A GLIB ARTICLE THAT SORTS OF POOPOO RUSSIA WITHOUT KNOWING SQUAT....

On June 12, Russia celebrates its Independence Day. The commemoration was instituted by President Boris Yeltsin in 1992 to a collective shrug—“Who did Russia declare independence from?” people asked. But in the early 2000s, President Vladimir Putin elevated the day to a major national celebration, accompanied by a cornucopia of flag-waving. For the past two years, “Russia Day,” as it is popularly known, has gone beyond reenactments of historic military victories to celebrate the country’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine—complete with charity auctions and motor rallies in support of the troops, and flash mobs to show national unity branded with a hashtag that translates as #WeAreRussiaWeAreTogether.

Propaganda aside, Russia does seem surprisingly unified. Despite the war’s heavy human toll, estimated by the United Kingdom’s Defence Intelligence to be as high as 500,000, and near-total isolation from the West, Russian society has not unraveled. On the contrary, it appears to be functioning better than before the war and shows clear signs of once-elusive social cohesion. One explanation for this paradox—national thriving amid unfolding calamity—is that, unlike Western states, which are designed to advance the interests of their citizens, Russian society operates with one purpose in mind: to serve the interests of its belligerent state.

A rigid autocracy since the nation emerged from Mongol rule in the 15th century, including seven decades of totalitarianism in the 20th century, Russia’s government has never had any effective separation of powers. For most of that history, the state has allowed few, if any, avenues for genuine political debate or dissent, and the judicial system has acted as a rubber stamp for its rulers’ orders. During my childhood, in the late Soviet years, the message that the individual and individual rights don’t count was drummed into us at school: Я, the Russian pronoun meaning “I,” is “the last letter of the alphabet,” we were told.

Related video: Russia-Ukraine war: Putin says Russia doesn’t need nuclear weapons to win in Ukraine (WION)

This subjugation to the collective embodied by the Russian state is the reason Putin could mobilize society for war so easily. Before the invasion, a quarter of Russians already believed that the state was entitled to pursue its interests at the expense of individual rights. More than two years into the carnage, public support for the war in Ukraine is polling at an average of 75 percent. So who’s to stop the Russian autocrat?

In peacetime, conformism, nepotism, a weak rule of law, and corruption do not inspire the innovation and initiative necessary for economic advancement. But when war comes, Russia suddenly starts humming along. The very things that hamper Russia in peace—the rigidity of its authoritarianism; its top-down, centralized system of government; its machinery of repression; and its command economy—become assets during periods of conflict because they allow the government to quickly and ruthlessly mobilize society and industry for its war effort, making up for the technological backwardness and social atomization that otherwise typify the country.

To the state, war provides its raison d’être: protecting Russians from enemies. In other words, Russia has been made for war.

[Robert F. Worth: Clash of the patriarchs]

Russia’s renewed vigor is manifest: In 2023, its GDP grew 3.6 percent, boosted by the government’s military spending; growth is projected to keep rising in 2024. Capital flight from the economy is finally over, allowing Putin to advance grandiose infrastructure projects. Instead of the empty shelves predicted by foreign commentators, Russians continue to enjoy their favorite products—rebranded with domestic names—thanks to Kremlin insiders’ buying or seizing assets of Western companies that left the Russian market after the invasion. Dubious schemes that circumvent economic sanctions have also enabled Russia to source strategic technologies and components, including those it needs for its weaponry, and this in turn has created lucrative business opportunities for Russian entrepreneurs.

The country is awash in money: Incomes are up across the board. The wage for enlisting to fight in Ukraine is at least eight times higher than the national average. Lump sums payable to those wounded—or, for those killed in battle, to their relatives—are enough to enable the purchase of previously unaffordable apartments, cars, and consumer goods. Russian media outlets, official and unofficial, are rife with storieslike that of Alexei Voronin, who doesn’t regret fighting in Ukraine despite losing part of a foot there. “Now I have everything,” he says, after the camera shows him gaming. His mother agrees that her son is lucky—he “only stepped on a mine,” whereas several of his fellow enlistees have been killed.

The situation at the front has also improved since last year. Volunteers continue to sign up to fight in Ukraine without Putin having to order another mobilization. Compared with the prospects for soldiers at the invasion’s start, the chances of survival are now much higher: The Russian military has better weapons and supplies, thanks in part to the willingness of civilians in the munitions industry to work round-the-clock shifts to make artillery shells and drones, outpacing Ukrainian and Western production. For our boys and We will win! read the graffiti on the Russian missiles and bombs that are cratering Kharkov and other Ukrainian cities and towns.

Such confidence is not just Russian jingoism. After reshuffling its commanders and improving logistics, Moscow has gained ground in Ukraine, neutralizing last year’s Ukrainian counteroffensive. Russian signals units have also learned to jam Western satellite systems and high-precision weapons.

Meanwhile, Russia has expanded the theater of war to its advantage. It has staged successful sabotage operations in Europe. It has increased its influence in Africa: Having absorbed the Wagner paramilitary force into its official military, Moscow has strengthened its relationship with various governments and local warlords. A self-proclaimed leader in the global fight against American hegemony, Russia has successfully courted regimes hostile to the U.S. all over the world, including Iran and North Korea, as well as more ostensibly neutral countries such as China, India, Hungary, and Brazil. Russia is far from isolated diplomatically.

Putin’s approval ratings remain high. With Kremlin propaganda casting him as a wartime president defending Russia from NATO and the West, Russia’s president has increased the number of his supporters. The opposition leader Alexei Navalny is dead; other dissidents have been exiled, imprisoned, or murdered, so no alternative viewpoints or narratives can break through. Instead of protesting a war that, for many, is literally killing their relatives—some 11 million Russians had relatives in Ukraine at the start of the invasion—young Russians today are lining up to gawk at captured NATO tanks and flocking to concerts of patriotic singers, where they chant “Russia” in almost religious exultation. At least some of that fervor appears genuine. More than half of Russians express confidence that their country is moving in the right direction.

[Anastasia Edel: What to read to understand Russia]

Russia is hardly unique, of course, in enjoying a powerful movement for national unity in a fight against a perceived external threat. What is specifically Russian is that its autocratic leaders always position their aggression as defense, and the Russian people invariably go along with it. The princes of medieval Muscovy seized neighboring territories under the guise of “gathering of the Russian lands.” The 18th- and 19th-century czars expanded this purported defense of Mother Russia to include Crimea, the Baltics, Finland, Poland, and the Caucasus. In the 20th century, the Bolsheviks “defended the achievements of the Revolution” in provinces of the Russian empire that had declared their independence, forcing them back into the fold under a Communist yoke.

The Kremlin’s self-mythology of offense-as-defense has been aided by two big invasions: the Napoleonic invasion of the early 1800s and the Nazi invasion in the 1940s. These exercises in national resistance cost millions of lives—yet the official piety ordains that this very sacrifice is what made Russia great. Putin has continued the tradition under new management, fighting imperialist wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and now Ukraine. For decades, his propaganda machine has exploited the real trauma of the Nazi invasion to support the fiction that all evil comes to Russia from the West, which envies Russia’s greatness and resources, and that it is therefore a duty of every Russian to rise up and fight it.

If you live inside this Fortress Russia, as I did when it was the Soviet Union, the sense of being besieged is almost impossible to escape. At summer camp, our games included “finding and disarming” saboteurs who’d infiltrated the camp to poison our dinner or steal our flag. In school and during holiday parades, we sang such lines as “We’re peaceful people, but our armored train stands at the ready!” The paranoia eased in the perestroika period of the late ’80s, and remained mild through the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in the ’90s, but it never died. The fact that Russia can today produce 3 million artillery shells a year means that even during its ostensibly democratic years following the end of the Cold War, it did little to dismantle its military capacity.

Putin’s war in Ukraine is exacting a greater toll than Russia has experienced in many decades. He is mortgaging the future of Russia and its people to fight his colonial war. A third of the Russian state budget is now dedicated to the effort, much of which consists of simply raining fire on the battlefields of Ukraine. That money won’t be spent on schools, hospitals, or social services. Half a million young men are lying dead in zinc coffins or sitting disabled in wheelchairs. Civilians are paying for their acquiescence with the complete subjugation of civil society, an absence of free speech, and severe travel restrictions. Still, any expectation that Russians will at some point hold their government responsible for all of that is mistaken. In Russia, pain is part of the deal.

Everybody falls in line. Soviet-era tanks are pulled out of storage and sent to the front line, bread factories get converted to drone production, kindergarteners weave camouflage nets: “Everything for the victory” goes the slogan. Businessmen who lost their Italian properties get over the grief and buy new palaces in Dubai with proceeds from government military contracts. The denunciation and prosecution of saboteurs is no longer just a game at summer camp. All aboard the armored train!

This unholy symbiosis of a martial state and an obedient people is bad news for the free world. It means that Putin has succeeded in mobilizing Russia in order to realize his dreams of domination, and Russia can indulge its expansionist mania indefinitely, particularly as the Western response is stymied by the fear of escalation. But Putin has already escalated, unfurling the map of conflict with his hybrid war of sabotage, psychological operations, and interventions in Africa.

The West must take this threat seriously and fight back. And here, it can take a different lesson from Russian history.

As Napoleon and Hitler both discovered, to carry a conflict onto Russian soil can come at a devastating cost. But defeat in a war beyond its borders can be fatal for Moscow’s rulers. Only when faced with that sort of military disaster and humiliation do Russian autocracies teeter and collapse: Already damaged by its failures in the Crimean War of 1853–56, which accelerated the abolition of serfdom, and in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, which forced Nicholas II to concede a parliament and constitution, the Romanov dynasty could not withstand the catastrophe of World War I; the humbling of the mighty Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s proved to be one of the nails in the U.S.S.R.’s coffin. A year ago, at a nadir of Russia’s campaign in Ukraine, Putin survived the rebellion of the Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin; since then, Russia’s military has recovered its position, and Putin’s rule has stabilized. But if Ukraine can begin to prevail, Putin’s narrative as the grand defender of Russia will no longer hold, and regime change will become possible once more.

Until then, the world’s security will always be at risk from “the nation of victors,” as Russia likes to call itself. Meanwhile, for Russians themselves, the independence they are told to celebrate on June 12 is simply a pledge of allegiance to a state that treats them as disposable assets of its imperial designs.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/why-russia-is-happy-at-war/ar-BB1nTNy2?ocid=BingNewsSerp

HOLD IT, THIS LAST PARAGRAPH IS CRAP (THE REST OF THE ARTICLE IS QUITE GLIB AS WELL)....

PUTIN AND RUSSIA CARE ABOUT THEIR CITIZENS... 

PUTIN AND RUSSIA HAVE NO IMPERIAL DESIRES, UNLIKE THE WEST, WHICH AMERICA HAS HAD SINCE 1917.....

SEE AGAIN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYhyrf95Urw

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.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

TRANSNISTRIA WILL BE PART OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.

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

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

READ FROM TOP

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

It was well-encapsulated in this 10-minute compilation video from 12 March 2014, “Ukraine Crisis – What You’re Not Being Told”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWkfpGCAAuw

which video is also archived here and here. That 10-minute documentary’s only error is at 22 seconds in, where its narrator said the year “two thousand thirteen” when he obviously meant to say “two thousand fourteen”; but, otherwise than that, I have verified the authenticity and correctness of each one of its many sources and allegations, and find that it is the best (most comprehensive, brief, and accurate) single history of the 20-26 February 2014 coup in Ukraine, which has yet been done.

It shows Victoria Nuland, whom Obama had selected to plan, organize, oversee, and direct, the coup in Ukraine, instructing America’s Ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, whom to get to become appointed to take over control of Ukraine’s government after the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, will be overthrown. That phone call from Nuland occurred on 27 January 2014, a month before Obama’s coup there was completed, and the person whom she selected to run Obama’s government of Ukraine was the rabidly anti-Russian Arseniy Yatsenyuk, or “Yats” as she sometimes referred to him in this video — and he did get the appointment a month later.

Here is that complete phone-conversation, which is merely excerpted in the 10-minute documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV9J6sxCs5k

and here is my transcript of it, along with my explanations of what she was referring to and why.

This recorded phone-conversation is the most “smoking gun” evidence that I know of for any coup that has ever taken place; and for this reason and also on the basis of all of the other evidences on this coup, I agree with what the founder and head of the Stratfor ‘private CIA’ corporate advisory firm said about the matter, that it was “the most blatant coup in history”. (But then, a year later, at the Website of a former convicted Wall-Street trader, he posted an opinion-article to which he slipped in, as-if it were an aside, mention that though on “the internet and Twitter, … you will find me saying the United States staged the most blatant coup in history,” and he went on to misrepresent what he had actually said, and he then alleged that he hadn’t said that, and then he said that “It was no coup,” it was nothing more than “a systematic campaign to saturate the internet, the Russians fed the quote back into some major Russian print publications, then back onto the internet, until it resonated and fed back on itself,” and, so, he alleged that it was just a nothingburger, which “the Russians” had cooked up. He needed to retain his mega-corporate customers.)

On 4 November 2019, I headlined “The Obama Regime’s Plan to Seize the Russian Naval Base in Crimea”, and provided my latest summary of, and links to, the evidences regarding the planning of Obama’s coup in Ukraine, and of the Obama regime’s extensive pollings of Ukrainians, and especially of Crimeans, both before the coup and after the coup, and noted the polls’ findings, which confirmed and made clear that the U.S. Government couldn’t go public with their poll-findings, because those findings were entirely consistent with the 16 March 2014 Russian-managed pebiscite in Crimea, which had found that 95.6% of Crimea’s voters had marked the option of “Join the Russia Federation as Federal subject of Russia.” Although that percentage was slightly higher than the pollings that the U.S. regime had commissioned, which were closer to 90%, any public challenging of that plebiscite on the basis of these poll-findings would have required the U.S. regime to acknowledge that both the U.S. polls and the Russian plebiscite could simultaneously be right; and, so, there was no U.S.-and-allied publicity given to those polls.

Furthermore: any such allegation (challenging the Crimean plebiscits’s 95.6% figure) by the U.S. regime might also cause to become dredged up Obama’s plan, as part of the coup, for Russia’s main naval base, which since 1783 has been in Crimea, to become replaced by yet another U.S. naval base (the only part of Obama’s plan that had failed — perhaps because Crimeans overwhelmingly despised the U.S. Government, by a margin of 76.2% “negative” to 2.8% “positive,” which is 96.3% negative to 3.7% positive, in the U.S. regime’s April 2014 poll of Crimeans — so, it would have been a hopeless cause for Obama to continue with that part of his plan, and to challenge that 95.6% plebiscite).

My 4 November 2019 article also documented Obama’s (Nuland’s, Yatsenyuk’s) plan to kill enough residents in the far-eastern region of Ukraine, which had voted over 90% for Yanukovych, for the population there to become either exterminated or else terrorized by the U.S.-imposed regime, so that enough of Yanukovych’s supporters would be culled from Ukraine’s electorate (around a million of them fled to Russia), so as to virtually assure that subsequently elected national leaders of Ukraine would likewise be rabidly anti-Russian, pro-U.S. regime. This ethnic cleansing by the U.S.-imposed Ukrainian regime, was likewise documented in that article.

So: this is how the war in Ukraine actually started. It started in 2014, by Obama, not by Putin (such as the U.S. regime and its colonies allege).

Even NATO’s leader Jens Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s leader Volodmyr Zelensky deny the U.S. Government’s lie that the war in Ukraine started on 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, and acknowledge that it started eight years before that, in 2014; Stoltenberg said, about this, “The war didn’t start in 2022. The war started in 2014.” Zelensky said about it, “I made a point that the war in Ukraine has been lasting for eight years. It’s not just some special military operation.” So, the U.S. Government’s lie, such as U.S. ‘Defense’ (Offense) Secretary Lloyd Austin expressed it, on 1 June 2024, is rabidly false, that:

“In February of 2022, Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine shocked the world — and this region [Singapore]. And since then, Putin’s war of aggression has provided us all with a preview of a world that none of us would want. It’s a glimpse of a world where tyrants trample sovereign borders, a world where peaceful states live in fear of their neighbors, and a world where chaos and conquest replace rules and rights. 

But Russia’s lawless invasion also reminds us that free countries can rally together to help the victims of aggression.”

That’s a baldfaced lie, which blames Putin, not Obama, for the war in Ukraine.

Similar lies are common in U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media, such as:

“When Russian President Vladimir Putin started the war in Ukraine, he tried to shift the blame to NATO, calling it the instigator. He argued that Russia had no choice but to defensively launch the invasion to prevent NATO from surrounding Russia from all sides. Reality, of course, was different. NATO was a defense alliance in retirement, collecting its “peace dividend” from the breakup of the Soviet Union. Most of its members maintained their defense spending below their shared commitment.”(Note that that commentator calls this “NATO … collecting its ‘peace dividend’ from the breakup of the Soviet Union” — as-if all that matters is peace for the U.S. regime, and that Russia’s authentic national-security concerns to protect Russia’s citizens against a possible U.S.-NATO invasion, should just be ignored — and that it says “NATO was a defense alliance in retirement … from the breakup of the Soviet Union,” though, in fact, that military alliance secretly continued on the American side after the USSR’s Warsaw Pact military alliance ended in 1991 — didn’t ever go into any ‘retirement’ when the Cold War on Russia’s side DID end. So: that’s not actually a “defense alliance” — it is very clearly an aggressionalliance, against Russia itself.)

and,

“Putin started the war in Ukraine.”

and,

“In 2014, Putin started the war in Ukraine by annexing the Crimea.”

and,

“Putin started the war in Ukraine and has said negotiations have reached an impasse, without slamming the door on them. But before the war started, Putin presented the West with a list of demands including, most notably, a halt to NATO enlargement.”

Though the second of the two sentences in that last one is true, nothing was wrong with Putin’s having presented those demands at that time, on 17 December 2021, as his requirements for a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine issue. Ukraine is the only country whose border is a mere 317 miles — five minutes of a nuclear missile’s flying-time — away from hitting The Kremlin and so decapitating Russia’s central command. That is the reason why the U.S. regime has wanted Ukraine so much as to risk WW3 over winning it (as they did) and keeping it (as they won’t): because the U.S. regime demands to ‘win’ WW3, not to merely avoid it. If they can’t be #1 over the whole world, they don’t want anything; they don’t have any “plan B,” yet, unless it’s WW3 itself. On 29 December 2016, I headlined about “America’s Secret Planned Conquest of Russia”, tracking that plan (now called “Nuclear Primacy”) back to at least 2006 as constituting the new mainstream view in the U.S. Government; and, on 19 April 2023, I headlined “U.S. Nuclear-War Strategy”, tracking even farther back, to 1981, when Nuclear Primacy, the goal of winning WW3, first was proposed to replace the pre-existing (but still dominant in Russia and China) “Mutually Assured Destruction” or “M.A.D.” view, that nuclear weapons exist only in order to prevent a WW3, not in order to win a WW3 (via attaining and using “Nuclear Primacy”).

If Obama had not wanted the war in Ukraine, then he wouldn’t have started it. He wouldn’t have hired people such as Victoria Nuland to get it done. (Maybe he had gotten a good laugh privately when he had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 before he had achieved anything in his Presidency.) He, and not Putin, started the war in Ukraine. Under international law, “the aggressor” is supposed to be the side that STARTED the war, not the side which was mortally endangered by that aggressor and needed to respond in the way it considered existentially necessary in order to respond effectively to and divert that threat, that danger, to one’s nation’s very existence.

In this case, it is clear that the U.S. regime’s #1 objective is to control the entire world, all countries, including Russia and China, and Iran, and Venezuela, and North Korea, and any other hold-outs. In Russia’s case, this demand by the U.S. regime is so extreme that it placed a requirement upon Finland for Finland to allow the U.S. to position its nuclear weapons in Finland in order for Finland to be allowed to become a NATO member. Finland isn’t as close to Moscow as Ukraine is (it’s 507 miles instead of Ukraine’s 317 miles away from The Kremlin); and, so, it demanded Finland to allow its nuclear missiles and Finland said yes. That proves how psychopathic the U.S. regime actually is.

And one should not forget the longstanding post-1991 lies by NATO about what it is: “NATO is not a threat to Russia.”  /   “NATO has tried to build a partnership with Russia, developing dialogue and practical cooperation in areas of common interest. Practical cooperation has been suspended since 2014 in response to Russia’s illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea, Ukraine, which NATO will never recognise.”  /  “NATO is not at war with Russia.”

But the actual fact is, and has been since NATO’s very start in 1949: NATO has always been the post-WW2 U.S. regime’s main military alliance to conquer Russia. For it to have continued after the Soviet Union ended in 1991, is, and should be punished as, an immense international-war crime. It is simply WW3 pushing to happen. Why, then, are not the world’s other nations demanding that NATO end —  demanding: End NATO Now! NATO has terrorized all decent countries. They are too afraid to condemn it publicly. (Similarly, for a different example, “Israel can get away with mass-murder because the world’s super power, USA, defends and excuses them of accountability.”)

The 14 November 2014 ARD German Government TV network broadcast interview of Putin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdlXqyZHB9kbecame removed by ARD when Germany’s Government decided that it wants to go to war against Russia, again (reprising Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa); and so broadcasting this interview had been a mistake. Therefore, ever since at least 12 March 2016, “This video is private.” has resulted from that URL. However, up until at least 14 September 2015, it had been public, and was therefore foertunately being archived by some of its viewers online; so, here it is, from an archived copy, of this hostile, pro-U.S. regime, anti-Russia-Government, interview of Putin, about these matters:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150914075634/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdlXqyZHB9k

“English: Exclusive ARD interview with Russian President Putin” | Günther Jauch | ARD. 17.Nov..2014

10:55: JAUCH: For the West, this [Russia’s annexation of Crimea] was a clear breach of international law. PUTIN: What’s the question? JAUCH: The question is, did you underestimate the reaction of the West? … PUTIN: We find this reaction absolutely disproportionate. … When we’re confronted with the accusations that Russia has violated international law, I can hardly feel anything but astonishment. What is international law? First and foremost, it’s the charter of the United Nations. … A vivid and fresh precedent was set in Kosovo. JAUCH: You mean the judgment of the International Criminal Court, with respect to Kosovo, which said that Kosovo had the right to self-determination, and that the people of Kosovo could vote on whether they wanted to have their own state or not? PUTIN: Exactly so, but there’s more to it than that. The most important thing mentioned there was that in terms of self-determination, people populating a certain area are not obliged to ask the opinion of the central authorities of the state where they are resident. There’s no need to have permission from the central governmental authorities, in order to take the necessary steps to self-determination. This is the most crucial point, and nothing that transpired in Crimea was any different from that which happened in Kosovo. I am deeply convinced that Russia has not violated any international laws. I am very open about this. It’s a fact, and we’ve never concealed it. … Besides, what is democracy? You and I know very well, what does demos mean, it means people. Democracy means the rule by the people. In our case, it’s the people’s right to be independent.

— earlier in it was:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150914075634/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdlXqyZHB9k

8:32: JAUCH: There was an agreement [between the national Government and the Maidan demonstrators, on 20 February 2014] which called for national conciliation and a national government. This agreement lasted about 24 hours and then was dead. You followed the events of the 21st of February very closely. Did you talk with President Obama or Chancellor Merkel at the time? PUTIN: Yes. Indeed, on the 21st of February, it was not only the German Minister of Foreign Affairs who came to the Ukraine, to Kiev, but also the ministers of Foreign Affairs of Poland and France. They acted as guarantors [along with the EU’s representative] for the agreement between the then President Yanukovych and the opposition. They were agreed that the process should be carried out peacefully. They signed this document, this agreement between the authorities and the opposition as guarantors, and the authorities actually thought that it would be executed accordingly. And indeed, I had a phone conversation with the President of the United States on the same evening [February 21st], and we discussed this problem in exactly this manner. However, the next day, a coup took place, despite the guarantees given by the Western powers [Obama’s Polish and French, and EU Minister of Foreign Affairs, stooges], the buildings of the Presidential Administration and the Government were taken over. In this context, I would like to stress the following: [10:00:] Either the European Minister of Foreign Affairs [Lord Catherine Ashton, recorded here in a private 26 February 2014 phone call about this matter] shouldn’t have signed the paper and guaranteed the execution of the agreement, or, having done so they should have insisted on its execution. Instead, they distanced themselves from it. Moreover, they seem to prefer not to remember the agreement, as-if it had never existed. I think it’s completely wrong; and even more so, it’s counterproductive. [10:38]

The U.S.-and-allied line on why Yanukovych was overthrown was that he had turned down the EU’s offer on 20 November 2013. But actually, that was a set-up deal, set up to be rejected in order for Nuland’s plan then to go directly into action. As I headlined on 27 March 2015, “The $160 Billion Cost: Why Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych Spurned EU’s Offer, on 20 Nov. 2013”. Even earlier than that, Putin had explained this to the Russian people, though without mentioning the $160 billion bottom-line price tag for Ukraine to enter the EU:

On 5 June 2014, less than a half year after Obama had grabbled Ukraine and started the war there, Putin did an interview about the Ukraine war, on Russia’s Voice of Russia channel. It was broadcast the next day, headlining “Russia never annexed Crimea, no plans to intervene in Ukraine, it’s a Western delusion – Putin”. Here are highlights:

On what happened in Ukraine:

Vladimir Putin: There was a conflict and that conflict arose because the former Ukrainian president refused to sign an association agreement with the EU. Russia had a certain stance on this issue. We believed it was indeed unreasonable to sign that agreement because it would have a grave impact on the economy, including the Russian economy. We have 390 economic agreements with Ukraine and Ukraine is a member of the free trade zone within the CIS. And we wouldn’t be able to continue this economic relationship with Ukraine as a member of the free trade zone [with the EU]. We discussed this with our European partners. Instead of continuing the debates by legitimate and diplomatic means, our European friends and our friends from the United States supported the anti-constitutional armed coup. This is what happened. We did not cause this crisis to happen. We were against this course of events.

The point is no one should be brought to power through an armed anti-constitutional coup, and this is especially true in post-Soviet space where government institutions are not fully mature. When it happened, some people accepted the regime and were happy about it, while other people, say, in eastern and southern Ukraine, just won’t accept it. And it is vital to talk with the people who didn’t accept this change of power instead of sending tanks, as you said yourself, instead of firing missiles at civilians from the air and bombing non-military targets.

On Russian troops in Ukraine:

The interviewer told the Russian President that the United States claimed they had evidence that Russia had intervened in the conflict by sending troops and weapons.

Vladimir Putin: Proof? Why don’t they show it? The entire world remembers the US Secretary of State demonstrating the evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, waving around some test tube with washing powder in the UN Security Council. Eventually, the US troops invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein was hanged and later it turned out there had never been any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq [ever since 1998]. You know, it’s one thing to say things and another to actually have evidence. I will tell you again: no Russian troops…

There are no armed forces, no Russian ‘instructors’ in southeastern Ukraine, and there never were any.

On whether Russia wanted to annex Ukraine and tried to destabilize the situation there:

Vladimir Putin: We never did that. The Ukrainian government must now sit down and talk with their own people instead of using weapons, tanks, planes and helicopters. …

On Crimea:

Vladimir Putin: It’s a delusion that Russian troops annexed Crimea. Russian troops did nothing of the kind.

Russian troops were in Crimea under an international treaty on the deployment of the Russian military base. It’s true that Russian troops helped Crimeans hold a referendum on their (a) independence and (b) desire to join the Russian Federation. No one can prevent these people from exercising a right that is stipulated in Article 1 of the UN Charter, the right of nations to self-determination.

In accordance with the expression of the will of people who live there, Crimea is part of the Russian Federation and its constituent entity.

I want everyone to understand this clearly. We conducted an exclusively diplomatic and peaceful dialogue – I want to stress this – with our partners in Europe and the United States. In response to our attempts to hold such a dialogue and to negotiate an acceptable solution, they supported the anti-constitutional state coup in Ukraine, and following that we could not be sure that Ukraine would not become part of the North Atlantic military bloc. In that situation, we could not allow a historical part of the Russian territory with a predominantly ethnic Russian population to be incorporated into an international military alliance, especially because Crimeans wanted to be part of Russia. I am sorry, but we couldn’t act differently. …

There are basically no Russian troops abroad while US troops are everywhere. There are US military bases everywhere around the world and they are always involved in the fates of other countries even though they are thousands of kilometers away from US borders. …

On the collapse of the Soviet Union:

Vladimir Putin: We will not promote Russian nationalism [patriotism yes, nationalism no], and we do not intend to revive the Russian Empire. What did I mean when I said that the Soviet Union’s collapse was one of the largest humanitarian – above all humanitarian – disasters of the 20th century? I meant that all the citizens of the Soviet Union lived in a union state irrespective of their ethnicity, and after its collapse 25 million Russians suddenly became foreign citizens. It was a huge humanitarian disaster. Not a political or ideological disaster, but a purely humanitarian upheaval. Families were divided; people lost their jobs and means of subsistence, and had no means to communicate with each other normally. This was the problem.

Practically everything that The West alleges about the war in Ukraine is false. It’s intentionally that way, not due to any mere negligence.

The Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama deserves to be tried at the International Criminal Court for the international war crime of aggression. The biggest problem in this regard is that no sensible definition of “aggression” yet exists in international law. (At the end of that article linked-to there, I proposed a new definition of the term. One of my longer articles explained the history behind that immense collective failure.) For another example of that failure: How is perpetrating an international coup — which in reality is an international war-crime; and it was that against Iran in 1953, Chile in 1973, Ukraine in 2014, and so many others — being addressed in current international law? It’s not; it is instead ignored. The International Criminal Court was designed by victor countries against victim countries. It wasn’t designed to sustain peace and prevent war. It’s a bad joke. However, historians nonetheless have an obligation to 100% truth, never to falsify. In the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’), they shirk that obligation, because 100% truth can cripple their careers. This is the reality, no matter how much historians in some countries (the countries that have dominated the world for far too long) might publicly deny it. Academic scholarship is profoundly corrupted by this reality.

The latest version of YouGov’s “World’s Most Admired” pollings around the world is the “World’s most admired 2021” version; and it is headlined: “The Obamas remain the world’s most admired man and woman”.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

https://theduran.com/obamas-guilt-for-ukraines-war/

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.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

TRANSNISTRIA WILL BE PART OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.

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

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

READ FROM TOP

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kv-dcsnr0Y

Russia and China Are DESTROYING The West's Dumb Narrative For Good | Dr. Matthew Crosston

The war in Ukraine is getting worse, the Genozide in Gaza is still in full swing, and the Neocons are dreaming of even more war. Luckily, outside the West nobody is taking the narratives coming from Washington, Brussels and Berlin serious anymore. Yet, the world has never been in worse danger from nuclear annihilation and threatened by a 3ed World War than now. How can we explain so much blind hubris and suicidal stupidity? Dr. Matthew Crosston is an expert in Russian foreign policy at Bowie State University where he serves as the director of the Academic Transformation Devision.

We last talked in August, 2023, it’s now June 2024, and it seems to me that things have only gotten worse for Ukraine, worse for the NATO countries, we are at the brink of further escalation with Russia, with official OKs to use NATO weapons against the Russia proper and maybe even NATO boots on the ground, and there is still no willingness in the west to pick up the Russians on their various signals that they would want to negotiate based on what has been reached in Istanbul which Putin recently again said can be—together with the realities on the battlefield—the basis for serious negotiation. Do you agree with my assessment or how do you view what happened in the past months?

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.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

TRANSNISTRIA WILL BE PART OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.

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

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

READ FROM TOP

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

BY GEOFFREY ROBERTS

'Misfit in Moscow' takes aim at UK's failed Russia strategy
Ian Proud served at the British Embassy and offers a scathing critique of how his country has handled the Ukraine crises

Notable among dissenters from NATO’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine have been former Western ambassadors such as Jack Matlock and Chas Freeman in the United States, Britain’s Tony Brenton, and Tony Kevin in Australia — dissident voices that are needed more than ever amid fevered lobbying for yet further escalation of the conflict.

A very welcome addition to their ranks is Ian Proud, economic counsellor in the British Embassy in Moscow from 2014-2019. A highly experienced diplomat, Proud served in Thailand and Afghanistan, organized the G8 summit in Belfast in 2013 and, in 2022, retired from the Foreign Office as Vice Principal of its International Academy — the body charged with the foreign-language training of British diplomats. Perhaps his finest hour was the part he played in the smooth running of the football World Cup in Russia in 2018, when tens of thousands of English soccer fans descended on Moscow and other match venues.

Unlike the vast majority of his colleagues in Moscow, Proud took the trouble to learn Russian and to travel the country far and wide, meeting officials, politicians, academics, students and ordinary people.

A self-professed “realist,” Proud believes the core purpose of diplomacy is to manage relations between states and to prevent conflict. In Moscow, according to his memoir published late last year, “A Misfit in Moscow: How British Diplomacy in Russia Failed, 2014-2019, he was appalled by the “utmost folly” of attempting to resolve “disputes with Russia through isolation and cancellation.”

An admirer of Margaret Thatcher, Proud is no Russophile or starry-eyed Putin admirer. He was perfectly willing to “roger” the Russians if it served a useful purpose: when the Skripals were poisoned in 2018 he hatched a plan to collapse Russia’s diplomatic representation in the UK. Many Russian diplomats were expelled from London and other Western capitals but, thankfully, there were no takers for Proud’s proposed escalation of the tit-for-tat.

However, in general, Proud advocates engagement and the search for mutual understanding as a far more effective policy. While some Western powers — France, Germany and the United States — continued to make such efforts during Proud’s time in Moscow, the British government opted for “megaphone diplomacy” and to talking with other countries about Russia rather than to the Russians themselves. “You can’t be friends with everyone,” comments Proud in “A Misfit in Moscow”, “but real diplomacy involves talking to those you disagree with the most.”

After the eruption of the Ukraine crisis in 2014. London’s mantra was that Russia had to be punished for its transgressions and there could be “no return to business as usual.” Though, as Proud recalls, there was one British Foreign Secretary who favoured positive engagement with the Russians – Boris Johnson.

As the economics attaché, Proud had responsibility for monitoring the impact of Western sanctions on Russia. For the Brits, those sanctions soon became an end in themselves rather than a policy tool. Proud ‘s economically illiterate colleagues did not want to know when he warned sanctions had inspired a successful Russian drive to economic nationalism and self-sufficiency. Especially important was the way Moscow weathered the monetary instability caused by a combination of Western sanctions and reduced energy prices. By the time Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow was well able to contain the West’s tawdry efforts to destabilize the ruble and collapse the Russian economy.

The most spectacular example of the British blundering concerned implementation of the Minsk agreements. This was the deal that curtailed (but did not end) the civil war between the Kyiv government and the pro-Russia Donbass separatists. Brokered by France and Germany, the agreed compromise was that Ukraine would regain sovereign control of the Donbass in return for granting it constitutionally guaranteed regional autonomy. In effect, the agreement would get Russia out of the Donbass but also give the rebels a veto on the country’s membership of NATO — something Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists were never going to accept.

As Proud relates, UK leaders in London had contrived to exclude themselves from the negotiations that led to Minsk, which meant the British played little or no role in the various efforts to find ways to implement the agreements. The one major British contribution to the sorry tale of the failed Minsk agreements was to persuade the EU’s European Council to agree that sanctions against Russia would not be lifted until Minsk had been fully implemented. Kyiv was delighted, and was further incentivized to stymie the implementation of Minsk as a means of locking in Western sanctions against Russia.

Proud claims that Moscow had to real interest in implementing Minsk either, but it seems to this reviewer that the public record shows Russia was probably the only party to those agreements acting in good faith. Certainly, in run-up to the Russian invasion, Putin was incessant in his insistence that implementation of Minsk was the only way to resolve the Ukrainian crisis peacefully.

Proud’s book was vetted by the Foreign Office prior to publication but the resultant cuts do not detract from its value as both a memoir and a critique of British policy towards Russia.

Since publication the author has been highly active on alternative media platforms as a critic of the West’s role in the Ukraine war. As he says in the book, if the West is unwilling to itself fight Russia, it needs to push for a ceasefire and help Ukraine to negotiate a just peace.

It’s a great pity more of his diplomatic colleagues didn’t, and still don’t, see it that way, too.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/britain-russia/

READ FROM TOP

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....