Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major and Woerner

On the 12 December 2017 the National Security Archive at George Washington University posted online 30 declassified US, Soviet, German, British and French documents revealing a torrent of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991. Some of the documents have been publicly available for several years, others have been revealed as a result of Freedom of Information requests for the study. See the briefing here.

Declassified UK’s Matt Kennard sits down with the former president of Ecuador who in 2012 granted the WikiLeaks publisher asylum and now lives in political asylum himself.   

By Matt Kennard 
Declassified UK

More recently, we have been looking at a fake story about North Korea supplying arms to Russia, which the author believes to have originated from a Telegram channel of dubious validity. Unfortunately, the story had two curious sequels.

As long as the fact this war was provoked remains unacknowledged by the side that provoked it, the sane path of detente will look like reckless appeasement and nuclear brinkmanship will look like sanity.

Vladimir Putin has approved the annexation of four territories in eastern Ukraine, whose addition to the Russian Federation now await authorization from Russia’s other branches of government.

Australia will impose another round of financial and travel sanctions on Russia following the Kremlin's move to sign treaties annexing four occupied regions of Ukraine.

In the Georgievsky Hall of the Kremlin, a ceremony was held  on Friday to sign agreements on the admission of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Luhansk People’s Republic, the Zaporizhia Region and the Kherson Region to Russia and the formation of new subjects of the Russian Federation.

September 30, 2022

For several years, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) managed its contacts with sources through a network of fake websites. However, after Iranian counterintelligence officers cracked their system and shared their findings with Beijing, at least two dozen CIA operatives were hounded out and killed.

That story was first made public in a Yahoo News report in 2018, but researchers wanted to know more. Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto announced its findings on Thursday, publishing them in a statement in lieu of a full report.

Today the Fitz gives up. What is the world coming to?

Author and former international rugby player Peter FitzSimons will step down as the public face of Australia’s republican movement after seven years at the helm.

Weeks after the Queen’s death spurred renewed debate about the British monarch’s role as Australia’s head of state, FitzSimons announced he would not renominate to chair the Australian Republican Movement (ARM).

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Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously described Ukraine as a “geopolitical pivot” of Eurasia, central to both US and Russian power. Since Russia views its vital security interests to be at stake in the current conflict, the war in Ukraine is rapidly escalating to a nuclear showdown. It’s urgent for both the US and Russia to exercise restraint before disaster hits.

By Jeffrey Sachs

The US is committed to the “open door” policy when it comes to NATO, but now is the wrong time to consider Ukraine’s membership application, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Friday.

“Right now, our view is that the best way for us to support Ukraine is through practical, on the ground support in Ukraine, and that the process in Brussels should be taken up at a different time,” Sullivan told reporters at the White House press briefing.

Earlier in the day, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky staged a signing of a membership application to the bloc, claiming Kiev is a “de facto”ally already and demanding an “accelerated” accession procedure. 

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has refused to negotiate a peace settlement as long as Vladimir Putin remains president of Russia, issuing a regime change demand via his official Telegram channel on Friday. 

Claiming he had “always offered Russia coexistence on equal, honest, dignified and fair terms,” Zelensky blamed Russia for the failure of negotiations, insisting that it was “obvious this is impossible with this Russian president.” 

“We are ready for a dialogue with Russia, but already with another president of Russia,” he wrote. Unlike the majority of his Telegram posts, this one was written only in Ukrainian, without an accompanying English translation.

Russia has accused the US of baiting it into using its UN veto power in a bid to limit Moscow’s influence on the Security Council. Russia blocked a US-sponsored resolution on Friday that would have condemned its acceptance into the Russian Federation of four former Ukrainian territories.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed accession treaties on Friday, starting the process of bringing the two Donbass republics and the Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions into the Russian Federation following successful referendums. Within hours of the treaties being signed, the US introduced a resolution to the United Nations Security Council condemning the “illegal so-called referenda in Ukraine” and demanding Moscow immediately withdraw its forces from Ukraine.

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Note: by the time the cartoon at top was re-posted, the unique reader figure now is 203,091 (at 03/10/22)..... (this figure is conservative as some people may visit the site and not be counted — as they only see the cartoons and read the headlines.....)

President Vladimir Putin has signed documents paving the way for the formal acceptance by Moscow of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions. The treaties await ratification by the Russian parliament.

According to the Kremlin, Friday’s decision followed a democratic vote, in which people living in the former regions of Ukraine exercised their right to self-determination and requested to be protected from Kiev.

The historic move was condemned and rejected by Kiev and its foreign backers, which regard it as an annexation of sovereign Ukrainian territory.

RT takes a look back at how an armed coup in Kiev eight years ago led to a change of European borders and a major armed conflict.

Maidan

“Too much blood has been spilled” — Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies highlight a few of the many under-reported appeals made at the General Assembly for peaceful negotiations.

We have spent the past week reading and listening to speeches by world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Most of them condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a violation of the U.N. Charter and a serious setback for the peaceful world order that is the U.N.’s founding and defining principle.