Bono, our savior…
Tag: russia
It’s under control…
The Most American Thing That Has Ever Happened
We are once again witnessing history being made, folks. Today, in the Year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-two, we get the great privilege of bearing witness to the single most American thing that has ever happened.
The Biden administration has asked top Democrats to decouple the federal government’s Covid relief spending package from its much larger bill for funding of the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, because one of those two things is too controversial and contentious to pass quickly.
Guess which one.
Politico reports:
Congressional Democratic leaders reached a bipartisan accord to send $39.8 billion to Ukraine to bolster its monthslong battle against a brutal Russian assault.
And that deal is now expected to move swiftly to President Joe Biden’s desk after Democrats agreed to drop another one of their top priorities — billions of dollars in pandemic aid that has stalled on the Hill. The Ukraine aid could come to the House floor for a vote as soon as Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the discussions who spoke candidly on condition of anonymity.
That nearly $40 billion worth of proxy war funding eclipses the paltry $10 billion in Covid relief funding that was being debated in congress, and is in fact well in excess of the already massive $33 billion sum requested by the White House.
“President Joe Biden and top Democrats have agreed to a GOP demand to disentangle a stalled COVID-19 response package from a separate supplemental request for military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine so the latter can move more quickly,” Roll Call reports. “At the same time, House and Senate Democrats have upped the price tag on the Ukraine package by $6.8 billion above Biden’s initial $33 billion request. Democrats proposed including an additional $3.4 billion for food aid and $3.4 billion more to replace U.S. military equipment sent to Ukraine, according to a source familiar with the offer.”
Biden Is Sending Ukraine Billions of Dollars of Weaponry It Can’t Use Properly
After hounding the US and other NATO members for weeks about his need for heavy weapons to defend against Russia’s ongoing “special military operation”, Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, appears to have been granted his wish.
The US Congress, on April 28, passed legislation that breathed life into a World War II-era law that would allow the US to quickly supply weapons to Ukraine on loan.
By a vote of 417 to 10, the House of Representatives sent the revised 80-year-old law to the desk of President Joe Biden, where he is expected to sign it (the US Senate had earlier passed the legislation unanimously.)
“Passage of that act enabled Great Britain and Winston Churchill to keep fighting and to survive the fascist Nazi bombardment until the United States could enter the war,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland who has been at the forefront of anti-Russian legislation over the years. “President Zelensky has said that Ukraine needs weapons to sustain themselves, and President Biden has answered that call.”
The Congressional action comes on the heels of President Biden approving an additional $33 billion in military aid on top of the nearly $3 billion already provided to Ukraine since the start of the conflict with Russia. While much of the earlier weapons shipments focused on light weaponry such as anti-tank missiles and man-portable air defense systems, the new support package places an emphasis on heavy weaponry, such as howitzers and armored fighting vehicles, which Ukraine needs to replace equipment destroyed or damaged in battle.
Beware of what you wish for.
General Omar Bradley, a famous American military commander during World War II who knew more than a thing or two about killing Nazis, is attributed with saying “amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.” For every piece of heavy equipment that the Ukrainian military is about to receive as part of this massive infusion of military aid provided by the US there is attached the unspoken yet critical reality of the issue of maintenance and sustainability. Simply put, if it’s broke, you can’t use it. And military equipment breaks – frequently – especially when subjected to the strains and stress of unending modern combat.
ANOTHER Russian billionaire dies in mysterious circumstances: Officials say energy firm exec died ‘after going to shamans for hangover cure made from toad venom’
Another Russian tycoon has been found dead under mysterious circumstances.
Billionaire Alexander Subbotin, 43, a former top executive with Kremlin-friendly energy giant Lukoil, is the latest in a number of high profile, suspicious deaths since Vladimir Putin ordered his forces to invade Ukraine.
The mogul had sought the advice of shamans to cure a hangover, according to the official version of events, but his death comes as the deaths of other prominent tycoons are under the spotlight which critics of Putin’s regime say could be murders.
The oligarch, who owned a lucrative shipping company, was reportedly treated with toad venom – put into an incision that had been made in his skin. Soon afterwards, Subbotin had a heart attack and was given a tranquilliser from the herb valerian.
The next morning he was found dead by male and female shamans Magua Flores (real name Alexey Pindyurin) and Tina Cordoba (Kristina Teikhrib), according to local reports citing the version of events shared by Russian law enforcement.
The pair reportedly treat clients by summoning the spirits, sacrificing animals and bathing them in cockerel blood.
Separately, the two controversial shamans – or traditional healers and diviners of spirits – are embroiled in accusations that they abused a makeup artist and blogger during a trip to Mexico last year.
They told state investigators that Subbotin was a friend and denied that they subjected him to shamanic rituals for payment.
Subbotin, reported by REN TV to be a billionaire, was a board member of Lukoil Trading House LLC, then became the owner of the New Transport Company (NTK) on the shores of the Gulf of Finland.
The US Could’ve Prevented This War Just By Protecting Kyiv From Nazis
As we hydroplane toward the brink of nuclear armageddon while Bono and the Edge play U2 songs in Kyiv, it’s probably worth taking a moment to highlight the fact that this entire war could have been avoided if the US had simply pledged military protection for Zelensky against the far right extremists who were threatening to lynch him if he enacted the peacemaking policies he was elected to enact.
To be clear, what we are indulging in here is entirely an act of fantasy. In imagining what would have happened if the US had pledged to protect the Ukrainian government from an undemocratic violent overthrow at the hands of fascists instead of waging a horrific proxy war, we are imagining a world in which the US government acts in the highest interest of all instead of working continuously to dominate the planet no matter how much madness and cruelty it needs to inflict upon humanity. A world in which the US hadn’t been taking steps toward the orchestration of this proxy war for many years.
With that out of the way, it’s just a simple fact that for a fraction of the military firepower the US is pouring into Ukraine right now, it could have prevented the entire war by simply protecting Ukrainian democracy from the undemocratic impulses of the worst people in that country.
When he was asked by The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel last month what he thinks is preventing Kyiv from signing a peace agreement with Russia, John Mearsheimer, whose analysis of this conflict has been prophetic for many years, replied as follows:
I think that when Zelensky ran for president he made it very clear that he wanted to work out an arrangement with Russia that ended the crisis in Ukraine, and he won. And what he then tried to do was move toward implementing the Minsk II agreement. If you were going to shut down the conflict in Ukraine, you had to implement Minsk II. And Minsk II meant giving the Russian-speaking and the ethnic Russian population in the easternmost part of Ukraine, the Donbas region, a significant amount of autonomy, and you had to make the Russian language an official language of Ukraine.
I think Zelensky found out very quickly that because of the Ukrainian right, it was impossible to implement Minsk II. Therefore even though the French and the Germans, and of course the Russians were very interested in making Minsk II work, because they wanted to shut down the crisis, they couldn’t do it. In other words, the Ukrainian right was able to stymie Zelensky on that front.
When Mearsheimer says that the Ukrainian right was able to stymie Zelensky, he doesn’t mean by votes or by democratic processes, he means by threats and violence. In an article last month titled “Siding with Ukraine’s far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky’s mandate for peace,” journalist Aaron Maté wrote the following:
In April 2019, Zelensky was elected with an overwhelming 73% of the vote on a promise to turn the tide. In his inaugural address the next month, Zelensky declared that he was “not afraid to lose my own popularity, my ratings,” and was “prepared to give up my own position – as long as peace arrives.”
But Ukraine’s powerful far-right and neo-Nazi militias made clear to Zelensky that reaching peace in the Donbas would have a much higher cost.
“No, he would lose his life,” Right Sector co-founder Dmytro Anatoliyovych Yarosh, then the commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, responded one week after Zelensky’s inaugural speech. “He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk – if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the Revolution and the War.”
Ukraine Alone Makes Biden The Worst US President In A Long Time
Antiwar libertarian hero Scott Horton has a viral tweet going around which reads simply, “Biden’s refusal to attempt to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine is the greatest scandal in American political history.”
Kind of smacks you in the face, doesn’t it? I’ve never seen anyone put it quite like that before, but if you think about it, how could it not be true?
It’s just a simple fact that the Biden administration is actually hindering diplomatic efforts to negotiate an end to this war, and that it has refused to provide Ukraine with any kind of diplomatic negotiating power regarding the possible rollback of sanctions and other US measures to help secure peace. Washington’s top diplomats have consistently been conspicuously absent from any kind of dialogue with their counterparts in Moscow.
Statements from the administration in fact indicate that they expect this war to drag on for a long time, making it abundantly clear that a swift end to minimize the death and destruction is not just uninteresting but undesirable for the US empire. Ukrainian media report that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Zelensky on behalf of NATO powers that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.”
That’s nervy…
Global Grain Reserves “Extremely Low,” Will Be Depleted For Years, Warns Top Fertilizer Boss
Snarled supply chains, adverse weather conditions in top growing areas, and conflict in Ukraine have wreaked havoc on the world’s agricultural system. The latest sign of an emerging food crisis is comments from a top US fertilizer company that warns it could take two to three years for farmers to resupply the world’s grain stockpiles.
“Global grains stocks remain extremely low, an issue that has become amplified because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“We think it will take at least 2-3 years to replenish global grains stocks,” Illinois-based CF Industries Holdings Inc.’s president and chief executive officer Tony Will said in a statement in Wednesday’s earnings report.
Over the years, Ukraine has earned the nickname “breadbasket of Europe” for its rich dark soil, vast wheat fields, and other farm goods. The Russian invasion has cut off the world from cheap and abundant farm goods.
Both Ukraine and Russia account for more than a quarter of the global wheat trade, about a fifth of corn, and 12% of all calories traded globally.
Zelensky Critic Arrested in Spain on Orders of Ukrainian Government
A popular YouTuber and critic of President Zelensky was arrested in Spain at the behest of the Ukrainian government on charges of treason and faces extradition, despite publicly condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Yes, really.
Anatoly Shariy, who has almost 3 million YouTuber subscribers, was detained on an international arrest warrant in a joint operation by Spanish and Ukrainian police, as well as international “partners,” according to the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU).
They claim that Shariy has been acting on behalf of “foreign” forces by infringing Ukraine’s national security via his media commentary on the war and engaging in “incitement of hatred.”
Shariy’s arrest “is more proof that every traitor of Ukraine will sooner or later receive his well-deserved punishment. It is inevitable,” the SBU asserted.
The blogger had previously been granted asylum by the EU in 2012 after fleeing persecution by the government of Viktor Yanukovich, who was pro-Russian.
Hellbound and Down 
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