Tag: ukraine

Neo-Nazi Battalion Just Claimed Russia Used Chemical Weapons in Ukraine, Potentially Dragging US into War

The prediction of a chemical weapons attack by Russia, along with the promised “severe” response by US and NATO is an extremely dangerous move by the Biden administration.

Putin has zero incentive to use chemical weapons on civilians in Ukraine. Not only would his own people very likely turn against him for such a move, he and his advisors know that anything close to a chemical weapons attack would provoke a response from the US and NATO — potentially sparking a war inside Russia and catastrophic nuclear war globally.

While Russia lacks the incentive to wages such an attack, the White House’s promise of a “severe response” to an attack does, however, provide an incentive for insidious forces inside Ukraine to stage a fake chemical attack. If unethical forces inside Ukraine could stage an attack and convince the world it was Putin who carried it out, they would immediately receive the backing of NATO and US.

Fast forward to this week, and on Monday, the Azov Battalion — whose credibility is derived from years of neo-Nazi activities with a month of praise and whitewashing in the Western media — has made the claim which could drag NATO into the war.

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Moscow Blasts US Genocide Label From Country That’s Committed “Well-Known” War Crimes

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was quick to back Joe Biden’s Tuesday remarks which labeled what Putin is doing inside Ukraine as “genocide”. Biden had followed his use of the label for the first time, which marks a serious escalation in the United States’ rhetoric by explaining, “It’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is trying to wipe out the idea of being Ukrainian.”

Zelensky then said on Twitter: “Calling things by their names is essential to stand up to evil,” and made clear he agrees with the definition: “We are grateful for U.S. assistance provided so far and we urgently need more heavy weapons to prevent further Russian atrocities.” 

The Kremlin has responded, on Wednesday calling the genocide label “unacceptable” and a distortion of the conflict, which the Kremlin has previously described as a battle against NATO expansion imminently threatening Russia’s legitimate security interests.

“We consider this kind of effort to distort the situation unacceptable,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov responded, according to Reuters. He emphasized the hypocrisy of a US military machine which has committed “well-known crimes” in the recent past.

“This is hardly acceptable from a president of the United States, a country that has committed well-known crimes in recent times,” Peskov described.

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Straight Out Of Dr. Strangelove

Robert Kagan, neoconservative writer and husband to Deputy Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, wrote a piece called “The Price of Hegemony” in Foreign Affairs last week that was fascinating. If I’d written his opening, people would denounce me as a Putin-concubine:

Although it is obscene to blame the United States for Putin’s inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading.

Just as Pearl Harbor was the consequence of U.S. efforts to blunt Japanese expansion on the Asian mainland, and just as the 9/11 attacks were partly a response to the United States’ dominant presence in the Middle East after the first Gulf War, so Russian decisions have been a response to the expanding post–Cold War hegemony of the United States and its allies in Europe.

Kagan went on to make an argument straight out of Dr. Strangelove. Instead of doing what some critics want and focusing on “improving the well-being of Americans,” the U.S. government is instead properly recognizing the responsibility that comes with being a superpower. So, while Russia’s invasion may indeed have been a foreseeable consequence of a decision to expand our hegemonic reach, now that we’re here, there’s only one option left. Total commitment:

It is better for the United States to risk confrontation with belligerent powers when they are in the early stages of ambition and expansion, not after they have already consolidated substantial gains. Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Moscow using it is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014, if the West had intervened then. And it has always been extraordinarily small…

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Western Dissent from US/NATO Policy on Ukraine is Small, Yet the Censorship Campaign is Extreme

If one wishes to be exposed to news, information or perspective that contravenes the prevailing US/NATO view on the war in Ukraine, a rigorous search is required. And there is no guarantee that search will succeed. That is because the state/corporate censorship regime that has been imposed in the West with regard to this war is stunningly aggressive, rapid and comprehensive.

On a virtually daily basis, any off-key news agency, independent platform or individual citizen is liable to be banished from the internet. In early March, barely a week after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the twenty-seven nation European Union — citing “disinformation” and “public order and security” — officially banned the Russian state-news outlets RT and Sputnik from being heard anywhere in Europe. In what Reuters called “an unprecedented move,” all television and online platforms were barred by force of law from airing content from those two outlets. Even prior to that censorship order from the state, Facebook and Google were already banning those outlets, and Twitter immediately announced they would as well, in compliance with the new EU law.

But what was “unprecedented” just six weeks ago has now become commonplace, even normalized. Any platform devoted to offering inconvenient-to-NATO news or alternative perspectives is guaranteed a very short lifespan. Less than two weeks after the EU’s decree, Google announced that it was voluntarily banning all Russian-affiliated media worldwide, meaning Americans and all other non-Europeans were now blocked from viewing those channels on YouTube if they wished to. As so often happens with Big Tech censorship, much of the pressure on Google to more aggressively censor content about the war in Ukraine came from its own workforce: “Workers across Google had been urging YouTube to take additional punitive measures against Russian channels.”

So prolific and fast-moving is this censorship regime that it is virtually impossible to count how many platforms, agencies and individuals have been banished for the crime of expressing views deemed “pro-Russian.” On Tuesday, Twitter, with no explanation as usual, suddenly banned one of the most informative, reliable and careful dissident accounts, named “Russians With Attitude.” Created in late 2020 by two English-speaking Russians, the account exploded in popularity since the start of the war, from roughly 20,000 followers before the invasion to more than 125,000 followers at the time Twitter banned it. An accompanying podcast with the same name also exploded in popularity and, at least as of now, can still be heard on Patreon.

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The Pimps of War

The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence.

They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state, and the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council and Brookings Institute. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many murderous military interventions go bad. They are immovable props, the parasitic mandarins of power that are vomited up in the dying days of any empire, including that of the U.S., leaping from one self-defeating catastrophe to the next.

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Americans Are “In Charge” of the War Says French Journalist Who Returned From Ukraine

A French journalist who returned from Ukraine after arriving with volunteer fighters told broadcaster CNews that Americans are directly “in charge” of the war on the ground.

The assertion was made by Le Figaro senior international correspondent Georges Malbrunot.

Malbrunot said he had accompanied French volunteer fighters, two of whom had previously fought against ISIS.

“I had the surprise, and so did they, to discover that to be able to enter the Ukrainian army, well it’s the Americans who are in charge,” said Malbrunot.

Adding that he and the volunteers “almost got arrested” by the Americans, who asserted they were in charge, the journalist then revealed that they were forced to sign a contract “until the end of the war.”

“And who is in charge? It’s the Americans, I saw it with my own eyes,” said Malbrunot, adding, “I thought I was with the international brigades, and I found myself facing the Pentagon.”

Malbrunot also mentioned America providing Ukraine with switchblade suicide drones, something highlighted by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in a tweet that revealed Ukrainian soldiers were being trained to use the devices in Biloxi, Mississippi.

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US Suddenly Pretends To Care About Rights Abuses In India

The United States is suddenly very concerned about human rights violations in India, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken telling the press on Monday that “we are monitoring some recent concerning developments in India including a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police and prison officials.”

While it is true that India’s right-wing government is guilty of human rights abuses and has been for years, it is also true that the US State Department does not actually care about human rights abuses.

A leaked State Department memo from the early days of the Trump administration showed neoconservative empire manager Brian Hook teaching a previously uninitiated Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that for the US government, “human rights” are only a weapon to be used for keeping other nations in line. In a remarkable insight into the cynical nature of imperial narrative management, Hook told Tillerson that it is US policy to overlook human rights abuses committed by nations aligned with US interests while exploiting and weaponizing them against nations who aren’t.

“In the case of US allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the Administration is fully justified in emphasizing good relations for a variety of important reasons, including counter-terrorism, and in honestly facing up to the difficult tradeoffs with regard to human rights,” Hook explained in the memo.

“One useful guideline for a realistic and successful foreign policy is that allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries,” Hook wrote. “We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them. For this reason, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And this is not only because of moral concern for practices inside those countries. It is also because pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically.”

No, the US State Department does not care about human rights abuses. Blinken’s remarks are just the latest in a series of shots across the bow that the US empire has been firing at New Delhi to warn it against moving into alignment with Moscow.

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Evidence that the Missile that Caused the Massacre in Kramatorsk Is Not Russian but Ukrainian

The serial number of the Tochka-U missile that hit the Kramatorsk railway station on 8 April 2022 is Ш91579 (in Russian) or Sh91579 (in English). This serial number marks the stock of Tochka-U missiles in the possession of the Ukrainian Army. Only the Ukrainian Armed Forces have Tochka-U missiles. Russia has not had them since 2019: they have all been deactivated. The Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics do not have and have never had Tochka-U.

The direction of the cone and the tail section of the missile that landed on the ground near the Kramatorsk train station clearly shows that it was fired from the 19th Ukrainian Missile Brigade, deployed near Dobropolie 45 km from Kramatorsk.

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Dick Cheney’s Daughter Wants War

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), was interviewed by CNN’s Jake Tapper today. During the friendly discussion, Cheney, referring to the tragic bombing of a train station in Ukraine, made the outrageous claim that Russia is conducting a “genocidal campaign.” The embattled congresswoman has joined with many other Democrats and Republicans in dangerous hyperbole that could easily escalate already heightened tensions.

By any definition of the word, Russia is not involved in a “genocide” against the Ukrainian people. But if there is some new definition that we’re not aware of, Cheney should be careful with her condemnations.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, a key architect for the invasion of Iraq, would be just as guilty, if not much more guilty, as Russian President Vladimir Putin of “genocide,” if this new definition describes Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. 

Liz Cheney is singing the tune of the New York Times, the Washington Post and a who’s who of regime change proponents, all itching for a fight — or, at least, the threat of a fight.

And the chorus sounds very familiar. The band broke up after the 2003 invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq. But leading up to that war, they were playing on every radio station.

There are many reasons that a war — or the talk of war — is desirable for policymakers and media “elites.” The first three that come to mind in this situation are the excuses offered by conflict for a disastrous economy, the need to bury years of U.S. political corruption in Ukraine, and Raytheon stock.

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CIA Admits Feeding Americans False Info About Ukraine

Last week an extraordinary article appeared in, of all places, NBC News, reporting that the US intelligence community is knowingly feeding information it does not believe accurate to the US mainstream media for the American audience to consume.

In other words, the article reports that the US “deep state” admits to being actively engaged in lying to the American people in the hopes that it can manipulate public opinion

According to the NBC News article, “multiple US officials acknowledged that the US has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect…”

Readers will recall the shocking headlines that Russia was prepared to use chemical weapons in Ukraine, that China would be providing military equipment to Russia, that Russian President Putin was being fed misinformation by his advisors, and more.

All of these were churned out by the CIA to be repeated in the American media even though they were known to be false. It was all about, as one intelligence officer said in the article, “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”

That may have been the goal, but what the CIA actually did was get inside America’s head with false information meant to shape public perception of the conflict. They lied to propagandize us in favor of the Biden Administration’s narrative.

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