Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 137

Dave DeCamp: Putin Shows African Leaders Draft Treaty on Ukrainian Neutrality from March 2022

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 6/18/23

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday met with African leaders in St. Petersburg and displayed a document that he said was a draft treaty on Ukrainian neutrality that was drawn up during negotiations in Istanbul in March 2022.

“As you know, a string of talks between Russia and Ukraine took place in Turkey so as to work out both the confidence-building measures you mentioned and to draw up the text of the agreement,” Putin told the African delegation, according to TASS.

“We did not discuss with the Ukrainian side that this treaty would be classified, but we have never presented it, nor commented on it. This draft agreement was initialed by the head of the Kiev negotiation team. He put his signature there. Here it is,” he added.

According to RT, the treaty, titled “Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees for Ukraine,” required Ukraine to enshrine “permanent neutrality” in its constitution. The US, Britain, Russia, China, and France are listed as guarantors. Since the treaty was a draft, it indicates that it wasn’t finalized and more details needed to be worked out.

Putin’s claim reflects an article published in Foreign Affairs last year that cited multiple former senior US officials who said Russia and Ukraine tentatively agreed on a peace deal in April 2022. They said the agreement would have involved a Ukrainian promise not to join NATO in exchange for a Russian withdrawal to the pre-invasion lines, and Ukraine would have received security guarantees from several countries.

Russian and Ukrainian officials met face-to-face in Istanbul on March 29, 2022, which was followed up with virtual consultations. After the meeting, Russia’s lead negotiator described the talks as “constructive,” and the Russian Defense Ministry announced it would “drastically” reduce military activity near the northern cities of Kyiv and Chernihiv, which led to a full Russian withdrawal from the north.

Putin said after the Russian withdrawal, Ukraine abandoned the treaty. “After we pulled our troops away from Kiev — as we had promised to do — the Kiev authorities … tossed [their commitments] into the dustbin of history,” he said. “They abandoned everything.”

Ukraine accused Russian troops of intentionally killing civilians in the northern areas it withdrew from, most notably in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. But if Putin’s account is true, Western pressure could have also led to Ukraine scuttling the treaty.

Then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited Kyiv on April 9, 2022, a few days after Russia completed its withdrawal from the north. According to a report from Ukrainska Pravda, Johnson urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky not to negotiate with Russia and that even if Ukraine was ready to sign a deal with Putin, Kyiv’s Western backers were not.

The Ukrainska Pravda report said at the time, Russia was ready for a Putin-Zelensky meeting, but two factors stopped it from happening: the discovery of dead Ukrainian civilians and Johnson’s visit.

Then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet was trying to mediate between Putin and Zelensky in March 2022 and gave a similar account of the West’s position. He said the US and its allies “blocked” his mediation effort and that he thought there was a “legitimate decision by the West to keep striking Putin” and not negotiate.

After peace talks were scuttled in April 2022, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said he expected the conflict to end after the Istanbul talks but then realized some countries in NATO wanted to prolong the war to “weaken” Russia. A few days after Cavusoglu’s comments, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin admitted that one of the US’s goals in supporting Ukraine is to see Russia “weakened.”

As the war has dragged on, the Biden administration has come out explicitly against a ceasefire. Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined the position earlier this month and said the US would continue building up Ukraine’s military rather than push for peace.

The African leaders who met with Putin on Saturday traveled to Russia and Ukraine to push for peace talks and an end to the war, but the chances of new negotiations between the warring sides are slim. The delegation included the presidents of Comoros, Senegal, South Africa, and Zambia, the prime minister of Egypt, and the foreign ministers of the Republic of Congo and Uganda.

The African delegation was in Ukraine on Friday, but Zelensky did not seem open to their proposals and reiterated his position that peace talks can’t happen until a full Russian withdrawal. In Moscow, the Kremlin said that the peace initiative presented by the African delegation “is very difficult to implement, difficult to compare positions.”

Phil Miller: RUSSIAN NEO-NAZI FIGHTING PUTIN TAUGHT AT FAR-RIGHT CAMP IN UK

By Phil Miller, Declassified UK, 6/8/23

A Russian football hooligan leading cross-border raids from Ukraine taught at a neo-Nazi camp in Wales where organisers dreamed of recreating Hitler’s SS.

The leader of an anti-Putin militia has disturbing links to an extreme-right wing movement banned in Britain, Declassified has found.

Denis Kapustin, who also uses the names Denis Nikitin and ‘White Rex’, was an instructor at a far-right camp in Wales in 2014.

His presence was noted by a Sunday Mirror investigation that year.

More recently, the White Rex has been in the news for leading the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK).

They are a group of armed dissidents launching raids into Russia from their base in Ukraine since March.

At least two civilians and a child have been killed in their attacks so far, with another 13 wounded.

While the RDK’s far-right ideology was belatedly noted in media reports, the fact its leader spent time teaching neo-Nazis in Britain has so far been forgotten.

He taught at the Sigurd Culture Camp in the Brecon Beacons in August 2014, which was designed to “enthuse them with a sense of racial pride, and to awaken the ‘Spirit Warrior’ within”.

Camp organiser Craig Fraser wanted to recreate Hitler’s SS by drilling his men into shape – and even planned to show footage from ISIS training in Syria at the next session.

The Sunday Mirror said a “key trainer at the event…was Denis Nitikin [sic], the owner and organiser of White Rex, a Russian martial arts and cage fighting club.”

Yesterday immigration minister Robert Jenrick refused to tell parliament what information the Home Office holds on Kapustin’s visit to the UK in 2014 or whether he had since been banned from entering the country, claiming not to comment on individual cases.

‘Go kick some immigrants’

In Wales, Kapustin taught over 30 participants how to deal with “attackers armed with knives” in “gruelling full contact practice fighting from which participants often emerged bruised but undaunted”.

When not fighting, organisers “spoke at length about the virtues of…our Pagan spiritual heritage”.

Anti-fascist research group Hope Not Hate found the Sigurd camp was a front for National Action, a neo-Nazi group later banned in the UK under the Terrorism Act for praising the murder of MP Jo Cox.

Two National Action figures who attended the training camp, Christopher Lythgoe and Matthew Hankinson, were later jailed for a total of 14 years for their involvement with the group.

German authorities reportedly banned Kapustin from entering Europe in 2019. He once had a framed photo of Joseph Goebbels in his bedroom and has been heavily engaged in football hooliganism across the continent.

When living in Moscow, he enjoyed hosting forest fights between hooligans after which they would “go kick some immigrants”.

The enemy of my enemy…

Despite Kapustin’s links to a banned British neo-Nazi group and violent racism, he has obtained Western arms in Ukraine for his rebellion against Russia – and appears to receive support from Ukrainian military intelligence (the GUR).

A GUR spokesman called RDK members “one of those forces that will be shaping the future configuration of post-Putin Russia.”

Yet in one Telegram message from May, Kapustin called for Russians to support him by praising the: “Glory of the Great Russian Empire!”

Journalist Leonid Ragozin has said that after the RDK attacked Bryansk region of Russia in March, Kapustin mocked a Muslim boy wounded in the attack over his mixed Tajik/Tartar heritage.

He placed swastikas over photos of his family and wrote: “Russia will be Aryan or lifeless”.

Mark Galeotti, author of the book Putin’s Wars, told Declassified: “I imagine Ukraine will use any weapon at its disposal against Russia, and if this means arming and supporting a neo-Nazi well, so long as he proves a capable leader and can attract like-minded fighters to the cause of challenging the Putin regime, so be it. 

“Churchill’s famous quote that ‘If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons’ springs to mind. 

“This is, after all, only a very small element of the overall war effort and Ukrainian military intelligence, GUR – which seems largely behind these pro-Kyiv Russian forces – is trying to distract and torment the Kremlin, and neo-Nazis certainly fit that bill.”

Maxim Solopov, a journalist who has investigated Russian neo-Nazis, said on his Telegram channel that a White Rex social media account had almost 45,000 subscribers by 2020. 

He estimated that even if only 1% of them remained active, it would give Kapustin around 500 supporters – some of who could be in Moscow, where pro-RDK graffiti has recently appeared.

Western weaponry

Photos from Kapustin’s recent raid in the Belgorod region of Russia show US-made armoured vehicles in his group’s convoy.

Earlier footage posted on the RDK’s Telegram channel indicates they have operated US-made rocket launchers – known as High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) – which cost around $5m each.

For small arms, Kapustin’s men do not all have to rely on rusty kalashnikovs, with some wielding sophisticated Belgian-made FN SCAR assault rifles. This has triggered concern from Belgium’s prime minister, Alexander de Croo, as to how weapons meant for Ukraine have ended up in the group’s hands. 

Swedish Pansarskott rocket launchers are also in Kapustin’s arsenal. And some of his men can be seen wearing camouflage smocks embroidered with union jacks, suggesting their uniforms might come from British army stocks. 

The RDK’s activities have not been limited to cross-border raids. They were responsible in December for guarding Snake Island, Ukraine’s famous outpost in the Black Sea. When a CNN reporter met them there, he omitted to mention the group’s neo-Nazi associations.

Their maritime capabilities often feature in Telegram posts, with members showing off amphibious landings from inflatable boats. 

They even claim to have landed in Zaporizhzhia, where Russian troops are occupying Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. 

Russian friends

Kapustin moved to Ukraine in 2017 following an invitation from Sergei Korotkikh, who founded Russia’s National Socialist Society and is accused of beheading a migrant beneath a swastika flag.

Declassified has previously revealed how Korotkikh obtained five rocket launchers Britain supplied to Ukraine, on whose side he now fights.

Prominent Russian neo-Nazis flocking to join the RDK include Aleksey Levkin, from the band Hitler’s Hammer. He organised the annual National-Socialist Black Metal festival in Kyiv. 

He is heavily involved with the Wotanjugend Telegram channel, which promoted the manifesto of Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 Muslims at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

A few weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, Levkin posted a photo of a British-made NLAW rocket launcher with the caption “mastering NLAW”, suggesting he was learning to use the UK-supplied anti-tank weapon.

Freedom of Russia Legion

Another anti-Putin militia fighting alongside White Rex is the Freedom of Russia Legion, which also has far-right figures involved in its Ukraine-based leadership.

The Legion’s commander, Maximillian ‘Caesar’ Andronnikov, is a former member of the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), which was designated as a global terrorist group by the US State Department in 2020.

The then Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said RIM “has provided paramilitary-style training to white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Europe”, linking their alumni to the bombing of refugee shelters in Sweden.

Vladimir Putin says his illegal invasion of Ukraine is needed to “de-nazify” the country, a claim which has been widely derided, partly owing to President Zelensky’s Jewish heritage.

Increasing evidence of the role played by neo-Nazis in attacking Russian soil from Ukraine will only fuel the Kremlin’s narrative.

This week the New York Times said some journalists asked Ukrainian soldiers to remove Nazi emblems on their uniforms before photographing them.

They expressed concern that the use of such patches “risks fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate.”

Vladimir Putin’s Meeting with War Correspondents – June 2023 – English Subtitles

Link here.

Full written transcript here.

Kyle Anzalone: NATO Members Continue Trading with Russia Despite Sanctions

By Kyle Anzalone, The Libertarian Institute, 6/8/23

Two recent reports have uncovered billions in trade between members of the North Atlantic alliance and Russia, after the Kremlin ordered the invasion of Ukraine last year. 

Corisk, a Norwegian risk-management firm, issued a report in May detailing billions in trade between Russia and Western states that transited through a third nation. “This report presents total estimates of Western circumventions of sanctions against Russia.” The report states, “Through a combination of top-down and bottom-up methodological approaches, we estimate the indirect trade of 16 Western countries with Russia at 8 billion Euros of indirect exports via third countries, and the indirect imports at 6 billion Euros via third countries in 2022.”

Corisk believes third-party counties are used to circumvent sanctions on Moscow. “This means that the indirect exports, largely likely to be circumventing sanctions, represented almost one-fifth of all Western exports ending up in Russia.” It continued, “The main Western countries behind most indirect exports to Russia in 2022 were Germany (2.05 billion Euros), Lithuania (1.45 billion), the United States (980 million), Poland (725 million), Japan (575 million), Czech Republic (490 million), France (400 million), and the Netherlands (290 million).”

A second study conducted by the Atlantic Council accuses Turkey of acting as a “critical” economic lifeline for Russia. “Although Turkish exports of electronic machinery, including critical integrated circuits, fell in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion, they have since recovered and grown well beyond the pre-invasion average,” the report stated. “From March 2022 to March 2023, Turkish electronic exports to Russia jumped by about 85%.”

It added, Turkey’s “trade with Russia remains a vital economic lifeline for its businesses as the country recovers and reconstructs from a devastating earthquake earlier this year.”

After Russia invaded Ukraine last year, President Joe Biden pledged to “cripple” Moscow’s economy with a sanctions package the White House compared to an “economic nuclear weapon.”

Part of the reason the economic war failed to harm Moscow’s ability to wage war in Ukraine is that the global community has largely refused to comply with the Western sanctions. The participants in the economic war are limited to Washington and its close allies. 

The Atlantic Council – a group funded by the US and UK governments – acknowledged that refusal to enforce sanctions is not condoning the war in Ukraine. “Such surges in trade, however, are not necessarily an indicator of support” for the war, the report says. “Instead, it is more likely they are predominantly the result of companies — and countries — pursuing legal opportunities for cheaper exports and new gaps in the Russian market.”

Michael Tracey: The Government Keeps Lying to Us About Ukraine. Where Is the Outrage?

By Michael Tracey, Newsweek, 6/14/23

On June 4, a group referring to itself as the “Polish Volunteer Corps” issued a boastful announcement confirming its participation in a series of cross-border ground offensives into Russia. News of these audacious raids was jarring enough, given the many prior assurances of U.S. and Ukrainian war planners, who insisted no attacks would be carried out inside Russian territory. It was all the more conspicuous that the incursion units were apparently comprised of Polish soldiers.

Poland, of course, is not only a NATO member state, but the NATO member state with which the U.S. has most assiduously aligned itself since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine (Polish government officials deny any formal connection to the “Polish Volunteer Corps”). So the raids raised an obvious, yet oft-neglected question: Just what the hell is U.S. policy in Ukraine?

If you turn on the TV, you’ll find pundits on every channel loyally reciting from memory the broad parameters of the U.S. mission—at least as it’s being conveyed in daily rhetorical flourishes by Biden Administration officials, assorted Congressional chest-thumpers, and brave think tank warriors. Freedom and autocracy are locked in a great cosmic battle of good versus evil, or so goes the usual storyline—most often narrated with a degree of moral complexity that can be generously compared to a lower-tier Marvel Movie.

But apart from this steady stream of heavily recycled platitudes, was it ever plainly disclosed to Americans—the chief financial sponsors of the Ukraine war effort, after all—that the scope of the war effort they’ve found themselves subsidizing would eventually expand to include platoons of Polish soldiers marching straight into Russia? Did anyone back in Washington, D.C. sign off on this, or was there ever an opportunity granted for public consideration of its potentially foreboding implications?

At least in theory, the U.S. is treaty-bound to come to the defense of Poland in the event of armed attack. And while Poland may nominally disavow the Polish Volunteer Corps, a Polish journalist writing for Poland’s largest digital publication says he was in attendance at a founding organizational meeting in Kyiv this past February, during which the unit was established not as a ragtag group of untested amateurs, but as an elite “sabotage and reconnaissance” force—which from the get-go was “reporting directly to the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.” Per this account, the unit was to consist of Poland’s “most experienced soldiers,” with notable imprecision as to where specifically those soldiers hailed from.

Then there’s the fact that shortly before the formation of the “Polish Volunteer Corps,” a cross-coalition bill was submitted to the Polish parliament which would make it legal for Polish nationals to fight in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The war against Russia was to be recognized as “a special situation from the point of view of the national security of the Republic of Poland,” the text reads, “requiring non-standard political and legislative actions on the part of the state.”

The “Polish Volunteer Corps” has been conducting joint operations with the “Russian Volunteer Corps,” another fully integrated “special unit within the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine”—euphemistically referred to in “Western” media headlines with plausible-deniability monikers like “Pro-Ukraine group of partisans.” Given how these ostensibly unattached “partisans” have been bragging about taking Russian hostages and otherwise getting themselves involved in increasingly spectacular, provocative attacks, one understands why Ukraine might wish to sustain plausible deniability.

“The ground war has come to Russia,” proclaimed one Polish state-backed media organ at the news that their soldiers had breached the border.

For many, the footage provided an occasion for rapturous joy, awash as they are in the primal euphoria of armed retribution. Meanwhile, these elite soldiers billed as “volunteers” have been razing Russian border settlements with U.S.-provided weaponry, according to the New York Times and Washington Post. The units “lobbed shells and missiles on residential areas,” the Times reported, and they appeared to be aiming their attacks at “no apparent military target.”

Convoys of armored vehicles called MRAPs, initially produced for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, were observed barreling into Russia from Ukraine, with still no explanation forthcoming as to how precisely they wound up there. Maybe someone in Kyiv just happened to leave a garage full of U.S. supplied armored vehicles unlocked. Either way, the Ukraine military was conclusively shown to have used U.S. weapons to attack Russia—the very thing President Biden and other administration officials have emphatically maintained they do not support and are not enabling.

Strangely though, this revelation of systematic government deception doesn’t seem to have moved the needle much in terms of the wider debate over U.S. involvement in Ukraine. Donald Trump could misstate the temperature outside by half-a-degree Farenheit and the entire U.S. media would be falling over themselves to piously accuse him of “lying”—but pile up mounds of incontrovertible evidence that Americans have been chronically deceived about a sprawling U.S. military intervention, and you’ll mostly get eye-rolls from the savvy-minded commentariat. That is, if you’re fortunate enough to be spared the standard sneering accusations of “Russian propagandist.”

Speaking of claims that might arguably be considered “propaganda,” almost exactly one year ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky embarked on a U.S. media tour promising Americans from the bottom of his heart that “We are not planning to attack Russia.” These claims were echoed simultaneously by President Biden, who insisted that “We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders.”

Yet here we are a year later, and there’s no longer any reasonable doubt that Ukraine is “striking beyond its borders,” and in increasingly aggressive fashion—from the cross-border raids to the drone-strike on the Kremlin to the bombing barrage on a residential Moscow neighborhood. And that’s only a smattering of examples from the past several weeks.

Still, it’s harder than one might expect to rouse much critical interest—especially among a media that has been politically, ideologically, and emotionally invested in Ukraine’s glorious war-fighting cause from the outset. One perfect example of late was a CNN article in which “senior U.S. officials” were reported confiding that while they had “condemned the strikes inside Russia,” they of course privately “believe the cross-border attacks are a smart military strategy.” A state official saying one thing in public but another in private used to be the most surefire sign of official deceit a journalist could hope to uncover. Yet CNN seemed to just let it flow by like a gentle spring breeze, almost as though they were actually impressed with the guile of the “senior U.S. officials” they’d been given the honor of anonymously paraphrasing.

As it stands, the U.S. government continuously pelts the American people with provable untruths in service of maintaining a war policy that bears almost no resemblance to how it was initially presented. And in the sectors of society allegedly tasked with scrutinizing government conduct, this is mostly met with a shrug.

How much more extreme does the deception need to get before sustained pushback is no longer avoidable?

If Polish soldiers launching a self-proclaimed “ground war” in Russia isn’t enough to rattle off the complacency, one shudders to think how severe of a shock would be necessary.

Gonzalo Lira’s Father Pleads With US Government To Save His Son From Ukraine’s SBU

Link here.

Sergey Karaganov: How Russia could save humanity from a global catastrophe

I find this proposal disgusting and stupid. Karaganov ignores that even one or a few nuclear bombs would cause major effects on the weather and consequently major famine that would affect billions of people outside of the areas bombed. I hope the reckless morons controlling policy in Washington are proud that they are now getting people of significant stature in Russia to consider these kinds of ideas. – Natylie

By Professor Sergey Karaganov, honorary chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and academic supervisor at the School of International Economics and Foreign Affairs Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow

Published in English by RT, 6/14/23

This article has sparked major debate among experts in Russia about nuclear weapons, their role and the conditions of their use.

This is especially the case given Sergey Karaganov’s status as a former presidential adviser to both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, and his position as head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a noted Moscow think tank.

Some prominent figures have reacted with dismay, while others have been less critical.

RT has decided it would be beneficial for our readers to read it in full. The following piece has been translated and lightly edited.

***

Our country, and its leadership, seems to me to be facing a difficult choice. It is becoming increasingly clear that our clash with the West will not end even if we achieve a partial – let alone a crushing – victory in Ukraine.

Even if we completely liberate the Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, it will be a minimal victory. A slightly greater success would be to liberate the whole of eastern and southern Ukraine within a year or two. But it would still leave part of the country with an even more embittered ultra-nationalist population pumped full of weapons – a bleeding wound that threatens inevitable complications, such as another war.

The situation could be worse if we liberate the whole of Ukraine at the cost of monstrous sacrifices and are left with ruins and a population that mostly hates us. It would take more than a decade to “re-educate” them.

Any of these options, especially the last one, will distract Russia from the much-needed shift of its spiritual, economic, military and political center to the East of Eurasia. We will be stuck with a wasteful focus on the West. And the territories of today’s Ukraine, especially the central and western ones, will attract resources – both human and financial. These regions were heavily subsidised even in Soviet times.

Meanwhile, hostility from the West will continue; it will support a slow-burning guerrilla civil war.

A more attractive option is the liberation and reunification of the east and south, and the imposition of capitulation on the remnants of Ukraine with complete demilitarization, creating a buffer, friendly state. But such an outcome would only be possible if we are able to break the West’s will to support the Kiev junta, and use it against us, forcing the US-led bloc into a strategic retreat.

And here I come to a crucial but hardly discussed issue. The root cause of – and indeed the main reason for – the Ukrainian crisis, as well as many other conflicts in the world, and the general increase in military threats, is the accelerating failure of the contemporary Western ruling elites.

This crisis is accompanied by an unprecedentedly rapid shift in the balance of power in the world in favor of the global majority, driven economically by China and partly by India, with Russia as the military and strategic anchor. This weakening not only infuriates the imperial-cosmopolitan elites (US President Joe Biden and his ilk) but also frightens the imperial-national elites (such as his predecessor Donald Trump). The West is losing the advantage it has held for five centuries to siphon off the wealth of the entire world by imposing its political and economic order and establishing its cultural dominance, mainly by brute force. So there is no quick end to the defensive, but aggressive, confrontation that the West has unleashed.

This moral, political and economic collapse has been brewing since the mid-1960s, was interrupted by the collapse of the USSR, but resumed with renewed vigour in the 2000s (the defeats of the Americans and their allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the crisis of the Western economic model in 2008 were milestones).

In order to slow down this seismic shift, the West has temporarily consolidated itself. The US has turned Ukraine into a punching bag to tie the hands of Russia, the politico-military lynchpin of a non-Western world freed from the shackles of neocolonialism. Ideally, of course, the Americans would simply like to blow up our country and thus radically weaken the emerging alternative superpower, China. We, either not realizing the inevitability of the clash or hoarding our strength, have been slow to act preemptively. Moreover, in line with modern, mainly Western, political and military thinking, we were rash in raising the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, inaccurate in assessing the situation in Ukraine, and not entirely successful in launching the current military operation.

By failing internally, Western elites have actively fed the weeds that have taken root in the soil of 70 years of prosperity, satiation and peace. These comprise of anti-human ideologies: the denial of family, homeland, history, love between men and women, faith, service to higher ideals, everything that is human. Their philosophy is to weed out those who resist. The aim is to neuter people in order to reduce their ability to resist modern “globalist” capitalism, which is becoming more and more obviously unjust and harmful to man and humanity.

Meanwhile, a weakened US is destroying Western Europe and other countries dependent on it, trying to push them into a confrontation that will follow Ukraine. The elites in most of these countries have lost their bearings and, panicked by the crisis in their own positions at home and abroad, are dutifully leading their countries to the slaughter. At the same time, because of greater failure, a sense of powerlessness, centuries of Russophobia, intellectual degradation and a loss of strategic culture, their hatred is almost more intense than that of the US.

Thus, the trajectory of most Western countries clearly points towards a new fascism, which could be called “liberal” totalitarianism.

In the future, and this is the most important thing, it will only get worse. Truces are possible, but reconciliation is not. Anger and despair will continue to grow in waves and waves. This vector of Western movement is a clear sign of the drift towards the outbreak of World War Three. It has already begun and could erupt into a full-blown conflagration either by accident, or due to the growing incompetence and irresponsibility of the ruling circles of the West.

The introduction of artificial intelligence and the robotization of war increase the risk of unintended escalation. Machines can act outside the control of confused elites.

The situation is aggravated by “strategic parasitism” – in 75 years of relative peace, people have forgotten the horrors of war, have stopped fearing even nuclear weapons. Everywhere, but especially in the West, the instinct for self-preservation has weakened.

I have spent many years studying the history of nuclear strategy and have come to an unequivocal, if unscientific, conclusion. The advent of nuclear weapons is the result of the intervention of the Almighty, who, appalled that mankind had unleashed two world wars within a generation, costing tens of millions of lives, gave us the weapons of Armageddon to show those who had lost their fear of hell that it existed. On that fear rested the relative peace of the last three-quarters of a century.

But now that fear is gone. The unthinkable in terms of previous notions of nuclear deterrence is happening – a group of ruling elites, in a fit of desperate rage, have unleashed a full-scale war in the underbelly of a nuclear superpower.

The fear of atomic escalation must be restored. Otherwise humanity is doomed.

It is not only, and not even so much, what the future world order will look like that is being decided in the fields of Ukraine right now. But rather whether the world we are used to will be preserved at all, or if all will be left is radioactive ruins, poisoning the remnants of humanity.

By breaking the West’s will in imposing its aggression, we will not only save ourselves and finally free the world from the Western yoke of five centuries, but we will also salvage the whole of humanity. By pushing the West towards catharsis and the abandonment of the hegemony of its elites, we will force it to retreat before a global catastrophe. Humanity will be given a new chance to develop.

Proposed solution

Of course, there is an uphill struggle ahead. It is also necessary to solve our own internal problems – to finally get rid of the mindset of Western-centrism and of the Westernizers in the administrative class. Especially the compradors and their peculiar way of thinking. Of course, in this area, the NATO bloc is helping us, unwittingly.

Our 300-year journey around Europe has given us a lot of useful lessons and it has helped us to form our great culture. Let us cherish our European heritage. But it is time to return home, to ourselves. Let us begin, with the baggage we have accumulated, to live in our own way. Our friends in the Foreign Ministry have recently made a real breakthrough by referring to Russia as a civilizational state in their foreign policy concept. I would add – a civilization of civilizations, open to the North as well as to the South, to the West as well as to the East. Now the main direction of development is to the South, to the North and, above all, to the East.

The confrontation with the West in Ukraine, however it ends, should not distract us from the strategic internal movement – spiritual, cultural, economic, political, military and political – towards the Urals, Siberia and the Pacific Ocean. A new Ural-Siberian strategy is needed, one that includes several powerful spiritually uplifting projects, including, of course, the creation of a third capital in Siberia. This movement should become part of the much-needed formulation of the “Russian Dream” – the image of the Russia and the world to which one aspires.

I have often written, and I am not alone in this, that great states without a great idea cease to be such or simply disappear into the void. History is littered with the graves of powers that lost their way. This idea should be created from above and not rely, as fools or lazy people do, on what comes from below. It must correspond to the deepest values and aspirations of the people and, above all, it must take us all forward. But it is the responsibility of the elite and the leadership of the country to formulate it. The delay in putting forward such a vision is unacceptably long.

But for the future to come to pass, the resistance of the forces of the past – i.e. the West – must be overcome. If this is not achieved, there will almost certainly be a full-scale world war. Which will probably be the last of its kind.

And here I come to the most difficult part of this article. We can keep fighting for another year or two, or even three, sacrificing thousands and thousands of our best men and grinding up hundreds of thousands more who are unfortunate enough to fall into the tragic historical trap of what is now called Ukraine. But this military operation cannot end in a decisive victory without forcing the West into a strategic retreat or even capitulation. We must force the West to abandon its attempts to turn back history, to abandon its attempts at global domination, and to force it to deal with its own problems, to manage its current multifaceted crisis. To put it crudely, it is necessary for the West to simply “piss off” and end its interference in the direction of Russia and the rest of the world.

However, for this to happen, Western elites need to rediscover their own lost sense of self-preservation by understanding that attempts to wear down Russia by playing the Ukrainians against it are counterproductive for the West itself.

The credibility of nuclear deterrence must be restored by lowering the unacceptably high threshold for the use of atomic weapons and by moving cautiously but quickly up the ladder of deterrence-escalation. The first steps have already been taken through statements to this effect by the president and other leaders, by beginning to deploy nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles in Belarus, and by increasing the combat effectiveness of the strategic deterrent forces. There are quite a few steps on this ladder. I count about two dozen. It could even go as far as warning our compatriots and all people of good will about the need to leave their homes near the objects of possible nuclear strikes in countries directly supporting the Kiev regime. The enemy must know that we are ready to launch a preemptive retaliatory strike in response to its current and past aggression in order to prevent a slide into a global thermonuclear war.

I have often said and written that with the right strategy of deterrence and even use, the risk of a ‘retaliatory’ nuclear or other strike on our territory can be minimized. Only if there is a madman in the White House who also hates his own country will the US decide to strike in ‘defense’ of the Europeans and invite retaliation by sacrificing a hypothetical Boston for a notional Poznan. The Americans and the Western Europeans are well aware of this, they just prefer not to think about it. We, too, have contributed to this recklessness with our peace-loving pronouncements. Having studied the history of US nuclear strategy, I know that after the USSR acquired a credible nuclear retaliatory capability, Washington never seriously considered using nuclear weapons on Soviet territory, even though it publicly bluffed. When nuclear weapons were considered, it was only against “advancing” Soviet forces in Western Europe. I know that the late Chancellors Helmut Kohl and Helmut Schmidt fled from their bunkers as soon as the question of such use came up in an exercise.

Movement down the ladder of containment-escalation should be fairly quick. Given the current direction of the West – and the degradation of most of its elites – each successive decision it makes is more incompetent and ideologically veiled than the last. And, at present, we cannot expect these elites to be replaced by more responsible and reasonable ones. This will only happen after a catharsis, leading to the abandonment of much ambition.

We cannot repeat the ‘Ukrainian scenario’. For a quarter of a century we were not listened to when we warned that NATO enlargement would lead to war; we tried to delay, to “negotiate”. As a result, we ended up in a serious armed conflict. Now the price of indecision is an order of magnitude higher than it would have been earlier.

But what if the present Western leaders refuse to back down? Perhaps they have lost all sense of self-preservation? Then we will have to hit a group of targets in a number of countries to bring those who have lost their senses back to their senses.

It’s a morally frightening choice – we would be using God’s weapon and condemning ourselves to great spiritual loss. But if this is not done, not only may Russia perish, but most likely the whole of human civilization will end.

We will have to make this choice ourselves. Even friends and sympathizers will not support it at first. If I were Chinese, I would not want an abrupt and decisive end to the conflict, because it will draw back US forces and allow them to gather forces for a decisive battle – either directly or, in the best Sun Tzu tradition, by forcing the enemy to retreat without a fight. As a Chinese person, I would also oppose the use of nuclear weapons because taking the confrontation to the nuclear level means moving to an area where my country is still weak.

Also, decisive action is not in line with the Chinese foreign policy philosophy, which emphasizes economic factors (with the accumulation of military power) and avoids direct confrontation. I would support an ally by providing him with rear cover, but I would go behind his back and not enter the fray. (In this case, perhaps I don’t understand this philosophy well enough and am attributing motives to my Chinese friends that are not their own.) If Russia uses nuclear weapons, Beijing would condemn it. But Chinese hearts would also rejoice in knowing that that the reputation and position of the US had been dealt a severe blow.

How would we react if (God forbid!) Pakistan attacked India, or vice versa? We’d be horrified. Upset that the nuclear taboo has been broken. Then let us help the victims and change our nuclear doctrine accordingly.

For India and other countries of the world majority, including nuclear weapon states (Pakistan, Israel), the use of nuclear weapons is unacceptable, both for moral and geostrategic reasons. If they are used “successfully”, the nuclear taboo – the notion that such weapons should never be used and that their use is a direct route to nuclear Armageddon – will be devalued. We are unlikely to win support quickly, even if many in the Global South would feel satisfaction at the defeat of their former oppressors who plundered them, carried out genocides and imposed an alien culture.

But in the end, the victors are not judged. And the saviors are thanked. Western European political culture does not remember, but the rest of the world does (and with gratitude) how we helped the Chinese to free themselves from the brutal Japanese occupation, and many Western colonies to throw off the colonial yoke.

Of course, if they do not understand us at first, they will have all the more incentive to educate themselves. Still, it is very likely that we can win, and focus the minds enemy states without extreme measures, and force them to retreat. And after a few years, we take take up a position as China’s rear, as it is now performing for us, supporting it in its struggle with the US. Then this fight can be avoided without a big war. And we will win together for the good of all, including the people of the Western countries.

At that stage, Russia and the rest of humanity will pass through all the thorns and traumas into the future, which I see as bright – multipolar, multicultural, multicolored – and giving countries and peoples the opportunity to build their own destinies in addition to the common one, which should unite worldwide.

Two thirds of Russians say paternalistic family head unnecessary – poll

Considering that Russia’s abortion laws are similar to those of many western European countries, there is no death penalty, guns are seriously restricted, street cops generally don’t carry guns, and support for strong welfare state programs are popular across the political spectrum, it seems that Russia is mainly conservative on issues relating to homosexuality and trans issues. – Natylie

RT.com, 6/5/23

Most Russians believe it is no longer necessary to have a single head of the family and that a rigid gender hierarchy has been replaced by the model of seeking a consensus in the family, a recent poll conducted by the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) suggests.

According to the survey, which was published on the organization’s website on Monday and polled some 1,600 people across the country on their beliefs about family structure, the share of Russians who believe there should be a clear head of the family has gone down from 58% to 29% over the past 15 years.  

Only about one in five people said they adhered to the paternalistic model and believed that the eldest man in the house should be the head of the family, and if there isn’t one, then that role should belong to the eldest woman. About 18% believe that the duty of providing for the family should rest with the man and that women should be in charge of the housework and raising children. 

The poll showed that those adhering to the paternalistic model of decision-making in the family are primarily men (23% versus 15% women), and also those with an incomplete secondary education, active television viewers, and residents of villages.

Meanwhile, over two thirds of respondents, or 68%, instead said that they believe in a consensus model, and that important decisions in the family should be made jointly while smaller ones should be made in accordance with the existing division of responsibilities. Many respondents also said that a strict division of household chores is a thing of the past and that both spouses equally contribute to resolving domestic and family issues.

Equality in family relations was most often advocated for by women (70% versus 64% of men), people between the ages of 18 and 34, those with at least a secondary education, residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as those who prefer the internet over traditional television.

Anna Arutunyan: Who’s actually running Russia?

Is Putin quietly grooming Mishustin to be his successor? Bolding for emphasis is mine. – Natylie

By Anna Arutunyan, The Spectator, 6/4/23

As the war in Ukraine spilled into Russian territory, with shelling in the Russian city of Belgorod, President Vladimir Putin was busy explaining that he “sleeps like a normal person” during an online meeting with families to honor Children’s Day. That Putin mentioned his healthy sleeping pattern, without discussing the ongoing Ukrainian incursion into Belgorod – where civilians, including children, were being evacuated — left some observers wondering who is actually running the country while he plays war. 

The Russian regime is far from monolithic, and there are other forces in power besides Putin and the turbo-patriots

Putin has a penchant for disengaging and struggling to make decisions, especially when there are no good ones left to make. He will micromanage his generals, but when it comes down to serious policy choices — like whether to announce another round of mobilization, or intercede in the vicious conflict between his defense minister Sergei Shoigu and the head of the Wagner mercenaries Yevgeny Prigozhin — he can’t seem to make up his mind. 

Which is odd, because aside from his floundering military campaign, the Russian economy is doing surprisingly well for a country slapped with unprecedented sanctions and isolation. Despite forecasts of a double-digit contraction, the economy shrank by just 2.1 percent in 2022 — less than it did during the pandemic year of 2020. And in April, the International Monetary Fund raised its prognosis for 2023, forecasting growth of 0.7 percent. 

While Putin is focusing all of his attention on the front — but without actually deciding much — the business of actually running the country has fallen to his prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin. The resilience of Russia’s economy and its day-to-day functioning is owed to Mishustin and his team of technocrats in the cabinet, as well as the fiscal miracles being worked by Central Bank chief Elvira Nabiullina. The prime minister has done a great deal to reorient Russia’s economy towards the global southeast, and has acted with a considerable degree of autonomy in dealing with foreign heads of state.

It was Mishustin, not Putin, who traveled to China on May 24. He met not only with his counterpart, premier Li Qiang, but also directly with President Xi Jinping. Russia is the junior partner in its relationship with China, so it is significant that Mishustin, and not Putin, reciprocated this state visit.

What is interesting, though, is that evidence suggests Mishustin does not support the war. At the fateful Security Council meeting on February 21, 2022, when Putin essentially asked each of his officials to approve a decision to recognize the secession of a good chunk of Ukrainian territory, Mishustin was one of only three officials who instead favored continuing talks with the West. Insiders say Mishustin was not even informed of the plans to invade until the night before. Moreover, in his public statements, Mishustin, unlike the majority of officials eager to stoke patriotic fervor, avoids talking about the “special military operation” when he can. True, he was responsible for implementing Putin’s orders on economic and social mobilization to support the war effort, but it is believed that even in private he doesn’t like talking about the war. 

That has led some observers to identify a “party of silence” or even a “party of peace” in the Kremlin that does not support the war, and which includes powerful officials close to Putin such as Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin. 

And this is where things get interesting. While Russia is very much ruled by a system where personal relations with the president often take precedence over institutional power, that is only part of the picture. Institutions still matter, and as prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin is the second most powerful man after Putin, regardless of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s temper tantrums. All state bodies — except the so-called of “men of force,” or siloviki, such as the defense ministry and security agencies — report to the prime minister. In addition, Putin’s practice of over-delegating hard decisions — especially during the pandemic — further beefed up Mishustin’s role. 

Mishustin cannot simply go to Putin and talk him out of the invasion. His power depends on his trustworthiness and his impeccable loyalty. Which leaves him little other choice but to make the best out of an impossible situation and at least preserve Russia’s economy to the extent that he can. 

All of this is important, however, because it demonstrates that the Russian regime is far from monolithic, and there are other forces in power besides Putin and the turbo-patriots — the loud supporters of the war in Ukraine. 

Right now, keeping quiet and doing their job is the only option for these silent, pragmatic technocrats, and we shouldn’t expect them to be in a position to sway Putin towards peace anytime soon. But a time will come when these forces may well be deciding Russia’s future. It is a giant stretch to call them the “good guys”: mired in corruption and complicit in the war, they will inevitably face a reckoning. But beyond the magical thinking about Russia’s disintegration, or conversely its overnight transformation into a peaceful democracy, western policymakers need to start thinking about a realistic future for Russia if they are serious about sustainable security in Europe. These technocrats will not have the answers anytime soon, but alienating them wholesale is not in anyone’s interests.

Garland Nixon on Alleged Tape Recordings That Expose Joe Biden’s Deal with Burisma Executive for Political Favors

Link here.