RUNNING UPDATES ON THE CONFLICT IN UKRAINE - 07.05.2023
Including geopolitical issues affecting the balance of power in the ongoing end game war to establish our common future, a closely monitored prison planet or tolerance for diverse modes of governance.
THE ROAD TO THE ULTIMATE CONCLUSION OF WORLD WAR III RUNS THROUGH HERE.
*** WILL ZELENSKY INITIATE A SUICIDAL COUNTEROFFENSIVE? ***
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“Ukraine. What is the truth...?
Why won’t western media tell both sides…?”
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VIRTUALLY UNREPORTED ATROCITY IN LUGANSK, 2nd JUNE 2014
A lot has been said about atrocities in the western media claimed to have been perpetrated by the Russians, for example at Bucha and Mariupol among others. These assertions are conveyed on the say so of the Ukrainian authorities. How willing though are western news broadcasters to convey atrocities attributed to the Ukrainians? The following will I think provide the answer.
If anyone wonders if they are receiving accurate coverage of the conflict in Ukraine I would suggest watching the video below of an event which occurred on the 2nd of June 2014 and ask themselves if they recall hearing about it on any mainstream media news channel at the time.
The video is harrowing to watch. The bodies (five women and three men) are real. Yet across western media there was only one single news report that occurred a day later. This was from CNN and occurred only because a CNN team happened to be nearby at the time of the atrocity and so the network could hardly ignore it as all others so obviously did.
The video below shows the unvarnished truth that was not considered newsworthy in western mainstream news.
THE SINGLE WESTERN MSM REPORT ON THE LUGANSK ATROCITY, 3rd JUNE 2014
The video at the CNN link below is the crime scene sanitised by CNN, though played straight with honest reporting on the scene not playing things to Kiev’s tune.
(There was a time early in the war in the Donbass when CNN were not afraid to contradict the Ukrainian regime in Kiev.) Watch because it's the first and last time you will see this.
5 women and 3 men died, all civilians.
Air attack on pro-Russian separatists in Luhansk kills 8, stuns residents.
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Lead feature:
ALEXANDER MERCOURIS of THE DURAN
Russia Storming Bakhmut, Prigozhin Says Surovikin in Charge, Russia Repels Drones, Bombards Ukraine.
ALEX CHRISTOFOROU of THE DURAN
WaPo, spring offensive all hype. Kadyrov in Bakhmut. Dutch farmers lifetime ban. Kamala AI Tsar. U/1
THE DURAN
US bank problems expose deep economic problems.
Turkey may have a new president, what will change?
GARLAND NIXON
THE STATE OF THE UKRAINE CONFLICT IS THE STATE OF THE NEOCON PROJECT.
CYRUS JANSSEN
Russian Sanctions are Now Destroying the US Dollar! Watch Out!
BRIAN BERLETIC of THE NEW ATLAS
Ukraine Jails US Commentator Gonzalo Lira for Speaking Uncomfortable Facts.
JACKSON HINKLE
Free Gonzalo Lira.
U.S. General: Russia Is STRONGER Than Ever.
SCOTT RITTER IN RUSSIA СКОТТ РИТТЕР В РОССИИ
Scott Ritter Waging Peace in Russia • St. Petersburg May 5.
COLONEL DOUGLAS MACGREGOR
Hundreds of thousands of Russian troops are sweeping everything before them.
DANNY HAIPHONG - BRIAN BERLETIC
Russia on the Retreat? Ukraine Attacks the Kremlin.
REDACTED
"This is an incredibly DANGEROUS moment" Putin activates nuclear arsenal to highest level | Redacted.
iEARLGREY
Bombed Babushka SAFE thanks to your support.
SCOTT RITTER
2-Minute Topic: Attack on the Kremlin.
2-Minute Topic: Sanctions Aren't Working.
THE JIMMY DORE SHOW w/ AARON MATÉ
“Russia Bombed Themselves” Says U.S. Media w/ Straight Face!
MINTPRESS NEWS
CODEPINK disrupted US Secretary of State.
Clare Daly points out the hypocrisy of the Western response to the war in Ukraine.
BORZZIKMAN
It was a Brilliant OP┃NATO instructors were Destroyed by the Russian Aerospace Forces in 'Chernihiv'.
MINTPRESS NEWS
Iranian forces seize American ship.
TECH REVOLUTION
Saudi Arabia And Russia's GAME CHANGING Oil Strategy LEAVES U.S In Dust | HUGE THREAT To The West.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
VLADIMIR POZNER: HOW THE UNITED STATES MADE VLADIMIR PUTIN.
Article published by Russia Today (RT) - 7th May 2023:
De-dollarisation is spreading and it’s not hard to see.
The major global economies are shifting and the clues are there for those who know where to look.
De-dollarisation is increasingly making headlines and signs of it are everywhere.
New sources of non-dollar finance are emerging. There are new bilateral agreements to trade and lend in currencies other than the US dollar. Even more importantly, major oil trade buyers and sellers – Moscow and Riyadh as much as Beijing and New Delhi – are agreeing to trade it in non-dollar currencies. These deals are destroying one of the main pillars of dollar dominance since OPEC quadrupled and then doubled oil prices in the 1970s, giving countries around the world a major reason to demand and hold dollars.
However, many analysts continue to write as if the dollar’s dominance remains intact. Of course, these arguments are based on all sorts of false assumptions. For instance, they claim the dollar will continue dominating until another country’s currency replaces it or that this will only happen if other countries pursue forms of internationalisation that mimic that of the US dollar today.
In a sense, the discussion is a little like that depicted in The Big Short, a film about a small band of bankers who bet against the housing market and the securities resting on it in the 2000s. Having made their bets, they waited for the market to collapse. It did. However, for a time, while mortgage defaults increased, the securities they are based on continued to rise in value. Prices were buoyed by investors primed by Alan Greenspan’s famous claim that there could not possibly be a housing market bubble. Nor were the securities downgraded. The rating agencies had not only given high scores to investment rubbish, they had come to believe their own lies. Only when the losses piled up and actually began to filter through the system in the form of payment shortfalls was the truth acknowledged.
De-dollarisation also has its equivalent of the losses and payment shortfalls. Consider the recent Financial Times story, ‘China’s ‘men in black’ step up scrutiny of foreign corporate sleuths’. It describes the Chinese Ministry of State Security using “methods familiar to spies and private detectives” to crack down on “foreign corporate sleuths” performing “due diligence” on investments. They cite the process of checking whether a supply chain involved “forced labour from Xinjiang” as an example, stating that such due diligence is critical for attracting US investment.
The piece adds that earlier, “the due diligence groups felt they had ample space to operate and that authorities understood their importance,” but now Beijing has stepped up scrutiny of these scrutineers on grounds of national security. They lament that “spy companies were the gatekeepers for money,” but now, “[t]hat sense of a mutually beneficial relationship is gone.”
Now, the Chinese government has no shortage of reasons for stepping up its scrutiny of the information being gathered by foreign, particularly US entities. After all, it is the target of a US hybrid war whose fronts multiply daily. However, this is not the only significance of the story. It goes deeper than that and testifies to de-dollarisation.
Since 1971 the US currency’s global role has rested on the claim that the dollar-denominated financial system was the world’s most sophisticated, with the broadest and deepest pools of capital from which the rest of the world’s investors could drink their fill. Certainly, the expansion of financial activity, also known as financialisation, has been critical. By increasing financial demand for the dollar, it counteracted the Triffin Dilemma caused by the US deficits that provided the world with liquidity, meaning that the larger the US deficits, the greater the downward pressure on the dollar.
Needless to say, claims about the attractions of US finance were exaggerated. As far as most of the world was concerned, rather than providing beneficial productive investment, the US dollar-denominated financial system only unleashed torrents of short-term ‘hot’ money that has only profited mostly Western speculative investors, while regularly wreaking havoc on the rest of the world’s economies. Only China and a handful of other much smaller, favoured, investment destinations benefited from a certain (easily overstated) amount of productive investment. Ironically, it was part of the hollowing out of US manufacturing through a little foreign direct investment and a lot of outsourcing.
Now, however, the US dollar-denominated system’s internal contradictions are mounting. While it is ceasing to provide its US and Western short-term investors with opportunities for speculative profit and to furnish the modest productive investment it once did.
The most fundamental of these mounting contradictions is the bind into which the rise of inflation puts the wizards at the Federal Reserve. On the one hand, the only way they can deal with inflation without eroding the power of capital is by raising interest rates, but that promises to crash the very financial structures of unproductive debt and speculation on which the wealth of the financial elite it serves relies. On the other hand, if the Fed does not raise interest rates, and permits inflation to run rampant, it will destroy the same system even more directly by undermining the value of the monetary unit, the US dollar, on which the entire system rests. What’s the point of accumulating your wealth in dollars if they are losing value at a rate close to or even higher than the rate at which you are accumulating it?
If the US financial system is losing its charm even for speculators, the very financialisation over which it presides and on which the US dollar system rests has, over the last several decades, strangulated the alternative source of gain, the US productive economy. For decades, it was deprived of the long-term, patient investment that alone can make it dynamic. Today, therefore, neither the financial system nor the US productive economy will keep dollars flowing into the US dollar system. The former, which once yielded profits – via interest or speculation – by skimming off production incomes kept capital flowing into the US dollar system based on a reasonable expectation of gain. That situation has been eroded.
It is no wonder that a recent Financial Times story comparing the US and European financial systems explained that, today the EU, with its proportionally larger base of productive corporations able to generate dividend income rather than merely uncertain and increasingly risky speculative gains, is likely to attract more money. And if Europe looks good compared to the US, China looks even better.
Money from around the world is flocking into Chinese IPOs (initial public offerings). By contrast, IPOs in the US and the UK, with the most financialized and productively weakened economies, have performed abysmally. The simple reason is that China still has a productive economy and far more of the sort of steady dividend-paying productive companies investors will now increasingly seek.
So, China cracking down on Western ‘due diligence’ sleuths is just another sign that the US financial system, and with it the dollar, is fast losing what few charms it once had. China may have tolerated a certain amount of espionage from Western financial investors when they constituted a major source of investment in China’s productive economy and US-China relations were miles better. Today, not only must it be more vigilant on national security grounds, with the US waging an ever-expanding hybrid war against China, its productive economy is winning the favor of the very capital that is fast falling out of love with the US financial system. China has no incentive to tolerate US “sleuthing.”
MAPPING/ANALYSIS CHANNELS
* Updates will be added here as and when they become available.
MILITARY SUMMARY UPDATE
Ukrainian Special Operations. Wagner Stays In Bakhmut. Military Summary And Analysis 2023.05.07
Akhmat Will Continue In Seversk After Bakhmut. Military Summary And Analysis 2023.05.07
NWE WAR REPORTS UPDATE
Bakhmut Final Battle | Both Armies pour in Reinforcements.
DEFENSE POLITICS ASIA UPDATE
RUSSIA GOES INTO COUNTEROFFENSIVE @ SYNKIVKA & GREATER-BAKHMUT; Chechen Akhmat Forces @ Bilohorivka.
UKRAINE ZAPORIZHZHIA OFFENSIVE LOOKING DANGEROUS; Eyeing Transnistria; Vuhledar & Bakhmut Offensive.
DPA WAR UPDATE
No update posted so far today
THETI MAPPING UPDATE
No update posted so far today
BALKAN MAPPING UPDATE
No update posted so far today
FREE RUSSIA UPDATE
No update posted so far today
THE RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE UPDATE
No update posted so far today
PROJECT GREAT UPDATE
No update posted so far today
MILITARY AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS UPDATE
No update posted so far today
RYBAR UPDATE
No update posted so far today
M MAPPING UPDATE
No update posted so far today
HISTORY OF MAKUS UPDATE
No update posted so far today
WEEB UNION UPDATE
Bakhmut Endgame | Situation Resolved | Wagner Continues Assaults | Bakhmut Front Update 07/05/23.
Bakhmut Endgame | Reinforcements Arrive | Full Front Update 07/05/23.
Detailed situation reports can be found on a daily basis concerning events in Ukraine over the past 24 hours at the ‘A SKEPTIC’ Substack account:
Link to 'A SKEPTIC' Substack channel.
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SUPPORTING SCOTT RITTER
I've been listening to Scott Ritter describe how things are for him and I suspect have been for him for quite some time now.
He has been doing a LOT of unpaid work with a great many interview requests coming in that he has been ready and willing to agree to. But the work where receives some pay for have suffered due to this, being left until the wee small hours of the night to complete work on.
Scott, I think you will agree, has been one of the most influential voices out there on Russia and Ukraine.
I was moved by Scott's words to take an annual subscription to his Substack account that he runs in coordination with his colleague on 'U.S. Tour of Duty', Jeff Norman. This is the main way that Scott recommends to help him with finances with which to upgrade his delivery of comment on Russia and Ukraine, via a better microphone etc. and perhaps the creation of a recording studio in his basement to create a more professional and impressive look. To invest in these things he would like to be sure that this has a viable financial future.
Would you also like to help by subscribing at one of the various levels to Scott's Substack account? I hope so. If so the link is here:
Below you'll find the edited part of the video where Scott talks of his commitments to get the facts out on events in Ukraine and of the finances that would come in handy to enhance their delivery:
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VICTORY BELONGS TO RUSSIA: IT IS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME
Each day that passes makes a conclusive Russian victory in the Donbass and beyond more certain. As Russia bolsters her forces, and weaponry, those of Ukraine decrease. Russian forces gain ready access to rest and recuperation as troop numbers increase. The increasingly exhausted and demoralised Ukrainian troops have an ever decreasing prospect of such respite. This situation is likely to bring them to complete breakdown as Russia unleashes the firepower of the more modern and advanced weaponry that is arriving with the newly mobilised Russian troops.
The various Ukrainian offensives are now weak when confronted by the reinforced Russian lines. A few futile efforts achieve quite miserable results before fire reigns down on the Ukrainian troops and they are forced back to their starting positions.
And now, all this being said, we have arrived at the wet, and later, freezing conditions where these pathetic Ukrainian forces will be subject to myriad forms of abject misery with death and injury all around them while they lie sodden or frozen, abandoned to their fate by Kiev.
The pitiable young and old of Ukraine have been frogmarched to their deaths as cannon-fodder while the bestial elites of the collective West urge their "president" to add more to their number there at the gates of Hell and their doom. We must feel for the majority of them as they are not the Nazis we revile, in most part they are decent men, fathers, sons, brothers, husband and uncles, who no doubt saw through the coup of 2014 for what it was. But sadly, their fate seems sealed.
Nothing will stop Russia now. Every factor favours them. Victory will be Russia's. In Donbass and beyond and in due course across the world.
Victory belongs to Russia: It is now only a matter of time.
UPDATES TO BE ADDED HERE AS AND WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE OVER THE NEXT 24 HOURS.
UPDATES TO BE ADDED HERE AS AND WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE OVER THE NEXT 24 HOURS
A FAIRY TALE FOR MODERN MINDS AND TIMES
We live in an age when we have access to more information than previous generations by an enormous margin. Yet we remain vulnerable to the spinning of fairy tales when you might think we had all grown far too cynical to believe in such things.
The particular fairy tale I would like to relate concerns a land that most of us were hardly aware of until recently. A land shrouded in a mystery few of us were interested in investigating, let alone revealing in all its reality.
Most of us remain of this frame of mind except for a few exceptional areas of revelation that have become the subject of great interest. The fairy tale concerning this non-fabled land lost to our communal attention has been related to us by the most influential storyteller of our time.
Interrupting a common ignorance regarding this land and events there the storyteller I talk of has painted a tale in glowing colours with the usual backdrop of every fairy tale that went before it, that of good and evil, of a monstrous devil and a virtuous female.
The virtuous, long-lost daughter requires little analysis. That she is pure, virtuous and without a single stain on her character is all we need know. She did nothing wrong that would merit the foul attentions of the monster that now inflicts her young person with such sorrow.
The monster however is provided to us in every possible detail. His characteristics are utterly negative and reprehensible with no redeeming qualities about them. He has a sick and terrifyingly violent mentality. His breath stinks and everywhere he goes there is pestilence, death and destruction.
In all previous fairy tales the reader must associate completely with the fair maiden and loath with every iota of mind and heart the villain. This is essential for the story to work its magic and deliver the most profound experience possible in order to deliver the message and moral of the story.
We must feel zero sympathy for the villain. He must be seen as completely lost to reason and heaven forfend, compassion. He is a brute with a mind cold as ice and a heart that feels nothing for anyone but himself. His motives are vile, his actions brutal and his intentions totally evil. The emotion the storyteller wishes to engender within us toward this brute is an overwhelming desire to see him hurt, crippled and eliminated at the soonest possible moment to save the poor, helpless maiden.
The monster has no backstory you see. There are no previous incidents that might explain the events with which the story begins. In such tales creating some sympathy for the villainous creature is completely out of the question. There can be no possible excuse for what he does. No attempt to find any ameliorating circumstance is sought, indeed it would be detrimental to the required stirring up of disgust, hatred and revulsion for the brute.
At each twist and turn of the story we are told of the hapless plight of our innocent, we can almost hear her cries and screams as those people and things she loves are killed and destroyed. “How can such evil exist!” we ask ourselves, gripped as we are by the horrendous actions of this vile creature who seems to have been born in Hell and destined to return there if we can help effect this outcome.
As readers now thoroughly gripped by the repeated barbarism of the fiend we are now totally committed to the outcome. Every sinew of our being strains to see the thing slain or at least badly beaten and driven off. We hear how this lovely victim, frail and naive has been sorely abused time and time again by this abominable monster. We grip tight onto imagined weapons and cry tears of both anguish and rage.
We wish to help. We would do anything to help, even risk our own lives to battle the giant ogre of a hellhound beast we conceive the abominable monster to be. But the storyteller hasn’t quite arrived at the point in the story where a happy ending comes into view. Instead, the motifs are simply repeated in scenario after scenario to reinforce the building of tension within us leading up to that final joyous climax.
But wait. What is this?
The monster has begun to break through the narrative being woven by the storyteller. A few of us have ears to hear what he is saying even when the majority, lost in their belief in the story as told, cannot bear to hear it. Slowly, very slowly, we begin to realise that the monster does indeed have a backstory. Bit by bit we hear him relate how the maiden’s father used a vicious whip upon him when he was young, how he was abused again and again after the virtuous one’s father used every aggressive act against his own father wishing to take and divide up his land.
Those who understand the backstory as told by the monster who seems not to be quite the monster we were told, begin to look in suspicion toward the storyteller with new eyes. There was more to this tale than we were being told! Our emotions were being played with. We were being manipulated. The story we were being told is false. There is another side to this story entirely.
Finally, reluctantly in some cases, eyes turn to the virtuous young lady who has suffered all these apparently unprovoked attacks. Suddenly we become aware of a hardness in her eyes we hadn’t seen before. Those white raiments that looked so pristine before now presented a more stained appearance and, most shockingly of all here and there upon them could be seen spots of blood. We had been unaware of these things that now seemed to emerge like a photographic negative developing before us.
And no, was that a snarl she now had on her previously beautiful untainted lips?
And what was that in her right hand, clenched so hard the knuckles were white? A whip???
Thank you so much for mentioning Gonzalo Lira !
Spread the word , this is so wrong .