Tag: russia

Republican Senator Confirms Ukrainian Strike on Russia With US Weapons

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, confirmed to The Associated Press on Wednesday that Ukraine has used US-provided weapons to carry out strikes on Russian territory, which risks a major response from Russia.

The report also cited an unnamed Western official who said Ukraine used US weapons on Russian territory. The report didn’t specify what type of weapons system was used, but it came after a Ukrainian lawmaker claimed US-provided HIMARS rocket systems destroyed Russian S-300 and S-400 air defense missiles inside Russia’s Belgorod Oblast.

A Ukrainian official also told The Wall Street Journal that HIMARS were used to hit a Russian air defense system in Belgorod. The HIMARS systems require US intelligence for targeting, meaning any HIMARS strike on Russian territory would have been directly supported by the US.

There’s been no official confirmation from Russia about the strikes, but Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday issued a fresh warning to the US and other NATO countries about the use of their weapons on Russian territory.

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Report Details US Troop ‘Land Corridors’ In Event Of European Ground War With Russia

NATO has a plan in place for rapid deployment of its forces in the scenario of a future Russian attack on Europe. It includes the development of “land corridors” which can be used to rush some 300,000 troops — mostly American soldiers — to front line positions in order to defend against a Russian invasion.

High-ranking British military sources described to the Telegraph that the plan entails troops landing at key European ports whereupon they would move east along pre-planned routes to counter potential Russian attacks.

Lt. Gen. Alexander Sollfrank, chief of NATO’s Joint Support and Enabling Command (JSEC), described to the UK publication, “Huge logistics bases, as we know them from Afghanistan and Iraq, are no longer possible because they will be attacked and destroyed very early on in a conflict situation.”

The logistics and troop transport corridors would originate in places like Greece, Italy, Turkey, The Netherlands, Norway – and the port of Rotterdam, a key northern European hub, is specifically named. Lines like the Germany-Poland railway are also mentioned in the report – all of which would theoretically allow rapid deployment of US forces to any NATO territory being threatened (based on Article 5 common defense).

Separate alarmist reports in UK media have been warning that the West should prepare for war with Russia at some point in the next two decades, connected with ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

For example, a prior March report in The Telegraph claimed that President Putin has a “paranoid obsession” with stoking conflict and provoking Western allies.

“Now that Russian President Vladimir Putin has secured his historic fifth term in office, it is patently clear that he will devote his next six-year spell at the Kremlin to pursuing his paranoid obsession of confronting the West,” that prior stated.

As for the Telegraph’s latest Tuesday revelation of the NATO land corridors — with the somewhat loud and sensationalist headline of “Nato land corridors could rush US troops to front line in event of European war” — the reality is that big picture contingency plans like this have been on US and NATO planners’ shelves since the Cold War.

But without doubt they are getting dusted off amid the continued escalation of the Ukraine proxy war…

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Ukraine ‘fires first US missile into Russia’ just days after President Joe Biden gave permission for the High Mobility Rocket Artillery System to be used to strike inside Russia

Ukraine last night claimed it successfully hit a missile system inside Russia using U.S. weapons.

It said the country’s forces destroyed Russian missile launchers with a strike in the Belgorod region.

Senior politician Yehor Chernev claimed Ukrainian forces used a High Mobility Rocket Artillery System, or HIMARS, The New York Times reported. 

It comes just days after the U.S. granted permission for Ukraine to fire American weapons into Russia.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden has ruled out Ukraine joining Nato in a major policy shift. The development comes after the defence alliance’s members, including the US and Britain, released a communique last year declaring ‘Ukraine’s future is in Nato’. 

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Russia Warns US Close To Making ‘Fatal’ Miscalculation Over Ukraine

On Monday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov warned the US to listen to warnings from Russian President Vladimir Putin about allowing Ukraine to strike Russian territory with American-made weapons.

“I would like to caution American officials against miscalculations which may have fatal consequences. For some unknown reason, they underestimate the seriousness of the rebuff they may receive,” Ryabkov said, according to the Russian news agency TASS.

“I am urging these officials who seemingly are not bothered by anything, to take some time away from playing computer games, which is apparently what they are doing, given their light-hearted approach to serious issues, and take a closer look at what Putin said, particularly at a press conference following talks in Tashkent,” he added, referring to a warning Putin issued during a recent visit to Uzbekistan.

Putin said there would be “serious consequences” for any NATO country that allowed Ukraine to hit Russian territory with its weapons. “This constant escalation can lead to serious consequences. If these serious consequences occur in Europe, how will the US behave, bearing in mind our parity in the field of strategic weapons? Hard to say. Do they want global conflict?” Putin said.

Ryabkov called Putin’s comments “a very significant warning, and it should be treated with the utmost seriousness.”

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Ukraine War Is Ethnic Cleansing On A Massive Scale – The Question Is For What?

There are many unanswered questions and strange developments in the Ukraine conflict, on both sides.

One thing is for sure — some entity or entities, that are very powerful, want the war to go on, and on, and on, despite opportunities to end the killing machine.

Yet, the killing continues.

The recent talks in Istanbul were torpedoed by the British.

The fourth cycle of escalation begins as Secretary of State Blinken declares Ukraine has the power whether or not to strike Russia with American-made long-range missiles.

WWIII anyone?

There is no state rational for continuing this war.

The only agenda can be the depopulation of Ukraine. It is ethnic cleansing on a massive scale.

Half the population has already fled. Over a million are maimed or dead.

A cematery for 500,000 is being constructed in Kyiv.

Ukrainians now can’t leave the house without a QR code or similar instrument. They are tracked everywhere they go.

Men are kidnapped daily on the street by private bounty hunters, who are immune from prosecution. There are no longer any police, only military private police.

I love the Ukrainian people, they have been very good to me.

Ukraine is a dictatorship in agony.

The Russian war machine has broken through Ukrainian defenses around Kharkiv in three places. Yet, they don’t advance.

Why?

Has Putin made a deal to stop the advance until after the American election? Then WWIII can commence?

This war is not about saving Ukraine, it is about something much darker, and sinister.

I believe it is massive ethnic cleansing….for what?

What will replace the Ukrainian people?

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Presidents Who Gamble With Nuclear Armageddon

The overriding job of any U.S. president is to keep the nation safe. In the nuclear age, that mainly means avoiding nuclear Armageddon. Joe Biden’s reckless and incompetent foreign policy is pushing us closer to annihilation. He joins a long and undistinguished list of presidents who have gambled with Armageddon, including his immediate predecessor and rival, Donald Trump.

Talk of nuclear war is currently everywhere. Leaders of NATO countries call for Russia’s defeat and even dismemberment, while telling us not to worry about Russia’s 6,000 nuclear warheads. Ukraine uses NATO-supplied missiles to knock out parts of Russia’s nuclear-attack early-warning system inside Russia. Russia, in the meantime, engages in nuclear drills near its border with Ukraine. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg give the green light to Ukraine to use NATO weapons to hit Russian territory as an increasingly desperate and extremist Ukrainian regime sees fit.

These leaders neglect at our greatest peril the most basic lesson of the nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis, as told by President John F. Kennedy, one of the few American presidents in the nuclear age to take our survival seriously. In the aftermath of the crisis, Kennedy told us, and his successors:

Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy – or of a collective death-wish for the world.

Yet this is exactly what Biden is doing today, carrying out a bankrupt and reckless policy.

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Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky slams Joe Biden and insists green light to bomb Russia with US weapons doesn’t go far enough in rare rebuke

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has criticised US president Joe Biden in a rare rebuke, claiming that the US’ decision to allow Ukraine to attack Russia with American weapons doesn’t go far enough. 

While Zelensky, speaking at Asia‘s top security summit in Singapore, thanked Biden for allowing Ukraine to strike limited Russian territory with US arms, he said restrictions need to be dropped. 

The US last week gave Ukraine permission to use American missiles to fire in to Kharkiv, where Russian troops have been building up in numbers. But this is the only area they are allowed to fire into, and Ukraine is only allowed to fire certain weapons. 

Zelensky said: ‘Is that sufficient? No. Why? Because I have given you the example of airfields from which Russia is permanently firing, in calm, knowing that Ukraine will not fire back because it has no corresponding systems and no permissions.’

He said that Russia has the advantage with the restrictions put on Ukraine, as its armies can carry on using artillery and long-range weapons to hit civilian infrastructure. 

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Is Ukraine Going Rogue Or Did It Attack Russia’s Early Warning Systems With American Approval?

Russian-US relations deteriorated further than ever in late May as a result of three developments.

First, the US set the ball rolling by more openly allowing Ukraine to use its arms to strike targets inside of Russia, then Poland said that the US will hit all of Russia’s forces in the special operation zone if Moscow uses nukes, and finally, President Putin signaled that he expects NATO to majorly escalate the conflict by sometime this summer. All of this is bad enough, but it’s made even worse by what Ukraine just did.

Russia confirmed that Ukraine hit at least one of its early nuclear warning systems, while Kiev claims to have targeted a second one deeper inside its opponent’s hinterland that hasn’t (yet?) been confirmed. These structures detect incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles of the sort that could be launched by the US in the scenario of a first strike, thus enabling Russia to prepare for an inevitable second strike. They have nothing to do with the Ukrainian Conflict and everything to do with strategic stability.

Both reportedly remain operable, but this nevertheless represents an unprecedented development since never before has any country ever targeted another’s such systems, which could partially blind them to a first strike in the worst-case scenario and thus give the attacking party a huge edge in that event. The further deterioration of Russian-US relations that occurred independently of this development raised tensions to their highest level since the Cuban Missile Crisis so this couldn’t have come at a worse time.

The most important question in the world right now is whether Ukraine is going rogue, perhaps to provoke a crisis like the aforesaid one in the expectation that it could force Russia to withdraw from at least some of the territory that Kiev claims as its own, or if this was done with American approval. The Washington Post’s report about how US officials are concerned about what Ukraine just did lends credence to the first view, but that might just be disinformation for plausible deniability purposes.

At the same time, however, it’s worth remembering how Ukraine defied the US’ public demands not to target Russian oil refineries. The Biden Administration doesn’t want that commodity’s price to spike ahead of the November elections, yet Zelensky still ordered his forces to hit refineries anyhow. That also came amidst the Congressional deadlock over more Ukraine aid that was resolved shortly after those strikes became problematic. It therefore wouldn’t be unprecedented for Ukraine to go rogue yet again.

On top of that, the Financial Times reported that “some Ukrainian officials say (ties with the US) have hit their lowest ebb” due to the abovementioned restrictions on targeting Russian oil refineries and Zelensky’s “paranoia” (as one of their alleged Ukrainian insiders described it) of the US’ intentions. He’s also offended that Biden won’t participate in the upcoming Swiss “peace talks” after snubbing them for a fundraiser, which reportedly prompted him to send a memo ordering officials to criticize the US leader.

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MI5 to shift focus from terrorism

Britain’s MI5 counter-intelligence service has shifted its focus from potential terrorist threats to challenges posed by spies of near-peer adversaries, including Russia, China, and Iran, The Telegraph reported on Saturday, citing sources.

While the UK authorities still deem international and domestic terrorism a priority, the agency is now reportedly devoting more resources to counterintelligence efforts. MI5’s calculus has changed because of the Ukraine conflict and the West’s stand-off with Russia, China’s alleged massive espionage campaign, and Iran’s alleged push to recruit criminals to target those who oppose the government in Tehran, The Telegraph said.

”Counterterrorism has not been deprioritized but this has been prioritized alongside it,” a senior government source told the outlet, adding that MI5’s “workload has definitely shifted in that direction.”

The Telegraph also claimed that Britain’s support for Ukraine has led to increased spying by Russia. “The more you step out, the more you find yourself in their crosshairs,” one of the sources said.

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The West Is Hell-Bent On Provoking Russia Into Hot War

The warning by President Putin could not be starker: “In the event of the use of long-range weapons, the Russian Armed Forces will again have to make decisions about expanding the sanitary zone further (…) Do they want global conflict? It seemed they wanted to negotiate [with us], but we don’t see much desire to do this.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov then came up with the appropriate metaphor to designate NATO’s ramped-up military outbursts: not only NATO is raising the degree of escalation but delving into a warlike “ecstasy”.

It does not get more serious than that. “They”, as Putin alluded to, do seem to want “global conflict”. That’s at the heart of NATO’s new suicidal “ecstasy” strategy.

For all their circumlocutions, NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have effectively greenlighted Kiev using Western weapons for attacks deep inside the Russian Federation. The alleged debate, still ongoing, is just a “smokescreen” for the real objective: a pretext that could lead to WWIII.

There’s no reason to think Kiev will stick to “limited” strikes against relatively unimportant targets. Instead, it is likely to target critical security infrastructure in hopes of provoking an unrelenting Russian response, which in turn would pave the way for NATO to invoke Article 5 and de facto engage in a Hot War.

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