Tag: perpetual war

EU states refuse Zelenky’s call to repatriate Ukrainian refugees for the frontline

European nations are rejecting calls from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy to repatriate fighting-age male refugees to their homeland to assist on the frontline.

Zelensky appealed to several EU countries to deport men of military age back to bolster military numbers both prior to and during Ukraine’s counter-offensive push into Russia this month.

The request was unanimously rejected by EU member states.

Ukrainian news site New Voice specifically referenced opposition from Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic because these countries have a shortage of workers. In Poland and the Czech Republic, for example, Ukrainians make up 30 percent of the workforce in the construction and transport sectors, and they would be reluctant to give up this labor.

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The Dangers of Ukraine’s Advance Into Russia

Should Americans regard Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region as a turning point in the war, one that could bring Kyiv important new leverage in bargaining over a settlement, if not outright victory? As tempting as it is to believe that the Ukrainian military can aspire to more than stalemate and compromise, there is little about the Kursk offensive that justifies such hopes.

True, Ukraine’s attack seemed to blindside the Kremlin, leading rapidly to the capture of some 30 villages and forcing the evacuation of roughly 200,000 Russian citizens. Ukrainian officials claim to control more than 400 square miles of Russian territory. This initial success has generated an impressive volume of optimistic takes on Western opinion pages and talk shows, while showing increasingly discouraged Ukrainians that their beleaguered forces remain capable of seizing the initiative on the battlefield.

To shift the course of the war, however, Ukraine’s gambit must either divert significant numbers of Russian forces from the fighting in Ukraine itself, seize or destroy strategically important assets inside Russia, or hold territory over the longer term that can become a bargaining chip in negotiations over ending the conflict. None of that appears likely.

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US Calls for Ceasefire But Keeps Supporting War

On August 12, the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, issued a press statement commemorating the anniversary of the adoption of the Geneva Conventions.

He said: “The 75th anniversary of the adoption of the 1949 Geneva Conventions is a fitting occasion to reaffirm our commitment to respecting international humanitarian law… We call on others to do the same.”

Except Israel.

Blinken added: “Faced with the horrible reality of war, parties to armed conflict must comply with international humanitarian law to mitigate many of war’s worst humanitarian consequences, support pathways to peace, and advance the protection of civilians and other victims.”

Except Israel.

Of course, Blinken did not add the words “except Israel” but he should have, considering what had happened just two days earlier.

On August 10, Israel dropped bombs on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians, killing over 100 and injuring hundreds more.

The New York Times reported that one witness “said he found a scene of carnage unlike any he had seen in the past 10 months of war: A prayer hall strewed with bodies and body parts over two floors.” Another witness said “the dead were all in pieces.”

CNN said there was “no advance warning of the attack” and reported that the director for ambulance and emergency services said, “All of these people who were targeted were civilians, unarmed children, the elderly, men and women.”

NBC News described the event as “one of the deadliest attacks in the 10-month war” and said the strikes hit the school “during dawn prayers.” The network reported, “The White House said it was deeply concerned.” Two days earlier, Secretary Blinken announced that the US was sending billions more to Israel in a new weapons package.

The Financial Times quoted a surgeon as saying, “This was a very bloody day,” and that he had performed several amputations including on at least four children.

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American Interventionist Foreign Policy: One and a Quarter Century of Failure

When Theodore Roosevelt succeeded William McKinley as president in 1901, he realized the US was no longer just a continental republic; with the Spanish-American War of 1898, America now claimed Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines as territories, Cuba a protectorate and annexed Hawaii.

Roosevelt “believed it was the burden of ‘civilized’ nations to uplift ‘uncivilized’ nations,” says Michael Patrick Cullinane. He believed U.S. interests were global interests, and that it was actually good for “civilized” nations to intervene in other countries’ affairs.

Moreover, the 26th president made sure the U.S. played a larger role in international affairs by extending the Monroe doctrine through the Roosevelt Corollary – the United States, henceforth, would protect countries in the Americas from recolonization by European powers, and would intervene militarily if  necessary to do so. It was a foreign policy he described as “speak softly and carry a big stick.” US presidents since Roosevelt have pursued his “big stick” foreign policy agenda.

In the slightly less than a hundred years from 1898 to 1994, the U.S. government (directly or indirectly) has intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America, alone, at least 41 times. That amounts to once every 28 months for an entire century. Overall, while the United States engaged in 46 military interventions from 1948–1991, from 1992–2017 that number increased fourfold to 188.

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What the hell is happening in Trieste?

A few days ago, a secret meeting was held in Trieste, attended by authorities of various kinds: members of NATO, members of the Atlantic Council, members of the Hungarian think tank Danube linked to Viktor Orbán, members of Donald Trump’s entourage, members of the Italian Armed Forces and Police force, representatives of the city government and representatives of the local Freemasonry. You will not find this information elsewhere. The topic of the meeting was the militarisation of the port of Trieste. Which is the reason?

The strategic role of Trieste in the Trimarium doctrine

The year was 1942: a book destined to become a cornerstone of American maritime strategic science was published in the United States of America. It was entitled America’s Strategy in World Politics and was written by the academic geographer Nicholas John Spykman, one of the fathers of maritime geopolitics and a spiritual pupil of Sir Halford Mackinder. Apparently, the book in question was not a success with the general public, while it became a veritable bible of ‘sea route’ strategy for all powerful thalassocrats, introducing the Rimland concept that we use in geopolitics today.

There is a small chapter in the text devoted to a particular topic: the Trimarium doctrine, today better known by its modernized name of Three Seas Initiative (3SI or TSI). It is a strategy that will become the golden rule for maintaining American power on the continent of Europe. The 3SI, also known as the Baltic, Adriatic and Black Sea doctrine, is today regarded as a strategic initiative in which 13 member states participate, namely Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, plus 2 de facto added states that are Moldova and Ukraine, and was officially launched as a project in 2015 by Polish President Andrzej Duda and Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovič under the careful coordination of the U.S. State Department.

A coincidence? Definitely not.

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Nuclear War Just Got Closer

For over two years, I’ve been warning about the dangers of escalation between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine.

Well, the U.S. and Russia have now climbed another rung on the escalation ladder that could possibly lead to nuclear war.

You probably know by now that Ukraine has invaded Russia in force. Up to six Ukrainian brigades totaling between 10,000-15,000 troops with armored personnel carriers and tanks invaded a lightly defended part of the Russian border.

They began to move toward a Russian nuclear power plant near the city of Kursk. The object was to capture the nuclear power plant and hold it hostage. The Russians would not attack to regain the plant because it’s too dangerous to stage a battle in proximity to a nuclear reactor.

A repetition of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster when a nuclear reactor in Ukraine near the Belarus border exploded in the worst nuclear accident in history could not be ruled out.

Control of a Russian reactor by Ukraine would give Ukraine leverage in forcing peace negotiations with Russia or even destabilizing the Putin regime.

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F-35: $2T in ‘generational wealth’ the military had no right to spend

On October 26, 2001, Jim Roche, the then Secretary of the Air Force, stood behind the podium in the Pentagon briefing room to announce that Lockheed Martin had won the competition to build the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Joining him on the stage, were Edward Aldridge, the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, and Gordon England, the Secretary of the Navy.

All three took turns at the microphone to tout the Joint Strike Fighter’s anticipated virtues. “The Joint Strike Fighter is a family of highly common, lethal, survivable, supportable, and affordable next generation multirole strike fighter aircraft,” said Aldridge.

All these claims have proven to be spurious to a greater or lesser extent in subsequent years as the F-35 program limped through a seemingly endless development process, but none so much as the “affordable” claim. At the time of the announcement, the F-35 was supposed to enter active service in 2008 and the program was expected to cost $200 billion.

Nearly 23 years later, the F-35 is officially the most expensive weapon program in history clocking with an anticipated total program cost of $2 trillion and engineers continue to struggle to make the jet work properly with development and procurement costs having more than doubled.

The three men who made that announcement were nearing the end of their long careers. Aldridge retired from the government in 2003 and went on to serve on the board of Lockheed Martin. Jim Roche left the Pentagon in 2005 and became the director of Orbital ATK. Gordon England eventually became deputy secretary of defense before retiring in 2009.

Through their Joint Strike Fighter decision, these three men committed the United States to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for a program that has proven to be an unmitigated disaster. They created a massive financial obligation that future generations of taxpayers must bear, without the much-touted program having produced any of the actual security benefits it was supposed to bring to the U.S. armed forces.

By the time the program’s conceptual flaws became obvious, all three individuals had long since left government service and it was left to an entire generation of their successors to salvage something from the mess they left behind.

It is that last point the individuals who temporarily occupy offices vested with such authorities need to keep front of mind. They have the power to commit future generations to truly massive amounts of spending. All three of the prime F-35 decision-makers were born in the 1930s making them part of the Silent Generation. Generation X, the Millennials, and Gens Z and Alpha must bear the burden of their decisions.

The power to spend such generational wealth should not be wielded in a perfunctory manner. Those with the power of the pen should be far less credulous when people pitch them on pie-in-the-sky programs based on unproven technological promises and assumptions.

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US, UK, Poland Took Part in Preparing Ukraine’s Operation in Kursk – Russian Foreign Intel

On August 6, Ukrainian forces launched an incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, which was slammed by President Vladimir Putin as a large-scale provocation. The Kiev regime planned the attack with the participation of the US and NATO, Russian presidential aide Nikolai Patrushev earlier said.

Ukraine’s operation in Russia’s Kursk region was prepared with the participation of the US, UK, and Polish intelligence services, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) said.

“According to available information, the operation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Kursk region was prepared with the participation of the US, British, and Polish intelligence services. The units involved in it underwent combat coordination in training centers in the UK and Germany. Military advisers from NATO countries are providing assistance in managing Ukraine’s units that have invaded Russian territory, and in using Western weapons and military equipment,” the agency told Russian media.

NATO countries are also providing the Ukrainian military with satellite reconnaissance data on the deployment of Russian troops in the area of ​​the operation, the SVR added.

As the situation on the front deteriorates for Ukrainian troops, Kiev’s Western handlers have been pushing it to move combat operations deep into Russian territory in recent months, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service said. One of the goals was to provoke an upsurge in anti-government sentiment and influence domestic policy in the country.

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Ukraine’s Two Wars

As the Russia–Ukraine conflict continues well into its third year, we naturally focus on the military struggle. A less visible but equally important battle is being waged within Ukraine’s religious communities. This conflict reveals the complex interplay between faith, nationalism, state power, and the ongoing war. 

Ukraine has historically been at the center of the Eastern European Orthodox world. It is on the banks of the Dnieper River in Kyiv that Eastern European Orthodoxy was born in 988 as a Slavic offshoot of Byzantium’s Greek Orthodoxy. It adopted Slavonic, a proto-Slavic tongue, as its liturgical language—a language the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), the largest religious organization in the country, still uses. 

In 2019, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) was founded in accordance with then President Petro Poroshenko’s “one nation, one church” vision. Poroshenko believed that an independent, national church was essential for national security, as opposed to the traditional UOC church, which was independent in governance but retained its legacy ecclesiastic connection with the Russian Orthodox Church based in Moscow. One way that the OCU displayed its nationalism was by replacing Slavonic with Ukrainian as its liturgical language. 

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Ukrainian government announced a series of measures identifying the UOC  with the Russian Orthodox Church and seeking repressive measures against it. On December 2, 2022, during his nightly address President Volodymyr Zelensky announced a decree that banned the activities of religious organizations “affiliated with centers of influence” in Russia and said that state services would examine the links between the UOC and the Russian church. 

If you were a Ukrainian patriot, President Zelensky signaled, the UOC could not possibly be your spiritual home. 

Shortly after Zelensky’s speech, I attended liturgy at the Russian church in Geneva, where I was visiting, hoping to better understand the overlay of the war and religious identity. There, I met both Russians and Ukrainians, including Ukrainians from the Russian-speaking east and ethnic Ukrainians from the west. I met a veteran of the Ukrainian special forces, the SBU, who shared that he fought in the Donbas in 2014 and later went to Russia on a spiritual visit. He was highly critical of what he claimed was the persecution by the Ukrainian government of his church at home, the UOC. Clearly, there was more to it than President Zelensky’s narrative portraying the UOC as a political fifth column—a narrative echoed by the media in Europe and the United States.  

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Biden’s Convention Speech Made Absurd Claims About His Gaza Policy

An observation from George Orwell – “those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future” – is acutely relevant to how President Biden talked about Gaza during his speech at the Democratic convention Monday night. His words fit into a messaging template now in its eleventh month, depicting the U.S. government as tirelessly seeking peace, while supplying the weapons and bombs that have enabled Israel’s continual slaughter of civilians.

“We’ll keep working, to bring hostages home, and end the war in Gaza, and bring peace and security to the Middle East,” Biden told the cheering delegates. “As you know, I wrote a peace treaty for Gaza. A few days ago I put forward a proposal that brought us closer to doing that than we’ve done since October 7th.”

It was a journey into an alternative universe of political guile from a president who just six days earlier had approved sending $20 billion worth of more weapons to Israel. Yet the Biden delegates in the convention hall responded with a crescendo of roaring admiration.

Applause swelled as Biden continued: “We’re working around-the-clock, my secretary of state, to prevent a wider war and reunite hostages with their families, and surge humanitarian health and food assistance into Gaza now, to end the civilian suffering of the Palestinian people and finally, finally, finally deliver a ceasefire and end this war.”

In Chicago’s United Center, the president basked in adulation while claiming to be a peacemaker despite a record of literally making possible the methodical massacres of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Orwell would have understood. A political reflex has been in motion from top U.S. leaders, claiming to be peace seekers while aiding and abetting the slaughter. Normalizing deception about the past sets a pattern for perpetrating such deception in the future.

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