....

The commentator compared the situation to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when US president John F. Kennedy, who he argued "loved peace," also felt "provoked" by the USSR basing ballistic missiles in the Caribbean island state.

He said the US and NATO were now signalling the will to deploy "the exact same kinds of middle range nuclear tipped ballistic missiles on the periphery of the of Russia, in Romania and Poland, and the intention to force them into Ukraine as well."

The shutting-down of debate in the West on Russia's legitimate security concerns was an obstacle to peace, he said.

"It needs to be discussed, because if you don't understand the beginnings of this thing, you're never going to abide by what we have to do in retrenching, stepping back and letting well, letting a cease fire and peace prevail," McGovern stressed. "You can be for peace, but you have to figure out a way to get it."

 

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NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

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by Dmitry Orlov

We hear more and more Western voices suggesting that peace talks in the former Ukraine might be a good idea, indicating that some people may be past the stage of denial (a few sanctions and Russia will retreat like an umbrella) and anger (throw all your money and guns at the Kiev regime!) and are approaching the bargaining stage (let Russia keep Crimea, but return the rest). As with the previous stages, this attitude is based on a very deep misunderstanding of the current situation. It's not that hard to explain – to those who are ready to process new information – so I'll give it a try.

1. The idea of ​​peace talks presupposes a certain level of trust between the two parties. In this case, the trust simply does not exist, because the West has not kept all its promises. When Russia authorized German reunification, it accepted the promise that NATO would not expand eastward; Yet that is exactly what NATO has done, right up to Russia's borders in Scandinavia and the Baltics, and it continues to nurture the fantasy of absorbing what is left of Ukraine. Instead of allowing the insurgents in Donetsk to quickly defeat the Kiev regime installed by the United States in 2014, Russia accepted the Minsk agreements, which the Kiev regime completely ignored, then the leaders of Germany and of France who signed the agreements admitted that they were just delaying tactics used to buy time in order to arm and train the Ukrainian side. And, for the sake of brevity, let's skip over the many broken promises by the United States. All this has allowed Russia to call Ukraine " non-agreement-capable » (недоговороспособные). The EU and the UN are equally untrustworthy. Take the example of the grain agreement. The deal involved a quid pro quo: Ukrainian grain exports would be unblocked in exchange for allowing some Russian exports. Russia kept its part of the deal, but the rest was ignored. The talks would therefore be in vain, because there can be no peace agreement if there is no trust – and there is no trust.

2. The idea of ​​peace talks presupposes the existence of a war, but there is no war. This is a special military operation against terrorists and war criminals who for eight years bombarded the Russian civilian population, violated the rights of Russians in myriad ways, and then planned an all-out assault on Russia that the Russian army foiled. There has been no declaration of war or severance of diplomatic relations: the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow is still open, as is the Russian embassy in kyiv. Russia allows Ukrainian passport holders visa-free entry and offers them a simplified path to Russian citizenship. Russia considers that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people and have the same rights, but that the Ukrainian state has lost its rights to sovereignty under international law because it has violated the rights of people who identify as Russians, choose to speak Russian and worship in Russian Orthodox cathedrals and churches. The special military operation cannot be considered complete until all terrorists and war criminals in the former Ukraine have been killed or brought to justice and the territory of the former Ukraine has been fully demilitarized, and none of that is negotiable.

3. The idea of ​​peace talks presupposes a reasonable initial proposal. An example of an unreasonable outgoing proposal is one that offers the other side something it does not want, such as the lifting of US and European sanctions which are, in Russia's view, unilateral and therefore illegal and , in any case, do far more harm to the EU than to Russia. Another example of failure is the request made to Russia to cede part of its sovereign territory. According to the Russian Constitution, Crimea, Donetsk People's Republic, Lugansk People's Republic and Zaporizhia and Kherson regions are now all part of the Russian Federation based on their internationally recognized rights of self-determination and results a public referendum, and any public call for their separation is a crime under Russian law. Suggesting that Russian officials are committing treason is not a good way to start negotiations.

4. The idea of ​​peace talks presupposes a modicum of mutual respect between the parties involved in the negotiation. Yet if we take any of the many articles about Russia published in the United States or the European Union, which we simply replace " Russians " and " Russian " by " Jews " and " Jewish and you publish the result, you find yourself in prison fairly quickly for a hate crime. Russophobia, which is rampant in the West, is no different from anti-Semitism or racism in general. Why would the Russian authorities want to grant a hearing to such reprehensible and despicable people?

5. The idea of ​​peace talks presupposes that both parties to the conflict have something to gain. Now, what does Russia have to gain from a premature cessation of hostilities, before having fully achieved the objectives of demilitarization, denazification and neutrality of Ukraine, which are the declared aims of its operation? special military? Moreover, these are not the only objectives that Russia wishes to achieve: a few months before the start of the operation, Russia asked the United States and NATO to keep their promises and to honor their commitments in collective security, including bringing NATO expansion back to its 1997 positions and withdrawing foreign troops and offensive weapons from Eastern Europe. In addition, the special military operation has made it possible to focus the world's attention on essential tasks: dedollarization, the organization of collective security around alternative organizations such as the BRICS and the SCO (whose number of membership is growing rapidly), which revolve around China as an economic force and Russia as the ultimate military power and security provider, and the completion of decolonization in Africa, Latin America, Asia and in the former Soviet republics. All these tasks are still unfinished and require more time.

6. The idea of ​​peace talks assumes that both parties to the conflict are pressed for time. But Russia is in no hurry. It committed between 10 and 15% of its armed forces in the special military operation. It did not institute a call-up in time of war and was content to call up a small fraction of reservists to active service and accept a few volunteers. Its economy is not in a state of war and is doing very well, with growth expected to resume later this year. Russia has used the conflict to test its weapons and tactics in direct confrontation with NATO (which largely commands Ukrainian forces), to update its weapons systems and to develop new weapons and tactics, especially in the field of air defense, drone warfare and radio-electronic warfare. Furthermore, this conflict gave Russia the opportunity to get rid of its internal enemies, many of whom chose to leave Russia voluntarily. Russia has already regained a number of historically Russian territories, and as the special military operation continues, it is expected to gain more, increasing its geopolitical power and economic potential. All in all, for Russia, the advantages of the special military operation greatly exceed the costs and it is far from having finished reaping these advantages.

7. The idea of ​​peace talks presupposes that neither side of the conflict sees a relatively easy and low-risk path to absolute victory, but Russia sees just that path. The collective West has hurt itself badly by imposing thousands and thousands of sanctions on Russia. More importantly, the whole of the EU, and Germany in particular, have destroyed the basis of their economic prosperity, namely the cheap energy supplied by Russia, and have therefore entered a crisis loop. economy from which they will emerge too weak to oppose Russia. On the other side of the ocean, the United States is, from an economic point of view, a dead man. Their last vestige of economic power lies in shale oil, which has peaked and is set to decline rapidly. Both its Treasury and its banking system are on the brink of collapse as the world gradually abandons the US dollar. The country is run by a senile puppet president, whose vice president is a sneering idiot. The country is in the throes of an incipient civil war that is sure to erupt as the financial meltdown continues and economic conditions worsen. Given these developments, the United States may no longer be in contention, US military bases around the world will become non-functional, the EU and NATO will dissolve, and the Europeans and other former vassal nations of the states States will replace their American puppet leaders with patriotic conservatives and restore bilateral relations with Russia. Russia may have known what it wanted at the start of the special military operation, but what it might get in the end might exceed its rulers' wildest dreams.

8. The idea of ​​peace talks presupposes that both sides fear being drawn into a larger conflict and view peace talks as a means of avoiding it and limiting damage. Yet, from Russia's perspective, the special military operation is self-limiting: Apart from sporadic acts of Ukrainian terrorism, the conflict is confined to the 1000 km front line that runs through former eastern Ukraine; the Ukrainian nationalists are being destroyed at a frantic pace, with a thousand men a day and a ratio of losses very favorable to the Russians, of the order of 10 against 1; With its new generation of hypersonic weapons against which NATO and the United States have no countermeasures, Russia completely dominates the escalation, so the commanders of the United States and NATO live in abject fear of having to confront Russia directly.

At this point, the biggest risk for Russia is that the Ukrainian military will simply give up, its Western supporters will shamefully slip away, and only one uk-ruin that the Russians will have to manage alone, ensuring the maintenance of order and feeding a miserable but hostile population. To avoid this scenario, the Russians are engaging in a veritable theater of shame, feigning weakness in order to bolster the morale of the Ukrainian forces and induce them to keep fighting and, ideally, to launch a counter-offensive, because it it will then be much easier for the Russians to decimate them. The recent hysterical video of Evgeny Prigogin in front of dead soldiers complaining about a lack of ammunition is a prime example of this. As the head of Wagner, a private military company, he can behave shamefully in front of the cameras without tarnishing the honor of the Russian military, and Kremlin propagandists take full advantage of this convenient arrangement.

But in the end, Russia will most likely be forced to accept what throughout history has been the default, normal, and expected end to armed conflict: surrender and unconditional surrender. It seems the world is finally running out of fools who want to sign peace treaties with the West.

Dmitry Orlov

source: Club Orlov via The Francophone Saker

 

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NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

 

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BY JONATHAN COOK

 

BRITISH WARMONGERING IS DRIVING EUROPE TOWARDS CATASTROPHE IN UKRAINE

From lobbying for fighter jets to supplying depleted uranium, the UK is making sure escalation is the only way forward.

 

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky made an unexpected trip to Britain last week on a whistle-stop tour of European capitals, pleading for more powerful and longer-range weapons to use in his war against Russia. 

What was hard to ignore once again was the extent to which the UK is playing an outsize role in Ukraine.

Last year, shortly after the start of the war, the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson, hurried to Kyiv – presumably on Washington’s instructions – apparently to warn Zelensky off fledgling peace talks with Moscow. 

At around the same time, the Biden administration made clear it favoured an escalation in fighting, not an end to it, as an opportunity to “weaken” Russia, a geo-strategic rival along with China.

Since then, the UK has been at the forefront of European efforts to entrench the conflict, helping to lobby for the supply of weapons, training and military intelligence to Ukrainian forces.   

British tanks and thousands of tank shells – including, controversially, some made from depleted uranium – are being shipped out. Last week, the UK added hundreds of long-range attack drones to the inventory. 

And an unspecified number of £2m-a-blast Storm Shadow cruise missiles, with a range of nearly 300km, have started arriving. Last week Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence secretary, said the missiles were already in use, adding that Kyiv alone was deciding on the targets.

Storm Shadow allows the Ukrainian military to strike deep into Russian-annexed parts of Ukraine – and potentially at Russian cities too.

A recent leak revealed that the Pentagon had learnt through electronic eavesdropping of Zelensky’s eagerness for longer-range missiles so that his forces were “capable of reaching Russian troop deployments in Russia”.

Lip service

Britain now pays little more than lip service to the West’s claim that its role is only to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian aggression. The supply of increasingly offensive weapons has turned Ukraine into what amounts to a proxy battleground on which the Cold War can be revived.

During Zelensky’s visit to the UK last week, Johnson’s successor, Rishi Sunak, effectively acted as an arms broker for Ukraine, joining with the Netherlands in what was grandly dubbed an “international coalition” to pressure the Biden administration and other European states to supply Kiev with F-16 fighter jets. 

Washington appeared not to need much cajoling. Three days later, Biden dramatically changed tack at a G7 summit in Japan. He effectively gave a green light for US allies to supply Ukraine not only with US-made F-16s but similar fourth-generation fighter jets, including Britain’s Eurofighter Typhoon and France’s Mirage 2000.

Administration officials surprised European leaders by suggesting the US would be directly involved in the training of pilots outside Ukraine. 

After a highly staged “surprise” visit by Zelensky to the summit at the weekend, Biden said he had been given a “flat reassurance” that the jets would not attack Russian territory.

British officials, meanwhile, indicated that the UK would start training Ukrainian pilots within weeks. 

‘Rightful place is in Nato’

No 10 has made clear that Sunak’s purpose is to build “a new Ukrainian air force with Nato-standard F-16 jets” and that the prime minister believes “Ukraine’s rightful place is in Nato”.

These statements seem intended once again to block any potential path towards peace. President Vladimir Putin repeatedly spoke out against Nato’s growing, covert involvement in neighbouring Ukraine before Russia launched its invasion 15 months ago.

“The prime minister believes “Ukraine’s rightful place is in Nato”

It is hard to imagine that the UK is heading off-script. More likely, the Biden administration is using Britain to make the running and soften up Western publics as Nato becomes ever more deeply immersed in the military activities of Russia’s neighbour.

Ukraine is being gradually turned into the very Nato forward base that first set Moscow on course to invade.

At the same time, Britain appears to be exploiting the Ukraine war as a showcase for its weaponry. After the US, it has been the largest supplier of military equipment to Ukraine. 

This week it was reported that UK arms exports hit a record £8.5bn, more than double last year’s total. The last time Britain was so successful at selling weapons was in 2015, at the height of the Syrian war. 

Risk to health

Europe’s weapons largesse is, we are told, the precondition for Ukraine to mount a long-awaited counter-offensive to take back territory Russia has seized in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine. 

Speaking candidly in Florence this month, Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, ruled out peace talks. Ukraine needed massive supplies of arms because otherwise “Ukraine will fall in a matter of days”, he said.

Borrell’s warning not only suggested the precariousness of Ukraine’s situation but implied that, out of desperation, its leaders might be prepared to approve ever riskier combat scenarios.

And thanks to British meddling, the heavy toll of casualties as the war rages on – among the Ukrainian population and Russian soldiers, as well as potentially inside Russia’s borders too – may be felt not just over the coming months but for decades.

In March, Declassified broke the story that some of the thousands of tank shells Britain is supplying to Kiev are made of depleted uranium (DU), a radioactive heavy metal produced as waste from nuclear power plants. 

Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour party has said it “fully supports” the UK government’s supply of these armour-piercing shells to Ukraine, despite the long-term risk they pose to those exposed to the chemically toxic contamination left behind.

DU shells fragment and burn when they hit a target. One analyst, Doug Weir, from the Conflict and Environment Observatory, told Declassified that the ammunition produces “chemically toxic and radioactive DU particulate [microscopic particles] that poses an inhalational risk to people”.

Nonetheless, British ministers insist the threat to human health is low – and worth the risk given the military gains in helping Ukraine to destroy Russian tanks. 

Cancer deaths

As Declassified has highlighted, however, a growing body of evidence following the use of such shells by the US in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and by Britain and the US in Iraq a decade later undermines these reassurances.

Italian courts have upheld compensation claims against the country’s military in more than 300 cases where Italians who served in the police or as soldiers in Bosnia and Kosovo have died of cancer after being exposed to DU. 

Many thousands more Italian former service-people are reported to have developed cancers.

In 2001 Tony Blair’s government downplayed the role of DU in Italy’s deaths to avoid upsetting the new administration of George W Bush. Both leaders would soon approve the use of DU rounds in Iraq, though the UK admitted a “moral obligation” to help clean up some of the contamination afterwards.

The West has taken little interest in researching the effects of DU weapons in Iraq, even though local civilian populations have been the most exposed to its contamination. DU shells were used extensively during both the 1991 Gulf war and more than a decade later during the US and British-led occupation of Iraq.

Nonetheless, Iraqi government statistics suggest the rates of cancers leapt 40-fold between the period immediately before the Gulf war and 2005.

The city of Fallujah, which the US devastated after the 2003 invasion, is reported to suffer “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied”. Birth defects are said to be roughly 14 times the rate in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki regions of Japan, where the US dropped atomic bombs. 

In 2018 the British government reclassified a 1981 report into the dangers of DU weapons by the Ministry of Defence’s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment it had made available three years earlier. 

Meanwhile, James Heappey, the armed forces minister, has misleadingly suggested that international bodies such as the World Health Organisation and the United Nations have found no long-term health or environmental hazards associated with DU weapons.

But as Weir told Declassified in March: “None of the entities cited by the MoD has undertaken long-term environmental or health studies in conflict areas where DU weapons have been used.” 

In other words, they simply don’t know – and possibly don’t care to find out.

Weir added that the WHO, UN and International Atomic Energy Agency had all called for contaminated areas to be clearly marked and access restricted, while at the same time recommending that risk awareness campaigns be targeted at nearby communities.

British officials have also recruited the Royal Society to their efforts to claim DU is safe – as the US did earlier, in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, citing two of its reports published in 2001 and 2002.

However, the Royal Society has vocally distanced itself from such claims. A spokesperson told Declassified that, despite the British government’s assertions, DU was no longer an “active area of policy research”. 

Back in 2003, the Royal Society rebuked Washington, telling the Guardian that soldiers and civilians in Iraq “were in short and long term danger. Children playing at contaminated sites were particularly at risk.”

At the same time, the chairman of the Royal Society’s working group on depleted uranium, Professor Brian Spratt, also warned that corroding shells could leach DU into water supplies. He recommended removing ordinance and conducting long-term sampling of water supplies.

 

Voices silenced

By lobbying for more overtly offensive weapons and introducing DU shells into the war, Britain has raised the stakes in two incendiary ways.

First, it is driving the war’s logic towards ever greater escalation, including nuclear escalation.  

Russia itself possesses DU weapons but is reported to have avoided using them. Moscow has long warned that it regards use of DU in Ukraine in nuclear terms: as the equivalent of a “dirty bomb”. 

In March Putin responded to the UK’s decision to supply DU tank shells by vowing to move “tactical” nuclear weapons into neighbouring Belarus. Meanwhile, his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, said it put the world “fewer and fewer” steps away from “nuclear collision”.

But Britain is also creating a situation where a catastrophic move, or miscalculation, by either Russia or Ukraine is becoming ever more likely, as events last week highlighted only too clearly.

Russia struck a military ammunition depot in western Ukraine, creating a giant fireball. Rumours suggested the site may have included British DU shells.

Whether this is true or not, it is a reminder that Moscow could hit such a storage site, intentionally or not, spreading contamination widely over a built-up area.

With Ukraine soon to be in possession of a full array of offensive weapons, largely courtesy of the UK – not only long-range drones, cruise missiles and tanks but fighter jets – it is not hard to imagine terrifying scenarios that could quickly bring Europe to the brink of nuclear conflict.

Moscow hits a DU ammunition depot, exposing a large civilian population to toxic contamination. Ukraine retaliates with air strikes deep inside Russia. The path to a nuclear exchange in Europe has never looked closer.

Those who warned that peace talks were urgently needed rather than an arms race in Ukraine are looking more prescient by the day. For how much longer can their voices continue to be silenced, not only by western leaders but by the western media too?

 

Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net

 

 

READ MORE:

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MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

 

 

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

 

EASY.

 

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....