Tag: ukraine

Smedley Butler Explains The Latest Excuse For American Intervention In Ukraine

Senior Fellow Alex Pollock drew my attention to an important quotation by Smedley Butler: 

1935 speech and later a book by Major General Smedley D. Butler (USMC), includes  “… A racket is best described, I believe, something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make large fortunes…

If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destructions, they will have no time for the constructive job of building a greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war – even the munition makers.

So … I say, TO HELL WITH WAR.”

It is notable that very little has changed over the past century in terms of how regimes rationalize war. It was during the First World War that the term “merchants of death” first gained widespread use, and it was also during that war that the American regime also spoke often in terms of munitions spending as a benefit of war. It was all part of a war-propaganda machine dreamed up with Woodrow Wilson’s cadre. 

Unfortunately, the propaganda still works with many. It was just two weeks ago, in fact, that the Biden Administration began explicitly trying to sell US military aid to Ukraine as a scheme to “create jobs” in the United States. The administration’s statement on the war spending is virtually identical to something out of a US propaganda mill in 1950 or 1918. We would only need to change a few of the names and places. According to Biden’s handlers: 

“While this bill dispatches military hardware to Ukraine,” Biden mentioned on Tuesday, “it actually finances manufacturing within the United States in states like Arizona, where Patriot missiles are manufactured; Alabama, the home of Javelin missiles; and also Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas, which are hubs for the production of artillery shells.”

There are a multitude of problems with this statement.

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Pentagon Using AI Program to Identify Targets in Middle East and Ukraine

A defense official said that US Central Command (CENTCOM) has deployed an AI program to help identify targets to bomb in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. The US used the AI targeting system dubbed “Project Maven” to locate Russian targets that were destroyed by Ukrainian forces.  

A senior CENTCOM official speaking with Bloomberg said AI systems helped to identify alleged rocket launchers in Yemen. The outlet described the statement made by Schuyler Moore, CENTCOM chief technology officer, as the “strongest known confirmation that the US military is using the [AI] to identify enemy targets that were subsequently hit by weapons’ fire.”

“We’ve been using computer vision to identify where there might be threats,” Moore told Bloomberg. She went on to say that the program has accelerated due to the situation in Israel. “October 7th everything changed,” CENTCOM’s CTO explained.

“We immediately shifted into high gear and a much higher operational tempo than we had previously,” Moore added, saying US forces were able to make “a pretty seamless shift” to Maven after a year of digital exercises.

Chief Warrant Officer 4 Joey Temple explained the value of Maven is increasing the number of targets a soldier can sign off on. He estimates that the number of targets could be boosted from 30 to 80 per hour. 

According to Bloomberg, he “describes the process of concurring with the algorithm’s conclusions in a rapid staccato: ‘Accept. Accept. Accept.’” Moore also expressed this view, stating, “The benefit that you get from algorithms is speed.”

While Moore touted the program’s deployment, it is unclear if it has had any positive impact on achieving US goals in Yemen. Washington has admitted that recent strikes on Houthi positions have failed to erode the group’s military capabilities.

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Ukraine war and Western system’s fatal flaw

We can see from the increasingly incoherent statements by western officials that they are outright panicked about Ukraine’s imminent capitulation to Russia: it is the surprise they did not expect. How important a piece was Ukraine on Western powers’ geopolitical chessboard? Last April, Poland’s President Mateusz Morawiecki gave away the mindset in a TV address when he said that, “If we lose Ukraine, we will lose the world for decades. Defeat of Ukraine could be the beginning of the end of the golden age of the West.”

Incidentally, his statement has subsequently been airbrushed in most media making it seem that he said “… we will lose peace for decades.” In some Slavic languages the word “Mir” means both world and peace, but Morawiecki was not talking about losing peace, but about the end of the West’s primacy in world affairs. From Western oligarchy’s point of view, the stakes could hardly be any higher in Ukraine. Being so very powerful and sophisticated, they should be winning that fight, right? Well…

We’ve got two days’ worth of dry powder…

After two years of Russia’s Special Military Operation, it is now clear that Russia is winning and that Ukraine is now well and truly broken. This is all in spite of the nuclear, all-out trade sanctions against Russia and the full support for Ukraine from her western allies, both in terms of financial, humanitarian and military aid. NATO has practically disarmed itself to provide weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.

Last November, the deputy of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Johann Wadephul stated to the media that the combat capacity of German Armed Forces has been seriously weakened by the shortages caused by the continuous supply of material and ammunitions to Kiev: “Crucial troop units can only last a maximum of two days in a battle. And that is a catastrophic find overall.” Other NATO countries are likely in no better shape regardless of the ongoing juvenile trash-talk about how Ukraine destroyed 50% of Russia’s military power, took back 50% of the territory held by Russia, all for cents on the dollar of West’s defence budgets, etc.

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What Did The CIA Know And When Did It Know It?

As Ukraine careens toward a political and military disaster, it is time to ask why did the CIA fail to predict this. “Wait a minute,” you might say, “How do you know the CIA did not?” Fair question. I no longer have access to classified information, but I can read the public statements of DOD and State Department officials as well as remarks by various members of Congress. At no time during the past two years — since the start of the Special Military Operation — have we heard a single discouraging word from anyone with access to CIA briefings on Ukraine’s military prospects suggesting the West embarked on a fool’s errand in trying to destroy Russia.

On the eve of the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the CIA should have provided answers to the following questions:

  1. What is the capability and condition of the Russian armed forces?
  2. What is Russia’s capability to withstand Western economic sanctions?
  3. What are the conditions that must exist that will force President Putin from office?

Here is what we know for certain. Despite repeated entreaties from Vladimir Putin to President Joe Biden and other Western leaders to provide assurances that Ukraine would not be admitted to NATO, the West told Putin to screw off and continued building up Ukraine’s military. The U.S. and its NATO allies believed that Russia’s military was weak and ineffective. Western leaders also believed that Russia’s economy was vulnerable to Western economic sanctions and that an economic collapse in Russia would catapult Putin from power.

The Western plan was simple, audacious and delusional — i.e., using Ukraine as a military proxy, defeat Russia and humiliate Vladimir Putin; apply Western economic sanctions that would devastate the Russian economy and further erode support for Putin; break up the Russia Republic into 41 new countries. Sounds crazy, but take a look at what Angel Vohra wrote in Foreign Policy Magazine in April 2023:

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, an independent U.S. government agency with members from the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate, and departments of defense, state, and commerce, has declared that decolonizing Russia should be a “moral and strategic objective.” The Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum, comprising exiled politicians and journalists from Russia, held a meeting at the European Parliament in Brussels earlier this year and is advertising three events in different American cities this month. It has even released a map of a dismembered Russia, split into 41 different countries, in a post-Putin world, assuming he loses in Ukraine and is ousted.

Western analysts are increasingly pushing the theory that Russian disintegration is coming and that the West must not only prepare to manage any possible spillover of any ensuing civil wars but also to benefit from the fracture by luring resource-rich successor nations into its ambit. They argue that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the West was blindsided and failed to fully capitalize on the momentous opportunity. It must now strategize to end the Russian threat once and for all, instead of providing an off-ramp to Putin.

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The Stories You’re Not Hearing About the Russo-Ukrainian War…

Several, seemingly small events in the Russo-Ukrainian War went largely unnoticed in western media recently. But each of them, in their own way, may be significant.

The Fall of Avdiivka

On February 25, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since Russia invaded his country two years ago. It was the first time he had released a number of dead. He wouldn’t provide the number of wounded.

On February 4, he said, “About 26% of the national territory is still under occupation,” before adding that “the Russian army cannot make much progress. We have stopped them.”

Both statements are absurd. As The New York Times remarks on Zelensky’s battlefield accounting, “It differs sharply from estimates by U.S. officials, who, this past summer, put the losses much higher, saying that close to 70,000 Ukrainians had been killed and 100,000 to 120,000 had been wounded.”

The 31,000 number may be closer to the number of dead and wounded in the past several disastrous weeks than in the past two years. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu recently said that over 383,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed or wounded since the war began. Yuriy Lutsenko, the former prosecutor general and ex-head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, says that 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or seriously wounded. A number of 400,000-500,000 is consistent with internal Ukrainian communications and reports from the battlefield that 20,000 soldiers a month would be necessary to replace the dead and wounded. That number also accords with the 450,000-500,000 number Zelensky has requested in a new mobilization.

Being absurd was appropriate when Zelensky was a comedian; it may have made Ukrainians laugh. But being absurd when Zelensky is president is not appropriate; it may make more Ukrainians die.

The second statement, that Russia is incapable of further significant advances because the Ukrainian Armed Forces has stopped them is no less absurd. Less than two weeks after making the statement, on February 17, after exhausting every capability it had, the Ukrainian Armed Forces retreated in disarray from the heavily fortified town of Avdiivka as it fell to the Russians. That was a very significant advance. Taking Avdiivka is not just a symbolic victory, as reported in the West, but a strategic victory that could open the door to the Donbas for Russian forces, allowing Russia to solidify the borders of its newly annexed territories.

Following the retreat from Avdiivka, Ukrainian statements about stopping Russia retreated one more step, now claiming that Russia won’t be able to advance. General Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military-intelligence chief, acknowledged that the loss of Avdiivka was tough, but insisted that Russia has its problems too, and that “they don’t have the strength” to advance significantly and capture all of the Donbas.

American officials echoed Budanov’s assessment, saying that “Russian gains in eastern Ukraine will not necessarily lead to any collapse of Ukrainian lines and that Moscow is unlikely to be able to follow up with another major offensive.”

Kiev said that their armed forces had withdrawn from Avdiivka and established new defensive lines around Lastochkyne and other nearby villages. But on February 26, Lastochkyne fell, and Ukrainian troops retreated to villages further west.

Western officials now say that Russia is “attacking in strength along four parallel axes in the northeast” and that they are “driving forward around Lyman and Kupiansk, in the Kharkiv region.” Newsweek says there are reports that Russian troops have now “advanced west of the village of Lastochkyne.” And military spokesperson Dmytro Lykhoviy now says that Ukrainian troops have withdrawn from Stepove and Severne, two villages near Avdiivka and north of Lastochkyne.

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Is Nato heading for nuclear war? 

On Monday, Europe crossed yet another red line in its ever-escalating, no-longer-so-proxy war against Russia. In a hastily arranged meeting of European leaders in Paris — a response to significant Russian breakthroughs on the Ukrainian frontline over the past few weeks — Emmanuel Macron shattered one of the few taboos left in Western circles by saying that sending Nato troops to Ukraine should not be ruled out. “We must do everything necessary to prevent Russia from winning the war,” he declared, adding that France could even take such action without the consent of other EU members because “each country is sovereign and its armed forces are sovereign”.

Unsurprisingly, this didn’t go down well with Nato allies, whom the French president hadn’t even bothered to warn beforehand. This was probably designed to maximise the statement’s impact: Macron is prone to attention-grabbing pronouncements that are never actually acted upon, often as a way of deflecting attention away from domestic problems.

This time, though, Macron overplayed his hand. His statement was so obviously unhinged that it fuelled a sizeable backlash in France, where half of the population opposes providing more aid to Ukraine. Marine Le Pen accused Macron of playing with the lives of French children, while radical leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon called it “madness”. Outside of France, meanwhile, practically all Nato members rebutted Macron’s suggestion and ruled out sending ground troops to Ukraine, while Putin himself yesterday warned such a move could spark a major escalation.

But how long will Nato leaders maintain this stance? After all, Macron is right about one thing: Nato countries have crossed virtually all the red lines they had given themselves at the start of the conflict. “Many people who say ‘Never, never’ today were the same people who said ‘Never tanks, never planes, never long-range missiles’ two years ago,” he said. In this sense, the whole troops-on-the-ground debate is little more than a distraction from the fact that we are, of course, already engaged in a de facto war against Russia — troops on the ground or not. Besides, it’s an open secret that Western special forces are already present in Ukraine — including British troops.

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Macron Doubles Down on Remarks About NATO Sending Troops to Ukraine

French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday stood behind his comments about NATO not ruling out sending troops to Ukraine despite the uproar it caused and the warning it drew from Russia.

“These are sufficiently serious issues; every one of the words that I say on this issue is weighed, thought through, and measured,” Macron told reporters.

Following a meeting of European leaders on the Ukrainian proxy war on Monday, Macron said, “There’s no consensus today to send in an official, endorsed manner troops on the ground. But in terms of dynamics, nothing can be ruled out.”

His comments appeared to confirm a warning from Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico, an opponent of NATO support for Ukraine, who said earlier that some NATO members were considering sending troops to Ukraine on a “bilateral basis.”

Macron’s comments caused many NATO members to refute the idea that they’re considering sending combat troops to Ukraine, although it’s an open secret that there are a small number of NATO special operations forces already in the country.

One NATO country that backed up Macron is Lithuania, the Baltic nation that borders Kaliningrad and has an active duty military that only consists of only about 15,000 troops.

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Scholz’s Slip Of The Tongue Spilled The Beans On Ukraine’s Worst-Kept Secret

The worst-kept secret of this proxy war is that it’s already a hot NATO-Russian war but an undeclared and limited one where both sides still abide by informal “rules of engagement”.

German Chancellor Scholz’s innuendo that France and the UK have clandestinely deployed troops to Ukraine to assist with “target control” against Russian forces prompted a harsh reaction from the British, but his slip of the tongue simply spilled the beans on this proxy war’s worst-kept secret. No honest observer believed the prior denials about Western troops in that country since their Ukrainian counterparts couldn’t realistically be trained to operate such modern-day arms in such a short time.

His inadvertent revelation, which was shared to explain why Germany won’t send long-range Taurus missiles to that country since it doesn’t want to follow the others’ lead by clandestinely deploying troops there, came shortly after French President Macron’s relatedly scandalous claim. He said that NATO countries debated whether to conventionally intervene in Ukraine when many of their leaders met in Paris on Monday though no consensus had been reached on this ultra-sensitive question.

Although practically every one of his peers denied that anything of the sort was discussed, the Financial Times then quoted an unnamed senior European defense official who bluntly confirmed that “Everyone knows there are western special forces in Ukraine — they’ve just not acknowledged it officially.” Such claims were hitherto dismissed as “Russian conspiracy theories” but now they predictably turned out to be statements of “conspiracy fact” to the surprise of only the most dishonest and naive observers.

The Ukrainian Conflict has always been a NATO proxy war on Russia that was waged by hybrid means through that former Soviet Republic, with this latest development removing any “plausible deniability” about that after the words that just came from the mouth of the EU’s de facto leader. This prompts a re-evaluation of the way in which the unprecedented NATO-Russian security dilemma there has been managed up until this point.

President Putin famously said the following on 24 February 2022 about those who’d like to interfere with the special operation: “No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history. No matter how the events unfold, we are ready. All the necessary decisions in this regard have been taken. I hope that my words will be heard.”

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NY Times Plays CIA Messenger — Turn Off The Lights, The Party Is Over

I apologize on not writing about the NY Times article by  Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz, The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin, before now but my schedule did not give me the time I needed to do the subject justice. I was inundated with requests for a comment by several media outlets and did my best to accommodate those in radio and TV interviews.

The key thing you need to understand is that this article is a deliberate piece of misinformation that is intended to shape public and policymaking opinion in the United States. The following opening to the article, like all propaganda, is a mixture of fact and fantasy.

the intelligence partnership between Washington and Kyiv is a linchpin of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. The C.I.A. and other American intelligence agencies provide intelligence for targeted missile strikes, track Russian troop movements and help support spy networks.

But the partnership is no wartime creation, nor is Ukraine the only beneficiary.

It took root a decade ago, coming together in fits and starts under three very different U.S. presidents, pushed forward by key individuals who often took daring risks. It has transformed Ukraine, whose intelligence agencies were long seen as thoroughly compromised by Russia, into one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.

Yes, it is true that U.S. intelligence, along with NATO, supplied Ukraine with intelligence used to carry out missile strikes on Russian positions. Admitting this in the pages of the NY Times is reckless and dangerous. I am pretty sure the Russians already knew this but putting this on the record with U.S. intelligence sources is a casus belli for Russia. Can you imagine the reaction if Russian intelligence confirmed they provided intel to a group or country that attacked the U.S.? Do you think Washington would ignore that and not seek retribution? Of course not.

But the article starts with the big lie by claiming that the CIA relationship with Ukraine started in February 2022 and then piles on with these two whoppers:

Before the war, the Ukrainians proved themselves to the Americans by collecting intercepts that helped prove Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of a commercial jetliner, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The Ukrainians also helped the Americans go after the Russian operatives who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The Maidan and the ensuing events in February and March 2014 involved what I believe was a joint U.S./U.K. intelligence operation to remove Ukraine’s President Yanukovich and install a pro-Western government that would be used to attack Russia. The fact of the matter is that the CIA has been dealing with Ukrainian opponents of Russia since at least 1947.

The propaganda purpose of the article is revealed by the decision of the reporters to repeat the specious claims that Russia shot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17 and that Russia “meddled” in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. We have had a slew of revelations over the last two months, principally from Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger, showing that it was the Clinton campaign with the help of the CIA and the FBI who meddled in the 2016 Presidential campaign in a failed effort to defeat Donald Trump. Entous and Schwirtz insert the bogus claim that Ukraine fingered the Russian officer responsible for “election interference.”

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Dutch Are Lone Supporters Of Macron’s ‘EU Boots On The Ground In Ukraine’ Plan

French President Emmanuel Macron’s words at the start of the week which opened the door to European ‘boots on the ground in Ukraine’ elicited shock, dismay and caution even from within the Western allies. NATO itself scrambled to assure the world that it has no plans to deploy troops inside Ukraine, with Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg rejecting the idea in remarks, given it would certainly mean automatic WW3.

According to CNN, “Macron had told reporters at a news conference that while he and the other 21 European leaders present did not agree on deploying military personnel, the prospect was discussed openly.” Even typically hawkish countries Poland and the UK distanced themselves from such a possibility. 

However one tiny NATO country did step up to back Macron’s words. The Netherlands has said it won’t rule out sending Western troops to Ukraine. Dutch Chief of Defense, General Onno Eichelsheim, told an Amsterdam-based news outlet that while it’s a possibility it is “not yet opportune” to do so.”I think you should keep all options open to see how you can best support Ukraine,” Eichelsheim said.

According to more from the Dutch interview: 

Ukraine has not asked the Netherlands to send troops and there is no point in discussing it at the moment, Eichelsheim added. If Western militaries were to go to Ukraine, it would have to be in a coalition, the Dutch military chef said. “This could either happen via NATO or via an alliance of 10-15 countries.”

“It would be very odd if one or two countries did it,” he added.

Indeed, President Putin’s ominous response to Macron’s words seized precisely on the question of NATO Article 5…

“If Ukraine joins NATO, you won’t even have time to blink your eye when you execute Article 5,” Putin said, which suggests that possibly a nuclear response could be on the table.

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