Printable View
So, what do you think, should the Ukraine surrender to Russia? Is the condition that Ukraine 'bear no arms' an acceptable term for surrender? Would you believe it if you were Ukrainian? Is this just a sideshow? Is the west really scared of Russia?
https://tribune.com.pk/story/2345255/1
Well, from what I believe I know, I think they have to. There doesn't seem to be any other option.Quote:
Posted by Justplain
I don't know more than anyone else here, but within the next week I'd not be surprised to see
- A brokered agreement between Ukraine and Russia
- A ceasefire, maybe presided over by a neutral country (such as Norway)
- A new administration in Kiev, as a central part of the agreement
- Withdrawal of most Russian forces, but armed Russian 'peacekeepers' remaining
- An assurance from Russia that non-militant Ukrainian citizens would be respected and unharmed
- Lots of blustering and political rhetoric from the US (and some European countries), and sanctions maintained, but basically nothing more
- The Nordstream2 gas pipeline to continue unhindered, which would be insisted on by Germany and others.
Russia and the West, particularly the USA have been playing brinkmanship with each other for more than half a century. Russia takes a shot at the eagle at least as often as America pokes the bear. Both countries lie to each other and have repeatedly lied to the world. They both have highly active and effective propaganda machines. It is easy to think about this War (call it what it is) being about the expansion of NATO and the protection of the Russians and Russian speaking people in the Dombas but that would be completely off the mark. The genesis of this war had nothing to do with NATO it had everything to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We know this for a fact because Putin has articulated clearly and repeatedly why he wants Ukraine to be part of Russia.
Putin has peddled so many lies about Ukraine it is hard to keep them straight. The lie that he summons at every opportunity is that NATO promised to never expand "one inch" beyond Germany. It is not in a treaty, agreement or charter. It is nothing more than Putin attempting to justify his designs on Ukraine and the killing of people to get it.
Another lie that has Putin prognosticators screaming in support of this war but has historians and truth seekers scratching their heads is the lie about Nazi elements within the Ukraine government. Putin has long sought to falsely paint Ukraine as a Nazi hotbed, which is a particularly bewildering accusation given that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish and lost three family members in the Holocaust. Putin's propaganda machine has done an incredible job getting some people in the world to believe that a Jew is a Nazi hellbent on the destruction of Russia.
Many people will tell you that Americans control NATO membership but that has never been the case and is certainly not the case today. The Americans exert some control and some influence but they do not have a final say on membership or changes to the NATO charter. A lot people of which I include myself wished that Biden would have told Putin that at least for the foreseeable future (10 years) Ukraine would have no chance to be admitted to NATO. Quite frankly there is only a fractional chance that Ukraine would ever become a member anyway. It takes a unanimous vote by all members to admit a new NATO Alliance Member. Germany, France and others have been reluctant to admit Ukraine. If Putin clearly understood that Ukraine would not become a member of NATO for at least 10 years it would have exposed Putin's true motivation. At the very least it would have removed his excuse for causing so much pain and suffering while at the same time destabilising the world.
American government contractors want war and if they can't have a war they want arms to be sent to Ukraine in great quantities. It is disheartening to watch the American propaganda machine better known as the mainstream media interview American senators and congressmen who consistently speak on the behalf of government military contractors telling the American public that billions of dollars of weapons will help Ukraine. Help them do what...........prolong an unwinnable war, incur more death and destruction or do these contractors just want more wealth arming civilians while they sit in their gated communities overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Russia's violent incursion into Ukraine is about circumstance and opportunity. The opportunity has presented itself to restore one of the perceived jewels in the crown of a fallen empire. The circumstances are such that only opposition would be coming from an ageing, weak, mediocre leader (Biden) that appears to have dementia. Putin understands that if he misses this opportunity the circumstances may never present themselves again in his lifetime.
It is now abundantly clear that Putin has a backchannel agreement with Xi Jinping of China to sell, natural gas, oil and coal. Putin also has an agreement with China to buy technology, manufactured goods and supplies. The sanctions that Europe and the USA plan to put in place will have little to no impact. There could very well be a broader understanding between the two that they will each stand down while the other chases restoration of their perceived empires. Oddly these two guys just don't get it, they have no clue about legacy and life, it is truly meaningless.
Make no mistake this is about Putin, it is about restoring an empire, it is about narcissism, ego, psychopathy, psychopathic behaviour and it is unnecessary.
A 4 year old documentary with Oliver Stone, titled: Ukraine on fire, a detailed history lesson from the past 80 years.
Warning, disturbing photos and footage.
https://vimeo.com/252426896/recommended
...
https://henrymakow.com/upload_images/schwab-putin.jpg
https://henrymakow.com/upload_images/wakey-wakey.jpg
https://henrymakow.com/upload_images/noth-see.jpg
Mod note from Bill:
Gwin had posted images from https://henrymakow.com, but that site appears to be down right now.
...
... United Network News Global Desk Report with Sunny Gault 2-24-2022 06:24Pain at the Pump? The War in Ukraine, The Pentagon and Biden attempt to sell US Rare Earth Minerals to the Chinese?homebreaking news and special reports
'Today, February 24th, 2022, liberal globalism officially collapsed. The whole geopolitical project beginning in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union and Francis Fukuyama’s neo-con fantasy of the end of history, where he envisioned that the entire world would now turn to a global neoliberal order that has since culminated in an epidemic of wokeness, that vision died last night, and Russian President Vladimir Putin killed it!'
https://youtube.com/watch?v=KAXWAA5GnEI
Thanks. I'm watching this right now. And only at 10:50 I'm thinking this is what is once again happening in Ukraine: yet another stupid war that somehow could have been prevented. :frusty:Quote:
Posted by Billy
And now it seems Putin and co are threatening Finland and Sweden to not join NATO. Right. So that man has lost his mind and wants us to be part of Russia. It's going like I thought it would. Either way, we're next it seems.
Link (in Finnish)
E: Sorry, I'm in a bit hurry. Guess that'll be translated very soon.
Kerry Cassidy and Patriot Dave Round 2. Breaking Ukraine Intel Update and Much More. Streamed live 2 hours ago
Certainly a different slant on whats happening
https://beforeitsnews.com/alternativ...o-3768093.html
Wow as soon as I posted this my computer froze up, just sayin! And Kerry talks directly about the Bio Labs in this interview
- Russian Strikes Targeting US-Run Bio-Labs in Ukraine?
An excellent article by Chris Hedges published yesterday, recommended by Wade Frazier an hour ago. ("He is right", said Wade.)
Chronicle of a War Foretold
After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a near universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion would be a foolish provocation against Russia. How naive we were to think the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail.
I was in Eastern Europe in 1989, reporting on the revolutions that overthrew the ossified communist dictatorships that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time of hope. NATO, with the breakup of the Soviet empire, became obsolete.
President Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Washington and Europe to build a new security pact that would include Russia. Secretary of State James Baker in the Reagan administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured the Soviet leader that if Germany was unified NATO would not be extended beyond the new borders.
The commitment not to expand NATO, also made by Great Britain and France, appeared to herald a new global order. We saw the peace dividend dangled before us, the promise that the massive expenditures on weapons that characterized the Cold War would be converted into expenditures on social programs and infrastructures that had long been neglected to feed the insatiable appetite of the military.
There was a near universal understanding among diplomats and political leaders at the time that any attempt to expand NATO was foolish, an unwarranted provocation against Russia that would obliterate the ties and bonds that happily emerged at the end of the Cold War.
How naive we were. The war industry did not intend to shrink its power or its profits. It set out almost immediately to recruit the former Communist Bloc countries into the European Union and NATO. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia were forced to reconfigure their militaries, often through hefty loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware.
There would be no peace dividend. The expansion of NATO swiftly became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the corporations that had profited from the Cold War. (Poland, for example, just agreed to spend $ 6 billion on M1 Abrams tanks and other U.S. military equipment.)
If Russia would not acquiesce to again being the enemy, then Russia would be pressured into becoming the enemy. And here we are. On the brink of another Cold War, one from which only the war industry will profit while, as W. H. Auden wrote, the little children die in the streets.
The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business, a very lucrative one. It is why we spent two decades in Afghanistan although there was near universal consensus after a few years of fruitless fighting that we had waded into a quagmire we could never win.
In a classified diplomatic cable obtained and released by WikiLeaks dated February 1, 2008, written from Moscow, and addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, there was an unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO risked an eventual conflict with Russia, especially over Ukraine.
“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement [by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” the cable reads. “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war.
In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership.
Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.”
The Obama administration, not wanting to further inflame tensions with Russia, blocked arms sales to Kiev. But this act of prudence was abandoned by the Trump and Biden administrations. Weapons from the U.S. and Great Britain are pouring into Ukraine, part of the $1.5 billion in promised military aid. The equipment includes hundreds of sophisticated Javelins and NLAW anti-tank weapons despite repeated protests by Moscow.
The United States and its NATO allies have no intention of sending troops to Ukraine. Rather, they will flood the country with weapons, which is what it did in the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia.
The conflict in Ukraine echoes the novel “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the novel it is acknowledged by the narrator that “there had never been a death more foretold” and yet no one was able or willing to stop it. All of us who reported from Eastern Europe in 1989 knew the consequences of provoking Russia, and yet few have raised their voices to halt the madness. The methodical steps towards war took on a life of their own, moving us like sleepwalkers towards disaster.
Once NATO expanded into Eastern Europe, the Clinton administration promised Moscow that NATO combat troops would not be stationed in Eastern Europe, the defining issue of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations. This promise again turned out to be a lie. Then in 2014 the U.S. backed a coup against the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych who sought to build an economic alliance with Russia rather than the European Union.
Of course, once integrated into the European Union, as seen in the rest of Eastern Europe, the next step is integration into NATO. Russia, spooked by the coup, alarmed at the overtures by the EU and NATO, then annexed Crimea, largely populated by Russian speakers. And the death spiral that led us to the conflict currently underway in Ukraine became unstoppable.
The war state needs enemies to sustain itself. When an enemy can’t be found, an enemy is manufactured. Putin has become, in the words of Senator Angus King, the new Hitler, out to grab Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. The full-throated cries for war, echoed shamelessly by the press, are justified by draining the conflict of historical context, by elevating ourselves as the saviors and whoever we oppose, from Saddam Hussein to Putin, as the new Nazi leader.
I don’t know where this will end up. We must remember, as Putin reminded us, that Russia is a nuclear power. We must remember that once you open the Pandora’s box of war it unleashes dark and murderous forces no one can control. I know this from personal experience. The match has been lit. The tragedy is that there was never any dispute about how the conflagration would start.
...
Related:Quote:
Of course, once integrated into the European Union, as seen in the rest of Eastern Europe, the next step is integration into NATO. Russia, spooked by the coup, alarmed at the overtures by the EU and NATO, then annexed Crimea, largely populated by Russian speakers. And the death spiral that led us to the conflict currently underway in Ukraine became unstoppable.
Words and actions are far from one another but still:
Steve Herman (@W7VOA) twitteó: "Cyberattacks can trigger Article 5" of the @NATO charter, notes @jensstoltenberg. https://t.co/IIh76jfYT8
Deja Vu
What today happen, should be happen 8 years ago...
Putin was indecisive and pay with 10.000 death people...
Today he don't want the same story again or worse...
At that time I was active in a "antiwar" Bar in Berlin, With people from all over the world, and I came in contact whit Russian and Ukrainian citizens.
We made a lot of actions: concerts, videos/films/photos,posters, etc
All the videos and films that now are relevant , from Oliver Stone documentation about the Maidan, interview whit Putin, etc.
This poster I stick over many Bars, Markets, in all monuments remember the liberation from Nazi Germany.
If a photo is worth more than 1.000 words...this photo speak volumes...
http://antikriegsnachrichten.de/im1/augustweb800.jpg
http://antikriegsnachrichten.de
More from J.R. Nyquist, published today. As I mentioned a few hours ago, Nyquist's view of the history and background (and of US agendas) doesn't agree with that of many other analysts.
The War in Ukraine: Interview With the Populist PatriotThe headline of the Pravda article cited above reads, “Russia takes complete advantage of castrated armed forces of the West.” We also read in that same Russian article, “The illusion of world supremacy played a cruel joke on Washington.” We must ask a question here: Who fostered the illusion of American world supremacy? What country supposedly quit the business of nuclear competition, the business of communist subversion, the business of the Cold War? Russia supposedly quit. But they did not quit!…Russia overcame the inertia of collapse and started reviving its power, while the West, being lulled by sweet day-dreams of the liberal ‘end of history,’ castrated its armed forces to the point, when they could be good [only] for leading colonial wars with weak and technically backward enemies. The balance of forces in Europe has thus changed in Russia’s favor.
— Pravda, 13 November 2014
Nevertheless, we find Tucker Carlson and Patrick Buchanan saying that we have been unfair to Russia, that we have needlessly provoked Vladimir Putin, tricking the Russians with false promises. No. The Russians tricked us. And they were already laughing at us in November 2014.
America wanted to believe that the nightmare threat of Mutual Assured Destruction was a thing of the past. The Americans never wanted a conflict with Russia, or with China. The Americans wanted to live in peace. But we will not be living in peace. The war is coming to us whether we want it or not. And the war has now begun in Ukraine and there will be additional moves.
Here is my discussion with Nevin Gussack of the Populist Patriot.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=CqfzjiB0sUk
Another "front" of the conflict that could bring more turmoil into it.
Russian fleet presumed to be targeting international cargo ships on the black sea. Seems like there is a good quantity of good proof and data on it at this point.
To honour Valentina Lisitsa:Quote:
Posted by Malisa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS7ttPETWXk
The force of great art is the same force as the one that brings heroism: it requires sacrifice of self.
Have we got a source for this please, assuming they are not your words?Quote:
Posted by rgray222
I cannot agree with the last sentence which has been bolded, it ignores a considerable amount of geopolitical history from the conclusion.
Where are my Finnish and Swedish friends now? This is getting real. Just trying to get your opinion.
Kiev is surrounded and Russian troops are in
There are reports that the Ukranian military has shielded themselves between habitational buildings and not allowing people to get away. They are using them as human shields now
Bridges and roads outside the city were preventively destroyed by the Ukrainian army. People are now trapped inside the war zone
https://t.me/asbmil/211
https://t.me/asbmil/214
https://t.me/asbmil/216