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Makeyevka. Neocons will push to escalate, will Russia stay the course?
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[/COLOR] Russia Strikes Druzhovka, Admits 63 Killed Makeyevka; Polish Mobilisation, Entry into Ukraine War
https://twitter.com/squatsons/status...95950295683072
:ROFL::ROFL::ROFL:
[url]https://twitter.com/MaimunkaNews/status/1610287915862458368
We've Reached Peak Zelensky. Now What?
Without such subsidies, Zelensky would not have lasted a month in the war. How many hours do you think he is going to last once that flow dries up? And it surely is.
U.S. President Joe Biden meets with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office of the White House, on September 1, 2021, in Washington, DC.
When the president of thepoorest,most corrupt nation in Europe is feted with multiple standing ovations by the combined Houses of Congress, and his name invokedin the same breath as Winston Churchill, you know we've reached Peak Zelensky.
It's a farcical, almost psychotic over-promotion, probably surpassed only by the media's shameful, hyperbolic railroading of the country into war with Iraq, in 2003. Paraphrasing Gertrude from Hamlet, "Methinks the media doth hype too much."
Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity.
Let's remember that before ascending to his country's presidency, Volodymyr Zelensky's greatest claim to fame was that he could play the piano with his penis. I'm not joking. And he ran on a platform to unite his country for peace, and for making amends with Russia. Again, I'm not joking.
Now, he's Europe's George Washington, FDR, and Douglas MacArthur all rolled into one and before whom the mighty and powerful genuflect.
Please. The only place to go from here is down. And, that is surely coming. Soon.
Consider some inconvenient facts that the fawning media, which is essentially the public relations arm of the weapons industry, doesn't want you to know.
The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen,recently let slip that the Ukrainian army has lost more than 100,000 troops in the eight months since the beginning of the war. Over the nine-year span of the Vietnam War, the U.S. with a population six times that of Ukraine, lost a total of 58,220 men.
In other words, on a per day, per capita basis, Ukraine is losing soldiers at a rate 141 TIMES that of U.S. losses in Vietnam. The U.S. lost the public on Vietnam when middle class white boys began coming home in body bags. Does anybody with half a brain believe such losses in Ukraine are sustainable? Does anybody have another plan to avert such slaughter?
Von der Leyen is among the shrewdest public figures in the world. What she is doing is laying the predicate for Western withdrawal from Ukraine and ending the War. If you look at the facts on the ground, not the boosterish propaganda ladled out by the media, you can understand why.
In a matter of weeks, Russia, with its hypersonic missiles, destroyed half of Ukraine's electrical power infrastructure. This, as winter is coming on. It can just as easily take out the other half, effectively bombing Ukraine back into the Stone Age. Is that what anybody wants?
The startling, indeed, terrifying part of this is that neither Ukraine nor the West have any defense against these hypersonic missiles. They travel so fast, and on variable trajectories, they cannot be shot down, even by the most advanced Western systems. They represent one of the greatest asymmetries in deliverable destructive power in the history of warfare, probably dwarfed only by the U.S.'s possession of atomic bombs at the end of World War II.
Again, there is no effective defense against them. The Russians have them. The Ukrainians don't. Game over. Can you understand why leaders in the West are beginning to wake up?
On the conventional front, the Ukrainians are having trouble securing even conventional weapons to defend themselves. U.S. arms suppliers are working around the clock to replace their own stocks and the stocks that European countries have given to Ukraine. But the backlog is running into years. A recent headline from The Wall Street Journal stated, "Europe is Rushing Arms to Ukraine but Running Out of Ammo."
Finally, the U.S. has committed $112 billion to Ukraine. That includes $45 billion just slipped into the omnibus funding bill against the likelihood that a Republican-controlled House will cut such funding, almost certainly substantially.
That's more than $10 billion per month since the war started in February. And that doesn't even count the subsidies, both material and financial, from the EU which amount to billions of dollars more per month.
Without such subsidies, Zelensky would not have lasted a month in the war. How many hours do you think he is going to last once that flow dries up? And it surely is.
The Europeans are coming to realize that their continent is being de-industrialized, literally moved backwards an entire epoch in economic terms, because of their willingness to serve as the doormat for the U.S.' imperial war against Russia. Not even they, with their supine fealty to U.S. domination, are willing to commit collective economic suicide on behalf of the U.S.
France's Macron and Germany's Scholz are suggesting that accommodations to Russian interests must be devised in order to bring about a peaceful settlement of the war.
Macron suggestedin a television address to his nation that an antagonized Russia is not in the security interests of Europe. "We need to prepare what we are ready to do…to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table."
Scholz was even more specific. In anarticle in Foreign Affairs he declared, "We have to go back to the agreements which we had in the last decades and which were the basis for peace and security order in Europe."
This is a direct repudiation of the U.S.'s maximalist position before the start of the War, that Russia's security needs were of no interest to a marauding NATO.
Even U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is now mooting the idea that territorial concessions must be on the table. In aWall Street Journal article, Blinken stated that, "Our focus is…to take back territory that's been seized from [Ukraine] since February 24th."
Notice, that this is a significant climb down from the U.S.' earlier position that all Russian gains since 2014, including Crimea, must be reversed before negotiations could begin. And this is just Blinken's opening hand. More concessions are sure to follow as Russian gains become greater and their likelihood of being reversed, lesser.
Put these four things together: staggering, unsustainable losses of soldiers; terrifying, indefensible asymmetries of destructive power; inability to supply oneself with even conventional defensive weapons; and categorically reduced support from your most important backers.
Does that sound like the formula for winning a war? It is not. It's the formula for losing the war, which is why von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz, and Blinken are now laying pipe for getting out. The tide is going out under Zelensky. He will soon be remembered as a Trivial Pursuits question, or an answer on Jeopardy: "The only modern head of state known to be able to play the piano with his penis." Ding. "Contestant #3?" "Who is Volodymyr Zelensky?"
A peace will soon be declared. Russia will keep the Donbas and Crimea in recognition of the facts on the ground. Both sides will be better off for this. The Donbas is ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally Russian, which is why it voted overwhelmingly for assimilation into Russia. Besides, if Kiev loved them so much, it wouldn't have murdered 14,000 of them over the past eight years and resumed massive shelling in early February of this year, before the Russian invasion.
Ukraine will foreswear any future affiliation with NATO. This is Putin's highest priority and what he asked for--and was denied--in his request to the U.S. and NATO last December, before the invasion was launched. If Russia begins its much-feared winter offensive, as many expect, Ukrainian generals will dispatch Zelensky in a coup rather than send their few remaining soldiers to certain annihilation.
U.S. grain and pharma conglomerates will buy up Ukrainian farmland—some of the best in the world—for pennies on the dollar. This is the standard MO of U.S. multinational vultures coming in after the kill to pick apart the carcasses. U.S. weapons makers will look for and help provoke the next feeding frenzy, much as they materialized Ukraine barely a year after the humiliating U.S. defeat in Afghanistan derailed their last gravy train.
Russia and China, driven together by U.S. bullying, will continue to constellate the nations of the Global South into an anti-Western bloc committed to collaborative, mutually profitable, peaceful development. The U.S. and its closest allies will cower behind the walls they've constructed of the ever-shrinking share of the global economy that they can manage to hold as their own.
Ukraine will prove a turning point in the dismantling of U.S. hegemony over global affairs that it has enjoyed—and, let's be honest, often abused--since 1945. The U.S. public is not psychically prepared for such a come down. But that is the cost of living in the fantasy world that the media lavishes up to keep that self-same public ignorant, fearful, confused, entertained, and distracted.
Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity. We need to be on the lookout for their next gambit to pillage the treasury and advance their own private interests above those of the nation. It will surely come.
see https://www.commondreams.org/opinion...ng-ukraine-war
https://www.rt.com/news/569393-uk-il...pying-ukraine/
British military using illegal spy tech in Ukraine – Grayzone
A private company linked to terrorism in Ukraine is providing the British military with illegally-gathered smartphone data to aid the planning of attacks and targeted killings, The Grayzone reported on Tuesday.
According to files leaked to the outlet, the military is making use of data illegally harvested from cell phones in Russia and Ukraine by spy firm Anomaly 6, to enable “the planning of military offensives and artillery attacks, assassinations, asset recruitment, and other measures.”
Previous reporting by the Grayzone revealed that Anomaly 6 employees know their data scraping operation – which can target any smartphone in the world through code surreptitiously embedded in popular apps – is illegal. Britain’s military and intelligence apparatus would be forbidden from gathering this data themselves, but according to the latest report, the Anomaly 6 data is forwarded to them by a UK private military company, Prevail Partners.
Ukraine run by ‘f****d up people’ – US instructor
This arrangement allows the government to bypass oversight and “to gain a realtime/near realtime understanding of the disposition” of Russian “troops, equipment, and lethal materials,” which can then be fed to Kiev. While the US has stated that it limits its intelligence sharing with Ukraine, the UK has not acknowledged any restrictions on the data it hands over.
The unreliable nature of some of this smartphone data, coupled with the Ukrainian military’s willingness to execute so-called “collaborators,” could link London to “crimes against humanity” committed by Kiev against civilians, The Grayzone stated.
Prevail Partners has been implicated in helping the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) to build an off-the-books “terror army.” One of its founding members allegedly helped draw up plans for the UK to bomb the Crimean Bridge, shortly before it was damaged in a blast in September that killed four civilians.
Moscow accused the UK of involvement in "[the] training, preparation and execution” of the bridge bombing, and responded to the attack with repeated waves of missile and drone strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure and military targets.
READ MORE: UK spies building secret ‘terror army’ in Ukraine – Grayzone
The latest revelations raise “the question of how Britain can plausibly claim not to be a formal belligerent in the war,” author Kit Klarenberg wrote on Twitter.
Ukraine’s assassination of Daria Dugina, its destruction of the Crimean Bridge, and attempted murder of Russian State Space Corporation leaders Dmitry Rogozin and Artyom Melnikov may have all been made possible by Anomaly 6’s software and Prevail Partners’ links to the British government, he claimed in the article.
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[url]https://twitter.com/RT_com/status/1610780617007894528
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