Tag: ukraine

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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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. 

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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.

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US Intelligence Has Helped Kill Multiple Russian Generals In Ukraine

Last month Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin bluntly admitted of US policy aims in Ukraine: “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree it cannot do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” He also sought to stress before the American public during an interview that the US is not fighting a “proxy war”.

However, unnamed senior American officials in a bombshell New York Times report have said that intelligence sharing with the Ukrainians have helped take out some of the estimated 12 Russian generals that have died on the front lines since the Feb.24 invasion, an astonishingly high number given the rarity in any war of deaths from among highest officer ranks (and considering the war has been going for a little over two months at this point).

The intelligence sharing, which was previously vaguely acknowledged as happening by President Biden, is part of a broadly expansive US role in the conflict with the way being paved by unprecedented in size military aid packages and weapons shipments.

According to the limited details of intelligence provided to the Ukrainians, The New York Times reports that “The United States has focused on providing the location and other details about the Russian military’s mobile headquarters, which relocate frequently.”  Additionally, “Ukrainian officials have combined that geographic information with their own intelligence — including intercepted communications that alert the Ukrainian military to the presence of senior Russian officers — to conduct artillery strikes and other attacks that have killed Russian officers.”

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Now Russia accuses Ukraine of using Black Magic: State media says ‘Satanic seal of the dark forces’ was found at deserted military HQ in propaganda claim

Russian state media have claimed there are signs that Ukrainian troops were practising black magic at a military headquarters in Ukraine.

A ‘satanic seal’ – a symbol believed to hold connections to a greater supernatural power – was apparently found on the wall of a deserted Ukrainian military base on the outskirts of the village of Trekhizbenka in the Luhansk region.

The Russian news agency RIA Novosti claimed the symbol, as well as other markings apparently made with blood, showed there were signs Ukrainian soldiers were ‘practicing black magic’.

The news agency claims ‘disciples of otherworldly forces tried to consecrate their weapons and made marks with blood’ so as to give their armoury extra energy to deal extra damage when it hits a target.

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US & Ukraine Contract With Private Sector Spy Firms To Target Moscow’s Forces

The Wall Street Journal reports that the US, Ukraine, and its allies are paying companies with spy satellites to collect intelligence on Russian troop movements.

Western counties have worked with several firms that maintain hundreds of satellites making passes over Ukraine each day. While the satellites have different abilities, some can scan the entire country daily with a nine-foot resolution. Other companies collect intelligence through clouds and at night.

HawkEye 360’s fleet of satellites can actively follow Russian troop movements. John Serafini, the firm’s CEO, said it has been following Russian forces using GPS jamming equipment. 

Maxar Technologies is contracting with various media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal. The firm provides journalists with images of a broad range of Ukraine with a 12-inch resolution.

Officials have recently discussed giving Kiev more detailed intelligence as the battle moves to Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. The US claims it assisted the Ukrainian military in downing a Russian troop transport, killing hundreds.

Senior national security officials told the outlet that the more affordable space-based technology is making it more difficult for Russia to hide its troop placements. Officials also noted that it is easier for the White House to declassify its intelligence because the data collected from private satellites is public information.

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