lost in american hegemonic aggression.....

Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

B. MOSCOW [February 1, 2008] 182 Classified By: Ambassador William J. Burns. Reasons 1.4 (b) and (d).

1. (C) Summary. Following a muted first reaction to Ukraine’s intent to seek a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) at the Bucharest summit (ref A), Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains “an emotional and neuralgic” issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. Additionally, the GOR and experts continue to claim that Ukrainian NATO membership would have a major impact on Russia’s defence industry, Russian-Ukrainian family connections, and bilateral relations generally. In Georgia, the GOR fears continued instability and “provocative acts” in the separatist regions. End summary. MFA: NATO Enlargement “Potential Military Threat to Russia”.

2. (U) During his annual review of Russia’s foreign policy January 22-23 (ref B), Foreign Minister Lavrov stressed that Russia had to view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat. While Russia might believe statements from the West that NATO was not directed against Russia, when one looked at recent military activities in NATO countries (establishment of U.S. forward operating locations, etc. they had to be evaluated not by stated intentions but by potential. Lavrov stressed that maintaining Russia’s “sphere of influence” in the neighbourhood was anachronistic, and acknowledged that the U.S. and Europe had “legitimate interests” in the region. But, he argued, while countries were free to make their own decisions about their security and which political-military structures to join, they needed to keep in mind the impact on their neighbours.

3. (U) Lavrov emphasised that Russia was convinced that enlargement was not based on security reasons, but was a legacy of the Cold War. He disputed arguments that NATO was an appropriate mechanism for helping to strengthen democratic governments. He said that Russia understood that NATO was in search of a new mission, but there was a growing tendency for new members to do and say whatever they wanted simply because they were under the NATO umbrella (e.g. attempts of some new member countries to “rewrite history and glorify fascists”).

4. (U) During a press briefing January 22 in response to a question about Ukraine’s request for a MAP, the MFA said “a radical new expansion of NATO may bring about a serious political-military shift that will inevitably affect the security interests of Russia.” The spokesman went on to stress that Russia was bound with Ukraine by bilateral obligations set forth in the 1997 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership in which both parties undertook to “refrain from participation in or support of any actions capable of prejudicing the security of the other Side.” The spokesman noted that Ukraine’s “likely integration into NATO would seriously complicate the many-sided Russian-Ukrainian relations,” and that Russia would “have to take appropriate measures.” The spokesman added that “one has the impression that the present Ukrainian leadership regards rapprochement with NATO largely as an alternative to good-neighbourly ties with the Russian Federation.” Russian Opposition Neuralgic and Concrete.

5. (C) Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality,

Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

6. (C) Dmitriy Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilising factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership. The letter requesting MAP consideration had come as a “bad surprise” to Russian officials, who calculated that Ukraine’s NATO aspirations were safely on the backburner. With its public letter, the issue had been “sharpened.” Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture. The irony, Trenin professed, was that Ukraine’s membership would defang NATO, but neither the Russian public nor elite opinion was ready for that argument. Ukraine’s gradual shift towards the West was one thing, its preemptive status as a de jure U.S. military ally another. Trenin cautioned strongly against letting an internal Ukrainian fight for power, where MAP was merely a lever in domestic politics, further complicate U.S.-Russian relations now.

7. (C) Another issue driving Russian opposition to Ukrainian membership is the significant defence industry cooperation the two countries share, including a number of plants where Russian weapons are made. While efforts are underway to shut down or move most of these plants to Russia, and to move the Black Sea fleet from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk earlier than the 2017 deadline, the GOR has made clear that Ukraine’s joining NATO would require Russia to make major (costly) changes to its defence industrial cooperation.

8. (C) Similarly, the GOR and experts note that there would also be a significant impact on Russian-Ukrainian economic and labor relations, including the effect on thousands of Ukrainians living and working in Russia and vice versa, due to the necessity of imposing a new visa regime. This, Aleksandr Konovalov, Director of the Institute for Strategic Assessment, argued, would become a boiling cauldron of anger and resentment among the local population.

9. (C) With respect to Georgia, most experts said that while not as neuralgic to Russia as Ukraine, the GOR viewed the situation there as too unstable to withstand the divisiveness NATO membership could cause. Aleksey Arbatov, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, argued that Georgia’s NATO aspirations were simply a way to solve its problems in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and warned that Russia would be put in a difficult situation were that to ensue.

Russia’s Response.

10. (C) The GOR has made it clear that it would have to “seriously review” its entire relationship with Ukraine and Georgia in the event of NATO inviting them to join. This could include major impacts on energy, economic, and political-military engagement, with possible repercussions throughout the region and into Central and Western Europe. Russia would also likely revisit its own relationship with the Alliance and activities in the NATO-Russia Council, and consider further actions in the arms control arena, including the possibility of complete withdrawal from the CFE and INF Treaties, and more direct threats against U.S. missile defence plans.

11. (C) Isabelle Francois, Director of the NATO Information Office in Moscow (protect), said she believed that Russia had accepted that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually join NATO and was engaged in long-term planning to reconfigure its relations with both countries, and with the Alliance. However, Russia was not yet ready to deal with the consequences of further NATO enlargement to its south. She added that while Russia liked the cooperation with NATO in the NATO-Russia Council, Russia would feel it necessary to insist on recasting the NATO-Russia relationship, if not withdraw completely from the NRC, in the event of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO.

Comment

12. (C) Russia’s opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia is both emotional and based on perceived strategic concerns about the impact on Russia’s interests in the region. It is also politically popular to paint the U.S. and NATO as Russia’s adversaries and to use NATO’s outreach to Ukraine and Georgia as a means of generating support from Russian nationalists. While Russian opposition to the first round of NATO enlargement in the mid-1990’s was strong, Russia now feels itself able to respond more forcefully to what it perceives as actions contrary to its national interests.

First published in Wikileaks.

https://johnmenadue.com/nyet-means-nyet-russias-nato-enlargement-redlines/

enough is enough — bring him home......

By Gus Leonisky at 23 Jul 2023 - 5:34am
Gus Leonisky's blog
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biden's nastiness

BY Gordon Duff

The American’s aren’t coming, they won’t be ‘on the ground’ nor in the air nor on the seas. There is no combat environment for the US against a grade one power. Let me tell you why.

America is all about bluff. Stealth planes, nukes when that threat doesn’t work, or they will unleash ISIS (is banned in Russia) or al-Qaeda (is banned in Russia) or one of a dozen terror groups like the MEK that the CIA keeps in its quiver.

Then there are false flags, usually school shootings, normally domestic or faked chemical attacks in partnership with Israel, certain groups in Georgia at the National Reference Lab, where biological and chemical weapons are produced and shipped via Bechtel and BP through Turkey and south to be used against Syria, Yemen or across Africa.

The proofs exist, in unimaginable quantities and these reports have along with testimony have been submitted to every court and agency imaginable, proving one thing: control of investigative organizations is the first step for a nation state that turns to terrorism as national policy.

Let’s talk about the war in Ukraine.

Let’s say the US has decided to come in by putting Ukraine into NATO, something Biden has refused thus far, though he is deploying some American reserve forces into Eastern Europe.

Americans, congress, the amateurs in the Pentagon and the fake press all believe America’s powerful air force will overpower Russia.

It won’t.

You see, even if Russia couldn’t shoot down American steal aircraft, and they can with relative ease, an overstated technology for sure, there is a full “checkmate” against American air power.

American planes have to have based.

Even with external tanks, any potential American landing field, be it an air base or a secret NATO facility off a German highway, all such places would be in easy range of missiles.

Worse still, Russia has two types of missiles, the Iskander and their hypersonics, that can penetrate any defenses and easily take out aircraft in any formerly ‘bombproof’ hangar or destroy any ground facility.

America’s air force and surface vessels of the navy would cease to exist quickly.

There would be no America air power, stealth to stealth dogfights over Europe, S-500s taking down America’s most expensive planes with proven ease while America’s combat helicopters would face an enemy they were never designed to meet.

The problem isn’t simply decades of proxy wars, 3rd world enemies, fake “coalitions” and feeding one side against another.

Even in Vietnam, with only 58,000 official combat dead, the American public felt the loss and eventually rose to oppose the injustice and lies. Will the children and grandchildren of that generation prove themselves?

America can’t take combat casualties. They also can’t fight a conventional war against a devastating enemy who has “come into his own,” will a proven track record of destroying America’s most advanced weapons and quashing combat tactics by NATO trained Ukrainians under Pentagon guidance.

In Vietnam, the US most likely lost around 80,000 dead with a later 50,000 or more from suicides (first 5 years, Department of the Navy estimate). What is silenced is the loss later on.

Estimates of well over 1 million deaths from Agent Orange poisoning have been cleansed from records, but not from the cemeteries.

Vietnam killed the best of a generation but also meant the end for any “mobilization” for war by a US now paying up to $60,000 a year for a recruit likely to have a drug habit and criminal record.

You see, COVID left the US strangely short of workers and with very low unemployment and much higher post-COVID wages and a general lack of trust in the government, America’s will not fight for Ukraine or NATO.

The media has been able to silence the cries of the family members of the estimated 250,000 to 400,000 already killed fighting for Zelensky. Every day, Twitter fills with videos of “press gangs” kidnapping aged Ukrainians for military service while their families look on screaming in horror.

And every day, Elon Musk cleans these videos away and replaces them with AI-generated tales of Russian war crimes.

Maybe if Musk stays on board and the Israel lobby and ADL keep their total stranglehold on America’s press, a press no one trusts with good reason, Biden might see fit to send what America has, to Europe.

Current deployable US forces sit at around 70,000. The problem here, without air superiority or planes at all and with artillery and armored vehicles the enemy has been “eating for breakfast” for 17 months as of this writing, those 70 thousand troops, even with 70,000 NATO “partners” will be attritted quickly.

This is World War I trench fighting for a military used to 6000 calorie buffet meals, air conditioning and PlayStation.

This is also a military that has no real combat veterans left and hasn’t had a real combat experience since Vietnam.

When Abrams tanks were destroyed in Iraq and a secret factory was built in Lima, Ohio to glue the parts back together, the admission that the 2006 Israeli defeat in Lebanon ended the usefulness of the tank was not noticed by the Pentagon.

Similarly, they love aircraft carriers that can be destroyed today by missiles, and they do love billion-dollar bombers.

It was Colonel David Hackworth that coined the term “Perfumed Princes of the Pentagon.”

The math that was done in the Pentagon denies our assertions here, assertions that any real military expert will take at face value. America would go to war without an air force.

They would go to war without the ability to do medivacs with helicopters as well. Most wounded in Ukraine die.

What is ignored is this, everything is being surveilled, not by satellites but drones floating around with high quality thermal optics. They cover everything in real time and coordinate with steerable artillery shells, suicide drones and the “Alligators,” helicopters that can get to any target while easily evading any mores to suppress them.

This makes Ukraine unsurvivable for the US and NATO.

But then won’t Russia have a civil war or run out of weapons?

Touching on another issue, Russia’s weapons capacity. Are they being supplied by other nations? Well, if not, and there is no hard proof Russia is using imported weapons despite claims in the press, were such a necessity to be reached, other nations would step in.

If Russia were gone, China would be weakened and vulnerable.

Without Russia’s nuclear arsenal, China would have either fallen by now to brazen efforts by, not so much “the US” as the global criminal elites who control the US.

There are hundreds of thousands of military, perhaps even millions, willing and able to fight NATO in Ukraine. There is also production capacity to build a million suicide drones a year easily or 100,000,000 artillery shells to pound NATO.

There is also the fear and anger, in some cases centuries old, that drives a world Biden is ignoring.

Gordon Duff is a former UN diplomat having served in the Middle East and Africa, a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted governments challenged by security issues, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

https://journal-neo.org/2023/07/20/the-short-but-nasty-truth-about-bidens-bluff-in-ukraine/

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enough is enough — bring him home......

By Gus Leonisky at 23 Jul 2023 - 5:40am
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staying on top.....

The world is facing the biggest power shift in decades, with the US poised to lose its leading position to China, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Saturday.

This could result in a major conflict between Washington and Beijing unless the US accepts that it cannot be the “winner” forever, he warned.

“[China] has become a manufacturing powerhouse and is now overtaking America,” Orban said in his annual speech in the town of Baile Tusnad in Romania’s Eastern Transylvania.

In just 30 years, China has undergone the industrial revolution that took the West around three centuries, the Hungarian prime minister said, adding that America is about to say ‘goodbye’ to its status as the world’s only superpower.

Beijing is also challenging the values Washington seeks to portray as universal, Orban said. China considers American values to be a “hostile ideology,” he said, adding that “there is some truth in it.”

Such a development would certainly not sit well with Washington, which will want to remain “on top of the world” forever, Orban warned. He said attempts to challenge existing hegemony had led to major conflict on multiple occasions in human history. “There are no eternal winners and eternal losers,” he added.

A conflict between the two great powers is likely but not unavoidable, the Hungarian leader believes. The world needs to find a new balance, and the two opposing parties should recognize each other as equals, he said. Major nations have to “accept that, today, instead of American dominance, there are two suns in the sky,”Orban added.

He also painted a grim picture of Europe’s future by saying it’s about to lose its dominant position in the global economy. Orban blamed the West’s anti-Russian policies for this development. The EU is already “rich but weak,” he said, adding that it would further lose its competitive advantages as a result of its determination to impose sanctions on Russia.

The idea that Russia can be separated from the world economy through various restrictions is an “illusion,” he warned. The EU has already witnessed the results of its erroneous decisions, Orban said, adding that “others buy Russian energy instead of us, and we pay more for energy than ever before.”

According to Orban, the UK and Italy would drop out of the world’s top ten economies, and Germany would fall to 10th place, down from its current fourth position. A significant part of the European economy is still linked to Russia despite all the rhetoric about sanctions, he said.

Hungary has emerged as one of the major critics of Western policies amid the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev. Budapest has repeatedly called for a ceasefire and peace deal in Ukraine, and has criticized the EU for sending arms to Kiev. In June, Orban told the German tabloid Bild that a Ukrainian victory on the battlefield was “impossible.” Hungary has also insisted that anti-Russia sanctions are hurting Europe more than they hurt Russia.

https://www.rt.com/news/580129-china-overtaking-us-hungary-orban/

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enough is enough — bring him home......

By Gus Leonisky at 23 Jul 2023 - 6:15am
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demilitarization......

By Colonel (Ret) Ann Wright / Popular Resistance

The weekend before the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, Global Women for Peace United against NATO representing women in 35 countries met July 6-9, 2023 for three days of peace discussions in Brussels, Belgium.

I am writing with details of each of the excellent panels and webinars to provide a sense of the numbers of women from around the world who participated in the program.

Photos of the various events in the conference are being posted in the media section of the Global Women’s website. Video recordings of the sessions are included for each session, but due to technical problems with the recordings, some are not of as good of quality as we had wished.

Global Women Meet With Members of the European Parliament

On July 6, 2023, twenty Global Women delegates met with members of the European Parliament to express their concern about the war-making role of NATO. The meeting was moderated by Skeyi Koukouma, from Cyprus, Secretary General of the Progressive Women’s Movement POGO. Irish member of the European Parliament Clare Daly and German member of the European Parliament Özlem Demirel spoke to the Global Women delegation about their concerns about NATO. The delegation gave a copy of the founding statement of Global Women to the members of the European Parliament.

MEP Clare Daly forcefully said that war and militarism are anathema to feminism and equality and stressed that equality, justice and peace are the principles that underpin women’s struggle for freedom. She emphasized that there is no place for militarism or the use of violence to achieve geopolitical goals. She underscored that NATO’s purpose is domination, not justice or the defense of human rights. MEP Daly emphasized that women must resist NATO’s policies, calling for its dismantling and the restoration of equality and peace and not allow NATO to co-opt the use of the term “Feminine Foreign Policy” and “Women, Gender and Equality.”

In her speech, MEP Özlem Demirel referred to the need for immediate demilitarization and obtaining peace only through peaceful means. She also stressed that the funds given for the purchase of arms and military equipment are at the expense of having funds for the strengthening of health, education and other services for the people worldwide.

Almost all of the twenty Global Women delegates took turns speaking, each emphasizing the problems faced in their countries because of NATO’s military actions and mandatory military expenditures. The need for world peace, demilitarization, for human services such as health and education and for strengthening the protection of human rights was emphasized by all delegates.

https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/18/brussels-global-women-for-peace-united...

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enough is enough — bring him home......