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volodymyr can see the west has overstretched its allocated amount of bullshit...

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The underlying issue is this: NATO promised not to expand eastwards. It has done so repeatedly. It is never called out for this.

In a stunning and unexpected outburst this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the press that his country’s current problems came from the West rather than the East.

The fears of a looming war were built on news stories that Russia had troops on the border it shares with the country — but this was not unusual, and there had been a similar assembly of soldiers a year ago, he said.

The truth was that the threat level had not changed, he told a press conference this week.

Furthermore, the real threat to Ukraine was not Russia, but the “destabilisation of the situation inside the country” he told journalists.

The cause of the panic was the press itself, Zelensky said.

Correspondents at the event were discomfited. The event was “a slightly surreal encounter” said the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford.

The Ukrainian leader went on to slam the US, British and other Western diplomats who were fleeing the country, as if the much-described war was actually real.

He denied that Ukraine was a sinking ship, but even if they saw it that way, “diplomats are like captains. They should be the last to leave a sinking ship.”

What’s really happening?

The Western powers appear to be repeating their Taiwan strategy in Ukraine.

Step one is to travel to someone’s territory and alter the status quo until the neighbours react.

Step two is to angrily accuse the neighbours of being aggressive and expansionist—even though they literally haven’t left their own territory (unlike the accusers).

Step three is to work with the press to mislead the world about which side is destabilizing the situation, and thus justify military expansion.

Ultimately, the aim is to push NATO borders eastwards, justify increased spending on the military, and attempt to further unite the world against communities which the West feels need to be “contained”.

It’s working

The plan is working. Russia is being universally painted as the aggressor, and military activity from the west is rising. The UK government is sending weapons and troops to Ukraine, and calling on other NATO members to “unite”. The US says it has 8500 troops ready to go.

On the media front, the message is virtually identical in every outlet: Russia is suddenly being threatening, so the good guys are being forced to respond. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the US was committed to helping Ukraine “defend itself”.

The BBC rolled out politician Tobias Ellwood to explain that all the problems are Russia’s fault. (The same man is used by the media as a source of negative comments on China.) The BBC newsroom always “forgets” to mention Ellwood’s background. He served as part of the 77th Brigade, a British army propaganda unit focused on psychological warfare, media operations, and “special influence methods”.

How differently viewers would see the news if they knew the full story: “We are the media, and we are about to showcase the views of a person trained in spreading disinformation via the media.”

Problems with the narrative

Just as the carefully balanced relationship between Taiwan and mainland China has been in place for years, with alternating periods of calm and tension, the same has been true in Ukraine. Russia has regularly placed troops on its border with Ukraine, and vice versa.

As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, the military tensions were a long-term fact of life between the two countries, and the threat level had not changed, despite every Western media outlet saying that it had.

But the underlying issue is this: NATO promised not to expand eastwards. It has done so repeatedly. It is never called out for this.

Yet those exact promises are well documented in history books — in the west as well as the east, as all students of recent European history know. Let’s look at them below.

After the quake

In 1989 and 1990, Europe went through a massive political earthquake, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and numerous related events. The Western powers and the Soviet Union held a series of meetings to reassure the other that they would not take advantage of the shake-up for purposes of aggressive expansionism.

The Russian side, represented by Mikhail Gorbachev, had to play it straight. The country had large numbers of other urgent issues on its plate, so his argument was simple: Moscow would not move westward – as long as the west would not move eastward. Let the countries in between be.

The famous inch

The buzzphrase that emerged from those discussions was just three words long: “Not one inch.” It came, originally, from the mouth of the US secretary of state James Baker, on February 9, 1990. NATO, he told Gorbachev, would move “not one inch eastward”.

NATO should rule out an “expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders”, the US Embassy in Bonn declared.

America’s national security archive, housed at George Washington University, sums up the meeting thus:

 

“Not once, but three times, Baker tried out the ‘not one inch eastward’ formula with Gorbachev in the February 9, 1990, meeting. He agreed with Gorbachev’s statement in response to the assurances that ‘NATO expansion is unacceptable’. Baker assured Gorbachev that ‘neither the president nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place’, and that the Americans understood that “not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”

 

The following day, the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl made a similar promise to Gorbachev: “We believe that NATO should not expand the sphere of its activity.”

Douglas Hurd, the British foreign secretary, declared his country would be party to the same promise. In June of that year, his boss Margaret Thatcher, the UK’s “Iron Lady” prime minister, made the same pledge to Moscow: “We must find ways to give the Soviet Union confidence that its security would be assured.”

A promise ignored

Fast forward to the present day: NATO has spent years declaring itself a “defensive” rather than “expansionist” force, while its actions show itself doing precisely the opposite, year after year.

This diagram published this week by the BBC shows just some of the eastward expansion of NATO since that time:

 

NATONATO

 

The “not one inch” promised has been disregarded, with Western diplomats saying that it was never intended to be lasting, and was never put down on paper, anyway.

Russia’s requests

Coming back to the present day, what is Russia asking for?

  • It is calling on NATO to halt its program of building missile bases in countries bordering or close to Russia’s territory.
  • It is asking NATO to withdraw troops in Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.
  • It is urging NATO to make it clear that Ukraine is not being groomed to join, thus further damaging the 1990 agreement.
Putin can’t win

Like China, Russia will be painted as the aggressor whatever it does. The western powers will be portrayed as the defenders, whatever they do. But while the press is taking a sharply pro-western angle, academics and the public have a much wider range of views.

“You asserted that ‘NATO is a defensive alliance’. It is not perceived that way in Russia,” wrote Robert Morley, a former staff member of the US National Security Council in a letter to The Economist. “Our decision to expand into areas previously dominated by the Soviet Union reinforced the perception that NATO is aggressively pursuing policies detrimental to Russia’s political and security interests.”

Russia’s response “is relatively moderate when compared with the American reaction to Moscow’s effort to establish a military presence in Cuba during the 1960s,” he added.

But while there is little hope that the mainstream media will ever lose its pro-NATO bias, the growth of independent media around the world gives hope that a more diverse, more inclusive set of voices will eventually be heard.

In the meantime, the Western hawks are once more banging the drums of war, but the East, so far, has always shown more patience than expected.

 

 

This article was first published by Friday Everyday and is reproduced on Pearls and Irritations with permission.

 

 

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/press-stunned-as-ukraine-leader-points-finger-at-west/

 

 

 

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the cookie lady...

 

The US is to keep its planned sanctions against Russia completely secret, so Moscow doesn’t have the opportunity to mitigate them in advance, a senior American official said on Sunday.

Speaking to CBS, US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland explained that Washington was working on a set of measures that would be imposed were Russia to invade Ukraine, but would not be letting the Kremlin know what they were beforehand.

“With regard to this package of sanctions … deterrence is best when there’s a little bit of strategic ambiguity around exactly what we are going to do,” Nuland explained. “So, we’ve said financial measures, we’ve said export controls, we’ve said new sanctions on Russian elites. But if we put them on the table now, then Russia will be able to start mitigating, and that doesn’t make any sense to us.”

Nuland’s statement came as a group of US lawmakers from both the Democratic and Republican parties, led by Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), reported that they were close to agreeing on a set of sanctions that could be implemented immediately after any Russian invasion.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/russia/547807-us-keep-sanctions-secret/

 

Telling OTHER people 'you have secrets", means that they already know... You should see Vladimir's panic!!!... No... Vladimir remains cool as a cool cucumber... He knows... Nuland's threat is only theatre to impress the DUMB Western media... Putin has been in the game long enough to know that your bag of tricks has only one real option left... No-one is going to press the red button.... Hopefully...

 

But Vladimir won't even try to humour you, Cookie Lady... He is more respectful than you are...

 

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the shale problem...

Can the World Handle the Truth about the West-East Crisis?

 

From Phil Butler...

 

The Biden Administration needs Russia to invade Ukraine. The US shale oil business needs Russia’s gas, to remain in Russia. The world may be at war soon, but not over the rights, wants, and wishes of the people of Eastern Europe or Central Asia. The controlling elites of the west are the ones gamling with lives, not Vladimir Putin and the Russians.

In October of 2015 an interesting meeting was held in London under so-called Chatham House Rule, wherein the identities of those attached to the statements or “facts” they present is hidden. The meeting was held under the auspices of the Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, and was labeled “The Role of US Shale in European Energy Security and Trade.” Key experts from academia, government, industry, nongovernmental organizations and research institutions sat at the roundtable. Interestingly, the report (PDF) from the meetup framed Arab Spring, and the Russia-Ukraine crisis, as the top game changing “challenges” to Europe’s energy security situation. The report is lengthy, but Russia is the targeted subject, it’s clear.

The discussion, and the ensuing report, treat geopolitical events and energy flows and profits as variables independent from one another. This is strange, even though the discussion circles back, over and over, to the subjects of Europe dependence on Russia energy, the Ukraine affair, and how American shale gas can fill a vacuum made by these “unusual” international relations events. But the rhetoric of these “experts” betrays the underlying truth, as always. Here is a passage from the report:

“Disputes between Russia and Ukraine, which led to a shutdown of natural gas supplies to Europe in 2006 and 2009, have highlighted the vulnerability of Europe’s energy security, created by the continent’s strong dependence on Moscow for energy supplies. This reliance not only complicated the European Union’s ability to respond to events such as Russia’s most recent adventurism in Ukraine, but also leaves Europe strongly beholden to Russian state gas company Gazprom and its pricing policies.” 

As you can see, the energy experts and stakeholders who met in London were keenly focused on Gazprom profits, more so than the welfare of Europeans and their energy security. If you read the entire report, you’ll understand what took place during the Arab Spring, in Ukraine, years previously in the Caucasus, and even the recent events in Kazakhstan. The United States broke out the last of her energy reserves to declare economic war on the rest of the world. Russia, given her position historically and resource wise, is the primary target. Iran, Venezuela, Libya, and other oil/gas rich nations are a secondary focus.

Also hidden in the meeting minutes from London is the current strategy the Biden administration is enacting. Between the lines of this Columbia discussion, we find the real crux of America’s problem/weakness. Another passage is telling:

“Russia has substantial idle producing capacity in the legacy Western Siberian producing region, where practically all costs are sunk. Hence, Russia can easily increase production levels without undertaking any new investments if it decides to “price out” US LNG from the European market.” 

Now we see the reason for the fear mongering over a Russian invasion of Ukraine. The strategists have unwittingly laid bare the real reason Washington is so vehement to incite a war. Skip forward to Nord Stream 2, and Vladimir Putin’s ultimate victory over big energy in the west. Russia is now in position to undercut anybody’s price for supplies of gas or oil to Europe. This is why the Biden administration is talking about “crippling sanctions” should the Russians take the bait and take over all or part of Ukraine. Yes, NATO is being used as a tool by western energy oligarchs. This is the sad, bitter, naked truth.

Finally, the energy war America has declared can only be won if the Russians are “sanctioned” out of the European oil and gas market. Our genius friends at Big Energy also revealed this at the London meetup. You see, European energy contracts with Russia are binding up until 2025, when many of the Gazprom contracts expire. Europe is contractually obliged to purchase most of its imported energy from the Russians, anyhow. So, the only way for US energy/policy interests to eliminate Russia as a competitor is war. The only way American shale oligarchs get to win is if Europe is “invaded” by Russia. This is the behind the scenes. A sort of Catch 22 for both Russia and the west.

This report also deals with crude oil, and once again focuses on Russian supplies, only more so to landlocked countries like Poland (not landlocked), Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic that use the Druzhba pipeline system. The people sitting at this roundtable probably had no inkling that somebody would be analyzing their outcomes in order to frame them as the henchmen of a potential World War III. But, maybe they did, given their use of the Chatham House Rule. Be that as it may, at the time Russia supplied almost one-third of Europe’s crude oil needs.

In the end, the whole west-east geopolitical crisis is about pricing and margins. US unconventional oil and gas production simply cannot compete with Russian or even OPEC capabilities, and not only because of the distances involved. Shale energy is expensive, and one reason we see the Biden administration prodding Russia is the devastating revenue losses low prices have caused the energy oligarchs in the west. And make no mistake, the current war on Russia is not something American thinkers just thought up in 2015 at a semi-secret meeting. This Brookings Institute report from March of 2002 reveals more of the envy/concern Washington has had for decades. “Russia: The 21st Century’s Energy Superpower?” The title pretty much says it all. I leave you with the gist of that think tank’s assessment from 20 years ago.

“Russia’s gas reserves far exceed those of any other country. Indeed, Russia is to natural gas what Saudi Arabia is to oil. With 32 percent of proven world reserves, Russia far outranks Iran (15 percent), Qatar (7 percent), Saudi Arabia and the UAE (4 percent), and the United States and Algeria (3 percent). Single-handedly, Gazprom, Russia’s giant gas company, holds a quarter of all world gas reserves, controls 90 percent of Russian output, and is Russia’s largest earner of hard currency.”

 

 

Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://journal-neo.org/2022/01/31/can-the-world-handle-the-truth-about-the-west-east-crisis/

 

 

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lower the tone, please...

 

The phone call between President Biden and Ukrainian President Zelensky "did not go well", CNN headlines: while "Biden warned that a Russian invasion is practically certain in February, when the frozen ground makes it possible for tanks to pass through", Zelensky "asked Biden to lower his tone, arguing that the Russian threat is still ambiguous". As the Ukrainian president himself takes a more cautious stance, Ukrainian armed forces are massing in the Donbass near the area of Donetsk and Lugansk inhabited by Russian populations.

According to reports from the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, obscured by our mainstream [media] which only talks about the Russian deployment, Ukrainian Army and National Guard units, amounting to about 150 thousand men, are positioned here. They are armed and trained, and thus effectively commanded, by US-NATO military advisers and instructors.

From 1991 to 2014, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service, the U.S. provided Ukraine with $4 billion in military assistance, which was added to by over $2.5 billion after 2014, plus over a billion provided by the NATO Trust Fund in which Italy also participates. This is only part of the military investments made by the major NATO powers in Ukraine. Great Britain, for example, concluded various military agreements with Kiev, investing among other things 1.7 billion pounds in the strengthening of Ukraine’s naval capabilities: this program provides for the arming of Ukrainian ships with British missiles, the joint production of 8 fast missile launchers, the construction of naval bases on the Black Sea and also on the Sea of Azov between Ukraine, Crimea and Russia. In this framework, Ukrainian military spending, which in 2014 was equivalent to 3% of GDP, increased to 6% in 2022, corresponding to more than $ 11 billion.

In addition to the US-NATO military investments in Ukraine, there is the $10 billion plan being implemented by Erik Prince, founder of the private US military company Blackwater, now renamed Academy, which has been supplying mercenaries to the CIA, Pentagon and State Department for covert operations (including torture and assassinations), earning billions of dollars. Erik Prince’s plan, revealed by a Time magazineinvestigation [1], is to create a private army in Ukraine through a partnership between the Lancaster 6 company, with which Prince has supplied mercenaries in the Middle East and Africa, and the main Ukrainian intelligence office controlled by the CIA. It is not known, of course, what would be the tasks of the private army created in Ukraine by the founder of Blackwater, certainly with funding from the CIA. However, it can be expected that it would conduct covert operations in Europe, Russia and other regions from its base in Ukraine.

Against this background, it is particularly alarming that the Russian Defense Minister Shoigu denounced that in the Donetsk region there are "private US military companies that are preparing a provocation with the use of unknown chemicals". It could be the spark that causes the detonation of a war in the heart of Europe: a chemical attack against Ukrainian civilians in Donbass, immediately attributed to the Russians of Donetsk and Lugansk, which would be attacked by the preponderant Ukrainian forces already deployed in the region, to force Russia to intervene militarily in their defense.

In the front line, ready to slaughter the Russians in the Donbass, is the Azov battalion, promoted to a special forces regiment, trained and armed by the US and NATO, distinguished for its ferocity in attacks on the Russian populations of Ukraine. The Azov, which recruits neo-Nazis from all over Europe under its flag traced from that of SS Das Reich, is commanded by its founder Andrey Biletsky, promoted to colonel [2]. It is not only a military unit, but an ideological and political movement, of which Biletsky is the charismatic leader, especially for the youth organization that is educated to hate the Russians with his book "The Words of the White Führer".

 

Manlio Dinucci

 

Source

Il Manifesto (Italy)

 

 

Read more:

https://www.voltairenet.org/article215489.html

 

 

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