RUNNING UPDATES ON THE CONFLICT IN UKRAINE - 03.04.2024
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.
*** UKRAINE: RUSSIAN ARMY ADVANCE IN MULTIPLE DIRECTIONS ***
“Ukraine. What is the truth...?
Why won’t western media tell both sides…?”
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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Kiev has lost more than 80,000 troops since January – Russian MoD.
In excess of 1,200 Ukrainian tanks and other armored vehicles have also been destroyed, Sergey Shoigu has estimated.
Ukrainian forces have lost more than 80,000 troops since the beginning of the year, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Tuesday, adding that the Russian military is continuing to reduce “the enemy’s combat potential.”
More than 14,000 pieces of military hardware have also been destroyed by Russian forces since January, including 1,200 tanks and other armored combat vehicles. During the same period, Moscow has liberated some 403 square kilometers of Russia’s new territories, Shoigu told a conference call with the country’s military leadership.
Despite Kiev’s lack of success on the battlefield, the Ukrainian leadership “is still trying to convince its Western sponsors of its ability to resist the Russian Army,” he said. To do so, Kiev has resorted to terrorism and long-range strikes on Russian territories, targeting the civilian population, the minister added.
READ MORE: Ukrainian general condemns sympathy for dead draft dodgers
“Our armed forces react asymmetrically to such crimes by Ukrainian militants,” the defense minister said. In March alone, the Russian military carried out 190 group strikes and two massive assaults on Ukraine using precision weapons and unmanned aerial vehicles, which targeted the country’s military and energy infrastructure facilities, he added.
Last month, the Russian Defense Ministry reported that the Ukrainian military had lost a total of 444,000 personnel since the outbreak of the conflict in February 2022, including 166,000 during last year’s failed summer counteroffensive.
However, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky claimed in February that only 31,000 of its soldiers had been killed since the start of the conflict. He did not reveal how many had been injured or gone missing in action.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian military commanders have repeatedly complained about a significant shortage of manpower, prompting Kiev to seek new ways of replenishing its fighting force. This includes asking Ukraine’s Western supporters to send back draft dodgers who are hiding abroad, and lower the threshold for citizens to be recruited into military service.
READ MORE: NATO tells Ukraine to keep drafting new troops
Moscow has repeatedly described the Ukraine conflict as a proxy war being waged against Russia by the US and its allies, and has accused the West of using Ukrainians as “cannon fodder” in pursuit of their own interests.
Kiev has lost more than 80,000 troops since January – Russian MoD.
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U.S. kept quiet on Crocus Intel.
Russian army has recruited 100,000 so far this year – MOD
Many people want to avenge the massacre at the Crocus City concert hall, the Defence Ministry has said.
The Russian Defence Ministry has registered an influx of volunteers willing to sign up as contract soldiers this year, with many willing to join the fight against Ukraine after Russian officials suggested Kiev may have been behind the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack.
In a statement on Wednesday, the ministry said that more than 100,000 people had signed contracts since the start of 2024, with numbers increasing nationwide.
Officials estimate that up to 1,700 volunteers register at recruitment centers each day, and that in the past 10 days some 16,000 Russian citizens have signed contracts.
“During interviews conducted over the past week… most candidates said their main motive for concluding a contract was a desire to avenge those killed in the tragedy that occurred on March 22, 2024 in Moscow Region,” the ministry added.
Read more: Child fatalities in Moscow terrorist attack updated
The Crocus City Hall tragedy claimed the lives of at least 144 people, including several children, and injured nearly 200, making it the worst terrorist attack on Russian soil since the early 2000s. A group of armed men – described by the Russian authorities as radical Islamists – stormed the venue, shooting indiscriminately before setting the building on fire.
According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the suspects directly involved in the attack were caught while fleeing towards the Ukrainian border where “a window” to cross the frontier had been arranged for them. Kiev has vehemently denied any involvement, and its Western backers have pinned the blame on Islamic State terrorists.
In late December, Putin said that a total of 617,000 service members were present in the zone of the military operation against Ukraine. He noted at the time that out of this number, 244,000 had been mobilised in the autumn of 2022. At the time, Moscow had called up 300,000 people.
The Russian president also said that 41,000 had been dismissed for various reasons since then. Putin added that Moscow does not plan to announce a second wave of mobilisation, as nearly 500,000 troops have current contracts with the Defence Ministry.
Russian army has recruited 100,000 so far this year – MOD.
COLLECTIVE WEST <-> GLOBAL MAJORITY
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USA
Death of empires: The collapse of the US and what will follow is inevitable.
The turn away from expansion, production and trade toward lending and speculation has precipitated decline for centuries.
One of the curious features of the American landscape is the fact that these days the financialization of the economy is widely condemned as unhealthy, yet little is being done to reverse it. There was a time, back in the 1980s and ‘90s, when finance-driven capitalism was supposed to usher in a time of better capital allocation and a more dynamic economy. This is not a view one hears often anymore.
So, if such a phenomenon is overwhelmingly viewed negatively but isn’t being amended, then perhaps it’s not merely a failure of policymaking but rather something deeper – something more endemic to the very fabric of the capitalist economy. It is of course possible to lay the blame for this state of affairs at the feet of the current crop of cynical and power-hungry elites and to stop one’s analysis there. But an examination of history reveals recurrent instances of financialization that bear remarkable similarities, which invites the conclusion that perhaps the predicament in the American economy in recent decades is not unique and that the ever-rising power of Wall Street was in a sense preordained.
Introducing Giovanni Arrighi: Financialization as a cyclical phenomenon
It is in this context that it pays to revisit the work of the Italian political economist and historian of global capitalism Giovanni Arrighi (1937-2009). Arrighi, who is often simplistically pigeonholed as a Marxist historian, a label far too constricting given the breadth of his work, explored the origins and evolution of capitalist systems dating back to the Renaissance and showed how recurrent phases of financial expansion and collapse underpin broader geopolitical reconfigurations. Occupying a central place in his theory is the notion that the cycle of rise and fall of each successive hegemon terminates in a crisis of financialization. It is this phase of financialization that facilitates the shift to the next hegemon.
Arrighi dates the origin of this cyclical process to the Italian city-states of the 14th century, an era that he calls the birth of the modern world. From the marriage of Genoese capital and Spanish power that produced the great discoveries, he traces this path through Amsterdam, London and, finally, the United States.
In each case, the cycle is shorter and each new hegemon is larger, more complex and more powerful than the previous one. And, as we mentioned above, each terminates in a crisis of financialization that marks the final stage of hegemony. But this phase also fertilizes the soil in which the next hegemon will sprout, thus marking financialization as the harbinger of an impending hegemonic shift. Essentially, the ascending power emerges in part by availing itself of the financial resources of the financialized and declining power.
READ MORE: Schizophrenic world order: The West is willing to destroy its financial system to punish Russia
Arrighi detected a first wave of financialization starting around 1560, when the Genoese businessmen withdrew from commerce and specialized in finance, thereby establishing symbiotic relations with the Kingdom of Spain. The subsequent wave began around 1740 when the Dutch began to withdraw from commerce to become “the bankers of Europe.” The financialization in Great Britain, which we will examine below, emerged around the end of the 19th century; for the United States, it began in the 1970s.
Hegemony he defines as “the power of a state to exercise functions of leadership and governance over a system of sovereign states.” Central to this concept is the idea that historically such governance has been linked to the transformation of how the system of relations among states functions in itself and also that it consists of both what we would call geopolitical dominance but also a sort of intellectual and moral leadership. The hegemonic power not only rises to the top in the jockeying among states but actually forges the system itself in its own interest. Key to this capacity for the expansion of the hegemon’s own power is the ability to turn its national interests into international interests.
Observers of the current American hegemony will recognize the transformation of the global system to suit American interests. The maintenance of an ideologically charged ‘rules-based’ order – ostensibly for the benefit of everyone – fits neatly into the category of conflation of national and international interests. Meanwhile, the previous hegemon, the British, had their own version that incorporated both free-trade policies and a matching ideology that emphasized the wealth of nations over national sovereignty.
Returning to the question of financialization, the original insight into its epochal aspect first came from the French historian Fernand Braudel, of whom Arrighi was a disciple. Braudel observed that the rise of finance as the predominant capitalist activity of a given society was a sign of its impending decline.
Arrighi adopted this approach and, in his major work called ‘The Long Twentieth Century,’ elaborated his theory of the cyclical pattern of ascendency and collapse within the capitalist system, which he called the ‘systemic cycle of accumulation.’ According to this theory, the period of ascendency is based on an expansion of trade and production. But this phase eventually reaches maturity, at which point it becomes more difficult to profitably reinvest capital in further expansion. In other words, the economic endeavors that propelled the rising power to its perch become increasingly less profitable as competition intensifies and, in many cases, much of the real economy is lost to the periphery, where wages are lower. Rising administrative expenses and the cost of maintaining an ever-expanding military also contribute to this.
This leads to the onset of what Arrighi calls a ‘signal crisis,’ meaning an economic crisis that signals the shift from accumulation by material expansion to accumulation by financial expansion. What ensues is a phase characterized by financial intermediation and speculation. Another way to think about this is that, having lost the actual basis for its economic prosperity, a nation turns to finance as the final economic field in which hegemony can be sustained. The phase of financialization is thus characterized by an exaggerated emphasis on financial markets and the finance sector.
How financialization delays the inevitable
However, the corrosive nature of financialization is not immediately evident – in fact, quite the opposite. Arrighi demonstrates how the turn to financialization, which is initially quite lucrative, can provide a temporary and illusory respite from the trajectory of decline, thus deferring the onset of the terminal crisis. For example, the incumbent hegemon at the time, Great Britain, was the country hardest hit by the so-called Long Depression of 1873-1896, a prolonged period of malaise that saw Britain’s industrial growth decelerate and its economic standing diminished. Arrighi identifies this as the ‘signal crisis’ – the point in the cycle where productive vigor is lost and financialization sets in.
And yet, as Arrighi quotes David Landes’ 1969 book ‘The Unbound Prometheus,’ “as if by magic, the wheel turned.” In the last years of the century, business suddenly improved and profits rose. “Confidence returned—not the spotty, evanescent confidence of the brief booms that had punctuated the gloom of the preceding decades, but a general euphoria such as had not prevailed since…the early 1870s….In all of western Europe, these years live on in memory as the good old days—the Edwardian era, la belle époque.” Everything seemed right again.
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However, there is nothing magical about the sudden restoration of profits, Arrighi explains. What happened is that “as its industrial supremacy waned, its finance triumphed and its services as shipper, trader, insurance broker and intermediary in the world’s system of payments became more indispensable than ever.”
In other words, there was a large expansion in financial speculation. Initially much of the expanding financial income derived from interest and dividends being generated by previous investments. But increasingly a significant portion was financed by what Arrighi calls the “domestic conversion of commodity capital into money capital.” Meanwhile, as surplus capital moved out of trade and production, British real wages began a decline starting after the mid-1890s – a reversal of the trend of the past five decades. An enriched financial and business elite amid an overall decline in real wages is something that should ring a bell to observers of the current American economy.
Essentially, by embracing financialization, Britain played the last card it had to stave off its imperial decline. Beyond that lay the ruin of World War I and the subsequent instability of the interwar period, a manifestation of what Arrighi calls ‘systemic chaos’ – a phenomenon that becomes particularly visible during signal crises and terminal crises.
Historically, Arrighi observes, these breakdowns have been associated with escalation into outright warfare – specifically, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), the Napoleonic wars (1803-15) and the two World Wars. Interestingly and somewhat counterintuitively, these wars have typically not seen the incumbent hegemon and the challenger on opposing sides (with the Anglo-Dutch naval wars a notable exception). Rather, it has typically been the actions of other rivals that have hastened the arrival of the terminal crisis. But even in the case of the Dutch and British, conflict co-existed with cooperation as Dutch merchants increasingly directed their capital to London, where it generated better returns.
Wall Street and the crisis of the last hegemon
The process of financialization emerging from a signal crisis was repeated with startling similarities in the case of Britain’s successor, the US. The 1970s was a decade of deep crisis for the US, with high levels of inflation, a weakening dollar after the 1971 abandonment of gold convertibility and, perhaps most importantly, a loss of competitiveness of US manufacturing. With rising powers such as Germany, Japan, and, later, China, able to outcompete it in terms of production, the US reached the same tipping point and, like its predecessors, it turned to financialization. The 1970s was, in the words of historian Judith Stein, the “pivotal decade” that “sealed a society-wide transition from industry to finance, factory floor to trading floor.”
This, Arrighi explains, allowed the US to attract massive amounts of capital and move toward a model of deficit financing – an increasing indebtedness of the US economy and state to the rest of the world. But financialization also allowed the US to reflate its economic and political power in the world, particularly as the dollar was ensconced as the global reserve currency. This reprieve gave the US the illusion of prosperity of the late 1980s and ‘90s, when, as Arrighi says “there was this idea that the United States had ‘come back’.” No doubt the demise of its main geopolitical rival, the Soviet Union, contributed to this buoyant optimism and sense that Western neoliberalism had been vindicated.
READ MORE: Debt could destroy US economy – JP Morgan boss
However, beneath the surface, the tectonic plates of decline were still grinding away as the US became ever more dependent on external funding and increasingly ramped-up leverage on a diminishing sliver of real economic activity that was rapidly being offshored and hollowed out. As Wall Street rose in prominence, many quintessential American economies were essentially asset-stripped for the sake of financial profit.
But, as Arrighi points out, financialization merely stalls the inevitable and this has only been laid bare by subsequent events in the US. By the late 1990s, the financialization itself was beginning to malfunction, starting with the Asia crisis of 1997 and subsequent popping of the dotcom bubble, and continuing with a reduction in interest rates that would inflate the housing bubble that detonated so spectacularly in 2008. Since then, the cascade of imbalances in the financial system has only accelerated and it has only been through a combination of increasingly desperate financial legerdemain – inflating one bubble after another – and outright coercion that has allowed the US to extend its hegemony even a bit longer beyond its time.
In 1999, Arrighi, in a piece co-authored with American scholar Beverly Silver, summarized the predicament of the time. It has been a quarter century since these words were penned, but they might as well have been written last week:
“The global financial expansion of the last twenty years or so is neither a new stage of world capitalism nor the harbinger of a ‘coming hegemony of global markets’. Rather, it is the clearest sign that we are in the midst of a hegemonic crisis. As such, the expansion can be expected to be a temporary phenomenon that will end more or less catastrophically… But the blindness that led the ruling groups of [hegemonic states of the past] to mistake the ‘autumn’ for a new ‘spring’ of their…power meant that the end came sooner and more catastrophically than it might otherwise have…A similar blindness is evident today.”
An early prophet of a multipolar world
In his late work, Arrighi turned his attention to East Asia and surveyed the prospects for a transition to the next hegemony. On the one hand, he identified China as the logical successor to American hegemony. However, as a counterweight to that, he did not see the cycle he outlined as continuing in perpetuity and believed there would come a point where it is no longer possible to bring into existence a state with larger and more comprehensive organizational structures. Perhaps, he speculated, the US represents just that expansive capitalist power that has taken the capitalist logic to its earthly limits.
Arrighi also considered the systemic cycle of accumulation to be a phenomenon inherent to capitalism and not applicable to pre-capitalist times or non-capitalist formations. As of 2009, when he died, Arrighi’s view was that China remained a decisively non-capitalist market society. How it would evolve remained an open question.
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While Arrighi was not dogmatic on how the future would shape up and did not apply his theories deterministically, especially with regard to the developments of recent decades, he did speak forcefully about what in today’s language could be called the necessity of accommodating a multipolar world. In their 1999 article, he and Silver predicted “a more or less imminent fall of the West from the commanding heights of the world capitalist system is possible, even likely.”
The US, they believe, “has even greater capabilities than Britain did a century ago to convert its declining hegemony into an exploitative dominion.” If the system does eventually break down, “it will be primarily because of US resistance to adjustment and accommodation. And conversely, US adjustment and accommodation to the rising economic power of the East Asian region is an essential condition for a non-catastrophic transition to a new world order.”
Whether such accommodation is forthcoming remains to be seen, but Arrighi strikes a pessimistic tone, noting that each hegemon, at the end of its cycle of dominance, experiences a “final boom” during which it pursues its “national interest without regard for system-level problems that require system-level solutions.” A more apt description of the current state of affairs cannot be formulated.
The system-level problems are multiplying, but the sclerotic ancien régime in Washington is not addressing them. By mistaking its financialized economy for a vigorous one, it overestimated the potency of weaponizing the financial system it controls, thus again seeing ‘spring’ where there is only ‘autumn.’ This, as Arrighi, predicts, will only hasten the end.
By Henry Johnston, an RT editor. He worked for over a decade in finance and is a FINRA Series 7 and Series 24 license holder.
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EUROPE
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MULTIPOLARITY - RUSSIA-CHINA / BRICS
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Dmitry Trenin: Russia is undergoing a new, invisible revolution.
The US-led bloc has pushed the country to develop a new awareness of itself and its place in the world.
When President Vladimir Putin, back in February 2022, launched Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, he had specific, but limited objectives in mind. It was essentially about assuring Russia’s security vis-à-vis NATO.
However, the drastic, expansive and well-coordinated Western reaction to Moscow’s moves – the torpedoing of the Russo-Ukrainian peace deal and the mounting escalation of the US-led bloc's involvement in the conflict, including its role in deadly attacks inside Russia – have fundamentally changed our country's attitude towards our former partners.
We no longer hear talk about “grievances” and complaints about “failures in understanding.” The last two years have produced nothing less than a revolution in Moscow’s foreign policy, more radical and far-reaching than anything anticipated on the eve of the Ukraine intervention. Over the past 25 months, it has been quickly gaining in strength and profundity. Russia’s international role, its position in the world, its goals and methods of reaching them, its basic worldview – all are changing.
The national foreign policy concept, signed by Putin just a year ago, represents a major departure from its predecessors. It establishes the country's identity in terms of it being a distinct civilization. In fact, it is the first official Russian document to do so. It also radically transforms the priorities of Moscow's diplomacy, with the countries of the post-Soviet 'near abroad" on top, followed by China and India, Asia and the Middle East, and Africa and Latin America.
Western Europe and the United States rank next to last, just above the Antarctic.
Unlike in previous decade, when Russia’s “turn to the east” was first announced, these are not just words. Our trade partners, not just political interlocutors, have also switched places. In just two years, the European Union, which only recently accounted for 48% of foreign trade, is down to 20%, whereas Asia's share has soared from 26% to 71%. Russia’s use of the US dollar has also plummeted, with increasingly more transactions being conducted in Chinese yuan and other non-Western currencies: such as the Indian rupee, the UAE dirham, as well as the instruments of our partners in the Eurasian Economic Union, and the ruble itself.
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Russia has also ended its long and tiresome efforts to adapt to the US-led world order – something which it enthusiastically embraced in the early 1990s, grew disillusioned about in the following decade, and unsuccessfully tried to establish a modus vivendi with in the 2010s. Instead of surrendering to a post-Cold War set-up, in which it was left with no say, Russia has begun pushing back more and more against the hegemonic US-centered system. For the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution, albeit in a very different way from then, the country has de facto become a revolutionary power. While China still seeks to improve its position in the existing world order, Russia sees that state-of-affairs as being beyond repair, and is instead seeking to prepare for a new alternative arrangement.
For the time being, instead of the “one world” concept, which the Soviet Union even accepted in 1986, under Gorbachev, Moscow's contemporary foreign policy has now split into two. For Russian policymakers, the post-2022 West has turned into a “house of adversaries,” while partners for Russia can only be found in the countries of the non-West, for whom we have coined a new description, “the World Majority.” The criterion for being included the group is simple: non-participation in the anti-Russia sanctions regime imposed by Washington and Brussels. This majority of over 100 nations is not considered a pool of allies: the depth and warmth of their relations with the Russia vary greatly, but these are the countries that Moscow can do business with.
For many decades, our country has been exceedingly supportive of various international organizations; it sought to join as many clubs as possible. Now Moscow has to admit that even the United Nations, including its Security Council (which Russia, a veto-wielding permanent member, has traditionally hailed as the centerpiece of the world system), has turned into a dysfunctional theater of polemics. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which Moscow long wanted to see as the premier security instrument in Europe, is now nearly totally dismissed due to the anti-Russian stance of its NATO/EU majority membership. Moscow has quit the Council of Europe, and its participation in a number of regional groupings for the Arctic, the Baltic, the Barents and the Black Seas has been put on hold.
True, much of this has been the result of the West’s policy of trying to isolate our country, but rather than feeling deprived of something valuable, Russians have few regrets over having had to leave or to suspend membership. Very tellingly, having re-established the supremacy of national legislation over international treaties, Moscow now cares little about what its adversaries can say or do about its policies or actions. From Russia's standpoint, not only can't the West be trusted any longer; the international bodies that it controls have lost all legitimacy.
This attitude toward Western-dominated international institutions contrasts with the view of non-Western ones. This year, Russia’s presidency of the recently enlarged BRICS group is being marked by hyperactivity in preparations for hosting. Russia is also most supportive of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which its close ally Belarus is about to join. Together with countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, it's working closely to build new international regimes in a number of areas: finance and trade, standards and technology, information and health care. These are expressly being designed to be free from Western domination and interference. If successful, they can serve as elements of the future inclusive world order which Moscow promotes.
So, the changes in Russia’s foreign policy run very deep indeed. There is a question, however: how sustainable are they?
Above all, it should be noted that changes in foreign policy are an important, but also a relatively minor element of the wider transformation which is going on in Russia’s economy, polity, society, culture, values, and spiritual and intellectual life. The general direction and importance of those changes is clear. They are transforming the country from being a distant outlier on the fringes of the Western world into something which is self-sufficient and pioneering. These tectonic shifts would not have been possible without the Ukraine crisis. Having been given a powerful and painful push, now they have acquired a dynamic of their own.
Read more: Zelensky’s new delusion: Why has the Ukrainian leader decided to claim multiple regions of Russia?
It's true that February 2022 itself was the end result of several trends that had been gathering momentum for about a decade. Feelings that fuller sovereignty was desired finally became dominant after Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012 and the re-unification with Crimea in 2014. Some truly fundamental changes with regard to national values and ideology were made in the form of amendments to the Russian Constitution, approved in 2020.
In March 2024 Putin won a resounding victory in the presidential elections and secured a fresh six-year mandate. This should be seen as a vote of confidence in him as the supreme commander-in-chief in the existential struggle (as Putin himself describes it) against the West. With that backing, the president can proceed with even deeper changes – and must make sure that those he has already wrought are preserved and built upon by those who succeed him in the Kremlin.
It is important to note that the Russian elites, which since the 1990s have been closely tied to the West, have had to make a hard choice recently between their country and their assets. Those who decided to stay have had to become more “national” in their outlook and action. Meanwhile, Putin has launched a campaign to form a new elite around the Ukraine war veterans. The expected turnover of Russian elites, and the transformation from a cosmopolitan group of self-serving individuals into a more traditional coterie of privileged servants of the state and its leader would make sure that the foreign policy revolution is complete.
Finally, Russia may not have been able to start moving so quickly in the direction of sovereignty had it not been for the Western policies of the past two decades: the increasing demonization of the country and its leadership. These choices have succeeded in making perhaps the initially most Westernizing, pro-European leadership that modern Russia has seen – including notably Putin himself and Dmitry Medvedev – into self-avowed anti-Westerners and determined opponents of US/EU policies.
Thus, rather than forcing Russia change to fit a Western pattern, all that pressure has instead helped the country find itself again.
Dmitry Trenin: Russia is undergoing a new, invisible revolution.
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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.
ON UKRAINE, CAN WE GET ANY SENSE OUT OF THE WEST?
What are the chances? Slim at best.
The forebrain of the West has frozen solid imbued with just one notion: Destroy Russia At All Costs. And what cost might that ultimately be? The complete undermining of our planet’s ability to survive in this modern world we have painstakingly created. No, not the end of humanity. Not the end of all life. Humans and our fellow animals are more resilient than that. But this modern world continuing in the face of a nuclear war? Forget it. Oh there may be luxury pockets for a while, strictly secure gated and guarded areas of affluence that you and me would be kept away from at pain of death. But life going on as normal outside of these elitist locations? Forget it.
That frozen mass that is supposed to be the communal forebrain of the western powers is not going to warm up and get rational anytime soon. In fact it is in the equivalent of a solidly locked-in ice age of the mind. These people don’t have thoughts on Russia any more, they have hatreds, they have spitting rages, seething hissy fits and venomous tirades. Seeking to find some compromise solution in regard to Russia is downright anathema, the idea of providing Russia with the security it desires from having NATO missiles squatting on its doorstep will never cross that frozen plateau of fixed stances and rabid prejudice that substitutes for intellect in the western elite mind.
Where is the common sense that used to, at least in part, inform western politicians of the past? Was there a virus that took it out that we failed to notice? Did the avid embrace of public relations by western politicians insidiously rot their brains? When was the sensible and pragmatic desire to engage in diplomacy regarding Russia discarded? Is there no one left among the major players of the West who has a clear grasp of the direction in which this is all heading and has the temerity to stand up amongst the frozen smile crowd of politicians and yell “Stop!”? If there is, he or she is resolutely failing to show their face. More minor figures who do call out for negotiations toward a renewed peace do exist of course. Robert Fico of Slovakia and Viktor Orban of Hungary. But that is a pretty poor showing among the rabidly eager for more war that constitutes the vast majority.
Fico and Orban stand holding olive branches among a large mob of U.S., UK and European politicians brandishing torches. These latter want to burn Russia down via tooling Ukraine up to the max but they seem completely oblivious to the fact that this enterprise stands every chance of burning down the entire global enterprise. They salivate when they think of all Russia’s resources, they grow gimlet-eyed at the thought of sending Russians to their graves, their plans of carving Russia up into pieces give the males a boner and the females an orgasm. These are the true Orcs of our modern world. Designer-suited savages and psychopaths. Well-heeled Huns of the modern day. With typically fake political smiles that hide their obsessive ambitions they spread the reek of both their bullshit and their hatred far and wide.
These denizens of an oncoming disaster are shielded from public gaze by the complicit array of mainstream news broadcasters and publishers. They are made to appear normal when they are in fact anything but normal. Their abnormality is extreme. The last few decades have been dedicated to making monsters appear moderate, their grooming has been immaculate and the words that issue from their mouths have been thoroughly rehearsed through the medium of focus groups and the careful attention of speechwriters. They have been programmed very well to deceive. The vacuum chamber of mass media brainwashing and conditioning of souls still holds the vast majority firmly within it through ownership of the vastly monied mediums used. The powerful force that is the people at large is firmly and securely caged by its own choice and therefore consent.
Unless the self-caged majority of everyday men and women realise their predicament and the potentiality of the oncoming disaster the monsters that supervise their caging are unlikely to be swayed. Their frozen brains, locked into hatred of Russia, will not thaw otherwise. Their gaze will remain locked, their fingers constantly hovering over the ultimate trigger, blind to all else but their manic hatred that surges through the core of their being. Those who don’t wish their elite-elected suicide to take place must quickly make their feelings known. “No War With Russia! Not In My Name!” must be heard on the streets and in the PR photo shoots of the warmongering politicians, outside their homes and inside their places of work. They must be made to relent and stand down, to wake up to their insane and totally wrong-headed states of mind on Russia. Only then can we get any sense out of them, and out of the West.
