Tag: ukraine

Geopolitics of human trafficking: How Western regime-change operations enable criminal activities

The slave trade in Ukraine has become one of the most serious problems of our time. Since the 2014 coup d’état, Kiev has been a key player in modern slavery, particularly for human trafficking and sexual exploitation networks. The political and social instability that has affected the country since the Western-led regime change operation is one of the main factors for the growth of such human rights violations.

A recent investigative report published by the Foundation to Battle Injustice showed in details the seriousness of the slave trade in Ukraine. According to the organization, Kiev has become one of the main global hubs in the human trafficking market, with free exploitation and circulation of irregular workers – in addition to the well-known trafficking of women and children in the predatory sex market.

The study points out that more than 300,000 Ukrainians were victims of the slave market between 1991 and 2021. This situation, however, has deteriorated even further since Vladimir Zelensky came to power. It is estimated that since the beginning of Zelensky’s government, more than 550,000 Ukrainians have been enslaved. These numbers are alarming and place Ukraine as one of the main agents of human trafficking in the entire world.

In its report, citing sources familiar with the topic and several insiders, the Foundation exposed how the slave trade in Ukraine is not limited to the exploitation of Ukrainian citizens. Since 2021, two reception centers for refugees from Africa have been operating in Ternopil. These facilities were used not only for receiving migrants but also for selling them on the European black market. An alleged member of the Ukrainian Presidential Cabinet, on condition of anonymity, reported to investigators that the organizer of the Ukrainian human trafficking network is Ruslan Stefanchuk, current chairman of the Verkhovna Rada.

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Ukraine Moves to Force Fighting-Age Men Into the Meatgrinder for U.S.

Dmitry Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, posted on X Tuesday that Kyiv is moving to pressure Ukrainian men who fled the country to avoid war with Russia by potentially cutting off their access to essential government services.

Ukraine will be receiving $61 billion in funding from the U.S., but it is having a hard time fielding a capable army. Thousands of men have fled and it is believed that up to 500,000 have died on the battlefield since the start of the war.

Kuleba posted on X that it is unfair that men who left the country would be treated the same as those who stayed.

”How it looks like now: a man of conscription age went abroad, showed his state that he does not care about its survival, and then comes and wants to receive services from this state. It does not work this way. Our country is at war,” he posted, according to RT, the Russian outlet.

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What Can We Learn From Our Forever War in Ukraine?

It has been a while since the United States won a war.  It looks as though we are about to lose yet another one – the war in Ukraine.  This is a proxy war justified as an effort to “weaken and isolate” Russia.  Our strategic defeat in this effort now leaves us with three unpalatable alternatives.  We can continue to support Ukraine as Russia grinds it to bits and reduces it further in size and population.  We can escalate the war, as French President Emmanuel Macron has advocated, despite the Russian threat to answer us with counter-escalation, possibly to the nuclear level.  Or we can face up to failure and save what we can of Ukraine by negotiating with Russia.  I know which of these choices I would prefer, and I suspect you do too.  And, however this unwise and unnecessary war ends, we need to ensure that there are no more like it in future.

They say that a mistake is only a mistake if you don’t learn from it.  Our country has recently made a lot of mistakes in its foreign policies.  Sadly, we don’t seem to be learning much of anything from this experience.  We have instead invented something uniquely American called a “forever war.”  Such wars routinely fail.  Still, we keep launching them.

I want to speak to you this evening about why we do this, why we shouldn’t, and how we can stop doing it.  My focus will be the forever war with Russia in Ukraine.

Forever wars can take many forms.  They can be economic or technological, like the one the Trump administration kicked off against China and that the Biden administration has enthusiastically doubled down on.  They can be military, like our twenty-three year “global war on terrorism.”  That has taken us into combat in over eighty countries, killed over 900,000 people, and cost us an estimated $8 trillion.  Forever wars need not be direct, as our proxy war in Ukraine illustrates.  They can even be covert, as our multiple barely concealed interventions in Syria demonstrate.

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The Ukraine war is lost, but Hollywood and DC don’t know it

On April 10, stars in Hollywood joined politicians in D.C. in demanding that Congress take up a war aid bill authorizing $60 billion in new assistance for Ukraine. 

But they’re all wrong. The war is lost. In fact, 90% of people in Europe believe that to be true. 

If that comes as a surprise, it shouldn’t. In late February, the Times of London published the results of a poll asking residents throughout the continent a very simple question: 

Can Ukraine win the war against Russia? Only 10% said yes. 

So, what do they see that Hollywood stars, the White House, and leaders on Capitol Hill do not? 

Three things. 

First, Ukraine lacks the soldiers to win. Kiev has lost at least 70,000 killed in action, with another 100,000 otherwise combat ineffective. 

And that’s a crisis. As Ukraine’s Commander of Joint Forces said on April 11, there are seven to 10 times more Russian soldiers than there are Ukrainians on the battlefield. 

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America’s Shame: It’s Sunday And We’re At War With The World

I know “the right side of history” is a goofy leftist trope—as if “history” were an entity, an organism of some sort, a knowable whole—but you do have to wonder what a future generation will think about what America has been doing to the world. I’ll let readers decide when we started downhill, who—or what ideologies—was/were responsible, and so forth. Interestingly, some GOPers are adopting that trope—leftist readers take note!

Michael Tracey @mtracey

Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly dropped to his knees in prayer for guidance on how to handle the Ukraine matter. Always fascinating when the voice of God becomes interchangeable with the voice of the National Security State

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Ukraine Gets Their Billions Despite CIA Director Reportedly Warning Zelenksy To Stop Stealing So Much Money

Democrats cheered and waved Ukrainian flags, chanting “Ukraine, Ukraine!” in some pavlovian response to Congress passing a bill that will send (another) $61 billion to Ukraine with no questions asked

Ukrainian president Zelenskyy was very pleased, personally thinking Speaker Johnson

I am grateful to the United States House of Representatives, both parties, and personally Speaker Mike Johnson for the decision that keeps history on the right track.

Democracy and freedom will always have global significance and will never fail as long as America helps to protect it.

The vital U.S. aid bill passed today by the House will keep the war from expanding, save thousands and thousands of lives, and help both of our nations to become stronger. Just peace and security can only be attained through strength.

We hope that bills will be supported in the Senate and sent to President Biden’s desk. Thank you, America!

‘War is Peace’, America!

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Unhinged Democrat Rep. Gerald Connolly Declares ‘the Ukrainian-Russian Border Is OUR Border’

Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat, declared on the House floor that “the Ukrainian-Russian border is OUR border” during an unhinged speech.

Connolly was raging at Republicans opposing the aid package to Ukraine before Saturday’s vote.

“Some say, well, we have to deal with our border first,” Connolly claimed. “The Ukrainian-Russian border is our border! It’s the border between depraved autocracy and freedom-loving people seeking our democratic way of life! Do we have a stake in that outcome? Yes. Undeniably, yes.”

Connolly echoed the sentiment in a post on X, writing, “The border between Russia and Ukraine is the border between depravity and democracy. Between autocracy and freedom. We undeniably have a stake in that outcome of that fight.”

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The Polish President Revealed That Foreign Companies Own Most Of Ukraine’s Industrial Agriculture

The Oakland Institute published a detailed report in February 2023 titled “War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land”, which exposed how foreign firms have clandestinely taken control of a significant share of Ukrainian farmland by exploiting a liberal law in collusion with local oligarchs. Their findings made waves around the world at the time but eventually receded from the public’s attention over half a year later once Western outlets like the USA Today misleadingly “fact-checked” it.

They took advantage of social media users conflating indirect ownership through stakes with direct control to discredit the institution’s report, after which it largely faded from the general discourse. Few could have expected that it would be none other than Polish President Andrzej Duda who just breathed new life into it during his interview with Lithuanian National Radio and Television. He was explaining Poland’s problem with Ukrainian agricultural imports when he dropped the following bombshell:

“I would like to draw particular attention to industrial agriculture, which is not really run by Ukrainians, it is run by big companies from Western Europe, from the USA. If we look today at the owners of most of the land, they are not Ukrainian companies. This is a paradoxical situation, and no wonder that farmers are defending themselves, because they have invested in their farms in Poland […] and cheap agricultural produce coming from Ukraine is dramatically destructive to them.”

Duda represents what’s widely considered to be one of the most pro-American and anti-Russian governments at any time in history so he can’t credibly be accused of “pushing Kremlin propaganda”.

He therefore wouldn’t have confirmed the dramatic claim of majority-foreign ownership of Ukraine’s industrial agriculture, albeit indirectly through stakes in national companies that exploit a liberal law in collusion with local oligarchs, if he didn’t have the facts provided to him by Polish experts to back it up.

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Ukraine’s Opposition To The Assimilation Of Its Refugees Is Extremely Hypocritical

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba warned on Friday that “It has become clear that assimilation would be extremely fast if we do not change our policy towards Ukrainians abroad”, calling on these refugees to “remain Ukrainian” with the innuendo that they shouldn’t plant roots in the West.

He didn’t explicitly say so, but it’s strongly hinted that he hopes that those millions who’ve fled the latest phase of the Ukrainian Conflict over the past two years will eventually return home to their country.

Kiev-based economist Alexey Kushch said in an interview with Ukrainian journalist Yury Romanenko last week that “I estimate that [after the conflict is over] Ukraine’s demographic profile <…> will be made up of 25 million people, including ten million senior citizens, five million children and two to three million disabled persons and veterans receiving social benefits. About seven to eight million working adults will make up the core of the economy.”

These two developments coincided with Ukraine’s passing of a new conscription law that doesn’t include a demobilization clause, which the media reported has left troops feeling “betrayed” while a member of the Rada described it as a “point of no return” in terms of turning citizens against the government. Kuleba obviously hopes that unassimilated Ukrainians will feel so unwelcome in the West that they’ll return home to risk their lives in the meatgrinder and then rebuild their country when the conflict ends.

Basically, he’s manipulating them on a faux “patriotic” pretext into creating problems for themselves abroad so that they’ll consider moving back to Ukraine, but his rhetoric is extremely hypocritical since it’s the opposite of how Kiev itself treats minorities.

It was observed that “The West Would Never Talk About Its Minorities The Way That Ukraine Talks About Its Russian One” after Rada speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk denied their very existence and associated rights last fall.

In other words, Kuleba wants Ukrainian refugees not to assimilate into their host societies, with a wink and a nod that they should exploit the liberal–globalist West’s related legislation and socio-cultural norms to preserve their culture as much as possible.

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Russia’s Military Is Bigger Than Before Invasion

A top US general told Congress last week that Russia’s military is 15% bigger today than it was before the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, an acknowledgment that the goal of “weakening” Russia has failed.

“The army is actually now larger — by 15% — than it was when it invaded Ukraine,” Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the head of US European Command, told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

Cavoli said that over the past year, Russia had increased its “front-line troop strength from 360,000 to 470,000,” which he said was due to Russia raising the maximum age of conscription from 27 to 30.

He described that this means Russia will have the ability to elarge “the pool of available military conscripts by 2 million for years to come.”

“In sum, Russia is on track to command the largest military on the continent,” he said. “Regardless of the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Russia will be larger, more lethal, and angrier with the West than when it invaded.”

Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell recently made similar comments, saying the US had “assessed over the course of the last couple of months that Russia has almost completely reconstituted militarily.”

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