Tag: ukraine

New York Times Blockbuster Article Prepares Americans for Defeat in Ukraine

A March 29 article on America’s involvement in the war in Ukraine in The New York Times by Adam Entous “reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood.” “Understood” is a euphemism. It means the American and global public were lied to.

The article reveals that the war in Ukraine truly was, as former British prime minister Boris Johnson and U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio have already said, a proxy war against Russia. U.S. military and intelligence were involved in every stage of the war, including supplying the weapons, the training, the planning, the war-gaming, the intelligence and the targeting. They were involved in everything from the big picture to the minute detail: “A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.”

American military and intelligence provided “intelligence about Russian battlefield positions, movements and intentions.” “Every morning, officers recalled, the Ukrainians and Americans gathered to survey Russian weapons systems and ground forces and determine the ripest, highest-value targets.” When a “European intelligence chief” discovered how “deeply enmeshed” NATO was in the battlefield operations, he marveled that “They are part of the kill chain now.”

But none of this is really new. For those paying attention to the news, and not the propaganda and repeated assurances and talking points, this information was readily available. Even The New York Times had already reported much of it. The Entous piece adds many names and significant details, but it is not a revelation that the U.S. was not only supplying the Ukrainian armed forces the weapons but that it was feeding them the intelligence.

But beneath the supposed bombshell, important nuggets are exposed that deserve more attention. Though, again, not entirely new, the piece opens with the revelation – intended as dramatic narrative and not investigative journalism–that from early in the war, NATO troops were on the ground in Ukraine. In the dramatic description of a clandestine convoy that smuggled two Ukrainian generals across the Polish border to meet with American intelligence and military officials to “forge what would become one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war in Ukraine,” The Times reveals that the convoy was “manned by British commandos, out of uniform but heavily armed.”

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It’s Official: Ukraine Conflict is British ‘Proxy War’

On March 29th, the New York Times published a landmark investigation exposing how the US was “woven” into Ukraine’s battle with Russia “far more intimately and broadly than previously understood,” with Washington almost invariably serving as “the backbone of Ukrainian military operations.” The outlet went so far as to acknowledge the conflict was a “proxy war” – an irrefutable reality hitherto aggressively denied in the mainstream – dubbing it a “rematch” of “Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.”

That the US has since February 2022 supplied Ukraine with extraordinary amounts of weaponry, and been fundamental to the planning of many of Kiev’s military operations large and small, is hardly breaking news. Indeed, elements of this relationship have previously been widely reported, with White House apparatchiks occasionally admitting to Washington’s role. Granular detail on this assistance provided by the New York Times probe is nonetheless unprecedented. For example, a dedicated intelligence fusion centre was secretly created at a vast US military base in Germany.

Dubbed “Task Force Dragon”, it united officials from every major US intelligence agency, and “coalition intelligence officers”, to produce extensive daily targeting information on Russian “battlefield positions, movements and intentions”, to “pinpoint” and “determine the ripest, highest-value targets” for Ukraine to strike using Western-provided weapons. The fusion centre quickly became “the entire back office of the war.” A nameless European intelligence chief was purportedly “taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his NATO counterparts had become” in the conflict’s “kill chain”…

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Will China Seal Zelensky’s Fate?

Adam Entous’ “blockbuster” New York Times report confirmed what only a few of us reported only weeks into the war, that Washington has been a co-belligerent in the war in Ukraine in all but name.

In a widely neglected article for the Asia Times on April 19, 2022, I reported that,

…US involvement goes deeper than arms sales and intelligence sharing. A Pentagon official who requested anonymity told me it is “likely we have a limited footprint on the ground in Ukraine, but under Title 50, not Title 10,” meaning US intelligence operatives and paramilitaries – but not regular military.”

In the same report I quoted Bruce Fein, a former associate attorney general during the Reagan administration, who described the behavior of the US and its allies as “systematic or substantial violations of a neutral’s duties of impartiality and non-participation in the conflict.”

If nothing else, Entous’ report demonstrates the troubling extent of our co-belligerency in a war against nuclear-armed Russia, and inadvertently revealed the depths of deceit to which Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan, Lloyd Austin and Antony Blinken sunk to keep America’s involvement from public view.

Having started a war he clearly believes he was provoked* into fighting after being serially misled by France and Germany during the Minsk process (2015-2022) Russia’s Vladimir Putin is in no mood to compromise.

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Ukraine has secret nuclear doomsday plan, according to former Zelensky adviser

Ukraine has a secret last-ditch “scorched earth” plan to render its entire territory uninhabitable in the event of a Russian victory in the war – and perhaps the rest of Europe with it.

This is according to Oleksiy Arestovych, a former adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In an interview with a Ukrainian journalist that he gave last month, Arestovych claimed that Ukraine’s current head of military intelligence, Kirill Budanov, has floated a plan to blow up all of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, and possibly some of Russia’s as well, if all other defensive measures fail.

Ukraine currently operates four nuclear power plants with a total of 15 reactors. One of them, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station, is the largest plant in Europe and has been under Russian occupation since March 2022. Russia, for its part, has 37 reactors divided among 11 power plants.

If all or even some of these reactors were attacked and destroyed simultaneously, the destructive impact would be beyond calculation. The Chernobyl nuclear accident that occurred in Ukraine in 1986, and which remains the worst disaster involving nuclear energy in history, killed dozens and led to long-term health problems for thousands of others. It also led to the evacuation of tens of thousands of people and rendered the surrounding area permanently uninhabitable, spreading radioactivity over a large area and even into Western Europe.

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So Milley was running the whole Ukraine war with Russia without telling the public -report

The first casualty in war is the truth, and now the New York Times has revealed how true that was.

While the U.S. public under the Biden administration was told, via Congress, that the U.S. was supplying arms to Ukraine, actually, the U.S. was pretty much running the whole show.

Its long and interesting report begins this way:

One of the men, Lt. Gen. Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, remembers being led up a flight of stairs to a walkway overlooking the cavernous main hall of the garrison’s Tony Bass Auditorium. Before the war, it had been a gym, used for all-hands meetings, Army band performances and Cub Scout pinewood derbies. Now General Zabrodskyi peered down on officers from coalition nations, in a warren of makeshift cubicles, organizing the first Western shipments to Ukraine of M777 artillery batteries and 155-millimeter shells.

Then he was ushered into the office of Lt. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, who proposed a partnership.

Its evolution and inner workings visible to only a small circle of American and allied officials, that partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology would become the secret weapon in what the Biden administration framed as its effort to both rescue Ukraine and protect the threatened post-World War II order.

The U.S., during the time of Gen. Mark Milley, was pretty much calling the shots on all aspects of the war — targets, intelligence, trainings, logistics and all kinds of sneaky pete inside Russia itself, ostensibly to keep the information out of Putin’s hands, the idea being to let him think Ukraine was putting up a ferocious fight on its own, without more than U.S. arms sales buttressing it.

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Sometimes, Appeasement Is the Best Option

Appeasement was a bad idea in 1938, but it’s often a good idea. Ukraine would be wise to appease Russia.

Ukraine’s supporters in the United States and Europe insist that any agreement ending Kyiv’s war with Russia must not involve Ukrainian territorial concessions, or Russia will profit from an inexcusable act of aggression against its neighbor. However, demanding a return to pre-conflict borders ignores current military realities. Russian forces occupy approximately 20 percent of Ukraine’s prewar territory, and there are no signs that Kyiv’s position is likely to improve. Indeed, Ukraine’s latest offensive into Russian-held territory near Kursk has been a spectacular failure.

The long-term prospects for Ukraine in a war of attrition are not encouraging either. Western intelligence agencies issue reports showing high (probably inflated) estimates about the extent of Russian military casualties, trying to sell the message that continued fighting will prove too costly for the Kremlin. However, those same agencies curiously omit estimates of Ukrainian military casualties, an odd stance if Ukraine actually is winning the war. Russia’s prewar population was approximately 140 million, whereas Ukraine’s was less than 50 million. Worse, the drain on the latter’s population from the fighting has been severe.  Experts estimate that Ukraine’s population has dropped by10 million since Russia’s February 2022 invasion: from 48 million to just over 37 million today, while Russia’s total has barely budged. Moscow’s edge in deployable military personnel and hardware is even greater. The brutal truth is that Russia is in a much better position than Ukraine to prevail in a war of attrition.

Insisting that the Kremlin return all conquered territory to Kyiv in a peace accord is profoundly unrealistic. Ukraine is almost certain to lose a war of attrition – after even more death and destruction. Western backers of Ukraine are doing their client no favor if they press Kyiv to persist in its unrealistic, maximalist demands. Recognizing an unpleasant reality and making essential policy adjustments do not constitute cowardice or feckless appeasement. It means having the wisdom to choose the best available option in a difficult situation.

An especially toxic phenomenon in world affairs has been the tendency of Western political leaders to be obsessed with the supposed lessons of the 1930s. It seems that every time a would-be challenger to any aspect of the existing U.S-directed international order surfaces, that individual is demonized as the “new Hitler.” Likewise, the country he controls supposedly poses a threat comparable to the one Nazi Germany posed. That caricature has been applied to political figures as diverse as Ho Chi Minh, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, and Vladimir Putin.

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Key Takeaways From NYT’s Secret History Detailing US ‘Shocking’ Involvement In Ukraine War

It is years too late and alternative and independent media had already done so much work on exposing the reality, including 600+ page books which have been published, but the New York Times on Sunday is out with a lengthy report on The Partnership: The Secret History of America’s Role in the Ukraine War.

Up until very recently, mainstream media gatekeepers wouldn’t so much as admit that a proxy war has been unfolding from the very start of the conflict in Ukraine. This even after the so-called paper of record had earlier in Feb. 2024 acknowledged that the CIA had built 12 “secret spy bases” in Ukraine to wage a shadow war against Russia going back to 2014. 

Again, it comes much too belatedly, but now with Ukrainian forces clearly losing the fight, the Times admits that the prior Biden administration was far more involved in being embedded on a military and intelligence level with Ukraine than was previously made public by official sources.

The report is a deep dive into the “extraordinary partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology” that became Zelensky’s “secret weapon” in countering Russia. It begins by describing that within two months of Putin sending his army across the border, Ukrainian generals in civilians clothes were being secretly whisked away for high-level war planning sessions at US bases in Germany.

“The passengers were top Ukrainian generals,” NY Times describes of men taken by a convoy of unmarked cars from the Ukrainian capital to Western Europe. “Their destination was Clay Kaserne, the headquarters of U.S. Army Europe and Africa in Wiesbaden, Germany. Their mission was to help forge what would become one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war in Ukraine.”

The report makes clear that US commanders were much more inter-woven into Ukrainian operations than known, to the point of ‘shocking’ some NATO allies. In essence many counter-Russia operations happening on Ukraine’s battlefields were simply run from the base in Germany. 

“But a New York Times investigation reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood,” the report continues. “At critical moments, the partnership was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations that, by U.S. counts, have killed or wounded more than 700,000 Russian soldiers. (Ukraine has put its casualty toll at 435,000.) Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command center, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.”

Notably, this is essentially US officials and the NY Times also admitting that the Kremlin has all along been right when it insisted this was never really simply about Moscow vs. Kiev – but that NATO countries have militarized Ukraine and weaponized it against Russia. President Putin and Kremlin officials have been fiercely complaining about US intervention all along, but this was dismissed in the West as merely ‘propaganda’.

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Russia Says UK & France Behind Latest Attack On Its Energy Infrastructure

There’s been another reported attack on the Sudzha pipeline infrastructure in Russia’s Kursk Region on Friday. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova conveyed to journalists a Russian military assessment saying a metering facility was “de facto destroyed” in a Ukrainian HIMARS attack. 

But unlike some of the prior Ukrainian attacks on the area, the Kremlin is directly blaming the West, going to far as to say that orders for the new strike came directly from European capitals.

We “have reasons to believe that targeting and navigation were facilitated through French satellites and British specialists input [target] coordinates and launched [the missiles],” Zakharova said, as cited in national media.

“The command came from London,” she emphasized, describing it as part of a West-backed “terror” campaign meant to degrade and destroy Russia’s energy infrastructure. 

The Kremlin has concluded this demonstrates that Kiev is “impossible to negotiate with,” she explained. The Ukrainians have done nothing to actually uphold the energy ceasefire put forward by Trump, despite that Zelensky “publicly supported” it, she said, suggesting it was all an empty game.

“Over the past 24 hours, the Kyiv regime continued its attacks on Russian energy infrastructure using various types of drones and HIMARS multiple rocket launchers,” the Russian military had also described.

Russia has alleged Ukraine launched rockets on the Sudzha facility, which had already been damaged in an earlier attack this week, along with nearly 20 drones launched at an oil refinery in the southern Saratov region.

Ukraine is meanwhile denying the Russian allegations, instead suggesting it’s a false flag orchestrated by Moscow:

On Friday, Ukraine denied claims that its forces fired on the gas metering station Sudzha and accused Russia’s military of striking the facility.

“Russia has again attacked the Sudzha gas transmission system in the Kursk region, which they do not control,” Andriy Kovalenko, an official who is responsible for countering disinformation, said on social media.

The two sides have traded blame for violating the energy ceasefire on basically a daily basis since it was proclaimed. It seems to have barely held, if at all, despite ongoing pledges from both sides to uphold it.

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Ukrainian Government Breaks Into Ancient Catacombs, Disturbs, Seizes Holy Relics In Further Attack On Christianity

We traveled to Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra in 2015 and walked among the relics of the saintly dead.

Now the Ukrainian government, in a further destruction of Christianity in the nation, is disturbing ancient relics of priests and saints to ‘examine’ them. For what reason they need to be examined, nobody knows.

Renowned Greek theologian, canonist, and presbyter Anastasios Gotsopoulos has issued a public appeal to the Primates of the Local Orthodox Churches concerning the situation at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, where Ukrainian authorities have initiated the examination of holy relics. The priest’s message was published by UOJ in Greece, reported the Union of Orthodox Journalists.

In his emotional appeal, Fr. Anastasios – rector of the Church of St. Nicholas in Patras – urged hierarchs to “raise a voice of denunciation and protest to stop the desecration of the holy sites of the Orthodox Church.”

He noted that on March 28, a commission appointed by Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture, accompanied by law enforcement, broke the locks of the Near and Far Caves of the Lavra to conduct “research” on the relics of the Pechersk saints.

“The composition of the commission clearly shows the regime’s disregard for the sanctity,” Gotsopoulos stated, pointing out that the commission includes anatomists, biologists, and even a veterinarian – but not a single representative of the Church.

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After Rejecting Peace, Ukraine Loses Security Guarantees & Revenue From Trump’s Mineral Deal Offer

President Donald Trump’s administration revised the previous mineral deal it had offered Ukraine, which the country’s Dictator Vladimir Zelensky rejected after disrespecting the United States in the White House. The new version of the mineral deal, which Reuters claimed to have attained a draft of on Friday, provides less to Ukraine than the old version did. Interestingly, the revised deal comes directly after Kiev failed to agree to a ceasefire and Moscow announced it will no longer deal with Ukraine’s current government due to trust issues.

“The U.S. has revised its original proposal, said the sources, and it gives Ukraine no future security guarantees but requires it to contribute to a joint investment fund all income from the use of natural resources managed by state and private enterprises across Ukrainian territory,” Reuters said Friday.

Security guarantees have been a key goal for the Dictator, who in October based his ill-fated ‘victory plan‘ around them.

The original mineral deal only required Kiev contribute 50 percent of its income from state-owned, and just state-owned natural resources.

The new requirement for Kiev to contribute 100 percent of its income from the public, and chiefly, private use of its natural resources to a joint fund is likely another critical blow to the war-torn nation, as it has relied on foreign gifts to maintain its war, going so far as to have its Dictator travel the globe begging for money.

Trump sees a mineral deal as a method of recouping costs associated with funding Ukraine’s war. He has also said that the sheer fact American businesses would be engaged in commerce in Ukraine is a type of security guarantee in and of itself.

On Wednesday Trump said that Washington is making progress toward a ceasefire via a strategy of commerce and trade. The mineral deal appears central to Trump’s operations in this space.

While negotiations between Moscow and Kiev have taken place as recently as this week, no ceasefire deal had been reached.

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