Tuesday 19th of March 2024

the major culprit for the crap on this planet is…...

The series of major explosions at Russian military bases on the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea over the past week mark the beginning of a new, even more dangerous phase in the imperialist war waged on Ukrainian territory against Russia.

Ukrainian officials have all but admitted that Kiev is behind the attacks, threatening that more is to come. Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, described the explosions as part of a beginning counteroffensive. “Our strategy is to destroy the logistics, the supply lines and the ammunition depots and other objects of military infrastructure. It’s creating a chaos within their own forces.” Hinting at plans to strike the Russian-built Kerch Bridge, which connects Crimea with the Russian mainland, Podolyak stated, “Such objects should be destroyed.”

 

BY Clara Weiss

 

There are only two scenarios that can account for the explosions, and both bear the imprint “made in Washington.

The German Der Spiegel has provided evidence suggesting that US-made missiles and ammunition that had not been officially delivered to Ukraine could have caused the explosions, circumventing Russian missile defense systems. Ukraine has openly acknowledged that the US is involved in the decision-making process behind every single strike on Russian targets.

Meanwhile, the American press takes as a given that the explosions were caused by the work of Ukraine’s special forces. The New York Times, which had praised the explosions as a “brazen” act of “defiance” against Russia, gloatingly reported on Wednesday about the work of these forces and one of its members, who had been trained by the neo-fascist Right Sector and the Azov Battalion. According to the Times,these units are not only responsible for these attacks on Russian military bases, but are also terrorizing Ukrainian workers, including teachers, for supposed “collaboration”.

These far-right terrorist forces have been armed and trained by the CIA. In January, Yahoo News reported that the CIA had conducted a secret extensive training program for Ukrainian special operation forces and intelligence personnel to prepare them for an insurgency since 2015. A former CIA official bluntly stated that the program had taught the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians”, adding: “The United States is training an insurgency.”

Whatever the political bankruptcy and reactionary nature of the Putin regime and its invasion of Ukraine, the fact of the matter is that this war was provoked and is now funded and escalated by the imperialist powers.

The Russian military is confronted with an army and paramilitary fascist forces that have been armed and trained systematically by NATO ever since the imperialist-orchestrated coup of February 2014. Their operations are planned and coordinated not in Kiev, but Washington.

In a massive overhaul that was overseen and funded by NATO, the crumbling Ukrainian military was restructured and ballooned from 130,000 in 2014 to almost 250,000 in 2021. Even before the beginning of the war in February, tens of thousands of troops had been trained directly by the US, UK, Canada and other NATO members. These training programs have been massively expanded since February, and US paramilitary forces are also providing training to Ukrainian troops in action.

The flood of sophisticated weaponry and ammunition into Ukraine, an impoverished country with a pre-war population of less than 40 million, has no precedent. According to the Kiehl Institute for the World Economy, the imperialist powers have pledged over $40 billion in weapons and ammunition since January 24. The US is by far taking the lead with $25 billion, followed by the UK ($4 billion), Poland ($1.8 billion) and Germany ($ 1.2 billion).

By now, any pretense of the “non-involvement” of the US in the war against Russia has been dropped, from decisions and statements by the White House to the coverage in the media, whose war reporting is tightly controlled by the national intelligence apparatus. Indeed, the triumphant reporting about Ukraine’s strikes on Crimea in the US media itself bears the imprint of a deliberate provocation against Russia. 

The Biden administration has warned openly of the danger of World War III, yet it has deliberately crossed every single supposed limitation upon US involvement that it had set itself.

Russian officials as well as Western military experts have repeatedly warned that attacks on Crimea by Ukraine would be seen as an existential threat by the Kremlin and could trigger a nuclear exchange. Yet the US, using its proxy forces in Ukraine, has been doing everything to provoke precisely such a response. 

So far, the Kremlin has been markedly restrained in its response to the evident efforts by Washington to escalate the war. There are no doubt significant divisions among the Russian oligarchs and within its state apparatus. The Russian oligarchy, the outgrowth of the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy and its destruction of the Soviet Union, is inherently incapable of responding in a coherent, let alone progressive manner to its bloody encounter with imperialism.  

But the political impotence and instability of the Putin regime, far from lessening the danger of an escalation of the war, is, on the contrary, another major destabilizing factor. Already, elements within the ruling United Russia party are calling for retaliatory strikes on “decision-making centers” which, as everyone knows, are located not in Kiev but in Brussels and Washington. 

Regardless of the intentions and plans of the warring sides, the war in Ukraine cannot be contained. Already, NATO is pushing aggressively to open up a northern front in the war. In Scandinavia, Sweden and Finland are set to join NATO. In the Baltics, the far-right governments of Lithuania and Latvia have stopped issuing visas to Russian citizens, while Estonia has begun the demolition of World War II-era Soviet monuments. This is a targeted provocation not only against the Kremlin but also the large local Russian-speaking population, which, like much of the working class population of the former Soviet Union, still feels a powerful allegiance to the victorious struggle of the Soviet masses against German fascism. 

In an indication that the Kremlin is anticipating a broadening of the front of the war with NATO, Russia has significantly increased its troops and missiles in neighboring Belarus, which shares borders with Ukraine, and the NATO members states Poland, Latvia and Lithuania. 

Only one conclusion can be drawn from the constant, reckless, and ever more brazen provocations by US imperialism and its lackeys in Eastern Europe: the American ruling class is determined to escalate the war with Russia. The aims, just as the borders, of this war extend well beyond Ukraine. From the standpoint of imperialism, Ukraine is but the opening shot in a new redivision of the world.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/08/18/pers-a18.html

 

SEE ALSO:

the plan behind the bullying of china and russia has been engineered for some considerable time…. like since about 1917…...

 

 

Gus Note: "But the political impotence and instability of the Putin regime..." is a glib statement that does not hold water. Presently Russia is holding fire and is restrained in its demolition of Ukraine.... but pushed a bit too far by the US demented US administration, things could change....

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bombing the nukey…...

 

BY James O’Neill

 

In March of this year Russian troops captured the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. It has been in Russian possession ever since, although the Ukrainian forces have made desperate attempts to recapture it. These attempts have included bombing and shelling of the site. To describe this ... incredibly stupid is an understatement.

The plant is a nuclear plant and its wanton destruction could cause the dispersal of nuclear material far from the site. To say that it endangers the lives not only of the Russian occupiers and the surrounding Ukrainians living in proximity to the plant is a massive understatement. The destruction of the plant risks a nuclear contamination of a vast surrounding area that includes not only Ukrainian territory, but also that of its geographical neighbours, including Russia, Poland and Hungary.

The Russians have protested the bombing and shelling of the plant, thus far without success. The Ukrainians seem impervious to the risks that are evident to all the people in the region, and as noted, in surrounding countries as well. The remarkable response by the Ukrainians is to blame the Russians for the shelling of the plant. This is not only demonstrably false, but is proven to be so. There is absolutely no reason for the Russians to destroy the plant, not least because it would endanger its own people.

What theUkrainian motive is for the shelling is not clear. They have expressed the wish to retake possession of the plant, but that is not going to happen. Nobody in their right mind would hand such a potentially dangerous object over to the Ukrainians who have shown by their actions a reckless disregard not only for the inhabitants of the plant, but also the lives and safety of the millions of people living within the likely zone of contamination in the event that the plant is destroyed.

The Ukrainians are not of course acting on their own in this reckless conduct. The Ukrainians are backed by the by the full forces of the NATO powers, who seem willing to allow the fighting to continue until the last Ukrainian. There is no realistic possibility of Ukraine ever winning this war and the intervention, through arms, “volunteers” and political support from the western powers who are backing the discredited regime of Zelenskyy.

These same Western powers that are backing the Ukraine regime are the same powers who endlessly site their devotion to the “rules based international order” which in the Ukrainian context is no more than a sick joke. The Ukrainian government has recently banned at least nine political groups that oppose it, including those that appeal to a Russian speaking audience. That group has suffered extra restrictions, including the banning of their native language.

It is the Western powers that have been supplying the missiles that have been hitting the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant over the past week or so. They must bear a degree of responsibility for the damage that is done to the plant and to the surrounding countryside and neighbouring nations. It has been estimated that the nuclear radioactive contamination that will ensue will be greater than both the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters that have occurred in recent years. Both of these nuclear disasters were accidents and were not deliberately planned for.

The Zaporizhzhia disaster by contrast is a deliberately engineered catastrophe. The United Nations’ international nuclear supervisory agency, the IAEA has condemned the attack on Zaporizhzhia as “suicidal”. The United Nations has not however, specifically condemned the Ukrainians for the attack on the plant, claiming instead that there were “conflicting reports”on who was to be held accountable. This is a disgraceful abdication of the UN’s responsibility. It is abundantly obvious who is responsible for the attacks, and that is the Ukrainians. The Russians have no conceivable motive for damaging the plane and to suggest otherwise betrays an alarming lack of logic by the UN.

The Kiev regime, together with its United States master, has been the main source of the claim that the Russians are responsible for what is happening at the plant. They say that the Russians are alleging Ukrainian responsibility for the attacks as cover for its own nefarious plans for the nuclear plant. It is an example of the type of twisted logic that one has come to expect from the Ukrainian regime and from their American masters. The latter are constantly seeking the means to criticise Russia and the nuclear power plant is a classic example of them seeking to turn to their advantage a Russian success, in this case the capture of the plant in March, shortly after the beginning of the Russian intervention.

There is one other point that clearly illustrates Ukrainian culpability for the missile attacks on the nuclear plant. The evidence clearly demonstrates that the missiles were fired from territory that is still under the control of the Ukrainian forces. It is a relatively simple matter to track missiles from their point of origin and the evidence has clearly demonstrated Ukrainian culpability for the attacks.

The attacks on a nuclear power plant illustrate the desperation of the Ukrainian government that despite extensive western military and political support is manifestly losing the war in Ukraine. A further measure of the extent to which the Ukrainian regime will go also came to light a littler over a week ago with a report from Amnesty International. That report made it very clear that the Kiev regime was using civilian centres such as schools and hospitals as well as residential areas as locations for their artillery weapons. When the Russians respond by attacking these weapons centres they are accused by the Ukrainians and by the insipid western media of attacking civilian centres. It is a well-established ploy by the Ukrainians and must be known to the apologists in the western media who continue to present incredibly one-eyed reports of the fighting.

The Russians have responded to this barrage of Ukrainian misinformation by summonsing the United Nations Security Council for an emergency session to highlight the dangers posed by the actions of the Ukrainian forces. Russia is calling for IAEA inspectors to be allowed to visit visit and report Ukrainian positions. This has met with predictable opposition from the British and American representatives on the Security Council. Their destructive attitude itself speaks volumes as to the true nature of the western backing of the Ukrainians ion the Wass, regardless of this multiple crimes.

There currently seems to be no limited to the steps that the Americans will take to support their Ukrainian allies. Thus far that strategy has been of little direct risk to the Americans who are content to use the Ukrainians as their proxies in this war. How long Russian patience will persist in the face of this strategy is an open question. The Americans for their part seem content to go on pushing at Russian patience. They may learn that such patience is not unlimited.

 

 

James O’Neill, an Australian-based former Barrister at Law, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

READ MORE:

https://journal-neo.org/2022/08/16/russian-patience-with-the-war-in-ukraine-is-not-endless-as-the-west-may-soon-learn/

 

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