Tag: ukraine

Deadly Blaze Rips Through US-Sanctioned Moscow Electronics Research Building

A huge and deadly fire is raging at a defense technology research center outside of Moscow, which has so far reportedly taken the lives of at least eight people (per BBC citing state media updates, though the casualty count is conflicting).

A building of the Platan Research Institute has been engulfed in flames, widespread social media videos show. It is located in the town of Fryazino in the Moscow region. Importantly, Platan develops radio-electronic systems for Russia’s Defense Ministry, raising suspicion that this could be the result of sabotage or covert attack connected to the war in Ukraine.

Governor Moscow oblast, Andrei Vorobyov, confirmed in a Monday statement that three floors of the building have been overwhelmed by flames. “The fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth floors are on fire,” Mash said Monday.

TASS has cited an eyewitness who saw two people tragically fall to their deaths after they jumped from a window trying to escape the flames and thick smoke. BBC writes:

There are conflicting reports about the building’s purpose. It once homed the Platan Research Institute and defence industry, according to Tass.

A statement to the agency from Ruselectronics, a Russia-owned electronics organisation, said the building has been privately owned since the 1990s. However, opposition media outlets recently reported that Platan was based in the building as late as 2023.

It is not immediately clear what caused the fire, but one eyewitness told Tass that it broke out on the sixth floor before spreading.

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Ukraine’s Attacks on Freedom of Expression Continue

U.S. officials routinely portray Ukraine as a democratic ally and the symbol of an existential fight between freedom and authoritarianism. That simplistic portrayal has intensified since Russia launched its large-scale attack in February 2022. The reality is that Ukraine is a corrupt authoritarian state similar to Russia. Not only does Volodymyr Zelensky’s government not respect civil liberties at home, but also it has tried to impinge on such liberties in the United States.

On three separate occasions since the Russia-Ukraine war began, Kyiv published an “enemies list” of critics with implicitly threatening overtones.   Zelensky and his colleagues clearly have no tolerance for critics, domestic or foreign. Their willingness to target and attempt to intimidate foreign critics became abundantly clear in the summer of 2022, when Zelensky’s government’s Center for Countering Disinformation (partly funded by U.S. taxpayers) published a “blacklist” of such opponents.  Numerous prominent Americans were on that list including University of Chicago professor (and the dean of foreign policy realists) John Mearsheimer, journalist Tucker Carlson, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and Cato Institute Senior Fellow Doug Bandow. The ominous, threatening nature of the blacklist became even clearer later in 2022, when the CCD issued a revised roster (including addresses) of the top 35 targets. That narrower, high-priority list denounced those critics as “disinformation terrorists” and “war criminals.” Such conduct definitely is not that of a liberal democracy. Yet official Washington and its media echo chamber continue to ignore Kyiv’s contempt for democratic norms.

The latest attack takes the form of a report “Roller Coaster: From Trumpists to Communists. The forces in the U.S. impeding aid to Ukraine and how they do it.” That report’s author was the U.S. government-supported Ukraine’s “Data Journalism Agency, (TEXTY),” which is listed as an “implementing partner” of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Transparency and Accountability in Public Administration and Services/TPAS Project.

A devastating analysis by the Spectator’s Ella Johnson noted that the new report listed Americans who were accused of nothing more than “impeding aid to Ukraine.” There were 391 individuals and 76 organizations on the list, including members of the conservative media and even several members of Congress.

The title of the report “oversells the product: it is a substantively thin piece, largely an excuse to smear a large group of Americans who have been skeptical of aid to Ukraine in one form or another,” Senator J.D. Vance and Representative Matt Gaetz wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “The accusations are laughable on their face,” Nation journalist James Carden, who is included on the list, told the Spectator. “And they should be treated with absolute contempt.

The Spectator reached out to several other people named on Ukraine’s TEXTY site. “All I can say is that I am proud to be on the list,” said Dr. Sumatra Maitra, senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America.  “It’s clarifying to see the State Department-funded Ukrainian NGO’s showing their true colors and creating blacklists, demonstrating how utterly Soviet they still are.”

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Russia summons the American ambassador over a deadly attack that Moscow says used US-made missiles

The Russian Foreign Ministry summoned the American ambassador on Monday to protest what it says was the use of U.S.-made advanced missiles in a Ukrainian attack on Russian-annexed Crimea that reportedly killed four people and wounded more than 150.

Washington “has effectively become a party” to the war on Ukraine’s side, the ministry said in a statement, adding, “Retaliatory measures will certainly follow.” It did not elaborate.

There was no immediate comment from U.S. or Ukrainian officials. The Associated Press could not independently verify Russia’s claims about the missiles used.

Kyiv’s forces have relied heavily on Western-supplied weaponry since Russia’s invasion more than three years ago. The military aid has been crucial in allowing Ukraine to hold the Kremlin’s army at bay, with few major changes along the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line in eastern and southern Ukraine for many months.

Some Western countries have hesitated over providing more — and more sophisticated — help for Kyiv’s army because of concerns about potentially provoking the Kremlin. But as Ukraine has at times struggled to hold the line against Russia’s bigger and better-equipped military, Western leaders have gradually relented and granted more support.

In the latest key development, the Pentagon said last week that Ukraine’s military is being allowed to use longer-range missiles provided by the U.S. to strike targets inside Russia if it is acting in self-defense. Since the outset of the war, the U.S. had maintained a policy of not allowing Ukraine to use the weapons it provided to hit targets on Russian soil for fear of further escalating the conflict.

Crimea, which Russian annexed from Ukraine in 2014 in a move that most of the world rejected as unlawful, long had been declared a fair target for Ukraine by its Western allies.

Russian authorities said that the dead in Sunday’s attack included two children who were hit by falling debris from Ukrainian missiles that were shot down over a coastal area in Sevastopol, a port city in Crimea. It said cluster munitions, which critics say harm more civilians than combatants, were also used.

Russia said the missiles were U.S.-made ATACMS, a long-range, guided missile. It summoned U.S. Ambassador Lynne Tracy to the Foreign Ministry.

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New evidence US blocked Ukraine-Russia peace deal, and a new Ukrainian excuse for walking away

Since the collapse of peace talks between Ukraine and Russia in April-May 2022, the Biden administration and establishment US media have maintained a near-total vow of silence.

Even as Russian President Vladmir Putin has directly accused the US and UK of sabotaging the negotiations in Istanbul, President Biden and his top principals have never offered a rebuttal, and no major US outlet has bothered to seek one. The lone exception was an anonymous senior administration official, who told the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov that Russian complaints were “Utter bulls—.” The official added: “I know for a fact the United States didn’t pull the plug on that. We were watching it carefully.”

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White House to Send Allies’ Patriot Air Defense Systems to Ukraine

Per a Thursday report in the Financial Times, the U.S. will suspend all orders for Patriot air defense systems to other countries and redirect their production to Ukraine.

According to the White House, it will be “re-sequencing” the planned deliveries so that Ukraine will receive produced systems at an expedited rate.

The move comes on the heels of the Biden administration’s promise of getting more Patriot systems for Ukraine “relatively quickly” at the recent G7 summit. 

The redirection will reportedly not affect exports to Taiwan.

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Slovak Defense Ministry Accuses Former Government of Sabotage and Treason Over Ukraine Jet Transfer

The Slovak Ministry of Defense said on Friday that it considers the transfer of MiG-29 fighter jets and air defense systems to Ukraine in 2023 as an act of sabotage by the former leadership of the ministry.

“Based on the results of the discovery of a number of failures of the former government, we, as the Ministry of Defense, are filing an application [to law enforcement agencies] on suspicion of committing sabotage, that is, treason, abuse of power and violation of duties to manage other people’s property,” ministry spokesman Igor Melicher told reporters.

After the inspection, the ministry did not find a document that would justify the legality of transferring fighter jets and air defense to Ukraine, the official added.

Earlier, Melicher stated that the transfer of MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine in 2023 was illegal, and legal measures would be taken against former Slovak Defense Minister Jaroslav Naď. Melicher pointed out that Slovakia’s constitution prohibits a caretaker government from making significant foreign policy decisions, such as transferring fighter jets to Ukraine worth over 500 million euros.

Slovak Ombudsman Robert Dobrovodský reported that the Slovak Ministry of Defense could not find any legal analysis confirming the legality of the MiG-29 transfer to Ukraine by Eduard Heger’s government in 2023.

In December 2022, the Slovak parliament passed a vote of no confidence in Heger’s government, but his cabinet continued to perform its duties with limited powers. In March 2023, Heger’s government decided to transfer 13 MiG-29 fighters and part of the Kub air defense system to Ukraine. The party of the current Prime Minister, Robert Fico, sought an investigation into the circumstances of this transfer, claiming that Heger’s government lacked the authority to make such decisions. Former Defense Minister Naď, who was part of Heger’s cabinet, argued that a legal analysis conducted before the decision confirmed the procedure’s legality.

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Former UN Weapons Inspector Warns About Looming Threat of Nuclear War

“You will die,” Scott Ritter warned Americans on Wednesday morning in a press conference hosted by the Schiller Institute. “The danger is real,” he said, “and Amercians should be scared.”

Ritter noted that, as the war in Ukraine escalates and the U.S. is providing weapons to directly attack Russia, “Anatoly Antonov, the top Russian nuclear weapon expert and lead negotiator on past nuclear treaties with the U.S., is sitting in the Kremlin and his phone is not ringing. We are not even attempting at diplomacy.”

Ritter was joined by Helga Zepp-LaRouche and former intelligence professionals Lawrence Wilkerson and former Republican state senator and Vietnam veteran Richard Black. They urged the people of the United States and the world to awaken to the danger of mutually assured destruction. 

Their dire warning comes as tensions escalate to a point reminiscent of, or even exceeding, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis during the first Cold War period, when the world came within a heartbeat of nuclear war breaking out.

The Western media are simply not covering developments. Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector who exposed the deceit surrounding the WMD and Iraq, urged Americans to take the urgency and sense of danger to the polls in the next election to prevent World War III, and to pressure decision makers every step of the way. 

While the Russian nuclear doctrine is defensive, the American doctrine has been under pressure to miniaturize the nuclear capabilities into conventional use and to develop first strike capabilities in recent years. 

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Why Won’t the US Help Negotiate a Peaceful End to the War in Ukraine?

For the fifth time since 2008, Russia has proposed to negotiate with the U.S. over security arrangements, this time in proposals made by President Vladimir Putin on June 14, 2024. Four previous times, the U.S. rejected the offer of negotiations in favor of a neocon strategy to weaken or dismember Russia through war and covert operations. The U.S. neocon tactics have failed disastrously, devastating Ukraine in the process, and endangering the whole world. After all the warmongering, it’s time for Biden to open negotiations for peace with Russia.

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. grand strategy has been to weaken Russia. As early as 1992, then Defense Secretary Richard Cheney opined that following the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union, Russia too should be dismembered. Zbigniew Brzezinski opined in 1997 that Russia should be divided into three loosely confederated entities in Russian Europe, Siberia, and the far east. In 1999, the U.S.-led NATO alliance bombed Russia’s ally, Serbia, for 78 days in order to break Serbia apart and install a massive NATO military base in breakaway Kosovo. Leaders of the U.S. military-industrial complex vociferously supported the Chechen war against Russia in the early 2000s.

To secure these U.S. advances against Russia, Washington aggressively pushed NATO enlargement, despite promises to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not move one inch eastward from Germany. Most tendentiously, the U.S. pushed NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia, with the idea of surrounding Russia’s naval fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea with NATO states: Ukraine, Romania (NATO member 2004), Bulgaria (NATO member 2004), Turkey (NATO member 1952), and Georgia, an idea straight from the playbook of the British Empire in the Crimean War (1853-6).

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Is Washington trying to dump the Ukraine war into the EU’s lap?

With just a mere matter of weeks now before the U.S. presidential election some experts are wondering if Joe Biden is preparing, at the last minute, to wriggle free of the Ukrainian curse and tell voters that in the next term, if he were to be President, Ukraine funding will be reduced dramatically. This would, after all, be a cunning move to outfox Trump who has told reporters on numerous occasions that he would end the war once in office simply through cutting U.S. financial support.

Either scenario places EU countries – and the EU itself in Brussels – in a quandary as their worst nightmare is coming true: America wants to hand over the responsibility of Ukraine to the Europeans and shed responsibility for the mess that it has created. One could even argue that relations now between the U.S. and EU countries are on a collision course given one recent offer Washington made to the EU in the form of a loan which the EU would guarantee but U.S. companies would benefit from.

As Hungary prepares to take the helm of the EU’s six month rotating presidency on July 1st, western elites are fretting over whether this time Budapest will veto outright the sanctions which are in place, which need to be signed off every six months. America in particular wants a quick fix solution but is indicating that it wants to hand over all the risk to Europe. It argues that those who hold Russian assets should be the ones to offer the guarantees against default – through interest on Russian cash held by them – and that U.S. Congress anyway is unlikely to sign off another batch of military aid, even in the form of a loan, at such short notice.

Following a massive body blow from European elections, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will tell President Joe Biden they reject the American proposal for Europe to act as sole guarantors for the loan, according to conversations with six senior diplomats and officials.

The offer was structured in such a way that EU countries would pay the interest, accept the risk and allow most of what was a 50bn dollar loan to benefit U.S. companies. Remarkable sting for the EU governments when it shows that the relationship between them and the Biden administration just sinks lower and lower each week.

Of course, there is a great deal of anger from the EU side as many EU leaders feel as though the U.S. has cleaned up quite nicely from the whole business of war which has profited the U.S. on so many levels but has drained EU economies, explaining why Poland recently held a pole which claimed that a majority of those asked wanted funding for the Ukraine war to end. Europe has really been left holding the baby over the Ukraine war and the palpable resentment against the U.S. is certainly growing. The deal the U.S. pushed of course was never going to be a runner but more likely a new European Commission in September will borrow a new 50bn euro tranche from its seven year 1.2 trillion euro budget for Ukraine. Even in this scenario, the EU is scraping the barrel and reaching new lows in throwing cash into the fire just as an ephemeral last-ditch effort to stay warm.

But both the U.S. and EU realise that time is running out for whoever wants to pour more money into the black hole of Ukraine. Time is running out because while Ukraine desperately needs the money, there’s no certainty that a Donald Trump presidency would back any loan initiatives. A final agreement will now be delayed until at least in autumn with just a matter of few weeks before November 5 election. Relations between the U.S. and EU have never been so tipped in Washington’s favour. And that’s before Trump even gets into the White House.

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Ukrainians dying in their hundreds of thousands so US weapon manufacturers can profit

Washington has spent $1.8 trillion over the 20-year failed military campaign in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban, whilst aid to Ukraine in just a little more than two years has already reached $175 billion dollars, according to a Council on Foreign Relations report published on May 9. The American military-industrial complex is rejoicing at the rate of weapons being given to Ukraine as contracts for military orders to replace outdated weapons with new ones are being secured for many years to come. However, the profiteering of American weapon manufacturers is coming at an immense human cost in Ukraine.

The huge expenses in Afghanistan were attributed to the fact that tens of thousands of American troops were stationed in the landlocked country and fought there directly. However, in the current conflict, Ukrainian soldiers continue to die in a futile war with Russian forces and are merely being used as cannon fodder in Washington’s indirect war with Russia so American troops do not have to die like they did in Afghanistan.

Although the situation is desperate on the battlefront for Ukraine, the US military industrial complex will continue profiting after the Biden administration on June 20 allowed for air defences to be swiftly delivered to Ukraine by delaying certain weapons shipments to other countries, which White House spokesman John F. Kirby admitted was a “difficult but necessary decision” given Russian rapid advances.

Kirby explained that Ukraine had a critical need for Patriot interceptor missiles as Russia has accelerated attacks, adding that the “decision demonstrates our commitment to supporting our partners when they’re in existential danger.”

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