Tag: perpetual war

Ukrainian regional security chief commits suicide – media

The head of Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, in Kirovograd Region was found dead in his home on Saturday evening, with sources telling local media that it was likely a suicide.

The body of Aleksandr Nakonechny was discovered by his wife at their apartment in Krapivnitsky, the website Obozrevatel explained.

The SBU has confirmed the security chief’s death, saying that the incident is being investigated.

Obozrevatel added that Nakonechny died of a “penetrating gunshot wound to the body.” 

According to preliminary data, he “committed suicide” with the firearm that he had been previously awarded for excellent service, a source told the outlet.

Lieutenant-colonel Nakonechny had been in charge of the region’s department of the SBU since January 2021.

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These Are The 10 Biggest Military Spending Nations In The World

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has continued, military spending and technology has come under the spotlight as the world tracked Western arms shipments and watched how HIMAR rocket launchers and other weaponry affected the conflict.

But, as Visual Capitalist’s Niccolo Conte details below, developing, exporting, and deploying military personnel and weaponry costs nations hundreds of billions every year. In 2021, global military spending reached $2.1 trillion, rising for its seventh year in a row.

Using data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), this visualization shows which countries spent the most on their military in 2021, along with their overall share of global military spending.

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Pentagon announces extra $775M in weapons to Ukraine

The United States will send another $775 million in missiles, drones, vehicles and mine clearing equipment to Ukraine to help in its war with Russia as the conflict enters a near standstill, the Pentagon announced Friday.

The new assistance package will include 16 howitzers and ammunition, AGM-88 High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles (HARM), ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, 15 Scan Eagle reconnaissance drones, and armored vehicles, among other armaments, a senior Defense official told reporters. 

The package comes at a critical time as Ukraine and Russia battle for control of the eastern part of Ukraine.  

Nearly six months into the war, the two sides are locked in a near operational standstill, with neither Kyiv nor Moscow able to drum up enough ground troops and weapons to turn the course of the conflict, Western officials assess.  

The extra shot of lethal aid could help Ukrainian forces gain the upper hand as Russian troops struggle with losses inflicted by U.S.-made missile systems.  

“I would say that you are seeing a complete and total lack of progress by the Russians on the battlefield,” the senior Defense official said, adding that it’s important to both sustain Ukrainian battlefield successes and enable them to be make gains as the conflict shifts.   

“We want to make sure that Ukraine has a steady stream of ammunition to meet its needs, and that’s what we’re doing with this package.” 

The latest lethal aid follows the $1 billion in weapons and equipment given to the embattled country earlier this month, the largest such tranche pledged since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. 

The package also pushes the United States past the $10 billion mark for military assistance for Ukraine under the Biden administration, spread out over 19 packages since August 2021. 

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More Boogaloo Bois Are Heading to Ukraine to Fight

Since the war in Ukraine began, some young Americans have rolled into towns there, waving flags with tropical prints. Local soldiers have sometimes assumed the foreign fighters had traveled all the way from Hawaii to join the fight against the Russian invasion.

But in reality, those flags have nothing to do with Hawaii. They’re the symbol of the American “Boogaloo” movement, a sprawling network of anti-government extremists, militiamen, and far-right members. The movement made its way offline and onto American streets in early 2020, when groups of young men in Hawaiian shirts carrying AR-style rifles started showing up to anti-lockdown protests.

Since the “Boogaloo”—memespeak for a violent uprising or civil war—failed to materialize in the U.S., some of the movement’s adherents sought battle experience elsewhere: Ukraine. 

VICE News has learned that 10 so-called “Boogaloo Bois” are preparing to deploy from the U.S. to Ukraine in the coming weeks, just as government agencies worry that American far-right extremists traveling to the conflict for combat experience could become national security threats upon their return. Vouching for them is Mike Dunn, a 21-year-old from Virginia, who was considered a leader in the Boogaloo movement and has been embroiled in the conflict in Ukraine since April. Until recently, he was recovering in a Ukrainian military hospital after his brigade came under heavy artillery in July, leading to fatalities, while defending a village in the Donetsk region. 

“I’ve met a couple of Americans here that are active Boogaloo Bois, and I have more Boogaloo Bois that will be arriving here,” Dunn told VICE News.

“They’ll be going through background checks and processing into whatever unit picks them,” Dunn said. “Whenever a unit takes them, they’ll process into and start fighting, to either get experience or to reignite some type of passion in their lives, for the excitement, I guess.” 

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Intelligence Community Goes to the Washington Post to Push a Claim That It Knew When Russia Would Invade Ukraine

According to a major exclusive in Tuesday’s Washington Post, before Russia invaded Ukraine, “U.S. intelligence community had penetrated multiple points of Russia’s political leadership, spying apparatus and military, from senior levels to the front lines, according to U.S. officials.” If so, we might add, how well did that work out for us?

This is how the Washington Post sets the scene.

On a sunny October morning, the nation’s top intelligence, military and diplomatic leaders filed into the Oval Office for an urgent meeting with President Biden. They arrived bearing a highly classified intelligence analysis, compiled from newly obtained satellite images, intercepted communications and human sources, that amounted to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war plans for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

For months, Biden administration officials had watched warily as Putin massed tens of thousands of troops and lined up tanks and missiles along Ukraine’s borders. As summer waned, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, had focused on the increasing volume of intelligence related to Russia and Ukraine. He had set up the Oval Office meeting after his own thinking had gone from uncertainty about Russia’s intentions, to concern he was being too skeptical about the prospects of military action, to alarm.

The session was one of several meetings that officials had about Ukraine that autumn — sometimes gathering in smaller groups — but was notable for the detailed intelligence picture that was presented. Biden and Vice President Harris took their places in armchairs before the fireplace, while Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the directors of national intelligence and the CIA on sofas around the coffee table.

Tasked by Sullivan with putting together a comprehensive overview of Russia’s intentions, they told Biden that the intelligence on Putin’s operational plans, added to ongoing deployments along the border with Ukraine, showed that all the pieces were now in place for a massive assault.

According to the Washington Post, we had it all. We knew the axes of advance, and we knew the sequencing of actions involving Russian airborne and special operations forces. Even so, Joey SoftServe was in a quandary because the #OrangeManBad had really fouled up things.

As he absorbed the briefing, Biden, who had taken office promising to keep the country out of new wars, was determined that Putin must either be deterred or confronted, and that the United States must not act alone. Yet NATO was far from unified on how to deal with Moscow, and U.S. credibility was weak. After a disastrous occupation of Iraq, the chaos that followed the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and four years of President Donald Trump seeking to undermine the alliance, it was far from certain that Biden could effectively lead a Western response to an expansionist Russia.

The Euros were skeptical of the intel and suspected the US was making it sound much more definitive than it was. On the other hand, the Ukrainians were afraid that reacting to intelligence in which they didn’t have 100% confidence could possibly precipitate a Russian invasion and would definitely hurt Ukraine’s economy.

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Modern US Warmongering Is Scaring Henry Kissinger

In a new interview with The Wall Street Journal, immortal Hague fugitive Henry Kissinger says the US is acting in a crazy and irrational way that has brought it to the edge of war with Russia and China:

Mr. Kissinger sees today’s world as verging on a dangerous disequilibrium. “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to,” he says. Could the U.S. manage the two adversaries by triangulating between them, as during the Nixon years? He offers no simple prescription. “You can’t just now say we’re going to split them off and turn them against each other. All you can do is not to accelerate the tensions and to create options, and for that you have to have some purpose.”

 

On the question of Taiwan, Mr. Kissinger worries that the U.S. and China are maneuvering toward a crisis, and he counsels steadiness on Washington’s part. “The policy that was carried out by both parties has produced and allowed the progress of Taiwan into an autonomous democratic entity and has preserved peace between China and the U.S. for 50 years,” he says. “One should be very careful, therefore, in measures that seem to change the basic structure.”

 

Mr. Kissinger courted controversy earlier this year by suggesting that incautious policies on the part of the U.S. and NATO may have touched off the crisis in Ukraine. He sees no choice but to take Vladimir Putin’s stated security concerns seriously and believes that it was a mistake for NATO to signal to Ukraine that it might eventually join the alliance: “I thought that Poland—all the traditional Western countries that have been part of Western history—were logical members of NATO,” he says. But Ukraine, in his view, is a collection of territories once appended to Russia, which Russians see as their own, even though “some Ukrainians” do not. Stability would be better served by its acting as a buffer between Russia and the West: “I was in favor of the full independence of Ukraine, but I thought its best role was something like Finland.”

Kissinger: “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to.” https://t.co/mytxSajU6Q

— Gal Luft (@GalLuft) August 13, 2022

I don’t know about you, but to me this warning is much, much more ominous coming from a bloodsoaked swamp monster than it would be from some anti-imperialist peace activist who was speaking from outside the belly of the imperial machine. This man is a literal war criminal who, as a leading empire manager, helped to unleash unfathomable horrors all around the world the consequences of which are still being felt today.

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Report: post-9/11 era one of the most militarily aggressive in US history

The United States has conducted nearly 400 military interventions since 1776, according to innovative research by scholars Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft. 

Half of those conflicts and other uses of force – including displays and threats of force as well as covert and other operations – occurred between 1950 and 2019, the last year covered in a new dataset, introduced by Kushi and Toft in a Journal of Conflict Resolution article published earlier this week. More than a quarter of them have taken place since the end of the Cold War.    

The United States has carried out 34 percent of its 392 interventions against countries in Latin America and the Caribbean; 23 percent in East Asia and the Pacific region; 14 percent in the Middle East and North Africa; and just 13 percent in Europe and Central Asia, according to a newly refined version of the Military Intervention Project (MIP) dataset — a venture of the Center for Strategic Studies at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. 

In addition to providing the most accurate count ever of U.S. military interventions — doubling the number of cases found in existing data, while also employing rigorous sourcing methods — the MIP offers 200 variables that allow for complex analyses of drivers and outcomes of wars and other uses of force.

Crucially, Kushi and Toft, the director of the Fletcher School’s Center for Strategic Studies, found that U.S. interventions have “increased and intensified” in recent years. While the Cold War era (1946–1989) and the period between 1868–1917 were the most “militaristically active” for the United States, the post-9/11 era has already assumed third position in all of U.S. history.  

Unlike earlier eras in which displays and threats of force were employed, such posturing short of military violence has been absent in recent years. The United States, they found, has actually “engaged in 30 interventions at level 4 (usage of force) or 5 (war).”

Until the end of the Cold War, note Kushi and Toft, U.S. military hostility was generally proportional to that of its rivals.  Since then, “the U.S. began to escalate its hostilities as its rivals deescalate it, marking the beginning of America’s more kinetic foreign policy.”  This recent pattern of international relations conducted largely through armed force, what Toft has termed “kinetic diplomacy,” has increasingly targeted the Middle East and Africa.  These regions have seen both large-scale U.S. wars, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, and low-profile combat in nations such as Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, and Tunisia. 

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US Government Reveals that It’s Providing Ukraine With Previously Unannounced Missiles

The United States military has recently admitted to the delivery of American anti-radar missiles to Ukraine. According to Press TV, these missiles are part of a plan “to facilitate the targeting of Russian radar systems by Ukrainian warplanes.”

The US Defense Department’s Undersecretary for Policy Colin Kahl announced at a press briefing on August 8, 2022 that the DOD sent several missiles to Ukraine. Though Kahl did not specify how many missiles were sent and when they were sent.

Per a CNN report released on August 9, also called attention to how Kahl did not explicitly spell out what kind of anti-radiation missile was sent to Ukraine.  

CNN was able to get in touch with a military official who said that the missile was an AGM-88 High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM). 

In addition, the Pentagon official revealed that the US assisted Ukraine with the delivery of spare parts for Russian Mig-29 planes to keep the Ukrainian Air Force’s fleet operating. Kahl claimed that the missiles “can have effects on Russian radars and other things.”

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