THE "RUSSIAN INTERVENTION" IN UKRAINE CAN ONLY GET "OUT OF CONTROL" IF NATO AND ZELENSKY DO SOMETHING STUPID. SO FAR THE RUSSIANS HAVE BEEN ECONOMICAL AND MINIMALIST IN THEIR ACTIONS. THIS IS WHY SOME RUSSIAN MID-LEVEL MILITARY ARE MIFFED. THEY'D PREFER KILL TURD ZELENSKY, ANNIHILATE KIEV AND DESTROY THE REST OF UKRAINE RATHER THAN FIDDLE WITH DEMOLISHING THE KIEV ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE, TOO SLOWLY TURNING THE SCREW ON ZELENSKY. 

BUT PUTIN KNOW THERE ARE AT LEAST 20 PER CENT RUSSIANS IN THE POPULATION AT LARGE IN THE GALICIAN (WESTERN) PART OF UKRAINE. AS WELL, DESPITE CLAIMS BY THE WESTERN MEDIA, PUTIN HATES HURTING PEOPLE. SOME HARSH SUPPORTING COMMENTATORS CALL THIS HIS "GOODY-TWO-SHOES WEAK-SPOT" OR SUCH.

SO, PUTIN WALKS SLOWLY AND CAREFULLY TOWARDS VICTORY AND JENS HATES THIS. UKRAINE LOST THE "WAR" FROM THE START AND AS THE RUSSIANS OFTEN REMIND THE WEST, THE DELAY IN THE PEACE PROCESS BY SENDING WEAPONS TO KIEV WON'T CHANGE THE OUTCOME. JENS KNOWS THIS AND HATES IT.... THIS IS WHY HE IS EAGER TO BARGE IN WITH HIS BIG BOOTS...

HE WOULD KNOW THAT THIS WOULD UNLEASH THE FINAL FLUSH OF HUMANITY THROUGH THE TOILET OF TIME..... BUT JENS IS MAD AND DELUDED, AS DEMANDED BY THE NATURE OF HIS POSITION: SHITHEAD OF THE MOST FASCIST ORGANISM OF WAR —NATO.

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British Royal Marines conducted high-risk operations in Ukraine in April, Lieutenant General Robert Magowan wrote in the force’s official journal. Before Magowan’s admission, Russia’s claims that NATO troops were active in Ukraine had been dismissed by Western analysts and media.

Members of 45 Commando Group of the Royal Marines left Ukraine in January after evacuating the British embassy in Kiev to Poland. However, some 300 members of the elite unit were sent back into the country in April to reestablish the British mission in Kiev, before going on to conduct “other discreet operations,” Magowan wrote in the force’s magazine, according to a report by The Times on Tuesday.

These operations took place “in a hugely sensitive environment and with a high level of political and military risk,” Magowan, who formerly served as commandant general of the Royal Marines and is now deputy chief of Defense Staff at the Ministry of Defense, stated.

While Magowan did not elaborate on what kind of missions the commandos carried out, his statement marks the first time that the UK has admitted its troops conducted special operations in Ukraine. The Ministry of Defense refused to confirm earlier accounts of British special forces training Ukrainian troops in Kiev in April.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has described the conflict in Ukraine as one between Russia and the “entire Western military machine,” and claimed in September that there are entire military units in Ukraine "under the de-facto command of Western advisers.”

Putin’s words were rejected by Western media outlets. "There is no evidence of NATO ground forces participating in Ukraine," Edward Arnold of the Royal United Services Institute think tank told the BBC at the time. "Nor of NATO commanders directing Ukrainian units on the battlefield. There is also a very low likelihood of this happening in the future as Nato seeks to mitigate escalation risks."

Magowan’s admission proves Arnold incorrect, but the UK is not the only NATO country to acknowledge the presence of its forces in Ukraine. An unnamed Pentagon official told reporters in October that an unspecified number of US troops were inspecting American arms shipments somewhere within Ukraine.

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/russia/568189-uk-troops-ukraine-operations/

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TIME TO MAKE A DEAL:

ANY NEGOTIATIONS HAVE TO PLY TO RUSSIA’S FAIR DEMANDS (THESE WON’T CHANGE, EXCEPT IN RUSSIA’S FAVOUR AS THE CONFLICT GOES ON. THE WEST KNOWS THIS):

*NO NATO IN UKRAINE.

*CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN

*THE DONBASS REGIONS ARE NOW RUSSIANS BECAUSE KIEV REFUSED TO ACCEPT THE MINSK AGREEMENTS

*FORMALISED WESTERN NON-AGGRESSION AGAINST RUSSIA (AND CHINA).

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NATO member states have agreed to increase the alliance's budget for 2023 by over 25%, the military bloc announced on Wednesday. The US-led alliance justified the move by referring to the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev.

The decision was motivated by the “degraded security environment” caused by the Ukraine crisis, according to the military bloc's statement.

“I strongly welcome the agreement of NATO’s civil and military budgets for 2023,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said, asserting that “only North America and Europe, working together in a strong NATO, can keep our one billion people safe in a more dangerous world.”

The ‘civil’ budget has been set to €370.8 million ($396.1 million), while the military spending is set to reach €1.96 billion. The figures constitute a sharp increase compared to 2022, up by 27.8% and 25.8% respectively.

The budgets represent the spending of the organization itself, with the ‘civil’ part covering “funds for personnel, operating costs, and program expenditures of NATO’s Headquarters and its International Staff.” The military budget is meant to cover the cost of “NATO Command Structure headquarters, missions, and operations around the world.”

The third commonly funded element, the NATO Security Investment Programme (NSIP), which covers construction costs as well as “command and control system investments,” has also received a boost. The NSIP cap has been set to €1 billion, representing a 26.6% increase.

The sharp uptick in spending for the bloc’s jointly-funded activities comes as multiple member states have pledged to spend more on defense individually, citing the need to replenish weapons stockpiles, which have been thinned-out by continuous support for Kiev.

They have also claimed the need to boost their capabilities in the face of the alleged “Russia threat.”The US alone has approved a record-breaking budget of some $848 billion, with some $800 million specifically allocated to aid Ukraine.

Russia has repeatedly raised concerns over the ever-growing NATO bloc, the eastward expansion of which has been openly named by Moscow as a prime threat to its security.

“NATO expansion remains the main driver for the West in relations not only with Russia, the post-Soviet countries and the former Warsaw Pact nations, which are already almost all absorbed by the alliance, but also, in general, in relations with other regions of the world,” Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said last week.

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/568256-stoltenberg-nato-budget-growth/

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PUMPING SELF-INFLATED VALUE OF A FASCSIT ORGANISATION, WITH CASH THAT THE POOR, JUSTICE AND DECENCY WILL NEVER SEE AGAIN...

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https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/45958

By Caitlin Johnstone

In what Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp describes as “a rare acknowledgment of the dangers of backing Ukraine,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg acknowledged a fear of something going “horribly wrong” and leading to a hot war between the nuclear-armed alliance and Russia.

In an article titled “‘I fear a full-blown war between the West and Russia’, Nato chief warns,” The Telegraph writes the following:

“I fear that the war in Ukraine will get out of control, and spread into a major war between Nato and Russia,” said Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, responding to a question about his greatest fears for the winter in an interview.

He told Norwegian broadcaster NRK on Friday that he was confident such a scenario could be avoided but that the threat was there.

“If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong,” he added.

And things absolutely can go horribly wrong when dealing with an increasingly aggressive standoff between nuclear superpowers, as we have seen from history. The last cold war saw many nuclear close calls as a result of technical malfunctions and misunderstandings, including an incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the only thing which prevented a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine from deploying its weapon on the US military was one officer refusing to go along with two others who were giving the orders to fire.

We got a taste of this horror once again last month in the long minutes following erroneous reports that Russia had launched missiles at NATO member Poland. The fact that cooler heads have prevailed up until this point does not mean that nuclear brinkmanship is safe, anymore than a game of Russian roulette not ending after the first couple of trigger pulls would mean that Russian roulette is safe to play.

So Stoltenberg is correct to be afraid. There absolutely are too many things that can go horribly wrong in such a standoff, and there are simply too many unpredictable moving parts for anyone to feel confident that this will not happen.

And it’s pretty crazy to hear Stoltenberg voice these concerns even while the Pentagon gives the go-ahead for Ukraine to begin launching long-range attacks on targets inside Russia in its war that is being backed by the United States, because those two positions would seem to be pretty strongly at odds with each other.

In an article titled “Pentagon gives Ukraine green light for drone strikes inside Russia,” The Times reports as follows:

The Pentagon has given a tacit endorsement of Ukraine’s long-range attacks on targets inside Russia after President Putin’s multiple missile strikes against Kyiv’s critical infrastructure.

Since daily assaults on civilians began in October, the Pentagon has revised its threat assessment of the war in Ukraine. Crucially, this includes new judgments about whether arms shipments to Kyiv might lead to a military confrontation between Russia and Nato.

This represents a significant development in the nine-month war between Ukraine and Russia, with Washington now likelier to supply Kyiv with longer-range weapons.

The Times quotes a “US defence source” as saying the following: “We’re not saying to Kyiv, ‘Don’t strike the Russians [in Russia or Crimea]’. We can’t tell them what to do. It’s up to them how they use their weapons. But when they use the weapons we have supplied, the only thing we insist on is that the Ukrainian military conform to the international laws of war and to the Geneva conventions.”

“They are the only limitations but that includes no targeting of Russian families and no assassinations. As far as we’re concerned, Ukraine has been in compliance,” the source says, which is a strange assertion given that US intelligence has reportedly concluded Ukraine was behind the assassination of the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin.

“Ukraine has been careful to use its own drones, not US-supplied weapons, to carry out the strikes,” The Times reports, while also noting that “Pentagon officials have made it clear that requests from Kyiv for longer-range US weapons, including rockets and fighter bombers which could be used for even more effective strikes inside Russia or occupied Crimea, are being seriously considered.”

This revelation comes days after Ukraine launched its most brazen attack into Russian territory yet, with drone strikes on bases which killed multiple Russian soldiers and damaged two nuclear-capable bombers. Not too long ago the US waging a proxy war that features direct attacks on Russia’s nuclear forces would have been an unthinkably terrifying prospect, yet that’s where we’re at now, and it only seems to be escalating.

Empire apologists will try to make this a conversation about whether Ukraine has a “right” to attack Russian territory, which is a red herring from the real issue at hand. Obviously Ukraine has a right to attack a nation that is attacking it; that’s not the point. The real issue is the danger of provoking a hot war between nuclear superpowers, which even the NATO Secretary-General is becoming increasingly nervous about.

The western power alliance continually ramping up aggressions to test how far it could provoke Russia is what led to this conflict in the first place. Now we’re at a point where there isn’t much space for Russia to back up before it’s against the ropes and potentially pressed to do something nobody wants. These people should not be talking about escalation, they should be talking about de-escalation. We need diplomacy, de-escalation and detente, and we need them yesterday.

First published by Caitlin Johnstone December 12, 2022

Caitlin Johnstone is a reader-supported independent journalist from Melbourne, Australia. She now lives in the US. Her political writings can be found on Medium.

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https://johnmenadue.com/nato-chief-voices-fear-of-war-with-russia-while-us-greenlights-drone-strikes-on-russian-territory/

MEANWHILE THE OLD FOOL IS UP TO HIS OLD TRICKS AGAIN:

Urgently negotiating an end to hostilities in Ukraine would prevent another world war, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger argued in an essay published on Friday. The 99-year-old statesman noted that, in 1916, the US government had the chance to end the First World War through diplomacy, but missed it for reasons of domestic politics.

Kissinger laid out his reasoning in the December 17 issue of The Spectator, describing the current conflict as a “war in which two nuclear powers contest a conventionally armed country,” a clear reference to Ukraine being a proxy war between the US and Russia.

The “peace process” Kissinger proposes would “link Ukraine to NATO, however expressed,” as he believes neutrality for Kiev is no longer an option. He also wants Russia to withdraw to the lines before February 24, while the other territories Ukraine claims – Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea – “could be the subject of a negotiation after a ceasefire.” 

In addition to “confirming the freedom of Ukraine,” the arrangement would strive to “define a new international structure, especially for Central and Eastern Europe,” in which Russia should “eventually” find a place, he explained.

While some would prefer “a Russia rendered impotent by the war,” Kissinger disagrees, arguing that Moscow’s “historical role should not be degraded.” Dismantling Russia could turn its vast territory into a “contested vacuum,” where “competing societies might decide to settle their disputes by violence” and neighbors could seek to claim territory by force, all in the presence of “thousands of nuclear weapons.”

In substance, this is the same proposal Kissinger had first floated in May, for which he was labeled an enemy of Ukraine and added to the notorious ‘Peacemaker’ kill list. In an interview earlier this month, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky categorically rejected any sort of ceasefire that did not take Kiev’s claimed 1991 borders as the starting point.

It was also unclear whether Moscow would accept any Western-mediated ceasefire at all, after former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s admission that the 2014 Minsk armistice was intended to “give Ukraine time” to prepare for war.

What’s fresh in Kissinger’s Spectator essay is his reasoning. He points to August 1916, at the height of the First World War, when the warring powers sought US mediation to end the unprecedented bloodshed. Though “a peace based on the modified status quo ante was within reach,” President Woodrow Wilson delayed the talks until after he could get re-elected in November. By then it was too late, and the war would go on for two more years, “irretrievably damaging Europe’s established equilibrium.”

Asked about Kissinger’s proposal, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russian President Vladimir Putin was “eager to give the article a thorough reading,” but “hasn’t had a chance to do so yet, unfortunately.”

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/568389-kissinger-ukraine-peace-proposal/

PUTIN IS BUSY SHARPENING HIS NUKES, IN PREPARATION AGAINST A "FIRST NUKE ATTACK" BY THE USA.....

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THE ONLY SOLUTION TO THIS STANDOFF IS FOR UKRAINE TO DO WHAT THE ENGLISH EMPIRE DID IN THE 1920S. ACCEPT THE INDEPENDENCE OF IRELAND, THE NAME OF WHICH, EIRE, WAS FULLY DECLARED IN 1937. IN THIS CASE UKRAINE HAS TO ACCEPT THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE FIVE REGIONS THAT WERE FORMERLY RUSSIAN BUT ATTACHED TO UKRAINE BY THE VAGARIES OF THE COMMUNISTS IN MOSCOW, FROM 1922 ONWARDS. IN 1991, THESE REGIONS SHOULD HAVE BEEN RETURNED TO RUSSIA WHEN THE USSR BROKE UP.

AS WELL THE WEST HAS TO SIGN A DEAL ON THE SECURITY OF RUSSIA. 

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https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/45958