Antinuclear

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

If Everyone Understood That The US Deliberately Provoked This War

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, SEP 7, 2023  https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/if-everyone-understood-that-the-us?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=136816741&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email

War is the single worst thing humans do. The most insane. The most cruel. The most destructive. The most traumatic. The least sustainable. Those who knowingly choose to steer humanity into more war when it could be avoided are the worst people in the world, without exception.

And there are mountains of extensively documented evidence that that’s exactly what the drivers of the US-centralized empire did in Ukraine. That’s why so many western analysts and experts spent years warning that the actions of western powers were going to lead Ukraine into disaster, and it’s why US empire managers keep openly boasting about how much their proxy warfare in Ukraine advances US interests. They knowingly steered Ukraine into war to advance their own geostrategic interests while being fully aware that no powerful nation would ever permit the kinds of foreign threats the west was amassing on its borders, and then they intervened in the early days of the war to prevent the outbreak of peace.

If there was widespread awareness of these facts, the US war machine would lose support around the world — not just for its actions in this one war, but for all future wars as well. Which is why so much energy goes into making sure this does not become a widespread understanding.

The official mainstream narrative throughout the western world is that Putin invaded Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom. That’s the actual, literal belief about this war that the western political/media class works to instill in the western public. Anyone who counters this self-evidently ridiculous assessment with facts and evidence gets branded a Russian agent and swarmed with pro-US trolls on social media, and loses all hope of securing a major platform in any mass media.

And it’s important to notice that shutting down all mature adult analysis of the events which led to the war in this way does not actually save a single Ukrainian life. It doesn’t make Russia any more likely to stop fighting and withdraw its troops. All it does is prevent people from seeing the US empire for what it really is. It isn’t being done to protect Ukrainians, it’s done to protect the empire.

The worst thing that could possibly happen to the information interests of the US empire would be for a critical mass of people to become aware that all this death and destruction in Ukraine could have been avoided by the US-centralized empire behaving less aggressively on Russia’s doorstep, and that those aggressions were instead increased with the goal of advancing US strategic interests on the world stage. If everyone really, deeply understood that all this suffering, all these mountains of human corpses could simply not have happened if the US hadn’t been feverishly focused on securing planetary domination at all cost, the US would no longer be able to manufacture consent for its agendas. It would no longer be able to whip up international support for its actions against its enemies. It would no longer be able to persuade the world to help prop up the hegemony of the dollar.

But because the US empire has the most advanced soft power apparatus that has ever existed, hardly anyone understands this. Not even the people who understand that the west provoked this war have deeply grappled with exactly what that means on a visceral emotional level, for the most part. It’s more of a superficial intellectual understanding for most, without really grokking into the horror of it all, really letting the enraging nature of what the US empire did wash over them.

The west was deceived into supporting yet another evil American war, this time with the added dimension of nuclear brinkmanship threatening the life of every terrestrial organism. All to suck Moscow into another draining military quagmire so war plans can be safely drawn up against China while advancing US energy interests in Europe and building support for US military alliances. It’s almost too evil to take in. There aren’t really words for it. 

And that’s one of the reasons it’s hard to get people to take in exactly what happened with Ukraine: people have a hard time wrapping their minds around the idea that anyone could be that evil, much less the government we’ve been trained by Hollywood to think of as sane and humanitarian. 

It’s about as monstrous a thing as you could possibly come up with. Yet here it is, still unfolding in all its blood-spattered glory.

Our task then is to help people see this and understand it, not just intellectually but emotionally. Help people really grasp deep down the horrors the US empire unleashed upon our world with the war in Ukraine; the suffering; the death; the existential danger. We can’t fight the empire on our own, but we can each do what we can to help weaken the consent manufacturing machine it uses to rule and terrorize the world.

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

Ukrainian POWs Say Families of Dead Denied Compensation

Nine captive AFU testify: Dead soldiers buried in trenches, wounded not evacuated

DEBORAH L. ARMSTRONG, SEP 8, 2023 https://deborahlarmstrong.substack.com/p/ukrainian-pows-say-families-of-dead?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1192684&post_id=136847336&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&utm_medium=email

Official numbers of Ukrainian casualties have been grossly underreported since Russia first began its Special Military Operation in February, 2022. According to some military analysts, the number of Ukrainian dead is in the hundreds of thousands, and former USMC Intelligence Officer Scott Ritter has put it as high as half a million.

To anyone really paying attention, it’s obvious that Ukraine cannot continue fighting much longer. Most of the healthy young fighting men have already been killed, and male conscripts who couldn’t come up with the thousands of dollars needed to flee their country, have already been forced into the war by the busloads.

But that is not enough for the regime in Kyiv and its power-hungry Western overlords. They are so desperate to keep “weakening Russia” — despite Ukraine’s looming defeat — that they will start calling up women beginning October 1st.

Meanwhile, captured Ukrainian servicemen tell horror stories of dead comrades left behind to rot, or buried in the very trenches they fought in, while commanders force them to sign papers agreeing to the “voluntary abandonment of bodies” in the event of death — a way to avoid paying compensation to the families of the fallen.

Nine Ukrainian POWs gave their testimonies in a video released this week on Telegram. I have translated the video and uploaded it to my channel on YouTube. You may watch it here, but I must warn you that there are extremely graphic images from the war.

In the video, the captive soldiers refer to their dead comrades as “200s” and the wounded are called “300s.” It’s military jargon that is used in Ukraine and Russia, and is believed to have been derived from the numbers on forms that had to be filled out for dead and wounded soldiers in times past. To make the translation easier to understand, I just referred to them as “dead” and “wounded” and left out the numerical designations.

The first POW has a slightly graying beard and looks to be in his 40’s. “All around us there were dead soldiers,” he says, “It was just horrible.”

The video shows the skeleton of a soldier still wearing a helmet.

“Very heavy casualties,” the second soldier says. He is also bearded but looks younger, perhaps in his 30’s. “It was really scary,” he adds.

More carnage is shown as prisoner number 3 is heard. “A lot of bodies were lying around and it was impossible to get them out of there,” he says. His head is shaved, he has a mustache, and looks somewhat emaciated, possibly in his 30’s. “The commanders made us bury the bodies of the dead right in our positions.”

POW number 4 has a gray head of hair and matching beard and looks to be in his 50’s or older. “They wrote reports and buried them right at the position,” he says, “so that they wouldn’t have to pay money to the family and relatives.”

More bodies which look like they have been left to rot for some time. “The dead were lying in the trenches,” says the fifth prisoner, who has bushy brown hair and a beard, and may be in his 20’s or 30’s. “Nobody even took them away or thought of taking them away. The wounded were also in the trenches, they wanted to go to the entrance, but they were told to go back.”

The sixth man is clean-shaven and bald, possibly in his late 20’s or early 30’s. “A guy was shot,” he says, “either he wanted to run away or one of the commanders didn’t like him, so he got drunk. They told us to bury him.”

“There was even one young man who shot himself,” says prisoner number 7, “but they didn’t care about him, they buried him immediately. They’ll write it off as casualties probably and that’s all.” His head is also shaved, but he sports a mustache and closely-cropped beard. A tattoo of a cat paws playfully at a mole on his neck. He, too, looks to be in his 20’s or 30’s.

The 8th man looks like he’s in his 30’s. He’s clean-shaven with scars on his head. “Many, many, very many casualties,” he says. “Lots of bodies on the road. You step over them, you just walk by. There were many dead, many wounded, and still even more. No kind of evacuation.” As he talks, the video shows clumps of bodies tangled together. “We came to the position, right in the trenches were dead soldiers. All around the trenches, there were also bodies lying.”

The ninth and final man looks younger, perhaps in his 20’s, with closely cropped hair and a bushy brown beard. He says that his commander issued a warning, saying “Listen, if anyone runs away, he’ll be shot.” The interviewer asks if he shot people and he answers simply, “yes.”

The Russian Investigative Committee took note of the testimony and reported that fighters in the Armed Forces of Ukraine are being forced to sign agreements stating that, if they are killed, their bodies will not be taken from the battlefield and their families will not receive any compensation from the Ukrainian government.

The agency emphasized that Ukrainian commanders treat their subordinates inhumanely, and that the signatures of the soldiers were collected deliberately in order to deny their families any compensation or allowances.

As you saw, the soldiers also testified that their wounded comrades were not given any aid and that their commanders threatened to shoot them if they abandoned their positions.

With special thanks to Lilya Takumbetova.

About the author:
Deborah Armstrong currently writes about geopolitics with an emphasis on Russia. She previously worked in local TV news in the United States where she won two regional Emmy Awards. In the early 1990’s, Deborah lived in the Soviet Union during its final days and worked as a television consultant at Leningrad Television. 

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

US Intelligence Official: Media Misleading Americans About Ukraine’s Battlefield Success

The massive push by Ukraine resulted in nearly no territorial gains.

Still, Washington has pushed Kyiv to continue the counteroffensive. The White House acknowledges that for Ukraine to have a possibility of success, Kyiv will have to be willing to sustain high casualties.

By Kyle Anzalone / Antiwar.com 8 Sept 23

In an interview with renowned reporter Seymour Hersh, a US intelligence official scolded the media for misleading the American public about Ukraine’s battlefield failures during the Spring counteroffensive. ………..

Responding to reports in recent weeks that Ukrainian forces were gaining momentum and recapturing territory, the official remarked, “Where are the reporters getting this stuff?” he asked. “There are stories talking about drunk Russian commanders while the Ukrainians are penetrating the three lines of Russian defense and will be able to work back to Mariupol.”

He continued, “The goal of Russia’s first line of defense was not to stop the Ukrainian offense, but to slow it down so if there was a Ukrainian advance, Russian commanders could bring in reserves to fortify the line.” The official added, “There is no evidence that Ukrainian forces have gotten past the first line. The American press is doing anything but honest reporting on the failure thus far of the offense.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered a similarly optimistic message during his trip to Kyiv on Wednesday. “In the ongoing counteroffensive, progress has accelerated in the past few weeks. This new assistance will help sustain it and build further momentum,” he said at a press conference.

The official says that message is being delivered from military intelligence to the White House, while the CIA has drawn other conclusions. “This kind of reporting from the military intelligence community is going to the White House. There are other views,” he said, referring to the CIA. The official explained those views do not reach President Joe Biden.

For over three months, Kyiv has ordered its forces to advance on entrench Russian defensive lines in southern Ukraine. Russian minefields caused Ukraine to lose a significant portion of its Western-trained soldiers and equipment in the opening weeks of the offensive. The massive push by Ukraine resulted in nearly no territorial gains.

Still, Washington has pushed Kyiv to continue the counteroffensive. The White House acknowledges that for Ukraine to have a possibility of success, Kyiv will have to be willing to sustain high casualties.

The official told Hersh no matter how committed Kyiv is to the war effort, President Zelensky’s goals are unattainable.  “Zelensky will never get his land back,” he said……………. https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/08/us-intelligence-official-media-misleading-americans-about-ukraines-battlefield-success/

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

NATO Chief Openly Admits Russia Invaded Ukraine Because Of NATO Expansion

Stoltenberg’s remarks would probably have been classified as Russian propaganda by plutocrat-funded “disinformation experts” and imperial “fact checkers” if it had been said online by someone like you or me, but because it came from the head of NATO as part of a screed against the Russian president it’s been allowed to pass through without objection.

In reality Stoltenberg is just stating a well-established fact: contrary to the official western narrative, Putin invaded Ukraine not because he is evil and hates freedom but because no great power ever allows foreign military threats to amass on its borders  —  including the United States.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, SEP 9, 2023 https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/nato-chief-openly-admits-russia-invaded?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=136866482&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email

During a speech at the EU Parliament’s foreign affairs committee on Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg clearly and repeatedly acknowledged that Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine because of fears of NATO expansionism.

His comments, initially flagged by journalist Thomas Frazi, read as follows:

The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.

So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.

Stoltenberg made these remarks as part of a general gloat about the fact that Putin invaded Ukraine to prevent NATO expansion and yet the invasion has resulted in Sweden and Finland applying to join the alliance, saying it “demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he’s getting the exact opposite.”

Stoltenberg’s remarks would probably have been classified as Russian propaganda by plutocrat-funded “disinformation experts” and imperial “fact checkers” if it had been said online by someone like you or me, but because it came from the head of NATO as part of a screed against the Russian president it’s been allowed to pass through without objection.

In reality Stoltenberg is just stating a well-established fact: contrary to the official western narrative, Putin invaded Ukraine not because he is evil and hates freedom but because no great power ever allows foreign military threats to amass on its borders  —  including the United States. That’s why so many western analysts and officials spent years warning that NATO’s actions were going to provoke a war, and yet when war broke out we were slammed with a tsunami of mass media propaganda repeating over and over and over again that this was an “unprovoked invasion”.

It would have been so very, very easy to prevent this horrific war. Off-ramp after off-ramp after off-ramp was passed to get us to where we’re at now. Chance after chance after chance to avoid all this pointless death and misery was passed up, both before 2014 and every year since. The US-centralized power structure knowingly chose this war, and it did so to advance its own interests. If people really, deeply understood this, the entire western empire would collapse.

It’s the damnedest thing how you’ll get called a Kremlin agent for saying that this war was provoked by NATO expansionism and that it serves US interests, even when NATO openly says this war was provoked by NATO expansionism and US officials keep openly saying that this war serves US interests.

The latest entry in the latter category came in the form of a Thursday tweet by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, which reads, “Standing with our allies against Russian aggression isn’t charity. In fact — it’s a direct investment in replenishing America’s arsenal with American weapons built by American workers. Expanding our defense industrial base puts America in a stronger position to out-compete China.”

When official authorized narrative-makers acknowledge these things it’s okay, but when normal human beings do it it’s Kremlin disinformation. This is because when the authorized narrative-makers do it they’re doing it to advance the information interests of the US empire — to explain to war-weary Americans how this war benefits their country, or to mock Putin’s failure to stop the enlargement of NATO — whereas when normal people do it it’s to establish what’s true and factual.

This all happens as a study sponsored by the EU with a group funded by US oligarch Pierre Omidyar is being circulated by mass media outlets like The Washington Post finding that Twitter under Elon Musk has not been doing enough to censor “Russian propaganda” on the platform. This would put Musk in violation of the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which requires platforms to restrict such materials.

As Glenn Greenwald has noted, the Digital Services Act defines “Russian propaganda” so extremely broadly that it includes “ideological alignment with the Russian state” in the category of materials that must be censored, which includes people who “parrot the Kremlin’s narratives through originally produced content or by spreading Kremlin aligned narratives to different target audiences and languages.”

Anyone who speaks out against US foreign policy relating to Russia online is always immediately accused of “parroting Kremlin narratives” by empire apologists mindlessly regurgitating what they’ve been told to believe by outlets like The Washington Post, whether they have anything to do with the Russian government or not. I myself have no affiliation or interaction with the Russian state whatsoever, yet I receive many of these accusations every single day online just for criticizing US foreign policy.

If I were the NATO Secretary General publicly gloating about how Putin’s efforts to stop the expansion of NATO have failed, it would be fine for me to acknowledge that NATO expansion provoked this war after our refusal to prevent a needless conflict. But because I am harming the information interests of the western empire instead of helping them, that makes me a Russian propagandist.

This isn’t because the definition of “Russian propaganda” is flawed, but because it is working exactly as intended. The push to marginalize and eliminate “Russian propaganda” has never had anything to do with fighting the actual materials put out by the Russian state (which have essentially zero meaningful existence in the western world); the push has always been about stomping out opposition to US foreign policy. 

Like so much else in this world when examining the behavior of power, it’s ultimately all about narrative control. The powerful understand that whoever controls the dominant narrative about world events actually controls the world, because real power isn’t just controlling what happens but controlling what people think about what happens. That’s the real glue holding the US-centralized empire together, and the world will never have a chance at knowing peace until people start bringing consciousness to it.

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