TODAY. My biased coverage of Ukraine war and Donbass referendums.
Why do I repeatedly give the pro Russian view of these events?
Well, it’s simply because the avalanche of Ukraine news and views in the prevailing English-language media is stridently anti-Russian, and heroically pro-Ukraine..
Think about it. We, the anglophone nations, plus Europe, are NOT at war with Russia. There might be some excuse for this appallingly bad coverage if we were formally at war.
Universally, it would seem, we swallow the story that the Donbass referendums are a sham. And where do we get our news from – it’s always Kiev – the heart of pro Ukraine propaganda, and hundreds of kilometres away from the Donbass region.
And what is our news avalanche like in style and content? Well on Australian TV media they showed the effect of the gas leak (attributed of course to Russian sabotage), as a close-up of a baby crying.! All we get is emotional coverage of unhappy people. Now this is true, and Ukrainian people are suffering. But it’s not a factual picture, and not the whole picture, of how the war is going.
And as for the history, the background to this war, and why it came about – forget it! All we get is unrelenting USA and NATO propaganda.
And for the future – like silver-tongued Anthony Blinken, and his Australia’s mimic Richard Marles – all we get is the mantra we must keep the “Global-Rules-Based-Order” !
Somebody has to raise questions about a view that differs from this avalanche. So that is why I, and a few others, do it
Sanctions against Russian exports – but that doesn’t apply to NUCLEAR EXPORTS, (while they bring in funding for Russia’s war!)
ED note. When will they all wake up? The nuclear industry is essential for the nuclear weapons so beloved by the governments that have them.
Keeping the nuclear industry going is essential for the wealth, power and influence of the global nuclear lobby, and the future of all their crackpot super-costly ‘advanced’ nuclear gimmicks.
Apparently we can all accept cutting back gas, oil, food ……. but must not let anyone curtail that sacred cow – the nuclear industry
Russia’s nuclear trade with Europe flows despite Ukraine war, By SYLVIE CORBET, September 30, 2022,
PARIS (AP) — While the European Union has agreed to curtail its use of Russian oil and gas, its member nations continue to import and export nuclear fuel that is not under EU sanctions — to the chagrin of the Ukrainian government and environmental activists.
A cargo ship carrying uranium that departed from the French port of Dunkirk traveled across the North Sea on Thursday, heading toward the Russian Baltic port of Ust-Luga. It was the third time in just over a month that the Panama-flagged Mikhail Dudin ship docked in Dunkirk to transport uranium from or to Russia.
Environmental group Greenpeace France denounced the ongoing shipments and called for stopping all trade in nuclear fuel, which it said was “financing the war in Ukraine, extending (Europe’s) energy dependence and delaying the transition to renewable energy.”
The EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, did not propose targeting Russia’s nuclear sector in its latest sanctions package presented Wednesday.
“France ensures strict compliance by economic players with all the European sanctions adopted against Russia. Civil nuclear power is not affected by these sanctions,” the French Foreign Affairs Ministry told the Associated Press.
The ministry that EU nations “did not consider this to be a relevant area for ending Russian aggression against Ukraine.”
Ukraine, meanwhile, is pushing for European sanctions in that area. The Ukrainian president’s economic adviser, Oleg Ustenko, said Wednesday that “in terms of uranium, we think it’s extremely important to impose sanctions, not only on Russian oil.”
“Oil, gas, uranium and coal, all this should be banned. Because they are using this money in order to finance this war,” Ustenko said.
According to Greenpeace France, reprocessed uranium meant to be transported to Russia were loaded onto the Mikhail Dudin on Wednesday. Pauline Boyer, an energy campaigner at Greenpeace France, said the ship’s repeated trips between Russia and France show “the extent to which the French nuclear industry is trapped in its dependence on Russia.”
French authorities have repeatedly said the country does not depend on Russia to supply the nuclear power plants that provide 67% of its electricity — more than any other nation………………………………………..
The Lingen plant is operated by Framatome, which is majority-owned by French utility giant EDF. It is supplying nuclear fuel to plants in France, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Britain, Spain, Sweden and Finland.
Faced with activists’ protests, the German government took a critical view toward the uranium shipment but said it couldn’t stop the fuel from being processed because it isn’t covered by the EU’s war-related sanctions on Russia.
At the end of last month, enriched uranium unloaded from the Mikhail Dudin in Dunkirk was destined for the Rhone valley in southern France, which is home to major sites of the French civil nuclear industry, according to Greenpeace France.
The French nuclear sector has a series of contracts with Russian state-controlled energy giant Rosatom, including some to import enriched uranium destined for European nuclear power plants and to export reprocessed uranium to Russia. Rosatom is one of the world’s biggest actors in the nuclear energy market.
Multinational company Orano, headquartered in France, has a contract with Rosatom to buy reprocessed uranium to convert it into nuclear fuel at its Seversk plant, in Siberia, and ultimately use it in reactors to produce energy.
The U.S. power industry also imports uranium from Russia to feed its nuclear plants.
AP recently tracked millions of dollars worth of shipments of radioactive uranium hexafluoride from Russian state-owned Tenex JSC, the world’s largest exporter of initial nuclear fuel cycle products, to Westinghouse Electric Co. in South Carolina. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-france-global-trade-only-on-ap-business-c521f2248c823f69f0a677735a78e89d
Uncle Sam’s Long Trail of Wreckage
the Biden administration opted to use Ukraine in a Western proxy war against Russia.
Washington and London appear to have sabotaged a possible peace accord between Moscow and Kiev.
The Biden administration is risking nuclear war with Russia to assist a corrupt, authoritarian regime in a country of little importance to the United States.
Until the early 1990s, Ukraine wasn’t even an independent country, much less a U.S. vital interest.
Very few policymakers even concede that Washington’s overseas military adventures often have not turned out as planned.
The American Conservative, Ted Galen Carpenter, Sep 28, 2022, The leaders and most of the news media in the U.S. seem to believe that Washington’s foreign policy over the past several decades has been a success and benefitted both the United States and the world. That assumption wasn’t really true even during the Cold War, although that confrontation eventually resulted in the peaceful demise of America’s nasty totalitarian adversary. There was plenty of collateral damage along the way, with the suffering caused by Washington’s conduct in Vietnam and Afghanistan being the most glaring examples.
The performance of U.S. leaders after the Cold War has been even worse. An array of disruptive, bloody tragedies—most notably those in the Balkans, Afghanistan (again), Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen—mark Uncle Sam’s global trail of wreckage. The Biden administration’s decision to use Ukraine as a pawn in Washington’s power struggle with Russia is fast becoming the latest example.
Very few policymakers even concede that Washington’s overseas military adventures often have not turned out as planned. The news media, which is supposed to serve as the public’s watchdog, have routinely ignored or excused America’s foreign-policy disasters. Instead, when one intervention fails, they simply move on to lobby for the next crusade pushed by U.S. leaders. Consider how few news accounts now deal with the ongoing violence and chaos in places such as Libya, Syria, and Yemen, even though Washington was a major contributor to all of those tragedies.
Paul Poast, a scholar with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, aptly describes the conflict in Syria as America’s “forgotten war.” “That the war in Syria has become the “forgotten war,” he observes, “points to a more disturbing trend in U.S. foreign policy: The United States is so engaged in wars and interventions around the world that a conflict involving the U.S. military that has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians does not even register with the American public anymore.”………………………………………
The turmoil in Iraq is less severe, but is still damaging the country. Political disputes and mass demonstrations against the current government regularly surface in Iraq. Pro-Iranian militias continue to play a prominent role in the country’s government, and the three-way split among Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs, and Kurds is becoming ever more contentious. Political violence among rival factions shows no signs of subsiding, nor does public resentment against the presence of U.S. troops. Washington so lacks trust in its “ally” that officials once threatened to seize the country’s bank reserves if Iraqi leaders continued to press for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
The level of human tragedy in Libya and Yemen is horrifying. Washington and its NATO allies bear almost exclusive responsibility for the situation in Libya………………………
The latest application of Washington’s meddlesome policy is in Ukraine. U.S. leaders ignored repeated Russian warnings that making Ukraine a NATO member or even an unofficial NATO military asset would cross a line that threatened Russia’s security. When Moscow finally responded to the provocations with an invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Biden administration opted to use Ukraine in a Western proxy war against Russia.
The conflict has already done enormous damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure and taken thousands of lives. Worse, Washington and London appear to have sabotaged a possible peace accord between Moscow and Kiev.
The U.S. foreign-policy record over the past three decades could hardly be worse. It is crucial not to let policymakers and their media mouthpieces get away with convenient collective amnesia and imitations of Pontius Pilate. Instead, they need to be held fully accountable for their blunders and deception.
Future U.S. policymakers also need to avoid repeating the faulty performance of their predecessors. To do so, they must make three significant changes to U.S. foreign policy.
First, Washington should utterly renounce nation-building. Trying to remake alien societies by force and impose Western political, economic, and social values is the essence of folly.
Even when the United States has not yet been drawn into a new war to enforce crumbling nation-building goals, as in Bosnia and Kosovo, such armed social experiments are an exercise in futility and frustration. Worse, nation-building missions frequently worsen conditions in the targeted country, and the predictable failure of U.S. objectives even can lead to Washington’s outright humiliation. The debacle in Afghanistan is a stark reminder of that danger.
Second, the United States must avoid the temptation to engage in regime-change wars. Such offensives often are a prelude to disastrous nation-building ventures. That was the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Those wars not only made matters worse for the populations in the three countries, but worsened the security situation for neighboring states and even the United States. In both Iraq and Libya, U.S. actions toppled secular dictators, paving the way for chaos that strengthened the position of Islamic jihadists. Granted, the secular dictators were brutal and sometimes caused problems for the United States, but Washington’s “solution” clearly made matters worse, not better.
Third, U.S. leaders must do a much better job of distinguishing vital national interests from secondary or peripheral ones. Washington’s current policy of using Ukraine as a proxy for a war against Russia is a troubling example of the failure to make such basic distinctions. The Biden administration is risking nuclear war with Russia to assist a corrupt, authoritarian regime in a country of little importance to the United States.
Until the early 1990s, Ukraine wasn’t even an independent country, much less a U.S. vital interest. To accept the risks the Biden administration is incurring is irresponsible and violates the U.S. government’s responsibility to the American people.
Unless these policy changes are made, it is just a matter of time until a new set of officials repeat the disastrous blunders of their predecessors. If they do, the consequences to America and the world will be equally damaging. Indeed, the Ukraine adventure reveals that the consequences could be even worse than the wreckage already wrought by Uncle Sam. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/uncle-sams-long-trail-of-wreckage/
Eva Bartlett describes Ukraine’s unspeakable genocide of Donbass FULL INTERVIEW (Graphic Content Warning)”
Interview I did on Redacted on September 22.
**Warning: This video contains graphic images of civilians killed by Ukrainian shelling of completely civilian areas of Donetsk.**
Quinbrook bags huge profit on sale of US wind, solar and battery company — RenewEconomy
Australia’s Quinbrook has locked in big profits from the sale of a US wind, solar and storage company it bought as a start-up five years ago. The post Quinbrook bags huge profit on sale of US wind, solar and battery company appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Quinbrook bags huge profit on sale of US wind, solar and battery company — RenewEconomy
September 30 Energy News — geoharvey
Opinion: ¶ “The hurricane problem Florida could have avoided” • After Hurricane Andrew, thirty years ago, Florida got new building codes. They may have somewhat protected against damage and enhanced survivability, but other disaster factors, such as rapid population growth and climate change, have tipped the disaster scale in the wrong direction. [CNN] Housing in […]
September 30 Energy News — geoharvey
India makes sure that China withdraws proposal against AUKUS nuclear submarines plan at IAEA
https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/china-withdraws-proposal-against-aukus-nuclear-submarines-plan-at-iaea-122100100002_1.html 30 Sept 22, China withdraws proposal against AUKUS nuclear submarines plan at IAEA, China withdrew a draft resolution at the IAEA against the AUKUS grouping seeking to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines following India’s objective view on the issue, sources said.
China on Friday withdrew a draft resolution at the IAEA against the AUKUS grouping seeking to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines following India’s objective [?] view on the issue, sources said.
China tried to get the resolution passed at the general conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which took place in Vienna from September 26 to 30.
The AUKUS (Australia, the UK and the US) security partnership announced in September last it would facilitate Australia getting technology to build nuclear-powered submarines.
The sources said India’s “deft and impactful” diplomacy was deeply appreciated by IAEA member states, particularly the AUKUS partners.
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 