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corrupt volodymyr as a replacement for his dead son and a match to the other one — the corrupt hunter......Throwing good money after bad is never a sound political strategy, especially at a time when the US public is feeling the strain of an economy in crisis. The one thing every observer of US domestic politics must concede is that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi know how to work Congress. For four decades, Biden walked the halls of the US Senate, strong-arming colleagues to line up votes for legislation, with Pelosi team-tagging in the House of Representatives.
BY SCOTT RITTER
In the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi did the same thing. Now, as president and House speaker, respectively, Biden and Pelosi pulled out all the stops to get one last piece of legislation across the finish line—the passage of an additional $45 billion in assistance for Ukraine. To avoid the potential hurdles that would have to be negotiated trying to get a Republican-controlled House of Representatives to pass legislation authorizing more aid to Ukraine in the coming year, Biden and Pelosi conspired to push through a massive package in the final days of the lame duck session of Pelosi’s tenure as speaker. But there was the chance that such an effort would be seen by many in Congress for what it was— a naked political maneuver designed to obviate the will of the US people who had voted to impanel a new Congress less disposed to freely dispensing treasure in support of a cause — Ukraine — which by all accounts appears to be on the ropes. Throwing good money after bad is never a sound political strategy, especially at a time when the American public is feeling the strain of an economy in crisis. Enter, stage right, Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine and the US' most powerful propogandist when it comes to getting the US Congress to open its purse. Previously, Ukraine’s beleaguered president was dispatched to the frontlines, where he handed out medals and received a flag signed by the “heroes of Bakhmut.” Zelensky then boarded a US Air Force plane, which whisked him off to Washington, DC where, on cue, he met with President Biden in the White House (and gave him a medal from one of the “heroes”), and addressed a joint session of Congress, handing Pelosi the autographed flag. Nancy Pelosi alluded to the precedent of Winston Churchill as Zelensky spoke to Congress. But let there be no doubt—“Ukraine is alive and kicking” will not be carved alongside any pantheon inscribed with the words of the former British Prime Minister. Indeed, in a year’s time, no one will remember anything about Zelensky’s speech; its content was as vacuous as the cause it purported to support. Zelensky’s Washington visit was little more than empty gestures and empty words offered up as window dressing for the grift that is the more than $100 billion in aid earmarked over the course of the past year for Ukraine. Lest anyone lose sight of what was actually transpiring in Washington DC during Zelensky’s visit. Ponder the following: it had nothing to do with providing Ukraine with the weapons it claims to need to successfully wage war against Russia. Nothing on Zelensky’s so-called “Christmas list” was funded by Congress—no M-1 Abrams tanks, no F-16 fighters, no long-range artillery rockets, no additional Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries. The US government was playing to a domestic audience, which means that the perception of military assistance is more important than giving Ukraine what it believes it needs. The standard US excuses—the advanced tanks and aircraft are too difficult to maintain, that the Ukrainian soldier is better off with old Soviet-era weaponry than the modern western equivalent—is mooted by the fact that the current formula guiding military assistance has failed. Russia has stabilized the situation on the battlefield and is preparing to seize the initiative, a reality that obviates the tens of billions of dollars of military assistance that has been dispatched to Ukraine. The current package, except for a single Patriot missile battery, is simply more of the same, virtually guaranteeing that Ukraine will continue to lose this conflict going forward. This, of course, appears to be an outcome the US is willing to accept. US policy appears to be geared toward the concept of, to paraphrase US Senator Lyndsey Graham, letting Ukraine fight to the last Ukrainian, so long as Russia pays a heavy price in the process. This is known to Ukraine, and yet Zelensky still came to Washington, DC. That a Ukrainian leader would debase himself to the point of so eagerly serving as a political puppet on the US domestic political scene speaks volumes about the reality of how far Ukraine has fallen in the past year. The tragedy is that, far from helping Ukraine prevail in its war with Russia, the US aid will only guarantee the further destruction of the Ukrainian nation and its people.
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NOTE THE PICTURE AT TOP HAD BEEN MANIPULATED BY UNKNOWN, THEN MISCHIEFED BY GUS....
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joe at the laundromat.....
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biden's biowarfare.....
MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The Russian Defense Ministry named new high-ranking participants in the military biological program in Ukraine, including ex-heads of the US Department of Health structures, all of them associated with the US Democratic Party, Commander of Russian Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov said.
"Earlier, we presented materials confirming the participation of Hunter Biden and his Rosemont Seneca Foundation, as well as other structures controlled by the US Democratic Party in financing Pentagon's main contractors operating in Ukraine. It was shown how deeply the son of the current US President [Joe Biden], Hunter Biden, is involved in financing the Metabiota company controlled by the US Ministry of Defense," Kirillov said, following the 9th Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention.
At the same time, some participants of closed projects still remain in the shadows, although they are key figures in the Ukrainian military biological program, the general explained.
"Among them are former director of Defense Threat Reduction Agency Kenneth Myers, executive vice president of the CIA-controlled In-Q-Tel venture fund
Tara O'Toole, former head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Thomas Frieden, former director of the National Institutes of Health
Francis Collins, former CEO of the Battelle Memorial Institute
Jeffrey Wadsworth, chief researcher and president of the Department of International Research, Development and Medicine of Pfizer,
and many others," Kirillov revealed.
The Russian official added that all those mentioned are beneficiaries of the Pentagon's biological projects in one way or another and are associated with the US Democratic Party.
According to Kirillov, the Russian Defense Ministry received access to the US Department of Defense report on Biological Threat Reduction Program Activities in Ukraine.
"Earlier we cited the report of Defense Threat Reduction Agency on activities in Ukraine, published by an American non-governmental organization. The Pentagon subjected the document to serious censorship, completely removing about 80% of the information. An expanded version of this report has become available to the Russian Defense Ministry, which reveals the names and posts of specialists and managers of biological projects, a list of laboratories involved, as well as facts confirming the conduct of exercises and training with pathogens of particularly dangerous infections," Kirillov said, following the 9th Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention.
The general added that according to the document, the participants of military biological programs are several Ukrainian biological research institutes, and three Pentagon contractors. The document also contains personal data of thirty laboratory employees and seven managers from the US Defense Department.
Kirillov also said that the Pentagon has been transferring the unfinished military-biological research in Ukraine to the states of Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
"According to the available information, the Pentagon is actively transferring studies that are not completed within the framework of Ukrainian projects to the countries of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Simultaneously, the US Department of Defense is increasing its cooperation with the states of Africa and the Asia-Pacific region – Kenya, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand. States that already have laboratories with a high level of biological isolation are of particular interest to the American military department," Kirillov said, following the 9th Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention.
Back in March, the Russian Defense Ministry revealed that the US had spent more than $200 million to establish biological laboratories in Ukraine, which participated in the American military program. According to Moscow, Rosemont Seneca, the investment fund of Hunter Biden (the son of US President Joe Biden) took part in the financing of the projects.
Washington vehemently denied the existence of those compounds; however, on March 7, undersecretary of state Victoria Nuland told lawmakers that "biological research facilities" linked to the US were in fact operating in Ukraine.
According to the papers discovered by the Russian military, the said labs were engaged in various research projects, such as the possible proliferation of typhus and hepatitis in the region, and the possible use of wild migratory birds for the transmission of a highly pathogenic form of avian influenza.
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the plunder....
BY MAX BLUMENTHAL
Steel fencing and police barricades ringed the perimeter of the US Capitol Building hours ahead of the arrival of Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian president appeared in Washington DC in the early afternoon on December 21, 2022, emerging from a US military jet clad in an olive drab sweatshirt and cargo pants, and charged with a singular mission: convince Congress and the Biden administration to send his government more than the whopping $45 billion in military and humanitarian aid it had already allocated for 2023.
Just outside the police barricades, at the eastern side of the Capitol grounds, as a demonstration by a small but dedicated group of antiwar activists wound down, a group of around 20 Ukrainians in dark business attire gathered for a photo. They were on their way into the Capitol, where they were to function as Zelensky’s personal cheering section, representing the Ukrainian diaspora before a nationally televised audience.
I approached members of the delegation to challenge them on Zelensky’s lobbying push and the planned expansion of the NATO proxy war he is leading against Russia. My questions were met with a torrent of worn-out talking points about Ukraine’s crusade to defend democracy, accusations that Moscow was sponsoring my reporting, and a complaint that $45 billion in US aid was too little.
Several of the Ukrainian delegates I encountered on the way into the US Capitol happened to have played significant roles in the transformation of Ukraine from a neutral state into a hyper-militarized vassal of the US and the IMF.
The most voluble among them, acting as a de facto spokesperson for the group, was Natalie Jaresko. A Ukrainian-American financial industry operative, Jaresko presided over several IMF austerity packages and the rampant privatization of Ukraine’s economy as the country’s Minister of Finance in its post-coup government.
In our exchange, Jaresko unabashedly defended Zelensky’s outlawing of 11 opposition political parties, his banning of opposition media, and his plans to blacklist the Russian wing of the Orthodox Church. “It’s martial law!” Jaresko exclaimed, justifying Kiev’s authoritarian crackdown as a necessary wartime measure.
Jaresko has seen the corruption and de-democratization of Ukraine from within. She helped open up the country’s economy to Western multinationals after being appointed to the Foreign Investors Advisory Council of Victor Yuschenko, a neoliberal president who gained power thanks to the “Orange Revolution” backed by US intelligence and Western-aligned oligarchs George Soros and Boris Berisovsky in 2005.
Under Yuschenko’s reign, Ukraine’s government officially heroized the World War Two-era Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. During our exchange, Jaresko deflected when asked if she supported Bandera. However, her brother, John, has presided over the construction of a memorial in Bloomingdale, New Jersey to “Heroes of Ukraine” including World War Two-era Nazi collaborators, according to researcher Moss Robeson.
Nine years later, following the Euromaidan coup also engineered by Washington, Jaresko rose to Minister of Finance. She was granted Ukrainian citizenship on the day of her appointment.
Through her new post, Jaresko assumed control of Datagroup, the company that oversees Ukraine’s telecom sector. As former investment executive Tim Duff recounted, Jaresko “immediately proceeded to squeeze her competitor, the owner of Datagroup, out of business using the kind of foreign currency loan debt scam favored by Mafia hoods and economic hitmen employed by the CIA.”
While in Kiev, steering the government alongside a cadre of Ukrainian-American operatives, Jaresko grumbled about her salary while angling for opportunities to supplement it. In a withering analysis of her financial self-dealing, the late investigative journalist Robert Parry found that Jaresko “collected $1.77 million in bonuses from a U.S.-taxpayer-financed investment fund where her annual compensation was supposed to be limited to $150,000”
As Jaresko lapped up praise from Beltway corporate media, the NATO-sponsored Atlantic Council that employed her as a visiting fellow acknowledged that under her watch, “the average monthly wage in Ukraine is only $194, an inflation rate of 55 percent is decimating citizens’ purchasing power, and a painful IMF-mandated austerity program involving sweeping cuts to social programs is being implemented.”
In 2017, Jaresko was rewarded with an appointment and $625,000 salary as director of Promesa, the unelected US board charged with restructuring Puerto Rico’s debt – and which average Puerto Ricans refer to derisively as “La Junta.” Jaresko resigned rom her position this April after leaving Puerto Rico’s economy firmly in the hands of Wall Street creditors.
The all-encompassing shock therapy that Jaresko prescribed from Puerto Rico to Ukraine was only possible thanks to society-wide disasters. In San Juan, it was Hurricane Maria that placed neoliberal capitalism on overdrive; in Kiev, it was a coup and a proxy war. Indeed, the conflict with Russia has provided Zelensky with justification to strip 70 percent of Ukraine’s workers of collective bargaining rights and arrest everyone from his political rivals to socialist organizers – a wave of repression that Jaresko explicitly justified in her exchange with me.
The Ukrainian president accompanied his Pinochet-style crackdown with an appeal this October at the NYSE Stock Exchange for multinational corporations to deepen their exploitation of his country’s economy and resources. As The Grayzone’s Alex Rubinstein reported, Zelensky’s foreign investment initiative plastered the word “deregulation” across the homepage of its website.
As I challenged the Ukrainian delegation on the nearly $100 billion of military aid the US has forked over to Kiev, a bespectacled middle-aged man interjected, demanding to know why I supposedly supported an “unprovoked” assault on an “innocent people.”
I countered that I opposed the Ukrainian military’s 8-year-long attack on the ethnic Russian population of Donetsk and Lugansk, where thousands had been killed before the Russian military ever entered Ukraine in February 2022. I then asked the indignant character if he also opposed the shelling of civilians in the eastern republics.
His reply came in the form of a firm “no!”
That person turns out to be a member of the US Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe named Orest Deychakiwsky. His commission is charged with monitoring Ukrainian compliance with OSCE commitments, including those Kiev made – and relentlessly violated –– to the Minsk Accords. As former German Chancellor Angela Merkel confessed this December, Ukraine’s Western backers used the Minsk Accords as a stalling tactic to prepare it for military conflict with Russia.
The son of a former member of Stepan Bandera’s OUN-B organization that collaborated with Nazi Germany towards the end of World War II, Deychakiwsky serves as the Vice President of the US-Ukraine Foundation. He previously worked at the Helsinki Commission under Sen. Ben Cardin, the pro-war Democrat who sponsored the Magnitsky Act imposing the first set of harsh post-Cold War sanctions on Russia and helping set the stage for the current conflict.
The Maidan infowarriorA member of the Ukrainian delegation who remained in the background while her fellow delegates jawed at me strongly resembled a prominent functionary of the post-Maidan media complex spawned with hundreds of millions in Western donations.
She closely resembled Anastasia Stanko, the deputy editor of Hromadske, a broadcast network she helped to found on the eve of the Maidan coup. Stanko was honored by the corporate-funded Committee to Protect Journalists with its 2018 press freedom award.
While opposition and Russian-language outlets have been banned by Zelensky, pro-NATO infowar instruments like Hromadske have flourished thanks to massive donations from the EU, USAID, the Thomson Foundation and transnational elites like Paypal founder Pierre Omidyar.
Though Hromadske has attempted to strike the liberal tone its benefactors prefer, it has occasionally provided a platform for genocide-level anti-Russian nationalism.
This March, days after Russia launched its military operation inside Ukraine, a guest on Hromadske ranted that the ethnic Russian population of Donetsk was filled “superfluous” and “absolutely useless people” who “must be killed.”
Researcher Moss Robeson noted in his analysis of Zelensky’s Ukrainian diaspora delegation that it also included Andrew Mac, an unpaid advisor to Zelensky described by Politico as “one of the biggest Washington power players for Ukraine.”
“We’re gonna send a lot more!”With tens of billions more on the way to Ukraine, the country’s debt to international creditors continues to grow, setting the stage for another crushing wave of austerity after the war. The diaspora operatives I encountered on their way into the Capitol gallery appeared poised to guide the plunder from the comfort of suburban America.
In the meantime, lawmakers from both parties can hardly contain their exuberance for expanding the proxy war. As one of the energy industry’s favorite senators, Democrat Joe Manchin, exclaimed when I asked him on a sidewalk outside the Capitol about the billions in military aid on the way to Ukraine, “We’re gonna send a lot more. I’m all in!”
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https://thegrayzone.com/2022/12/23/zelenskys-diaspora-hit-woman-ukraine/
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the massacre of the ukrainian jews celebrated by the kiev nazis.....FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....
sacrificed in a false-flag event?.....
IS ZELENSKY GOING TO BE DIEM-ED?
LARRY C. JOHNSON22 December 2022 by
HELMHOLTZ SMITH
If you think that Volodomyr Zelensky is the first leader in the throes of a civil war (yes, I know, Russia invaded, but the war in Ukraine at its roots is a civil war) to visit Washington, DC and speak to Congress and be compared with Winston Churchill, think again.
I thank my friend, Helmholtz Smith, for noting this historical precedent and finding the relevant video.
While I am sure Zelensky is flattered to be described as a modern day Churchill, he was not the first accorded that honor. Did you know that Ngo Dinh Diem also was the Vietnamese Winston Churchill?
In May 1961, U.S. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson visited Saigon and enthusiastically declared Diệm the “Winston Churchill of Asia”. Asked why he had made the comment, Johnson replied, “Diệm’s the only boy we got out there.” Johnson assured Diệm of more aid in molding a fighting force that could resist the communists.
Diem learned the hard way that once your U.S. backers anoint you as the next Churchill, your days are numbered. Diem was murdered as a consequence of a U.S. engineered coup.
Zelensky’s Wednesday appearance in Washington, D.C. and the accompanying accolades equating him with Winston Churchill is prima facie evidence that most pundits and news readers in American are certifiable ignoramuses. For starters, Churchill, notwithstanding his love affair with imperialism, was a towering intellect. He authored scholarly books and established himself as one of the greatest rhetoricians of all times. He had a knack for turning a phrase and creating iconic moments.
Zelensky? I challenge anyone to recite one memorable moment from Zelensky’s snooze fest before the U.S. Congress. Banality thy name is Volodomyr. But Zelensky can do something that Churchill never did — he can play the piano with his penis. Gives new meaning to the phrase, “banging out a tune.”
Now, set aside the levity. Remember this week as another watershed moment in U.S. history. At the very moment that Washington embraced a malevolent dictator masquerading as a Nazified version of Fidel Castro, Russia sent an unmistakable message to the United States and Europe — Russia acknowledged that a state of war exists, pitting Russia against NATO and the United States, and it is building up its conventional and nuclear forces in anticipation of a future clash.
My dear friend Paul, a retired Navy SEAL Commander, asked me the essential, pertinent question this morning:
The question that continues to nag me, Larry, is most basic. What is the Ukraine-Russia War’s endgame? What do we see as a Ukraine win? Russia’s withdrawal? What does Ukraine see as a win – old borders restored, Russia minds its own business, etc.? What does Russia see as a win – total or partial domination of Ukraine? A western border pushback to NATO’s backyard? Then fortify it (build a fucking wall)? I don’t see focused discussion of the endgame. No one seems to be asking or answering the endgame question. It appears we (the US) are dumping $$ billions into Ukraine’s defense without telling the taxpayers what the money is expected to achieve – the endgame.
So what do you think? What is the endgame in Ukraine?
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daring visit.......
"Daring"?
Zelensky’s Weapons Wish List Goes Mostly Unfulfilled on Trip to Washington - New York Times - Dec 22, 2022
After his daring 10-hour dash to the nation’s capital on Wednesday, Mr. Zelensky left with nearly $2 billion in new arms and equipment — as well as a likely commitment from Congress for nearly $50 billion in additional aid next year.What please is "daring" in taking an armored car ride from Kiev to Poland to jump onto a U.S. military plane for a non-stop flight to Washington DC?
Likewise "bold":
Zelensky’s role on the Washington stage is Ukrainian fighter - Washington Post - Dec 21, 2022
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s bold Wednesday visit to Washington is an epic piece of theater designed to motivate multiple audiences — in the United States, Europe, Russia and Ukraine itself. The message is simple: With its own bravery in battle and the world’s help, Ukraine will prevail.Baloney.
Larry reminds us of a similar visit 65 years ago that looked great (vid) but had an unhappy ending:
By the time of the coup, there were 12,000 advisers in Vietnam, but those who knew Diem best feel that neither he nor Nhu would ever have invited or allowed 550,000 American soldiers to fight in their country, and to permit the devastation caused by air attacks, including bombing and defoliation. There is evidence that shortly before the coup took place—and for several months afterward—the first tentative efforts were initiated both by the Saigon Government and the National Liberation Front to come to some sort of accommodation.The coup against Diem had of course been arranged by the U.S. government:
The Pentagon's, secret study of the Vietnam war discloses that President Kennedy knew and approved of plans for the military coup d'état that over threw President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.“Our complicity in his overthrow heightened our responsibilities and our commitment” in Vietnam, the study finds.
Back in April, when Boris Johnson made it clear to Zelenski that the U.S. would not support any peace agreement with Russia, he may well have thought of Diem's fate. He decided to ditch the ongoing negotiations and to commit his country to the suicidal quest of beating the Russian army.
Accordingly Zelenski's "epic piece of theater" was "designed" to keep him alive and to fill his bank account plus those of the owners of the U.S. war industry.
Everything else be damned.
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