Russian President Vladimir Putin assured on Tuesday July 19 that the gas giant Gazprom would fully fulfill its obligations to its suppliers, at a time when deliveries to Europe are falling in the midst of the conflict in Ukraine. “Gazprom has fulfilled, continues to fulfill and will fully fulfill its obligations, if anyone needs it,” he told a press conference after talks in Tehran.

Mr. Putin called on Tuesday, July 19, to lift Western restrictions on Russian cereals to obtain progress in the export of Ukrainian agricultural production, currently blocked in the country because of the Kremlin offensive. "We will facilitate the export of Ukrainian cereals, but on the basis that all restrictions related to air deliveries for the export of Russian cereals are lifted," said the Russian president, after talks in Tehran.

Mr. Putin said on Wednesday (July 20th) that he had not seen any willingness on the part of Ukraine to respect the terms of what he presented as a preliminary peace agreement decided in March. Speaking on television after his visit to Iran, Vladimir Putin announced that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had offered to mediate between Moscow and Kyiv. “The result obviously depends on the willingness of the parties to implement the agreements that have been reached. We see today that this is not the will of the power in place in kyiv,” said Vladimir Putin.

Russia "is working on the annexation of Ukrainian territories" using the same "tactics" as for Crimea in 2014, accused the White House on Tuesday, July 19. "The Russian government has detailed plans to annex a number of regions in Ukraine, including Kherson, Zaporizhia and all of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts," Washington said. The “illegitimate” representatives that Moscow has imposed in these areas “will hold puppet referendums on reunification with Russia”, “perhaps in September during the Russian regional elections”, he added.

At the same time, Russia is seeking to set up Russian banks there to generalize the use of the rouble, "forces residents to apply for Russian citizenship", "imposes its cronies in the security services", while "sabotage the civil Internet “, the White House said.

GusNote: THE VAST MAJORITY OF RESIDENTS (ETHNIC RUSSIANS) OF THE DONBASS REGION ARE MORE THAN HAPPY TO BECOME "RUSSIANIZED" OR "PUPPETIZED" — AWAY FROM THE NAZIS OF THE KIEV GOVERNMENT....

Bombings in eastern Ukraine. In Kramatorsk, a missile fell at the end of the morning, Tuesday July 19, in a small garden surrounded by an enclosure of four-storey buildings, in the heart of the city, noted the journalists of Agence France-Presse. “At this stage we have one death,” said Igor Yeskov, spokesman for the city hall. A seriously injured man, his head bleeding and wrapped in a carpet by neighbors, was lying on the ground, before being taken away by the emergency services. "He was passing by, in the street, and was hit," said a panicked woman. 

GusNote: Was this a UKRAINIAN MISSILE/BOMBING?

Southern Ukraine hit by the Russian army. In the Odessa region, Russian forces fired seven missiles, injuring at least six people including a child, according to the Ukrainian presidency. The Russian Defense Ministry, for its part, claimed that its strikes on Odessa had destroyed a stockpile of ammunition supplied by the West.

Six people were killed in a bombardment on Monday July 18 on Toretsk, in eastern Ukraine. According to local officials, a shell hit an apartment building in this city of about 30,000 people in the Donetsk region, one of two Donbass provinces that Moscow is seeking to conquer in full.

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(side column — translation by Jules Letambour)

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By Patrick Lawrence

Special to Consortium News

At last we were able to read, last week, a New York Times story that concerned the Russians but not the brutal Russians. However, if we are not reading about the brutal Russians and their brutal military and their brutal attacks on civilians in Ukraine, we are obliged to read about the lonesome Russians, the pariah Russians, the Russians the world has forsaken. We are never going to read about ordinary, just plain Russians in the Times or in the rest of the mainstream press as it apes the Times. This we must accept.

Vladimir Putin traveled to Tehran last Tuesday for a summit with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. This was an unusual occasion: The Russian president has not been much for foreign travel since the Covid–19 pandemic erupted; it was his second state visit outside the Russian Federation since Russia intervened in Ukraine last February.

And it is a big deal, deserving of our attention. It marks another step, a considerable one, in the construction of the diplomatic, political, and economic infrastructure that will — I don’t consider this a daring prediction — define the 21st century. We witness the new world order many of us anticipate as it is being built.

The new world order many of us anticipate, if you have not noticed, ranks high among the great unsayables in American discourse and among American media. No, we’re still stuck on our “rules-based international order,” which is clunky code for the hegemony America defends. It is hopelessly passé at this point but remains lethally destructive.

Apart from significant signals that Moscow and Tehran are committed to deepening ties, the centerpiece of the occasion was a simultaneous memorandum of understanding signed by the National Iranian Oil Company and Gazprom. In an agreement worth $40 billion, the Russian energy supplier is to assist on the technology side as Iran develops two gas fields and six oil fields. Further out, this is part of a long-in-the-making project that will connect Russia, Iran, and India by sea, road, rail, and, eventually, a very significant Iran–to–India gas pipeline.

One giant step for Russia and Iran, let’s say, and one even more giant step for the non–West as it advances toward parity with the West.

But never mind all that. When Putin traveled to Tehran it was to find solace in “a fellow outcast,” The New York Times misinformed us in its July 19 report. Iran and Russia are “two isolated, sanctions-stricken countries whose main connection is their active opposition to the United States, its allies and its domination of the multilateral world order,” we read in the paper’s second-day story.  

You simply cannot beat the Times for reductionist rubbish when a major development does not match America’s fictions. The task is to keep its readers’ heads buried so far into the sand they have no hope of pulling them out.

I can’t, anyway.

A Second Summit

Apart from the Putin–Khamenei talks and the Gazprom–NIOC surprise, Putin attended a second summit, this one with Ebrahim Raisi, the Iranian president, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Tehran and Moscow share a common interest in bringing order to Syria now that Damascus, with Russian and Iranian help, has reasserted sovereignty except in areas of the north where the Islamist militias of ISIS and its offshoots remain active and where the U.S. continues to steal Syrian oil as part of an illegal occupation.

As reported, the intent of the three-way was to dissuade the perfidious Turkish leader from launching another offensive against the Kurdish population in areas near the Syrian frontier with Turkey. There’s no indication at this time as to how successful Putin and Raisi were in their talks with Erdogan, a tinpot main-chancer whose word and a quarter will get you a cup of coffee, as we used to say.

I love some of the problems the Times’ Steven Erlanger identified when analyzing the Russian–Iranian demarche, and there must be problems if an event of this magnitude is to be properly misunderstood. “Russia does not share Iran’s enmity toward Israel and does not want Tehran to develop a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Erlanger tells us.

Last time I checked, Tehran wants a settlement with Tel Aviv that guarantees its security; the enmity runs in the other direction. Tehran, as a matter of its religious principles, does not want to build a nuclear weapon — as it has made clear too many times to count.

Here is a good one: 

“Russia and Iran are also competing to sell their sanctioned and discounted oil to China and other countries. Though the quality of the crude is different in both countries, it is difficult to imagine them forming some sort of cartel to sell sanctioned oil, Mr. Shapiro [a former State Department bureaucrat] said.”

Who said anything about some sort of cartel, other than Mr. Shapiro? But it must be said, who can imagine two oil-producing nations getting along when they both market internationally — especially when they are not selling the same product? I think I understand.   

The best in this crop of silly assertions is Erlanger’s analysis of the main fault line in the Tehran–Moscow relationship. It does not rest on “shared values and democracy.” Uh-oh. It is “transactional” and rests on converging interests. “But transactional relations do not make for lasting alliances or disguise the strains within them,” writes our Steve [as if the U.S. is not transactional in its international dealings].

Translation: The Biden regime is hell bent on replacing politics and history in international relations with ideology and an authoritarians-vs.-democrats binary that is supposed to define all of humanity. I have to set aside my usual decorum here. Horseshit. History, politics and interests are the proper determinants in state-to-state relations. Ideology, even when referred to as “values,” has no place in them.

Stevie, you’re no Jack Kennedy.

Coherence of the Non–West

In the increasing coherence of the non–West, there were a few days last year that I have never got out of my head. They occurred after the Biden regime’s first significant encounter with the Chinese. You remember: the disastrous talks in Anchorage, Alaska, March 2021.

The Chinese side was looking expectantly for a new start with the Americans, the beginning of a serious relationship based on mutual respect, parity, and none other than common interests. Antony Blinken, our secretary of guitar strumming and state, instead gave them canned ideological lectures about democracy, human rights and the rules-based international order. It was a disaster.

As soon as Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, returned to Beijing, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian FM, flew to the Chinese capital for talks. As soon as those talks finished, Wang flew to Tehran and concluded a 25–year, $400 billion agreement with the Islamic Republic — tech transfer, infrastructure development, oil sales, and so on — that had been years in gestation.

There you have it, the dynamic of the non–West’s coalescence. It is not anti–American or anti–anybody, as the Western press insists it is. The powers involved have, imagine this, too many common interests to bother with adversarial enmity and, indeed, would rather the Americans and their allies cut out the ideological antagonism and join in the effort to build a world order worthy of the term. Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping made this explicitly clear in that remarkable joint declaration they made public on the eve of the Beijing Olympics last winter.

What happened in Anchorage, what made it so key a moment, is that the Chinese simply gave up trying to work with the Americans: You can’t get any sense out of them, Beijing concluded. This, parenthetically, is exactly what the Russians concluded 11 months later when they intervened in Ukraine.

The construction of infrastructure to serve a 21st century world order has been under way for some time. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a big part of it. Then you have bilateral relations improving here and there: China’s recent economic agreements with Cuba, China’s with Iran, Iran’s with Venezuela, China’s with Venezuela, India’s with Russia, and so on. These multiply as we speak.

All these desperate outcasts. They seem to be everywhere, lolling around feeling forlorn.

The Russia–Iran development is another piece of this but seems to me singularly important. It signals that sanctions, which do not work in any case, will eventually fail completely and that Iran is more than gradually coming in from the cold.  

On the diplomatic side, the Islamic Republic has just become part of a three-sided bloc with Russia and China. This follows by a year its admission as a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a Eurasian partnership China started in 2001. Tehran’s application to join the BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — is pending, as is Argentina’s.  

When Hossein Amir–Abdollahian, Iran’s foreign minister, visited New Delhi earlier this summer it signaled what The Diplomat is calling a reset in relations. His Indian counterpart, along with Prime Minister Nahendra Modi, were effusive in their celebrations of the relationship afterward.

In the nuts-and-bolts line, Iran recently agreed with Azerbaijan, its northern neighbor — this is another memo of understanding — to build an elaborate corridor establishing rail, road, communications and energy links. Now this gets interesting. Coming atop the Gazprom deal, the project with Azerbaijan brings Iran closer to a direct transport link with Russia.

Now dolly out. This deal comes just as a new rail link between Russia and India opens, via Iran. This is part of something called the International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC), which Moscow, Tehran and New Delhi set in motion at the turn of the century. No, in all likelihood you have read nothing of this.

Here is the part that most interests me. As the INSTC develops, it may follow naturally that India and Iran can revisit a project that was iced many years ago. In the early years of this century, the two sides proposed a gas pipeline linking Iranian fields to Indian ports. The U.S., eager to make the Islamic Republic the outcast Steve Erlanger wants us to think it is, vigorously opposed the project and it was dropped.

Reports now suggest the pipeline project, which makes eminent economic sense, is under study once again. Nothing definite is yet agreed, but it tells us that in time Western markets, long key to the West’s coercive power, will no longer be the only markets. And I like the poetic justice: You can slow us down but you cannot stop us.

This same can be said of the non–West’s ever more evident gathering of forces, interests, and cooperative arrangements. Who, I have to ask, is leading the world forward in a sensible, constructive direction? And who is retarding this process with all its might, the only thing it has left?

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. 

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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BY James O’Neill

Last week there was a meeting of Russian President Putin and President Erdogan of Turkey and President Raisi of Iran in Iran’s capital Teheran. Only a short time ago a meeting of these three men, especially in Iran’s capital of Teheran, would have been unthinkable. The meeting was a measure of how much the world has changed in a very short time.

Iran has recently joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and also applied to join the BRICS group, as has Turkey. The idea of Turkey joining such a group, of which Russia and China are the two strongest members and a bitter opponent of the United States led coalition of Western states, would have been unthinkable. It is a measure of how the world has changed and is changing, all in a very short time period.

Another applicant to join BRICS is Saudi Arabia which recently hosted United States president Joe Biden and what turned out to be a fruitless exercise from the American point of view. Biden, who had earlier expressed very critical comments of the Saudi government, was forced to eat humble pie in his foray to the Kingdom. He was forced to meet the Saudi leader in Jeddah, being denied the privilege of a meeting in the Saudi capital of Riyadh.

Russia has made a major effort to woo Turkey which is currently a favoured destination of Russian tourists. Turkey maintains a military presence in Syria, aimed primarily at the Kurdish minority that is in fact an American proxy. The Americans for their part, continue to occupy a part of Syrian territory. There is not the least basis in international law for that occupation. Worse, the Americans are continuing the theft of Syrian oil for which they make absolutely no effort to pay the Syrians. They simply take it and keep the proceeds, which amounts to several million dollars per day. The word “theft” is used advisedly as no other word as accurately describes the nature of the United States actions. Equally as bad as the theft is the complete absence of criticism of such unlawful activity from Australia whose media pretend nothing is happening.

Russia talking to Turkey on such friendly terms marks also another shift in Russian foreign policy. Together with China, Russia is forging a new international trading order on which the vast majority of the nations of the developing world are a part. Again, there is a fundamental shift in the world order, coming on top of the fact that the vast majority of those nations have refrained from uttering any criticism of Russia for its actions in Ukraine.

One of the most important players in this emerging New World order is India. The role of India has always proved something of a puzzle. It is long-enjoyed good ties with Russia and the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) is merely the latest manifestation of the good relationship. India is also a member of the quartet of nations, along with the United States, Japan and Australia, that form what is increasingly an unlikely alliance clearly aimed at China. How India reconciles its membership of this quartet alongside its relationship with Russia remains one of the great mysteries, let alone its membership of BRICS which includes China, nominally one of the targets of the aforementioned quartet.

In this context, India joining the INSTC may be one of the clearest signals, together with its refusal to criticise Russia over the Ukrainian confrontation, that India has decided to cast its lot with the developing nations. In this context it will be interesting to see how its relationship with the Americans survives in the aforementioned quartet.

In this context, India joining the INSTC may be one of the clearest signals, together with its refusal to criticise Russia over the Ukrainian confrontation, that India has decided to cast its lot with the developing nations. In this context also it will be interesting to see how its relationship with the Americans survives in the aforementioned quartet.

Western Europe for its part continues its inevitable slow demise, of which its sanctions against Russia are playing an inexorable role. The confident United States-European view when the full sanctions were applied in February of this year was that Putin’s reign was imminently dead and that the Russian economy would collapse.

What has actually happened has been a rude shock to European arrogance. After some initial stumbles the Russian rouble has progressively strengthened to reach its highest point against the Euro and United States dollar for several years. It is the European economies that are collapsing and the coming winter is likely to be uncomfortably cold for them in more than one sense.

Western solidarity is also collapsing. There are of course those who will oppose Russia to the bitter end, such as Ursula van der Leyen, but their position looks increasingly untenable. A range of European countries are now looking to make private deals with the Russians to avoid the inevitable political consequences of their citizens literally freezing this winter.

Their plight is meeting with a marked reluctance by the Russians to even care about their plight, as entirely self-inflicted as it is. Putin’s recent speech to the Strong Idea For a New Time forum was notable for its promotion of the “truly revolutionary” changes that are occurring in the world that could transform the existing world order to one that was more “harmonious, fairer and more community focused and safe” than the existing world order, dominated is it has been by the selfish demands of the world’s small number of rich nations.

The existing world order was “condemned to fail” Putin said, is it was “becoming a brake on the development of our civilisation”. The old order, which the West was pleased to describe as “the rules based international order”, a singularly inept description and anathema to those who believe in the powerful status of international law as the governing ethos, is bound to fail, Putin argued.

It is a system of change that is long overdue and the sooner it occurs the better off we will all be.

James O’Neill, an Australian-based former Barrister at Law, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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I know, it seems that "we" (all these articles) are repeating ourselves, but one cannot say it often enough: the US want to take all the toys of all the kids on this planet. We need to be aware that as others are getting on well in the playground, the US bullies could come in at any time and wreck everything.... And with a dithering senile old kook at the helm, the US are in a mess.

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