US Says It’s Just Hanging Out With Ukrainian Soldiers While Giving Them Weapons, Not Training Them

In a carefully worded answer at a press conference yesterday, the Pentagon pushed back against reports that its soldiers are training Ukrainian forces in Poland, saying they’re only “liaising” with them.

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said American troops are helping Ukrainian soldiers load weapons and “lethal aid” into convoys as those troops make supply runs from Poland into Ukraine. 

“It’s just a general liaison with them as these shipments are handed over,” said Kirby, referring to the weapons being handed over to Ukrainian forces by the U.S. According to him, there are brief conversations, soldier to soldier, on how to use that gear, but that would not constitute official training. 

“But of course, there are interactions as these Ukrainian soldiers take possession of some of this gear and this kit, and I really don’t have more detail than that, ” he said. 

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Do Americans Really Want to Support the Neo-Nazi Filled Western Ukrainian Government?

Americans have been inundated by a massive propaganda campaign since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, prompting 74% of Americans to support a no-fly zone that could ignite World War III.

On March 10, Congress passed a $13.6 billion aid package to Ukraine, half of which is being directed by the Pentagon.

Ukraine is presented as some great moral beacon when its government has been acquiescent to the rise of neo-Nazism since a February 2014 coup backed by the Obama/Biden administration.[1] As the battle of Mariupol comes to an end with Russian forces securing the city, reports are coming out of wide-scale atrocities carried out by the neo-Nazi Azov battalion, including firing on civilians. Residents said that members of the battalion were real Nazis who walked around with swastikas and other Nazi symbols clearly visible on them.

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Ingredients To Build Dirty Bomb Go Missing From Chernobyl Monitoring Lab

Anatolii Nosovskyi, director of the Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP) in Kyiv, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in a recent interview that the ingredients needed to build a dirty bomb have gone missing from a monitoring lab for the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

The publication reported:

In the chaos of the Russian advance, he told Science, looters raided a radiation monitoring lab in Chornobyl village—apparently making off with radioactive isotopes used to calibrate instruments and pieces of radioactive waste that could be mixed with conventional explosives to form a “dirty bomb” that would spread contamination over a wide area. ISPNPP has a separate lab in Chornobyl with even more dangerous materials: “powerful sources of gamma and neutron radiation” used to test devices, Nosovskyi says, as well as intensely radioactive samples of material leftover from the Unit Four meltdown. Nosovskyi has lost contact with the lab, he says, so “the fate of these sources is unknown to us.”

Russian military forces quickly took control of all Chernobyl facilities shortly after they launched their invasion into Ukraine back at the end of February and effectively held the staff there hostage for nearly a month, according to the report.

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Rand Paul Warns Biden Is A “National Security Risk” Because He Is “In Cognitive Decline”

Following Joe Biden’s unscripted blurting out that Vladimir Putin ‘cannot remain in power’, and another bizarre appearance Monday where he appeared to rely on cue cards, Senator Rand Paul warned that it is becoming a “national security risk”.

Appearing on Fox News, Paul noted “A lot of times when you’re around somebody who’s in cognitive decline, you find yourself trying to help them with a sentence, trying to help them complete it… but we shouldn’t have to do that for the commander-in-chief.”

Paul continued, “And, it is actually a national security risk because he’s sending signals that no one in their right mind would want to send to Russia at this point. We aren’t trying to replace Putin in Russia. We aren’t trying to have regime change. We’re not sending troops into Ukraine, and we’re not going to respond in kind with chemical weapons.”

The Senator urged that Biden “lives in an alternate universe” where he blurts out whatever he pleases then claims then way it was perceived isn’t accurate.

“So I guess you’re supposed to look the other way. But even the left-wing media is noticing these gaffes,” Paul asserted.

“I do think that it is a real problem, and there’s a humorous angle to this. But it’s really not funny because we’re worried about what he’s saying, precipitating or escalating the conflict in Ukraine into a world war. That’s very serious,” Paul further emphasised.

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Prophetic RAND Corp. Report: “Destabilize and Undermine” Russia. Recommended “Provocative Actions”

A “prophetic” RAND Corporation report titled “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia” published in 2019 declares the stated goal of American policymakers is “to undermine Russia just as the US subversively destabilized the former Soviet Union during the Cold War,” and predicts to the letter the crisis unfolding in Ukraine. RAND Corporation is a quasi-US governmental think tank that receives three-quarters of its funding from the US military.

While designating Russia as an “intractable adversary,” the report notes that “Russia has deep seated anxieties” about Western interference and potential military attack. These anxieties are deemed to be “a vulnerability to exploit.”

The RAND report lists several “provocative measures” to insidiously “destabilize and undermine” Russia. Some of the steps include: repositioning bombers within easy striking range of key Russian strategic targets; deploying additional tactical nuclear weapons to locations in Europe and Asia; increasing US and allied naval force posture and presence in Russia’s operating areas (Black Sea); holding NATO war exercises on Russia’s borders; and withdrawing from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

Almost all the provocative actions recommended in the RAND report have practically been implemented by the successive Obama, Trump and Biden administrations since the 2014 Maidan coup, toppling Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and consequent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia.

The US Air Force has flown B-52 strategic bombers and RC-135 reconnaissance planes over eastern Ukraine in months before the invasion, as part of its effort to deter Russia. To stiffen Ukraine’s ability to resist, the United States and NATO dispatched teams of military advisers in months before the invasion to survey air defenses, logistics, communications and other essentials.

Besides deploying 15,000 additional troops in Eastern Europe last month, total number of US troops in Europe is now expected to reach 100,000. “We have 130 jets at high alert. Over 200 ships from the high north to the Mediterranean, and thousands of additional troops in the region,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told CNN on March 9.

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‘War is a Racket’: Biden Using Ukraine Crisis to Ram Through Record-Breaking Military Budget

Rebuffing progressive lawmakers’ calls for Pentagon spending cuts, President Joe Biden on Monday is set to unveil a budget blueprint for the next fiscal year that includes a record $813.3 billion in funds for the U.S. military apparatus, a $31 billion increase from the current level.

“We’re being robbed of resources to feed the endless hunger of the military-industrial complex.”

The president’s Fiscal Year 2023 budget request, which must be approved by Congress, is expected to contain $773 billion for the Pentagon alone as well as billions in funding for the Energy Department’s maintenance of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

The New York Times reported Monday that Biden’s funding request for the Pentagon—the only federal agency that has not passed an independent audit—will “include $4.1 billion to conduct research and develop defense capabilities, nearly $5 billion for a space-based missile warning system to detect global threats, and nearly $2 billion for a missile defense interceptor.”

According to Bloomberg, the White House is urging Congress to approve $145.9 billion for procurement, funding that will allow the military to purchase “61 F-35 jet fighters from Lockheed Martin Corp., fewer than previously planned, as well as… the B-21 bomber from Northrop Grumman Corp. and two Virginia-class submarines from General Dynamics Corp. and Huntington Ingalls Industries Corp.”

The president’s latest budget proposal will land on Capitol Hill amid Russia’s deadly invasion of Ukraine, which has thus far proven to be a major boon for the U.S. weapons industry as the Biden administration pours arms into the besieged country.

“The hawks in Washington want to jack up the military budget and use Ukraine as an excuse,” William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, argued in a recent interview on Democracy Now!, noting that Biden’s new military budget request amounts to $100 billion more than was spent at the height of the Cold War.

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Re-Visiting Russiagate In Light Of The Ukraine War

It’s hard to believe that the last president spent his term pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and ramping up cold war escalations against Moscow which helped lead us directly to the extraordinarily dangerous situation we now find ourselves in, and yet mainstream liberals spent his entire administration screaming that he was a Kremlin puppet.

A lot of anti-empire commentary is rightly going into criticizing how the Obama administration paved the way to this conflict in Ukraine with its role in the 2014 coup and support for Kyiv’s war against Donbass separatists. But what’s getting lost in all this, largely because Trumpites have been using their mainstream numbers to loudly amplify criticisms of the role of the Obama and Biden administrations in this mess, is what happened between those two presidencies which was just as crucial in getting us here.

Though it’s been scrubbed from mainstream liberal history, it was actually the Trump administration that began the US policy of arming Ukraine in the first place. Obama had refused forceful demands from neocons and liberal hawks to do so because he feared it would provoke an attack by Russia.

In a 2015 article titled “Defying Obama, Many in Congress Press to Arm Ukraine“, The New York Times reported that “So far, the Obama administration has refused to provide lethal aid, fearing that it would only escalate the bloodshed and give President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a pretext for further incursions.”

It wasn’t until the Trump presidency that those weapons began pouring into Ukraine, and boy howdy are we looking at some “further incursions” now. This change occurred either because Trump was a fully willing participant in the agenda to ramp up aggressions against Moscow, or because he was politically pressured into playing along with that agenda by the collusion narrative which had its origins at every step in the US intelligence cartel, or because of some combination of the two.

In all the world-shaping news stories we’ve been experiencing lately, it’s easy to forget how the narrative that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government dominated news coverage and political discourse for years on end. But in light of the fact that today’s major headlines now revolve around that exact same foreign government, this fact is probably worth revisiting.

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