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By Dr Salim Nazzal

(The Corona war) revealed many things, first and foremost of the greed of Western countries, especially with regard to providing vaccines for poor countries in the third world.

It also revealed that globalization which said to have made the world a small village has become questionable issue. The borders of countries were closed and each country had to rely on itself, which strengthened the idea of self-reliance, especially in basic foodstuffs.

The Corona war has provided an important lesson for the countries outside the Western world that they must rise as a cooperating force, especially in crises such as the Corona crisis, where countries closed their borders.

And the Ukrainian crisis revealed in an unequivocal way the ugly face of the West, which we thought was from the past. We watched on TV screens how racist dealt with Arab, Indian and African students in Kyiv when they were not allowed to board the trains to escape the war.

We also saw how the racist episodes with the colored persons on the Polish border. Though this thing may vary from a western country to another, yet this confirms that the superiority view over the people of the countries with brown and black skin is still there.

The Moroccan thinker Al jabre explained this phenomenon from a historical perspective. In his view the slogans of the French Revolution about brotherhood, justice and equality were only for the French, because the state of the French Revolution was itself the one which colonized the Third World and deprived its people of their basic rights.

In crises, real positions are revealed. It appears that the rhetoric in the West about human rights in the nonwestern countries has been a tool often used against any regime that challenge the west domination.

Therefore, the west must not be surprised that most of the third world countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America did not stand with America and the West in the Ukrainian-Russian war. The reason in my view is that nonwestern counties do not support occupying any country but rather they are more aware than ever of the hypocrisy and duplicity of the West

These countries saw that it is in the interest of their countries to take a position of the center. The Pakistani Prime Minister expressed this position by saying that we are not slaves to the West. This blunt position expresses the essence of the position of many countries outside the west that do not see that America’s enemies are necessarily its enemies.

We may still remember that Nelson Mandela took a similar position when he was told in America that has friends like Castro and Gaddafi, and his response was that America’s enemies are not necessarily his enemies

It seems that the time for America to drag the nonwestern world into its wars, choosing friends for them and choosing enemies for them, is over. It is true that many non-Western countries are still in conflict with each other. And it is true that its abilities to stand up to America are still limited, but it is also true that the world outside the west is no longer ready to accept that America determines its options for it, including who are its friends and who are its enemies.

Salim Nazzal is a Palestinian Norwegian researcher, lecturer playwright and poet, wrote more than 17 books such as Perspectives on thought, culture and political sociology.

6 April 2022

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ellen Brown

Foreign critics have long chafed at the “exorbitant privilege” of the U.S. dollar as global reserve currency. The U.S. can issue this currency backed by nothing but the “full faith and credit of the United States.” Foreign governments, needing dollars, not only accept them in trade but buy U.S. securities with them, effectively funding the U.S. government and its foreign wars. But no government has been powerful enough to break that arrangement – until now. How did that happen and what will it mean for the U.S. and global economies?

The Rise and Fall of the PetroDollar

First, some history: The U.S. dollar was adopted as the global reserve currency at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, when the dollar was still backed by gold on global markets. The agreement was that gold and the dollar would be accepted interchangeably as global reserves, the dollars to be redeemable in gold on demand at $35 an ounce. Exchange rates of other currencies were fixed against the dollar.

But that deal was broken after President Lyndon Johnson’s “guns and butter” policy exhausted the U.S. kitty by funding war in Vietnam along with his “Great Society” social programs at home. French President Charles de Gaulle, suspecting the U.S. was running out of money, cashed in a major portion of France’s dollars for gold and threatened to cash in the rest; and other countries followed suit or threatened to.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar to gold internationally (known as “closing the gold window”), in order to avoid draining U.S. gold reserves. The value of the dollar then plummeted relative to other currencies on global exchanges. To prop it up, Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made a deal with Saudi Arabia and the OPEC countries that OPEC would sell oil only in dollars, and that the dollars would be deposited in Wall Street and City of London banks. In return, the U.S. would defend the OPEC countries militarily. Economic researcher William Engdahl also presents evidence of a promise that the price of oil would be quadrupled. An oil crisis triggered by a brief Middle Eastern war did cause the price of oil to quadruple, and the OPEC agreement was finalized in 1974.

The deal held firm until 2000, when Saddam Hussein broke it by selling Iraqi oil in euros. Libyan president Omar Qaddafi followed suit. Both presidents wound up assassinated, and their countries were decimated in war with the United States. Canadian researcher Matthew Ehret observes:

We should not forget that the Sudan-Libya-Egypt alliance under the combined leadership of Mubarak, Qadhafi and Bashir, had moved to establish a new gold-backed financial system outside of the IMF/World Bank to fund large scale development in Africa. Had this program not been undermined by a NATO-led destruction of Libya, the carving up of Sudan and regime change in Egypt, then the world would have seen the emergence of a major regional block of African states shaping their own destinies outside of the rigged game of Anglo-American controlled finance for the first time in history.

The Rise of the PetroRuble

The first challenge by a major power to what became known as the petrodollar has come in 2022. In the month after the Ukraine conflict began, the U.S. and its European allies imposed heavy financial sanctions on Russia in response to the illegal military invasion. The Western measures included freezing nearly half of the Russian central bank’s 640 billion U.S. dollars in financial reserves, expelling several of Russia’s largest banks from the SWIFT global payment system, imposing export controls aimed at limiting Russia’s access to advanced technologies, closing down their airspace and ports to Russian planes and ships, and instituting personal sanctions against senior Russian officials and high-profile tycoons. Worried Russians rushed to withdraw rubles from their banks, and the value of the ruble plunged on global markets just as the U.S. dollar had in the early 1970s.

The trust placed in the U.S. dollar as global reserve currency, backed by “the full faith and credit of the United States,” had finally been fully broken. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a speech on March 16 that the U.S. and EU had defaulted on their obligations, and that freezing Russia’s reserves marks the end of the reliability of so-called first class assets. On March 23, Putin announced that Russia’s natural gas would be sold to “unfriendly countries” only in Russian rubles, rather than the euros or dollars currently used. Forty-eight nations are counted by Russia as “unfriendly,” including the United States, Britain, Ukraine, Switzerland, South Korea, Singapore, Norway, Canada and Japan.

Putin noted that more than half the global population remains “friendly” to Russia. Countries not voting to support the sanctions include two major powers – China and India – along with major oil producer Venezuela, Turkey, and other countries in the “Global South.” “Friendly” countries, said Putin, could now buy from Russia in various currencies.

On March 24, Russian lawmaker Pavel Zavalny said at a news conference that gas could be sold to the West for rubles or gold, and to “friendly” countries for either national currency or bitcoin.

Energy ministers from the G7 nations rejected Putin’s demand, claiming it violated gas contract terms requiring sale in euros or dollars. But on March 28, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia was “not engaged in charity” and won’t supply gas to Europe for free (which it would be doing if sales were in euros or dollars it cannot currently use in trade). Sanctions themselves are a breach of the agreement to honor the currencies on global markets.

Bloomberg reports that on March 30, Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the lower Russian house of parliament, suggested in a Telegram post that Russia may expand the list of commodities for which it demands payment from the West in rubles (or gold) to include grain, oil, metals and more. Russia’s economy is much smaller than that of the U.S. and the European Union, but Russia is a major global supplier of key commodities – including not just oil, natural gas and grains, but timber, fertilizers, nickel, titanium, palladium, coal, nitrogen, and rare earth metals used in the production of computer chips, electric vehicles and airplanes.

On April 2, Russian gas giant Gazprom officially halted all deliveries to Europe via the Yamal-Europe pipeline, a critical artery for European energy supplies.

U.K. professor of economics Richard Werner calls the Russian move a clever one – a replay of what the U.S. did in the 1970s. To get Russian commodities, “unfriendly” countries will have to buy rubles, driving up the value of the ruble on global exchanges just as the need for petrodollars propped up the U.S. dollar after 1974. Indeed, by March 30, the ruble had already risen to where it was a month earlier.

A Page Out of the “American System” Playbook

Russia is following the U.S. not just in hitching its national currency to sales of a critical commodity but in an earlier protocol – what 19th century American leaders called the “American System” of sovereign money and credit. Its three pillars were (a) federal subsidies for internal improvements and to nurture the nation’s fledgling industries, (b) tariffs to protect those industries, and (c) easy credit issued by a national bank.

Michael Hudson, a research professor of economics and author of “Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire” among many other books, notes that the sanctions are forcing Russia to do what it has been reluctant to do itself – cut reliance on imports and develop its own industries and infrastructure. The effect, he says, is equivalent to that of protective tariffs. In an article titled “The American Empire Self-destructs,” Hudson writes of the Russian sanctions (which actually date back to 2014):

Russia had remained too enthralled by free-market ideology to take steps to protect its own agriculture or industry. The United States provided the help that was needed by imposing domestic self-reliance on Russia (via sanctions). When the Baltic states lost the Russian market for cheese and other farm products, Russia quickly created its own cheese and dairy sector – while becoming the world’s leading grain exporter.

Russia is discovering (or is on the verge of discovering) that it does not need U.S. dollars as backing for the ruble’s exchange rate. Its central bank can create the rubles needed to pay domestic wages and finance capital formation. The U.S. confiscations thus may finally lead Russia to end neoliberal monetary philosophy, as Sergei Glaziev has long been advocating in favor of MMT [Modern Monetary Theory]. …

What foreign countries have not done for themselves – replacing the IMF, World Bank and other arms of U.S. diplomacy – American politicians are forcing them to do. Instead of European, Near Eastern and Global South countries breaking away out of their own calculation of their long-term economic interests, America is driving them away, as it has done with Russia and China.

Glazyev and the Eurasian Reset

Sergei Glazyev, mentioned by Hudson above, is a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin and the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission, the regulatory body of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). He has proposed using tools similar to those of the “American System,” including converting the Central Bank of Russia to a “national bank” issuing Russia’s own currency and credit for internal development. On February 25, Glazyev published an analysis of U.S. sanctions titled “Sanctions and Sovereignty,” in which he stated:

[T]he damage caused by US financial sanctions is inextricably linked to the monetary policy of the Bank of Russia …. Its essence boils down to a tight binding of the ruble issue to export earnings, and the ruble exchange rate to the dollar. In fact, an artificial shortage of money is being created in the economy, and the strict policy of the Central Bank leads to an increase in the cost of lending, which kills business activity and hinders the development of infrastructure in the country.

Glazyev said that if the central bank replaced the loans withdrawn by its Western partners with its own loans, Russian credit capacity would greatly increase, preventing a decline in economic activity without creating inflation.

Russia has agreed to sell oil to India in India’s own sovereign currency, the rupee; to China in yuan; and to Turkey in lira. These national currencies can then be spent on the goods and services sold by those countries. Arguably, every country should be able to trade in global markets in its own sovereign currency; that is what a fiat currency is – a medium of exchange backed by the agreement of the people to accept it at value for their goods and services, backed by the “full faith and credit” of the nation.

But that sort of global barter system would break down just as local barter systems do, if one party to the trade did not want the goods or services of the other party. In that case, some intermediate reserve currency would be necessary to serve as a medium of exchange.

Glazyev and his counterparts are working on that. In a translated interview posted on The Saker, Glazyev stated:

We are currently working on a draft international agreement on the introduction of a new world settlement currency, pegged to the national currencies of the participating countries and to exchange-traded goods that determine real values. We won’t need American and European banks. A new payment system based on modern digital technologies with a blockchain is developing in the world, where banks are losing their importance.

Russia and China have both developed alternatives to the SWIFT messaging system from which certain Russian banks have been blocked. London-based commentator Alexander Mercouris makes the interesting observation that going outside SWIFT means Western banks cannot track Russian and Chinese trades.

Geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar sums up the plans for a Eurasian/China financial reset in an article titled “Say Hello to Russian Gold and Chinese Petroyuan.” He writes:

It was a long time coming, but finally some key lineaments of the multipolar world’s new foundations are being revealed.

On Friday [March 11], after a videoconference meeting, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and China agreed to design the mechanism for an independent international monetary and financial system. The EAEU consists of Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia, is establishing free trade deals with other Eurasian nations, and is progressively interconnecting with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

For all practical purposes, the idea comes from Sergei Glazyev, Russia’s foremost independent economist ….

Quite diplomatically, Glazyev attributed the fruition of the idea to “the common challenges and risks associated with the global economic slowdown and restrictive measures against the EAEU states and China.”

Translation: as China is as much a Eurasian power as Russia, they need to coordinate their strategies to bypass the US unipolar system.

The Eurasian system will be based on “a new international currency,” most probably with the yuan as reference, calculated as an index of the national currencies of the participating countries, as well as commodity prices. …

The Eurasian system is bound to become a serious alternative to the US dollar, as the EAEU may attract not only nations that have joined BRI … but also the leading players in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as well as ASEAN. West Asian actors – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon – will be inevitably interested.

Exorbitant Privilege or Exorbitant Burden?

If that system succeeds, what will the effect be on the U.S. economy? Investment strategist Lynn Alden writes in a detailed analysis titled “The Fraying of the US Global Currency Reserve System” that there will be short-term pain, but, in the long run, it will benefit the U.S. economy. The subject is complicated, but the bottom line is that reserve currency dominance has resulted in the destruction of our manufacturing base and the buildup of a massive federal debt. Sharing the reserve currency load would have the effect that sanctions are having on the Russian economy – nurturing domestic industries as a tariff would, allowing the American manufacturing base to be rebuilt.

Other commentators also say that being the sole global reserve currency is less an exorbitant privilege than an exorbitant burden. Losing that status would not end the importance of the U.S. dollar, which is too heavily embedded in global finance to be dislodged. But it could well mean the end of the petrodollar as sole global reserve currency, and the end of the devastating petroleum wars it has funded to maintain its dominance.

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This article was first posted on ScheerPost.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.

6 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Eric Zuesse

An update to

How Both Putin and Biden Bungled in Ukraine

By Eric Zuesse, April 04, 2022

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On April 4th, Russia’s RT headlined “Russia and Ukraine trade accusations over Bucha civilian deaths (TIMELINE): After footage of dead civilians in the Ukrainian city of Bucha emerged, the West immediately pointed the finger at Moscow”, and included such items as, on April 2nd,

One clip published and later deleted by Ukrainian military commander Sergey Korotkih showed Ukrainian troops in Bucha discussing engagement rules. Korotkih, formerly a citizen of Belarus, is an open neo-Nazi who went to Ukraine back in 2014 to fight in the ranks of the notorious Azov Battalion. In Russia, Korotkih is wanted on multiple murder charges. One of the fighters can be heard asking if it was OK to shoot at “guys not wearing blue armbands” identifying Ukrainian soldiers. The response was an affirmative “you bet”.

This links through to this uploaded cellphone video evidence recording that conversation, physically onsite at Bucha, as Ukraine’s forces were coming into the area to inspect and evaluate the situation and to record and display the extent of their victory there.

Furthermore, on April 4th, Russia’s Ministry of Defense alleged that:

“All units of Russian troops completely withdrew from Bucha on March 30, and these shots [videos about Bucha that were distributed to the press] appeared on the 4th day after that, when SBU officers and representatives of Ukrainian TV arrived in the area”

If this statement is true, this would prove (even without there having been the necessary independent international investigation into Ukraine’s allegations on the matter) that Ukraine’s accusations were, in fact, bald-faced lies.

If Russia’s allegations in that Bucha matter are true, then, of course, the propaganda-value of the ‘news’-reports by CNN and others regarding it will reduce with time, and perhaps even become the enduring scandal here — yet another scandal of U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media being actually instead propaganda-media. Trusting Western reports regarding Russia might then turn out to be even stupider than it was before.

Putin’s reputation in the U.S.-and-allied countries might then not suffer long-term harm from the Bucha matter. Putin’s approval-rating within Russia, itself, has risen from his low of around 60% in August 2021 to above 80% now, mainly as a result of soaring from 71% just before the February 24th invasion.

However, what’s far more important going forward will be the public opinion of him outside Russia, in the countries that never really stopped their Cold War against Russia after the Soviet Union’s 1991 end. America’s regime-change-in-Russia campaign will almost certainly not succeed by driving Putin’s approval-rating inside Russia down to where, say, Joe Biden’s in America is. But if America takes an alternative approach, such as a military coup, or a blitz invasion of Russia, perhaps the people who rule in America might ultimately succeed (in which case what happened to Ukraine after Obama conquered it in 2014 might happen, some day, to Russia itself).

The South Front Report

Then, later on April 4th, the best news-site on the war, South Front, bannered “NEW EVIDENCES SHED LIGHT ON ALLEGED MASSACRE IN BUCHA, KIEV REGION (VIDEO, PHOTO)”, and reported that,

Today, there are more interesting videos from Bucha shared by the Ukrainian military which may help to shed light on what did really happen in the town left by the Russian troops on March 30.

On April 2, a day before Ukrainian “journalists” came to Bucha to stage the horrific scenes on the streets, the National Police of Ukraine published a video of the mop up operation in Bucha.

Video Player

00:00

07:48

The footage confirmed that:

• there were no corpses laying on the streets. Not a single civilian confirmed that any mass shootings [had occurred] in the city.
• Ukrainian demining teams who entered the town right after the Russian withdrawal had no work to do. They are seen walking on the streets along with civilians. Not a single mine left by the Russians was shown on the video.
• Servicemen of the National Guard asked some civilians if they needed help, none of them replied asking for any immediate assistance, confirming that they are fine.

Only one man is seen killed in his car. It is not clear how did his death happen. Another victim was obviously a servicemen of one of the warring sides killed in clashes, whose corps[e] is laying [lying] near a destroyed military equipment.

One of [the] Ukrainian “patriots” made a comment on behaviour of the “Russian invaders”. After his own compatriots told Russian servicemen about his acute social awareness, Russian military checked his apartment but found only flags and a bunch of Ukrainian symbols. To add some drama to his case, the man claimed that [a] Russian soldier took him out “to kill him”, but suddenly changed his mind and brought the man to the military commander. The brave patriot only had a short peaceful conversation with Russian servicemen, with no tortures. …

This video of the National Police of Ukraine, shot presumably on April 1 or earlier, does not really correspond to what the Ukrainian media published on April 3, trumpeting to the whole world that the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation allegedly carried out a “mass massacre” of civilians.

As more photos are shared from the spot, more proves [proofs], that the scene was staged, appear.

As the main video proof from Bucha raised a lot of suspicions and was quickly disclaimed, it was accompanied by more fake photos allegedly made in the town.

Unfortunately, these attempts are even less effective and are evident lies. For example, notorious Advisor to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Arestovich published the photo of a woman tortured in Mariupol last week by Ukrainian Azov militants, claiming that she was a victim tortured by the Russians. The photo was later deleted but was widely spread by the Ukrainian MSM, who even did not come together if it was in Gostomel or in Bucha. The Ukrainian media are trying their best to gain as much hype as possible, lying on any matter. …

The Al Jazeera Report

However, at around the same time, Al Jazeera, which is owned by the Thani family of U.S.-allied Qatar, headlined “Bucha killings: ‘The world cannot be tricked anymore’,” and showed Ukraine-government-supporting alleged “witnesses” who alleged that Russian soldiers had perpetrated a “massacre” there, and urged international war-crimes trials against Russia’s leaders (and nothing against America’s leaders).

No one has — at least in any prominent ‘news’-medium — urged any war-crimes trial against any American leader: not against George W. Bush, nor against Obama, nor against Biden: no American leader at all.

Washington Post and AP Reports

Yet later in the day, America’s AP bannered “Biden: Putin should face war crimes trial for Bucha killings”, and an editorial in Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post headlined “The Bucha massacre should prompt a forceful response” and said that “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the civilian executions ‘genocide,’ and President Biden declared that Mr. Putin is ‘a war criminal.’ Those words will find meaning only with a determined prosecution.”

As-of day’s-end on the 4th, it seemed that there were corpses in Bucha, but there was no public information yet on the identities of the dead, nor on how many were civilians, how many were Ukrainian soldiers, and how many were Russian soldiers, and the ways in which each of those individuals had become killed — much less on whether any legal grounds yet existed for asserting that any “war crimes” had been perpetrated by anyone there.

And the Ukrainian account of the Bucha matter was full of faked ‘interpretations’ of the ‘evidence’ they were providing.

Nonetheless, on the morning of April 4th, Washington’s The Hill had bannered “Macron, EU official join calls for further sanctions over ‘clear’ indications of war crimes in Bucha”.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change.

6 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

 

By South Front

On April 3, the Ukrainian propaganda machine attempted another attack against Moscow. A few videos showing dozens of civilians who were allegedly killed by the Russian servicemen were widely spread by all the Ukrainian MSM.

The main thesis of the Ukrainian and Western media is that the Russian military left Bucha, causing huge civilian casualties. One of the main pieces of evidence was a video of the AFU driving along the city. Corpses of civilians were shown laying along the road.

The slightest analysis of the footage rose a lot of suspicions on its credibility. You can read more information HERE.

Today, there are more interesting videos from Bucha shared by the Ukrainian military which may help to shed light on what did really happen in the town left by the Russian troops on March 30.

On April 2, a day before Ukrainian “journalists” came to Bucha to stage the horrific scenes on the streets, the National Police of Ukraine published a video of the mop up operation in Bucha.

The footage confirmed that:

• there were no corpses laying on the streets. Not a single civilian confirmed that any mass shootings in the city.
• Ukrainian demining teams who entered the town right after the Russian withdrawal had no work to do. They are seen walking on the streets along with civilians. Not a single mine left by the Russians was shown on the video.
• Servicemen of the National Guard asked some of civilians if they need help, no of them replied asking for any immediate assistance, confirming that they are fine.

Only one man is seen killed in his car. It is not clear how did his death happen. Another victim was obviously a servicemen of one of the warring sides killed in clashes, whose corps is laying near a destroyed military equipment.

One of Ukrainian “patriots” made a comment on behaviour of the “Russian invaders”. After his own compatriots told Russian servicemen about his acute social awareness, Russian military checked his apartment but found only flags and a bunch of Ukrainian symbols. To add some drama to his case, the man claimed that the Russian soldier took him out “to kill him”, but suddenly changed his mind and brought the man to the military commander. The brave patriot only had a short peaceful conversation with Russian servicemen, with no tortures.

This video of the National Police of Ukraine, shot presumably on April 1 or earlier, does not really correspond to what the Ukrainian media published on April 3, trumpeting to the whole world that the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation allegedly carried out a “mass massacre” of civilians.

As more photos are shared from the spot, more proves that the scene was staged appear.

As the main video proof from Bucha raised a lot of suspicions and was quickly disclaimed, it was accompanied by more fake photos allegedly made in the town.

Unfortunately, these attempts are even less effective and are evident lies. For example, notorious Advisor to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Arestovich published the photo of a woman tortured in Mariupol last week by Ukrainian Azov militants, claiming that she was a victim tortured by the Russians.

The photo was later deleted but was widely spread by the Ukrainian MSM, who even did not come together if it was in Gostomel or in Bucha. The Ukrainian media are trying their best to gain as much hype as possible, lying on any matter.

In fact, Ukrainian media used a random photo of Yakut conscript soldiers, which was found in social networks.

These soldiers were demobilized a year ago. Now they were advised to hide their army photos so as not to be exposed in Ukrainian fakes.

Some of the victims in Bucha are people who were killed by the so-called Ukrainian territorial defense. This is confirmed by the Ukrainians themselves. The rest of the victims were killed in the shelling conducted by the AFU after the departure of Russian troops — this is indicated by a large number of craters from artillery strikes on the video.

On April 3, the Russian Defense Ministry confirmed that Kiev’s information about the mass killings in the Ukrainian Butcha was not true, and the footage was staged.

The Russian Defense Ministry stated that all the facts irrefutably confirm that the photos and video frames from Bucha are another staging of the Kiev regime for the Western media, as it was a case in Mariupol with the maternity hospital, as well as in other cities.

It was added that:

• All units of the Russian troops completely withdrew from Bucha on March 30, and these shots appeared on the 4th day after that, when SBU officers and representatives of Ukrainian TV arrived there;
• During the stay of Russian soldiers in Bucha, not a single civilian was injured;
• 452 tons of humanitarian aid were delivered and issued to civilians by Russian servicemen in the settlements of the Kiev region.

On April 4, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed that Russia sees a direct threat to international security in such provocations as in the Butchs. In turn, spokesperson of the Russian President Peskov claimed that Russia categorically rejects any accusations of involvement in the deaths of people in the Ukrainian Butcha, the topic should be discussed at the international level.

Peskov added that the videos distributed by Ukraine cannot be trusted, experts of the Russian Ministry of Defense have revealed signs of video forgery and fakes, facts and time lane also undermine the reliability of the statements of the Ukrainian side.

“We would demand that international leaders not rush into sweeping accusations and listen to Russia’s arguments.” -Peskov said.

In turn, the European Union has already claimed that its readiness to tighten sanctions against Russia and strengthen Kiev’s support in defense issues, according to German Foreign Minister Anna Lena Berbock on Twitter. European officials attribute this decision to the reports of the Ukrainian authorities about the events in Bucha. London followed their example.

Surprisingly, on April 4, London has not agreed to hold a meeting of the UN Security Council on the events in Bucha in Ukraine. This was stated by the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova in Telegram.

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6 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

 

By Rodney Atkinson

Russian troops evacuated Bucha on March 30. Ukrainian National Police began entering Bucha on March 31, and that same day the mayor of Bucha announced that the town was fully under the control of Ukrainian officials.

At no time was there any suggestion by the mayor (watch video below) or any other Ukrainian official of mass killings undertaken by Russia. Given that they are claiming bodies litter the streets they could hardly have escaped the attention of the Mayor!

Mayor of Bucha confirms liberation from Russian occupants

It took four day for claims of a “war crime” to emerge (3rd April).

Film of alleged victims on the roads in Bucha look suspicious, with “bodies” moving. (we know this has happened in other staged and acted films provided by Ukraine’s propaganda) It is claimed that civilians had been shot and buried in shallow graves. We know from the behaviour of NATO allies in the Yugoslav war that in Racak dead soldiers were dressed up as civilians and then paraded as the victims of “a massacre” which was later debunked.

There is also the possibility that those civilians in Bucha who were accused of cooperating with Russian forces could have been executed by Ukrainian forces following the Russian exit on 30th March.

It is also both unprecedented and suspicious that the U.K. Chair at the UN Security Council refused an emergency meeting called by Russia on 3rd April to discuss the Bucha claims.

A Ukrainian MP Ilya Kiva has accused the Ukrainian SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] of fabricating (with the help of MI6) the Bucha “crimes”. (see youtube unless it has been censored already!)

If only we could say that “time will tell” which side is telling the truth! But there is certainly no doubt about the self-filmed Ukrainian crimes in this post (see below).

The Cynical Sacrifice of Ukraine

In an interview with CNN ON 20th March, Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy said of Joe Biden and the NATO leadership (the interview)

“I requested them personally to say directly that we are going to accept you into NATO in a year or two or five, just say it directly and clearly, or just say no,” Zelensky said. “And the response was very clear, you’re not going to be a NATO member, but publicly, the doors will remain open,”

Nothing shows the cynical sacrifice of Ukrainians more than this duplicitous treatment of Zelensky by NATO. Privately NATO and the Biden administration were telling Zelenskyy Ukraine was never going to be in NATO, yet they told him they were going to act publicly as if the possibility existed. The latter position (together with Zelensky’s remarks about developing nuclear weapons) they knew would provoke Russia into war.

The German President has every reason to be angry at this given that he promised Zelensky before the war that if he rejected NATO membership the Russians wouldn’t attack.

The evident (at least 8 year long) intent of the USA and NATO to provoke Russia into an attack was confirmed by Biden’s intemperate admission (on his visit to Poland) that he wanted regime change in Moscow. As Madeleine Albright (recently deceased) said in 1998

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America! We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

According to recent polls, one-third of the American people were enthusiastic about the idea of nuclear war with Russia. Even though as one commentator pointed out most of them would be Democrat supporting inhabitants of major cities which would be nuclear bomb targets! After years of wall to wall Russophobic bigotry and lies about Ukraine blasted out by tech companies, politicians and the mainstream media this mad mass psychosis is no surprise.

David Sanger reported for the New York Times that the Biden administration

“seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential paths to de-escalation … CIA officers are helping to ensure that crates of weapons are delivered into the hands of vetted (!!!) Ukrainian military units, according to American officials.”

In fact (as happened with US weapons provided to Syrian rebel forces) hundreds of tanks and anti tank weapons have found their way into the hands of the Russians as Ukrainian troops have defected, been killed or captured.

The Mindless Western and Ukrainian War Propaganda

Here are some examples of the blatantly distorted media and image war. A picture of an injured child from Damascus is used again as anti Russian propaganda in Ukraine:

Here a “heartbreaking” image of a Ukrainian soldier leaving his loved one to go to war turns out to be from fiction film “The War of Chimeras”.

The BBC broadcast on the World Service the news that somewhere called “Tarkov” was resisting the Russians. Pity it is a fictional city from a computer game!

A film of a rocket ostensibly shooting down a Russian aircraft also turned out to be a scene from a commercial film!

Russian Civilians Killed in East Ukraine Don’t Make News

This DONETSK bombing by Ukrainian troops which killed 20 civilians was not reported in the western media. The missile was one used only by Ukrainian forces. See this.

Indeed there is a report that a far greater crime had been intended with civilians drawn by false information to an Administration building with fake text messages.

The very next day, Monday March 14th, at about 12:20 in the afternoon, the ukrops (Ukrainian forces) launched a Tochka-U ballistic missile with a 1,000 pound anti-personnel cluster bomb warhead at the Administration building in the city center.

The Nazis sent text messages and posted on social media (under fake pro-DPR accounts) for mothers, wives and sisters of our soldiers to gather at the administration building at noon on Monday to get information about their men. THIS was the intended target of the missile.

As many civilian women as possible. And it is not a rumour, I can confirm I have seen the text message myself sent to the daughter of one of my comrades. Our air defence intercepted the missile and prevented it from reaching the target, but some of the cluster bomb cassettes fell on University Avenue in downtown Donetsk (where the 20 civilians were killed).

Ukrainian War Crimes and Propaganda

As befits a regime headed by a comedian and actor, never has one side in a war used so many actors to fake scenes for propaganda purposes. The most common has been the use of actors to fake dead bodies. The most recent being claims related to areas where Russian troops have withdrawn since 30th March. Here a “body” moves and after the car goes by, starts to get up.

A similar film was taken a couple of weeks ago ostensibly from a morgue where some 30 “bodies” were lined up. Unfortunately some of them moved while the filming was going on!

Ukrainian Psychopaths

But such fakes are nothing compared to the treatment by Ukrainian soldiers of captured Russians in an infamous video.

At the beginning of the video, we can see Ukrainian soldiers shooting newly arrived prisoners through their legs. Needless to say they are not treated. Shock could have killed them due to the pain. In the rest of the video Russian POWs lying on the ground with bullet wounds in their legs. Some of them have their legs broken. It takes psychopaths to film their own atrocities and then make it public. All of this was filmed by Ukrainian soldiers themselves.

Article 13 of the Third Geneva Convention states: “Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated.” Here Ukrainian soldiers call up the mothers and wives of soldiers they have killed, mocking them

Ukrainian Soldiers Film Themselves Calling Up Mothers of Russian Soldiers Killed in Action And Mocking Them

Crimes in the Donbass

“Tatyana accompanies me to the hospital. She has also lived in Volnovakha most of her life. “The Ukrainians deliberately destroyed us. They needed the land. And then, it seems, the land was no longer needed, so they just beat us out of anger,” she says, pointing to holes blown into the hospital by shells and shrapnel-scarred asphalt. Then she takes me to the morgue, a small building that has also been noticeably damaged by shooting. The door turns out to be unlocked, and I see the morgue is completely filled with dead bodies. They lie in the corridor stacked up in two or three layers.

According to Tatyana, the National Guard soldiers siphoned diesel fuel from the hospital’s generators, so all the old people who depended on artificial ventilation devices died. “

The Ukrainian military allegedly said they would “leave nothing” in Volnovakha if they were ousted by pro-Russian forces.

See this.

When Fox News’ Bret Baier asked President Zelensky on Friday about reports of Azov Battalion committing atrocities, Zelensky appeared to brush them off by saying, “They are what they are, they were defending our country.” Fox then censored their report!

See this.

The main reason why so many civilian buildings have been damaged and destroyed in Ukrainian towns is because Ukrainian soldiers have used those buildings and the civilians in and around them as human shields. Here is a report from Odessa which although not yet the centre of Russian operations its preparing for an attack. Ukrainian troops have apparently taken up positions in Schools and hospitals.

See this.

Odessa native (Lev Vershinin) living in exile in the EU wrote in this article in Russian:

• Nazi/Ukr-soldiers taking positions in schools, hospitals:
• school no.1 at Mikhailovskiy-Place 10
• school no. 57 at Yamchinkiy street 7
• school no. 59 at Maraslievskyy street 60
• medical centre/surgery at Sudostroitelnaya 1
• Odessa University clinic at Tenista st. 8
• maternity clinics no.1 and no.4
• evening school no.25 at Staroportofrankovskiy st 45a
• Marinskiy gymnasium at Lev-Tolstoy-st 9

Aidar-leader Maksim Marchenko in a document of 16/3/2022 ordered his troops to prevent civilians from leaving the city (apparently a document with his stamp & signature exists). This has been the norm which is why the humanitarian corridors offered by the Russians were for a long time a dangerous failure. Only the Ukrainians have the incentive to bottle up civilians as human shields in the cities to which they have retreated. They know the Russians don’t want to destroy such heritage but are forced to fire on buildings which protect Ukrainian gun positions. Would the British Government station guns in St Paul’s Cathedral?

Oles Yanchuk – former mayor of Odessa, now leader of Nazi-battalion “Bratstvo” – said about Odessa: the city will be destroyed (by us): “if they come to Odessa, they will receive it only burned down and destroyed.”

Other buildings used by Ukrainian troops have been a synagogue and the famous Pecherskaya Lavra monastery in Kiev. See this.

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6 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By T.J. Coles

Since the US-engineered 2013-14 coup in Ukraine, American forces have taught Ukrainians, including neo-Nazi units, how to fight in urban and other civilian areas. Weaponizing Ukraine is part of Washington’s quest for what the Pentagon calls “full spectrum dominance.”

“[I]f you can learn all modalities of war, then you can be the god of war,” so said a Ukrainian artillery commander in 2016 while receiving training from the US Army.

The unnamed commander was quoted by Lt. Claire Vanderberg, a mortar platoon leader training soldiers as part of the Pentagon’s Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine. The training has taken place at the absurdly named International Peacekeeping and Security Center, which sits close to the border with Poland near the Ukrainian town of Yavoriv. Western media reported Russia’s recent cruise missile attack on the base, but chose not to mention what has taken place inside.

The relationship described above is a snapshot of a decades-long US-NATO effort to not only pull Ukraine from Russia’s orbit, but to actively weaponize the country against Moscow.

US national security state acknowledges “Russia is pushing back,” not pushing first

In their internal documents, the Pentagon and other arms of the US national security state reiterate the same arguments the anti-war left does when it explains how Ukraine has been used to provoke Russia into a military escalation. The principal difference is that the Pentagon speaks from an unabashedly imperialist perspective in which such provocations are seen as an important component of US power projection.

Recently, the US Director of National Intelligence’s Annual Threat Assessment reported: “Russia is pushing back against Washington where it can—locally and globally—employing techniques up to and including the use of force.” Note: Russia is “pushing back,” not pushing first.

A report from 2021 by the National Intelligence Council concedes of Russia and China: “Neither has felt secure in an international order designed for and dominated by democratic powers,” with “democratic” meaning the US and friends. Both Russia and China “have promoted a sovereignty-based international order that protects their absolute authority within their borders and geographic areas of influence.”

In October 2017, US Army Field Artillery School Assistant Commandant, Col. Heyward Hutson, who is responsible for training Ukrainians, explained: “Ukraine wants to become a NATO nation, but Russia doesn’t want them to be a NATO nation. Russia wants to have a buffer zone.” He added that another “problem is a lot of Eastern Ukraine is pro-Russia so the civilian population there is divided.” A 2016 US Army War College report reiterated: “Russia’s basic national security strategy is to keep its ‘neighboring belt stable’, NATO weak, China close, and the United States focused elsewhere.”

Another, from 2007, explains that the “pro-reform forces in power since the Orange Revolution” (read: pro-US forces) “would like to move Ukraine squarely into the Euro-Atlantic community with only limited deference to Russia.”

The document goes on to note that, at the time, the “Ukrainian political and military leadership has remained divided over the question of whether Ukraine should pursue a collective security approach or retain its neutral status.” It concluded that, while “[m]ost senior [Ukrainian] commanders have pro-reform credentials… there are still large numbers of senior leaders within the Main Defense Forces who have no or only limited exposure to Western training and operations.”

The US-sponsored coup of 2013-14 enabled Washington to smooth over that contradiction by launching an extensive program to train units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

NATO is “not an exercise in diplomacy and deterrence as before”

When the Soviet Union collapsed, so too did its military alliance, the Warsaw Pact. But the West not only refused to disband its alliance—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—it expanded up to Russia’s borders.

NATO’s own records state that in 1992:

“Just four months after Ukraine’s declaration of independence” from the USSR, “NATO invited its representative to an extraordinary meeting of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, the body set up to shape cooperation between NATO and the states of the former Warsaw Pact.”

Russia did not propose a similar pact with America’s neighbors.

In 1994, Ukraine joined the so-called Partnership for Peace (PFP). Citing the UN Charter, the PFP states that signatories agree “to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, to respect existing borders and to settle disputes by peaceful means.” A US State Department primer reveals that the PFP had an ulterior motive. Its real aim was not neutrality but to move Ukraine and other signatories closer to NATO.

“Participation in PFP does not guarantee entry into NATO, but it is the best preparation for states interested in becoming NATO members.”

The primer also lists the 52 actual and planned military exercises in which PFP members initially engaged on or near Russia’s borders.

Bill Clinton-era policymakers explained that “NATO is not merely an exercise in preventive diplomacy and deterrence as before.” NATO expansion had a political agenda. They considered “NATO enlargement [a]s a democratization policy.” As above, “democratization” means pro-US. Citing President Clinton’s 1996 campaign speeches, the report notes that in their minds NATO “will provide the stability needed for greater economic development in Central and Eastern Europe.” In other words, post-USSR NATO was designed, in part, to guarantee US led-“free markets” (which are often neither free nor markets, but monopolies,) in ex-Soviet nations where state-ownership of businesses was the norm.

In 1997, NATO and Ukraine signed the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership. The Charter was a prima facie violation of the PFP in that it compromised Ukraine’s political independence. It proposed several areas of NATO-Ukraine cooperation, “including civil emergency planning, military training and environmental security.” NATO brags: “cooperation between NATO and Ukraine quickly developed” in the form of “retraining for former military officers … and invit[ing] Ukraine to participate in NATO-led exercises.”

Making Ukraine a “military partner of the US”

The US Army says: “Ukraine has been a military partner of the U.S. dating back to the mid 1990s.” In 1998, America’s Special Operations Command Europe hosted a Special Operations Forces (SOF) conference in Stuttgart, Germany. The US Army reports: “This benchmark even brought military personnel from Moldova, Georgia, and the Ukraine together to view U.S. SOF demonstrations and discuss opportunities for future Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) and Joint Contact Team Program (JCTP) events.”

In June 2000, the US Marines reported that the Navy’s amphibious warship, the USS Trenton, had sailed from the Aegean to the Black Sea and had docked in Odessa (Ukraine). The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) “got to experience some of Odessa’s history first hand when they climbed the Prymorsky, or ‘Maritime’, Stairs.” In addition to the pleasantries, “the focus for MEU personnel and USS Trenton crew [was] NATO’s next exercise – Cooperative Partner 2000 (CP00) – of which Ukraine is the host nation.”

In addition to Ukraine’s participation in the US-led NATO training and exercises, Ukrainian soldiers fought in American-led wars. After 9/11, they participated in the occupation of Afghanistan via NATO’s so-called International Security Assistance Force. Ukrainian troops also aided the US-British-occupation of Iraq. In 2008, the Army lauded their comrades: “More than 5,000 Ukrainian troops have served in Iraq during Ukraine’s five years of service in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

After backing 2014 coup, US provides “lethal security assistance”

Established in 2014 during the US-backed coup, the Ukraine component of the US State Department and Pentagon’s Global Security Contingency Fund (GSCF) provides tens of millions of dollars-worth of training and equipment to “develop the tactical, operational, and institutional training capacities of its Ministry of Defense and National Guard.” The State Department says: “The GSCF has also supported Ukrainian Special Operations Forces in developing tactical and institutional capabilities that are compatible with Western models.”

According to one Pentagon-linked journal: “Arsen Avakov, the Minister of Internal Affairs from 2014 to 2021[, …] enabled the expansion and later integration of paramilitary forces into the National Guard,” including the nazi Azov Battalion.

From 2015, the Pentagon’s European Command oversaw the Joint Multinational Task Force-Ukraine (JMTF-U), in which the US Army and National Guard trains the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In addition, officers were trained in the US through the International Military Education and Training program. The Congressional Research Service reports that, “[s]eparately, U.S. Special Operations Forces have trained and advised Ukrainian special forces.” In addition, the US participates in the annual NATO Partnership for Peace exercise, Rapid Trident.

In November 2015, supposedly at the request of the new pro-US regime, the Obama administration sent two AN/TPQ radar systems to Ukraine. “President Petro Poroshenko had the opportunity to review the equipment, and was briefed by U.S. military personnel on its capabilities.”

The US Army later revealed that the radar system was not purely defensive. A team from US Army Europe, Fort Sill’s Fires Center of Excellence (FCoE), and the Army Security Assistance Training Management Organization (SATMO) “conducted four weeks of operator training.”

Since the initial delivery, “Ukraine received four additional Q-36 radars … and training by U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command with support from the FCoE and USSATMO.” The publication quoted one trainer as saying that “the U.S. team showed their brigade, battalion and platoon commanders how to tactically employ the radar system to support fire and maneuver efforts.”

Since 2016, SATMO’s Doctrine Education Advisory Group (DEAG) “has advised Ukrainian Security Forces at the operational level to revise doctrine, improve professional military education, enhance NATO interoperability and increase combat readiness.” In January this year, DEAG brought the first load of $200m-worth of “lethal security assistance, including ammunition for the frontline defenders of Ukraine.”

US trains Ukrainians to “blend into the local populace” waging warfare in civilian-heavy areas

One of the more immoral US actions in Ukraine has been the training of armed forces to fight in civilian areas, goading Russia to fight in densely-populated locations with the effect of scoring anti-Russia propaganda points when Russians kill Ukrainian civilians.

In 2015, the US Marines implied that American service personnel would travel to Ukraine to fight. “Unofficial travel (leave or liberty) to any country in Africa or the following European countries [including Ukraine and its neighbors] requires command O-6 level approval … The countries are subject to change based on the Foreign Clearance Guide (FCG), Department of State (DOS), Combatant Command, and/or Intelligence threat notifications.” This suggests preparation for “irregular” warfare.

An undated document published by the US Special Operations Center of Excellence (SOCE), apparently from around 2017, states that “the United States should learn from the Chechnya rebels’ reaction” to Russia’s invasion of Chechnya in the ‘90s. It explains that the “rebels” engaged in “decentralized operations,” using social media to “blend into the local populace.” Russia’s enemies used “misinformation” to manipulate Russians into killing the rebels’ enemies.

The SOCE paper goes on to note that the Army Special Operation Forces “are trained to thrive in these environments.” The document explicitly advocates for the US to train irregular forces to provoke Russia: “The United States should form an interagency working group with the Department of State, members of the intelligence community and SOCOM,” the Special Operations Command, which would “serv[e] as the DoD lead/representative.” It suggests that such a working group “understand that SOCOM actions will need to be unconventional and irregular in order to compete with Russian modern warfare tactics.”

By bolstering Ukraine’s armed forces and goading Russia, US elites have openly used Ukrainian civilians as pawns. For many years, Ukrainian forces were trained in urban combat by US personnel: i.e., to fight Russians in densely-populated civilian areas. “Task Force Illini” is comprised of 150 soldiers from the 33rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team of the Illinois Army National Guard.

In September 2020, the US Army reported that Armed Forces Ukraine soldiers “honed their urban operations skills as Task Force Illini advisors lent their expertise at Combat Training Center in Yavoriv” – the Western Ukrainian de facto NATO base near Poland’s border.

“Thunderbirds” train Ukrainian in full-scale vehicular combat

The Oklahoma-based “Thunderbirds” have gone through several incarnations over the last century. The army unit was originally known as the 45th Infantry Division and is now the 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team. By early-2017, the JMTG-U mission fell under the 7th Army Training Command and US Army Europe, which paired Thunderbirds from the 1st Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment with soldiers from the Ukrainian 28th Mechanized Brigade and 79th Airborne Brigade. Their goal was to prepare Ukrainians for full-on vehicular combat.

Putin claims that Ukraine is a pawn of NATO. US propaganda rejects the notion, attempting to prove it by publicly ruling out Ukraine’s membership in the Alliance. But in April 2017, the US Army admitted that under the JMTG-U, the Thunderbirds’ mission was “to train the Ukrainian army to NATO standards, develop their noncommissioned officer corps, and help them to establish a combat training center, so that in the future, they can continue to train themselves.” So, if the Ukrainian military is trained to NATO standards and is overseen by a US puppet president, it might as well be part of NATO, minus the US obligation to come to its defense.

The proposed center became the Yavoriv Combat Training Center. The US Army reported that in October 2017, “a new grenade range was opened. Maj. Montana Dugger said: “We’ve helped them build long-range maintenance plans so they’ll be able to use these facilities for the next 20, 30-plus years.”

Seemingly ignorant of the comical doublespeak, the US Army also explained that Ukrainian’s Combat Training Center “is being established at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center near Yavoriv.” Also ironic is that while the Thunderbirds train a military incorporating neo-Nazi units to fight Russians in Ukraine, its pre-1930s insignia was a swastika, which its Oklahoma-based museum describes as “an Ancient American Indian symbol of good luck.”

CIA covert operations’ goal: “kill Russians”

In addition to the overt but under- or non-reported events outlined above, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has run a covert, eight-year training program. Why the need for covert ops in the face of extensive overt projects? The CIA specializes in assassination, proxy warfare, psychological operations, and false flags. This suggests that their efforts include tactics prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

Yahoo! News reported that in 2014, under a doctrine called “covert action funding,” “a small, select group of veteran CIA paramilitaries made their first secret trips to the frontlines to meet with Ukrainian counterparts.” The training was conducted by the CIA’s Special Activities Center, which suggests that even if the officers were “ex-CIA” and Special Forces, they were given access to Langley at high-levels, making it a de facto official mission.

One operative is quoted as saying that the officers attempted to Talibanize the Ukrainian paramilitaries in the sense that the Afghan Taliban had no sophisticated hardware that was vulnerable to enemy blinding. Ergo, basic, non-tech warfare training was required. The report says that the trainers:

“taught their Ukrainian counterparts sniper techniques; how to operate U.S.-supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles and other equipment; how to evade digital tracking the Russians used to pinpoint the location of Ukrainian troops, which had left them vulnerable to attacks by artillery; how to use covert communications tools; and how to remain undetected in the war zone while also drawing out Russian and insurgent forces from their positions, among other skills, according to former officials.”

In addition, one former senior source said (paraphrased by the reporter): “The agency needed to determine the ‘backbone’ of the Ukrainians … The question was, ‘Are they going to get rolled, or are going to stand up and fight?”

So who tends to have “backbone,” i.e., a ruthless and psychopathic fighting spirit? Fascists and ultra-nationalists. Indeed, it has been widely reported by even US corporate media that the Ukrainian Armed Forces and paramilitary units were infested with Nazis. Today, the same media refer to the Nazis as mere nationalists.

Beginning 2015, the CIA’s Ground Department arranged for Ukrainians to be trained in the US south. The operations continue to the present and have been expanded under the Biden administration. “The multiweek, U.S.-based CIA program has included training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, tactics like ‘cover and move,’ intelligence and other areas.” One senior officer is quoted as saying: “The United States is training an insurgency … to kill Russians.”

In February this year, shortly before the Russian invasion, it was reported that the CIA had been “preparing Ukrainians to mount an insurgency against a Russian occupation.” Against an occupation? Or an insurgency to provoke an occupation?

In addition to the CIA, the US military has its own covert operations. Under the Resistance Operating Concept started in 2018, the Pentagon appears to have been training territorial defense units comprised of Ukrainian civilians. This seems to have led to the creation by Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces creating a National Resistance Center that teaches civilians guerrilla tactics.

Ukraine military build-up brings the world to the brink

After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, pro-Russian eastern protests erupted in Donetsk and Luhansk. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) noted: “The government in Kyiv responded with military force and employed local militias to help push back the separatists.” The CRS added that the US leads Britain, Canada, and Lithuania in the Multinational Joint Commission on Defense Reform and Security Cooperation. The Pentagon’s European Command had a European Reassurance Initiative at the time, which is now called the European Deterrence Initiative. Under this program, dozens of Ukrainians were trained in Huntsville, Alabama, in RQ-11B, hand-launched Raven drone operations. Seventy-two drones were sent to Ukraine in 2016.

A January 2016 UK House of Commons Library research briefing states: “Fighting between Ukrainian government forces and Russian-backed separatists has killed more than 9,000 people since April 2014 and injured more than 20,000.” The briefing goes on to note that after the UN Security Council-backed Minsk II agreement, which called for a ceasefire and the withdrawal of frontline forces on both sides, the Ukrainian parliament granted special status and enhanced autonomy to parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.

The Royal United Services Institute is a UK Ministry of Defense-linked think-tank. One of its reports concedes that Russia had a largely “defensive policy” when it came to Ukraine. It says: “Russian officials have become alarmed by expanding and overlapping Western alliances from an enlarged NATO and EU, to AUKUS and the Coalition of Democracies promoted by both the US and the UK.”

Part of Russia’s strategy has its roots in the US-led destruction of Libya in 2011, the report explains. The NATO bombing of Libya and overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi “underscored how strong Western alliances were able to bypass or manipulate the [UN Security Council] UNSC, essentially circumventing a forum where Russian interests could be protected.”

Indeed, on February 27th, 2022, the UNSC adopted Resolution 2623, which states: “the lack of unanimity of its permanent members at the 8979th meeting has prevented it from exercising its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.”

The absence of international diplomacy, the weakness of a domestic anti-war movement in the US, and the cheerleading for war by many leftists and liberals under the doctrine that Putin is an evil villain has pushed the world as close to terminal nuclear disaster as it has been since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis; perhaps even closer. Many Russians have taken to the streets to clamor for a ceasefire. After looking the other way as their leaders spent the past 8 years weaponizing Ukraine against Russia, Western publics have yet to demand the same.

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T.J. Coles is a postdoctoral researcher at Plymouth University’s Cognition Institute and the author of several books, the latest being We’ll Tell You What to Think: Wikipedia, Propaganda and the Making of Liberal Consensus.

6 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Paul Joseph Watson

Footage posted to Twitter shows what appears to be Ukrainian soldiers calling up the mothers of dead Russian soldiers killed in action and mocking them over their loss.

Yes, really.

“Pro-Ukraine accounts on Twitter translated the videos and celebrated the heinous acts with glee,” writes Chris Menahan.

A translation of the exchange reveals that the soldier tells the mother “this fucking moron is no more,” informing her that all that was left of him was “his ass and a leg.”

The Ukrainian appeared to be using the phone that belonged to the dead Russian to call his mother.

An alleged neo-nazi Azov Battalion member named Ivan Zaliznyak uploaded the video and five others to his Telegram channel.

The clips hardly do much to bolster the narrative, relentlessly amplified by the legacy media, that the Ukrainians are the ‘good guys’.

Over the weekend, horrific footage emerged of Ukrainian fighters committing literal war crimes by shooting captured Russian soldiers in the knees and watching them die in agony.

However, that doesn’t seem to have deterred the ‘Ukrainian flag in my Twitter bio’ crowd, who seem more hopped up on signaling their virtue than ever before.

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6 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Peter Oborne

Prime Minister Imran Khan’s decision to dissolve the Pakistani parliament to head off a vote of no-confidence has been greeted by global shock and bemusement.

That bemusement is misplaced. I’ve covered Pakistani politics over two decades. As a long-term student (and admirer) of the country, I can state with confidence that the real shock is not that Pakistan has been struck by political crisis; it’s that it has taken so long.

Few democratically elected leaders of Pakistan last long. Indeed, not one of Khan’s predecessors has survived a full term since the country’s founding 75 years ago.

And Khan is no ordinary prime minister. Showing exceptional courage, he challenged vested interests. He tried to root out corruption. He forged a new, independent foreign policy. To his immense credit, he even jeopardised his rule by refusing point-blank to be a pawn of the US. Above all, Khan broke the mould of the stinking, corrupt and rotten two-party system that dominated Pakistan’s democratic politics for decades.

That has meant making enemies – plenty of them. Some are internal and others external. And now, they have come for him.

But before analysing the current standoff, it’s important to grasp that Khan has been vulnerable to attack ever since the party he founded, Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI, translated as Movement for Justice), secured power in 2018. PTI did not win the majority that Khan had yearned for, meaning that from the start, he was obliged to cobble together a coalition government.

Imran Khan: Pakistan’s Prime Minister on the Taliban, China and world cricket

In recent months, that precarious coalition has crumbled, as fair-weather supporters have succumbed to the entreaties of enemies – and, according to some reports, bribery or the covert encouragement of US diplomats.

Abiding weakness

Khan has many strengths as a politician, but in the context of Pakistani politics, one abiding weakness. True to his own nature and the precepts of his deep Islamic faith, he is not corrupt. This quality is not simply unusual in Pakistani politics; it’s a crippling drawback.

Khan’s honesty makes him fundamentally unsuited to the debased methods that are second nature to many successful Pakistani politicians. Last weekend, when Khan’s enemies thought they were about to destroy him, the embattled prime minister simply dissolved parliament, paving the way for elections. This decision has left Khan’s opponents in the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) clutching their pearls in horror.

How outrageous, they are in effect now saying, that the future of Pakistan should be decided by the democratic will of the people, rather than sordid deals struck in darkened rooms. I have been racking my brain to think of a precedent, not just in Pakistan but any country, for Khan’s decision to go to the country at a time of deep crisis. I’ve failed.

In Britain, my own country, how much better would it have been if, back in 1990 (when Khan was still captain of the Pakistani cricket team), Tory party plotters had chosen an election, rather than conspiring in smoke-filled rooms behind closed doors to destroy Margaret Thatcher, one of the greatest prime ministers in British history.

It would have been the right thing to do, and so much more democratic. That’s, of course, why the plotters didn’t want an election. They secretly feared that Thatcher was more popular than them, and I dare say they were right.

I have seen neither Bilawal Bhutto Zardari nor Shehbaz Sharif, the leaders of the two main opposition parties aiming to force Khan out, attempt to explain what’s wrong with a popular vote. Both men know that Khan will fight on his record – and that it’s stronger than they admit.

Economic disaster

Sharif especially knows that Khan inherited an economic mess when he took office four years ago – the legacy of egregious mismanagement by his own party, the Pakistan Muslim League. A highly intelligent and gifted man, Sharif must be agonisingly aware in private that his party was the architect of the massive debt and gross economic incompetence that Khan has struggled to confront since taking office.

The new leader inherited a virtually empty Treasury, a broken tax system and barely two months’ worth of foreign exchange reserves. To deal with Pakistan’s external debts, the Khan government hiked up the prices of power and fuel, bearing most heavily on the poor. Popular anger was inevitable, and Khan has certainly not solved all the country’s problems.

But he has done reasonably well given the need to deal (alongside every other world leader) with the Covid-19 pandemic. It is especially invidious, as his opponents have done, to blame Khan for the raging inflation that is a feature of the general global economy, and not only of Pakistan’s.

Yet, amid these difficulties, Khan has brought optimism and confidence to his high office. He has a more commanding presence on the international stage than any Pakistani leader since Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the brilliant and charismatic founder of the PPP (and grandfather of Khan’s current opponent, PPP chief Zardari).

Like Ali Bhutto, Khan has worked to shape Pakistan as an independent nation. Ali Bhutto turned Pakistan away from the craven dependence on the US that characterised the long dictatorship of Mohammad Ayub Khan. Imran Khan has sought to do the same, building alliances with China and Russia, while also reaching out to Muslim states such as Iran, Malaysia and Turkey. Even supporters must acknowledge this policy has enjoyed only mixed success.

Saudi influence

Pakistan’s economic predicament has left it dependent on its creditors, especially Saudi Arabia and China, two regimes with ruling principles far different from its own. This dependence is the main reason why Khan has not spoken out publicly against Chinese maltreatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. Khan has also been silent on the ongoing tragedy in Yemen, where hundreds of thousands of people have died as a direct or indirect result of the Saudi-led war.

The fact that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is for all intents and purposes Khan’s bank manager restrains him from speaking out – and not just over Yemen. When Khan wanted to join Malaysia and Turkey in an Islamic alliance, MBS intervened.

It is also important to note that Khan has disappointed onetime supporters who saw him as a fierce defender of human rights. They now accuse him of sanctioning attacks on journalists and the free press, allowing himself to become a willing tool of the Pakistani military.

Nevertheless, Khan has shown statesmanship over Kashmir, where his efforts to make peace have been thwarted by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Khan has also struck an independent line over Afghanistan. Since the fall of Kabul last August, there has been tension with Washington about US overflights of Pakistan. More importantly, Khan and the US have been at odds over Afghan state assets frozen by Washington, at a time when the funds are desperately needed to relieve starvation and poverty in Afghanistan.

Crucially, as with Ali Bhutto, this independence has infuriated Washington, which since its military defeat in Afghanistan has an even greater need for Pakistan to resume its traditional role as a US client state.

Vassal state

From my perspective here in London, I have no idea whether Khan’s claims that the US has been working to undermine him are true. But anyone with more than a passing familiarity with Pakistani history knows they are not, to put it mildly, absurd.

The US has treated Pakistan like a vassal state since its independence in 1947. The CIA engineered the coup that brought to an end to 11 years of civilian rule in 1958, and installed Pakistan’s first military dictator in the shape of the brutal Ayub Khan. With indecent alacrity, former President Dwight Eisenhower signalled US approval of the dictatorial regime by visiting Pakistan not long afterwards.

It is telling that only five US presidents have ever visited Pakistan – Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and George W Bush – and never during periods of civilian rule. US aid to Pakistan always skyrockets during military dictatorships, making a mockery of US claims to support democratic institutions.

As for President Joe Biden, Imran Khan told David Hearst and me, when we interviewed him for Middle East Eye last autumn, that the US leader had never so much as rung him up. Incredible, given the crisis in Afghanistan – and punishment, beyond doubt, for not taking the US line.

Do not forget that Khan first made his reputation as a highly principled critic of the US role in Pakistan, and in particular, his country’s acquiescence to American drone strikes against suspected Taliban leaders.

Overcoming the odds

It is also highly relevant that Khan’s foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, is equally as principled, displaying this a decade earlier when serving as foreign minister in the government of Asif Ali Zardari, father of the current PPP leader.

In 2011, then-CIA contractor Raymond Davis shot two Pakistanis in the back in the streets of Lahore, and then claimed diplomatic immunity. Rather than ensuring he faced justice, Zardari shamefully allowed the US to smuggle Davis out of the country. I was in Pakistan at the time and vividly remember the national sense of shame, and even moral horror, at Zardari’s craven supplication to US criminality.

Qureshi shared it. He resigned from Zardari’s government and joined Khan’s PTI shortly afterwards.

Khan’s critics, both in Pakistan and overseas, have made light of his claims that the US could be responsible for his current political troubles. This attitude reflects either naivety, ignorance or disingenuousness. While the facts are still obscure and may never be fully known, history shows that Khan is entirely reasonable in fearing US interference in the country he governs.

Thirty years ago, Khan famously told his Pakistani cricket team that they needed to fight like “cornered tigers” when all appeared lost in the 1992 Cricket World Cup.

The task that faces Khan is yet more awesome today – but don’t write him off just yet. He overcame immense odds to win that World Cup.

I believe he deserves the chance to finish the task he began three and a half years ago, when he won the 2018 election. Or at the very least, to defend his record in a fresh set of elections.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Peter Oborne won best commentary/blogging in 2017 and was named freelancer of the year in 2016 at the Online Media Awards for articles he wrote for Middle East Eye.

6 April 2022

Source: www.middleeasteye.net

By Paul Antonopoulos

The Institute of International Finance believes that Russia’s current account surplus is likely to reach $200-240 billion this year. Experts note that Moscow’s balance of payments has historically been determined by the export of energy resources, raw materials and import of goods. Considering the price levels, especially for oil, Russia’s revenue from oil sales in March reached historic highs, something that was not expected when the West launched its economic war against Moscow. None-the-less, it appears that the yuan, China’s currency, will be the biggest winner during this crisis between Russia and the West.

Banks are now asking customers to open accounts in China’s national currency and this trend is being observed not only in Russia, but across the world. As early as 2019, Moscow and Beijing adopted the decision to gradually abandon the dollar in trading with each other. But, at the time, these were just the intentions and the first step: overall, Chinese banks still have large reserves of American dollars.

Now, China’s Foreign Ministry has raised the topic of switching to payments with Russia to the ruble or yuan. Discussions about transferring payments in the national currency of energy commodities are already underway. Beijing is pushing for a similar strategy in Southeast Asia and in its dealings with Arab countries. For example, Saudi Arabia is unhappy with Washington’s policies and calls the dollar a black hole. As a result, Riyadh and Beijing could change the payment currency of oil from dollars to yuan

Ten years ago, China began promoting the use of the yuan internationally and has achieved some limited success. It is recalled that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said that events in Ukraine could change China’s financial trajectory and that Beijing can take advantage of the situation and start expanding the yuan.

According to the IMF, the yuan is the fifth largest reserve currency in the world, with central banks holding the equivalent of about $319 billion in reserves. Within the global economy, this figure is not so large: the yuan accounts for only about 2.5% of the total reserves of central banks. By comparison, the dollar accounts for more than 50% of reserves and the euro 19%. At the beginning of the year, Bloomberg reported that the Chinese currency had become the fourth most popular means of payment in the world.

Currently the yuan is used as a reserve currency in about 75 countries. The yuan could become the new international currency because China has a strong economy and the country produces everything from simple goods to high tech weapons.

In effect, it is Western policies that led Russia to expand trade with the East. For example, India and Russia are discussing the creation of a payment mechanism in rubles and rupees.

One way or another, Russia-China bilateral trade will quickly grow under the current circumstances. China has one of the largest reserves of rubles, with the Russian currency accounting for 13.8% of its foreign exchange reserves. In addition, China is Russia’s main trading partner, with the volume of transactions between the two countries exceeding $148 billion last year.

However, on a number of important issues – for example, the supply of parts for aircraft, Beijing has so far not adopted a specific decision. According to Reuters, China has reportedly recommended that its four largest oil and gas companies reduce their participation in Russian projects. China’s Foreign Ministry denied the report.

Although experts say the reason the yuan is so unpopular in international trade is because the Chinese government does not have a positive global image, this ignores the fact that China’s multilateralization and diversification of economic relations are still underdeveloped. In this way, so long as China’s economy goes strength to strength, the Russian economy and ruble will be able to weather the full effects of the West’s economic siege, something that was unlikely anticipated when sanctions were enthusiastically imposed.

For a long time, the maintenance of a cheap national currency was beneficial to Beijing thanks to the large volume of exports of goods valued in US dollars. However, the role of the Chinese currency in foreign trade with Russia will depend on its will and most importantly on Beijing’s ability to operate independently and autonomously from the West. Both Russia and China appear to be on the correct and accelerated path towards de-Dollarization.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

5 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

The alleged massacre of civilians in Bucha is one of the most talked about topics around the world in recent hours. Russia has been repeatedly accused by Western governments and mainstream media, and there are already calls for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be prosecuted for war crimes and human rights violations. However, there is a series of controversies in the case, from possible falsifications in the images released by Ukrainian forces to incoherent information about the dates of the massacre, which demands a deep investigation.

According to the official Kremlin’s position, the Russian government categorically denies any involvement by its forces in operations that killed civilians in Bucha. Spokesperson Dmistry Peskov stated on Monday, April 4, about the case, making it clear that Moscow, in addition to denying participation in the massacre, supports the immediate launch of high-level investigations on the occurrence. The Russian authorities also committed to take the discussion forward to the UN Security Council in order conduct an international investigation in the grave tragedy.

Furthermore, Peskov made it clear that the Russian government does not trust the veracity of all the information contained in the videos and photos of dead civilians released by the Ukrainian government. There are reports from Russian experts pointing out possible forgeries and frauds in the content of the videos.

Other Russian officials also commented on the case, pointing out that there is evidence that the videos were forged or performed. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, for example, claimed during a meeting with UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths that the Ukrainian press had released fake videos about Russian operations in Bucha, and that there had been a staging organized by Kiev’s forces in the region days after the departure of Russian troops.

In the same vein, the official representative of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, said that the videos and photos released by the Ukrainian press and the Western statements about them appear to be a “custom-made story”. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu also spoke out, claiming that the case is a production by the Kiev regime for Western media that sounds like a provocation against Russia. Finally, the head of the Russian Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, also expressed distrust about the veracity of the material released by Kiev and requested a procedural assessment on the possible massacre of civilians.

Despite the distrust, which seems justified in the face of a long history of fake news and information warfare on the part of the NATO-Kiev axis, Moscow seems open to hearing contrary opinions, which is precisely why the government seems so interested in launching an investigation, both using its official experts and international agents convoked by the UNSC. It is possible that, in addition to the obviously fake and staged videos, there is also real material, with actual images of dead people. The Kremlin’s main point is that, regardless of whether the videos and photos are real or not, there is no Russian involvement in cases of massacre of civilians.

Considering the evident victory of the Special Operation in Bucha region, there would be no strategic advantage for the Russian military to shoot civilians, which would cause unnecessary harm to the country. Now, Zelensky, Biden and other Western leaders are calling for Putin to be condemned by international courts and planning an increase in sanctions. So, it does not seem at all reasonable that Russian forces would have deliberately planned and carried out a massacre of civilians, considering that these would be the obvious consequences of such acts.

Another point that needs to be mentioned is that there is an evident time lapse in the case. The Russians withdrew from Bucha on 30 March. The Ukrainians entered Bucha on March 31, and the “retake” of the city was announced by the mayor on the same day. Azov’s paramilitaries entered the city only on April 1. So how were the “bodies in the streets” found only on April 3?

If international society is really interested in the truth, it must heed the Russian request for an investigation at the UNSC. If Western governments refuse to cooperate with the investigation, it will be possible to conclude that they have something to hide. The UN must remain neutral and commit itself to the search for the truth of the facts, even if this truth is unpleasant for the West.

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

6 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca