Tag: russia

World’s deadliest spot: the horror of Lake Karachay

Standing for just one hour at the shore of Russia’s Lake Karachay (“black water”) in 1990 would have killed you. Before it was buried beneath concrete and stone, the lake held an apocalyptic secret: over 50 times more radioactive material than was released in the Chernobyl disaster.

For decades, the Soviet Union’s Mayak nuclear facility — built in secrecy between 1946-1948 as part of Stalin’s nuclear weapons program — used this small lake in the Ural Mountains as a convenient dumping ground for its most dangerous nuclear waste, creating what the Worldwatch Institute would later describe as “the most polluted spot on Earth.” To spread the good cheer, the 1957 Kyshtym Disaster (an explosion in underground storage vats) forced officials to start dumping the radioactive schmutz in other areas, including the nearby Techa River.

The lake became even more deadly when it started drying up in 1968, exposing radioactive sediment on the shoreline. Winds swept up the contaminated dust and carried it across the countryside, irradiating half a million people. In nearby villages like Metlino, doctors worked overtime treating what they could only call the “special disease”— the compassionate servants in the Politburo forbade them from mentioning radiation in their diagnoses.

The lake bed itself was a monument to nuclear horror — its sediment, nearly 11 feet deep, was composed almost entirely of high-level radioactive waste. Between 1978 and 1986, as the deadly reality of the situation became clear, workers risked their lives to dump almost 10,000 hollow concrete blocks into the lake to keep the radioactive sediment from shifting. The project to finally bury the lake completely would take until 2015, when the last layer of rock and soil transformed Lake Karachay from a liquid nightmare into what officials euphemistically termed “a near-surface permanent and dry nuclear waste storage facility.”

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NATO knows Ukraine is losing – Foreign Policy

NATO is fully aware that Ukraine is slowly losing its conflict with Russia, with an especially difficult winter predicted to worsen the situation, the influential US publication Foreign Policy has reported.

Amid increasing infrastructure damage and pressure on Kiev’s key resources, Western officials are warning that a victory for Moscow would solidify its influence in Europe, the magazine claims in an article, published on Wednesday. 

Foreign Policy sources believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is taking advantage of uncertainty in Washington. Michael Bociurkiw – a lobbyist at NATO’s Atlantic Council adjunct – speaking from Ukraine, stated that the Kremlin sees a leadership “vacuum” during this period and is “testing for soft tissue” in the West. 

The strategy has reportedly been effective, he says, as missile strikes across Ukrainian cities have increased the possibility of winter power and heating shortages. 

Moscow’s attacks on Ukrainian ports, according to officials, have also hurt Kiev’s logistics. 

The report indicates that Ukraine’s losses are reshaping the strategic outlook in the US and Western Europe. It highlights that a Russian victory would be a major setback for Washington and NATO. Western experts argue that Russia retaining its new territories could lead to a strengthened military presence near NATO’s borders, potentially igniting further conflict. 

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Trump ‘could be assassinated like JFK if he tries to end Putin’s war in Ukraine’, Kremlin official warns

A top Kremlin official has warned a ‘tired’ Donald Trump could face a JFK-style assassination if he ‘really tries’ to end Vladimir Putin‘s war against Ukraine should he emerge victorious from today’s US presidential election.

The chilling warning came on Sunday from close Putin crony Dmitry Medvedev, formerly Russian president and his country’s longest-serving prime minister, now deputy head of the Kremlin’s security council.

He also branded US Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris ‘stupid’ and ‘controllable’ who – as president – would be ‘afraid of everyone around her’.

‘For Russia, the elections will not change anything, since the candidates’ positions fully reflect the bipartisan consensus on the need for our country to be defeated [in the war].

‘Kamala is stupid, inexperienced, controllable and will be afraid of everyone around her. A synod of the most important ministers and assistants will rule, plus indirectly the Obama family.’

Trump may face the same fate as John F Kennedy in 1963, predicted Medvedev, who was Russian president from 2008 to 2012.

‘A tired Trump, issuing platitudes like ”I’ll offer a deal” and ”I have a great relationship with…” will also be forced to follow all the system’s rules.

‘He won’t be able to stop the war. Not in a day, not in three days, not in three months.

‘And if he really tries, he could become the new JFK.’

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If ever a war could easily have been avoided, the war in Ukraine is that war. 

Address to the U.N. Security Council, Oct. 31, 2024

Thank you, Madam President, and thank you for giving me this opportunity to address this distinguished body.

If ever a war could easily have been avoided, the war in Ukraine is that war. If ever a war was needlessly provoked, the war in Ukraine is that war.

The war in Ukraine came about as a result of the Western powers’ single-minded insistence on scooping up every single country on the European continent into NATO, and on expanding the borders of NATO right up to the borders of the Russian Federation.

The war in Ukraine came about because the Western powers for more than three decades continued to dismiss the innumerable pleas of successive Soviet and Russian leaders, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, that there could be no security for anyone on the continent unless the West and Russia agree on a common framework for peace that guarantees the freedom and security of all.

How do we know that this? Because former NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told us as much. In September 2023, Stoltenberg went before the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and explained very succinctly that the war in Ukraine could have been avoided had NATO not insisted on moving its military infrastructure up to Russia’s borders.  President Putin, he explained, had

“actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement….He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO….We rejected that. So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite.”

What Stoltenberg was referring to here were the two draft proposals for a new security architecture for Europe that Russia had issued on Dec. 17, 2021. The proposals—one addressed to NATO, one addressed to the United States—recalled the framework of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 in which the mutually antagonistic parties of the Cold War agreed to recognize one another’s security concerns and pledged not to enhance their own security at the expense of that of their purported adversaries. 

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Ukraine Announces First Direct Clashes With North Korean Troops

The US and South Korea now say many thousands of North Korean troops are on the front lines, potentially engaging Ukrainian forces, with most of them located in Russia’s Kursk oblast, which has been under Ukrainian troop presence since the August cross-border offensive.

“More than 10,000 North Korean soldiers are currently in Russia, and we assess that a significant portion of them are deployed to front-line areas, including Kursk,” spokesman for South Korea’s defense ministry, Jeon Ha-kyou, told a briefing.

The Pentagon has said the same with spokesman Pat Ryder having stated Monday, “All indications are that they will provide some type of combat or combat support capability.” He added: “We would fully expect that the Ukrainians would do what they need to do to defend themselves and their personnel.”

The US administration has continued to warn that these foreign troops are “legitimate military targets” if they are found inside Ukraine and enter the fight.

Kiev has taken the allegations a step further, saying that already there’s been an exchange of fire between Ukrainian and North Korean troops. But it reportedly happened inside Russia.

“Ukrainian officials said on Monday that their forces had fired at North Korean soldiers in combat for the first time since their deployment by Russia to its western Kursk region,” FT writes of the new development.

The publication is calling the alleged instance “the first direct intervention by a foreign army since Russia’s full-scale invasion” as well as constituting an expansion of “what was already the largest land war in Europe since the second world war.”

“The first military units of the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] have already come under fire in Kursk,” Andriy Kovalenko, Ukraine’s high-ranking ‘counter-disinformation’ official, announced on Telegram. Another top intelligence official said the same but did not provide or confirm any details of the alleged clash.

Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha has urged his visiting German counterpart Annalena Baerbock on the “need for decisive action” in response to North Korea’s presence in the conflict.

“We urge Europe to realize that the DPRK troops are now carrying [out] an aggressive war in Europe against a sovereign European state,” Sybiha told a press conference.

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NATO Kicks Off Largest Artillery Drills In Finland, On Russia’s Northern Doorstep

The US Army Europe and Africa on Monday launched what are being described as NATO’s largest artillery drills, dubbed Lightning Strike 24, and held in Finland’s northernmost region of Lapland.

The exercise involves over 5,000 military personnel from the US and 28 Allied and partner nations, and will feature over 130 weapons systems, aimed at showing off the alliance’s field artillery capability. But ironically this comes at a moment many Western nations have complained that their artillery shell stockpiles are dwindling to due supplying them to Ukraine over the past 2+ years of war.

The drills are expected to last until November 28, and encompass other locations beyond Finland, including Germany, Poland, Romania, and Estonia.

But it is the Finland portion of the drill likely to be most closely watched from Moscow, given the large Lapland area lies very near the Russian Murmansk region border, and north of the Arctic Circle.

“This is a good example of how our field artillery combined with Allied capabilities forms powerful defense in northern Finland and NATO,” the exercise commander, Colonel Janne Mäkitalo, has stated.

He also hailed that the drills will demonstrate how allied support can come to Finland “very quickly” if needed in the event of a conflict or threat.

Most of the NATO troops will be concentrated in the Finnish portion of the drills, some 3,600 military personnel out of the total 5,000.

The US Army is the most sizeable component, according to an official press release:

Major participating units and organizations include U.S Army Europe and Africa, U.S. Army 56th Artillery Command, U.S. Army V Corps, U.S. Army 21st Theater Sustainment Command, U.S. Army 41st Field Artillery Brigade, U.S. Army 10th Mountain Division, U.S. Army 1st Cavalry Division, U.S. Army 4th Security Assistance Forces Brigade, U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division, the Finnish Army, NATO Multinational Division Northeast, and NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps.

Finland and Sweden are NATO’s newest members, with Finland formally gaining entry April 4, 2023. Importantly, Finland shares a 1,340-kilometre (830 mi) border with Russia, and Moscow has warned that this could result of the greater militarization of the Baltic regions.

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COUNTEROFFENSIVE 2.0: Ukraine Can Win! Just Give it Until Summer 2025, U.S. Officials Say

U.S. officials told The New York Times this week that despite a string of battlefield losses and a dwindling pool of reinforcements, all Ukraine needs to turn the tide in its war with Russia is a little more time, and billions in more support.

The latest timeline to victory was a reminder of Ukraine’s disastrous counteroffensive in Spring 2023, which was billed in the presstitute media as an almost-certain turning point in the war that would result in the Russians being humiliated on the battlefield and kicked out of the country.

The Trends Journal accurately forecasted that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would run into a brick wall against Russia, and that’s exactly what happened.

Before the Ukraine War began, The Trends Journal called for Ukraine to negotiate for a peaceful solution, not because we agree with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade, but because Kyiv has no chance of winning and it would be in the best interest of Ukrainians to get along with their superpower neighbor.

Thomas Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in Politico that the setbacks of Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive “have made it clear that victory will not come soon, if at all. A long war of attrition lies ahead.”

American officials told the paper that if the U.S. is unrelenting in its support “until next summer, Kyiv could have an opportunity to take advantage of Russia’s weaknesses and expected shortfalls in soldiers and tanks.”

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Newsweek Corrected False Perceptions Of Russian Policy Towards Israel

This facilitates Russia’s involvement in any potentially forthcoming multilateral talks on resolving the latest regional war, which could in turn facilitate Russian-US talks for resolving the Ukrainian Conflict.

The Mainstream Media (MSM) and the Alt-Media Community (AMC) have hitherto pushed the same narrative about Russian policy in West Asia by misportraying it as anti-Israeli, each in advance of their own ideological interests, the first because Israel is the US’ ally and the second because it’s Iran’s enemy. That’s why it’s so surprising that Newsweek, which is one of the most globally known MSM outlets, just published a piece that corrects false perceptions of Russian policy towards Israel.

Titled “At War in Ukraine, Putin Emerges as Potential Peace Broker in Middle East”, the most important part is the first third where they quote former Israeli Deputy National Security Advisor Orna Mizrahi. She now serves as a senior researcher at the Institute of National Security Studies and can be considered an authoritative source on this subject given her impressive professional experience. Here’s what she told Newsweek regarding reported plans for a new UNSC Resolution to reduce arms flows to Hezbollah:

“We always prefer the Americans, but we understand that, because of [the Russians’] really good relations nowadays with the Iranians, maybe they can provide something that will contribute to this for the stability of any arrangement in the future.

Another point is the fact that they are part of the United Nations Security Council five and if we get to the point that we have some kind of a new resolution about the ceasefire in the United Nations Security Council, we would like that the Russians will approve it.

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Russian Economy Zooms Ahead, Outpaces US and EU Growth

When the special military operation (SMO) was launched to end the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict, the political West insisted that Russia was finished (precisely what it tried to ensure back in the 1990s). Its economy was supposed to be ruined, with the Kremlin even expected to default after much of its forex reserves were frozen (i.e. stolen) by Western banks.

After all this failed, the US-led belligerent power pole tried to impose the laughable price cap on Russian oil, one that even the most prominent Western nations tried to circumvent, including Japan and even the pathologically Russophobic United Kingdom. As for the United States, it continued buying Russian commodities while criticizing everyone else who did. Still, through its Neo-Nazi puppets in Kiev, NATO launched a virtual total war on Moscow in an attempt to disrupt its economy and cause as much damage as possible.

And yet, it all failed once again. The Kremlin secured economic stability despite being forced to conduct the SMO against the entire political West. Not only that, Russia overtook Germany as the world’s fifth and Europe’s largest economy, a humiliating defeat for its EU/NATO rivals who expected quite the contrary. Berlin’s economic performance was worse than in decades, while London was at its lowest in well over 300 years (since 1709, to be specific).

And yet, to “add insult to injury”, even Western data showed that the initial estimates of Moscow’s economic performance were wrong and that it was actually even better in both 2023 and 2024. Updated IMF’s forecast of 2.6% GDP growth doubled its previous assessment. According to the Financial Times, this increase of 1.5% was the largest for any economy featured in an update to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook, released on January 30 this year.

Top-ranking Russian officials, including the current Defense Minister Andrei Belousov (previously tasked with economic development), expected the growth to be stable enough for the Eurasian giant to overtake Japan by 2030. However, what was supposed to happen in no less than six years, actually happened in less than six months. According to this year’s data, President Putin’s forecast of increased economic growth (over 3.5-4%) not only turned out to be true, but even conservative, although the mainstream propaganda machine attempted to portray it as “too overoptimistic”. However, the only thing that was actually too overoptimistic was the political West’s expectation that the sanctions would work. Namely, according to earlier World Bank data updates for this year, Russia indeed managed to overtake Japan as the fourth largest economy in the world (in terms of GDP PPP).

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The Ukraine War is Lost. Three Options Remain.

I started listening to George Beebe a few years ago when he was warning about tensions in Ukraine, the real risk of escalation to nuclear war and the dangers of groupthink.  Back in 2021 he assessed that Russia was likely to invade Ukraine given the combination of the US’s determination to bring the country into NATO and the fact that it was a “now-or-never moment” for Moscow to stop this happening.  Years earlier, US Ambassador to Moscow, and now CIA director, William Burns had urgently cabled Washington to warn that the Russians regarded Ukraine as ‘the reddest of red lines’:

“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” Ambassador Burns wrote. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

I quote all this because if Ukraine, all of Europe, and quite possibly all of us, are to be spared worse, we have to get past one very unhelpful word: “unprovoked”.

It stands in the way of doing what is utterly essential: deep, constructive and ongoing discussions between Russia and the West to create a security framework for all of Europe that is acceptable to all parties.

Since February 2022 Western propaganda has drummed into people’s minds that the invasion was “unprovoked”.  Very few outside the West, however, share this perspective.  George Beebe doesn’t support the invasion, estimates that Russia has a lot to answer for, but rejects this kind of simplistic rhetoric as unhelpful and potentially disastrous.  He was interviewed this past week by Professor Glenn Diesen and Alexander Mercouris on The Duran and, in my estimation, gave a masterclass in responsible statecraft.

“There has been a lot of narrative management, a lot of policing of public discourse.” Beebe said. “Anybody who suggested that there may have been some element of provocation that affected Russian decisions on this was immediately anathematized.”

Beebe says the West has an erroneous idea as to the very nature of the conflict. The US and the Europeans defined the Russian invasion as a “deterrence model problem” rather than a “spiral model problem”.   In the former, the adversary is a kind of Hitler that must be stopped at all costs.

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