Tag: ukraine

Pentagon Wants Permanent Military Bases In Eastern Europe To Deter Russia

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Mark Milley in Tuesday testimony before the House Armed Services Committee told Congressional leaders that the US should establish permanent military bases in Eastern Europe in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

He cited that allies Romania, Poland and Baltic countries remain “very willing” to host US bases, and that “they’ll build them, they’ll pay for them.” He testified alongside Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin. “My advice would be to create permanent bases, but don’t permanently station,” Milley said.

He explained that this wouldn’t necessitate permanently deployed forces, but with the same benefits: “You get the effect of permanence by rotational forces,” the top general said.

Among other highlights in the House testimony was his being questioned over whether Vladimir Putin could have been deterred ahead of the Feb.24 invasion of Ukraine, short of direct US-Russia clash. He said:

“Candidly, short of the commitment of US military forces into Ukraine proper, I’m not sure he was deterrable.”

But he and Secretary Austin touted the Pentagon’s robust response in assisting Ukrainian forces, including providing weapons as well as intelligence sharing: 

“We’ve had extraordinary intelligence all throughout and the intelligence sharing that we’ve enabled Ukraine to see … the ability of us to transmit information that is useful to Ukraine has been enormously helpful,” the US commander said.

On US weapons in the Ukraine war being a game-changer, Milley described, “We’ve seen them again blunt the advance of a far superior force with respect to the Russians in terms of numbers and capability by using the right types of techniques and the right weapon systems; the Javelin, the Stingers are proven to be very effective in the fight.”

Gen. Milley further called Russia’s action the “greatest threat to peace and security of Europe, perhaps the world in my 40 years of service and in uniform.”

He described that it shakes the foundations of the current global order, specifically also mentioning China: “We are now facing two global powers, China and Russia, each with significant military capabilities,” he said.

Secretary Austin backed Milley’s Ukraine assessment, confirming that the US had provided Ukraine with one billion dollars in aid ahead of the Russian invasion…

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Ukrainian Civilians Being Used as Human Shields Continues

As the humanitarian situation in Ukraine declined, UN officials briefed the Security Council on 7 March.  Vasily Nebenzya, the Russian Federation Permanent Representative, argued that safety for civilians in Ukraine is not a problem for Russia, because “we are not bombarding them,” but rather it is the Ukrainian radicals and neo-Nazis who were holding civilians hostage in cities and using them as human shields, not allowing them to leave, despite the fact that there were humanitarian corridors.

As it has been in the past, “we think that UNICEF’s views should be based on reliable tried and tested information,” Nebenzya began, and asked the council to consider the dangers of the proliferation of “small arms and light weapons many of which have fallen into the hands of radical elements including those who have been deliberately freed from prison.”  An irresponsible step by Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the number of civilian victims at the hands of the radicals was increasing day by day, he noted.

“There is an information war going on, more likely a disinformation war, and we would say that in the West – in the free world – where Russian information resources are being turned off and where any information which contradicts your version of events is not allowed to be broadcast.”

He emphasised that safety for civilians in Ukraine was not a problem for Russians because Russians were not bombarding them but rather it was Ukrainian radicals and neo-Nazis who were holding hostage whole towns and cities and were making use of citizens as human shields.  They were not allowing civilians to leave cities despite the fact that there were humanitarian corridors and that Russian units had declared a ceasefire.

Nebenzya explained that an agreement was reached that on 5 March a humanitarian corridor would be opened from Mariupol but the radicals in Mariupol violated this agreement.

“A radio conversation that was intercepted between two commanders of the nationalist battalion Azov … the radicals there were told to shoot at the legs of those who were heading for the humanitarian corridors. Those who risked life and limb to try and leave Mariupol, when they reached the checkpoints to exit the city, were shot on site by Ukrainian Nazis. There’s a great deal of video evidence of this. In Mariupol alone there were some 200 000 civilians who are in the crosshairs of the of the forces there,” he said.

The Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk called the proposal to open humanitarian corridors towards Russia “absurd and unacceptable,” Nebenzya told the council, “it is clear to us that the Kiev regime is making use of all available and unavailable methods to wholeheartedly stop the exit of those citizens who wish to leave, and also foreigners who wish to go to Russia, because they’re scared that once these people are free they will tell the truth about the actions of Ukrainian radicals.”

He quoted a statement made that day by the Mayor of Sumy, Alexander Lysenko, together with the commander of the national battalion: “There will not be any green corridors. No civilians will leave to Russia and those who try to will be shot dead.”

“We are also particularly concerned that the Ukrainian radicals are continuing to hold hostage, as human shields, more than 1500 foreigners in a range of cities … we are shocked by news of the inhumane attacks by nationalists on student accommodation which has among other things caused the death of Indian students.”

Nebenzya pointed out that the cowardly practice of using the civilian population as hostages is “not just deeply immoral but also violates the norms of international humanitarian law including articles 57 and 58 of the first additional protocol to the Geneva Convention of 1949.”

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The truth about Bucha is out there, but perhaps too inconvenient to be discovered

“In war, truth is the first casualty.” This quote has been attributed to Aeschylus, a 6th BCE Greek tragedian noted for his “copious use of imagery, mythic allusion, grand language, wordplay and riddles.” It is only fitting, therefore, that the man who first gave word to the concept of modern-day war-time propaganda would see his quote come to life in the present-day Ukraine. The Kiev government and their Western information warfare advisers may have coopted all of Aeschylus’ playwright devices to craft a modern-day tragedy in the Ukrainian town of Bucha that exemplifies the notion of the lie as not just a byproduct, but also a weapon of war.

The main source of the Bucha tragedy reports is a videotape, taken by the Ukrainian National Police, of one of their convoys driving through a street in the town. A dozen or so corpses litter the roadway, many of them appearing to have been bound. This video has gone viral, producing a pandemic of anguish and anger that has swept over much of the world, capturing the attention of heads of state and the head of the Catholic Church alike, resulting in a tidal wave of condemnation and outrage directed at Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. The cause-and-effect relationship between the video and the global backlash is clear – the former could not exist without the latter.

One of the first lessons of objectivity is to slow things down to make sure that fact is not obscured by emotion. The Bucha videotape is disturbing. The video has been released in its present form, it appears, with the express intent of producing a visceral “shock and awe” moment for the viewer. If this was indeed the case, then those who released it – the Ukrainian National Police – have succeeded beyond their wildest imagination. Or that of their advisors, as the case may be. 

The linkage between the dead and the Russian military was established immediately, without any fact-based data to back it up, and subsequently echoed in all forms of media – mainstream and social alike. Anyone who dared question the established “Russia did it” narrative was shouted down and belittled as a “Russian shill,” or worse. 

That these conclusions are the byproduct of mass hysteria is beside the point – why seek to be objective when the narrative fits every stereotype that had been carefully assembled beforehand by the same people parroting the Bucha story today. Social “preconditioning” of an audience unused to critical thinking is an essential step in getting this audience to accept at face value anything that is put before it, regardless of how egregiously the facts of the story strain credulity. And let’s be clear – the Ukrainian narrative of the events in Bucha seems to stretch credibility.

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20 Facts About The Emerging Global Food Shortage That Should Chill You To The Core

A very alarming global food shortage has already begun, and it is only going to get worse in the months ahead.  I realize that this is not good news, but I would encourage you to share the information in this article with everyone that you can.  People deserve to understand what is happening, and they deserve an opportunity to get prepared.

The pace at which things are changing around the globe right now is absolutely breathtaking, but most people assume that life will just continue to carry on as it normally does.  Unfortunately, the truth is that a very real planetary emergency is developing right in front of our eyes.  The following are 20 facts about the emerging global food shortage that should chill you to the core…

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Pundits Who Advocate Hot War With Russia Are Enemies Of Humanity

In an appearance on the MSNBC show Velshi, The Modern War Institute’s John Spencer explicitly advocated direct US military conflict with Russia due to allegations of war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.

“I’m ready to commit at this moment — unlike I was before this day — to put people in direct contact with Russia, to stop Russia,” Spencer said. “Call it peacekeeping. Call it what you will. We have to do more than provide weapons. And by ‘we,’ I mean the United States. Yes, we’ll do it as a coalition with lots of other people, but we are the example. So put boots on the ground, send weapons directly at Russia.”

Notice the bizarre verbal gymnastics being used by Spencer to obfuscate the fact that he is advocating a hot war with a nuclear superpower: “put people in direct contact with Russia,” “send weapons directly at Russia”. Who talks like that? He’s calling for the US military to fire upon the Russian military, he’s just saying it really weird.

To be clear this isn’t just some arms industry-funded think tanker saying this; The Modern War Institute is part of the Department of Military Instruction for the United States Military Academy, which is operated directly by the Pentagon.

Asked by the show’s host Ali Velshi what he thought of warnings that direct military confrontation with Russia could lead to nuclear war, Spencer said, “It is a huge risk, I understand that. But today is different.”

Velshi himself was much more to the point than his guest, both online and on social media.

“We are past the point of sanctions and strongly-worded condemnations and the seizing of oligarchs’ megayachts,” Velshi told his MSNBC audience. “If this is not the kind of moment that the United Nations and NATO and the UN and the G-20 and the Council of Europe and the G-7 were made for, what was the point of these alliances if not to stop this? The world cannot sit by as Vladimir Putin continues this reign of terror.”

“The turning point for the west and NATO will come when the sun rises over Kyiv on Sunday, and the war crimes against civilian non-combatants becomes visible to all,” Velshi said on Twitter over the weekend. “There is no more time for prevarication. If ‘never again’ means anything, then this is the time to act.”

Asked what specifically he meant by this, Velshi clarified that he was advocating “Direct military involvement.”

“Lines have been crossed and war crimes have been committed by Putin that make direct military intervention something NATO now must seriously consider,” Velshi added.

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Pandora Papers Reveal Offshore Holdings of Ukrainian President and his Inner Circle

Actor Volodymyr Zelensky stormed to the Ukrainian presidency in 2019 on a wave of public anger against the country’s political class, including previous leaders who used secret companies to stash their wealth overseas.

Now, leaked documents prove that Zelensky and his inner circle have had their own network of offshore companies. Two belonging to the president’s partners were used to buy expensive property in London.

The revelations come from documents in the Pandora Papers, millions of files from 14 offshore service providers leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with partners around the world including OCCRP.

The documents show that Zelensky and his partners in a television production company, Kvartal 95, set up a network of offshore firms dating back to at least 2012, the year the company began making regular content for TV stations owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch dogged by allegations of multi-billion-dollar fraud. The offshores were also used by Zelensky associates to purchase and own three prime properties in the center of London.

The documents also show that just before he was elected, he gifted his stake in a key offshore company, the British Virgin Islands-registered Maltex Multicapital Corp., to his business partner — soon to be his top presidential aide. And in spite of giving up his shares, the documents show that an arrangement was soon made that would allow the offshore to keep paying dividends to a company that now belongs to his wife.

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Manufactured Crisis: CIA trained the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and has chosen Ukraine as birthplace of new “Global White Supremacist” Terror Threat

As the conflict between Ukraine and Russia continues to escalate and dominate the world’s attention, the increasing evidence that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is and has been working to create and arm an insurgency in the country has received considerably little attention considering its likely consequences.

This is particularly true given that former CIA officials and a former Secretary of State are now openly saying that the CIA is following the “models” of past CIA-backed insurgencies in Afghanistan and Syria for its plans in Ukraine. Given that those countries have been ravaged by war as a direct result of those insurgencies, this bodes poorly for Ukraine.

Yet, this insurgency is poised to have consequences that reach far beyond Ukraine. It increasingly appears that the CIA sees the insurgency it is creating as more than an opportunity to take its hybrid war against Russia ever closer to its borders. As this report will show, it appears the CIA is determined to manifest a prophecy propagated by its own ranks over the past two years.

This prediction from former and current intelligence officials dates from at least early 2020 and holds that a “transnational white supremacist network” with alleged ties to the Ukraine conflict will be the next global catastrophe to befall the world as the threat of Covid-19 recedes.

Per these “predictions”, this global network of white supremacists – allegedly with a group linked to the conflict in the Donbas region of Ukraine at its core – is to become the new Islamic State-style threat and will undoubtedly be used as the pretext to launch the still-dormant infrastructure set up last year by the US government under President Biden for an Orwellian “War on Domestic Terror.”

Given that this CIA-driven effort to build an insurgency in Ukraine began as far back as 2015 and that the groups it has trained (and continues to train) include those with overt Neo-Nazi connections, it seems that this “coming Ukrainian insurgency,” as it has been recently called, is already here.

In that context, we are left with the unnerving possibility that this latest escalation of the Ukraine-Russia conflict has merely served as the opening act for the newest iteration of the seemingly endless “War on Terror.”

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Canceling All Things Russian ‘A Warning Sign’

A current trend to cancel all things Russian, even Tchaikovsky concerts, is a warning sign because it’s the same kind of thinking used during the totalitarian Soviet Union and can lead to more harm, according to Gary Saul Morson, a Northwestern University professor who has studied Russian literature and thought for decades.

“This should be a warning sign when you start thinking that because President [Vladimir] Putin does horrible things in Ukraine, we have to stop listening to Tchaikovsky,” Morson told NTD’s “The Nation Speaks” program on Mar. 26. “What’s going on here? How far can such thinking go?”

“To me, it’s reminiscent of exactly how the Soviets thought. They certainly divided the world into all good and all bad. And so, literally anything you did that hurt your enemy was good. And that was the basis of their morality,” said Morson. “It is what led to the horrors of Soviet behavior to killing millions of people.”

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US Provides $300 Million More in Security Assistance to Ukraine, Including Military Equipment

The Pentagon announced on April 1 that it will provide up to $300 million more in security assistance to Ukraine in military equipment amid Russia’s invasion.

The funds will be provided under authority granted to the Pentagon by the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), which was created in 2015 in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

“This decision underscores the United States’ unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in support of its heroic efforts to repel Russia’s war of choice,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby announced.

According to the department, capabilities in the latest package include laser-guided rocket systems, tactical secure communications systems, unmanned aircraft, armored vehicles, machine guns, ammunition, medical supplies, and other equipment.

Kirby said the new package “represents the beginning of a contracting process to provide new capabilities” to Ukraine, rather than delivering equipment drawn from U.S. military stockpiles.

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