Antinuclear

Sovereignty mocked in the ‘proxy war’ in Ukraine

By William Briggs | 11 September 2023 https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/sovereignty-mocked-in-the-proxy-war-in-ukraine,17887

The cliché that truth is the first casualty of war may be a tired one but it is still true.

But in the war in Ukraine, if truth loses out, then hypocrisy is surely the biggest winner. The war shows this to be the case. Sides get taken in war. The protagonist states win allies to their banner. Third-party countries quickly “prove” to their people that right rests with one side or another. The media quickly step in to do their bit and heaven help any dissenting voice. Such has been the trajectory of the protracted war in Ukraine.

Our own government, in close alignment with the USA, NATO and the majority of the West, quickly made the determination that it was a relatively black-and-white affair. There is a “goody” and a “baddy” and that is as much as the people need to know. The media speak with one voice. There is more than a hint of Animal Farm in this. ‘Four legs good, too legs bad.’ Russia, we must believe, invaded Ukraine to grab territory, to grow an empire, and to return to a faded imperial past.

The courageous Ukrainian people, we must believe, are yearning for freedom, for justice and so they fight back to preserve democracy. It is a nice story, but as more and more authoritative but “dissident” voices have shown, there is a whole lot more to it than cheap slogans.

Three names among these “dissidents” stand out in the current propagandised media world. Seymour Hersch, Jeffrey Sachs and John Pilger. It is a terrible indictment on how distorted reality has become that these most eminent writers and multiple award-winning truth-tellers have been shunted to the sidelines, made virtual pariahs, and ridiculed in some rather important circles.

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ Orwell was warning against the rise of authoritarianism and of the manipulation of thought. Both seem to have arrived.

Those giant figures have repeatedly stated a simple fact and a fact made more obvious with every passing blood-stained week of this unnecessary war. The fact, which cannot be denied is that the war is a proxy war between the USA, NATO and its allies including Australia on one side, and Russia on the other.

The forces that are waging this war may not have committed battle troops to Ukraine, but they train their forces, both in Ukraine and abroad, have special forces units inside Ukraine, and have spent well over $100 billion on providing materiel to ensure that the war, is, if not won, then will result in the economic and social destruction of Russia. Ukraine, in such a scenario, is simply collateral damage.

The hypocrisy, the propagandising, the manner that collective thought is created and dissent is silenced is complete. This Orwellian view of the world would be questioned by Orwell as being too improbable. No country, regardless of its own worldview is permitted to interact with the “enemy”. There has been much said about whether the government of the Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK) will or will not enter into an arms deal with Russia.

The DPRK has been effectively the subject of sanctions since 1950. It believes that its existence is only guaranteed by perpetually building a deterrence to attack. It sees almost endless war games and drills close to its borders. It believes its sovereignty; its very existence is threatened. It sees no problem with dealing with an enemy of the United States.

White House security adviser Jake Sullivan in a press briefing promised that if Pyongyang provides weapons to Moscow, it is ‘not going to reflect well on North Korea and they will pay a price for this in the international community’.

The two recalcitrant states in this case are both sovereign nations, are both represented at the United Nations and if such a deal eventuates will be doing no more than what 49 nations are doing in pouring weapons, munitions and expertise into Ukraine to assist in the proxy war.

If the media were not quite so blinkered and committed to their role as propagandists for the war, then such a hypocritical position would be clear. Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong recently stated that “Russia cannot be allowed to infringe upon another country’s sovereignty”. She is quite right. But in the spirit of hypocrisy and hyperbole, the U.S. pledge to impose all manner of penalties on the DPRK for exercising its own sovereign rights is to admit that the world has run mad.

Australian drones have been used in attacks on Russia. Apparently, this is not an “infringement” of sovereignty.

The war is a fact of life. It is a lamentable fact of life. It would be preferable for the war not to have begun. Reason, logic and humanity would demand that the war end. Every call to sense and humanity has been rejected. The most obvious and possible call came from China and its 12-point peace plan. The USA and its allies would not consider it.

Russia, rightly or not, believes that it is facing an existential crisis. The giants of investigative journalism, who have been all but cancelled, silenced from mainstream media and deemed to be irrelevant agree with the basis of Russia’s claims and are wary of the way this proxy war is being prosecuted. The Ukrainian people have been “sold a pup”. They are being used and manipulated by the West, NATO, and primarily by the USA.

Truth died on day one of this awful war. In its place, hypocrisy has unfurled its banner over the battlefield.

September 12, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

A new French fairy tale: “Cheap” nuclear electricity in France is not what it appears.

The French public are paying for their nuclear addiction — and will pay even more when the plants need decommissioning. 

By Axel Mayer, 11 Sept 23,  https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2023/09/11/a-new-french-fairy-tale/—

“Bread and games”(Panem et circenses) were the enforcement strategies in the Roman Empire to maintain power. “Cheap petrol, cheap electricity and football” are popular campaign strategies under a democracy, says Axel Mayer, Vice-President of the Trinational Nuclear Protection Association (TRAS).

In France, the nuclear industry is in decline and the nuclear company EDF is heavily in debt. At the same time, President Macron is once again promising cheap nuclear power and wants to have new small nuclear power plants built. A small part of the French nuclear industry’s financial problems is to be solved with EU money.

In this context, the fairy tale of cheap French nuclear power is happily spread in France and also in Germany and the use of nuclear energy is praised as the miracle weapon in the losing war against nature and the environment. However, the price of electricity in France is only apparently cheap.

According to a report of the supreme audit court in France, the research and development, as well as the construction of the French nuclear power plants, cost a total of 188 billion euros. Since in France the “civilian” and the military use of nuclear power cannot be separated, the sum is probably much higher. Retrofitting France’s outdated reactors will cost over 55 billion euros. Liberation magazine reports retrofitting costs of nearly 100 billion euros by 2030.

People of France are paying for expensive nuclear power with their taxes

According to a report by the French Ministry of Economy, the semi-state-owned EDF had debts of about 41 billion euros at the end of 2019, an amount that is expected to be nearly 57 billion euros by 2028. To avoid domestic political problems, EDF is not allowed to raise the price of electricity for political reasons. EDF liabilities are driving up France’s national debt massively. The people of France (and especially their grandchildren) are paying for the seemingly cheap, but in reality expensive nuclear power with their taxes.

This cost does not include the dismantling of the nuclear power plants or any costs of a severe accident. A serious nuclear accident would have devastating consequences in France. A government study estimates the cost at 430 billion euros.

Demolition costs of over 100 billion euros

In France, EDF operates 56 outdated reactors that are now becoming old and decrepit almost simultaneously, but the company has built up almost no reserves for decommissioning. In Germany, the government is very optimistic about a 47 billion euros cost for decommissioning and final storage. The decommissioning of the large number of French nuclear power plants could cost well over 100 billion euros as costs rise, if no savings are made on safety. There is a distinct possibility that the nuclear industry could bankrupt the French state even without a nuclear accident that could happen at any time.

A “European Pressurized Water Reactor” (EPR) has been under construction on France’s Atlantic coast in Flamanville since 2007. The flagship project was originally scheduled for completion in 2012 at a fixed price of 3.2 billion euros. Since then, the start of operation has been postponed again and again, and the Court of Auditors now puts the cost at over 19 billion euros. Whether the EPR can go online in 2024 is questionable. The model reactor will never work economically.

In countries with a functioning market, no new nuclear power plants are building

Swiss nuclear lobbyist and Axpo CEO Christoph Brand puts the kibosh on dreams of cheap nuclear power from new, small nuclear plants. “The production costs for the electricity supplied by new nuclear power plants are currently about twice as high as those of larger wind and solar plants,” Brand said. “No matter how one assesses the risks of nuclear power, it is simply not economical to rely on new nuclear plants,” he said in the pro-nuclear NZZ on Oct. 21, 2021.

In countries with a functioning market, no new nuclear power plants are being built. When in doubt, it always helps to look at EDF’s share price, which has fallen massively over the long term, to assess the market chances of the nuclear renaissance announced by President Macron.

“Bread and games” with artificially low nuclear electricity prices can work in election campaigns. Low-cost, risk-free electricity is generated today with photovoltaics and wind energy. (AM/hcn)

September 12, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Ukraine’s defeat could mean the end of NATO in its current form

The ‘shift focus to another enemy’ narrative is the simplest and most obvious – that will be China. NATO is already trying to expand its influence in Asia, including via a planned ‘liaison office’ in Japan. The ‘China is the real threat’ narrative is bubbling steadily to the surface in Western media.

The bloc has too much riding on Kiev’s highly-unlikely success, and that’s why it’s doing all it can to prolong the conflict

By Chay Bowes, journalist and geopolitical analyst, MA in Strategic Studies, RT correspondent

As the West’s proxy war in Ukraine slips inexorably towards utter failure, the neocons behind the debacle are faced with dwindling avenues of retreat.

Early confidence that Russia, in its current form, would collapse under the pressure of the harshest sanctions regime in history failed to materialize. Early Russian miscalculations on the battlefield were not followed by a military meltdown, but by a pragmatic display of strategic adaptability, which is begrudgingly admired in the military war rooms of the West. The Russian army, far from falling apart, has steeled itself into making bold decisions to retreat when prudent and advance when required, both of which have proven devastating for their Ukrainian opponents. It follows that, as the Western political elites that cultivated this conflict peer into another winter of political, military, and potentially economic discontent, it is now that we potentially face the most dangerous period in Europe since the outbreak of WWII.

The catalyst for a wider war in Europe isn’t, in fact, a limited conflict in Ukraine in itself, one that started in 2014 and, notably, had been largely ignored by Western powers for almost a decade. The real issue is that NATO, which is currently engaged in a proxy War with Russia, is facing a ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’ scenario regarding its growing military involvement in Ukraine. If the US-led bloc escalates further as defeat looms, it could likely lead to direct confrontation with Russia. If it doesn’t, its proxy will collapse and leave Russia victorious, a fate once utterly unthinkable in Brussels, Washington, and London, but now becoming a nightmarish reality.

Such a defeat would be devastating and potentially terminal for the prestige and reputation of the whole NATO brand. After all, despite the Soviet Union having long ceased to exist, the bloc still markets itself as an indispensable bulwark against  imagined Russian expansionism. In the event of an increasingly likely Ukrainian defeat, that ‘essential partner’ in ‘countering Russia’ will have been proven utterly impotent and largely irrelevant. More cynically, the vast US arms industry would also be denied a huge and lucrative market. So, how does a multi billion-dollar machine that has prophesied absolute victory against Russia even begin to contemplate defeat? And how do senior EU bureaucrats like Ursula Von der Leyen climb down from their quasi-religious devotion to the ‘cause’ of utterly defeating Russia, which she has shamelessly evangelized for over a year and a half? Lastly, how does the American administration, which has gone politically, morally, and economically ‘all in’ against Russia in Ukraine, contemplate what amounts to an increasingly inevitable European version of Afghanistan 2.0?

They will need to do two things: Firstly, find someone to blame for their defeat and secondly, find a new enemy to deflect public opinion onto. The ‘someone to blame’ will be quite easy to identify – the narrative will be flush with attacks on states like Hungary, China, and to some extent India, who will be accused of “undermining the unified effort needed to isolate and defeat Russia.”

Blaming Ukraine itself will also be central to this narrative. Western media will insure it’s singled out as incapable of ‘taking the medicine’ proffered by NATO and therefore suffering the consequences, not listening to Western military advice, failing to utilize Western aid correctly and, of course – given that little has been done by Zelensky to tackle the endemic corruption in Ukraine – this fact will be easily weaponized against him and used to lubricate a slick narrative of ‘we tried to help them, but they simply couldn’t be saved from themselves’.

The ‘shift focus to another enemy’ narrative is the simplest and most obvious – that will be China. NATO is already trying to expand its influence in Asia, including via a planned ‘liaison office’ in Japan. The ‘China is the real threat’ narrative is bubbling steadily to the surface in Western media.

And, most worryingly, should Western powers fail to make their case for ‘plausible deniability’ around the culpability for this war, there is always the option of further escalating it. Such an escalation could rapidly lead to direct confrontation between NATO and Russia, an outcome no lucid observer on either side of the debate could or should be contemplating. The problem is, rational assessment and negotiation seem to have become so rare in Washington and Kiev that a devastating escalation could, quite remarkably, be considered an option by the deluded neocon think-tank advisers wielding disproportionate influence over an increasingly desperate political class in Washington and Brussels. In the event that NATO does indeed sanction a direct intervention into Ukraine, it will, of course, be justified as a ‘peacekeeping’ or humanitarian intervention by Polish or Romanian troops, but the categorization of the ‘mission’ will become gloriously irrelevant when the first clashes with Russian forces occur, followed by a potentially rapid spiral into all-out war between Russia and NATO.

It could be argued that the process to disassociate from Ukraine has already started, beginning with the embarrassment Zelensky faced at the recent NATO summit and progressing with the open spats between Western ‘partners’ over whether to give Ukraine ever deadlier weapons to essentially insure its self-destruction. 

From here on out one thing is abundantly clear, nothing will happen by accident when it comes to the EU and NATO’s interaction with the Zelensky regime. Whatever comes next may need to be spun both ways, to either pull out or to escalate. A case in point is the blame game being openly acted out around the obvious failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, with open finger-pointing in the Western media by Ukrainian officials like the ambassador to Germany, Aleksey Makeev. Kiev’s top man in Germany recently blamed the West for the bloody failure of the ill-fated project, suggesting it was solely due to European and American delays in shipping weapons and cash to Kiev. According to the ambassador, it was this Western failure that apparently allowed the Russians to build their defenses in eastern Ukraine, where tens of thousands of unfortunate Ukrainian conscripts have met their fate in the past three months.

In the real world, the counteroffensive, which has now become a slow-motion calamity, had been telegraphed to the Russians and the wider world for almost a year and will surely be recalled as one of the greatest military misadventures in history. The fact that the Ukrainian regime openly advertised its intentions, even loudly pointing out the avenue of assault and strategic goals, is conveniently ignored by the likes of Makeev. It now seems apparent that Kiev believed that its overt saber-rattling would stimulate faster and larger weapons shipments from its increasingly concerned partners – it didn’t, and by the time those very same sponsors’ patience ran out with Kiev’s lack of progress on the battlefield, it was glaringly obvious any offensive against long-prepared Russian defenses was doomed to fail. Yet, because of Kiev’s PR need and demands from Western political elites, the counteroffensive began, wiping out entire battalions of Ukrainian troops and burning through a huge portion of the Western heavy weapons previously provided.

The situation evokes a kind of tragic romantic folly, with Ukraine desperate to woo NATO and the EU to the point of suicide, NATO and the EU playing the aloof lover; never having really considered marriage but willing to allow its admirer to throw itself onto the spears of the real object of their attention – Russia. Of course, the real concern now preoccupying the EU-NATO cabal is how to survive this tawdry affair and move on. While the hapless Jens Stoltenberg would have us believe NATO has never been stronger, the reality is far less rosy for the ‘defensive alliance’ that has bombed its way across Europe and the Middle East, and now seeks to expand to the Pacific. The reality is that the Ukraine conflict could destroy NATO. It has become something of a modern day League of Nations, adept at admonishing small fish, but utterly incapable of standing toe to toe with any peer adversary, a failed political institution, posing as a military alliance, that in reality would collapse in the face of a direct challenge from either Russia or China. Of course, it seems that NATO has also willfully fallen under the spell of its own propaganda.

The big question now is whether the bloc would in reality contemplate a direct confrontation with Russia in Ukraine? Or will the Western political elites who built the scaffold the Ukrainian conflict is now blazing on choose to reverse through blame or escalate through desperation?

One thing is indisputable: The fate of NATO and its credibility as a ‘defensive alliance’ is irrevocably intertwined with the outcome of the Ukrainian conflict, yet because NATO is, in reality, a political rather than military institution, these crucial issues will never be debated openly, as the answers would be akin to a priest announcing the nonexistence of God from the pulpit.

September 11, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

USA & NATO responsible for Ukraine war, German & French public say in poll

Most people in Germany and France blame the United States and/or NATO for the war in Ukraine, according to a poll conducted not by a pro-Russian group but rather by anti-Putin activists.

BEN NORTON, SEP 10, 2023, Geopolitical Economy Report

Original shows tables of poll results.

Most people in Germany and France blame the United States or NATO for the war in Ukraine, according to a poll conducted not by a pro-Russian group but rather by anti-Putin activists.

This public opinion is unlikely to have a significant impact on government policy, however.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock stated bluntly in a NATO-funded conference in 2022 that Berlin would support Ukraine “no matter what my German voters think”.

In the German poll, respondents were only allowed to pick one answer. In France, the poll was a bit different, and people could blame multiple parties for starting the war in Ukraine. (This explains why the sum of the latter poll is greater than 100%.)

Among the French surveyed, 43% blamed the USA, 36% NATO, 19% Ukraine, and 19% other European countries, while 40% blamed Putin.

These results suggest that many average Europeans can see clearly that the conflict in Ukraine is not merely a battle between Kiev and Moscow, but rather a proxy war that the NATO military alliance, led by the United States, is waging against Russia.

The outcome of these polls is even more striking when one considers who sponsored them.

The so-called “Anti-Corruption Foundation” was founded by Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, a regime-change activist who is openly supported by Western governments…………………………………………………………………………………………….more https://geopoliticaleconomy.substack.com/p/us-nato-responsible-ukraine-war-poll?r=nxsz

September 11, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

IAEA warns of nuclear safety threat as combat spikes near Ukraine nuclear power plant

The United Nations atomic watchdog warned of a potential threat to nuclear
safety from a spike in fighting near Europe’s largest nuclear power plant
in Ukraine, whose forces continued pressing their counteroffensive on
Saturday. The International Atomic Energy Agency said its experts deployed
at the Russia-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant reported hearing
numerous explosions over the past week, in a possible indication of
increased military activity in the region. There was no damage to the
plant.

PBS 9th Sept 2023

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/iaea-warns-of-nuclear-safety-threat-as-combat-spikes-near-ukraine-power-plant

September 11, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

A Slow mindless grind towards nuclear Armageddon?

Strategic Culture, Fri, 01 Sep 2023

This week saw widespread air strikes on the Russian Federation involving mass aerial drone attacks. Six regions were attacked including the capital, Moscow. Among the targets was the Kursk region where a nuclear plant is located. Several international airports across Russia were temporarily shut down. This is an incredible situation in which Russian territory is being targeted by a military assault not seen since the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany.

The U.S. media could barely contain its glee at the surge in air strikes on Russia. The New York Times hailed them as a “morale booster” for Ukraine, while CNN noted cryptically that the Kiev regime was “emboldened” to hit strategic targets inside Russia. The telling question of course not asked by CNN is: emboldened by whom?

Most of the incoming drones were shot down or disabled by Russian air defenses. But that is beside the point that Russian territory is now being targeted by mass attacks. And there can be no doubt that this “emboldened” military campaign is being enabled and directed by the United States and its NATO allies who are arming the Nazi regime in Kiev to the teeth.

The air strike, this week at Pskov airport is particularly revealing. Several Russian military cargo planes were reportedly destroyed. The location is only some 30 kilometers from Russia’s northwestern border with Estonia and over 600 km from Ukraine. It is almost certain that NATO members Estonia and possibly Latvia enabled that attack on Pskov. Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has openly accused NATO of participating in the air assaults on Russian territory. The British publication, The Economist, also reported that NATO hardware, satellite and navigational logistics were vital for the drone campaign.

Dmitry Medvedev, the Deputy Chairman of Russia’s National Security Council, this week stated that Russia now has legal justification for going to war with NATO members directly. He warned that the world is on the brink of a nuclear conflagration.

We need to step back here and see the process of the proverbial boiling-frog scenario.

[CORRECTION: It’s a myth that frogs will stay in water that slowly heats, until they die.  In reality, they will try to get out, as soon as the temperature becomes uncomfortable.]

 This describes an insidious creeping situation which would otherwise not be tolerated. A frog apparently will jump back from a pot of boiling water but if the frog is placed in the pot of water which is then slowly brought to the boil it will succumb passively to its ill fate.

The process seems apt as a metaphor for the conflict in Ukraine between the U.S.-led NATO bloc and Russia. The Kiev regime was installed in 2014 through a CIA-backed coup against a democratically elected president; it was armed and trained by NATO, despite its vile Nazi battalions, to attack ethnic Russians in Ukraine; when Russia intervened militarily in February 2022 after diplomatic offers were rejected by the U.S. and NATO, the conflict has steadily escalated over the past 18 months to the point where pre-war Russian territory is now coming under mass air strikes.

This mass assault on Russian territory by NATO forces would have been unthinkable only a few months ago. And yet here we are at that astounding point.

There seems little doubt that the air strikes on Russia are a sort of Plan B to compensate for the abject failure of the NATO-backed regime on the battlefields in Ukraine. The much-vaunted “counteroffensive” that started in June has become a debacle for the NATO sponsors. The turn towards drone strikes on Russia appears to be a change in tactic as a way of terrorizing the Russian population and destabilizing the authority of Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as distracting from NATO’s military incompetence.

Russia’s defense doctrine mandates the use of nuclear weapons if the state’s existential security is threatened. So far, the NATO-backed drone attacks on Russia have not reached that threshold. But the incremental process is dangerously heading in that dreadful direction.

If we were to turn the tables on the situation, the audacity would become even more apparent. Can anyone imagine for a second how the United States would react if a foreign adversary was enabling the launch of air strikes on Washington DC and other strategic centers, whereby airports were shut down and military infrastructure was being destroyed?………………………………………………………………. more https://strategic-culture.su/news/2023/09/01/boiling-frogs-towards-nuclear-armageddon/

September 9, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Residents file suit to halt wastewater release from Fukushima plant

About 150 residents from prefectures such as Fukushima and Miyagi went to court on Friday to halt the release of treated radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, making it the first lawsuit of its kind.

In the suit filed with the Fukushima District Court against the central government and plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc, the plaintiffs said the water discharge, which started on Aug. 24, threatens citizens’ right to live safely and hinders local fishermen’s businesses.

They are also seeking nullification of nuclear regulators’ approval of facilities installed for the water discharge and a ban to be placed on the release.

An additional lawsuit at the end of October is being planned………………………………………………………………….  https://japantoday.com/category/national/residents-file-suit-to-halt-wastewater-release-from-fukushima-plant

September 9, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Scott Ritter: A comprehensive Ukrainian defeat is the only possible outcome of its conflict with Russia

Rt.com 8 Sept 23

Kiev was offered a peace deal long ago, but chose war instead, egged on by its Western backers. Now its fate is sealed

September 2 marked the 78th anniversary of the World War Two surrender ceremony onboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. This moment formalized Japan’s unconditional capitulation to the United States, and its allies, and marked the end of the conflict. From the Japanese perspective, it had been ongoing since the Marco Polo bridge incident of July 7, 1937, which started the Sino-Japanese War.

There was no negotiation, only a simple surrender ceremony in which Japanese officials signed documents, without conditions.

Because that is what defeat looks like.

History is meant to be studied in a manner that seeks to draw out lessons from the past that might have relevance in the present. As George Santayana, the American philosopher, noted, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The Ukrainian government in Kiev would do well to reflect on both the historical precedent set by Japan’s unconditional surrender, and Santayana’s advice, when considering its current conflict with Russia

First and foremost, Ukraine must reflect honestly about the causes of this conflict, and which side bears the burden of responsibility for the fighting. ‘Denazification’ is a term that the Russian government has used in describing one of its stated goals and objectives. President Vladimir Putin has made numerous references to the odious legacy of Stepan Bandera, the notorious mass murderer and associate of Nazi Germany who is feted by modern-day Ukrainian nationalists as a hero and all but a founding father of their nation.

That present-day Ukraine would see fit to elevate a man such as Bandera to such a level speaks volumes about the rotten foundation of Kiev’s cause, and the dearth of moral fiber in the nation today. The role played by the modern-day adherents of the Nazi collaborator’s hateful nationalist ideology in promulgating the key events that led to the initiation of the military operation by Russia can neither be ignored nor minimized. It was the Banderists, with their long relationship with the CIA and other foreign intelligence services hostile to Moscow, who used violence to oust the former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, from office in February 2014.

From the act of illicit politicized violence came the mainstreaming of the forces of ethnic and cultural genocide, manifested in the form of the present-day Banderists, who initiated acts of violence and oppression in eastern Ukraine. This, in turn, triggered the Russian response in Crimea and the actions of the citizens of Donbass, who organized to resist the rampage of the Bandera-affiliated Ukrainian nationalists. The Minsk Accords, and the subsequent betrayal by Kiev and its Western partners of the potential path for peace that these represented, followed.

Ukraine cannot disassociate itself from the role played by the modern-day Banderists in shaping the present reality. In this, Kiev mirrors the militarists of Imperial Japan, whose blind allegiance to the precepts of Bushido, the traditional ‘way of the warrior’ dating back to the Samurai of 17th century Japan, helped push the country into global conflict. Part of Japan’s obligations upon surrender was to purge its society of the influence of the militarists, and to enact a constitution that deplatformed them by making wars of aggression – and the military forces needed to wage them – unconstitutional.

Banderism, in all its manifestations, must be eradicated from Ukrainian society in the same manner that Bushido-inspired militarism was removed from Japan, to include the creation of a new constitution that enshrines this purge as law. Any failure to do so only allows the cancer of Banderism to survive, festering inside the defeated body of post-conflict Ukraine until some future time when it can metastasize once again to bring harm……………………….

As the Western establishment media begins to come to grips with the scope and scale of Ukraine’s eventual military defeat (and, by extension, the reality of a decisive Russian military victory), their political overseers in the US, NATO, and the European Union struggle to define what the endgame will be. Having articulated the Russian-Ukrainian conflict as an existential struggle where the very survival of NATO is on the line, these Western politicians now have the task of shaping public perception in a manner that mitigates any meaningful, sustained political blowback from constituents who have been deceived into tolerating the transfer of billions of dollars from their respective national treasuries, and billions more dollars’ worth of weapons from their respective arsenals, into a lost and disgraced cause.

………………………………….. Russia has been undertaking the successful demilitarization of Ukraine’s armed forces since the initiation of partial mobilization. The equipment Ukraine is provided by the West is similarly being destroyed by Russia at a rate that makes replacement unsustainable. Meanwhile, Russia’s own defense industry has kicked into full gear, supplying a range of modern weapons and ammunition that is more than sufficient.

The harsh reality is that neither Ukraine nor its Western allies can sustain the operational losses in manpower and equipment that the conflict with Russia is inflicting……….. if Kiev persists in extending this conflict until it is physically unable to defend itself, it runs the risk of losing even more territory, including Odessa and Kharkov.

Russia did not enter the conflict with the intent of seizing Ukrainian territory. But in March 2022, Kiev rejected a draft peace agreement (which it had preliminarily approved at first), and this decision to eschew peace in favor of war led to Russia absorbing Donbass, Zaporozhye, and Kherson.

As one of its conditions to even begin negotiating for peace with Moscow, Kiev demanded the return of all former Ukrainian territories currently under Russian control – including Crimea. To achieve such an outcome, however, Ukraine would have to be able to compel compliance by defeating Russia militarily and/or politically. As things stand, this is an impossibility.

What Ukraine and its Western partners do not yet seem to have come to grips with is the fact that Russia’s leadership is in no mood for negotiations for negotiations’ sake. Putin has listed its goals and objectives when it comes to the conflict – denazification, demilitarization, and no NATO membership for Ukraine. 

……….The longer Kiev – and its Western partners – drag out this conflict, the greater the harm that will accrue for Ukraine……….. https://www.rt.com/russia/582259-ukraine-unconditional-surrender-nato/

September 9, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment