“What are our goals?” Retired German general and former military policy advisor to Merkel, Erich Wade, explained in an interview why Ukraine cannot win, why it makes no sense to send tanks to Kiev, and why Germany does not even have a plan of action in this conflict.

“We have a military stalemate that we cannot solve with weapons.” A military victory for Ukraine is not to be expected, and negotiations are the only possible way. What is happening in Ukraine is a war of attrition. Marders and leopards are not enough to take over Crimea or Donbass. In eastern Ukraine, the Russians are clearly advancing. They may soon conquer the Donbass completely. The West can send 100 “leopards,” but they will not change the overall situation. And the most important question is: how do we get through such a conflict with a belligerent nuclear power? By the way, Russia is the strongest nuclear power in the world! Otherwise, we will wake up one morning and find ourselves in the middle of World War III.

https://www.emma.de/artikel/erich-vad-was-sind-die-kriegsziele-340045

by Alastair Crooke, Director of Conflicts Forum; Former Senior British Diplomat; Author via Al Mayadeen 

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – – that’s all.” ~ Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking-Glass’

The EU, with much ado, this week announced the NINTH sanctions package on Russia. What is it about sanctions the EU doesn’t ‘get’? Russia has comfortably survived Western financial sanctions (even the fervently anti-Putin Economist concurs). Perhaps it is the tech sanctions which ultimately will ‘strangle Russia’. Good luck with waiting that one out! Who ends up strangling whom?

The EU still is busy trying (“legally”) to annex any, and all, Russian assets in Europe. And what Russia targets has the EU found to sanction? Well, that was no easy hunt, as so much has already been sanctioned. So the focus is on making illegal any last remaining Russian voice still extant in Europe.

Yes, we Europeans have been so afflicted by “head-spinning” disorientation through the rain of state disinformation, and by outrageous, obvious lying, that many have begun to question their own and surrounding levels of sanity. In their bemusement, they have come to see the “messaging” of endless sanctions as “perfectly rational”. They have been hypnotised into “You are either ‘with the narrative’ or ‘against it’.”

So, clearly, all Russian discourse within Europe must be eliminated:

Last week the EU General Council put out a statement that it is “concerned Turkey is maintaining a close partnership with Russia, despite the war in Ukraine and tough Western sanctions against Moscow.” The deepening economic ties between Turkey and Russia are “a cause for great concern”, EU foreign policy chief Borrell said in a letter to the European Parliament. Also “of concern” was Turkey’s continued policy of “not joining the EU’s restrictive measures against Russia”, the letter said. It was important that Turkey not offer Russia any workarounds to sanctions, Borrell cautioned.

To which, President Erdogan riposted:

“It’s an ugly statement. Borrell can’t define and formalize our relations with Russia. He has neither the qualifications nor the ability to make such decisions. Who is he to assess our relations with Russia with respect to sanctions?”

Then, on 12 December, Borrell announced that the EU will agree on a “very tough” package of sanctions against Iran:

“We are going to approve a very tough package of sanctions. [The EU] will take any action we can to support young women and peaceful demonstrators. And we will try to agree further sanctions on Iran over the supply of drones to Russia.”

Put plainly, the EU doubles-down; nay, triples-down: spraying its sanctions toward anyone ‘not with the narrative.’

It is surprising (or maybe ‘not’), that the EU is not reading the runes on Ukraine accurately, in terms of the struggle over Ukraine policy taking place in Washington. Loosely put: the élite US Realist constituency, together with Henry Kissinger — a ‘hawk’, sometimes posing as a Realist — is going head-to-head with the Russophobic constituency within the élite, hinting that the latter covet a bigger war (which US would be ill-advised to wage).  

Although the notion would be no surprise to most readers, Kissinger — in saying that a dismemberment of Russia or the destroying of its ability to conduct strategic policy is a ‘no-no’ — implicitly strips naked the neo-conservative constituency by putting their covert aims into objective consciousness (the latter has always denied their aim being to dismantle Russia into inconsequential statelets and then to seize its resources). Kissinger at least ‘outs’ the issue.

So far, this maneuvering between US élite constituencies is more about preparing the ground within the US foreign policy discussion groups, than birthing a new policy. (It is too early for that, perhaps?).

The EU however, wants to ‘mark its territory’, but does not think things through. Olaf Scholz, limp-wristed, mutters about a ceasefire and the complete withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. 

The British PM, however, has poured cold water on any ceasefire: The West should consider any Russian call for a cease-fire in its war against Ukraine “completely meaningless” in the current circumstances, Rishi Sunak said on Monday.

Well, even if there were a withdrawal to positions of 24 February 2022 (the Kissinger proposal), that just won’t work as the basis for a ceasefire, but rather highlights the naïvety of EU ‘thinking’.

The EU wraps the Ukraine into a fantasy of a like-minded democratic state struggling for its independence against an overweening ‘big brother’. This is nonsense. Ukraine is ethnically, linguistically, culturally and affiliationally divided. It is in midst civil war. It has been in civil war for decades. Tens of thousands dead.

Simply to pretend that this fundamental fact does not impinge on any ceasefire framework is ridiculous. The armed nationalist siege lines are arrayed within rocket range of those northern (culturally Russian) civilian cities (such as Donetsk) the radical nationalists wish to conquer and subdue.

Such a ceasefire would be analogous to re-inserting the Catholic Irish Republican Army (IRA) forces under the nose of the Protestant Northern Ireland paramilitaries. Does anyone believe that London would be able to just abandon the Protestants to such a prospect? Well, neither can Moscow allow the ethnic Russians (particularly in lands which have been a part of Russia for centuries) be allowed to swing in the wind of a ceasefire in which all is restored to ‘as it was’ (i.e. when the nationalist forces were freely treating Donetsk City as a coconut shy).

To give Kissinger his due, he recognises the ceasefire’s implausibility by referring to the possible partition of Ukraine (via referenda) becoming a necessity — were his ceasefire proposal prove impossible. (The EU are miles off such thinking.)

Rather, the EU has dug itself into a ‘Bakhmut trench’ with its Ukraine “must win”, and “we must support Ukraine for ‘as long as it takes’”. The EU acts as if it believes itself to be in control; that is, that the EU will decide whether ‘to confer a ceasefire’ on Russia — or not. 

Most likely, the EU will be a bystander watching events from the outside. It will not have a seat at the table. 

And there may never be a formal ‘ceasefire’. Diplomats are overly fond of saying that conflicts are never resolved by military means — but that is quite untrue. Often a demonstration of military strength is required, precisely in order to catalyse and bring about a tectonic shift. 

Or, simply, the outcome may emerge from the ‘inside-out’: i.e. from a bottom-up, or outside-in, leadership realignment occurring inside Kiev or in the Ukrainian military — separate from any EU or US direct involvement. The possibility should not be overlooked.

The consequences to these EU high pretentions of having agency in respect to events in Ukraine are not trivial, but of a strategic order. The most immediate is that the EU’s fanatical support for Kiev has moved ethnically ‘anti-Russian Ukraine’ further and further away from any possibility of serving as a neutral or buffer state.   

Pari passu for any EU role. It has burnt any bridges as mediator. Why would ethnically Russian Ukrainians trust the EU (when the Kremlin doesn’t)?

The fanning — by Ukraine ‘activists’, inside the EU leadership class and at the highest level of the EU — with toxic anti-Russian sentiments inevitably has plumbed a bitter fault line in Ukraine.  

Yet, not one confined to Ukraine alone: It is both fracturing Europe, and creating a strategic fault line between the EU vs the rest of world.  

President Macron said this week that he sees ‘resentment’ in President Putin’s eyes. — “a sort of resentment” directed at the Western world, including the EU and the US, and that it is fueled by “the feeling that our perspective was to destroy Russia”. 

He is right. The resentment however, is not confined to Russians who have come to despise Europe; it is rather, that across the globe, resentment is bubbling up at all the destroyed lives strewn in the wake of the western hegemonic project. Even a high-ranking French Ambassador now describes the rules-based order as an unfair “Western order” based on “hegemony”. 

Angela Merkel’s interview to Zeit Magazine confirms for the rest of world that EU strategic autonomy always was a lie. She admits that her advocacy of the 2014 Minsk ceasefire was a deception. It was an attempt to give Kiev time to strengthen its military — and was successful in that regard, Merkel said. “[Ukraine] used this time to get [militarily] stronger, as you can see today. The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today”.

The EU posits itself as a strategic player; a political power in its own right; a market colossus; a monopsony with the power to impose its will over whomsoever trades with it. Simply put: the EU insists (and believes) that it possesses meaningful political agency. But it has no political or military power per se (it being a US vassal). Rather, its influence derives from its economic breadth — and that has been wasted through self-harm.

Authored by Nick Corbishley via NakedCapitalism.com,

As the Qatargate scandal widens, questions are being asked as to whether its reverberations will reach the Commission, the EU’s executive branch. Recent revelations suggest the EU’s Chief Diplomat Josep Borrell could be implicated.

Since erupting last weekend with police raids on MEPs’ homes and offices in the European parliament, the Qatargate scandal has done nothing but mushroom. What began as a criminal probe into current and former MEPs and parliamentary assistants implicated in a bribery ring aimed at burnishing the public image of the current World Cup host has widened significantly — not only in terms of the number of people involved but also the number of organizations and third countries, which now also include Morocco.

As the scandal grows, both the Parliament and the European Commission are locked in a frantic damage control mission. European Parliament president Roberta Metsola on Thursday (15 December) pledged to unveil a “wide-ranging reform package” in January, which will include measures to bolster whistleblower protections, a ban on all unofficial parliamentary friendship groups (groups of MEPs discussing relations with non-EU countries) and a review of enforcement of code of conduct rules for MEPs.

Read More

Fallout Spreads

For the moment almost all of the focus is understandably on the European Parliament, but questions are beginning to be asked as to whether the fallout will spread to the EU’s executive branch, the European Commission. Asked whether he is worried about such an outcome, Didier Reynders, the EU Commissioner for justice, told Politico that it is “all the time a possibility”.

Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, herself no stranger to corruption allegations, both in her native Germany and in Brussels, said the following in a Monday morning press conference:

The allegations against the VP of Parliament [Eva Kaili] are of the most concern, very serious. It’s a question of confidence of our people in our institutions, it needs highest standards. I proposed the creation of an independent ethnics body that covers all EU institutions (in March).[1] For us it is very critical to have not only strong rules, but the same rules covering all the EU institutions, and not to allow for any exemptions.

Von der Leyen added that the Commission is looking at its own transparency register for all logged meetings between staff and Qatari officials. That is not as comforting as it may sound given the flagrant disregard for transparency and accountability her Commission has shown in its acquisition of billions of COVID-19 vaccines.

What’s more, as the non-profit research and campaign group Corporate Europe Observatory notes, the Commission’s 2014 transparency reforms apply only to the top 250 most
senior officials in the Commission. Many lower level officials from among the 30,000+
Commission staff regularly meet with lobbyists but they are not included within the rules.

EU’s Biggest Corruption Scandal in Years

Von der Leyen also refused to answer questions about the European Vice President Margaritis Schinas’ connections with Qatar, provoking umbrage from the Brussels press corps. Margaritis, also from Greece, represented the EU at the opening ceremony of the World Cup, and has been heavily criticized for lavishing praise on the “improving” labor conditions in Qatar, where at least 6,500 migrants workers from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan died between 2011, the year the World Cup was awarded to the country, and 2020.

Politico describes Qatargate as the biggest corruption scandal to hit the EU in years, though it faces a run for its money from the blossoming scandal over the Commission’s deeply opaque dealings with Pfizer and other vaccine makers, which is now the subject of an investigation by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. The EU’s ombudsman Emily O’Reilly branded the Commission’s refusal to disclose the text messages between von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla as “maladministration.”

In contrast to Qatargate, that scandal has been studiously ignored by Europe’s legacy media despite the staggering sums of money involved (tens of billions of dollars to date to buy up to 1.8 billion COVID-19 vaccines), the number of people affected (anyone who pays taxes in the EU and felt compelled by the EU’s vaccine passport rules to take a medical product they didn’t want) and the seniority of those implicated, including Von der Leyen herself and Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.

Von der Leyen herself has come under fire for concealing and/or deleting records of her conversations with Bourla prior to the Commission’s purchase of up to 1.8 billion vaccines. As for Bourla, he has twice refused to give testimony to a European Parliament special committee on the matter.

Borrell in the Mix?

For his part, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy Josep Borrell described Qatargate “very, very worrisome.” But he was also at pains to emphasize that no one in the European Commission’s diplomatic service, which he heads, is under investigation: “There is nothing and no one being referred to neither from the External Action Service nor from the delegations.”

But that may change in the coming days or weeks. Former European Parliament Vice President Eva Kaili, who is at the center of the bribery allegations, denies receiving the €1.5 million of cash found at her home and in her father’s possession [2] and claims she was acting exclusively on orders from above. According to Kaili’s lawyer, Michalis Dimitrakopoulos, those orders came directly from EU Parliament President Roberta Metsola and Borrell.

From Euractiv:

In an interview with Greek MEGA TV channel, Dimitrakopoulos said Kaili has nothing to do with bribery from Qatar.
“What the public opinion needs to know is that Qatar did not need to bribe Ms Kaili because she went to Qatar as a representative of the European Parliament, the speeches, the interviews she gave were after the agreement and order of the President Roberta Metsola,” Dimitrakopoulos said.
He added that documents prove this and explained that Kaili did not take any initiative or have an agenda.
“Ms Metsola sent her to Qatar, what she was going to say had Ms Metsola’s approval […] Ms Metsola had also sent EU official Mr Roberto Bendini with her to watch all of Ms Kaili’s meetings”, he explained.
“I am telling you the words of Ms Kaili, she was carrying out a plan that had started in 2019, High Representative Josep Borrell and Ylva Johansson [Commissioner for Home Affairs] had decided at the Commission level, to cooperate with Qatar, Kuwait and Oman,” the lawyer added.

For the moment, these are just leaked allegations made by the lawyer of a suspect in a very serious corruption investigation, and should be treated as such. But one thing that is clear is that Borrell, as Europe’s chief diplomat, played a leading role in forging closer ties with Qatar.

MEPs now suspect Qatar’s palm-greasing may have unduly influenced negotiations on the highly lucrative EU-Qatar aviation agreement. Signed last year, the deal granted Qatar Airlines unlimited access to the EU’s vast market of 450 million people while giving European airlines access to Qatar’s somewhat smaller market of 2.9 million people. The first deal of its kind ever to be signed by the Commission, it was heavily criticised by major EU airlines and unions, but defended by the EU, which claimed it would provide “opportunities for both sides.” An EU spokesperson said on Wednesday the agreement was reached with “full transparency.”

In the end, Europe’s desperate hunger for energy sources, which was already readily apparent even by the summer of 2021, probably played a much larger part in securing the deal than a few greased palms. On his first visit to the country as EU’s chief diplomat, in September 2021, Borrell praised Qatar as a “reliable energy partner”, which in these times, he said, is “especially important.” He also announced EU plans to build a fully fledged diplomatic mission in Doha this year, which was inaugurated in September.

As previously mentioned, Morocco is also implicated in this ever-widening scandal. According to Spanish journalist Ignacio Cembrero, it is the country’s foreign intelligence services, the DGED, that has been bribing MEPs, presumably to frustrate any resolutions in favor of Western Sahara, the resource-rich former Spanish colony it invaded and occupied in 1975. Morocco has also been accused this year of using Pegasus spyware to target the mobile phones of around 200 Spanish government officials, including the Prime Minister Pedro Sanchéz and then Defense Minister Margarita Robles.

Regular readers may recall that over the last year the North African country has garnered increasing support for its “autonomy” plan for Western Sahara among big hitters in the EU including Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. The plan would essentially involve formalizing Morocco’s permanent occupation of the resource-rich region and has already received the blessing of both Israel and the US.

Another Toothless Ethics Body

For the moment, it is far from clear just how far this burgeoning scandal will reach. One thing that is clear is that the reputational damage will be large and lasting. The European Union’s ability to lecture the misbehaving governments of Member States and third-party countries on how to govern will be further diminished.

EU institutions need to get their house in order once and for all, and fast. And that is unlikely to happen. The EU ombudsman Emily O’Reilly said this week that Von der Leyen’s proposed plan for a new ethics body is likely to end up as “something with no teeth, something that will possibly sit there passively, wait for complaints to come in.”

What the body really needs, O’Reilly said, is investigatory and sanctions powers. But that might actually threaten to derail the gravy train Brussels has become.

And the problem is not just illegal cash payments stuffed away in paper bags and briefcases; it is the vast lobbying apparatus that has built up in Brussels, which is now the second largest lobbying capital in the world after Washington. As in Washington, lobbying reaches into just about every aspect of governance. In its 2015 report, CEO reported that lobbyists representing businesses and trade associations made up 75% of all high-level Commission lobby meetings and more than 80% in certain areas such as financial regulation or the internal market.

The inevitable result, as in Washington, is that policies are made almost exclusively in the service of vested corporate interests. Sometimes corporate lobbies even draft the EU’s legislation. This is the business model of modern governance.

Lastly, if Borrell is indeed caught up in this burgeoning scandal and, by some miracle, loses his job, it would be no great loss to the EU’s 450 million citizens. He is the least diplomatic of diplomats. Just about every time he speaks, whether on the wonders of European colonialism or the vast untamed jungle that lies beyond Europe’s borders, damage is inflicted on the EU’s relations with some other part of the world. Since long before the Ukraine conflict he has played a leading role in escalating tensions with Russia, the EU’s biggest neighbor and energy supplier.

He is also no stranger to scandal, having been convicted, in 2018, of insider trading in Spain. That resulted in him being placed on the Spanish market regulator’s blacklist. The ensuing scandal triggered calls for his resignation as Spain’s then-Foreign Minister. But he resisted those calls and in 2020 was bumped up to the European Commission, as so often happens with scandal-tarnished domestic politicians in the EU.

High gas prices in the EU will remain for 20 years, as long-term contracts with the US are concluded for this period

This was stated by the outgoing general director of the Austrian energy concern Energie AG Werner Steinecker.

According to Steinecker, gas in Europe will no longer be as cheap as it used to be, even if the current global processes are regulated.

The EU buys liquefied natural gas from the US on a take-or-pay basis. Contracts are concluded for 20 years, so the countries of Europe will have to pay any price.

#source

The EU will be able to be part of a multipolar world only when it stops saying “I obey” the USA – Lavrov

“The fact that Europe cannot defend its interests, in my opinion, is still a medical fact,” the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

#source