Tag: ukraine

There’s never a dull moment when former high-ranking State Department official Victoria Nuland goes on the record for a new tell-all. She’s certainly never shy about broadcasting her role in anti-Moscow covert maneuvering and machinations.

Indeed, many already know her as Victoria-‘Fuck the EU’-Nuland and for essentially running foreign policy in Europe stretching back through the Obama years as then Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, where many of the problems which sparked the disastrous and tragic Russia-Ukraine war were first set in motion.

Exiled Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar recently sat down with her for a new interview published to YouTube earlier this month. The most interesting part of the interview was when he pressed Nuland on widespread reports saying that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson actively encouraged President Zelensky to back out of a potential peace deal with Moscow early after the Feb.2022 Russian invasion. There was a possible chance to end the war and perhaps avoid hundreds of thousands of deaths. But the West apparently convinced Zelensky to fight it out.

But a deal was on the table, and Russia was demanding a full commitment to Ukrainian neutrality regarding NATO. Nuland laid out that it was “relatively late in the game” when Kiev started seeking guidance on the peace deal from Washington and its allies. Zygar said there were statements from foreign leaders privy to the negotiations saying both sides were “really close” to achieving a deal.

“The Ukrainians began asking for advice on where this thing was going, and it became clear to us, clear to us and the Brits, clear to others, that Putin’s main condition was buried in an annex to this document that they were working on. And it included limits on the precise kinds of weapons systems that Ukraine could have after the deal,” Nuland introduced in response.

She went on to describe that Washington didn’t like that the end result of the deal would leave Ukraine “neutered” as a military force while at the same time the same limits weren’t imposed on the Russian military. “People inside Ukraine and people outside Ukraine started asking questions about whether this was a good deal, and it was at that point that it fell apart,” Nuland admitted.

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Ukraine’s allies are struggling to fulfil their own promises to deliver military supplies to Kiev while the volume of Russian military equipment production exceeds that of the West, Bloomberg writes, citing sources. This is creating concerns since Ukraine does not have the means to defend its energy infrastructure, with another difficult winter just weeks away.

“Ukrainian allies meanwhile are scrambling to meet pledges made earlier this year to beef up the war-battered nation’s air-defence systems. Several NATO allies have yet to follow through with commitments reaffirmed at the alliance’s summit in Washington in July,” the report said.

Along with the difficulties of supplying military equipment to Kiev, the agency highlighted the Russian economy’s ability to ensure the production of defence equipment, including missiles and ammunition, in a quantity that exceeds the West’s ability to send weapons to Ukrainian forces.

According to the cited sources, the Ukrainian Army is facing a shortage of weapons and is unable to contain the advance of Russian troops into the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic amid the failed attempt to weaken Moscow’s offensive through Ukraine’s attack on the Kursk region and the observed reduction in Ukraine’s power generation capacity following the destruction of energy infrastructure.

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Washington keeps getting caught in lies as the Western establishment pretends to not be backing Ukraine with its incursion into Russia.

A senior U.S. intelligence officer acknowledged this week that Kyiv had access to a consortium of satellite imagery that the Zelensky regime used to plan and execute their invasion into Russia’s Kursk Region, a claim that Washington denies as false.

According to the powers that be here in the United States, nobody knew in advance that Ukraine was planning the invasion, even though it has already come out that both the U.S. and Great Britain “provided Ukraine with satellite imagery and other information,” to quote a New York Times report.

The Times included a caveat claim that the satellite imagery and other intelligence was not meant “to help Ukraine push deeper into Russia, but to allow its commanders to better track Russian reinforcements that might attack them or cut off their eventual withdrawal back to Ukraine” because it was supposedly delivered after the start of the incursion.

Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, who directs the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), commented that the Times may be confused. The paper’s sources could have been referring to the commercial satellite imagery that the U.S. has been giving Ukraine access to for years through the Global Enhanced GEOINT Delivery (G-EGD) portal, operated by the space company Maxar.

“There were over 400,000 accounts in that particular portal,” Whitworth said at a recent discussion panel hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. “And so, the availability of commercial imagery is sustained.”

“If that is what they are using for purposes of this particular campaign, this limited campaign in Kursk, then I’ll defer to them to confirm that. But the availability is always there.”

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It is understandable that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is asking the West for all the help they can deliver. It is the primary responsibility of a nation’s leader to protect the citizens of his nation. But by the same accounting, it is the primary responsibility of U.S. President Joe Biden to protect the citizens of his country.

It is partly for that reason that the Biden administration has, from the beginning, formulated its goal in Ukraine as protecting its territory and sovereignty while avoiding direct conflict with Russia that could lead to a larger Russia-NATO war.

But, from a Russian perspective, the recent incursion into Kursk inside Russia’s borders with Western tanks, American mobile Patriot missile batteries and U.S. provided HIMARS rocket launchers looks a lot like a NATO attack on Russia using Ukrainian troops.

Assuaging that perspective is not helped by the lack of condemnation of the invasion from the United States, the absence of any visible attempt to rein it in, the assessment that Ukraine’s invasion into Russian territory with Western weapons does not cross any U.S. red lines and the now evident American cooperation with the provision of “satellite imagery and other information about the Kursk region” to help the Ukrainian invading force “to better track Russian reinforcements that might attack them or cut off their eventual withdrawal back to Ukraine.”

The American stance on the Ukrainian invasion puts Biden’s primary responsibility at risk. And it puts that responsibility on a slippery slope to even greater risk.

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