuclear technology and delivery systems.

Also, Lavrov suggested that Western powers should refrain from creating military installations in former Soviet states that are not members of NATO.

He also expressed hope that Ukraine will realise the seriousness of the current situation, and that it needs to show independence during the negotiations with Russia.

March 1, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Romney’s self-fulfilling Russia prophecy

The degradation of the Russian-US relations is the byproduct of the American foreign policy

By Scott Ritter | RT | March 1, 2022

A decade ago, then-Presidential candidate Mitt Romney was lambasted by the media for calling Russia “America’s number one geopolitical foe.” Today, he is being lauded for being a visionary. Romney’s self-fulfilling prophecy says more about bad US policy than Russian malfeasance.

It was the hot mic moment heard around the world. On March 26, 2012, as reporters were being led into a photo opportunity involving President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on the eve of a global nuclear security summit in Seoul, South Korea, their microphones picked up an exchange between the two leaders.

Obama: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.”

Medvedev: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…”

Obama: “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”

Medvedev: “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

The context of the conversation—delicate negotiations between the US and Russia regarding ballistic missile defense systems in Europe—was irrelevant to what happened next.

That night,while being interviewed by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Obama’s Republican opponent in the 2012 US Presidential race, Mitt Romney, chided the Democratic incumbent for his comments. “Russia is not a friendly character on the world stage,” Romney said. “And for this president to be looking for greater flexibility, where he doesn’t have to answer to the American people in his relations with Russia, is very, very troubling, very alarming.” Calling Russia America’s number one geopolitical foe, Romney declared, “they fight every cause for the world’s worst actors. The idea that [President Barack Obama] has some more flexibility in mind for Russia is very, very troubling, indeed.”

The issue of Obama’s hot mic moment came up again, during a televised debate on October 22, 2012. Obama, aware of the potential negative political exposure his hot mic incident could create, came loaded with a zinger. “A few months ago,” he told Romney, “when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia… and the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

All Romney could do was repeat his assessment of Russia being America’s number one geopolitical foe, before declaring: “I have clear eyes on this. I’m not going to wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to Russia, or Mr. Putin. And I’m certainly not going to say to him, ‘I’ll give you more flexibility after the election.’”

Obama’s mic-drop moment was devastating for Romney, who lost the election in a landslide.

Years later, some of Romney’s biggest critics appear to have changed their minds about his “Cold War” moment. “Look, I’m willing to say that in 2012 when we all scoffed at Mitt for saying that, gee, Russia was our No. 1 geopolitical foe, think we were a little off there,” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau noted in 2017.

In the aftermath of Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine, Mitt Romney’s 2012 pronouncements have been, in the eyes of many political observers in America, vindicated.

Romney certainly believes so, commenting on CNN’s State of the Union last Sunday that “a geopolitical foe they obviously were and continue to be, because Russia continues to fight us in every venue they have. They support the world’s worst actors.”

Romney expressed concern over a trend by three former presidents—George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump—who sought to reset relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “John McCain was right,” Romney said. “He said he looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and saw the KGB. And that’s what we’re seeing: a small, evil, feral-eyed man who is trying to shape the world in the image where once again Russia would be an empire. And that’s not going to happen.”

To the geopolitically uninitiated, Romney’s 2012 remarks, when viewed through the lens of the present, certainly seem prescient. What is missing, however, is the context of history over time, the factual connectivity between events circa 2012, and the moment. When Obama and Medvedev had their hot mic incident, the US and Russia were still in their “reset” phase of the Obama first term, where the US hoped against hope that they would be able to weaken Putin’s hold on power by promoting the political fortunes of Medvedev.

This gambit failed, not because of any malfeasance on the part of Russia, but the lack of integrity in the Obama administration when it came to fulfilling promises made to Medvedev concerning arms control and the NATO intervention in Libya. While the US notion that Medvedev could somehow supplant Putin as the leading political figure in Russia was always an American pipe dream (the brain child of none other than Michael McFaul, Obama’s foremost Russian expert in the national security council who went on to become Obama’s Ambassador in Moscow), the notion that improving US-Russian relations through meaningful diplomatic engagement was not far-fetched. Indeed, had the Obama administration delivered on missile defense, and limited the intervention in Libya to purely humanitarian pursuits, there was a good chance that relations between the US and Russia during Putin’s second incarnation as Russia’s President could have been constructive.

The duplicity and deceit of the Obama administration, when combined with the flagrant Russophobia that defined the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, so soured relations that even before Joe Biden took office in early 2021, the level of US-Russian discourse had sunk to Cold War-era levels. The Trump administration had inherited a dark mess from its predecessor when it came to US-Russian relations, colored not only by the false allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to steal the 2016 US Presidential election, but a proxy conflict in Ukraine which had emerged in the aftermath of the so-called Maidan Revolution. The 2014 US-backed insurrection overthrew the duly elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, replacing him with ultra-nationalists whose anti-Russian stance led to the reabsorption of Crimea by the Russian government and the outbreak of fighting between the new Ukrainian government and pro-Russia separatists in the Donbass region.

The US had become so entangled in the Ukrainian web that Trump was impeached based upon a phone call he made in the summer of 2019 to newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. During that call, he allegedly held US military aid hostage to a promise by Zelensky to investigate the relationship between Joe Biden’s son and a Ukrainian energy holding company, Burisma. The way the impeachment manager, Representative Adam Schiff, described the importance of this aid was telling when it came to the state of US-Russian relations.

“This military aid, which has long enjoyed strong bipartisan support, was designed to help Ukraine defend itself from the Kremlin’s aggression. More than 15,000 Ukrainians have died fighting Russian forces and their proxies, and the military aid was for such essentials as sniper rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers, radar, night vision goggles and other vital support for the war effort,” Schiff said in his opening address to the US Senate presiding over the impeachment trial of Trump, on January 22, 2020.

He continued: “Most critically, the military aid we provide Ukraine helps to protect and advance American national security interests in the region and beyond. America has an abiding interest in stemming Russian expansionism and resisting any nation’s efforts to remake the map of Europe by dint of military force, even as we have tens of thousands of troops stationed there. Moreover, as one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry: ‘The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that they can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.’”

Seen in this light, there was nothing prescient about Mitt Romney’s 2012 categorization of US-Russian relations. Far from representing a maintenance of a decade-long status quo linked to the pernicious personality of a single Russian president, the degradation of relations between Russia and the US from 2012 to the present was the byproduct of an American foreign policy which was inherently anti-Russian in its construct. Romney’s 2012 pronouncements represent little more than a self-fulfilling prophecy, the consequence of a relationship marked by bad faith on the part of the United States.

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.

March 1, 2022 Posted by | Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

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