Tag: perpetual war

Dutch Are Lone Supporters Of Macron’s ‘EU Boots On The Ground In Ukraine’ Plan

French President Emmanuel Macron’s words at the start of the week which opened the door to European ‘boots on the ground in Ukraine’ elicited shock, dismay and caution even from within the Western allies. NATO itself scrambled to assure the world that it has no plans to deploy troops inside Ukraine, with Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg rejecting the idea in remarks, given it would certainly mean automatic WW3.

According to CNN, “Macron had told reporters at a news conference that while he and the other 21 European leaders present did not agree on deploying military personnel, the prospect was discussed openly.” Even typically hawkish countries Poland and the UK distanced themselves from such a possibility. 

However one tiny NATO country did step up to back Macron’s words. The Netherlands has said it won’t rule out sending Western troops to Ukraine. Dutch Chief of Defense, General Onno Eichelsheim, told an Amsterdam-based news outlet that while it’s a possibility it is “not yet opportune” to do so.”I think you should keep all options open to see how you can best support Ukraine,” Eichelsheim said.

According to more from the Dutch interview: 

Ukraine has not asked the Netherlands to send troops and there is no point in discussing it at the moment, Eichelsheim added. If Western militaries were to go to Ukraine, it would have to be in a coalition, the Dutch military chef said. “This could either happen via NATO or via an alliance of 10-15 countries.”

“It would be very odd if one or two countries did it,” he added.

Indeed, President Putin’s ominous response to Macron’s words seized precisely on the question of NATO Article 5…

“If Ukraine joins NATO, you won’t even have time to blink your eye when you execute Article 5,” Putin said, which suggests that possibly a nuclear response could be on the table.

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European Official Says Everyone Knows There Are Western Special Operations Forces in Ukraine

In the wake of French President Emmanuel Macron’s comments about Western countries not ruling out sending troops to Ukraine, a European official speaking to Financial Times pointed out that Western special operations forces are already in the country.

“Everyone knows there are Western special forces in Ukraine — they’ve just not acknowledged it officially,” a senior European defense official said.

The Discord leaks revealed last year that as of March 2023, there were 97 NATO special operations soldiers in Ukraine, including 14 Americans and 50 British troops. The leak confirmed earlier reporting from The Intercept that said US special operations forces were on the ground, along with CIA operatives.

It’s unclear if the number of NATO troops inside Ukraine has changed since the Discord leaks, but the comment from the European official confirms that they are still there in some capacity. Macron’s comments also drew attention to the tens of thousands of foreign fighters who joined Ukraine’s Foreign Legion. At least 50 American citizens have been killed fighting in Ukraine.

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US airman Aaron Bushnell claimed to have classified knowledge of US forces fighting in Gaza tunnels on night before setting himself on fire: pal

Aaron Bushnell claimed he had secret knowledge of US troops fighting in Hamas tunnels under Gaza — just hours before setting himself on fire in an “extreme act of protest” against Israel, a close pal told The Post on Tuesday.

The 25-year-old airman — who served in the Air Force’s 70th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing, but also interacted with radical anarchist groups online — ranted that he had “top-secret clearance’’ for military intelligence data in the call to his friend Saturday night, he said.

“He told me on Saturday that we have troops in those tunnels, that it’s US soldiers participating in the killings,’’ claimed the pal, whose ties to Bushnell have been verified by The Post.

“His actual job involves the processing of intelligence data. Some of what he was processing had to do with the Israeli Gaza conflict.”

“One of the things he told me is that coming across his desk … was the US military was involved in the genocides going on in Palestine,’’ the friend said, referring to Israel’s war against the Palestinian terror group Hamas in Gaza.

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Macron: France Could Put Troops on the Ground in Ukraine

There is a growing sense of desperation in the West to get the funding to keep the Ukraine War going.

Victoria Nuland, the U.S. State Department’s #2 official, said recently if Russian President Vladimir Putin is allowed to win, other “hungry” tyrants will start to get ideas. (A not-so-subtle nod to China’s Xi Jinping with Taiwan.)

Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister and ultimate Russian hawk (along with his wife), told CNN that the U.S.’s credibility hangs in the balance on whether it passes another $60 billion for Ukraine.

Sikorski, who is famous for thanking the U.S. for bombing the Nord Stream pipelines before deleting the post, got to thank the Secretary of State in person in Washington on Monday. Blinken posted on X that they talked about how their partnership “continues to grow,” which usually means a new air defense contract.

French President Emmanuel Macron, not to be outdone by the U.S.’s dog and pony show, went even further and vaguely told reporters that he couldn’t rule out French troops entering the fray in Ukraine.

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Ukraine has used US-made chemical weapons: Russia

Washington and Kiev have violated articles of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) as Ukrainian forces have used illegal munitions on the battlefield, Russian Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov has claimed.

The head of Russia’s Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Protection Forces provided several examples of Kiev’s alleged use of banned chemical weapons and non-lethal chemical agents that he said were obtained from the US.

Kirillov claimed that Ukraine used drones to drop US-made gas grenades on December 28, 2023 containing “CS” compound – a chemical classified as a riot-control tool that irritates the eyes and upper respiratory tract, and can cause skin burns, respiratory paralysis and cardiac arrest when used in high concentrations.

He said the delivery of such munitions by the US to Ukraine was a direct violation of the rules of the OPCW, which states that a country must “never, under any circumstances, transfer chemical weapons directly or indirectly to anyone.”

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Biden wants to put the US on permanent war footing

The White House is steering the United States into a budgetary ditch it may not be able to get out of.

The Biden administration is supersizing the defense industry to meet foreign arms obligations instead of making tradeoffs essential to any effective budget. Its new National Defense Industrial Strategy lays out a plan to “catalyze generational change” of the defense industrial base and to “meet the strategic moment” — one rhetorically dominated by competition with China, but punctuated by U.S. support for Ukraine’s fight against Russia and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

Instead of reevaluating its maximalist national security strategy, the Biden administration is doubling down. It is proposing a generation of investment to expand an arms industry that, overall, fails to meet cost, schedule, and performance standards. And if its strategy is any indication, the administration has no vision for how to eventually reduce U.S. military industrial capacity.

When the Cold War ended, the national security budget shrank. Then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and deputy William Perry convened industry leaders to encourage their consolidation in a meeting that later became known as the “Last Supper.” Arms makers were to join forces or go out of business. So they ended up downsizing from over 50 prime contractors to just five. And while contractors needed to pare down their industrial capacity, unchecked consolidation created the monopolistic defense sector we have now — one that depends heavily on government contracts and enjoys significant freedom to set prices.

In the decades since, contractors have leveraged their growing economic power to pave inroads on Capitol Hill. They have solidified their economic influence to stave off the political potential for future national security cuts, regardless of their performance or the geopolitical environment.

Growing the military industrial base over the course of a generation would only further empower arms makers in our economy, deepening the ditch the United States has dug itself into for decades by continually increasing national security spending — and by doling about half of it out to contractors. The U.S. spends more on national security than the next 10 countries combined, outpacing China alone by over 30%.

Ironically, the administration acknowledges in the strategy that “America’s economic security and national security are mutually reinforcing,” stating that “the nation’s military strength depends in part on our overall economic strength.” The strategy further states that optimizing the nation’s defense needs typically requires tradeoffs between “cost, speed, and scale.” It doesn’t mention quality of industrial output — arguably the biggest tradeoff the U.S. government has made in military procurement.

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Ukraine’s Top Spy Chief Says Navalny Died From Blood Clot, Rejects ‘Murder’ Narrative

In a very unexpected plot twist, Ukraine appears to be in agreement with the Kremlin on Alexei Navalny’s death inside a far northern Russian prison which occurred on Feb. 16 and was listed by Russian authorities as officially due to “natural causes”. The dominant Western narrative has thus far been that Putin had him “murdered”. 

Yet now Kiev sources are saying that the anti-Putin activist supported by the West died of a blood clot. Surprisingly, this explanation is being advanced among Ukraine media sources after none other than Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR), bluntly stated it to a group of journalists on Sunday. “I may disappoint you, but as far as we know, he indeed died as a result of a blood clot. And this has been more or less confirmed,” Budanov stated.

“This wasn’t sourced from the internet, but, unfortunately, natural [causes],” he added in the remarks which were also caught on video. The spy chief’s words were also picked up in The Daily Mail, though predictably US mainstream outlets have been slow to acknowledge the assessment.

Further, the NATO-friendly pundit Anton Gerashchenko, who also served as former Ukrainian Advisor to Internal Affairs Minister, has said the following:

Vladimir Osechkin, founder of Gulagu. Net, says that, according to his sources, Navalny was killed (finished off with a blow to the chest) after being tortured with frost.

Head of Ukrainian military intelligence Kyrylo Budanov said that according to his sources, “it was a blood clot.”

Over the weekend Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, said her son’s body was finally released to the family. She has said Russian officials are seeking to pressure the family into doing a ‘secret funeral’ so as not to attract public demonstrations. “We do not know if the authorities will interfere to carry it out as the family wants and as Alexey deserves,” she said previously.

Navalny’s wife has laid ultimate blame on Putin for his death, while President Biden too and other Western leaders have said “Putin is responsible.”

“What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality,” Biden had said immediately after Navalny’s death was announced by Russian prison services. Some European leaders quickly branded Putin’s government a “rogue regime” as a result, urging that Moscow “must be held accountable”. The whole situation seems akin to the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, where there was a rush to blame Moscow, but allegation which were later quieted and walked back.

Meanwhile, Russia hawks in the US are urging the administration to go beyond last Friday’s large round of new anti-Moscow sanctions…

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Settler violence: Israel’s ethnic cleansing plan for the West Bank

On February 8, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian shepherds who were out grazing their herds in the Sadet a-Tha’leh community, near Hebron in the occupied West Bank. They expelled the Palestinians from the pasture and used drones to scare their livestock. As a result, the shepherds suffered severe losses as many of their terrified animals had miscarriages and stillbirths in the middle of lambing season.

The incident is not unique and it is part of what human rights defenders are describing as “economic warfare by settlers which leads to displacement”.

What happened at Sadet a-Tha’leh is one of 561 incidents of Israeli settler attacks against the Palestinians, which the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has recorded between October 7 and February 20. As of January 17, settlers have killed at least eight Palestinians and injured 111, per OCHA’s database. Repeated waves of violence by settlers, often backed by the army, have led to the displacement of 1,208 Palestinians, including 586 children, across 198 households.

While humanitarian and human rights organisations tend to register these violent acts as separate incidents, they constitute systematic brutality unleashed by extremist settlers onto the Palestinian population of the occupied West Bank in parallel to the plausibly genocidal acts carried out by the Israeli army in Gaza.

Supported by the Israeli security forces and aided and abetted by the government, settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory in order to establish full sovereignty over it and enable settlement expansion – despite settlements being illegal under international law.

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CIA Built “12 Secret Spy Bases” In Ukraine & Waged Shadow War For Last Decade, Bombshell NYT Report Confirms

On Sunday The New York Times published an explosive and very belated full admission that US intelligence has not only been instrumental in Ukraine wartime decision-making, but has established and financed high tech command-and-control spy centers, and was doing so long prior to the Feb. 24 Russian invasion of two years ago.

Among the biggest revelations is that the program was established a decade ago and spans three different American presidents. The Times says the CIA program to modernize Ukraine’s intelligence services has “transformed” the former Soviet state and its capabilities into “Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.”

This has included the agency having secretly trained and equipped Ukrainian intelligence officers spanning back to just after the 2014 Maidan coup events, as well constructing a network of 12 secret bases along the Russian border—work which began eight years ago. These intelligence bases, from which Russian commanders’ communications can be swept up and Russian spy satellites monitored, are being used launch and track cross-border drone and missile attacks on Russian territory. 

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Swarms of AI “killer robots” are the future of war: If that sounds scary, it should

Yes, it’s already time to be worried — very worried. As the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have shown, the earliest drone equivalents of “killer robots” have made it onto the battlefield and proved to be devastating weapons. But at least they remain largely under human control. Imagine, for a moment, a world of war in which those aerial drones (or their ground and sea equivalents) controlled us, rather than vice versa. Then we would be on a destructively different planet in a fashion that might seem almost unimaginable today. Sadly, though, it’s anything but unimaginable, given the work on artificial intelligence and robot weaponry that the major powers have already begun. Now, let me take you into that arcane world and try to envision what the future of warfare might mean for the rest of us.

By combining AI with advanced robotics, the U.S. military and those of other advanced powers are already hard at work creating an array of self-guided “autonomous” weapons systems — combat drones that can employ lethal force independently of any human officers meant to command them. Called “killer robots” by critics, such devices include a variety of uncrewed or “unmanned” planes, tanks, ships and submarines capable of autonomous operation. The U.S. Air Force, for example, is developing its “collaborative combat aircraft,” an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, intended to join piloted aircraft on high-risk missions. The Army is similarly testing a variety of autonomous unmanned ground vehicles, or UGVs, while the Navy is experimenting with both unmanned surface vessels, or USVs and unmanned undersea vessels or drone submarines). China, Russia, Australia and Israel are also working on such weaponry for the battlefields of the future.

The imminent appearance of those killing machines has generated concern and controversy globally, with some countries already seeking a total ban on them and others, including the U.S., planning to authorize their use only under human-supervised conditions. In Geneva, a group of states has even sought to prohibit the deployment and use of fully autonomous weapons, citing a 1980 U.N. treaty, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, that aims to curb or outlaw non-nuclear munitions believed to be especially harmful to civilians. Meanwhile, in New York, the U.N. General Assembly held its first discussion of autonomous weapons last October and is planning a full-scale review of the topic this coming fall.

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