Tag: russia

Europe’s Misguided Interventions

At last week’s Paris meeting of the ‘coalition of the willing’, Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron congratulated themselves on reinserting Europe into the peace process opened up by President Trump. In practice, they have done their best to derail it.

Nothing is more foolish than their idea of placing British and French military soldiers and aircraft in Ukraine to provide ‘reassurance’ against renewed Russian aggression after a ceasefire.

Not only cannot it not be made to happen – since both America and Russia reject it – but the attempt to make it happen distracts attention from the serious business of making peace. It is, rather, a desperate attempt to make Britain and France relevant to a peace process which they did not initiate and never wanted.

What might be made to happen, because potentially acceptable to both Russia and the United States, is a UN-supervised ceasefire with non-NATO peacekeepers. But there has been no European suggestion to this effect.

Scarcely less foolish is the Paris decision to ‘accelerate’ and ‘toughen’ economic sanctions against Russia. To keep sanctions as a pressure point is perfectly sensible, but to urge their expansion now is to derail peace talks just at the moment when a real prospect of peace has opened up.

Economic sanctions are instruments of war, successors to the blockades. Their phased withdrawal should be part of peace-making.

The project of ‘reassuring’ Ukraine against renewed Russian aggression says nothing about reassuring Russia against future NATO aggression.

This reflects the dominant western view that NATO is a purely defensive alliance, that Russia’s attack on Ukraine was unprovoked, and that therefore any Russian demand for reassurance is bogus.

This flies in face of credible evidence that NATO’s leader, the United States, played an active, and possibly crucial, role in destabilizing the elected pro-Russian government of Yanukovych in 2014, and installing a Ukrainian nationalist alternative.*

That the Russian invasion was provoked, is not to say that it was justified. It was a moral and strategic blunder, one of whose consequences was to add two new members to the NATO alliance. Nevertheless the hostility to NATO expansion which underlay it was a product not just of a long history, but of insistent repetition from Gorbachev onward which the West, confident of its victory in the Cold War, cheerfully ignored. It was naive to believe that vengeance would limp after Russia had recovered its strength.

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New York Times Blockbuster Article Prepares Americans for Defeat in Ukraine

A March 29 article on America’s involvement in the war in Ukraine in The New York Times by Adam Entous “reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood.” “Understood” is a euphemism. It means the American and global public were lied to.

The article reveals that the war in Ukraine truly was, as former British prime minister Boris Johnson and U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio have already said, a proxy war against Russia. U.S. military and intelligence were involved in every stage of the war, including supplying the weapons, the training, the planning, the war-gaming, the intelligence and the targeting. They were involved in everything from the big picture to the minute detail: “A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.”

American military and intelligence provided “intelligence about Russian battlefield positions, movements and intentions.” “Every morning, officers recalled, the Ukrainians and Americans gathered to survey Russian weapons systems and ground forces and determine the ripest, highest-value targets.” When a “European intelligence chief” discovered how “deeply enmeshed” NATO was in the battlefield operations, he marveled that “They are part of the kill chain now.”

But none of this is really new. For those paying attention to the news, and not the propaganda and repeated assurances and talking points, this information was readily available. Even The New York Times had already reported much of it. The Entous piece adds many names and significant details, but it is not a revelation that the U.S. was not only supplying the Ukrainian armed forces the weapons but that it was feeding them the intelligence.

But beneath the supposed bombshell, important nuggets are exposed that deserve more attention. Though, again, not entirely new, the piece opens with the revelation – intended as dramatic narrative and not investigative journalism–that from early in the war, NATO troops were on the ground in Ukraine. In the dramatic description of a clandestine convoy that smuggled two Ukrainian generals across the Polish border to meet with American intelligence and military officials to “forge what would become one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war in Ukraine,” The Times reveals that the convoy was “manned by British commandos, out of uniform but heavily armed.”

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Greenland “Absolutely Critical” For Hunting Russian Submarines: Top U.S. General In Europe

As U.S. President Donald Trump continues to seek control of Greenland, the top U.S. military commander in Europe said the massive island is vital to America’s national security. The main issue, he said, is that Greenland’s geographic location makes it a key landmass from which to track Russian submarines before they have a chance to disappear into the Atlantic Ocean and potentially endanger the East Coast. You can read more about the strategic importance of Greenland in our deep dive here.

“Access to the airspace and water space found in Greenland is absolutely critical for the United States,” said U.S. Army Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli. NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) and head of U.S. European Command. Cavoli addressed the security value of Greenland during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday. Asked about the frigid island, Cavoli made it clear he was talking about the military value of it and not the Trump administration’s policy of trying to assume Greenland from Denmark.

“The key there is it forms the western border of the Greenland, Iceland, UK (GIUK) gap, which is that body of water through which Russian submarines from the Northern Fleet in Murmansk come up and then down through that gap,” Cavoli stated. Murmansk is home to some of Russia’s most capable submarines, like the Yasen-M class nuclear-powered cruise missile carrying Kazan.

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Secretive Russian military satellites release mystery object into orbit

A trio of secretive Russian satellites launched earlier this year has released a mysterious object into orbit, sparking interest among space trackers and analysts.

The three satellites, designated Kosmos 2581, 2582 and 2583, launched on a Soyuz-2.1V rocket from Plesetsk cosmodrome early on Feb. 2 (GMT). Since then, the satellites, whose purpose is unknown, have displayed interesting behavior, while in a near-polar orbit roughly 364 miles (585 kilometers) above Earth.

In March, the satellites appeared to be conducting potential proximity operations, or maneuvering close to other objects in space, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and spaceflight activity tracker.

Following this, the U.S. Space Force cataloged a new object in orbit, which was possibly released by Kosmos 2581 on March 18.

Russia has provided no details about the satellites and their mission. Many Kosmos missions are classified.

The released object could be used for a number of objectives, including military experiments, such as satellite inspection or target practice, testing technology for docking or formation flying. It may also be a scientific payload or even the result of an unintentional fragmentation, though this would usually result in numerous pieces of debris.

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It’s Official: Ukraine Conflict is British ‘Proxy War’

On March 29th, the New York Times published a landmark investigation exposing how the US was “woven” into Ukraine’s battle with Russia “far more intimately and broadly than previously understood,” with Washington almost invariably serving as “the backbone of Ukrainian military operations.” The outlet went so far as to acknowledge the conflict was a “proxy war” – an irrefutable reality hitherto aggressively denied in the mainstream – dubbing it a “rematch” of “Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.”

That the US has since February 2022 supplied Ukraine with extraordinary amounts of weaponry, and been fundamental to the planning of many of Kiev’s military operations large and small, is hardly breaking news. Indeed, elements of this relationship have previously been widely reported, with White House apparatchiks occasionally admitting to Washington’s role. Granular detail on this assistance provided by the New York Times probe is nonetheless unprecedented. For example, a dedicated intelligence fusion centre was secretly created at a vast US military base in Germany.

Dubbed “Task Force Dragon”, it united officials from every major US intelligence agency, and “coalition intelligence officers”, to produce extensive daily targeting information on Russian “battlefield positions, movements and intentions”, to “pinpoint” and “determine the ripest, highest-value targets” for Ukraine to strike using Western-provided weapons. The fusion centre quickly became “the entire back office of the war.” A nameless European intelligence chief was purportedly “taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his NATO counterparts had become” in the conflict’s “kill chain”…

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Will China Seal Zelensky’s Fate?

Adam Entous’ “blockbuster” New York Times report confirmed what only a few of us reported only weeks into the war, that Washington has been a co-belligerent in the war in Ukraine in all but name.

In a widely neglected article for the Asia Times on April 19, 2022, I reported that,

…US involvement goes deeper than arms sales and intelligence sharing. A Pentagon official who requested anonymity told me it is “likely we have a limited footprint on the ground in Ukraine, but under Title 50, not Title 10,” meaning US intelligence operatives and paramilitaries – but not regular military.”

In the same report I quoted Bruce Fein, a former associate attorney general during the Reagan administration, who described the behavior of the US and its allies as “systematic or substantial violations of a neutral’s duties of impartiality and non-participation in the conflict.”

If nothing else, Entous’ report demonstrates the troubling extent of our co-belligerency in a war against nuclear-armed Russia, and inadvertently revealed the depths of deceit to which Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan, Lloyd Austin and Antony Blinken sunk to keep America’s involvement from public view.

Having started a war he clearly believes he was provoked* into fighting after being serially misled by France and Germany during the Minsk process (2015-2022) Russia’s Vladimir Putin is in no mood to compromise.

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Ukraine has secret nuclear doomsday plan, according to former Zelensky adviser

Ukraine has a secret last-ditch “scorched earth” plan to render its entire territory uninhabitable in the event of a Russian victory in the war – and perhaps the rest of Europe with it.

This is according to Oleksiy Arestovych, a former adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In an interview with a Ukrainian journalist that he gave last month, Arestovych claimed that Ukraine’s current head of military intelligence, Kirill Budanov, has floated a plan to blow up all of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, and possibly some of Russia’s as well, if all other defensive measures fail.

Ukraine currently operates four nuclear power plants with a total of 15 reactors. One of them, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station, is the largest plant in Europe and has been under Russian occupation since March 2022. Russia, for its part, has 37 reactors divided among 11 power plants.

If all or even some of these reactors were attacked and destroyed simultaneously, the destructive impact would be beyond calculation. The Chernobyl nuclear accident that occurred in Ukraine in 1986, and which remains the worst disaster involving nuclear energy in history, killed dozens and led to long-term health problems for thousands of others. It also led to the evacuation of tens of thousands of people and rendered the surrounding area permanently uninhabitable, spreading radioactivity over a large area and even into Western Europe.

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Top German Politicians Are Calling For Resumption Of Russian Gas

In Europe, the lure of a return to cheap energy is ever-present, and that conversation is becoming easier as the Trump administration in Washington pushes hard for ceasefire negotiations with Moscow.

Senior German politicians are already calling for a resumption of ties with Russia. For example Michael Kretschmer, a senior member of Friedrich Merz’s centre-right Christian Democrats, is now arguing that EU sanctions on Russia are “completely out of date” as they increasingly openly contradict “what the Americans are doing.”

Financial Times in a fresh report quoted Kretschmer’s words to the German press agency DPA as follows: “When you realize that you’re weakening yourself more than your opponent, then you have to think about whether all of this is right.”

The same publication has observed the expected immediate backlash to the statements as follows:

Kretschmer, who is also a long-standing opponent of weapons deliveries to Ukraine, is the latest in a string of figures from both Merz’s centre-right CDU and the centre-left Social Democrats to have gone public in recent weeks with calls to resume economic or energy ties with Russia.

That has created a problem for Merz — who is all but certain to be Germany’s next chancellor — as well as for his likely coalition partners in the SPD at a time when he is trying to cast himself as a strong partner for Ukraine and for Europe. Germany’s Green party, which is strongly pro-Kyiv, called on Sunday for Merz to clamp down on “friends of Putin” in his party. 

But Merz hasn’t himself actively tried to silence this growing desire in some political circles for rapprochement with Russia.

But Bloomberg reported Monday, “The co-head of Germany’s Social Democrats party and frontrunner to become the next finance minister Lars Klingbeil dismissed swirling speculation over reviving pipeline gas deliveries from Russia after a potential peace deal for Ukraine.”

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So Milley was running the whole Ukraine war with Russia without telling the public -report

The first casualty in war is the truth, and now the New York Times has revealed how true that was.

While the U.S. public under the Biden administration was told, via Congress, that the U.S. was supplying arms to Ukraine, actually, the U.S. was pretty much running the whole show.

Its long and interesting report begins this way:

One of the men, Lt. Gen. Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, remembers being led up a flight of stairs to a walkway overlooking the cavernous main hall of the garrison’s Tony Bass Auditorium. Before the war, it had been a gym, used for all-hands meetings, Army band performances and Cub Scout pinewood derbies. Now General Zabrodskyi peered down on officers from coalition nations, in a warren of makeshift cubicles, organizing the first Western shipments to Ukraine of M777 artillery batteries and 155-millimeter shells.

Then he was ushered into the office of Lt. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, who proposed a partnership.

Its evolution and inner workings visible to only a small circle of American and allied officials, that partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology would become the secret weapon in what the Biden administration framed as its effort to both rescue Ukraine and protect the threatened post-World War II order.

The U.S., during the time of Gen. Mark Milley, was pretty much calling the shots on all aspects of the war — targets, intelligence, trainings, logistics and all kinds of sneaky pete inside Russia itself, ostensibly to keep the information out of Putin’s hands, the idea being to let him think Ukraine was putting up a ferocious fight on its own, without more than U.S. arms sales buttressing it.

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Sometimes, Appeasement Is the Best Option

Appeasement was a bad idea in 1938, but it’s often a good idea. Ukraine would be wise to appease Russia.

Ukraine’s supporters in the United States and Europe insist that any agreement ending Kyiv’s war with Russia must not involve Ukrainian territorial concessions, or Russia will profit from an inexcusable act of aggression against its neighbor. However, demanding a return to pre-conflict borders ignores current military realities. Russian forces occupy approximately 20 percent of Ukraine’s prewar territory, and there are no signs that Kyiv’s position is likely to improve. Indeed, Ukraine’s latest offensive into Russian-held territory near Kursk has been a spectacular failure.

The long-term prospects for Ukraine in a war of attrition are not encouraging either. Western intelligence agencies issue reports showing high (probably inflated) estimates about the extent of Russian military casualties, trying to sell the message that continued fighting will prove too costly for the Kremlin. However, those same agencies curiously omit estimates of Ukrainian military casualties, an odd stance if Ukraine actually is winning the war. Russia’s prewar population was approximately 140 million, whereas Ukraine’s was less than 50 million. Worse, the drain on the latter’s population from the fighting has been severe.  Experts estimate that Ukraine’s population has dropped by10 million since Russia’s February 2022 invasion: from 48 million to just over 37 million today, while Russia’s total has barely budged. Moscow’s edge in deployable military personnel and hardware is even greater. The brutal truth is that Russia is in a much better position than Ukraine to prevail in a war of attrition.

Insisting that the Kremlin return all conquered territory to Kyiv in a peace accord is profoundly unrealistic. Ukraine is almost certain to lose a war of attrition – after even more death and destruction. Western backers of Ukraine are doing their client no favor if they press Kyiv to persist in its unrealistic, maximalist demands. Recognizing an unpleasant reality and making essential policy adjustments do not constitute cowardice or feckless appeasement. It means having the wisdom to choose the best available option in a difficult situation.

An especially toxic phenomenon in world affairs has been the tendency of Western political leaders to be obsessed with the supposed lessons of the 1930s. It seems that every time a would-be challenger to any aspect of the existing U.S-directed international order surfaces, that individual is demonized as the “new Hitler.” Likewise, the country he controls supposedly poses a threat comparable to the one Nazi Germany posed. That caricature has been applied to political figures as diverse as Ho Chi Minh, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, and Vladimir Putin.

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