by Declan Hayes 

It is as unthinkable that the Zelenskys, Johnsons, Camerons, Obamas and Clintons should walk away unscathed from Kiev than Hitler, Bormann, Goebbels and the others could have walked away unscathed from Berlin.

 

Russia Today reports that Mad Dog Zelensky is barking his coke-filled head off again. This time, he is demanding ex POTUS Trump come clean on how Trump intends to finish the war between Zelensky’s backers and the Russians NATO failed to exterminate to Kiev’s east. Neither Trump nor anyone else in authority has to explain anything to Zelensky, whose acting and begging bowl skills are now totally irrelevant to Ukraine’s end game.

To see that, all we must do is recall what were NATO’s war’s objectives and what were their means to obtaining those objectives. The objective was for BlackRock and similar predatory firms to own Ukraine and lands to its east, and for Ukraine’s armed forces to be the tip of the spear NATO would use to rend Russia’s asunder.

To that end, Zelensky and his cronies were given almost unlimited lines of credit in exchange for the deeds to Ukraine, which Ukrainian battlefield successes would underwrite. Sadly, this was not to be and Russia’s Armed Forces continue to send their Ukrainian counterparts to early graves at what are unsustainable rates.

This is not to write Ukraine’s Armed Forces off, but it is to say that, like the Wehrmacht after Kursk, they have no chance of prevailing. In that regard, it is worth recalling that Hitler’s former Chief of Staff Hans Guderian, remarked that, following Kursk, “There were to be no more periods of quiet on the Eastern Front. From now on, the [Russian} enemy was in undisputed possession of the initiative”.

And so it is in Ukraine, where the Ukrainian Armed Forces are broken and there is no great general or group of generals, who can turn the tide. Ukraine’s army is akin to Robert Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia after Sherman’s March to the Sea, or Hannibal’s after Scipio sacked Carthage. The game is up, and Zelensky’s backers know it, even if that fool is as stupid as Hitler was in his bunker.

This is not me sounding off , or putting on a cocked hat, pretending I am another Napoleon who, lest we forget, had a rough time of it against the very same enemy Zelensky’s press-ganged unfortunates now face, Even The Economist, the World Bank, the IMF and all of Zelensky’s other main collaborators are calling time on this sordid, little huckster.

The Economist, which has long played chief soap box for NATO’s Russophobic shot callers, is telling us Zelensky has less than a month to avoid default. Though Zelensky may still be able to squirrel long term loans out of gullible international financiers, the lights will be soon going out all across the rump Reich and we are unlikely to see them being switched on again, until Zelensky and his shopaholic wife stand in the dock of a Moscow court.

Zelensky’s former friends at the World Bank are just as bearish. They tell us that Russia’s “unprovoked” war has set Ukraine back 15 years and that the world economy has also taken a battering “in the face of steep interest rates, record-high debt levels, and a climate of escalating fragility and conflict”.Although the World Bank estimates that “the cost of reconstruction and recovery stands at $486 billion”, there is no explanation why more good money should be thrown into the money burning furnace that is the Ukrainian war machine. Quite simply, Ukraine has no prospect of any recovery until they sit down and negotiate with Russia on Russia’s terms. The longer Ukraine feels emboldened to murder Russian children, the longer will Russia’s Armed Forces feel obligated to target Ukraine’s infrastructure and the longer will there be no return to be had on investing in Ukraine.

Russia, meanwhile has inked a lucrative deal to supply India with coke, not the sort that goes up Zelensky’s nose by the bucket full, but the sort that powers India’s power stations. Deals like that indicate Russia can continue the process of putting manners on Zelensky’s rump reich for as long as it takes.

Indeed, if one were to hazard a guess at Russia’s strategic war aims, it seems to be that they intend to pummel Ukraine until its leaders are forced to come to their senses.

Although the IMF have not yet come to their senses, that seems to be fine with Russia, which is prepared to continue to hit targets within Ukraine for as long as the IMF continues to fund them.

Nor is Russia alone in this. Iran, China and North Korea are duty bound to pay very close attention to Russia’s tactics because they are in much the same boat themselves, with Hezbollah, in particular, playing a similar cat and mouse game with Israel, and tiny Yemen keeping NATO’s armada on the back foot in the Red Sea.

Although the US Center for Strategic & International Studies expressed its satisfaction with the last tranche of US taxpayers’ money Zelensky extorted, there is no evidence that subventions like that can stem the tide. In June 2024 alone, the World Bank’s International Financial Corporation (IFC) gave Zelensky a further $1.4 bn “for a green and resilient reconstruction in Ukraine”.

But, as things currently stand, this green-tinged Marshall Plan for Ukraine makes no sense. The original Marshall Plan had two overriding objectives: firstly, to keep American factories busy, so there would be no post-War slump and, secondly, to make the Soviet option unattractive to Western Europe by giving it significant investment injections (to buy American goods).

The two reasons Black Rock, Pimco, Amundi and NATO’s other predatory companies rallied behind the NATO flag were to buy Kiev’s assets on the cheap, and to use it to strip Russia of its resources. But, as with Hitler and Napoleon before them, things have not worked out as planned, and, despite being given a two-year freeze on paying interest on its debt, the best Kiev can do is to tell its investors to take further massive write offs for supporting it.

Ukraine wants to write off 60% of its current debt value, while creditors argue a 22% hair cut would be “more reasonable.” When faced with a loss of 60% or 22%, neither option makes sense if one has the opportunity to bolt.

Ukraine has been a debacle NATO will only recover from, if the Zelensky, Biden and allied organised crime families, as well as their European collaborators get their day in a military court, before which these rogues should beg for their lives, just as they begged for billions to end the lives of so many others.

Although that will not end matters, it would send out a signal that there is hope that some form of justice might prevail. It is as unthinkable that the Zelenskys, Johnsons, Camerons, Obamas and Clintons should walk away unscathed from Kiev than Hitler, Bormann, Goebbels and the others could have walked away unscathed from Berlin. Ukraine is finished, and those like Zelensky, Khan, Clooney, Penn and the Bidens, who are responsible for destroying it, should answer in the same way Hitler’s lackeys answered in Nuremberg.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/07/04/zelensky-is-out-of-money-men-and-options/

 

MEANWHILE:

The Ukraine war will end in a surrender, not in a negotiated deal.  That is my sense of where the war is headed and why the parties cannot negotiate a settlement.

The latest wrinkle in the missing negotiating saga is a declaration, in the form of an interview given by Volodymyr Zelensky to the Philadelphia Inquirer.   Zelensky says there can't be direct negotiations between Ukraine and Russia but there could be indirect negotiations through a third party where Ukraine and Russia will not only have the third party as an intermediary, but any deal will only be with the intermediary, not Russia or Ukraine.  Zelensky suggested maybe the UN could act in this role.

The Zelensky proposal is a non-starter for many reasons, but the biggest one is that warring states need to directly agree on ending a conflict.  There is no hope of a third party implementing any deal, as the Minsk agreements (2014, 2015) prove.  Minsk was a hybrid case, where the deal was signed by Russia, Ukraine and by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).  Ukraine refused to implement the deal, and the OSCE proved toothless and unwilling to try and enforce the Minsk accords.  The deal was given political backing by Germany and France, although neither was a signatory and Germany and France were not legally obliged in any manner to support the resulting deal.

 

Zelensky's "proposal" really is just another smokescreen to deflect criticism of Ukraine for not wanting a settlement with Russia. There are three strong forces keeping Zelensky from the negotiating table.  The most important is that the main Anglo-Saxon players in NATO, namely the US and the UK, strongly oppose any negotiations with Russia.  The US has done everything it can, using sanctions and diplomatic measures, to prevent any dialog with Russia on any subject (other than prisoner exchanges).  

The second reason is Ukrainian legislation, sponsored by Zelensky, prohibiting negotiations with Russia.  The Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine's parliament) could rescind that legislation in a nanosecond if Zelensky asked them to do so, but he won't.  Zelensky completely controls the Ukrainian parliament, has arrested or exiled opposition politicians, and he controls the press and other media. Zelensky's iron fist means that he won't personally allow direct negotiations.

Zelensky also has signed a decree prohibiting any negotiations with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin.

The third reason relates to pressure on Zelensky from hard-right nationalists, including especially the neo-Nazi Azov brigade. Direct evidence for this is the firing of Lieutenant General Yuri Sodol, the top commander of Kiev's forces in the Kharkov (Ukr. Kharkiv) area. Sodol was accused by Azov brigade leaders of killing more Ukrainians than the Russians in the Kharkov battles.  Azov took their message to the Rada, and Zelensky obliged them by firing Sodol.

 

Since Sodol's dismissal the situation for Ukraine continues to worsen along the entire line of contact.  Ukrainian battle losses are very high, on some days as many as 2,000 killed and wounded. The Russians have stepped up their attacks with FAB glide bombs, including the monster FAB-3000 which just hit a Ukrainian army command center in the Donbass town of New York and reportedly killed 60 or more Ukrainian military personnel.

The Russians say that Zelensky himself is not a negotiating partner because his term of office expired in May.  There is some confusion about the legal situation in Ukraine, but experts in and outside Ukraine think that since Zelensky completed his term the leadership of the country should pass to the Speaker of the Rada.  Ruslan Stefanchuk is the Rada speaker and he is becoming more politically active, but he has not opposed Zelensky continuing in power.

Meanwhile, given the battlefield situation, the Russians no doubt figure that the time will soon come when the Ukrainian army either collapses or surrenders, or both.  In either case, the Ukrainian government will need to be replaced in some manner, perhaps with an interim military leadership selected by Russia.  That would allow the Russians to formulate a capitulation agreement with the replacement government.

A surrender by Ukraine's army and an agreement with a replacement government would make continued NATO involvement in Ukraine impossible.  That could open the door, finally, to a security dialog between NATO and Russia once NATO digests what happened and why.  Unfortunately, loading NATO with has-been political leaders like Marc Rutte, does not bode well for the future of the alliance.  The key message for NATO if the Russians win in Ukraine, as seems more and more likely, is that NATO has to stop its expansion and look for a more stable arrangement with Russia in Europe.

https://weapons.substack.com/p/ukraine-war-will-end-in-surrender?publication_id=1159397&post_id=146166051&isFreemail=true&r=7nm2&triedRedirect=true

 

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Talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Friday revolved around finding the “shortest way out” of the Ukraine conflict, the latter revealed during a joint press conference following the closed-doors negotiations.

Moscow’s and Kiev’s positions remain very “far apart,” Hungary’s PM admitted, citing his recent trip to Kiev to meet the Ukrainian leadership.

“A lot of steps have to be taken to get closer to a resolution of the war. Still, we’ve already taken the most important step—establishing the contact, and I will continue to work on this in the future,” Orban stated.

The enduring conflict between Russia and Ukraine is affecting the broader European region, Orban noted, adding that the continent has enjoyed the most rapid and sustainable development only during peacetime.

As I’ve already told Mr President, Europe needs peace. Yet this peace will not emerge by itself, we must work to reach it,” the visiting premier said.

The Russian president has reiterated Moscow’s readiness to resolve the hostility through negotiations. The Ukrainian leadership, however, appears to be still incapable of abandoning its idea of waging a war “until the end,” Putin noted.

Moscow is seeking to reach lasting, sustainable peace rather than opting for a temporary ceasefire or a “frozen conflict” of any sort, the Russian president warned.

There should not be a “ceasefire or some kind of pause that the Kiev regime could use to recover losses, regroup, and rearm. Russia is in favor of a complete and final end to the conflict,” he stressed.

https://www.rt.com/russia/600527-orban-putin-ukraine-conflict/

 

 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7xaJqiC58E

THE WEST EXPOSED: Europe Wants UKRAINE'S Lithium to Secure Its Renewable Energy Transition

 

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The conflict is about NATO and its expansion, and Moscow sees Kiev as a proxy for the bloc

By Glenn Diesen

 

Political realism is commonly and mistakenly portrayed as immoral because its principal focus is on an inescapable security competition, and it thus rejects idealist efforts to transcend power politics. Because states cannot break away from security competition, morality for the realist entails acting in accordance with the balance of power logic as the foundation for stability and peace. Idealist efforts to break with power politics can then be defined as immoral, as they undermine the management of the security competition as the foundation of peace. As Raymond Aron expressed in 1966: “The idealist, believing he has broken with power politics exaggerates its crimes.”

Ukraine’s sovereign right to join NATO

The most appealing and dangerous idealist argument that destroyed Ukraine is that it has the right to join any military alliance it desires. It is a very attractive statement that can easily win support from the public, as it affirms the freedom and sovereignty of Ukraine, and the alternative is seemingly that Russia should be allowed to dictate Ukraine’s policies.

However, arguing that Ukraine should be allowed to join any military alliance is an idealist argument, as it appeals to how we would like the world to be, not how the world actually works. The principle that peace is derived from the expansion of military alliances without taking into account the security interests of other great powers has never existed. States such as Ukraine that border a great power have every reason to express legitimate security concerns, but inviting a rival great power such as the US into its territory intensifies the security competition.

Is it moral to insist on how the world ought to be when war is the consequence of ignoring how the world actually works?

The alternative to expanding NATO is not to accept a Russian sphere of influence, which denotes a zone of exclusive influence. Peace is derived from recognizing a Russian sphere of interests, which is an area where Russian security interests must be recognized and incorporated rather than excluded. It did not use to be controversial to argue that Russian security interests must be taken into account when operating on its borders. This is why Europe had a belt of neutral states as a buffer between East and West during the Cold War to mitigate the security competition.

Mexico has plenty of freedoms in the international system, but it does not have the freedom to join a Chinese-led military alliance or to host Chinese military bases. The idealist argument that Mexico can do as it pleases implies ignoring US security concerns, and the result would likely be the US destruction of Mexico. If Scotland secedes from the UK and then joins a Russian-led military alliance and hosts Russian missiles, would the English still champion the principle of consent?

When we live in a realist world and recognize that security competition must be mitigated for peace, then we accept a security system based on mutual constraints. When we live in the idealist world of good states versus evil states, then the force for good should not be constrained. Peace is then ensured when good defeats evil, and compromise is mere appeasement. Idealists who seek to transcend power politics and create a more benign world thus find themselves intensifying the security competition and instigating wars.

The morality of opposing NATO expansionism

To argue that NATO expansionism provoked Russia’s invasion is regularly condemned by idealists as immoral because it allegedly legitimizes both power politics and the invasion. Is objective reality immoral if it contradicts the ideal world we would like to exist?

The former British ambassador to Russia, Roderic Lyne, warned in 2020 that it was a “massive mistake” to push for NATO membership for Ukraine: “If you want to start a war with Russia, that’s the best way of doing it.” Angela Merkel acknowledged that Russia would interpret the possibility of Ukrainian NATO membership as a “declaration of war.” CIA Director William Burns also warned against drawing Ukraine into NATO, as Russia fears encirclement and will therefore be under enormous pressure to use military force: “Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.” An advisor to former French President Sarkozy argued that the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership in November 2021 “convinced Russia that they must attack or be attacked.” None of the aforementioned people sought to legitimize an invasion, rather they sought to avoid a war. Yet, heeding their warning is condemned as giving Russia a veto, while ignoring these warnings is depicted as principled and virtuous.

When great powers do not have a soft institutional veto, they use a hard military veto. The idealists insisting that Russia should not have a veto on NATO expansion pushed for the policies that predictably resulted in the the loss of territory, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a nation destroyed. Why do the idealists get to present themselves as moral and “pro-Ukrainian”? Why are the realists who for more than a decade warned against NATO expansion immoral and “anti-Ukrainian”? Are these labels premised on the theoretical assumption of the idealists?

NATO as a third party?

Suggesting that Ukraine has the sovereign right to join NATO presents the military bloc as a passive third party that merely supports the democratic aspiration of Ukrainians. This narrative neglects that NATO did not have an obligation to offer future membership to Ukraine. Indeed, the Western countries signed several agreements with Moscow after the Cold War, such as the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, to collectively construct a Europe without dividing lines and based on indivisible security. NATO broke these agreements by pushing for expansion and refusing to offer Russia security guarantees to mitigate the security competition. By offering future membership to Ukraine, NATO shifted the pressure to Ukraine and the NATO-Russia conflict became a Russia-Ukraine conflict. Russia felt it had to prevent Ukraine from joining the military bloc and hosting the US military on its territory.

NATO’s support for Ukraine’s right to choose its own foreign policy is also dishonest, as Ukraine had to be pulled into the orbit of the military bloc against its will. The Western public is rarely informed that every opinion poll between 1991 and 2014 demonstrates that only a very small minority of Ukrainians ever wanted to join the alliance. NATO recognized the lack of interest by the Ukrainian government and people as a problem to be overcome in a report from 2011: “The greatest challenge for Ukrainian-NATO relations lies in the perception of NATO among the Ukrainian people. NATO membership is not widely supported in the country, with some polls suggesting that popular support of it is less than 20%.”

The solution was to push for a “democratic revolution” in 2014 that toppled the democratically elected government of Ukraine in violation of its constitution and without majority support from Ukrainians. The leaked Nuland-Pyatt phone call revealed that the US was planning a regime change, including who should be in the post-coup government, who had to stay out, and how to legitimize the coup. After the coup, the US openly asserted its intrusive influence over the new government it had installed in Kiev. The general prosecutor of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, complained that since 2014, “the most shocking thing is that all the [government] appointments were made in agreement with the United States” and Washington “believed that Ukraine was their fiefdom.” A conflict with Russia would be manufactured to create a demand for NATO.

What were the first decisions of the new government hand-picked by Washington? The first decree by the new Parliament repealed the ability of Ukrainian regions to designate Russian as an official second language. The New York Times reports that on the first day following the coup, Ukraine’s new spy chief called the CIA and MI6 to establish a partnership for covert operations against Russia that eventually resulted in 12 secret CIA bases along the Russian border. The conflict intensified as Russia responded by seizing Crimea and supporting a rebellion in Donbas, and NATO sabotaged the Minsk peace agreement that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians voted to have implemented. Preserving and intensifying the conflict gave Washington a dependent Ukrainian proxy that could be used against Russia. The same New York Times article mentioned above, also revealed that the covert war against Russia after the coup was a leading reason for Russia’s invasion:

“Toward the end of 2021, according to a senior European official, Mr. Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the head of one of Russia’s main spy services, who told him that the CIA, together with Britain’s MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow.”

The immorality of peace vs the morality of war?

After Russia’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine, the idealists insist that Ukraine must become a member of NATO as soon as the war is over. It is intended as an appealing and moral statement to ensure that Ukraine will be protected and such a tragedy will not be repeated.

Yet, what does it communicate to Russia? Whatever territory Russia does not conquer will fall into the hands of NATO, which can then be used as a front line against Russia. The threat of NATO expansion incentivizes Russia to seize as much territory as possible and ensure what remains is a deeply dysfunctional rump state. The only thing that can bring peace to Ukraine and end the carnage is to restore its neutrality, yet the idealists denounce this as deeply immoral and thus unacceptable. To repeat Raymond Aron: “The idealist, believing he has broken with power politics exaggerates its crimes.”

 

This piece was first published on Glenn Diesen’s Subtrack and edited by the RT team 

 

https://www.rt.com/russia/600586-political-idealism-destroyed-ukraine/

 

NATO'S GOAL IS PRIMARILY TO DESTROY RUSSIA ON BEHALF OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE (SEE: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171). NATO LIES. THE AMERICAN EMPIRE LIES. UKRAINE WAS NEUTRAL. SO THE KIEV GOVERNMENT, UNFORTUNATELY MAINTAINED WITH (NEO)NAZI IDEALS (NATIONALIST), AND NOW WITH AN ILLEGITIMATE PRESIDENT, HAD TO RECOGNISE THAT 35 PER CENT OF ITS POPULATION IS (WAS) ETHNIC RUSSIAN.

ADOPTING THE MINSK AGREEMENTS WOULD HAVE SOLVED A LOT OF THE SITUATION, BUT THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND ITS EUROPEAN LACKEYS (FRANCE AND GERMANY) PUSHED KIEV TO RENEGE ON THESE. NOW MOST OF THE DONBASS (FORMER RUSSIAN PROVINCES FORMING ABOUT 25 PER CENT OF UKRAINE) IS IS THE HANDS OF MOSCOW BY LEGITIMATE REFERENDUM AND RUSSIAN "PROTECTION" (MILITARY INTERVENTION). RUSSIA WILL NEVER ABANDON THESE. A DEAL NEEDS TO BE MADE.

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.

 

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