Tag: russia

Elon Musk: “Most Are Oblivious” to the Danger of World War 3

Tesla founder Elon Musk warned that “most are oblivious to the danger” of World War 3 as the conflict in Ukraine continues to escalate.

The comment was in response to a speech by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to the General Assembly on Monday during which he expressed his fear that humanity was marching toward a “wider war” with its “eyes wide open”.

“Could we please not do WWIII,” asked commentator Luke Rudkowski.

“Most are oblivious to the danger,” responded Musk.

Despite Musk providing his SpaceX Starlink satellite internet systems to the Ukrainian government, supporters of prolonging the war have attacked Musk for calling for peace.

Last week, Mikhail Podoliak, an aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, even claimed, without evidence, that Musk was restricting the reach of pro-Ukraine Twitter accounts in order to help spread “Russian propaganda”.

“Maybe a regulator is needed to explain competition rules to the owner?” Podoliak suggested.

The Twitter CEO previously warned that the “relentless escalation” of the conflict in Ukraine was placing the security of the world in jeopardy.

In January, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock caused consternation after saying “we are fighting a war against Russia.”

This prompted Croatian President Zoran Milanovic to respond by calling the remark “madness” and wishing Germany better luck than with the last war they had with Russia 70 years ago.

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Ukraine Had Lost the War Before It Even Started

I will start with the obvious, much of which has been confirmed by official sources and analysis. 

From Day One, Russia was involved as part of it’s “Special Operation” in “precision” attacks against Ukrainian military installations, which commenced hours prior to President Putin’s February 24, TV address:  

“I am referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border. It is a fact that over the past thirty years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries …In response,  we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail.”

From one week to the next, Ukraine was without a Navy and without an Air Force, destroyed at the outset in late February, early March 2022.

Part II of this article focusses in detail on another obvious concept, which has not been the object of media coverage or even analysis by the independent media:

Turkey, NATO’s heavyweight is “Sleeping with the Enemy”. It has a military cooperation agreement with Russia

What this means is that under present conditions a US-NATO war against Russia is an impossibility.

The Black Sea is strategic. While the Ukraine coastline is in large part controlled by Russia, Turkey controls the entire Southern coastline of the Black Sea as well as access to the Mediterranean. (under the Montreux protocol) (see map below)

Turkey is playing a double game, it is not acting on behalf of NATO in the war theater. It is “unofficially” collaborating with Russia. The March 2022 failed peace agreements in Istanbul were hosted by the Erdogan government. 

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Ukrainian Forces Using Drone-Dropped Chemical Weapons in Donbass, DPR Chief Says

Donbass People’s Militias and Russia’s regular Army began finding evidence of suspected Ukrainian preparations to employ chemical weapons last spring. Kiev and its Western sponsors have issued counterclaims, accusing Russia of using or preparing to use its non-existent chemical weapons stocks.

Ukrainian forces have resorted to the use of chemical weapons in the Artyomovsk (Bakhmut) and Ugledar directions on the front line in the Donbass, Donetsk People’s Republic head Denis Pushilin has announced.

“According to the statements of our forces, and commanders who came forward with such information, there are facts of the use of chemical compounds causing sickness among our servicemen not only in the Artyomovsk direction, but also in the Ugledar direction,” Pushilin said in an interview with Russian media on Monday.

Pushilin said he has been receiving such reports for at least three weeks now. “They are dropping [chemical weapons] from drones on the locations of our forces,” the DPR head clarified.

Earlier in the day, Yan Gagin, an advisor to Pushilin, similarly told Russian media about the employment of chemical agents by the Ukrainian side, and said the agents being used were causing severe dizziness, nausea, and vomiting among some fighters.

Gagin indicated that chemical weapons have been used by the Ukrainian side for some time now, with attacks happening “along the entire front line as substances causing nausea, choking and coughing,” and the chemicals being “sprayed from special containers installed on drones.”

According to the World Health Organization, symptoms like dizziness, nausea, and coughing may be signs of exposure to potentially deadly nerve agents.

The official said some Ukrainian troops have been openly boasting of their possession of these illegal weapons online, posting videos of specially-designed drones and imported gas grenades on social media. Gagin urged for information about the use of these illegal weapons to be systematically gathered and sent to the United Nations.

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More Evidence That The West Sabotaged Peace In Ukraine

Days after the war in Ukraine began it was reported by The New York Times that “President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has asked the Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, to mediate negotiations in Jerusalem between Ukraine and Russia.” In a recent interview, Bennett made some very interesting comments about what happened during those negotiations in the early days of the war.

In a new article titled “Former Israeli PM Bennett Says US ‘Blocked’ His Attempts at a Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal,” Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes the following:

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in an interview posted to his YouTube channel on Saturday that the US and its Western allies “blocked” his efforts of mediating between Russia and Ukraine to bring an end to the war in its early days.

On March 4, 2022, Bennett traveled to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin. In the interview, he detailed his mediation at the time between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which he said he coordinated with the US, France, Germany, and the UK.

Bennett said that both sides agreed to major concessions during his mediation effort.

…

But ultimately, the Western leaders opposed Bennet’s efforts. “I’ll say this in the broad sense. I think there was a legitimate decision by the West to keep striking Putin and not [negotiate],” Bennett said.

When asked if the Western powers “blocked” the mediation efforts, Bennet said, “Basically, yes. They blocked it, and I thought they were wrong.”

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Amid Spy Balloon Controversy, Biden Admin Approves $2.1 Billion Aid Package to Defend Ukrainian Skies

As national attention was captured by a Chinese surveillance balloon flying over the United States, the Biden administration has approved another $2.1 billion military aid package to strengthen Ukraine’s air defense arsenal.

The package includes $425 million in arms and equipment drawn from existing U.S. stockpiles, as well as $1.75 billion in Ukraine Assistance Security Initiative (UASI) funds, which Ukraine can use to purchase new weapons—particularly those related to air defense—from manufactures contracted with the U.S. Department of Defense.

In Friday’s announcement, the Pentagon said the package includes “critical air defense capabilities to help Ukraine defend its people.”

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Facebook Protects Nazis to Protect Ukraine Proxy War

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced on January 19 that the company no longer considers Ukraine’s Azov Regiment to be a “dangerous organization.” The far-right paramilitary group grew out of the street gangs that helped topple Ukraine’s president in the US-backed 2014 coup. Originally funded by the same Ukrainian oligarch that backed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s rise to power, Azov was on the front lines of civil war in Eastern Ukraine, and was later fully integrated into the Ukrainian national guard.

The main outlet to report on this move was the Kyiv Independent (1/19/23), a Ukrainian newsroom closely linked to Western “democracy promotion” initiatives. These ties are reflected in its coverage of Facebook’s move. Take the description of the Azov Regiment:

The group has sparked controversy over its alleged association with far-right groups—a recurring theme used by Russian propaganda.

The “association” with “far-right groups” has been far more than “alleged,” and is well documented and openly acknowledged by members of the organization. Even the use of “far-right” downplays the fact that they have regularly been seen sporting Nazi symbols and even making Nazi salutes. NATO was forced to apologize after tweeting a photo of the regiment, circulated as part of public relations for the war, in which a soldier was wearing a symbol from the Third Reich (Newsweek, 3/9/22).

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A panicked Empire tries to make Russia an ‘offer it can’t refuse’

The Washington Post’s old school Moscow-based correspondent John Helmer has provided an important service, offering the full text of Blinken’s offer, of course extensively edited to include fantasist notions such as “US weapons help pulverize Putin’s invasion force” and a cringe-worthy explanation: “In other words, Russia should not be ready to rest, regroup and attack.”

The message from Washington may, at first glance, give the impression that the US would admit Russian control over Crimea, Donbass, Zaporozhye, and Kherson – “the land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia” – as a fait accompli.

Ukraine would have a demilitarized status, and the deployment of HIMARS missiles and Leopard and Abrams tanks would be confined to western Ukraine, kept as a “deterrent against further Russian attacks.”

What may have been offered, in quite hazy terms, is in fact a partition of Ukraine, demilitarized zone included, in exchange for the Russian General Staff cancelling its yet-unknown 2023 offensive, which may be as devastating as cutting off Kiev’s access to the Black Sea and/or cutting off the supply of NATO weapons across the Polish border.

The US offer defines itself as the path towards a “just and durable peace that upholds Ukraine’s territorial integrity.” Well, not really. It just won’t be a rump Ukraine, and Kiev might even retain those western lands that Poland is dying to gobble up.

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Ukraine Proves We Learned Nothing From The Vietnam War

Days ago marked 50 years since the signing of the Paris Peace Accords which effectively ended American participation in the Vietnam war. One of the consequences, according to Georgetown University international affairs scholar Charles Kupchan, was that an “isolationist impulse” made a “significant comeback in response to the Vietnam War, which severely strained the liberal internationalist consensus.”

As the Cold War historian John Lamberton Harper points out, President Jimmy Carter’s hawkish Polish-born national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, scorned his intra-administration rival, the cautious, gentlemanly secretary of state Cyrus Vance as “a nice man but burned by Vietnam.” Indeed, Vance and a number of his generation carried with them a profound disillusionment in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. And for a short time, the “Vietnam Syndrome,” (shorthand for a wariness and suspicion of unnecessary and unsupportable foreign interventions) occasionally informed American policy at the highest levels and manifested itself in the promulgations of the Wienberger and Powell Doctrines which, in theory anyway, represented a kind of resistance on the part of the Pentagon to unnecessary military adventures.

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Former UK Defense Minister Says NATO May Need To Send Ground Forces To Ukraine

The “domino theory” was once used to great effect in order to manipulate the American public into supporting the Vietnam War, but will the same narrative work to get the west to support World War III with Russia? 

Former UK Defense Minister Sir Gerald Howarth seems to think so as he uses this exact claim to justify NATO boots on the ground in Ukraine. 

It should be noted that a large percentage of the American populace and most of Europe have no interest whatsoever in engaging with Russia and possibly its allies in all out war, but the establishment appears intent on forcing the issue anyway.  The delivery of NATO tanks and the possibility of longer range missiles will no doubt trigger a wider response from Russia, which will then be used by NATO as a reason to escalate further. 

At the very least, Howarth does admit what many in the alternative media have been saying for some time – That Ukraine’s efforts have ground to a halt without further support from NATO troops.  The deliveries of money and weapons are nothing more than a stop-gap; wars are won by men. 

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A Costly and Prolonged Cold War Now Seems a Certainty

No one knows how the war in Ukraine will end, but there is one post-war certainty: there will be a prolonged and costly Cold War between the United States and Russia.  In an interview with David Ignatius of the Washington Post, who has been doing the bidding of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency for several decades, Secretary of State Antony Blinken emphasized the importance of a “long-term goal of deterrence.”  Ignatius took this to mean that the Biden administration will make sure that Russia “should not be able to rest, regroup and reattack.”

Ignatius is joining the likes of such Cold Warriors as former secretary of state Condi Rice, former secretary of defense Bob Gates, journalists such as Max Boot and scholars such as Angela Stent and Leon Aron who believe that Russia’s war is not directed only against Ukraine, but against the larger idea that European states can peacefully cooperate.  Yale historian Timothy Snyder goes further, arguing that the rule of law can have a chance in Russia only if “Russia loses this war,” and that Russia’s defeat will reverse the “trend…towards authoritarianism, with Putinism as a force and a model.”  It is naive to think in terms of “rule of law” coming to Russia.

We have been accustomed to politicians who blithely talk about the “war to end all wars,” but it is unusual to have a distinguished historian argue that the “Ukrainians have given us a chance to turn this century around, a chance for freedom and security that we could not have achieved by our own efforts, no matter who we happen to be.”  Snyder argues that “if Russia loses” it would mark an “end to an era of empire,” marking the “last war fought on the colonial logic that another state and people do not exist.”  According to Snyder, a Ukrainian victory would “teach Beijing that such an offensive operation [against Taiwan] is costly and likely to fail.”  Snyder believes that “this is a once-in-lifetime conjuncture, not to be wasted.”

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